History of English Literature, Volume 7 : English Modernism 1789973988, 9781789973983

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Volume 7

History of English Literature

Volume 7 is dedicated to the four main figures of English Modernism. It opens by discussing ‘interstitial’ novelists, such as Galsworthy, Bennett, Wells and Forster; essayists like Chesterton; and the war poets. The study then turns to a close analysis of the key writers of the period: T. S. Eliot is looking for ‘roots’ and the anchors for a modern society facing dissolution; D. H. Lawrence is the exponent of a Modernism of contents rather than of forms, which undermines the aesthetics of the movement; Joyce is the builder of a ‘palace of art’, with an archetypal plot each time updated and stylistically more refined; and Virginia Woolf is, finally, the writer who pursues the utopia of the finished work, the metaphor of her life.

www.peterlang.com

Franco Marucci

Franco Marucci is a former Professor of English at the Universities of Siena, Florence and Venice Ca’ Foscari. His publications include Il senso interrotto. Autonomia e codificazione nella poesia di Dylan Thomas (1976), The Fine Delight that Fathers Thought: Rhetoric and Medievalism in Gerard Manley Hopkins (1994), L’inchiostro del mago. Saggi di letteratura inglese dell’Ottocento (2009) and Joyce (2013). His Storia della letteratura inglese in eight volumes was published by Le Lettere / Editoriale Srl, 2003–2018. As a creative writer he is the author of Pentapoli (2011), followed by Il Michelin del sacro (2012). He runs the blog , with comments and features on literature and music, and a weekly sports page.

English Modernism

History of English Literature is a comprehensive, eight-volume survey of English literature from the Middle Ages to the early twenty-first century. This reference work provides insightful and often revisionary readings of core texts in the English literary canon. Richly informative analyses are framed by the biographical, historical and intellectual context for each author.

Histor y of English Literature

‘Franco Marucci’s History of English Literature is unique in its field. There is no other book that combines such erudition and authority in such a compact format. An indispensable work of reference.’ — J. B. Bullen, Visiting Fellow, Kellogg College, Oxford

English Modernism

Franco Marucci

Peter Lang

Volume 7

History of English Literature

History of English Literature Volume 7

English Modernism Franco Marucci Translated from the Italian by Elena Gualtieri, Colin Parmar, Kallina Temperini, Ciáran Durkan and Denis Gailor

PETER LANG

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Names: Marucci, Franco, 1949- author. Title: English modernism / Franco Marucci. Other titles: Storia della letteratura inglese. Modernismo. English Description: Oxford ; New York : Peter Lang, [2019] | Series: History of English literature ; volume 7 | Translation of Il modernismo, volume 5, tome 1 of Storia della letteratura inglese. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018032658 | ISBN 9781789973983 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: English fiction--20th century--History and criticism. | Modernism (Literature)--Great Britain. Classification: LCC PR97 .M3713 2018 | DDC 820.9/009--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018032658 Originally published in Italian as Storia della letteratura inglese – Dal 1922 al 2000 – Il modernismo by Casa Editrice Le Lettere (2011).

Cover image: John William Waterhouse, Ulysses and the Sirens (1891). Cover design by Brian Melville. ISBN 978-1-78997-398-3 (print) • ISBN 978-1-78874-112-5 (ePDF) ISBN 978-1-78874-113-2 (ePub) • ISBN 978-1-78874-114-9 (mobi) © Peter Lang AG 2019 Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers, 52 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LU, United Kingdom [email protected], www.peterlang.com Franco Marucci has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work. All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed. Printed in Germany

Contents

List of abbreviations

xiii/I

Part I

Interstitial Literature

1/I

§ 1.

Interstitial literature

3/I

  2–7.

Shaw after 1921

7/I

§  2. From the Nobel Prize to nonsense. Popularity and decline of an international playwright, p. 7. § 3. Saint Joan. The divine call, an unthinkable ‘maybe’, p. 14. § 4. Burlesques on the powers-that-be, p.  21. §  5. Too True to Be Good, p. 23. § 6. Other extravaganzas and socio-political fables, p. 26. § 7. Last plays, p. 35.

 8–11.

O’Casey

38/I

§ 8. The Irish powder keg explodes, p. 38. § 9. The Dublin trilogy, p. 43. § 10. Wrestling with Catholicism, p. 50. § 11. The oneacters, p. 60.

  12.

Priestley, Rattigan

62/I

 13–16.

Wells

68/I

§ 13. The multifaceted intellectual, a modern, amateurish Leonardo da Vinci, p. 68. § 14. The unknowns of science, p. 79. § 15. Odysseys of a salesman, p. 98. § 16. Three intellectuals, Wells’s alter egos facing history, p. 112.

vi/I

§§ 17–22. Arnold Bennett

123/I

§ 17. A Victorian photograph album, p. 123. §18. A provincial in the city, p. 132. §§ 19–21. The Five Towns novels (§ 19. Anna of the Five Towns, p. 137. § 20. The Old Wives’ Tale, p. 142. § 21. Clayhanger, p. 154). § 22. Trying to keep up in the post-war era, p. 162.

 23–28. Galsworthy

169/I

§ 23. The funerals of aristocracy, p. 169. § 24. Skirmishes against self-righteousness, p. 175. §§ 25–27. The Forsyte Saga (§ 25. The threat of entrepreneurial security, p. 180. § 26. The melancholy calendar of the generational turnover, p. 198. § 27. Nostalgia for chivalrous times, p. 205). § 28. The dramas, p. 209.

  29–38. Forster

215/I

§ 29. Against the falsity of the educational tradition. The bridge between the two cultures, p. 215. § 30. Where Angels Fear to Tread. The immature hearts, p. 222. § 31. The Longest Journey, p. 229. §§ 32–33. A Room with a View (§ 32. The stubborn self-deception of a tourist in search of herself, p. 231. § 33. The rescue of the ‘buoni uomini’, p. 235). §§ 34–36. Howards End (§ 34. The three nations, p. 241. § 35. Who shall inherit England?, p. 246. § 36. The urbanized farmer welcomed back into his habitat, p. 250). § 37. Maurice, p. 253. § 38. A Passage to India. The unreconciled diversities, p. 256.

 39–41. Beerbohm § 39. Reanimating aestheticism, p. 259. § 40. Exercises in style, p. 263. § 41. Zuleika Dobson and other sketches, p. 267.

259/I

vii/I



§§ 42–47. Chesterton

274/I

§ 42. The crusade against contemporary isms, p. 274. § 43. The myth of the tavern, p. 280. § 44. Heresy and orthodoxy, p. 284. § 45. Two fantasies on the present and the future, p. 288. § 46. The Father Brown stories, p. 293. § 47. Other works of fiction, p. 301.

  48.

Belloc, C. S. Lewis, Tolkien

304/I

  49.

The Powys brothers

317/I

  50.

Vernon Lee

325/I

 51–58. Maugham

333/I

§  51. A humble, self-taught craftsman, p. 333. § 52. Naturalist fiction and drama up to 1914, p. 336. § 53. Of Human Bondage. Bitter loves, p. 341. § 54. The Moon and Sixpence. The artist, integrated and disintegrated, p. 348. § 55. Plays of the 1920s, p. 350. § 56. Cakes and Ale. The subtle, caustic, metabiographical suggestions of the life of Hardy, p. 353. § 57. The amnesty of adultery, p. 356. § 58. The short stories, p. 362.

  59.

Chesney, Buchan, Saki and the ‘war of the future’

365/I

  60.

The Georgian poets

371/I

  61.

The poetry of the Great War

376/I

 62.

Owen

380/I

 63.

Sassoon

389/I

viii/I

§ 64. Brooke

396/I

  65–66.

406/I

Edward Thomas § 65. Diaries and prose from before the war, p. 406. § 66. The poetic songbook, p. 417.

 67.

Rosenberg

422/I

  68.

Other war poets

429/I

 69.

Graves

439/I

 70.

Masefield

448/I

  71.

De la Mare

453/I

  72.

Stevie Smith 

460/I

  73.

Edwardian music

463/I

The Index of names and Thematic index for Volume 7 can be found at the end of Book 2. Part II

Modernism1/II § 74.

England from 1922 to 1945

3/II

 75.

Modernism

10/II

 76.

Imagism

18/II

ix/I



§§ 77–85.

Yeats after 1919

23/II



§ 77. The book and the image, p. 23. § 78. The lunar pseudophilosophy, p. 32. § 79. The tail end of The Wild Swans at Coole, p. 45. § 80. Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The marriage of body and spirit, p. 51. § 81. The Tower. The second coming, p. 59. § 82. The Winding Stair and Other Poems. The Platonic idea and the revenge of the human, p. 68. § 83. From A Full Moon in March, p. 75. § 84. Testaments, p. 77. § 85. The dramas, p. 85.

  86.

Edith Sitwell 

101/II

  87.

Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell 

108/II

 88.

Firbank

111/II

  89–91.

Wyndham Lewis

126/II



§ 89. The roar of Vorticism, p. 126. § 90. That lonely old volcano of the Right, p. 135. § 91. The trilogy of the hereafter, p. 142.

  92–105.

T. S. Eliot



§ 92. The roots that clutch, p. 146. § 93. The overwhelming question, p. 160. § 94. Prufrock and Other Observations. The moment to its crisis, p. 168. § 95. Gerontion and the poems of 1920, p. 185. §§ 96–97. The Waste Land (§ 96. The orchestration, p. 199. § 97. Witnesses of the pastiche, p. 208). § 98. The Hollow Men and Ash-Wednesday, p. 219. § 99. Nonsense, minor and incidental poetry, p. 226. §§ 100–101. Four Quartets (§ 100. The music of time, p. 230. § 101. The alpha and the omega, from the rose garden to the thorn bush, p. 241). § 102. Liturgical action and propedeutics for

146/II

x/I atonement in Eliot’s drama, p. 255. § 103. The literary system, p. 270. § 104. Other works of criticism, p. 283. § 105. The English patient, p. 285.

§ 106. Bunting

294/II

  107.

Christopher Fry

299/II

 108.

Whiting

304/II

  109–122. Lawrence

305/II



§ 109. The messiah of phallic reawakening, p. 305. § 110. The early novels, p. 315. § 111. Sons and Lovers. The mining scenario and the Oedipal dilemma, p. 322. § 112. The short stories, p. 330. § 113. The Rainbow. Analysis and management of passions, p.  333. §  114. Women in Love. The agon between life and death, p. 343. § 115. The Lost Girl, p. 356. § 116. Aaron’s Rod. The biblical wanderer, p. 361. § 117. Kangaroo. An Australian fable, p. 368. § 118. The Plumed Serpent. In an imaginary Mexico, p.  375. §  119. Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Broken taboos, p. 388. § 120. Later short novels and stories, p. 395. § 121. The poetry, p. 398. § 122. Prophecy and prejudice in Lawrence’s non-fiction, p. 408.

  123–124. Dorothy Richardson 

§§  123–124. Pilgrimage (§  123. The English harbinger of monologue interieur, p. 418. § 124. Towards self-knowledge, p. 427).

  125–127. Ford Madox Ford

418/II

§ 125. The restorer of the old order from the trenches of formal Modernism, p. 431. § 126. The Good Soldier. The crisis

431/II

xi/I

of chivalric ideals, p. 437. § 127. Parade’s End. A consciousness in the Great War, p. 445.

§§ 128–151. Joyce

§ 128. The bygmester of the palace of art, p. 457. § 129. Biography, p. 470. § 130. Essays on criticism and aesthetics, p. 476. § 131. The epiphanies, p. 481. § 132. The poetry, p. 485. §§ 133–135. Dubliners (§ 133. Devices of Joyce’s short story, p.  493. §  134. Paralysis in the three human ages, p. 498. § 135. ‘The Dead’. The game of cardinal points, p. 506). §§ 136–138. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (§ 136. The first two versions, p. 514. § 137. The impossible perfection of faith, p. 520. § 138. The investiture of the artist, p. 526). § 139. The journalist and lecturer, p. 529. §§ 140–141. Exiles (§ 140. The betrayed, betrayable and betraying husband, p. 532. § 141. Towards a new alter ego, p. 534). §§ 142–147. Ulysses (§ 142. The endogenesis, p. 538. § 143. Threads in the maze, p. 546. § 144. From morning to noon, p. 551. § 145. Afternoon and evening, p. 559. § 146. The night, p. 565. § 147. Molly’s monologue, p. 570). §§ 148–151. Finnegans Wake (§ 148. The connections, p. 573. § 149. The sources, p. 584. § 150. Technique, p. 587. § 151. The language, p. 592).

  152.

Stephens, O’Brien

 153–156. Mansfield

457/II

596/II 601/II

§ 153. Out of Eden, but towards purgatory, p. 601. § 154. In a German Pension. Sketches at the spa, p. 612. § 155. Bliss and Other Stories. Existentialist motifs in Mansfield’s stories, p. 617. § 156. The Garden Party. Rites of passage, p. 621.

 157–168. Woolf

627/II

xii/I

§ 157. Exorcisms of incompletion, p. 627. § 158. Woolf ’s hours in a library, p. 637. § 159. Biography, p. 649. § 160. The Voyage Out, p. 655. § 161. Night and Day, p. 660. § 162. Jacob’s Room. The novel as a splintered biography, p. 663. § 163. Mrs Dalloway. Life, death and resurrection, p. 668. § 164. To the Lighthouse. The metaphysical parable of a landing: failed, delayed, successful, with human losses, p. 675. § 165. Orlando. The historical cavalcade of the hermaphrodite, p. 683. § 166. The Waves. Six soliloquists, stereophonic voices of a single author, p. 688. § 167. The Years. The crowded kaleidoscope of modern times, p. 692. § 168. Between the Acts. A forecast of the future, p. 696.

§ 169.

Bloomsbury, Roger Fry, Strachey

  170–174. Compton-Burnett 

701/II 707/II



§ 170. The dirty laundry of Victorianism, p. 707. § 171. The beginnings, p. 717. § 172. The nemesis of parental tyranny, p. 721. § 173. Novels of servants and of three generations, p. 727. § 174. Sour family comedies, p. 731.

 175.

Garnett

735/II

  176.

Poets of the Second World War

737/II

Index of names 

745/II

Thematic index 

769/II

List of abbreviations J. R. Taylor, Anger and After: A Guide to the New British Drama, Harmondsworth 1963. BAUGH A Literary History of England, ed. A. C. Baugh, 4 vols, London 1967. BRM Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930, ed. M. Bradbury and J. McFarlane, Harmondsworth 1991 (1st edn 1976). CAB I contemporanei - Letteratura inglese, ed. V. Amoruso and F. Binni, 2 vols, Roma 1982. CLA M. Praz, Cronache letterarie anglosassoni, 4 vols, Roma 1951 and 1966. CMM Modernismo / Modernismi. Dall’avanguardia storica agli anni Trenta e oltre, ed. G. Cianci, Milano 1991. CRHE The Critical Heritage, anthologies of criticism on single authors, published in London, with editors and dates of publication as stated in the bibliographies. CSI E. Cecchi, Scrittori inglesi e americani, 2 vols, Milano 1954 (1st edn 1935). DES V. De Sola Pinto, Crisis in English Poetry 1880–1940, London 1963 (1st edn 1951). EMW J. I. M. Stewart, Eight Modern Writers, Oxford 1963. GSM H. J. C. Grierson and J. C. Smith, A Critical History of English Poetry, London 1956. HAP Hopkins Among the Poets, ed. R. F. Giles, Hamilton 1985. HWP B. Russell, History of Western Philosophy, London 1964 (1st edn 1946). HYN S. Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s, London 1976. IDM F. Marucci, L’inchiostro del mago. Saggi di letteratura inglese dell’Ottocento, Pisa 2009. KPE F. Kermode, Puzzles and Epiphanies: Essays and Reviews 1958– 1961, London 1962. KRG F. R. Karl, A Reader’s Guide to the Contemporary English Novel, London 1968. AAA

xiv/I

KRI LET LRB MAR MEF MIT MPR OCE PCS PGU PLE PSL SSI TLS WAR WAX WEL Volume 1 Volume 2 Volume 3 Volume 4 Volume 5 Volume 6 Volume 8

List of abbreviations

F. Kermode, Romantic Image, London 1971 (1st edn 1957). Letture. Libro e spettacolo. Mensile di studi e rassegne. The London Review of Books. F. Marenco, Storia della civiltà letteraria inglese, 4 vols, Torino 1996. G. Melchiori, I funamboli. Il manierismo nella letteratura inglese da Joyce ai giovani arrabbiati, Torino 1974 (1st edn 1963). L. Mittner, Storia della letteratura tedesca, 3 vols in 4 tomes, Torino 1964–1977. J. H. Miller, Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers, Cambridge, MA 1965. G. Orwell, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, ed. S. Orwell and I. Angus, 4 vols, Harmondsworth 1970. M. Praz, Il patto col serpente, Milano 1973 (1st edn 1972). The Pelican Guide to English Literature, ed. B. Ford, 7 vols, Harmondsworth 1968 and 1970. M. Pagnini, Letteratura e ermeneutica, Firenze 2002. M. Praz, Storia della letteratura inglese, Firenze 1968. M. Praz, Studi e svaghi inglesi, 2 vols, Milano 1983 (1st edn 1937). The Times Literary Supplement. A. C. Ward, 20th Century English Literature 1901–1960, London 1964 (1st edn 1928). E. Wilson, Axel’s Castle, London and Glasgow 1971 (1st edn New York 1931). R. Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, 8 vols, New Haven, CT 1955–1992. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 1, Oxford 2018. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 2, Oxford 2018. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 3, Oxford 2018. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 4, Oxford 2019. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 5, Oxford 2019. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 6, Oxford 2019. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 8, Oxford 2019.

Note. Except for the above abbreviations, full publication information of cited works will be found in the bibliography for each author.

Part I

Interstitial Literature

§ 1. Interstitial literature Any wide-ranging study of literary history compels the critic and historian to move the authors at stake backwards and forwards, like a strategist shifting his armies in front or behind a certain line on the map, or a chessplayer with his pieces. The category of ‘interstitial’ or ‘in-between’ literature is not a recognized one in the periodization of twentieth-century English literature.1 I have coined the phrase in order to place and study some of the writers, texts or sets of texts that could not or would not be included in the previous volume of this History, and for the reasons I shall explain shortly. Their inclusion here is justified at times by the very specific way in which some of these writers balanced a number of multiple interests and themes, at others by their lateness compared to others and to the main current or currents in English literature after 1921. Rather than labelling them ‘interstitial,’ I could have easily identified these writers as belated, or unclassifiable. They were all born and grew up in the Victorian era; they made their mark well before the watershed of 1921, even if they continued to write after that date, in a kind of drift. Edwardian and Georgian by dates, they first published before those signposts, and continued to write afterwards. But they never caught up, did not innovate at all, or not enough to be numbered among the modernists. They would be ill served if seen as twentieth-century writers in full garb, but neither would it work to relegate them to Victorians tout court. 2. The main triad of these long-lived writers on the cusp of 1921 (and the most awkward one for the purposes of classification) is that of Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy. This close-knit triad seems to have been conceived by intelligent design: all its members are like twins or near-twins, their dates of birth within a few years or even months from each other. They were all three born in 1866 or 1867, were all indefatigable workers, authors of tens if not hundreds of books,2 with a near-perfect synchrony for their literary debuts a few months from the end of the nineteenth century, while at least two of them died within months of each other, covered in fame and glory. And yet the crème of the innovators bunched them all together and decried their novels as superficial and shoddy, partly on the 1 2

English history up to 1921 is dealt with in Volume 6, § 250. Bennett and Galsworthy both wrote sagas, working in the long form and not on short novels. That too is a significant difference from the production of modernist writers.

4/I

Part I  Interstitial Literature

objective judgement (applicable to all three) that their post-war production had degraded into nameless and consumerist fare. Despite their shared literary origins, they were all born in three different parts of England, and each followed a seemingly different course of apprenticeship. Wells was to all intents and purposes a Londoner, and nearly working class in origin; Bennett and Galsworthy, both sons of lawyers, came to London to become writers from the industrial Midlands and the hills of Surrey respectively. Wells and Bennett wrote to each other constantly, with the former issuing slightly patronizing letters whenever Bennett published a new novel, to which Bennett bowed, yet always with touches of biting irony. Galsworthy on his part had with Bennett a close epistolary exchange and friendship, less so with Wells. But what joined all three was Conrad. The first to note impressionistically their common matrix was Orwell, who studied and read voraciously at least two of them. He contrasted their shared Conradian origin with the typology of the younger writer, represented for him by Lawrence and Joyce. To Orwell, the new, modern writer of the 1920s chiselled his material like a sculptor, was less prolific, more painstaking, more devoted to narrative form, less optimistic. Above all, he was less well-read, with a lighter ideological baggage (expect than in the case of Wells). The difference between the interstitial triad and the modern writers was the same, in Orwell’s view, as that between Dickens and Flaubert.3 3. Orwell had then understood everything: that the reference point for this triad was Dickens, or at the very least that the wider area and tradition they were looking at was that of nineteenth-century realism. The three writers should not nevertheless be ignored, or be dismissed and mocked as they were by their contemporaries and those who followed shortly after, like Orwell all exponents of a radical intelligentsia with its unacknowledged Bloomsbury roots. The sheer volume of their work is impressive, as well as an anti-modern and anti-modernist feature. Wells was the least gifted as a writer, yet he reinvented the Victorian dystopian genre, leaving a void behind him, even if after 1900 he could not find a new vein, and his writing effectively petered out. Bennett is the finest nib of the three, unmatched in his rendering of the comic pathos of the suburban village undergoing a transition and in the mock-heroic burlesque. Mostly a great imitator, he 3

OCE, vol. II, 231.

§ 1. Interstitial literature

5/I

wrote one single masterpiece surrounded by a number of mediocre blockbusters. Galsworthy did not write for money, and reached the peak of his fame in the early 1920s, when Bennett’s reputation was in decline, with a saga that seems aimed at flattering the wealthy middle class. Galsworthy is interstitial for his theme, the transition to modernity, which he sees from a nostalgic standpoint, but some other features of his writing – the sense of writing in a void, and the retreat from serialization – are already more modernist. Galsworthy had explicitly no affinity with formal Modernism, towards which he was openly dismissive and impatient after 1922.4 But his writing practice speaks of a desire to catch up with the new expressive instruments, particularly through his aural imitation of a strand of stream of consciousness that was watered-down and unspecific, yet still stream of consciousness it was. For Forster, Galsworthy was part of a generation of writers who ‘got their impressions and formed their attitudes in an earlier period, before the first of the two world-wars’.5 4. There are however many more writers whose temporal location and status should be reviewed: Chesterton, Beerbohm, de la Mare, Firbank. The first two are emblematic cases. Beerbohm is an aesthete born a little too late, and therefore not fully enlisted in the aesthetic movement. He watches it as a younger member would, bearing testimony, but from the side-lines, observing it under a veil of nostalgia, or more often casting it in the guise of reductive parody. Chesterton was Beerbohm’s age, and would perhaps have followed in his wake had he gone to Oxford, hotbed of aesthetes. His painterly education brought him close to the aesthetes; he regularly considered suicide, might have been briefly a homosexual, flirted with paganism. In the end, though, he effected his own revolution. His love and nostalgia for the Middle Ages, which were enlivened by Morris’s work, had none of Pre-Raphaelite delicacy, but rather a Dickens-like exuberance and rowdiness. While Beerbohm has some rare overlaps with Modernism, Chesterton has none, even if this is one label this crusader against –isms does not contest. At the fin-de-siècle, then, Catholicism emerges as a gathering station, a life-choice that rebuts various popular doctrines, like socialism. Chesterton, Belloc, Ford Madox Ford, but particularly the first two,

4 5

See Gindin’s 1987 biography, 477–8, cited in § 23.1, bibliography. E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, Harmondsworth 1970, 288.

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Part I  Interstitial Literature

gave birth to a warring, fighting, fundamentalist version of Catholicism, by which they lived. Other, later strands of Catholicism like those of Waugh and Greene will be only cold ideology, not exuberant life-scripts. Another small group impossible to categorize is that of the poets who died in the Great War, who are objectively and by contrast not belated but in many instances looking ahead. The same age as the others named above, they write naturally and before 1921, but will be published after that date, giving them posthumous impact and resonance. But interstitial too are those writers who only lived through the brief Edwardian era of nine years, or those who just lived through the Georgian period, dying in 1921 or shortly afterwards. The borders and temporal markers of the writers’ lives are in these cases out of sync with literary periodization. In this context, another phenomenon to be analysed is that of the possible metamorphic energy evident in the career of other writers. Some long-lived writers underwent a process of renewal; others stayed the same and ended up repeating themselves during their careers. Wells went through three phases, but in some ways these were regressions and involutions rather than innovations. While his first phase genuinely opened up new territories, the following two were one the re-hashing and resurrection of the typically Victorian social comedy, and the other a return to the conversation piece and the novel of ideas. Lastly, Yeats and Shaw after 1919 and 1921 are two writers who cannot be analysed under this heading as they do not belong to either of its currents. Yeats changes his skin much more often than Shaw, but he can never be called ‘belated’. 5. My discriminating criterion will then be that of the dates of birth, starting from the empirically determined point of 1860. Ultimately, though, the choice of whom to include in this category of interstitial literature is made instinctively, on the basis of an instant reaction, of a sweep of the landscape, of a glance. A more intrinsic demarcation is provided by the more unequivocally modern and Modernist writers who looked upon these survivors of an earlier age as at their acid test, as a kind of writing to be overtaken and rejected in order to start anew. The clearest and more unambiguous of these rejections is Woolf ’s ‘Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown’, a far from memorable essay, partial and unfair, but which implicitly calls for this category of interstitial literature.6 6

On Woolf see below, § 158.1.

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§ 2. Shaw after 1921* I: From the Nobel Prize to nonsense. Popularity and decline of an international playwright Saint Joan brought Shaw the Nobel Prize in 1925 and consolidated his reputation as the Great Elder of literary Europe,1 the most widely known and accessible writer in English after Wilde in the whole world, from London to New York and up to the shores of the Middle East. His popularity was astonishing: his plays had runs of weeks on end, were almost simultaneously translated and produced in all the main European languages; even where they were not because of censorship, they still managed to scandalize. The première was often held abroad; at home a dedicated festival was established for Shaw in the spa town of Malvern in 1927. Soon Shaw took to adapting his plays for radio and film, thus increasing their popularity. He lived in a beautiful retreat surrounded by the green spaces of Hertfordshire, but was acclaimed everywhere, the subject of photographs, paintings and sculptures (a bust by Rodin) that depicted him both in public roles and in intimate settings. Like an old-fashioned Victorian diva, he regularly crossed the oceans to reach America, South Africa, India; in 1931 he travelled to Russia and was met by Stalin. He was the very definition of the genius playwright, an opinion-maker in great demand, the entertainer who still made people think with his quips, the voice of a certain kind of England (everyone took him for English): outspoken, pragmatic, agnostic yet respectful of religions seen in terms of a historical convergence, and the spoke-figure of a moderate rather than fundamentalist social-communism, duly diluted by a good dose of classical liberalism. Shaw also had a striking physicality: gaunt, the long face framed by a curly white beard always neatly trimmed, his head covered in a short, snowy main. Most distinctive was his eccentric jaegerlike attire: tassel boots, stripy woollen socks, knickerbockers with matching jacket and alpenstock. To many he looked like a merry boy scout, with

*

The bibliography on Shaw in Volume 6, § 287, must be completed with Shaw: An Autobiography 1898–1950: The Playwright Years, ed. S. Weintraub, New York 1970, and The Unexpected Shaw: Biographical Approaches to G. B. S. and His Work, New York 1982. Prefaces to the plays will be cited as Prefaces from Prefaces by Bernard Shaw, London 1938.

1

CRHE, 300.

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the suppleness of an athlete. In 1924 he received a public accolade from Pirandello; the German playwright Siegfried Trebitsch was also a follower, and his translator;2 at Shaw’s death, Thomas Mann and many others wrote a deferential obituary. Popularity is not however necessarily true greatness. At home, T. S. Eliot remembered Shaw with his typically ambiguous caution; in one of his rare remarks on his fellow Irishman, Yeats identified in Shaw his polar opposite, the absence of creativity; the critic William Archer’s frank quip aptly noted that Shaw had made a lot of noise but left no trace.3 As a counterweight, we should note that after 1921 Shaw rested on his laurels, and that the few complete plays he wrote (just nine), apart from a few other slight works, have not survived the test of time, even though they were an immediate success. In terms of absolute and lasting value, only Saint Joan has enjoyed and continues to enjoy a nearly unanimous consensus, as well as being retained in the repertoire. This downward slope is mirrored by critics, who sometimes stop abruptly after Saint Joan, while at other times they offer simply a rapid overview, in the name of a lenient assessment that would see Shaw in decline but still capable of flashes of style and humour. The most frequent criticism against late Shaw is that his characters lack 2

3

One of the plays Shaw generously admitted into his canon was the translation of one of the works of his own translator, Jitta’s Atonement. Trebitsch’s original play premièred in Vienna in 1920; it was translated by Shaw – who did not have much German – through a ‘telepathic method of absorption’, to the point where we could actually speak of a ‘co-invention’ with Trebitsch (Purdom 1964, 276). The play was sporadically shown in New York and in London in the early 1920s. It centres on a three-way relationship between two university professors and a woman, Jitta, married to one of them, and lover to the other. During a meeting, Jitta’s lover has a heart attack, and she promises him she will get her lover’s book, loosely inspired by psychoanalysis and in effect their co-creation, published under her husband’s name. After the funeral, her husband inquires as to the identity of the woman who was with his colleague while he lay dying, but is reluctant to put his name to the other’s work. Jitta confesses the truth, but forces her reluctant husband to publish his colleague’s work as his in order to avoid a scandal that would ruin the surviving man. In the end, the plot is uncovered, but precisely because everyone has something to confess, the happy ending is assured. The Shavian theme is common with much fin-de-siècle pessimism: the critique of the indissolubility of marriage, when faced with the difficulty of a lasting compatibility between spouses. CRHE, 301.

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psychological depth and the plots real action; his characters are seen to be moving against increasingly sketchy backdrops, without ties to scenery. ‘Most of my plays are almost independent of scenery’, he conceded.4 2. Like Shaw, Orwell too was active during the same three decades and reflected on the foundations of the equally totalitarian fascist and communist regimes, incubating his novel and his ‘socialist’ political essays in the decade of 1920–1930. This is the time when he argued that English literature would have to choose between taking refuge ‘in the belly of the whale’ (and maybe the very whale of Bloomsbury’s post-aestheticism) and becoming politicized. The difference is that Shaw writes under a veil of allegory, of play and irreverence, and through layers and layers of character parody, burlesque, macaronic even. His genre is that of the bagatelle, of theatrical nonsense, at times taking off from a short-lived if deadly serious news item which is often demystified by Shaw, who resorted to the category of ‘tomfoolery.’ Some lighter pieces from 1910 and the following years had already ushered in a theatre of snapshots, of splinters, of sketches that petered out into jokes. The Glimpse of Reality becomes a Plautus-like farce in one frame with a disguised friar, a hoodwinked count and other stereotypes of classical Greek and Latin comedy. Even in the more complex dramas Shaw tends to lapse into incidental gags, such as the predictable and overused spat between an impertinent, witty and (involuntarily) provocative subaltern and his short-tempered superior, a skit that plays on the unexpected, misunderstandings, puns, and witticisms. In the 1930s, Shaw’s specializes in dream-like or quasi-dream-like drama, surreal, fantastic and therefore absurd. The Apple Cart takes place entirely in the realms of fantasy and fable, but others too while starting from a realistic base soon deviate. Shaw is a master of this game on the borderline, where both characters and the action move and develop here and there unexpectedly and surprisingly. In this way he invents a new form or formula for theatre in which the dramatic guarantee is disappointed in favour of the propensity towards a theatre that stages the unexpected. Here the playwright’s incursions, normally prohibited, are entrusted to the character whose turn it is to act as the playwright’s spokesman. We

4

Quoted in Holroyd 1991, 14.

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can therefore speak of Shaw’s own dramatic Modernism. He had already displayed a certain Brechtian alienation before 1921, an alienation which intensifies after 1921 through the repeated process of staging a character that breaks out of his role and through the anachronism of the staging.5 Even more experimental is Shaw the ‘minimalist,’ with plays in one act or even one scene and a stripped down dialogue, which may suggest a distant preview of Beckett and Pinter. 3. The lustre lost in the plays remains intact in at least some of the prefaces, which relate to the plays in a loose way, without providing new information. Shaw remains an elegant prose writer, too elegant perhaps. By the stylistic standards of his time he is an academic essayist, pompous, learned, adept at writing a Latinate prose – smug, embellished – that almost no one would be writing after the war6. This is particularly evident in his periods, unit of measure of this style, which become longer, curled around his main clauses, and with subordinate ones imbricated in other subordinates, all in Latinate polysyllabic lexemes. His prose uses barely any comma or other intermediate punctuation, so that reading is laborious in terms of sentence construction as well as for the density of his concepts. Shaw thought of himself as a ‘critic and moral chastiser through ridicule (otherwise known as a comedy writer).’ He was a concerned witness of the social and political situation, but studied it with detachment and levity, not with anguish. He confessed that he had lived ‘between two world wars without having missed a meal and always having slept the night in his own bed’; his typist reported that in twenty-eight years he had only lost his patience twice.7 In his essays and prefaces, his method is often to defend a humanitarian, enlightened,8 tolerant thesis, dictated by common sense, though not to the point of being blind to the reasons of the opposite position. Killing animals for sports is unacceptable, but never killing animals on principle untenable, since some animals will have to be killed, even just in self-defence. Making prisons more humane and less punitive, better 5 6 7 8

See on this the useful qualifications of Weintraub 1982, 222–3. The Latin grammar was the only one he had ever studied, as he confessed (Prefaces, 775). Holroyd 1991, 26. See for instance W. Archer in CRHE, 300, for a frequent comparison between Shaw and Voltaire.

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still abolishing them would be a good thing; yet it is useless to pretend that prisoners are not at times violent, and that persuasion and meekness do not always work. In Shaw’s preface to the Webbs’ study of the English prison system, we hear the development of many of the arguments made by Dickens and Reade, and some of Butler’s. He admits that there are incurable criminals, but by and large he believes prisons to be populated by petty criminals who are often less guilty than many others who got away with it. He saw crime as the product of circumstances, but jail deprives prisoners of freedom and quality of life, making them relapse once they are out. Improve the circumstances and you will have fewer criminals. Thumbs down, similarly, on the system of separate incarceration, on which the Victorians had hotly debated for decades. In politics too Shaw was inclined towards tolerance and equidistance, shunning radicalism as a thinker not given to millenarian hopes nor confiding in divine and magic interventions from above to solve the situation. Shortly after the Great War, and after having supported the socialist MacDonald, Shaw moved to the right up to the point of supporting the pro-fascist Mosley and continental dictatorships. Behind his disquisitions he had the same fundamental, socialist objective as Orwell: to make life ‘decent,’ that is, liveable: ‘If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions’.9 With Orwell, Shaw believes the English tend towards anarchism, and that the socialist dream of a perfectly organized society, without poverty and overwork, clashes with the aspiration to mould one’s life and with the loathing of state interference. The ideal system, the cornerstone of the Shavian utopia is that governments should be decision-making bodies, and therefore strong, but without undermining the notion that ‘the individual is a law unto itself,’ and thus leaving him practically all the fundamental freedoms.10 The idea of social organization as a prison was shared among many nineteenth-century reformers. Dickens coined McChoakumchild, Shaw rhymed ‘child training’ with ‘child taming’.11 Shaw’s brand of socialism is partly the detached, jargon-laden, ‘armchair’ variety that Orwell abhorred. Shaw never got into the trenches in defence of endangered freedom as Orwell did: he was 9 10 11

Prefaces, 299. Prefaces, 300. Prefaces, 317.

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too old to fight, and more importantly his ideology did not demand that kind of commitment. His disagreement with Orwell became an outright fight when Fabianism, and indeed Shaw’s brand of social-communism, came to idolize Stalin and the Great Dictator. The preface to the play The Millionairess analyses the individual charisma of the ‘born bosses’, the great leaders, the magnetic historical figures like William the Conqueror and Napoleon. In it, Shaw reviews recent history to demonstrate how the failure of the democratic system will facilitate the rise of the boss, that is of dictatorships. But Mussolini is far from satirized in this preface; he is seen as a Machiavellian hero who took note of the fact that the era of freedom was over and that it was necessary to return to a functioning state. And fascist Italy, Shaw believed, did work. He proclaimed himself an admirer of Einstein, but then came out with anti-Semitic blunders such as the following: ‘Now no doubt Jews are most obnoxious creatures’, and ‘it would have been better for the world if the Jews had never existed’,12 only to then correct himself as usual, and add that we all have mixed blood, not least Hitler himself. The preface to Saint Joan turns the Maid of Orleans into another representative of the category of the charismatic historical leaders, like Socrates and Napoleon; but Shaw also argues that the saintly ‘bosses’ are violently eliminated because of the fear they inspire, and as a consolation, that in 99 cases out of 100 the dictator goes crazy. With The Apple Cart, both the play and the preface, Shaw makes it manifest that he had converted to monarchism, having first been a democrat. Then he corrects himself: he had in fact intended to show the limitations of both systems, at least in so far as they are understood by idealists. The conflict is really between plutocracy on the one hand and the two other systems on the other; it is the rich who have swallowed democracy. The play was meant to draw attention to the delays and inconveniences of the democratic system of parliamentary representation. A public speech Shaw would have held on the disadvantages of democracy is reproduced verbatim. Of the latter Shaw does not accept the principle that it is a government by the people, which he considers a mirage. He revisits Mill’s notion that good governance is what

12

Prefaces, 487.

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does the minimum to allow the autonomy of the individual to have free range.13 On the other hand, he finds that society has evolved into a form of socialism, because the state manages and coordinates almost everywhere several public services. The point of the preface to The Apple Cart is that a false belief in democracy leads to an Orwellian oligarchy that ‘abuses power for its own gain’. 4. Shaw declared himself a secular man with three articles of faith: creative evolution, socialism, and vegetarianism; by 1942 he more simply identified as republican and communist. But by declaring Joan of Arc a saint he polluted this secularism with traces of religious belief. In the preface to the play, for instance, he credits the Saint’s telepathy, voices and visions, or at least gives them a psychological and psychic justification. His rather forced explanation is that they were the dramatization of the pressure exercised on her by the force behind evolution; they were in fact an ‘evolutionary appetite’.14 On the relationship between science and faith, the theme also of In Good King Charles’s Golden Days, Shaw confessed his repentance: he had believed in science as a religion, he was now going back to religious belief. He argued that science generates credulity, religion scepticism. At the time of the play (1935), he had come to look upon science with suspicion, but with respect and sympathy at the insights of poets and prophets.15 While explicit and uncompromising on the fallacies and incompleteness of the Bible, Shaw on the other hand recalls the old Arnold, since even though the Scriptures are a jumble of illusions, of blunders, of tales, they are indispensable, and have a very high historical and poetic value. Creative evolution is not a totalitarian creed, a theological system that cuts out other systems and finds them inconceivable (even an orthodox Catholic like Teilhard de Chardin was an evolutionist). It is also true that Shaw declared himself an agnostic and non-believer in the revealed religions, but as every

13 14

15

Prefaces, 331. Grene 1987, 132–50, is among the few critics that discuss what Shaw really thought, and would like his public to think about the ‘voices’ Joan claims to hear, and about miracles. Grene observes that Shaw, clearly embarrassed, regards miracles as inventions, that is conjectures that stand in place of ‘tedious explanations’. Prefaces, 636.

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honest English sceptic he continued to investigate the phenomenon of religion. In a beautiful page of the prefaces he summarizes who was Jesus, that is the usual historical, gifted and eclectic character, to be analysed as a human being. This troubled yet secular interest leads him to tackle problematic articles of faith in a sense paradoxically even more religious than a believer – as he does in his obsessive involvement with the visions and voices of Joan of Arc. After all the theory of creative evolution must declare who determines and operates it, who is its Aristotelian prime mover, unless it espouses the thesis of self-generation of the evolutionary movement. Creative Evolution is, to be frank, increasingly a ball and chain for Shaw’s ideology, often forcing the playwright into acrobatics in order to make it the deus ex machina of his plays. Of Shaw’s short stories ‘The Black Girl in Her Search for God’ (1931–1932), the most famous, is a theological parable illustrating through parody the changes in the divine imago throughout the various books of the Bible. ‘The Aerial Football’ is a ‘Catholic’ joke, featuring a bishop and a poor woman at the gates of paradise, where they receive a surprise. In ‘The Miraculous Revenge’ an Irishman digs up a grave to investigate a ‘Catholic’ miracle, an example of that genre of grotesque and macabre associated quintessentially with Stevenson. ‘The Emperor and the Little Girl’ (1916) is a fable suffused with unusual pathos, featuring a Kaiser overcome with remorse who haunts the battlefields while addressing as equal a little girl who ends up torn apart by bombs. ‘A Dressing Room Secret’ is yet another product of Shaw’s polemic with Shakespeare, whose Othello and Macbeth he considered overrated. § 3. Shaw after 1921 II: ‘Saint Joan’. The divine call, an unthinkable ‘maybe’ The first of the short plays alternating with the long ones, The Admirable Bashville; Or, Constancy Unrewarded,16 appeared in 1901, penned by a Shaw who re-writes himself in the genre, as he put it, of a ‘literary joke’. It is a blank verse adaptation of his early novel Cashel Byron’s Profession, to which 16

The title echoes that of a famous play by Barrie (Volume 6, § 299.2). Compared to the novel, Shaw shifts the focus to the brisk servant and his unrequited love for his mistress.

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Shaw resorted to prevent pirate copies circulating in America.17 The story centres on the situation of the weary Lydia who longs for a man without art or culture, and finds him in the beefy Cashel, who attempts to leave the boxing ring for her sake. After a winning match, though, Cashel is wanted by the police for disturbance of the peace and thrown in prison. But a final twist reveals Cashel is of noble origin and marriage to Lydia follows. It is a successful entertainment farce, whose heap of improbable developments and twists reveals its origin in the Victorian serial. The sheen of verse makes it akin to Gay’s parodic theatre, with echoes and casts from Shakespeare and Milton that turn it sometimes into a delicious and delighting hybrid pastiche, particularly since its subject, boxing matches, is alien and resistant to treatment in verse. In Press Cuttings (1909),18 which aims to be a hilarious farce of militarism and feminism, sprinkled with a succession of comical one-liners, the historical figure of General Kitchener receives at the Ministry of War a suffragette sent to him by the Prime Minister. This opening turns out to be a hilarious coup de théâtre: the Prime Minister – whose name, Balsquith, is a riotous fusion of Asquith and Balfour – has used this ploy to forestall the ferocity of the suffragettes’ campaigns and to escape controls and avoid trouble. It is indeed a time of chaos, as laws that would exclude women from a two-mile perimeter around Westminster are being debated in Parliament. Paradoxically and provocatively, the debate hinges on the feasibility and usefulness of martial law, supported by the general with candid but abhorrent arguments which are rejected by the PM. This battle precedes The Apple Cart because it voices, without completely burying it, the view that governing a country requires the use of force and that democracy has limits. And in fact the repudiation of authoritarian militarism stems solely from the General’s pompous speech,

17

18

In blank verse is also the swift, amusing parodic sketch ‘Shakes versus Shav’, (1949), the last opus of Shaw’s canon. The Bard is imagined to be reborn and to show up at Malvern Festival to unmask his presumptive reincarnation, Shaw himself, who answers back to Shakespeare placing his own masterpieces on the same plane as Shakespeare’s immortal works – indeed, according to his opinion, above. The performance of this play was prohibited until the names of the protagonists were camouflaged.

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which reveals all the resources at its disposal. As some ad hoc allusions hint, the historical setting is that of the Anglo-Prussian war of the ‘battleships’ and of the feared Prussian invasion of England. A speech more grimly militaristic, warmongering, deafer to appeasement than that of the General is inconceivable. In the second part, the Prime Minister receives in the same Ministry a delegation from the Anti-Suffragette League. Dramatic contrast is provided by the general’s housekeeper, who expresses the position of public opinion, pragmatic and indifferent to the great ideological questions that preoccupy the powerful. The Anti-Suffrage League is picturesque and pompously belligerent: its two representatives pose as Amazons, and their dialogue with the general is peppered with somewhat threadbare verbal gags. Their frenzied thirst for action induces even the general, advocate of authoritarianism, to practice moderation.19 The play then loses its thread as it descends into hard-core absurd with a series of burlesque weddings celebrated on stage. The Glimpse of Reality (1909), an historical ‘little tragedy,’ starts well, with a scandalous situation, close to Browning in appearance: an aged friar confesses a girl with no dowry, who plots to obtain it by attracting a wealthy patron to her father’s tavern. The disgusting monk, 113 years old and with sagging limbs, evokes glimmers of that macabre attraction Salome feels for Jokanaan, but for a moment only and therefore for the sake of parody. He turns out to be a disguised count, the same one that the girl and her publican father are about to kill in order to rob and who, after shedding the disguise, turns vehemently against his assassin. In short, the point of the play hinges on how the innkeeper will manage to kill the count to earn the ten crowns promised by the local lord to the murderer, and how the count will parry his wily attempts. But the short piece languishes well before the denouement: the count tries to kill the assassin, but stays alive, though blackmailed; the crowns flow into the girl’s dowry. In Passion, Poison and Petrifaction; Or, the Fatal Gazogene (1905) a murderer enters a house of a gaudy splendour, where a tired pretentious woman has just fallen asleep. It is her husband, who is approaching the 19

The assertion that the great historical warriors were women in disguise, and that women ‘govern the world using men’, obviously recalls the philosophical background in Man and Superman.

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bed but is held back by a sneeze of the sleeper. In evening dress, her lover then knocks on her door; the husband offers the guest a glass of poisoned whisky. Here, more than in any other of these little plays, Shaw would like us to enjoy the humour in his puns. Eventually the husband has the wife all to himself, while the dying lover can be saved with an antidote made of lime peeled from the ceiling. The absurd result is that the dying person is transformed into a living statue, which blesses the reconciled couple. The Fascinating Foundling (1909), not without spikes of invaluable humour, pivots on the encounter between an orphaned fop and the Lord Chancellor, who is asked to provide the youth with a theatre career and an aging wife. Immediately after a handsome suffragette, also orphaned, enters the office: she is the right person, and the deal is done. The little scene is among the wittiest, particularly in the very frank and truthful jokes of valets and orderlies, figures with which Shaw always centres the target. The Music-Cure (1914) describes the plight of a young politician who has bought shares he believed would have risen, but have instead collapsed, reducing him to a state of nervous exhaustion. This is also an absurd farce of weak hold: the patient, asleep with opium, thinks he is seeing crocodiles, and believes that Strega, a pianist who enters the room, is one of them. The latter, a sort of virago, was sent by his mother; on hearing her play a polonaise by Chopin, the young politician falls in love, and offers himself as a domesticated little husband in need of protection (delighted, even, by the prospect of some beatings). 2. The external occasion for Saint Joan (1923) was the canonization of the Maid by the Holy Office in 1920, but in fact a play about her figure had been brewing for some time.20 Shaw researched her life thoroughly, and retraced it in six scenes plus an epilogue, to show the fateful end met

20 Sidetracking many (see e.g. Woodbridge 1963, 117), Shaw claimed that the idea came to him by chance. He did not know what to write, so why not write about St Joan. Compared to the previous tradition, dramatic, melodramatic and biographical, Shaw’s treatment of the heroine is totally anti-romantic: no carnal love – except the pure Platonic sympathy for the ‘bastard’ Dunois – is attributed to Joan, as was in Schiller. Shaw is closer to Verdi, whose opera Giovanna d’Arco is oddly never mentioned by Shaw in the preface, nor remembered by comparatists or historicists.

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by benefactors to society who are crushed by institutions. He even bent the young warrior to the role of a forerunner of Protestantism, a follower of ‘private judgment’ to connect with God, outside of any mediation by ecclesiastical apparatuses. Shaw investigates the source of her courage and how both courage and the drive to act are inspired by the example of an indomitable heroine. As a Puritan, he admires too a fundamental faith that rests on private enlightenment: the maiden is a foreshadowing of the Quaker, Fox,21 and of the future dissenting evangelical sects. He is sceptical and at a close look minimizes the miracles: facts and natural events, though exceptional and unforeseen like the sudden overproduction of eggs from the chickens after a long and tough strike, are miraculous only through coincidence. The Archbishop himself harbours a Victorian brand of scepticism when he declares that miracles are ‘simple and innocent tricks’ to strengthen the faith of the believers, and do not imply anything truly supernatural. Even the sudden change of wind which allows the French to wade the Loire and repel the English is part of the natural order.22 The drama focuses on many key moments in an arc stretching from 1429 to 1456, the year in which the trial is reviewed and overturned under the guise of a dream that breaks with the illusionism of the stage, featuring a contemporary Catholic English priest who reads the bull of canonization. Saint Joan follows the path of the rehabilitation of saints condemned as witches, and has some overlap with the literature of demonic, Faustian imprint in its freest form. The friction in the scenes, the farcical and grotesque flavour turning to the ‘absurd’ in some situations, suggest a sort of Faustian remake such as Browning’s epilogue to Parleyings, entitled ‘Fust and His Friends’.23 In the opening dialogue between the maiden and the captain puns abound precisely because spoken words are not capitalized: Joan has received orders from the Lord, who is not the lord; a similar quid 21 The actual protagonist of In Good King Charles’s Golden Days. 22 As Bishop Cauchon notes, Joan herself never speaks of miracles, her ‘miraculous’ action being simply the product of her lucidity and firmness. Echoing Carlyle, the bishop speaks of the exceptional resources given by ‘the courage of the faith,’ even when the faith might be ‘false’. 23 Volume 6, § 23.5.

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pro quo pivots on the King and the king. It is the first of many contrasts in action and in register: the captain is incredulous and rude in front of a peasant woman who claims to have been invested by God with a mission, and tells it with the utmost candour, simplicity and understatement. Her frankness is the result of an unself-conscious and naïve faith that tells her all are equal before God, and that there are no titles and privileges before him. The significance of Joan’s unconscious political-religious plan begins to take shape further on in the dialogue: on the one hand, the mission was thrust on her by the ‘voices’ of angels and of divine messengers; on the other, her mission is to restore France to the French in accordance with its natural and linguistic boundaries. It is the messianic program of a war inspired by God to carry out his command. In the second scene we see the carousel of faithless prelates, cynical men of the world and inept rulers. None is of heroic stature, all are grotesque and petty. The Dauphin Charles is debt-ridden and the laughingstock of the attendants and the Archbishop. In soldier’s garb, that is, dressed as a man because God has invested her as a warrior, Joan is brought to the king, and easily passes the test to which she has submitted herself by unmasking the king in disguise and recognizing the real thing. The indomitable masculine Joan wants to proceed against the English forts on the bridge of Orleans, as the ‘miraculous’ wind picks up, just like St Catherine had promised in her visions. The fourth scene shifts to the English camp, where the losers ascribe the unfortunate event to magic and indict Joan as a witch who has availed herself of diabolical powers. 3. The theological question at stake is whether Joan acted by magic or is a heretic. The four-way debate between the French bishop and the English priests that takes place in the play sets up Joan as a spiritual antecedent of Protestantism: she leaps over the Church to claim direct contact with God. It is not coincidental that the bishop should compare her to Mohammed and link her to Hus and the other heresies that are sweeping through Europe. But they also see in Joan a historical symbol. If she is not stopped, the mediating function of the priest will be circumvented, but not only that: aristocracy too will be liquidated, since the king and the king only must be in direct contact with God. The representatives of political power, allied with its spiritual counterpart, glimpse in Joan the dawn of a

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catastrophe and of a cultural earthquake. Thirdly, Joan does not know she is acting against imperialism, putting the brakes on the territorial expansion of the great powers,24 since she supports a nationalist politics, with boundaries drawn along the rigorous demarcations of nations as sociallinguistic-ethnic wholes. In the one but last scene, Joan has completed her mission and is about to return to her village, for which she was homesick. Yet she pushes the king to conquer Paris even while surrounded by sceptics and herself suffering a lapse of enthusiasm. The well-disposed and bold Dunois too brings back the reasons for war to pragmatic considerations, with the king offering the usual counterpoint to these solemn disquisitions. Joan challenges him to act with a candour that is mistaken for arrogance and disobedience. The last scene of the trial underlines the origins of the charge of heresy in the words of the inquisitor. During the questioning Joan is the more naturally and humanely sincere, to the point of being witty, of uttering provoking jokes, of making the tragic familiar. She is also silly in a feminine way, as well as firm in her replies. She can but confirm that she puts God’s vital command before the deadly teachings of the Church. She eventually caves in because she realizes that St Catherine had promised her she would not be burnt at the stake, and therefore deduces that it must have been the devil who spoke to her, as she is being made to confess; she signs her confession with a heavy heart. But on hearing she will be imprisoned for life, she tears up the parchment, believing once more that her voices were truthful, and yearning for the beauties of creation which would have been forever barred to her. The epilogue takes place a quarter of a century later, a spectral dialogue in the night-time between the king, former Dauphin, and the ghosts of those who took part in the trial, whose belated review has revealed the corruption and myopia of the judges. After Joan’s spectre, one by one the other ghosts confess themselves, recriminate, regret and are redeemed, in a change brought about by the death of the maiden. Among these, there is a blaspheming soldier who takes a day’s leave from Hell in Joan’s honour: he had given her the two branches out 24 This might have been a contemporary reflection on the end of the Great War, which dismantled the Empires of Central Europe and remoulded the European chessboard on the principle of national territories.

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of which she fashioned her imploring cross at the stake. In a fast-forward to 1920, the last ghost to appear is a man dressed as a priest who proclaims Joan’s canonization. But Joan’s request that she should be allowed to live again is turned down, as ‘the heretic is always best left dead’. § 4. Shaw after 1921 III: Burlesques on the powers-that-be The rather loose link that joins The Apple Cart (1929), subtitled ‘a political extravaganza’, to a well-researched historical drama like Saint Joan, and to Shaw’s penultimate play, which again came after a number of historical extravaganzas, lies in the theme of the world’s need for a strong leader and decisive political management. Starting from a proverb, the play debates the hypothesis of an imaginary reversal of the British constitutional monarchy, not in explicit terms, but rather in the form of a political fable that has the flavour of Büchner and looks to Orwell’s dystopia (which, since Orwell knew Shaw, well might have been inspired by the latter). The stylized, Latinate, macaronic names in the play signal Shaw’s inability or unwillingness from now on to treat ideological issues if not under the species of mockery and unreal and surreal farce. This is a utopian drama set in the last quarter of the twentieth century,25 a time of political disaffection, and of wealth (pace Orwell): poverty has been completely abolished, but without the need for announcing or implementing the rationing of consumer goods (including Orwell’s chocolate) and luxury items; a prophecy of the welfare state, it has been said. The trouble is the dictatorial direction – and this is Orwellian – taken by the king, who finds himself cornered by the Labour government. Having gained some time to meditate on the government’s ultimatum, which he ends up spending with his mistress, the king receives the American ambassador who – again foreshadowing Orwell – announces America’s return to the British Empire by plebiscite. The king eventually abdicates to stand for election as a private citizen in the town of Windsor. But the government realizes that in this way the king would become a dictator elected by the people, and the withdrawal of the ultimatum props up the status quo. 25

The internal chronology is shifted thirty years forwards, or in 2000, according to Valency 1973, 391.

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2. Formally the play consists of two long sessions of the Privy Council, separated by an interlude, where the intention is to satirize the usual pettiness of politics, its small-minded character, made up of comic puppets and homunculi in an atmosphere of burlesque comedy. The issue on the agenda is governance and the ability to govern, which is grounded either in the principle of the iron fist, or on that of blandishments: too much democracy restrains political decisions, a leader is necessary, and then constitutional monarchy becomes a stumbling block. Among the first to arrive at the Council is Boanerges, newly minted Minister of Commerce, who in a private audience asks the constitutional monarch Magnus for a decisive action to tackle the crisis. A union leader of humble origins, Boanerges is obviously a Bolshevik, since he wears a red Russian-style blouse and often comes out in eulogies for a republican system to be established without bloodshed or revolution. Between him and the king the knotty problem is framed in these terms: do we need a constitutional monarch to act as an ‘adhesive postage stamp’, or a strong monarch, semi-divine as in the old days of the Romans? King Magnus replies that after all the president of a republic has ten times more power than a puppet king who serves the interests of the plutocrats. From all this emerges a veiled demand for more executive powers to those who govern, and a rejection of the checks and balances of the democratic system. During a momentary absence of the king, the whole cabinet meets to agree on how to limit the royal prerogatives. This England of the future is in a state of affluence founded, as in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, on capital investments in pockets of poverty and cheap labour. It has achieved that kind of socialism Orwell had in mind and for which he fought: ‘we have the best-paid proletariat in the world’. The ministers then want to silence the king, who responds with a long oration praising the merits of monarchy and barely refraining from declaring his support for absolute monarchy. The interlude between the two acts is filled with skirmishes between the king and his mistress. She oozes a high and delusional romanticism, and wants to free the king, prisoner of the vulgar low intrigues of politics. Stripped of regalia, Magnus turns out to be a melancholy, resigned, hen-pecked husband nagged by the queen. When time is about to run out, the king receives the American ambassador just before entering the Council again. The content of the

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American’s embassy reveals that already at this early stage, when Burnham’s books were still to be written26 and disseminated, the British assumed, or feared, a division of the world into two or three blocks of influence, with the merging of England into a bigger block, and the end of its centuries-old global supremacy. Socialists, though not to the point of disavowing their patriotism, neither Shaw nor Orwell greeted optimistically this scenario, which nevertheless issued from the very political weakness and submissiveness of the English. Speaking in Orwellian tones, the king sees clearly that this engulfment could be the end of old England: ‘We may survive only as another star on your flag’. To the Council the king paints a bleak picture of a future in which the centre of gravity of the world will have moved to Moscow or Washington. He remains one of Shaw’s historical movers who feels he ‘has forces’ inside him. The trick with which he threatens to return to politics after his eventual abdication ends up by protecting the status quo, and indicates that monarchy is the best possible political form, as long as it is freed from ‘constitutional’ constraints. § 5. Shaw after 1921 IV: ‘Too True to Be Good’ Rather quirky, decidedly artificial, diegetically disconnected, the threeact play Too True to Be Good (1931) leans on an initially ingenious and rather astonishing find, but then fails to fill it up, leaving the play stranded in a series of isolated provocations, a collection of eccentricities and sensational scenes, thus preventing the underlying global meaning from emerging clearly and convincingly. In other words, the play does not bear out the plan put forward in the preface, where the stated intention was to represent how having money does not lead to any results, but is rather boring and a source of dissatisfaction. In this preface Shaw presents himself as the socialist thinker in favour of the abolition of capitalism and private property to redeem mankind from a double curse, for the rich and for the poor. The brilliant premise brings us back to the atmosphere and the types of Heartbreak House, as well as to the method of staging a double plane of reality and fantasy. A young, spoiled English aristocrat, bed-ridden with measles, discovers just 26 Volume 8, § 29.2.

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before it happens the planned theft of a magnificent pearl necklace by her nurse, who is in cahoots with a military chaplain turned thief. Having foiled the theft, the young woman finds herself healthy and full of life; she accepts the two fledgling criminals’ invitation to make common cause and throws herself into a life of adventure away from bourgeois conventions and especially from her mother’s protection. The strongest analogy is with Barrie’s dream-plays, since it is not clear whether the whole play is to be read purely as the patient’s dream.27 If so, even in this projected dream world a luxurious but boring life is swapped for a thrilling one, as in Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton. In Shaw’s fantastic Neverland, the roles are reversed in exceptional circumstances: Nurse Sweetie, former hotel scullery maid, becomes a countess, while the aristocrat has to pose as a native and must submit; in all three beats a longing for a life beyond conventions. Shaw then opens with a satire of the aristocracy and the symbol of the disease that is attacking and eroding it; in the development he attempts to spread around the dull and insipid evolutions of the trio28 a bitter cheer that is never despairing but always tightly controlled. The play moves to the imperial territory of India, where the three pranksters in disguise hold in check a garrison of idlers and eccentric soldiers by letting them believe that a gang of robbers are claiming a huge ransom for a kidnapped Englishwoman. Verbal gags and repeated bursts of oratory aimed at too many gratuitous targets are meant to enliven this drab canvas without dramatic development. Miss Mopply, the ‘patient,’ denounces parental coercion, with its protective cotton wool which nevertheless cannot shield from the disease. Similarly, Aubrey Bagot, who became a priest, and a thieving one at that, despite his secular education and atheistic father, comes out of nowhere to denounce the failures of scientism.29 When in this exotic scenario enters Colonel Tallboys, he introduces a stale satire of sedentary and inactive militarism and of the Indian police, while the caricature of Meek the attendant re-hashes the figure of 27 28 29

There is however no return to the opening scene, and to the bed-ridden ‘patient’. The play concludes with a note that says ‘the author […] does not believe the world can be saved by words alone’. According to Holroyd 1991, 263, the priest is a not-disparaging parody of Rev. Inge, dean of St Paul in London.

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the impertinent yet alert and resourceful subaltern.30 The simple-minded character of the plot must be continuously masked by inward-looking yet abundant speeches and monologues which aspire to be – and unintentionally are – gratuitous notifications of the chaos and nonsense of life,31 while at the same time invoking a kind of Pentecostal fire of renewal. Shaw attempts to make of his three protagonists Brechtian characters out of role, capable of expressing the friction between an overabundance of rambling words and the need for action; the attempt is a failure. 2. In the first act a patient with measles, whose first name we never learn, has a vision of the microbe that struck her down, though from the point of view of the microbe, she is the one to have infected it. The double plane of the action, the natural and the supernatural, is revealed by the fact that the microbe comments aloud on the actions of the characters and follows closely a long dialogue between the doctor and the concerned mother of the patient. The expected point of view is reversed when the infected bacillus asks the doctor to be healed, conveying the message that the rich are full of infectious diseases, that any cure only deceives the patient who must instead heal herself. In short, the patient has been made ill by too much caring rather than by its absence, and has no good reason to complain of a lack of attentions. It is then not a lively nurse who takes care of the patient, but rather a thief ’s sidekick signalling to her accomplice the right time to come in. When the thief enters the room and is about to pull out the drawer of the night-table to steal the pearl necklace, the not-so-ill patient jumps out of bed to face him off and knock him down – an unexpected outpouring of the ‘mysterious power that gives us life but is to all unknown’. Immediately afterwards, the two criminals conceive a plan: to take the patient on as an accomplice, since after the scuffle she feels better than ever. With the proceeds of the sale, the imaginary invalid will enjoy life, true life. The pair will get a hefty commission on the sale of the necklace. Patient and microbe recover, and the three stage a fake kidnapping, 30 Riding a powerful and noisy motorbike, Meek has been seen as a reflection of Lawrence of Arabia, a friend of Shaw’s. 31 In the thief ’s final speech: ‘everyone is falling, falling, infinitely and despairingly falling into a void where there is no footing’.

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still driven by an overwhelming desire for an untrammelled life. The second and third acts look like they only take place in the delusional imagination of the patient as she enjoys the adventurous life that convention precluded. They are however sheer incongruity. In the second act, the former patient, still dissatisfied, is about to be unmasked as English by the colonel. In the third, the first scene is a slow and long-winded dialogue on the prospects of humanity by a pious and delusional sergeant who loves Bunyan, and seems in his delirium to predict Europe’s decay as it submits to dictatorship and the winds of war. Out of nowhere jumps an old man raving and blathering on matter escaping the control of science, in whom the thieving priest recognizes his father. The end unravels as it jumps into utopias arising from the weariness and disappointment for a world ‘that is precisely the opposite of what I was taught’ – and then into the surreal, also with countermoves such as that of the ‘patient’ who ends up founding an order of lay nuns in which her mother will be the cook. § 6. Shaw after 1921 V: Other extravaganzas and socio-political fables The short Village Wooing (1933) consists of three conversations between the only two characters, wittily designated with the first and last letters of the alphabet – a and zed – to indicate their fundamental opposition, in three different situations. The sketch ends with the poles overlapping, and therefore with a wedding. A forty-year-old intellectual, sly and reserved, enters into a dialogue with a young, cheeky shop assistant on the deck of an ocean liner. The woman won her passage in a quiz, the man writes travel guides. In deference to Shaw’s ideological scheme, the woman is the one to provoke and tease the slightly misogynist man, widower of a mismatched union. After the initial frost, a connection is made, but neuroses and frustrations emerge too. ‘I do not think the world is rightly arranged’, states the disenchanted writer, who seems to be left untouched by the meeting on the ship. In the second scene the writer is on a countryside ramble when he happens to drop by the very village shop where the young woman works as shop assistant and phone operator (the village being the one where Shaw lived). He does not recognize her because he has had a memory lapse,32 32

A motif shared in the Orwellian ‘clergyman’s daughter’ (see Volume 8, § 25).

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but otherwise he is still as grouchy, grumpy and stubborn. The situation is however gradually reversed as it is the man now who feels the need to speak and communicate, interrupting with his curiosity the shop-assistant’s work. He is undergoing a great transformation, and in the third scene he woos the shop assistant (having bought the shop) and convinces her to get married. It is a bit of a forced fable on the need for marriage as the engine of history, in spite of its penalties and risks. Always dry and funny, the dialogue nevertheless ends up by succumbing to the writer’s vague and fantastical tirades, which deny that marriage merely amounts to sensual satisfaction and praise it for its contribution to the continuation of life and the antidote to the ‘extinction and final annihilation’ of man. 2. The vast and gradually impossible to follow – and therefore also to stage – On the Rocks (1933) may function as the counterpart to The Apple Cart, as it reviews the chaos of contemporary society and politics in the guise of a partly surreal farce. The point of view here is not that of the monarch, but of an imaginary Liberal Prime Minister heading a government of broad national coalition. More precisely, the historical background is that of the discontent of the working classes, of a rising unemployment that brings the masses ever closer to socialism and Marxism, amid fears of a possible proletarian revolution in Britain. On the opposing front, a timid and unsure democracy is in power, tempted by a more repressive policy against the background of shifts in alliances between parties and opinion groups. Many of these issues are the same as those that preoccupied Orwell, whose treatment was however much more direct and far less farcical, as well as coming from the opposite political perspective. The gist of Shaw’s discourse lies in identifying the unavoidable contradictions revealed in totalitarian ideologies once they are implemented, including that of Marx, in Shaw’s opinion. The title is wittily ambiguous: on the one hand, it pessimistically alludes to the sinking of the national ship and to its fatal clash against the rocks; on the other, it mocks the moderate view for which socialism would destroy the family, the rock, or stone, or even pillar on which society rests. As the curtain rises, it shows the premier preparing a speech for a meeting of clergymen which will hinge on the concept that socialism ‘destroys the family’. In ironic contrast, his daughter enters the scene to demonstrate that the PM’s own family is far from harmonious: she protests against her mother’s oppressive interference in her life, while

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the girl’s mother in her turn confesses her increasing frustration. Crushed by the machinations of politics, the PM is comforted with the acrobatic trick of a half-dreamy interlude where a therapist who proclaims herself a ‘ghost from the future’ admonishes him, cuts him down to size, and then brings him to her sanatorium to heal his mind. Though the first act takes off soberly, is orderly and mindful of theatrical conventions (at least up to this improbable spectral appearance), the major failing of the play turns out to be its uncontrolled verbosity. The second act is among the most incoherent in Shaw’s corpus: a carousel of too many ill-defined and hastily focused public figures expands too freely and in excessive, loving detail on the politics of their class. In Downing Street everyone is waiting for the Prime Minister to wake up after delivering a revolutionary discourse that announced a vast program of nationalizations to wide-spread astonishment, inspired by his reading of the complete works of Marx during his restcure. The sequencing of various interventions has the paradoxical task of proving that the program is supported by all but the proletarians it should and would favour. Alternatively, they could be seen as driving home the defeatist conclusion that after each decision – for or against the capitalists and proletarians – there will always be one class that loses out and remains unsatisfied. The workers are the only ones to demand the withdrawal of the socialist program. It is easy for Shaw to demonstrate that every new political direction struggles to reshuffle the deck, but that each reshuffle produces monstrous alliances in accordance with its inspiring principles. The paradox is that ‘chained dogs [the workers] are the fiercest guardians of property’. This extended cabinet meeting concludes with the resignation of the conservative side in the coalition. The playwright does not seem able to stop from suggesting that only the iron fist will be able to restore national order; on the other hand, he is also confident that there will never be a revolution in England.33 Not the least of the contradictions besieging the proletariat is that two revolutionaries should both be vying to marry the 33

This is clear from the start. The opening political question is how the head of the executive might wipe out the plague of unemployment. The police commissioner reminds him that in any case for as long as the demonstrators are merely listening to revolutionary speeches, the discontent is harmless.

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son and daughter of the Prime Minister,34 who in his turn must recognize that it is impossible to pursue a sound and thoughtful form of politics. Even the old Marxist points to the failures of the democratic system, once it becomes a reality and is no longer an unreachable chimera. He too calls for the hard iron fist, or to be clear a ‘dictator’. In the preface Shaw barely touches upon the starting event of the drama – the repression of the protesters advocated by the police chief – only to move on to a disquisition on the need of mass exterminations, though without cruelty. Addressing the question of whether a government should be firing on its own people and on unruly demonstrators, Shaw argues that it is a political function from which there can be no exemption. The incorrigible should be eliminated, just as the unredeemable should end up in jail. With a superb page playing devil’s advocate, Shaw ends up arguing that Jesus was rightly ‘exterminated’, although with unnecessary cruelty. 3. The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1934) consists of five episodes in scenes distributed between a prologue and two acts, but held together by the slightest of ties: about twenty years intervene between the prologue and the two acts. Shaw reaches here the height of his theatre of the fantastic, and takes to the most outlandish extremes his poetics of the weird, the bizarre, the singular. The confused, complex and ever far-fetched fantasy in this play is only inferior by sheer weight to Back to Methuselah, which it reprises in a few thematic chords. And it is exactly a play to be taken as a backdrop bringing to the forefront issues always open to debate for Shaw. Each of the six frames brings out one of the issues without letting the others vanish: one by one, they touch upon the decline of imperialism and of its administrative class, upon Christianity made relative, the crisis in the institution of marriage, the sense of an ending and the collapse of a civilization, offset by the always necessary and constructive response to the life force. But each picture is out of proportion to the theory it is meant to illustrate, either by defect or by excess. The theory is too emphatically 34 This artificial coda is meant to be a joking detour onto Shaw’s conception of marriage, which he sees as a lottery. It is odd that the proletarian factory-worker would intensely want to marry the PM’s son; yet even if their incompatibility is clear, she resigns herself to being the vehicle for ‘developing the race’.

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spouted by Shaw’s characters, and not always crystal clear; rarely motivated by the plot, it cleaves Shaw’s play into the purely dramatic mechanism and the imperious, irrepressible need to demonstrate and teach. In the first part of the prologue the ‘emigration’ official of an undefined ‘tropical harbour’ somewhere in the British Empire is not a new acquaintance, since the official brutalized by his service in the Imperial administration had already been sampled by Kipling, Conrad, and more recently in Orwell’s Burmese Days.35 A recently arrived young woman manages to blow some joie de vivre into him, pulling him away from the suicide he had planned (and which ends up being committed by the scribe, another disillusioned with his Imperial posting). They each represent the broken dream of the white man’s burden, turned into futile and alienating routine. While strolling on the beach and into the caves in the rocks, the young woman and the official come across the figures of a priest and a priestess of an unspecified eastern religion ‘of life’. The soundness of this creed is immediately proved by rescuing the officer who has also attempted suicide by jumping into the sea, and above all by a practice antithetical to that of the Christian religions. ‘The rules of your country must be senseless’, the priestess proclaims referring to the celibacy of priests and enriching the scene with a series of jabs against Christianity. 4. The first act then takes place in a tropical island of the British Empire, one of the ‘unexpected,’ where a young and naïve English priest lands having escaped a pirate ship. He witnesses in amazement and bafflement a monstrous genetic experiment, where two sons and two daughters are born to six parents: the priest and priestess of the prologue, the immigration official and the young woman, the governor of the island with his consort. The purpose of the experiment is the ‘fusion in flesh and spirit of East and West,’ but the four children now do not have a shred of ‘moral conscience’ and will have to derive it from a union, even a sexual one, with the priest, who balks at the polygamous law in force on the island. In the 35

At first sight, the idyll between the immigration official and the young woman resembles that between Flory and Elizabeth in Orwell’s novel. The local administrators are described by the priest as many little Kurtzes attempting to escape ‘what they call the horrors’.

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second act the political fable takes off: Britain has cut off its ties with the Empire, and New Delhi is its new capital; the ‘simpleton’ has married the two daughters of the six parents but has turned out to be impotent, and is now as mocked in the experimental community as he was at first celebrated. The final twist is delightful, and at last truly theatrical: an albatross appears in the sky (the Coleridge reference is substantiated by some not gratuitous but anticipatory jokes in the previous act), but when it is shot down an angel appears, a little put out and embittered by the bullets, announcing that it is Judgement Day. Shaw lets us see the silly unravelling of the overwhelming event predicted in the Bible, because the atmosphere is not at all of exceptionality and panic, rather he uses this stereotype, so widespread in the late nineteenth century, to wish for the life force to be followed and the necessary elimination ‘of the lives that have utility, meaning and purpose’. Before taking off clumsily into the sky with the ‘noise of a vacuum cleaner’, the angel adds that ‘the day of judgment is not the end of the world but the beginning of real human responsibility’. And indeed the play closes with a deafening radio announcement of the disappearance from Earth of several ‘non-entities’ who had once been considered indispensable for human life.36 5. The Six of Calais (1933) is a one-act play that returns to a historical subject with only a few peaks of absurdity, and many grotesque ones. It revolves around the theme of human inconsistency in applying the concept of mercy. Its starting point is a well-known heroic episode of the fourteenth century, which is however trivialized by turning King Edward III into yet another husband oppressed by his wife. The king is surprised that the besieged would have little pity on the pregnant queen; yet he himself denies mercy to the six hostages he decides to send to death, deaf to the queen’s entreaties that they be spared. The queen eventually persuades the irascible but harmless king; yet the sixth hostage, the only one who refused to submit 36

Clutching at straws, in the preface Shaw argues that Djerjinsky’s purges are modern, contemporary forms of apocalypse comparable to the Inquisition. They were both phenomena of ‘liquidation’ that mimicked the Day of Judgement: in Russia too they proceeded to a division between the good and the bad, condemning heretics and rewarding believers.

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to the king, is not grateful. It is then the suddenly inflexible queen who demands his execution. But though far from pleased, the king does not go back on his decision to pardon the sixth hostage, with whom he exchanges roars like two ‘Champagne dogs’ in an entertaining pantomime scene. The Millionairess (1934) aims to be at least in part a pure sparkling comedy of gags, but it is another rambling sketch, where characters and events randomly ‘happen’ on the scene. Shaw tries his best to give an allegorical sense – the failure of wealth, the schizophrenia and whim of a millionaire (whose business acumen and indomitable spirit of initiative he nevertheless admires) – to a story that pivots on mere adventures, some of which quite inert. The curtain rises on the rich Epifania Ognisanti di Parerga who visits her lawyer to sign off a will that leaves everything to a husband she nevertheless sees as useless. At the lawyer’s, the millionairess announces she will take her life immediately after the signing, even though she is too temperamental to appear credible as a suicide. The lawyer manages to calm her down, undoes her plan by providing a humorous recipe for a poison, and prompts her to reveal the reasons that would push her to the irrational gesture. The inheritance to the husband is meant to ruin him (‘money goes to his head’), having discovered that he betrayed her with an insignificant little darling of a commoner. In the course of her recap, the millionairess reveals to the lawyer that she unfortunately married her athletic, sporty but unsuitable husband after he managed to meet her father’s condition: to make 150 pounds grow a thousandfold in six months.37 But the athlete proves to be both temperamentally incompatible with the millionairess and sexually frigid. Immediately after, the husband turns up in the lawyer’s office with his lover, while Epifania is joined by hers, an intellectual her equal. In Act II Epifania, who unwittingly decided to undergo a trial of self-knowledge, acts even more irrationally: she knocks her lover down the stairs of a tavern just for noticing her obsession with her father’s greatness; she then pursues an Egyptian doctor who came out of nowhere, to whom she poses the same condition once met by her husband. After teaching 37

The husband is a boxer and tennis player, but also improbably gifted with a tenor’s voice that resembles Caruso’s – which is how he manages to make the initial capital grow.

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some poor tailors how to earn a few more pennies through the spirit of initiative, she then refurbishes a decaying tavern to become its owner, only to discover there one day among her customers the happy couple of her husband with his mistress. Just as the lawyer’s office in the beginning, the tavern becomes the meeting point of all the characters. The lawyer in the meantime must settle the claim for damages of the former lover of the millionairess, who announces she will marry the Egyptian doctor. An alternative ending explains who and what would Epifania be in Russia. 6. Geneva (1938) is Shaw’s version of the plays and films that from Brecht to Orwell to Chaplin staged or foresaw the rise of European dictatorships and the world’s unstoppable drift towards a conflagration that would take place some years later. Being Shaw’s, it is satirical and carnivalesque, in disguise and lighthearted, dotted with absurdity. It should also be implicitly dramatic, but Shaw here pushes to the extreme the same un-representability that always threatens his theatre. He empties the play of its recognizably dramatic traits, and reduces the conventions of theatrical representation to a mere pretext. The stage turns then into just a generic and sketchy backdrop from which a series of characters, some easily recognizable public figures (though Hitler, Mussolini and Franco are never explicitly named), others gross deformations of national or racial types, expound with much oratorical verve their point of view. The play opens in a shabby so-called office of the Geneva-based Intellectual Cooperation, a satirical take on the inefficiency of the League of Nations and any other international body responsible for the maintenance of peace and the protection of human rights.38 Its English secretary, who typically and happily inconsistent makes no secret of her narrow-minded parochialism,39 receives a dignified Jew who complains of Hitler’s persecution of the Jews and wants to appeal to the International Court of Justice at The Hague.

38 39

As the Secretary of the Coop puts it: ‘When the nations kept apart war was an occasional and exceptional thing: now the League hangs over Europe like a perpetual warcloud’. This secretary is the ironic deus ex machina of events. Her naïvely undiplomatic letters to The Hague provoke an international crisis, while her out-of-place comments are dotted throughout the play even when she has become a secondary character.

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From then on the first act consists of the appearance of other characters who expose violations of the rules of democracy in their own countries; many do not have specific national designations, and in fact the Creole widow of an assassinated president comes from a fanciful – and therefore utopian – South American republic of Eden on Earth.40 The closing sketch of the act sees a stiff and proud Anglican bishop, concerned by the spread of communism to the spheres of the intelligentsia, fall to the ground stone dead after a bitter spat with a Soviet commissar. In the second act the sheer drama of political invective takes over. The British Foreign Minister must remind the judge of the International Court at The Hague that the European nations, especially those under a totalitarian regime, can ultimately disregard the almost inexistent and entirely ideal powers of the Court. After a third act filled with mere chatter that reaffirms the distance of the positions at stake, the highlight of the play is the questioning of the dictators. Shaw creates his delightful parody of Mussolini first with a farcical name, Bardo Bombardone, and then with the caption describing the entrance of a ‘Dictator […], dominant, brusque, every inch a man of destiny’; more anonymous is Hitler’s disguise as Ernest Battler. There is no hint of cosmic anguish, just the sense of a game full of improvisations and provocations between bullies. The two dictators engage in a show of crackling war rhetoric and self-praise, with the British minister as a firm contrast.41 But Geneva ultimately proves how difficult it is to make authentic and creative art out of the Nazi-fascist dictatorship rather than turning a play into a mere echo chamber of opinions. Even the stage entrance of Flanco, namely Franco, is transformed into a review of the war actions in Spain. The play ends on the stroke of the German invasion of Poland. Only the fantastic prediction of a universal cataclysm, the glaciation of the earth due to the enlargement of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, leads back to the concrete the always slightly absurd dialogue: in a utopian twist, the 40 The participation of this imaginary state is also used to question the efficiency of the Society. It is a typical South-American republic where the rules of civic cohabitation are merrily violated and the most chaotic and summary violence reigns. 41 The Brit is the one to predict à la Orwell that the war will end with neither winners nor losers, in a climate of cold war between opposing superpowers.

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various positions are reconciled and make common cause in the face of a supranational emergency. § 7. Shaw after 1921 VI: Last plays The historical comedy In Good King Charles’s Golden Days42 (1939) hits upon one of the most lithe, fresh and humorous openings of the late Shaw. Suggesting implicitly that the play might be about Newton, the opening stages a long effective contrast, seasoned with hilarious jokes, quid pro quos, and flashes of caricature, between the figure of the famous mathematician with his head in the clouds43 and the house servants, much more pragmatic and with an instinctive common sense. All the more so despite the facile and overused dramatic trick of having all the characters enter the stage one by one, producing a lively choral effect punctuated with puns and witticisms. Setting the play in 1680, Shaw brings together King Charles II and the Quaker George Fox in Newton’s Cambridge study, with the intention of re-hashing the historical debate between the grass-root religious revival, science and the state’s own interests. The play aims to capture as if live the moment when science was irreparably severed from religion with the birth of the Royal Society to pursue its aim of a dispassionate investigation of the laws of the universe. Shaw does not take sides, but limits himself to delineating the three positions: that of Newton, who strives to reconcile the dictates of pure science with the natural phenomena as described in the Bible;44 that of Fox, who hurls anathemas against any 42 The title is a quotation from an eighteenth-century anonymous folk song (T. F. Evans, in Innes 2000, 249). 43 The preface to Saint Joan draws a parallel between the visionary mathematician (though not pathologically so), who gives a ‘fanciful’ explanation of the eleventh horn of the beast seen by Daniel, and the saintly visionary par excellence. 44 In a less successful incidental episode, Newton however must refute the theory of yet another intruder, the historical figure of the painter Kneller, who argues that God made the world in the spirit of an artist, and that ‘the right line, the line of beauty, is a curve’. After a long squabble, Newton, who sticks to his claim that ‘everything that moves moves in a straight line’, refuses to have his portrait done by someone ‘who lives in a curved universe. He would distort my features’. Shaw knew (cf. Weintraub 1970, 211–12) that it was Hogarth who had said that ‘the line of beauty is a curve’,

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church that might interpose itself between man and God; and that of the king, advocating the thesis that ‘A ready-made Church is an indispensable convenience for most of us’, but motivated above all else to mount a finely balanced and quibbling defence of his sexual promiscuity.45 With the appearance on stage, one after another, of three of the king’s mistresses (an actress and two aristocrats), the dramatic contrast is played out between the Puritans Newton, Fox and the house servants on one side, disgusted by the worldliness of those figures, and on the other side the chatter and bickering of the three rivals who each want the king to themselves.46 For the first half of Act I, Shaw actually obeys the stipulations of the title to represent the days of good King Charles, since the monarch remains mostly in the background. But from the dialogue with his brother James – a toolengthy episode of dramatized history – we learn that those days had also been golden. Shaw is indulgent with the conjugal weaknesses of the king, but approves of his mediating abilities, Solomonic but also at times cynical and opportunistic, between the diverse and irreconcilable pulls and pushes tearing apart Restoration England. Above all, Shaw portrays the king as an Anglo-Catholic equally distant from the most stringent Puritanism and from professed Catholicism, as well as from Whigs and Tories. By contrast the insanely intransigent Catholic James has his fate already sealed in the mind and prescient words of the king. 2. Buoyant Billions (1947), the first and only play by Shaw to be completed after the war, cynically illustrates the sterile perspective of a utopian belief in a post-war reconstruction and transformation. This is a period when in Shaw’s view the names of the great reformers and revolutionaries, from Jesus to Marx, flowed from the annals of history but Hogarth could not appear in the play as a character, as he had lived beyond its temporal boundaries – even though the play is riddled with a number of other historical inconsistencies. 45 In the very short second act, the king confesses to Queen Catherine that he keeps mistresses out of sheer political opportunism, reasons which his loving queen perfectly understands and of which she approves. 46 The actress and the king also perform a few passages from Dryden’s tragedies in order to evoke the exciting atmosphere of Restoration theatre and to show the Puritan disgust for the theatre through the reactions of Fox and the governess.

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into the minds of all the idealists, including that of the young and hotheaded Junius, who naïvely adheres to the ranks of the ‘improvers of the world’, convinced that any petty changes achieved through the means of Parliament would be sterile. Middle-class moderation is represented by the father who tries to dissuade Junius from his reckless romanticism, as he dreams of a near-religious conversion.47 The allegorical function, aimed at a whole generation, disillusioned and shocked by the carnage of the war, is also evident in the first act, where the characters are identified as ‘son’ and ‘father’, as well as in the unusually short and sober dialogues. In fact this romanticism that the father believes to have been repressed is ready to erupt as soon as the young man leaves for his pilgrimage, when on the road he meets a kind of soul mate, a woman who like him is looking for authenticity, and misanthropic and deeply disappointed by civilization, not because she is poor but because she is too spoiled by luxury (like the ‘patient’ of Too True to Be Good), and who is fleeing her billionaire father. Clementina thus reprises at the same time the psychological imbalance of the millionairess, the protagonist of the play by the same title. The two fight until the last against the blossoming of an inexplicable passion inside them, which first struck them in the swamps of Panama, and then becomes consolidated with their return to the ranks of the bourgeoisie. Even the much more verbose central part of the play, which descends into gratuitous eccentricities of location, painstakingly demonstrates the supremacy of the life force over any ideal, and that marriage, a legal contract necessary for the continuation of life, is just as likely to succeed if entered into for money as for love. The six small dystopian acts or sketches of Farfetched Fables (1948) are structured as random and jittery encounters between two interlocutors. Some revolve around the dark-tinted future of the post-war world, despite the danger of nuclear destruction and the development of new chemical weapons; others are Swiftian satires on the vagaries of science.

47 The father’s objection, that the son is sawing off the branch on which he is (comfortably) sitting, is very common in the literature of the time (see for instance Orwell, in Volume 8, § 21.8).

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§ 8. O’Casey* I: The Irish powder keg explodes To use an understatement, Sean O’Casey (1880–1964) is not exactly on everyone’s lips: dismissed in a few summary, uninformed and sometimes inaccurate lines in the classic textbooks,1 he has effectively been struck out from the more recent ones. It is a glaring omission: O’Casey is in fact second only to Shaw in stature as cantankerous and surly intellectual, in the innate, powerful predisposition towards drama, in the vigour and inventiveness of his works, and their remarkable feel for dialogue and gags. After Shaw, O’Casey is the major English-language playwright of the early twentieth century; we might even say he is the first, given the weakening of Shaw’s theatre after Back to Methuselah, as we just saw. It is true that there are not many additional terms of comparison in the dearth of excellence that is the theatre of the early 1920s. My assessment, however, takes into account equally notable and skilled playwrights, like Galsworthy and Maugham, like Yeats, who was writing plays of variable and controversial quality, and like Auden and Isherwood, who in the 1930s produced some impressive works but then stopped in their tracks. Coward remains the only rival. A further comparison between O’Casey’s last major plays and the first ones by Beckett *

Collected Plays, 4 vols, London 1964, to which should be added some plays published after 1955. Mirror in My House: The Autobiographies of Sean O’Casey, 2 vols, New York 1956 (each volume consists of three of the total six parts). Letters in 4 vols, ed. D. Krause, London, New York and Washington, DC 1975, 1980, 1992. R. G. Hogan, The Experiments of Sean O’Casey, New York 1960; D. Krause, Sean O’Casey: The Man and His Work, London 1960, 1975; S. Cowasjee, O’Casey, Edinburgh and London 1966; W. A. Armstrong, Sean O’Casey, London 1967; Sean O’Casey, ed. R. Ayling, London 1969; M. Malone, The Plays of Sean O’Casey, Carbondale, IL and London 1969; B. Benstock, Sean O’Casey, Lewisburg, PA 1970, 1972; Sean O’Casey: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. T. Kilroy, Englewood Cliffs 1975; Sean O’Casey Centenary Essays, ed. D. Krause and R. G. Lowery, Gerrards Cross 1980; H. Kosok, O’Casey the Dramatist, Gerrards Cross and Totowa, NJ 1985; C. Murray, Seán O’Casey: Writer At Work, Dublin 2004; J. Moran, The Theatre of Sean O’Casey, London 2013.

1

His date of birth is often erroneously given as 1884. Glaring is the instance of R. Williams’ Drama from Ibsen to Eliot, London 1952, which reserves for O’Casey just a ‘Note’ at the end of the chapter on Synge. On these oversights, also in well-known overviews, see Krause 1960, 83–6.

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or Pinter, which preceded it, is inadmissible. O’Casey, however, grasped the potential of the one-act play, which is the space of his greatest experimentation – while it looks as something of a side-dish. O’Casey theatrical formula is indeed not light years away from Auden’s political theatre. Auden, though, complemented the formula with more cultured and refined filters, with more literary tradition than the rough O’Casey, a kind of untamed force of nature. His emergence is all the more surprising when we consider that he started and continued writing without reference points and with no inspiring figures or putative fathers, disconnected from any literary movement, in almost complete isolation and self-reliance. In him the end-results of the comic tradition fuse with a foretaste of the absurd and of existentialism that become more evident after the first trilogy, when O’Casey also tries out some structural variants, assaying other themes in parables and dream-like farces of inescapable determinism, condemnations to a life without hope, without transcendence, and some denunciation of a God who tolerates evil. Of course O’Casey’s theatre always privileges dialogue. Like Synge, he is infallible in capturing the tone of the Irish vernacular of commoners (not peasants but city-dwellers), uneducated and yet capable of delivering great oratory and debates. Their speeches are filled with big abstract, Latinate words, cut out from who knows where and who knows how, which produce a strange, jarring humorous effect. The reason for his neglect lies in the fact that O’Casey, an initially purely Irish writer who gradually widened his thematic range and lost this specificity, has always been viewed suspiciously, if not with outright animosity, by the British, while paradoxically also proving unpopular and unlikeable with the Irish themselves. In short, he is a writer who has never been championed by a literary grandee or a lobby. 2. Proof of the unfair neglect suffered by O’Casey is an exceptionally partial, arbitrary and misleading review by Orwell. It would seem obvious that O’Casey should be reviewed by Orwell, since he was a political playwright, socialist and communist, and a utopian, non-aligned communist at that. All that survives of Orwell’s judgement, however, is a review of one volume of O’Casey’s autobiography, which is such a blunt and heated slating one does not believe one’s eyes.2 Why so much spite? Perhaps Orwell poured 2

OCE, vol. IV, 30–2.

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there a hidden and unspoken intolerance of the Irish? First Orwell targets the indulgence with which England greets Irish nationalism, a fashionable cause among the intelligentsia; then, after having identified in the critique of all things English O’Casey’s hallmark, he accuses him of biting the hand that feeds him. Perhaps Orwell lumped all O’Casey’s work together with Purple Dust, an anti-English satire that is admittedly amusing and merciless, but traditional and in every respect old hat – with the only defect, and consequent irritation, of not having been written by an Englishman.3 While Orwell concedes that resentment against the oppressive imperialism of the British and the huge loss of life they caused is justified, his assessment of O’Casey’s autobiography is uncompromisingly negative: pretentious, nebulous, written in the third person and therefore intolerably narcissistic, in a style that imitates the ‘untamed Joyce’ of Finnegans Wake (which indirectly tells us what Orwell thought of that feat).4 It is undeniable that O’Casey’s work as autobiography does not put its emphasis on accurate and objective information, but on the epic-lyrical recreation, which can turn sometimes into an unwitting parody and make its readers smile. Without precise dates, experiences are mostly interior ones, and remembered in frequent, feeling bouts of stream of consciousness without punctuation. The need to make of Ireland the pivot of the universe and to magnify and monumentalize public and private histories incontrovertibly joins O’Casey to a narcissism that is typically Irish. This kind of clandestine Recherche, particularly in the early volumes, exceeds in its 2,000 pages the proportions of George Moore’s, and, by a wide margin, Yeats’s; still it shares their motivation. Politically, Orwell accuses O’Casey of having combined communism with a romantic, even ‘bombastic’ nationalism (target of his special criticism are O’Casey’s memories of the wretched Kathleen ni Houlihan, symbol of Ireland). Orwell’s was ultimately a strange position, that the ‘poor’ British were still paying the penalty for Cromwell’s massacres.5 Putting forward 3 4 5

This is also Benstock’s assessment (1972, 23). O’Casey’s admiration for Joyce’s work is confirmed in a letter to Joyce, quoted in Ellmann’s biography (Ellmann 1952, 734; for full reference, see § 128.1 bibl.) O’Casey replied to Orwell’s critique in the last of the six parts of his autobiography (see vol. 2 of the 1956 edition, 135–54), which was dedicated to MacDiarmid, to

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an opposite thesis, we could say that O’Casey was in fact marginalized and forgotten by his fellow countrymen, who obstructed and exiled him when he was alive. To this we must now turn. 3. From a Protestant background and a dedicated church-goer up to the age of twenty, O’Casey came from a family classified as shabby-genteel, with bourgeois aspirations. He lost his father at six years and was self-taught, but forced to look for odd jobs and junior positions in the railways and as newsboy; an early trade union affiliation cost him a dismissal in one of these valuable training positions. His political consciousness was suddenly raised in 1906, when he changed his name from John Casey to Sean O’Cathasaigh, learned Gaelic and became an active, always opinionated member of several autonomist movements. When a close friend died in 1917, he began though in his late thirties to write for the theatre in Dublin. His collaboration with the Abbey Theatre, to all intents and purposes directed by Yeats, was always stormy; in 1926 he emigrated to England, and then spent some time in America. He became a bit like Joyce, a spiritual exile who could not find his home in any creed, political alignment or party: a dissident by principle, he made that destiny into his reality too. The indelible fact is that O’Casey was born and raised in an environment saturated with bitter disagreement and fierce, indomitable controversy, certainly not in a harmonious context. Beneath the Olympian impassivity of the playwright, O’Casey hides a knot of grievances: brooding resentments, bitter pills he cannot swallow, gripes to get off his chest; he is a contrarian, nothing is ever right for him, he is against everything and the opposite of everything. In the plays he persists in sending down the drain the little good that should be treasured: people who meet must deny to be ontologically in mutual agreement, cannot admit to feel an innate kinship, and must therefore always be ready to have verbal confrontations or even to come to blows. In O’Casey’s work, human relationships are riven by an ill-disguised primitive hostility; he is mercilessly pessimistic, and does not know how to be constructive or hopeful. He does not empathize, is whom O’Casey wrote warm tributes. Cock-a-Doodle-Dandy (§ 10.6), which greets the departure of the protagonist for England with the words ‘where life resembles life’, appeared too late in 1949 to temper Orwell’s judgement.

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not indulgent, does not forgive. He could be accused of pretending to be the highest, impartial judge. As a playwright he must of course always rise above the parties, but the posture of impartiality often leads him to hurt his own compatriots.6 In fact the quarrelling, in O’Casey, is systematically attributed to the Catholics by Protestants, just like the psychic division of his characters, for example between drinking and abstinence, or between sinning and resisting. Upon investigation, his oeuvre turns out to have only one Protestant protagonist, an exception since all his major plays are centred on Catholics and set in a Catholic environment. The implication is that Protestants are superior to the odd, hung-up Catholics. O’Casey is clearly secular and an atheist, yet an atheist of Protestant background who does not cease for a moment to argue with Catholicism. This becomes for him a raison d’être. His polemic is so heated, and so anachronistic, that it reminds us of Swinburne; his ongoing reckoning so relentless that it leads us to think him a turncoat, a lapsed, disappointed, forsaken Catholic – yet he was a Protestant by birth.7 Perhaps he aims at the wrong target and like all Protestants in reality rails against a Puritanism that he renames ‘Catholicism’.8 Catholicism would then be for him particularly guilty of repressing sexuality. Many of O’Casey priests and the whole of his Catholic Church have just one goal and one perversely anti-human mission: to fight against the enjoyment of life, particularly when it celebrates and gratifies both body and spirit. During the war, O’Casey diluted his Irish settings to write political fables and Brecht-like Lehrstücke, but unlike Brecht he set up Marxism and Catholicism as antithetical poles, with the red star and 6 7

8

As Yeats put it addressing the audience of the première to The Plough and the Stars: ‘You have once again damaged yourselves’. It turns out though that O’Casey’s grandfather was a Catholic born of a Protestant mother who had chosen to follow her mother’s faith. According to Cowasjee 1966, 50–1, O’Casey was on the point of conversion at about twenty years of age, and even carried a rosary in his pocket. His wife Eileen was a Catholic, whom he married in the Catholic Church; their three children were all baptized Catholics (Krause 1960, 137). A number of critics (see Cowasjee 1966, 85, and Kosok 1985, 237) have pointed out that by the 1940s and beyond the exiled O’Casey had lost all contact with Ireland, and that his perception of the still-evolving country had therefore become anachronistic.

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not that of Christ unfailingly emerging victorious. The obsessive theme of the plays of his last fifteen years becomes the nightmare of Catholicism, which O’Casey never manages to overcome. § 9. O’Casey II: The Dublin trilogy In his youth, O’Casey and one of his brothers staged and performed plays adapted from Shakespeare and Boucicault for local companies. He had started out with prose pieces, chronicles and ballads on recent historical events. Then between 1919 and 1923 he wrote and submitted to the Abbey Theatre some immature plays on militant Irish themes that Yeats and Lady Gregory returned to sender but with not entirely negative assessments; indeed they encouraged him with detailed feedback.9 Both had sensed that O’Casey had the makings of a real playwright. In 1923, though, when O’Casey was already forty-three, they accepted and staged The Shadow of a Gunman, the beginning of a fruitful collaboration which, as mentioned above, would be wrecked five years later. This was followed by two equally brave plays which already put into perspective the very immediate, controversial, bloody and painful events of recent Irish history. In O’Casey’s view, Ireland was in 1922 a ‘rotten’ state, only slightly less so than Hamlet’s Denmark. In each of the plays O’Casey has his protagonists complain that Ireland is a ‘miserable country’ where nothing can be built and chaos and anarchy reign. We can hear there resonate the paraphrase or variant of the catchphrase Auden might have taken up and echoed in The Orators, where a senior pupil laments that England is a country ‘where nobody is well’. It is symptomatic that in The Shadow of a Gunman the first stage direction describes a room where ‘it appear[s] impossible to effect an improvement’ of the shocking squalor. The main characters all share the same, peculiar physiognomy, torn between romanticism and pragmatism, determination and weakness, old and new. At the beginning tinged with spontaneous humour, the overall tone later becomes one of inconsolable bitterness. All three dramas are parables on 9

On the only surviving play of this time see Kosok 1985, 7–14, who considers its publication a ‘disservice’ to O’Casey. This play takes the tally of O’Casey’s works to twenty-three in total.

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political passion, which only intoxicates and blinds, and only matters to drunks. They are restrained attempts at arguing against a political fanaticism which leads its followers to sacrificing themselves for ‘the homeland’, an abstract entity that is not worth it. From a historical distance, O’Casey’s political judgement on the Easter uprising and the subsequent turmoil of 1921–1922 looks the same as the mockery and derision of the first stanza of Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’. Iris Murdoch will remember both in The Red and the Green. But even for a Protestant like O’Casey the truest and statistically most authentic symbol of Ireland can only be the nucleus of the Catholic family, historically the most oppressed and subjected to Ireland’s political and spiritual powers, and of the most damaged religion, the one that sacrificed the highest number of victims at the altar of the homeland.10 The unity of place and space in these plays is due to the setting ‘in the tenement’, the same that stood at the centre of the first novels by Dickens, such as Nicholas Nickleby, where this block of housing for the poor appeared, however, as an oasis of genuine feelings and mutual solidarity, despite the occasional skirmishes, and not as the untamed dispensation O’Casey depicts in Ireland. Still O’Casey operates on two planes and does not neglect the demands of pure theatre alongside those of the social and the political: consciousness-raising and persuasion go along with the need to amuse, entertain, make people laugh and smile. The plots of these three plays are not perfect clockwork, rather they are fragmented, dilatory and tenuous overall; but the dialogue is plucked from life and hits the spot. These plays insert themselves within the oral tradition of the commoner who wants to talk polished and difficult, but at best produces fresh creative metaphors, witticisms, sharp bickering, or even delightful blunders, puns and boasts that mimic a Sam Weller. O’Casey’s theatre is phonetic, a faithful reproduction of the Irish brogue, and such also when reproducing the speech of British soldiers.

10

In a very clear passage of his autobiography (vol. I of the edition cited in the bibliography, 271), an adolescent O’Casey tells his mother he doubts Protestants are really Irish: ‘one day while we were playing, Kelly told me that only Catholics are really Irish, and that since we are Protestants, we cannot even think of having anything Irish in us’. His mother persuades him otherwise.

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2. The Shadow of a Gunman11 (1923), disjointed and prolix and with too many incidental scenes of predictable success,12 deals with the consequences of the civil war in the slums of Dublin, denouncing the tragic inanity of the war in the sacrifice of a pure, innocent, unknowing working-class girl. The play is however frayed, too long, and with too many incidental scenes and set pieces. O’Casey wrote his first play on a colourful but dismembered community of Irishmen and -women who live for the day. But like Dickens’s poor, O’Casey’s do not indulge in self-pity but scheme to suffer as little as possible; they are then fundamentally apolitical. Even their poverty is exorcized with a smokescreen of words. This community is exceptionally not based on the family unit, but haphazard. There are two men without families, impotent dreamers, chatty and verbose: one an amateur poet, the other a hawker of plates and dishes à la Synge, since despite being uneducated he discusses theology, mythology and poetry. There is Minnie, the limpid, genuine and fresh girl of the Irish tradition, who comes onto the stage with the excuse of asking the poet for a bit of milk and ends up innocently teasing him. The poet is a sceptical patriot, cold, a relativist, and ardently believes in the need to jettison the poetry of ‘dulce et decorum est’; but his opting out is also not a solution, since it makes him guilty too, an unwitting accomplice of the catastrophe. In the second and last act, the two lone men keep on talking with some early hints of the theatre of the absurd. Completing the subhuman landscape, a woman living in a ‘hollow’ appears on stage like a ghost, almost without reason, blinking at the light. In the background the guerrilla of the Irish against the Irish reverberates, while the night is filled with a sense of pulsating, irrational threat. Having taken home a sack full of Republican bombs, the innocent Minnie gets killed during an incursion by the ‘Black and Tans’. 3. In Juno and the Paycock13 (1924), O’Casey’s early masterpiece, the political motif is somewhat muted at the start, barely mentioned in the 11 12 13

This title is as ambiguous as several by Galsworthy, and ‘shadow’ may refer to appearance, incompleteness, or boast. Like one at the very beginning, of the landlord knocking at the tenants’ door to collect the rent, which recalls a similar one in Dickens’s Little Dorrit, and its ‘Bleeding Heart Yard’. ‘Peacock’, according to Irish dialectal pronunciation.

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setting within a family of poor Irish who live hand to mouth, and whose son lost an arm during the Easter riots and is now a member of the ‘regulars’. The drama inches forward on the safe ground of gags and caricatures, of stereotypical roles, but with a genuine freshness of language, yet still confined by its spatial monotony, and soon demonstrating a dearth of material, some slowness and some empty jokes. O’Casey objectifies and takes his distance from recent events, revisiting them without animosity or flares of feeling, with a restrained and melancholy pessimism towards the possibility that anything might change. The stereotypical roles are those of the fanatic thug, the devout, sacrificial mother, the idle, drinking head of the family, the coy daughter who aspires to be ‘modern’; all at the mercy of ancestral schemes of behaviour they cannot escape. It belongs to the genre of the comedy revolving around the format of an unexpected bounty falling to a poor devil, who is however not worthy of compassion for his bad luck or unfavourable destiny, but rather guilty of wanting to stay poor and not striving to improve his lot. While poor he does still say sometimes the right things, but which he goes back upon once he becomes wealthy and starts aping the bourgeois. The dramatic device is clearly derived from the theatre of Plautus or Molière, or from Dickens’s sketches, which bet everything on the little scene, on the bickering, on repeated verbal felicities, thus updating the Victorian sketch in time and setting. In fact, the drama becomes a bitter farce on hypocrisy: no one is saved, and even the classic prig makes an appearance – a kind of Tartuffe, the undercover rogue who preaches the doctrine of the loving breath of Buddhism while taking advantage of the daughter and then fleeing the scene. The play eventually turns into a political parable with an apocalyptic crescendo. It composes a disastrous picture of Ireland at that time, suffering from ancestral curses, historical deformations and a national predisposition. The end explodes into an actual anarchic conflagration, with Ireland symbolized by this family unit in which even religion, the last bastion, falters and fails, since it presupposes a God unable to rule over free will and ‘human stupidity’ (a position not very different from that of the agnostics). Pointing his finger at the factions that divide Ireland and shed her blood, the playwright concludes that the Irish deserve their deadly barrage of misfortunes. O’Casey is not a fatalist like Synge: these

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are self-inflicted misfortunes, and Ireland is immolating her own children, in O’Casey’s view of the bloody events that followed the formation of the Free State. As the curtain falls, the fire is still burning, and the whole world is in the grips of unbridled anarchy. 4. The scene opens in the year 1922, within the house of an Irish Catholic working-class family of unemployed, the Boyles: the husband is a swaggering ne’er-do-well, a drunken pub-attendant; the son a brave rebel wounded in action in 1916, now somewhat mentally impaired; the longsuffering mother is patient, albeit exhausted; the daughter Mary – says the author who, not content with the dialogue, reveals this in a stage direction – is torn between tradition and modernity, sensitive to the world’s seductions: coquettish and frivolous, and yet attentive to current topical events and an unlikely reader of Ibsen, Joyce’s inspirer. Upon Boyle the father’s entry, some light is thrown both on the playful reference to the myth of Juno and the peacock, and on Juno’s impotence, though far from submissive, towards her ne’er-do-well husband, who has brought home a jolly old friend who will then reveal himself as a louche and Mephistophelian figure always at Boyle’s heels, and a hypocrite ready to take advantage, leech-like, of his friend’s generosity. Boyle inevitably appears as the old stage Irishman, that is, a braggart displaying Irish blarney and, above all, a shirker, who as soon as work is mentioned makes up an unbearably acute pain in his legs. Act I flows on with the witty, but poisonously scathing exchanges between husband and wife, giving rise to a comedylike atmosphere reminiscent of Molière. The act then evaporates and falls into several dilatory phases; and yet, in the final dialogues Boyle, whose various forms of cowardice have just been unmasked and demolished, stands out as being more human and pitied by the playwright’s unthinkable and provoking relativism; for the author, who seemed at first to side with Juno, now rehabilitates Boyle because of his healthy yearning to be free of all ties (the Church and priests have always had too much power on the isle, he confides). Boyle is presented as the only crooked one in a family of upright individuals – Juno Boyle holds the house together, Mary can stand up for herself, Johnny is a patriot – but is it really so? Is it not, or rather, quite the contrary, that is not Boyle the only one free to fantasize and fight against stifling customs, and are not the other family

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members unwittingly the oppressed? Which is the extent of political responsibility, how far ought it to stifle the enjoyment of life’s natural goods? Resorting to the miraculous will is a trick of old comedy; it is a coup de théâtre, and indeed, the announcement concluding this act is a relative’s will, which will change the family’s life; whereupon the old drinking companion is boldly dismissed. The rehabilitation, however, is but a timid hypothesis, and the first negative fruit of that stroke of good luck is that the fickle Boyle takes back all that he had said, and that money leads him to disavow all that he had affirmed when he was poor: whilst as a poor man he spoke the rough and brutal truth, as a rich man the poor devil raves and becomes unctuous, a bigot, and a spokesman for the powerful. From henceforth the playwright sets himself up in the role of a moralist striking against the hypocrisy and, above all, the ontological fragility of human beings; or anyhow he turns them into absolutes embodied by the Irishman, denying any practicable way for change. The newly rich will turn into Dickensian middle-class people who contemplate buying a house over the sea while purchasing furniture on credit and striving to keep up appearances. In the meantime, Mary’s engagement is celebrated. O’Casey, however, negates the move to a higher class through yet another blow of pessimism or fatalism: two months later, Mary’s engagement, which in the previous act had surely been too quick, has already come to nothing, and the girl has been made pregnant by her seducer. The third act, too, follows the usual models: the will turns out to have been a false piece of news, and since the Boyles had borrowed to buy, their creditors hurry to claim the money due from Boyle himself, who is in bed, suffering from aches and pains. Everything seems to collapse: the mind-opening readings have excessively opened the mind of ‘Mary’s daughter’, Mary; a Good Samaritan would be willing to forgive, but he stops when faced with the dishonoured, Victorian-like ‘fallen’ woman. Everything falls through also because Johnny, the son, has told on the ‘irregulars’ comrade, and is executed as retribution. 5. The Plough and the Stars (1926), more ample, eventful and composite, thence also more ambitious, dissolves the unity of space and goes back in time to 1915 and 1916 and to the Easter Rising, and therefore tries, with uneven results, the solution of the temporal polyptych, capturing

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some warning signs of the riots and of their incubation and alternating now between public and historical and private scenes. On a diagnostic plane, O’Casey once more confirms a great, but sterile and, once more, self-destructive variety of positions within the Irish political deployment. It is a more choral drama; we see on stage a wider community of beings in fierce disagreement with each other, older and younger persons and also housemates forced to a sharply deranged cohabitation, always in a ‘tenement’ which is a proverbial powder keg about to explode, and which sometimes actually does explode, although the primordial instincts of physical aggression are only vented through insults. What is typical of this drama, and ends up by being one of its faults, is that it gives a voice and a passive and too long-protracted hearing to purely separate sequences of the various, Babelish opposite opinions, which results in a chain of verbal clashes, bickering and contumelies, and turns the play into a sort of tissue of a permanent quarrel. A barely middle-class house is the setting for an ideological conflict between the old Irish soul, devoted to the traditional values of religion and homeland, albeit with its own nuances, and atheistic socialism, self-declaredly far-sighted, for the time being only destructive. The protagonist Clitheroe, a brick-layer, is called to command a phalanx of the Army of the city of Dublin, whilst his wife Nora has kept the appointment hidden from him in order to have him all to herself, thus anticipating the dilemma between the enjoyment of affections and their sacrificing for the sake of one’s country. As the time of the rising approaches, the hate against the British increases, with the campaign directed by orators predicating the purifying function of war and sacrifice.14 The whole of Act II consists of delirious extracts from the stump speech of a politician inciting his fellow-citizens to violence, heard from a pub where a mischievous prostitute does her job fatally attracting into her net weak patriots just back from sounding off buoyantly in favour of the Republic above all else. Act III follows the Easter Rising from the point of view of the excitement reverberating upon the secondary characters. O’Casey, often accused of romanticizing, inexorably taints the heroism of his fellow countrymen,

14

O’Casey was thinking of Pádraic Pearse’s harangues.

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and does not shrink at witnessing their mean, squalid and exploitative behaviour.15 In the final act, while Dublin is on fire and Nora has lost her husband, all the other characters confirm the frailness of human intentions, incapable of enduring the moment’s emotional diapason. Bullets whistle and the innocent lose their lives. The last scene aspires to rise to Shakespearian greatness, with a mother’s sorrow for her dead daughter, and above all Nora Clitheroe ranting and raving like Lady Macbeth. § 10. O’Casey III: Wrestling with Catholicism The Silver Tassie (1927, performed in London in 1929, after having been refused, with a sudden volte face, by Yeats for the Abbey,16 where it would only be shown as late as 1935), obeys a novel dramatic aesthetics, and tackles new themes. In the four acts there is no longer a unity of time and space, and the action referred to the protagonist, the classic hero’s rise and fall, is reduced and dissolved within a structure of choral patches, isolated sketches, protracted and incidental gags bearing but a scarce, if not totally lacking, comical strength. Its secondary characters exhibit and reassess their slothfulness, their malevolence, their apathy, their fanciful long-windedness but, above all and especially, their lack of nobility. That is to say that the main hero spends but little time on the scene, and he does so at first just in order to bask in a halo of unconscious glory, a public esteem which he then has to acknowledge as being insincere when, after having been a winning sportsman, he returns from war wounded and mutilated, and is then forgotten by his own community. The Irish Civil war, the theme that up to then had been dear to O’Casey, is put aside here, leaving its place to the world war where the Irish fought in the British army 15

16

The Plough and the Stars had controversial success, in a way similar to that of The Playboy of the Western World written by Synge twenty years before, just because of this scene with the prostitute and of the open exhibition of scarcely dignified and honourable behaviour by O’Casey’s fellow countrymen. It therefore became the object of a hostile campaign in the press. As Krause points out (Krause 1960, 105–6), this play was turned down by Yeats substantially for the same reasons for which the First World War poets were not included in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse in 1936: suffering had to be sublimated, and forgotten, as a fever or an illness are forgotten.

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at the Somme front, dying and getting wounded for a political cause that did not concern them; but it is, after all, a psychic war that O’Casey is always concerned about: one of men at war with their own compatriots, and this time above all warring against themselves, defeated by passions, incapable of governing themselves, turncoats against dignity. In Act I the aim of the playwright, who starts an over-long introductory scene, is the usual accusation against the Catholic religion, and religion in general, for being punishing and menacing, and for immobilizing man within a mortifying cage which forbids the healthy instincts of life’s enjoyment, instilling feelings of guilt and the dreadful imminence of the Last Judgement. This O’Casey does by putting one against the other – in his classic crossways, the sitting room of the Dublin working-class family – an overly bigoted young Susie who tries in vain to hide her coquettishness and sensuality, and other two constant types who, albeit loud-mouthed and idle, go on, not without reason, about their need for freedom. The protagonist Harry, straight back from his football victory, enters the scene and makes a toast, like one of Bizet’s toreadores, drinking from the newly conquered ‘silver tassie’, with the betrothed who is his Carmen, before leaving for the front feeling a little dazed, prone to his instincts, unable to think (if that is so, then the young Susie is, for the time being, his Micaela). The act is fragmented into several speeches by secondary characters, who let us perceive how the marriage relationship is marred and undermined by subterranean tensions. Act II is very experimental indeed even for O’Casey, and the first ever to take place outdoors, no longer in the fixed working-class interior. The soldiers at the front speak and sing in bits of surreal verse, of folklore songs and popular ballads, to signify the psychic estrangement caused by the experience of war, and by that war in particular. With a slight delay O’Casey proves to be aware of the significant literary chapter represented by the War poets, getting quite close to Rosenberg’s hallucinated solutions.17 The pace of this act is listless, confused, fragmented if not chaotic, and the spoken part lets us hear elliptic military-like voices as though from a war 17

See Cowasjee 1966, 48 and 52, for the influence of Owen and Sassoon. According to nearly all critics, this is the ‘expressionist’ act par excellence in the drama of O’Casey, who had read Toller and O’Neill.

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bulletin. Act III shows us a hospital whose atmosphere anticipates those of the theatre of the absurd: the surgeons sing songs and court the nurses, while Harry is awaiting surgery in order to recover, as it were, from retaliation, for he, an athlete, had his legs paralysed during the war. During the closing party everyone has fun, all coherence and hypocrisy cast off; even the holier-than-thou Susie flirts blatantly with the surgeon. Once more, O’Casey is unable to restrain himself from a sadistic exhibition of the frailty of human intents, and Harry is obliged to be an impotent witness – symbolically castrated from the waist down – to his ex fiancée’s flirting with his best friend. The drama, then, degenerates into the usual brawl of outspoken words. 2. Within the Gates (1934) – technically a surreal fantasy, an oneiric drama in a typified setting, that is a park where larvae, phantoms, characters come and go bearing no precise name, but only acting out their roles – unmistakably has behind it the two dramas by Shaw and Barrie, Heartbreak House and Dear Brutus respectively, which ten years earlier might have been defined, like this one, as woodland pageants of dreamy nocturnal apparitions. The novelty of this plan lies in the chain of four scenes, no longer acts, and cyclic scenes, each one set in a season of the year; these scenes repeat or remix the entries of these fixed characters, who by often reciting songs and refrains within a nonexistent and synchronic action, enunciate their complaints, lamentations, grudges, vainglory or obsessions. The play, which allows the minor characters to go on even excessively with their small talk, and might have benefited from some trimming, pits them one against the other with dialogues resembling those found in Leopardi’s Operette morali on the meaning of life, the chance of a future existence, or the literal truth of the Bible, and others yet. The aim is adjusted on the way, and the goal is not so much that of denouncing the unfair social organization of life as a whole, and the miserable condition of the needy and of some drifters, as a punctilious theological discussion and an indictment against the Church. And if the other precedent of the artisans’ scene in Midsummer Night’s Dream comes to mind, Browning’s Pippa Passes is even more related, for among the characters there is a lewd bishop who does not follow his own preaching, repeating word by word, only then to blatantly contradict it, Pippa’s slogan, that is, that ‘God’s in his Heaven /

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All’s right with the world’.18 The drama’s object is that of excluding and disbarring the otherworldly perspective, as well as denying the false comfort of religious faith: ‘I’ll go game, and die dancing!’, exclaims the prostitute. The characters, albeit different, all have in common their giving in to carnal instincts, even while they are promising and proclaiming their sublimation. Not only the prostitute, but also the whole of humanity as presented in this play is once again morally and spiritually ‘fallen’, to use and adapt the typical Victorian euphemism. And its representatives, as is by now usual in O’Casey, can say and unsay everything almost at the same moment, due to an ontological, and even historical, weakness of will. The prostitute lashes out at the sanctimonious minister of Christ, using the words of Christ himself against the Pharisees, thus re-embodying the stoned prostitute who was forgiven by Jesus. Without giving in to the flattering temptation of a new imprisonment within a spiritual cage such as the Church, she newly forms, together with the ‘dreamer’ poet, a sort of novel Adamitic couple, with the utopia of obeying a different pact, that is, the awareness of fully human freedom in front of God. Thus, even if there were a god, it certainly would not be the one represented and preached by his living ministers, but rather, adhering to a founding point of the Protestant creed, a god in direct contact with whoever believes in him, with no intermediaries. However, O’Casey would not be O’Casey if the old religion did not, at the very last moment, reaffirm its clutch, appearing to man when faced with the danger of death: the prostitute, when she feels death approaching, summons that bishop who is also her father incognito. 3. The imaginary and utopian time of The Star Turns Red (1940) is ‘tomorrow, or the next day’, the place being only vaguely Irish. O’Casey launches a prophecy or a fantastic simulation among the many ones resounding from many sides before the war, pressed by the clash between fascisms and communisms and the impending war. The drama emerging 18

That O’Casey worked following the design of this play by Browning seems to be confirmed by the fact that the prostitute is the bishop’s daughter, which is a mere suspicion in Browning’s dramatic poem, where in the fourth and last scene a corrupt bishop mends his ways (Volume 4, § 114.5). This parodic reprise has escaped even critics more attentive to the sources of the play.

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from this is not only dry and slow, but also didactic in tone and unpleasantly partisan, tainted by a Manichaean separation between wholesome communists, perfect champions of a real humanity and depositors of real justice free of oppression or illusions, and right-winged opportunists intent upon compromising or maintaining constituted power. Because of the author’s parti pris, the Church here is the object of actual slander, such as being supposed to accuse communists of tainting the marriage sacrament through fornication. The anti-Catholic rancour overflows, pointing against the Catholic Church and its clergy as being the instigators behind the murder of a communist. In a typical family, made up of a pusillanimous father and a pious mother, one of two brothers is a communist, the other a fascist; and the former’s girlfriend embodies private life, vital force and the desire to enjoy life without sacrificing it to any faith or ideology which might limit it. There is the by now unavoidable, thence also rather tiresome, banter of barely resisted temptation provided by the nonetheless chaste f  lirt, who thus provokes the bigot or the ‘sublimator’ on the verge of giving in to it; and each one of the males affirms that he is pure, denouncing the sensuality and weakness of which they are secretly guilty. As a Lehrstück, this drama takes sides with the extreme intransigence of communism as against any form of compromise and collusion, and the theory rivets around the chief of the communists, who has everyone against him. However, at the end communism, with a sudden reversal, is the only shining star, and in the reign of the imaginary it may overturn and defeat the ecclesiastic power, thus outshining the star of Christ’s birth.19 4. Purple Dust (1940, played in 1945), surreal, hypothetical or ‘extravagant’ as O’Casey himself said, depicts two speculators renovating an ancient Irish Tudor mansion, thus evidencing the unbridgeable gap between the atavistic local customs and stubborn modernity, resulting in the fact that, after several mishaps and inconveniences, the two protagonists see their dreams destroyed by a symbolic tempest. O’Casey’s drama, visibly indebted to Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island, is scintillating with gags apt to satirize 19

I fail to see how Armstrong 1967, 21, can assert that a ‘reconciliation between Christianity and Communism’ takes place here.

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the already clumsy and maladroit Englishmen, pouring as it does upon them amused comical streaks; this is the first time one savours such comical strength in O’Casey’s work. This is not, however, a mere divertissement aimed, on the playwright’s part, at showing off his ventriloquist versatility. The two Englishmen are all but naïfs, their bizarre idea hiding their lucrative aim and, furthermore, acting as a cover for their absenteeism and political apathy vis à vis the war emergency. The target here is the vulgarity and moral emptiness of these Englishmen, somewhat forcedly clear-cut into their typical roles, thus highlighting the claims of a superior culture they do not have, and the owner’s fatuousness and paternalism. The English and the Irish culture and civilization have nothing in common, are in fact deeply alien to one another, and their very common language, English, is but a vehicle for humorous and grotesque misunderstandings. Played upon a fine-tuned irony, this drama involves the upturning of the theory according to which nothing works properly in Ireland, and of the superiority of the English; it is, in particular, a satire of the commonplace notion of the astute English colonizer bringing the light of civilization upon a desert and inhospitable island; it is no mere chance that Gulliver is evoked. And yet, the inevitable thrust at the warped Catholic Church, and conversely the approval of the young progressive communist and of his omnia munda mundis, comes out as fake. 5. A drama of apparent, even revolutionary changes is Red Roses for Me (1942, played in 1946). The time in which it is set is ‘some time ago’, therefore it looks fantastically backwards instead of forwards, and at the time of the Dublin railway and transport strike in 1913; above all, there seems to loom a glimmer of optimism, and a tad of nostalgia and concession to break through. In fact, the question is decidedly whether the cornerstones and orientations of O’Casey’s dramatic thinking have not changed completely. However, the different ideological planning corresponds to an episodic plot vainly trying to mask its scarcity of action: O’Casey, after placing his conceptual poles in the first two acts, lets his characters engage freely in dialogues on subjects which never leave the Irish inert. The third act is already too slow and empty, and the fourth too hectic, before closing with the habitual stratagem of a police bullet accidentally killing the hero. Even irrespective of psychoanalytical implications, one cannot fail to notice

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that the opening, and widely repetitive scene, showing a mother and son, leads us all the way back to a vision of family similar to D. H. Lawrence’s. The mother is firm and stalwart but also, like O’Casey’s real mother, she devotedly annihilates herself for her family, whereas the passive father, an egotist, merely looks on; but indeed with no insinuation, as in Lawrence, of a shameful, posthumous attraction for the father and a psychic reduction for the mother. O’Casey was an orphan, thence the father’s being a nonentity, or, as in this work, being absent because he is dead. The capital breakthrough, though, is that for the first time a play by O’Casey allows a Protestant man and a Catholic woman to love one another on the basis of ideological equality, and overlooking the differences in their faiths; that is to say, a theory is tested, and utopias are simultaneously built, on the ability to do what is never achieved in O’Casey, namely, to reason civilly and reach an agreement, placing the emphasis on what people, and the Irish in particular, have in common.20 For the first time here the poor tenement, ubiquitous in O’Casey’s early plays, shows a mixture between Catholics and Protestants, poor folk from both faiths who live respecting one another. Will this be possible to the end? Will it be possible to set history back to zero and start again, nullifying centuries of prejudice and quarrels? Breydon, the hero, is a typical ‘intelligent artisan’, a trade unionist who loves Shakespeare and above all Ruskin, the utopian of a regenerated society; this workman, indeed, covers the walls with prints from Angelico and Constable, representing that beautiful art which is meant to throw a veil of light upon reality, thus also counterfeiting and exorcizing it (in the drama it is always raining outside). The utopia almost immediately clashes with actual reality. Breydon’s fiancée will decline taking part in the workmen’s entertainment in order to go, like the girlfriend of the protagonist of Joyce’s ‘Araby’, to a spiritual retreat.21 This is the expected, symbolic verification

20 The evolutionistic reference to the resemblance between man and monkey, thence between man and beast, is therefore functional, in the incidental dialogues, to the theory that man may be endowed with reason, and thus may not be a beast. 21 Such engagement is, however, engineered in a farcical and subtly sectarian manner, for the retreat has been organized by the so-called Daughters of St Frigid (!), in order to give the saint ‘warm devotion’. In an interlude which jokes with the sacred, a minor

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of a Catholicism which is stubbornly guilty of sublimating, and incapable of designing the correct hierarchies in life. The Protestant workman must declare that God allows there to be, indeed wants there to be joy upon earth. The provisional Eden very soon gets ruffled, breaking down and decaying, the scene becoming that of unavoidable and irreconcilable difference, of altercation and cacophony of opinions. At first unselfish love clashes against religion; then a series of quarrels erupt within the very same class of workmen: the show’s singing must be neither religious nor romantic, but rather, political, and there is one wing of the working class which calls for the expunction of all references to religion. It soon becomes impossible to reconcile all the opinions in a drama which had begun so promisingly. The young dreamer and trade unionist’s integrity resists the blackmail of a promotion in his career if he renounces guiding the strike, and he is only eliminated by a circumstance which is fatal, but not wholly such, in that it is born of exasperated fanaticism. O’Casey, however, before the curtain goes down, makes an effort to be really constructive and retract or remedy his pessimism, and he does so by introducing the utopian figure of a rector, a Protestant rector, who endorses the strike. This deus ex machina comes out too aptly, in a clumsy and arbitrary move. Such a rector is, actually, an ecumenical Protestant, thence a totally imaginary character. 6. Within the, by now obvious, counterpoint of historic-realistic plays and extravaganzas, Oak Leaves and Lavender (1945) belongs to the latter domain. Here we can still see diaphanous figures acting in a mysterious English manor, within an oneiric fantasy lacking a proper action. These are ‘humours’ from a different age, with no backbone or substance, immaterial mayflies rambling, and recalling and raving, whilst the alarm is raging on outside; but the ‘battle of England’ is kept at a good distance. Some subplots and peasant interludes with their own verbal gags, Shakespearelike, prolong further a plot which is scenically slow. The context-creation is deceitful, but an excuse to crowd the stage with characters who speak mainly to themselves, or who relate to one another for a short while, touching on, character, a Protestant who lives in the tenement, steals a rundown miraculous statue of the Virgin which is venerated by some Catholic bigots, only however to return it perfectly renovated.

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as in a nineteenth-century conversation piece, the usual range of irreconcilable opinions and stances. The anti-Catholic attack is resumed with an assault which is more direct than ever, and with an insatiable polemic bitterness, in Cock-a-Doodle Dandy22 (1949), the apologue of an exorcizing obsession which cannot but fail, for it is against man, and therefore assumes the visionary guise of the diabolic; this is the exact and tangible measure of the obfuscation and perversion of real religion, or perhaps even its retaliation. In this grotesque and hallucinated fantasy O’Casey retrieves his old happy dialogical vein and his clever and successful mimetic mixture of macaronic Latin harangues and low-level, slang idioms. In the play, taking place within one single day, he shows us the mounting up of the mirages of a female devilry which terrifies two slobbering old lechers, in a seesaw alternating between timorous and terrified exorcizing prayers and returns of leering flame. What is condemned of Catholicism is the repression of the flesh and of the senses that it supposedly preaches, an inhuman renunciation which is teased by girl servants, maids and peasant girls alike, who in O’Casey’s work all resemble one another like peas in a pod, all being mischievous perky females always showing off good well-shaped legs, the erogenous zone par excellence, and capable of driving a male mad. Indeed O’Casey, in one of his comments, wonders why ever girls should not be allowed to pull up their skirts. At the time Catholicism, at least Irish Catholicism, was for O’Casey an agent of thought which, apocalyptically, announced the re-invasion on the Devil’s part, and his infestation of the world through female flesh. The curtain goes down upon a barely re-established order, with small gestures, however, of rebellion against the exalted Savonarolian prelate23 even on the part of the believers, and in the name of a more human-oriented religion. In The Bishop’s Bonfire (1955) the characters are divided between the devotedly defeatists, who are the majority and are faithful to a clergy having powers of life and death, and 22 23

That is to say the cock, in an easy phallic translation of the diabolical female temptation. There is here an irresistible reference, which has surprisingly escaped the critics, to the phallic cock in The Man Who Died by Lawrence (§ 122.6). In the following drama, The Bishop’s Bonfire, there will indeed be a bonfire of dangerous books.

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a very few prophets of a religious feeling which is not misrepresented and oppressive. Thence the oft-duplicated plots of crossed love stories leaving only a feeling of disconsolate bitterness, and the psychic dependence on a Catholic faith embodied by a sacred statue tormenting believers with its hallucinations, namely with tangible and audible signs of approval and disapproval, within the setting of a backward Ireland still in a situation of cultural minority. As the short preface revealed, The Drums of Father Ned24 (1950, played in the States in 1960) was dedicated to a group of Irish dissidents contesting official and Vatican Catholicism; it is, therefore, a theatrical mediation of a militant attitude. The prologue is magisterial, one of the scenes of purest theatre in all of O’Casey, with the burning and looting of the Black and Tans who, in the far-away time of the Civil War, capture two Irishmen who do not speak to one another although sharing the same religion, for one is a regular whilst the other is a diehard, which illustrates the unbridgeable gap and perpetual internal feuds of Ireland. The soldiers themselves, bearers of hate and death, are surprised at such ferocious loathing, and paradoxically they have to exhort the two men to fraternize, vainly blackmailing them, and promising not to raze the town to the ground if they make peace; indeed they avoid killing them, stating with deadly sarcasm that they damage Ireland more alive than they would dead. Thirty-four years later, when the drama opens, hate has not been subdued, and its bite is still ferocious, translated into a mean and devouring sense of rivalry; and yet the two characters of the prologue, now administrators of that community, must pretend to forget it, so as to join forces in their exploitation plans. However the drama, which is O’Casey’s most studiedly geometrical, after the initial exploit loses some of its strength in order to show, through the event of a music festival, the clash between the traditionalist and immobilizing obscurantism of the old and the young forces of political, religious and cultural renewal, and of an Ireland which is upto-date: such forces are represented by a Catholic priest, the only one in the whole of O’Casey’s work who is bravely open-minded. This, however, 24 Its performance at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1958 was blocked by the local Archbishop who requested substantial alterations. Samuel Beckett raised his protest by removing a mime of his from the festival programme.

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is an ironic concession, for the priest, like some sort of evanescent Godot, is never on stage; perhaps he does not even exist.25 § 11. O’Casey IV: The one-acters Five one-acters, written between 1937 and 1951, are a kind of litmus test for O’Casey, mathematically descending from his lesser ability in engineering ample plots with several characters, and able to stand well on their own. We, as spectators, gain from this because they are experimental and transitional texts, devoid of Irish politics, still Irish as to the setting and idiosyncrasies but in a lighter and more generic way, focusing as they do upon strangeness of behaviour and situation. Three of them are based upon the misadventures of three buddies from different social backgrounds, messy, inept or even falsely simple-minded. I would not hesitate to say that, by forming a series with constant internal features, they anticipate the late, ‘serial’ Samuel Beckett or even his early drama set in the countryside and hinging on a couple of tramps.26 The End of the Beginning (1937) starts with the challenge to a lazy and ‘macho’ husband who is left by his working wife to do the household chores on his own. As he has a paunch, before starting the clearing he clumsily does some exercises with a friend of his who has come to the house, and the two men collaborate, making endless disasters while carrying out their task. The act does not flow easily and has some longueurs, but this is part of its programme: that of an absurd farce. The two men throw, in fact, a bridge to Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, because of the stubborn bickering between the unhearing, the byzantine and yet furious arguments, and the eventual peace-making. A Pound on Demand (1939) is the best of the five and the richest in happy dramatic ideas. Two drunkard workmen ask the Post Office to give them a pound from a savings 25

With this drama, which was written by O’Casey when aged eighty-one, the curtain practically drops on his playwriting; in his last four dramas, of which only one had several acts, he continued changelessly his score-settling with an obscurantist Catholicism and wrote in favour of intellectual freedom; and it is in the name of such freedom that he invoked and hailed, in the last one, the reconciliation between the English and the Irish (Kosok 1985, 289). 26 These anticipations were not noticed, and seem even to be excluded, by an attentive critic such as Kosok 1985 (see 117, 325).

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book to the bearer to buy themselves a drink, and the whole act consists in the exhilarating and even absurd gags of the two cronies, which cross with separate scenes and flashes of other unrealistic contexts. The request for the form to be filled in is repeated, ignored, and interrupted by a lady who must send a letter to India; the two simpletons are however only apparently such, and are slyly aware of what they are doing. In this sketch, the developments of which are followed in slow motion, O’Casey cannot of course refrain from showing the scarcely repressed gut dislikes of the four characters on scene, thence, as always, exemplifying the natural, innate intolerance and the anti-social, aggressive instincts of their fellow humans. The situation escapes control and risks precipitating, that is to say the police might have to be called to re-establish order. It is the usual, Irish powder keg. Mistakes, misunderstandings, tricks, ruses, faked misapprehensions follow one another, but the post office employee does not give them the pound because the signature on the form does not correspond to that on the savings book. The two tramps, for now they have become that – not however docile but, to the contrary, furious – exit the Post Office with menacing tones. Hall of Healing (1951) is a series of weirded out scenes depicting some poor fellows, passive, timorous and incapable of rebellion, waiting to enter the parochial surgery; it is the work of an O’Casey who mercilessly insists on the impossibility of improving the social fabric, in the grips of a blind determinism against which nothing works, and of the unavoidability of evil. The prurient Bedtime Story (1951) presents an employee who is terrified by the idea of having committed a sexual sin because he spent the night with a ‘pagan’ slut, thus playfully satirizing the moral burden of the Catholic Church. The employee is a pusillanimous and bigoted Catholic guy; as a Catholic he is lubricious, and puts the girl onto his knee with the excuse of an innocent reading of poems by Yeats (whom O’Casey mocks through his characters, who say he is a poet who makes one fall asleep or rather induces to sleep-walking, and that he remained locked in his tower, waiting for the amateur poets to imitate him).27 One is reminded of Joyce in this farcical drama, for the employee has just been to a spiritual retreat, he is a member 27 O’Casey’s autobiography is, for obvious reasons, swarming with mocking observations aimed at the figure of Yeats.

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of the Society of St Vincent de Paul, and is obliged to lie blatantly to his flat-mate who comes home at that late hour, having remorselessly been to the ball full of good-looking girls. The employee, in front of him, must pretend that he is an advocate of morals. The impudent slut, before sneaking away, takes several pounds off the employee. An appreciable scenic success is owed to the fact that the other tenants are judged by the employee as having suddenly lost their minds and being dangerous, while they in their turn think the same of him. Time to Go (1951) is once more a street drama, and after an exchange of negative opinions against the Church on the part of two country peasants who live opposite one another, a range of characters make their entry and start wandering, plaintive and discouraged, against the background of squalid moral decay. § 12. Priestley, Rattigan It would take more space than I feel right to give John Boynton Priestley (1894–1984) in order to list, classify and fully discuss his career and his works. Priestley was but one of the many versatile writers to whom now and then English literature gives birth. Active in all fields of literary activity, he was therefore a synthesizer, an encyclopaedist, and a divulger with some strokes of genius. However, even his contemporaries knew and cherished his first two novels published in the early 1930s, and followed him more assiduously at his beginnings and in his first hits as a playwright until the eve of the Second World War. If in the recent past many a critic and literary historian barely mentioned him, nowadays practically everyone skips him. We may speak of him as a sort of minor Wells, owing to the great quantity of works left and to the indefatigability of his production, and for the amateur-like mediation with the world of ideas witnessed by his art. The Good Companions (1929), which made him known, was appreciated by a public by then worn out by the subtle quibbles and cerebral excesses of the modernist novel, for it was a work of rear guard and restoration, of a Dickensian stock in its picaresque construction, in the generosity of its humour and in its lessons in cheap good-heartedness.1 When Priestley 1

His second novel, Angel Pavement (1930, the name of a street), about a group of clerks working in London offices, was outspokenly dismissed by Orwell (OCE, vol. I,

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moved on to drama, he chose the wise policy of dramatizing, and in so doing abridging that successful novel, only shortly later to make radical amendments. His theatre is not, in fact, an appendix of his fiction, but rather it surpasses it, in the admittedly over-ambitious exploration of some questions pertaining to contemporary philosophical speculation. It is also a very precocious and solitary attempt at displacing the traditional diegetic fabric of well-made drama, through some operations which lead one to think of no less than Tom Stoppard. His three best comedies present in fact combinatory mechanisms and devices that help to reflect on the fallacy of time or on its non-linearity. Priestley, having exhausted the series of ‘time plays’, started to wonder what was hidden behind the facade or the ordinary surface of life, and even in the afterlife. Nearly all his dramas flaunt a scientific and exoteric patina which, however, translates into concoctions that are, as in the good old days, subtly edifying, being furthermore very scholastic in the way the dialogue and plot are organized. In Dangerous Corner (1932) the enfolding of the story is awkward and complicated, with some rich upper-class people who try to throw some light upon the circumstances and motivations of an indebted suicide; the truth knots up until it is discovered that perhaps it was not suicide but murder. For six-fifths it is a dense mystery story, Agatha Christie-like; this occurs precisely because Priestley wants to transpose metaphysical or even existentialist questions which refer to the very randomness of life, conceived as a tightrope walking. In other words, the drama ought to prove how each one of our actions is the outcome of virtuality and of chance, and that it is possible to at least imagine a different course of things. Indeed the playwright, when but a few lines are missing to the end, suddenly goes back on his tracks and the drama starts over from the beginning, but towards a different conclusion. The tragedy of human history is redeemable through good will or thanks to a deus ex machina. In the second drama of this ‘time trilogy,’ Time and the Conways (1937), the spectator gets to know the disappointments following many an ardent dream about the future, for he has seen Act III before Act II. This device, however, is not as modern as it might seem, 47–50), who, by criticizing its sloppiness, masked his wholly negative judgement on Priestley’s washed-down socialism.

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and is after all inspired by Dickens’s Christmas novels and stories. A typically Dickensian solution is also that of characters yielding for an instant to a negative existentialist fatalism, only then to shake themselves, go back to hoping, wipe the slate providentially clean and stop seeing everything dark. Time and the Conways could, in 1937, effectively work as an allegory, with the ship which, in Act I, anyone feared to sink while it does not; in other words, a better future was in store if only one would really believe it possible, and had faith in a sort of vague humanitarian socialism.2 I Have Been Here Before (1937), where a cheap German doctor stops at the very last minute a man who is about to commit suicide and avoids the wife’s flirting with another man, thus reconciling the couple, celebrates man’s capacity to escape the forms of determinism conditioning him. This work, which some interpreters found and still find profound and powerful, is in my opinion the weakest and most pretentious of Priestley’s three ‘time plays,’ especially in the doctor’s absurd final babbling about history as a series of metempsychotic spirals, which Priestley might have heard of from a Russian scholar, Ouspensky, or perhaps even taken from Yeats, of whose oneiric theatre this work exhibits quite a few traces. Among the other later dramas, Johnson Over Jordan (1939) is a daring remake of Newman’s The Dream of Gerontius, as it puts on stage, with choreographies accompanied by Britten’s music, the visions of a dead man as the curtain rises upon his death. Such metaphysical and apocalyptic concerns are also expressed allegorically in An Inspector Calls (1946), in which a mysterious inspector charges the members of a middle-class company with the death of a suicide – an imaginary guilt which, however, allows some to feel the non-provisional shiver of damnation. The lifeless The Linden Tree3 (1947), 2

3

Priestley gave famous weekly radio speeches in the years 1940–1941, with the aim of persuading the population of the necessity of national unity against Hitler and, at the same time, of designing a future democratic and egalitarian society. Orwell (OCE, vol. III, 167) criticized his Yorkshire accent, which Priestley did not hide in order to sound closer to his audience. Linden is the name of the history professor who is the protagonist, whose ideas are inspired by Matthew Arnold, as well as the name of the tree. Linden, sixty-five, close to retirement, and seeing himself overthrown by new forces, is not wholly unlike the protagonist of Rattigan’s The Browning Version.

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Priestley’s last dramatic success, addresses the English nation prostrated by the war, with a message of encouragement containing an invitation to shake off sterile nostalgic memories of the Edwardian times, and extols the faith in the unwavering values of humanism.4 2. Terence Rattigan (1911–1977), the son of a much talked-about Irish Protestant lawyer, therefore from an upper-class family, and a student at Harrow and Oxford, embodied in the early 1950s the quintessence of that old-fashioned theatre, without the slightest inventive thrill, and immobile in its conventions, against which the Angry Young Men lashed out. Rattigan replied to them with the perfect and clear awareness of being a man from a different epoch, untouched by any form of modernity. The Angry Young Men, however, had perhaps also secretly learned from this playwright, and may have envied him his ease, his fluency, his lively sense of the comical, his sure competence in the use of the dramatic contraption, in short his pure and solid workmanship, the same to be found in Maugham. Like the latter, Rattigan disliked kaleidoscopic London and, on the strength of the earnings he had made with his theatre, he went to live in the Bermudas, where he died. Nor was he ashamed of bowing to the rough aesthetics of ‘aunt Edna’, the prototype of the philistine Englishman or woman, and the symbolic addressee of a theatre such as his, which without false shame favoured relaxation and distraction. Actually, his figure is far more varied and complex, and the customary matching with Coward – the two of them competed for the role of ‘king’ of the English theatre in the early 1950s –5 only works as far as his early, brilliant production is concerned, such as made its triumphant entrance with French without Tears (1936). This is a light comedy on the hackneyed theme of three young Englishmen who, having arrived in France to learn the language, fall in love with the same woman. The comedy, as well as other sure box-office successes, has ended up forgotten unlike a few works which may still be found in a repertoire 4 5

In his old age Priestley dramatized the novel The Severed Head (Volume 8, § 147.4) by Iris Murdoch. AAA, 18 and 20. Taylor also recalls (112, 282) that Shelagh Delaney started with the persuasion that she could do better than Rattigan, having seen one of his minor dramas.

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today. They are part of his serious production, which brought onto the scene burning and delicate issues as well as examples of lonely and misunderstood individuals, often the victims of external determinisms, which may be prejudices, lies, hypocrisies, or even the social system as a whole. After the liberalization of homosexuality it was not long before the reasons for this solidarity towards the isolated, the emarginated or even those fighting for their rights, found an aetiological explanation; indeed, some plots were later supposed by critics to have been, as in Forster’s case, coverings, travesties or adjustments of homosexual stories which would not have passed censorship: in other words, coded plots for homoerotic sexuality. In The Winslow Boy (1946) Rattigan dramatized the famous case of a cadet expelled from the Naval Academy with a false accusation of stealing, the legal case being won in the end; the audience, having just recovered from the war, rewarded the playwright with the same favour with which the Victorian public, a century earlier, had read Trollope’s serials about trials.6 The old professor of Greek in The Browning Version (1948), who, suffering from heart disease, quits teaching without even getting a pension, is submerged with all sorts of dumb humiliations, indelicacies and affronts, which make him appear as a figure of alienation and estrangement, and also as some kind of petty monarch quietly acknowledging the fact that 6

The distance from the Angry Young Men’s first dramas is therefore huge, in spite of the fact that they started to appear only ten years later. Rattigan’s comedy, set in the early pre-war years, begins in a clear-cut and precise manner, with calibrated scenic steps and exploiting the satirical chances offered by the generation conflict on a Sunday just after the much-honoured Winslow family has returned from church; the authoritarian father is by now a tamed bogeyman and the children are kicking about with impatience. When the daughter’s fiancé comes to propose, speeches with a real, yet comical Victorian flavour are repeated concerning annuities and dowries. It is, however, Winslow the father who is at the centre of the drama, and Rattigan wants to make of him not so much the poor innocent citizen strangled by summary justice, as a moral reference point: he is the unwavering helmsman intent upon saving the sinking ship of family honour, to which he sacrifices all other values. In Act II, the best of the three, the fourteen-year-old son, who is a victim of diffidence, defends himself successfully from the accusations, and the whole trial proceedings are then followed ex post facto, and read from newspaper reports, in the last two acts, distanced in time, until the absolution.

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he has been dethroned, albeit through mellifluous notifications.7 In The Deep Blue Sea8 (1952) the wife of a judge undermines social conventions by having an affair with an Air Force officer. The naturalistic, dark, far more modern Separate Tables9 (1954) reviews, in self-contained scenes filled with a dry stenographic dialogue, the guests of a boarding-house overlooking the sea, and reconstructs the suffocating and deeply hypocritical, or even philistine atmosphere enveloping some characters who are either psychotic, tormented or afflicted by past secrets. Towards the end of his career Rattigan was sought by film directors who almost made a colossal of his Ross, dated 1960, on the legendary figure of T. E. Lawrence. His last work, a costume drama about the life and loves of Lord Horatio Nelson (1970), concerned a theme and a figure also dealt with by John Arden.

7

8

9

The title refers to an edition of a translation by Browning of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (see Volume 6, § 18.1 n. 41), which with a good deed a school-boy gives to his professor, a gesture which in the latter sets in motion a small vindication and a form of self-affirmation, after so many instances of passive acceptance. Some of the Angry Young Men will repeat the setting of this play, wholly taking place in a miserable furnished flat, in fact a single living-room which claustrophobically oppresses the protagonist Hester, who vibrates with a protest against conventions which is not too far from Jimmy Porter’s ‘anger’. Hester in the drama is actually a painter and, like the protagonist in a novel by Orwell (which might be a deliberate quotation), a ‘clergyman’s daughter’ who sensitively confronts two men, her husband – who significantly is a judge, and stands for oppressive middle-class order – and the other, her lover, representing a slightly shabby romanticism, lazy and tactless. After an excellent choral first act, with the neighbours hurrying to see the woman who has failed to commit suicide – all of them cowardly, gossipy and inquisitive – Act II and III are slower and more static, finally showing how the protagonist finds solace in her artistic vocation from having been left by both men. On the autobiographical, homosexual traces, masked and made heterosexual, see the review by Hugo Williams of a theatrical performance of the play, in TLS, 22 January 1993, 18. The play has two single acts taking place in the same hotel, first in winter, then in summer; the first consists of three scenes, the second of two. They show different guests, but in the same sordid and oppressive atmosphere. In Act II the company of holidaymakers wonders whether to ask that a smarmy major, who groped a woman in a cinema, be expelled from the hotel.

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§ 13. Wells* I: The multifaceted intellectual, a modern, amateurish Leonardo da Vinci Placing Herbert George Wells (1866–1946) turns out to be more difficult and arbitrary than expected, and our embarrassment paradigmatically refers us back to that category of ‘interstitial’ and border literature of which I have spoken above. In other words, is Wells fully entitled to be considered a twentieth-century writer, apart from his date of birth and death? Is he at least a writer of the early twentieth century? Or is he not, instead, still a Victorian who, debuting in the last decade of the nineteenth century, lived and wrote drifting beyond the natural end of that period? If we look more closely, we will see that some critics answer the query by begging the question, that is asserting that Wells is not even a novelist, but rather, just a journalist and divulger, and confining his activity and competency as a pure novelist to the sole science fiction novels which he wrote *

Atlantic Edition, 28 vols, London 1924–1927, with prefaces to the single volumes by Wells himself; Complete Short Stories, London 1927. Well’s Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866), London 1934 and 1966 (cherished, and summarized with some extravagance, by Praz in SSI, vol. I, 89–92), is reticent on his love life and must be integrated by H. G. Wells in Love: Postscript to an Experiment in Autobiography, London 1984. Well’s letters, which knew how to be spicy when necessary (see OCE, vol. II, 469), are edited by D. C. Smith and P. Parrinder, 4 vols, London 1988.    Life. V. Brome, H. G. Wells: A Biography, London, New York and Toronto 1951; L. Dickson, H. G. Wells: His Turbulent Life and Times, London 1969; N. and J. MacKenzie, The Time Traveller: The Life of H. G. Wells, London 1973; D. C. Smith, H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography, New Haven, CT and London 1986; M. Coren, The Invisible Man: The Life and Liberties of H. G. Wells, London 1993.    Criticism. G. West, H. G. Wells, London 1930; N. Nicholson, H. G. Wells, London 1950; M. Belgion, H. G. Wells, London 1953; B. Bergonzi, The Early H. G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances, Manchester 1961, and, as editor, H. G. Wells: A Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1976; W. W. Wagar, H. G. Wells and the World State, New Haven, CT 1961; I. Raknem, H. G. Wells and His Critics, Trondheim 1962; J. Kagarlickij, The Life and Thought of H. G. Wells, Eng. trans., London 1966; M. R. Hillegas, The Future as Nightmare: H. G. Wells and the AntiUtopians, New York and Oxford 1967; K. B. Newell, Structure in Four Novels by H. G. Wells, The Hague-Paris 1968; P. Parrinder, H. G. Wells, Edinburgh 1970, and, as editor, CRHE, London and Boston, MA 1972, and, as co-editor with C. Rolfe,

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before 1901.1 And this already is an implicit answer to our first question, on whether or not he is a twentieth-century author. This thesis is however too strict, and Wells is indeed a novelist whose conformity to such a label ought to be judged case by case; it is equally true that he still carries along, scarcely hidden, a Victorian heritage and tradition2 mixed up with an almost dazzling progressivism, which may pass as being anti-Victorian, although his indifference to any formal experimentation unmasks him as being an anti-modern and, with even more reason, an anti-modernist. Wells, with his nearly a hundred published books, is the last Victorian H. G. Wells under Revision, Selinsgrove, London and Toronto 1990; W. Bellamy, The Novels of Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy: 1890–1910, London 1971, 51–70, 114–43 and passim; K. Young, H. G. Wells, ed. I. Scott-Kilvert, Harlow 1974; R. Bloom, Anatomies of Egotism: A Reading of the Last Novels of H. G. Wells, Lincoln, NE 1977; J. R. Hammond, An H. G. Wells Companion, London 1979, H. G. Wells and the Modern Novel, Basingstoke 1988, and H. G. Wells and the Short Story, New York 1992; R. D. Haynes, H. G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future, London 1980; F. McConnell, The Science Fiction of H. G. Wells, Oxford 1981; J. Huntington, The Logic of Fantasy: H. G. Wells and Science Fiction, New York 1982; P. Kemp, H. G. Wells and Culminating Ape: Biological Themes and Imaginative Obsessions, London 1982; J. Batchelor, H. G. Wells, Cambridge 1985; M. Sherborne, H. G. Wells / Michael Draper, Basingstoke 1987; L. R. Anderson, Bennett, Wells and Conrad: Narrative in Transition, Basingstoke 1988; B. Battaglia, Nostalgia e mito nella distopia inglese: saggi su Oliphant, Wells, Forster, Orwell, Burdekin, Ravenna 1998; L. Dryden, The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells, Basingstoke 2003; The Reception of H. G. Wells in Europe, ed. P. Parrinder and J. S. Partington, London 2005; H. G. Wells: Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. S. McLean, Newcastle 2008; D. Abrams, H. G. Wells, New York 2011; S. J. James, Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity and the End of Culture, Oxford 2012; R. Edwards, The Edge of Evolution: Animality, Inhumanity, and Doctor Moreau, New York 2016. 1 2

Bergonzi 1961 did this, in a book which had the merit of rediscovering Wells, but with the qualification noticed in n. 2 below. Bergonzi 1961, 1, opens with the very peremptory assertion that Wells is a twentiethcentury man, but in the whole of its first chapter (and even further on: see 90) reconstructs his close and strong ties with late nineteenth-century scientific thought, pointing out even the tiniest collusions with the climate of Decadentism in the ‘Nineties’.

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phenomenon, or miracle, of serial productivity,3 and no other first-rate novelist wrote as much in the same period of time. We need to go back to Trollope in order to find a rival. It is indeed a miracle for the further reason that Wells was a self-made man and novelist, who had become such thanks to a concurrence of fortunate coincidences. He was the proletarian or the working-class poor or destitute child of scarcely cultivated parents, cast into the ring when still a young boy, yet animated by that Victorian stubbornness which had unconsciously become natural after Darwin.4 Wells had not followed the humanist curriculum, had only learnt Latin in order to work as shop assistant at a chemist’s, nor was he a ‘defector’ from Oxford or Cambridge simply because he had never been a student there. His inexhaustible vitality is reflected in a productive erethism which is the sublimation, also Victorian to the core, of an indomitable sexual appetite.5 Yet Wells was revealed to the world by novels and short stories which openly embraced the progressivist cause and invented, almost from nought, the formula of a ‘scientific’ literature, although if one reads them over again carefully, they exude deceiving triumphalism. When he had already advanced in his career he wrote an admittedly autobiographical novel, The New Machiavelli; but owing to his versatile ambition as an allround scholar studying the problems of humanity in his days – owing to the connection between science and art, and above all to his Icarus-like folly in imperturbably tackling all fields of knowledge – we might perhaps call him a new and modern Leonardo. This is actually a mere suggestive metaphor. Wells is an unprecedentedly amateurish Leonardo who, for 3 4

5

Nearly all of Wells’s novels before 1920 were first published in instalments (CRHE, 6). The memory of the basement kitchen in his house in his home village of Bromley, from which Wells as a child recognized and classified passers-by from below by examining the state of their foot-wear, remained imprinted in him, returning for instance in his first science fiction story, The Time Machine, in which the traveller is an Eloi, that is, a middle-class man, and the monstrous Morlocks, representing the working classes, live underground. Wells confessed in his autobiography that he had never had homosexual instincts; he was later to become, or had the reputation of being, ‘the greatest stallion’ of his day (Brome 1951, 115).

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instance, had no familiarity with the visual arts and did not practise them.6 However, like Leonardo – the first and utmost of utopians – Wells foresaw and imagined man flying and the first airplanes; he is akin to Leonardo in that he is a designer and an engineer who does not only study machines apt to make man superhuman, instar Dei, but also strives ingeniously to fill the creative gaps of God himself, whom he scolds for not creating the perfect man, and strives to improve him. To measure and observe life en scientifique, or even his own in his autobiography, meant applying a secular pre-condition to history. Wells the narrator is an analyst who puts the show-piece into the test-tube and then writes down the reaction obtained; and his prose is controlled, inert, seldom breaking down into tones of exclamation or exhilaration. According to that doubtlessly absurd touchstone – sometimes also applied to Orwell – which is the quantity of formulated prophecies that have come true – almost as though the great writer were a fortune teller – Wells postulated that there was life in the universe and in other planets besides the Earth. He likewise predicted man’s landing on the moon over half a century in advance, and told humanity about the fantastic myth of the Martians. One of his novels, which, mysteriously, is hardly quoted in this our epoch of cloning, foretold the worrying likelihood of experiments being carried out to transform animals into human beings. And in 1908 another ‘novel,’ more properly a political fantasy tale, foretold both the world wars of the twentieth century.7 In the early Well’s symbolic and visionary geography there is an amazing sense, or rather, as it were, scent of the city, together with the shift of the measurement unit from the single individual to the mass. No passive imitator, Wells joins the nineteenth-century visionaries who depicted the ‘city of the dreadful night’, but reworks the topos to identify it, not with the past or present city, but with the future one. He is the imaginary planner of a future town. In order to achieve this he is also a sociologist who constructs his futuristic urban and building projects starting from an estimation of the 6 An extremely mediocre ersatz is represented by the ‘picshuas’ (see below, n. 79). 7 In The World Set Free (1914) the natural decline of radium is foreseen, together with the production of bombs which go on exploding for an indefinite period of time, thence the nuclear chain reaction.

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needs, even just hinted or latent, of the society he has in front of him. We owe him the intuition that the world would go in the direction of housing concentration and urban agglomerations, leaving behind single dwelling units; and he foresaw not only skyscrapers but also the daedal-like apartment buildings, that is to say a city seen as a constellation of many human organisms, or even self-sufficient micro-cells. He also foresaw the economy of the supermarket and the shopping mall, a small multifunctional, self-contained world and an aggregation of primary services, from the perfume shop to the post office. As to his second quality – which is the reverse side of that criticism often addressed to him, of not being good enough at providing an all-round depiction of one single character – Wells is a master at imagining the effects of external occurrences upon mankind, seen as an indistinct and anonymous mass.8 His mankind is a symbolically migrating one, in the scenario of future events, and the choral scenes in The War of the Worlds, where London people are described as fleeing in an anticipation of the diaspora, are difficult to forget. 2. Orwell, the greatest and sharpest of experts on Wells among professional writers together with Henry James, often vibrantly pointed out9 how Wells had fed and nurtured, with his science fiction, those born at the beginning of the century, helping to change and modernize the philistine way of thinking, which had indeed not yet been extirpated and survived in England. He used to repeat that Wells looked back to the past with disgust and wore the future ‘round his neck.’10 Orwell was among the first to hail Wells as the prophet of a technological or technocratic society, and to define his work as an enduring, forty-year-long allegory of the historic and cosmic clash between romanticism and science.11 Wells, according to Orwell, envisioned a future society that was aseptic, synonymous of progress, airplanes and hygiene,12 throwing to the wind the past one of

8 9 10 11 12

This observation was first brilliantly made by Arnold Bennett (CRHE, 131). OCE, vol. II, 166–72. Cf. OCE, vol. I, 488, and II, 233. See again OCE, vol. II, 166–72. Therefore Wells represented for his contemporaries the man who had invented the airplane, simply because he ‘wanted’ to be able to fly.

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religion, of farm work, of poets and ‘horses’ – which horses, Orwell continued, are the object of a ‘violent counter-propaganda’. Thus, he found the exact contrary to Wells in the primitivist and anti-scientific D. H. Lawrence.13 In actual fact, as I anticipated above, there lurks a misunderstanding behind Wells’s scientism, which presents two antithetic features: his scientific romances study the benefits, the resources, the perspectives but also the variables of progress, if not even the dead ends of science. Wells pleads the cause of science but he cynically foresees the abysses it might open up and into which mankind might sink. Even the recurrent imagining of other worlds in which the utopia of an aseptic, geometric, rational system has been implemented (and in which man has been perfected, losing all his beast-like characteristics, and made into a thinking machine, a solely cerebral organism, therefore recreated remedying all the shortcomings decreed by the first Creator), contains a measure of satire, a satire often aimed precisely at what Wells maintained as a pure theorist. Wells closed his science fiction and opened social comedy, then closed up the latter as well and became a novelist of ideas, because he was faithful to a project, and not just in order to try new paths, perhaps dictated by the market. Science fiction is simultaneously a proof of faith in scientism and a Dantesque acknowledgement of the limits of scientism itself, ‘perché non corra che virtù nol guidi’ [‘lest it run where virtue guides not’]: a satire, even, of the scientist out of step with his world and indifferent about the consequences of his researches in non-applied science. The second human type of Wells’s narrative is the adventurer in a space-time which is above all social, and his mounting from having no means at all to upper-class wealth ends with his wise stepping back into the ranks of Victorian Biedermeier, that is into the hard-working little family content with its little. It is significant that this solution, of the scientist setting apart science and ambition in order to give in to routine, is indeed the final one in his first non-science fiction novel. In his third phase Wells defends the need for a scientism without sentimental défaillances, but he has to endure the inroads of an indomitable eroticism, so that rational

13

OCE, vol. II, 234–5.

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man is always also irrational. Romantic and sublimated or idyllic love takes its revenge, in the novels, in sketches which are among the most trenchant he has ever narrated. Thus the useful social scientist, a world benefactor, is finally no longer the pure scientist of his beginnings, guilty of so much damage and the follower of dangerous chimeras, and Wells the political utopian, in the last two decades of his literary work, goes back to being a scientist who believes that only a technological revolution can save the world. This may even just be an implication and a backlash of the original fear of an apocalypse, which may only be prevented by a world-wide government. 3. Wells’s science fiction petered out in a decade or little more, and its relevance was played down by the novelist himself, and almost removed in his later autobiography;14 his subsequent humorous and satiric fiction did not last much longer, although it had separate stages. From 1910 onwards Wells stood up as the maître à penser of a secular humanism presented and divulged through an extremely rich series of not always genuine propaganda leaflets,15 and as the theorist of a universal palingenesis which was, however, too tied up to historic contingencies and to Wells’s own ideological criteria. He called himself a socialist, but did not always agree with socialists; a member of the Fabian Society, he drifted away from it because it was too moderate, and he accused it of lacking a solid background knowledge of economics. He ran in the general election in 1922 and in 1923, but without any real faith in the Labour party. His utopia took shape after the Great War, in the form of a world state which would favour scientific progress and put an end to nationalism and democracy, the latter being an insufficient system owing to the common citizen’s inability for any decision-making process.16 Political vote should,

14 15 16

On the reasons for this, see Orwell’s conjectures in OCE, vol. IV, 326–7. Wells was sued for plagiarism, but absolved in 1927, after the publication of The Outline of History (1920), which was praised by several historians, including Arnold J. Toynbee, although it was criticized by others because of its secular bias. This utopia goes against religion and against the respect, which is much more strongly felt today, for ethnic and racial differences; but Chesterton already objected to Wells in 1904 (see CRHE, 105) that it was possible to fight, and indeed that there were already those who were fighting not only for equality but also for a ‘differentiation’.

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then, be limited solely to scientists and other persons of merit.17 He had, on the other hand, always been an ­anti-Marxist socialist who maintained it would have been better if Marx had never been born – although Stalin, whom he met personally, led him to revise this belief.18 His blind faith in a reformed and strengthened Society of Nations, this being the sole organism able to abolish war as an offence tool in the world, is denied daily by the impotence of ONU. Mind at the End of its Tether (1945), Wells’s last work, announced the idea that it would not have been negative if mankind were to be replaced by a different species. Another name by which he called post-war society, competing with Auden’s ‘Age of Anxiety’, was ‘the age of frustration’. Orwell pointed out that in his opinion Wells’s prestige was, even before mid-century, on the decline, and found the explanation – Orwell is not all that clear about this, and seems more than anything to be missing a broken idol – in Wells’s having failed to understand the boomerang and the residual negative force of the old ideologies, and their backlash: that is to say, for having underestimated and taken lightly the presence of dictatorships, and Hitler in particular. In short, the development of science was discovered not to automatically lead to world peace, but rather, to act as a prop for dictatorships, and Orwell deemed that it was science that had produced the mass destruction of war; the Great War itself had already been an allegory of the war massacre as a result of progress. It was not, however, the politically engaged writers who triggered off Wells’s decline; but rather, the modernists. Wells is like a touchstone for the very concept and for the semantic and relativistic transformation of the idea of ‘modernity’. His contemporaries were led to define him as the non plus ultra of the modern writer, sweeping away all that was old, and who was not only up-to-date, but also ahead of his time. The next generation, basing its judgement upon different criteria from the quality of ideas, discovered that Wells was only falsely modern, and that he was, indeed, the least modern author that it was possible to imagine. A sort of death blow, in the name of the new modernist and anti-Victorian novel, 17 18

His unshakeable faith in a planned world was corroborated by a visit to Russia (Russia in the Shadows, 1920). He had found him likeable, as recalled by Orwell (OCE, vol. I, 370–1), who also noted that the dictator was extremely telegenic!

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was dealt to Wells, as also to Bennett and Galsworthy, by Henry James and Virginia Woolf, the latter in her article, often indicated as foundational of a new literary climate, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’.19 If we consider Wells strictly speaking as a novelist, even as the author of a novel proudly proclaimed as ‘modern’ such as The World of William Clissold, there is nothing modern, even less so modernist, in Wells, starting from his absolute indifference to any formal experimentation. Henry James’s criticism, that he cared neither for the shape of the novel nor for the verisimilitude of his characters, but only for contents and ‘values,’ was returned to the sender with firm and determined disagreement.20 Wells is not the only proletarian or petty bourgeois to reach literature and publication from the ranks; nor is he the first to arrive there through the rocambolesque vicissitudes of life; nor, yet again, is he the first writer to have a different education from that of the two prestigious English universities. Just as he is not the first agnostic, thus he is not the first utopian either. His circle and his genealogy are those of two slightly older writers, Butler and Shaw, whose problems and inquests he shares. This also implies the usage of literature – no poetry or drama in his case –21 as a debating weapon and as a place for diatribe, in order to formulate hypotheses on the future of the world and of society, on the existence of God, on the historical value and truthfulness of the Scriptures and on the evolution of species. There already was a ‘waste land’ around, but the remedies were the dreaming of a better and rosier future, which however, if it came true, would have had no chance of lasting. After 1901 there were many anti-Victorians such as Wells, whose message was then equally Victorian and anti-Victorian, as this was part of the game and, anyhow, of the variety of a self-integrated system. 4. Each subsequent protagonist of Wells’s novels roughly follows a pattern of formative experiences freely modelled upon his own. It is, therefore, 19 § 158.1. 20 Experiment in Autobiography, vol. II, 495, in a chapter entirely devoted to questions of narrative aesthetics (487–504). The Jamesian artist is satirized in Wells’s minor novel Boon, dated 1915. 21 With the minor exception cited by Batchelor 1985, 53. Drama would have certainly been a useful pulpit for Wells; however, see also n. 79 below.

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a fantastic bundle of parallel paths. This incessant autobiographical parallelism is witnessed by the many and similar, if not almost identical, odysseys of the child, of the school-boy, of the orphan, of the ardent and sensuous lover, even though sometimes this path is traced on the woman’s side. Even his science fiction turns around figures of scientists who share the utopias and aspirations of the real Wells. When he exhausted the range of autobiographical variations Wells was obliged to veil pure invention and transform his alter egos into consciences that were almost exclusively thinking; thus the novel of ideas was born. His final phase is characterized by aridity of invention and by the endless productivity of the essayistic novelist. The essay novel was not discovered by him; it had been reborn and had been admirably illustrated in Europe by Proust and Musil, although Wells may claim a slightly earlier start. One cannot overly insist on the lack of life experience in these final novels: such a deviation towards the ideological novel is deliberate, and Wells might have continued to produce novels and novelettes by drawing on even ephemeral cues, as he had shown that he was capable of doing. The turning he took instead was supported by his persuasion that, the better to succour humanity and in order to have a wider range of influence, the pure idea needed the compromising mediation of a novel. Wells’s late essay novel strikes one for its overflowing narcissism. There are three complementary versions of this autobiography, and at least three are his partly, but not wholly coinciding alter egos, Remington, Britling and Clissold. This only partial coincidence is due to the fact that they reflect the fluidity of Wells’s social and political thought, determined by the historic contingencies that impressed him with the passing of time. Wells had lived as well as written even too long to be able to transfer into one single writing act the accumulation of that material, both mnemonic and intellectual. Those three subsequent selves of his are the updates of the Wellsian personality in the course of fifteen years, invoked by a past which needs to be reconstituted and rebuilt. Wells thus attends to a sort of great novel in three acts which might be defined as a Wellsian ‘search of lost time,’ but without any real possibility of a fair comparison with Proust. Anyhow, Wells immediately started writing a fourth autobiography, this time in the first person and without any coverings, and his last act of elephantine narcissism (this work is almost 800 pages long) and the

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ultimate monument raised to himself. Upon first opening this Experiment in Autobiography, it is after all no surprise to find that the first, certainly not casual words are ‘This brain of mine came into existence …’ .22 Whoever reads it and synthesizes his essay production and his novels of ideas, will note the confidence, even the bravado of the fearless, enlightened thinker intent on routing all the current idols. One furthermore reads here a supposedly apodictic clarity, a stubborn rationalistic optimism, a candid and instinctive atheism, which acted as a minority counterpoint, in the first few decades of the twentieth century, to all negative and proverbially ‘weak’ forms of existentialism, and which turn Wells into a belated and, anyhow, isolated thinker. For this reason too I will compare him in the following discussion to Matthew Arnold, and also to a figure which is strangely absent both from the inquiry made by Wells himself and by that of his critics: namely, that of John Stuart Mill. 5. In the early post-war years Wells earned the stature of a world authority and a guide for humanity, or at least the fame of a controversial intellectual and of a free and equidistant thinker – altogether free, in particular, from any forms of ideological subservience.23 The evolutionary theory studied by Wells, and that of the natural ‘survival of the fittest’, later turned with the action of the headsman’s axe – this was also Gissing’s fate – against his own works, only few of which have survived and are still regularly in print. His writings are militant in that many of them were elicited by contingencies, and once the moment was past, their fire was inexorably out; that is to say, they suffered the transience of newspapers or journalism, or that of propaganda.24 Orwell pointed out25 that Wells For this expression, which recurs often in Experiment in Autobiography, see vol. I, 38 and 317, and vol. II, 752. This work is indeed devoted, as is admitted by the author himself (vol. II, 417), to the ‘steady expansion of the interests and activities of a brain’; as such it does not touch upon any intimate facts and, except for one chapter, does not discuss the aesthetics of fiction and the genesis of the novels. 23 Wells’s huge European following at the beginning of the century may be inferred from the number of French translations of his science fiction books, which made the fortune of the publisher Mercure de France. 24 As Wells himself cheerfully acknowledged. 25 OCE, vol. IV, 293. 22

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as a narrator dies down in 1920, and that should one judge him by his novels written after that date he would be regarded as a minor author; and in 1947 Orwell deemed that ‘two thirds of [them] ha[d] already ceased to be readable’.26 Of course, from such a gigantic macrotext, even just limiting oneself to the fiction, every reader has extracted his own favourite novels, either after due consideration or more or less arbitrarily in the wake of Wells himself, who in his autobiography sporadically gives quite objectionable and often untenable classifications on single novels of his. All critical studies on Wells deal, unavoidably, with his science fiction narratives; several of them, however, discuss only that, cutting out all the rest; indeed, only few provide a bird’s eye view of his whole production, novel by novel.27 Through a quite normal phenomenon of compensation and rethinking, now and then someone goes against the grain and claims to exhume or uncover the hidden masterpiece, but unconvincingly. Wells, in my opinion, will always be appreciated for those tales which he considered juvenile whims, and soon abandoned to stand up as an inspired prophet, and the interpreter and ideological guide of an age. Those flashes of imagination were to give their fruits in the cinema of the futuristic urban dystopia, of Fritz Lang, Ridley Scott and William Ford Gibson, rather than in literature itself.28 § 14. Wells II: The unknowns of science Wells, born in a London suburb, was the youngest son of an ex gardener, who had become a tradesman and supplemented his income by giving cricket lessons, and of a governess; he therefore belonged to a

26 OCE, vol. IV, 327. According to Praz’s severe estimate (SSI, vol. I, 92), Wells ‘does not belong to the world of literature but for a few humorous pages’. 27 We may quote among these Batchelor 1985, a necessarily cursory overview. 28 Well’s echo surfaces in a certain type of sophisticated and elitist twentieth-century novel, such as the take-off made in a work by C. S. Lewis, or in Arthur Sammler, the protagonist of Mr Sammler’s Planet by Saul Bellow. Woody Allen’s film comedy, Sleeper, is vaguely based upon Wells’s novel When the Sleeper Awakes, published in 1896, a sort of dress rehearsal for Nineteen Eighty-Four by Orwell (who admitted as much in OCE, vol. IV, 195).

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lower-middle-class impoverished family, who thanks to an inheritance were able to buy a china shop, without however becoming any wealthier. Unforeseen occurrences and some ‘providential’ conjunctions of the stars brought about Wells’s career as a writer, which would otherwise have been that of a shop assistant or at the most of a primary school teacher with some literary curiosity and ambition. A broken leg when he was seven years old obliged him to a long convalescence and fed his passion for reading. After another accident, occurred to his father, he was put to work as an apprentice at a draper’s in Southsea; before he was eighteen, having left school, he had already embraced various jobs and temporary occupations (as for instance those of assistant chemist and teacher), until he won a scholarship for the London Royal College of Science, where he studied until he was twenty-one. He left college when he failed to pass the geology exam, in spite of his interests in other sciences; he was, however, soon to resume his studies, precisely in zoology, at the University of London in 1890, under T. H. Huxley’s guidance. Because of the family’s financial straits he was kept by an aunt, whose daughter, his cousin, he married in 1891, only to leave her in 1894 in order to go and live with one of his students, Amy Catherine Robbins. Thus one of the most strongly upheld proposals of Wells’s progressivist crusade, that is, free love, was born of personal experience, for during his marriage Wells had liaisons with other women, who even gave him children.29 Previously, in 1887, when he was working as a teacher in Wales, he had been diagnosed with the symptoms of tuberculosis, and this may have influenced his decision to launch himself in London as a journalist, critic, reviewer and sketch writer. 2. Well’s science fiction novels and the ones based on biological hypotheses and genetic engineering, most of which are not very long, sometimes indeed as quick to read as short stories, were published in

29 Rebecca West gave him a son, Anthony West, in 1914. Others of his lovers were Amber Reeves, the daughter of a Fabian, with whom Wells had a daughter, Moura Budberg, Gorkij’s secretary, who refused to marry Wells after he was left a widower in 1927, and Odette Keun, a journalist.

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rapid succession, almost one a year, starting from 1895.30 They share a wellestablished and repeated structure: one day, in the future or even today, a perfectly normal, or perhaps even megalomaniac scientist, biologist or inventor, enters a different time or space and encounters possible realities, living fantastic experiences which he then relates to his community on his return. Thus the anonymous ‘time traveller’ and Griffin, the ‘invisible man’, become the explorers of new dimensions. Moreau is also a ‘time traveller’, but Wells divides this figure into two separate entities, for Prendick is also a traveller, except that these two figures are then joined into one, because Prendick too is a biologist, a scientist, horribly tempted to become like Moreau, therefore himself also an inventor. These inventors bring about and cause states of metamorphosis, or witness them: the metamorphosis of society in time, that of the animal into man, or even the metamorphosis of the transparency of human tissues. A biological and physiological metamorphosis of man is doubtless represented by the Martian, that is, a more evolved human type whose existence may be documented by science, and which was created by some unknown god and which Wells allows earthly man to meet. The latter then finds himself overthrown from his pedestal as king of the universe in God’s image, being also obliged to acknowledge that the human organism is no such marvel, but rather it is in many of its parts improvable. Some other Wellsian topoi or recurrent themes are the extra-terrestrial menace and the danger of science being left to its own devices and cut off from the needs of human society. The inventor gives birth to monsters, or strange and disgusting hybrids which have definitely lost their human connotations and are thence aptly defined as ‘a thing’: this is indeed the reification of man shortly before Kafka. Each one of these Wellsian scientists fails, in various degrees, to measure and model his activity upon the needs and urgencies of society. And man, smug and vain, must be warned that he lives in a continuous menace: the menace of his personal extinction, that of the extinction of his race, and that represented by his probably being inferior to more evolved beings, totally unknown to him. A further constant element is the study 30 In point of fact Wells debuted, outside science fiction, with two veiled autobiographies, inspired by his experience as a teacher (see below, n. 52).

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of scalar phenomena and relationships, and that of the range of possible, proportional changes. It is a kind of relativism.31 In other words, he who imposed and experienced a regime of superiority upon a family of inferior beings who submit to him, later finds out that he himself has been subdued by an unsuspected race of other superior beings. These scalar series also involve physical size: in various cases Wells is struck and surprised by the fact that bacteria are not the smallest unit of measurement extant or possible, just as man discovers that there are other human species which are bigger, indeed gigantic.32 The history of evolution teaches us that some animals, which used to have unheard-of proportions, are now extinct. The scientific approach implies the usage of two instruments such as the microscope and the magnifying lens, which replace the naked eye or the close look.33 Another scalar phenomenon is the fact that, in The War of the Worlds, imperialist and expansionist England suffers the ironical and grotesque poetic justice, or boomerang, of being itself colonized. Wells’s science fiction novels proper are surrounded by a galaxy of short stories, both contemporary and posterior, which, published in magazines in the wake of Kipling’s success, remained long fixed in his contemporaries’ imagination, and for their freshness of invention and imagination are second only to the latter’s stories written in the same timespan and in that genre. The complete edition includes more than sixty, for a total of over 1,000 pages. They are medium-sized, and divided into chapters, therefore forming short novels, but in a usually small number of pages, which gives them a dry and tense tone, almost as if they were instant sketches to be further developed. Science fiction is only a branch or a sub-group, and these stories are actually more often than not, like Poe’s, tales of ‘mystery’ and ‘imagination’, therefore neo-Gothic in theme and setting, but for the

31 32 33

Or it is even some form of estrangement ante litteram, such as that occurring in ‘The Wonderful Visit’ (1895), where an angel descended upon earth can make no sense of the customs and conventions regulating the life of humanity. In the story entitled ‘In the Abyss’ (1897) there is a description of an inspection on the sea bottom which brings to light sub-aqueous bipeds for whom human beings are like angels to men. WAR, 30.

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fact that the atmosphere is not quite as dark and morbid, and for a far cooler naturalness, absolutely understated, not even remotely aimed at causing an emotional shock. Just as in Poe’s case, they are often framed as stories collected by a witness who recounts strange, often unlikely, visionary adventures occurred to someone else.34

34 Just picking up a few random cards from the deck, ‘The Door in the Wall’ (1906) brings back quite a number of reading memories: the door which for the young lad, now an affirmed and busy politician, had represented the entrance into a magic garden, blatantly quotes not only Poe but Alice’s door in Carroll’s work and simultaneously, as if with a diabolical reversal, that ‘door in the wall’ which opens, for Stevenson’s Utterson, not into a garden, but rather into a house of horrors. A visionary incursion into a garden also opens the first of T. S. Eliot’s quartets. The story by Wells is then a post-lapsarian parable which further reflects the Victorian motif and myth of growing (see Volume 4, §§ 141.1 and 143.3), for the politician cannot so much reopen that same door as feels unwilling to do so, caught up and devoured as he is by adult responsibility, which, at the apex of his career, kills him. ‘The Country of the Blind’ (1904), which sold like hot cakes among Orwell’s schoolmates at Eton (and we shall see why), starts as a biological fantasy and the idea of an altered heredity, that is imagines that blind parents should invariably give birth to blind children, one generation after another. So that Nunez, ascending to that fenced-off district, is a Butler-like traveller overstepping the mountain pass in order to venture into a reversed dispensation. The community, which the explorer gradually gets to know, has endowed itself with new social laws, realizing not a few points of Wells’s utopias, including the implementation of a technology-free society. The paradox on which the story – once again scalar – turns is the hierarchical reversal between those who can see and the blind, for the blind build a cleaner and better-functioning society than that of the seers; part of the paradox includes the fact that the traveller Nunez is prescribed surgery to cure him by removing his eyes, those ‘irritating bodies’. Nunez the westerner’s prejudice is that blindness may be a punishment inflicted on a society with no idols, thence with no priestly caste to speak for one or several deities; such polemic is aggravated by an anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish feeling, bound to be appreciated by the English. The society of the blind, to the contrary, embodies a healthy, no-nonsense secular community endowed with true enlightenment, that is, real sight. Equally disconcerting is Nunez’s bad fate, consisting in a slow, Gulliverlike disillusion: he tries first to affirm his own superiority to the primitive blind as a supposedly evolved being; as an imperialist and a colonizer, he even day-dreams of a ‘coup d’état,’ in the name of a doubtful civilization of which he is an ambassador; but then he is, precisely, obliged to accept the truth that he is some sort of Yahoo among

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3. It is no mere chance that the stimulus towards science fiction came to Wells also via Barrie, an earlier writer of ‘fables’, the most famous of which hinges on a transgression of linear time.35 The literary journals, which had understood how that brand-new trend – science fiction – was a new space to dive into, made Wells’s fortune. The Time Machine (1895) tells of two voyages made by an anonymous ‘time traveller,’ one in the 802,000th millennium, the other in another, unspecified era. These time travels, carried out by means of a small equipment built by him, are then told in a flashback to friends, acquaintances and relatives from the community. The London of the future corresponds to the outlines of a world which is apparently more hospitable than the one left behind: the climate is agreeable, the traffic flows easily, isolated houses and dwellings have been suppressed and replaced by big and high buildings where people now live; man’s size has become somatically reduced, but people are friendly and smiling and wear multi-coloured clothing. Among these Eloi, however, the family nucleus has disappeared and, more importantly, the need to work has ceased to be, for in this new Golden Age everything that is needed for daily survival is always at hand. In actual fact, there is a secret division within this society, for underground the Morlocks,36 the monsters, are the dark side of the Eloi, Houyhnhnms, as the lama spitting on him in disgust also proves. Nunez, demoted to being an idiot, recites in the end a series of ‘double-thinkings’ like Orwell’s Winston Smith. It is seldom or never noticed that the situation at the beginning of ‘Through a Window’ (1894) is an amazing anticipation of that found in Hitchcock’s film Rear Window (the director himself confirmed to Truffaut, as we read in handbooks, that the plot was derived from a story by C. Woolrich). Bailey is a writer who has broken a leg – this biographical detail surfaces dozen of times in Wells – and Bailey, assisted by a nurse and visited by a friend, passes the time with no wish to read or write, looking like a ‘mummy swathed in white wrappings’ from the waist up, and watching the shows or, rather, the snapshots which daily follow one another within his window-frame. It is true that he has a river and not a courtyard in front of him, but the spectator in this story is a witness to mysterious facts and to a murder, and here, too, the murderer attempts to enter Bailey’s room. 35 Brome 1951, 59, without of course forgetting the contemporary scientific debate on the ‘fourth dimension’, as documented by Bergonzi 1961, 33–4. 36 The syllable ‘mor’ frequently appears in the first names of characters in Wells’s early works, probably not to indicate death, but rather, the mark of a monstrous

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Swiftian Yahoos just as the traveller is one of Gulliver’s great-grandsons. The subterranean Morlocks represent the proletarians who, for a kind of retaliation, must and will feed on their masters, after having been bled out, chewed to the bone and then cannibalized by those very same masters. The ideological framework here is that of Darwinism integrated with Marxism, with the addition of middle-class contempt or disgust towards the working classes: the Morlocks cannot be understood otherwise. Therefore, the whole science fiction machinery is a – again scalar – screen for a hallucinated middle-class murder of the working classes. When the traveller finds out the existence of this subterranean ethnic group the whole construction of the novel turns out to be not only Swiftian but also Dantesque, that is to say, not only an allegory of the conflict between classes, but also a visit to some sort of Otherworld, made by a pilgrim without his Virgilian guide. A small attempt to soften the story is offered by the two flowers given to the traveller by Weena, who is an Eloi. 4. This fantasy starts from the verified hypothesis of time being a fourth dimension of space, and from the possibility of carrying out within time travels similar to those made within space. However – this always being suggested by Wells as an ‘off-screen’ scientist – the doubt arises of a progressive worsening of life forms. When the traveller reaches London in the future, the atmosphere is Morris-like, remindful of that Edenic London which appeared before William Guest, also a traveller into the future. One of Wells’s goals in the whole of his science fiction, which he never neglects, is the rendering of the perfect normalness and commonplaceness of the exceptional. The inventor of the time machine is in fact a humorous, familiar, jolly scientist, who at the end of the voyage is ravenously hungry and is surrounded by stylized stock figures obviously astonished and incredulous. On the other hand, the arrival in London of the time traveller blatantly quotes Gulliver’s landing in Lilliput: the Lilliputians, small, fragile and pale, are now become the almost dwarf-like Eloi, who are four feet tall and thence at least slightly under-sized. And they metamorphosis; in fact, it reappears in Moreau and, minus a phoneme, in his assistant Montgomery. Hammond 1988, 92, instead opines that Mordet’s imaginary island, where in Tono Bungay the deadly quap is situated, might be understood as ‘more death’.

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touch the newly arrived, while speaking an unintelligible language. But he is also thought to be a child of the sun, like Butler’s Higgs in Erewhon, and the inhabitants wreathe his head with a garland. The traveller discovers that this future race has bent nature to the needs of man. Man now lives in a non-polluted environment – Wells here follows Ruskin and Morris – and with no need to work. The world is not over-populated, old age has been abolished. All the paraphernalia, all the alternatives of utopian case history are run through. The future appears, in fact, to be a regression, even intellectually, to a society which amuses itself and fiddles around, with neither an economic life nor development, thence with no production needs. As a scientific hypothesis, The Time Machine does not pose the question of the duration of creation in time, or perhaps it postulates it as being eternal and infinite: the sun is not extinguished, as Wells’s forefathers feared; he himself was to reverse his thought a few years and some novels later. In point of fact, the notion of time at work in the novel does not involve a time which is continuously being made and is becoming, but rather one already existing, and which can, so to speak, be reached, if only the time we live in will change its speed. Man, then, enters time, a continuously becoming time which runs parallel to him like a river flowing, and whose mazes can be reached if only life’s rhythm be sped up. The other facet of science fiction here is bitter social reflection. The life and the industrial lung of the aboveground wealth lie in the underground. That is where work and production are carried out for the aboveground. The descent into the shaft leads the brave explorer face to face with the repulsive Morlocks. Such are ‘the two species that had resulted from the evolution of man’. The Eloi, ‘like the Carolingian kings’, had ‘decayed to a mere beautiful futility’. In other words the Morlocks feed on dead bodies, whilst the Eloi are only herbivorous. ‘After all, they were less human and more remote than our cannibal ancestors of three or four thousand years ago’. Wells devises a society mechanism according to which the proletarian continues to stay underneath, therefore serving and being submitted, and sustaining his master; but the Morlocks, like Dracula (‘I felt little teeth nipping at my neck’), suck the blood of the ruling upper classes, who feed them, or even that of the aristocracy in full crisis, dying or disappearing. This too is a horrid, Dantesque retaliation.

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5. The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), an amazingly topical novel in our epoch of cloning, belongs primarily to the repertoire of works on the demonic creator or demiurge, a constellation whose central star is of course Frankenstein, while also it links up with the numberless epics of shipwrecks and awesome adventure novels about sea and islands, from Swift to Defoe, from Melville to Stevenson,37 from Conrad to Ballantyne. Like many of its predecessors it is a framed novel, whose first external narrator, and transcriber of the plot, is supposed to be the grandson of the biologist Edward Prendick. The initial phases have the slow and dilatory pace of the most typical and commonplace sea adventure, with a shipwreck, a drifting in the lifeboat, and the episode of avoided cannibalism which takes the life of two of the three castaways – a clear metaphor of the obstacle race of evolutionary life – until Prendick, whom we gradually acknowledge as the archetype of the witness or traveller in virtual space and time, is taken on board a ship transporting some ‘experiments’ by Doctor Moreau – that is, animals transformed into men and other animals who still have to take the treatment, together with a ferocious puma in a cage. The possible cannibalism of the two castaways is thus revealed to us as a mise en abyme or prolexis, for it provides a glimpse of the animals become men who butcher one another on the island and feed on human (actually animal) meat, thence a humanity regressed to the state of the beast.38 Indeed, the spectacle witnessed by Prendick upon his arrival, while wandering on the island, is that of a dead rabbit, in fact mauled, the sign of a carnivorous impulse which is expressly forbidden by the new Table of the Law promulgated

37

38

Stevenson comes to mind especially for The Ebb-Tide, in which Attwater spurts out dark and demonic flashes. A reviewer (CRHE, 49) instead considered Montgomery, Moreau’s assistant, a Stevensonian character. Also the Italian protagonist of Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (see IDM, 135) is caught out showing ‘furry’, perhaps also pointed ears, like those of an animal: the same adjective is used for M’ling, Moreau’s servant, a beast turned into man. Hawthorne’s influence is noted and documented by Bergonzi 1961 in his first chapter (1–61), without however pinpointing this possible contact. It shows then not just the fact that ‘survival may depend on mere chance’ (Bergonzi 1961, 101, with whom Parrinder 1970, 27, agrees).

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by Moreau. That scene on the life-boat, however, is doubly proleptic, for Prendick, terrified and as if struck by lightning, thinks that Moreau uses men as guinea-pigs to turn them into animals, whereas it is just the other way round. He therefore believes that he is a designated victim, and runs away to be chased until he gives up and is informed by Moreau and his assistant of their experiments. Thence begins a tumult of tormented and nightmarish hallucinations in which the novel attains its climax. Wells’s narrative ability is even more unique if we consider that, not yet an expert as a pure novelist, he makes every effort to narrate in a stunted, bald, telegraphic manner, without stylistic embellishments. I have mentioned Swift; behind him, however, there was also Kipling, who must be quoted because these humanized animals, as is repeated several times, possess, reveal and let emerge Kipling’s ‘mark of the beast’. Nor can it be actually excluded that Orwell may have started from here to write Animal Farm as a variation. Indeed, Wells includes an episode in which humanized animals are obliged to recite a decalogue binding them to be and remain human: they are submitted to their creator, and are obliged daily to recite the contrary of what the Orwellian animals preach, above all that four legs is bad and two legs good. Here the situation reverses the one presented by Orwell, although it evolves darkly in the direction of the expulsion of man seen as a deified master, up to the rebellion of the animal to human power. The Law is declaimed by a sort of Orwellian Moses, only far more beastly, sinister and bloodthirsty. Those lines also attest the certainty of divine punishment following transgression, in a civilization which has gone back to being Mosaic. Moreau’s regret is for the fact that the beastly mark described by Kipling will always re-emerge, no matter how many strenuous attempts he makes at turning such beasts into real men; that is, into men that are completely exempt from such an animal mark. The most alarming and dystopian scientific hypothesis in the novel, which is simultaneously anti-evolutionary, is that man has indeed evolved and has been formed from apes, but that he is always on the verge of returning to that stage. Wells draws the possible parable of man as being animalized, not that of a humanized beast shedding those far-away attributes in order to become lord of the universe, and even the very mould in which the divine becomes incarnate. Civilization, Wells fears, is regressing towards the animal instead of progressing towards the

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divine and the spiritual. Moreau’s last hope lies in the puma, but it is the latter who rebels and mauls him. Of course Prendick, that new Gulliver, who when left alone also somehow becomes a Robinson Crusoe, mirrors himself in those animals and discovers that he too is partly a beast; that is to say, he discovers in himself some features similar to theirs.39 In the meantime, Prendick sees in the leopard-man, captured for eating animal meat, ‘the fact’, or even perhaps the ‘fate’, ‘of its humanity’, and he pities him as a tortured creature; he furthermore understands how becoming human implies shouldering the moral or imposed imperative, and looks back to that time when the humans were immoral or amoral. Prendick ominously becomes the lord of the island after entertaining the ironical, failed project of immediately returning to the ‘idyllic virtue’ of his fellow men. ‘An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie’. Prendick the scientist dangerously starts on the opposite path, that of man descending to the animal, and becoming similar to the humanized beasts governed by him. Of course, the return to normal life makes him precisely similar to the returning Gulliver at the end of Swift’s fourth part: his nightmare and his hallucination are those of seeing himself surrounded by men with beastly faces, as in a drunken oneiric flurry: ‘The animal was surging up through them’. It is, here, denied that they may be ‘men and women for ever’. And Prendick, like Gulliver, misanthropically stands aloof from them. 6. The Invisible Man (1897), a title that so many later novels will readopt, is more difficult and less brilliant in its shaping idea and in its development. Griffin, a physicist – but his name is revealed only later, and his career is in fact told a fellow scientist in flashbacks – has invented a way to make tissues – even human tissues – transparent, and it is an invention that he applies to himself but reaping only damages and very few benefits. 39

At the same time, the beast-man is also an image of the human being who is degraded into a beastly state by routine work in the late nineteenth-century civilization; this feature is not, however, as elaborated as in Wells’s other science fiction novels. The humanized animals’ rebellion to a demiurge is enhanced by pursuits evoking the more turbid atmospheres of a novel written half a century later, Lord of the Flies by Golding.

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Among the former is that he is forced to protect himself from the cold and go around all wrapped in scarves and bandages. The first half of the story is wholly taken up by the arrival of the inventor to a frozen tavern, flavoured with incidental episodes of classic Victorian comedy, such as those of the landlady who takes no nonsense from anybody, the drunk landlord, the watch-repairer – all these caricatures and gags belonging to a long tradition. The puzzle of the newcomer to the village – who locks himself up in his room with his 1,000 bottles containing powders and vials, arouses in the community the same curiosity as Silas Marner in George Eliot’s short novel, and is totally invisible apart from his clothes – is investigated by the landlady. Griffin is then a far from new development of the metaphor of science that creates deceptively advantageous but actually uncontrollable inventions; and the novel is a ‘morality’ about the dangers of scientific experimentation. So was Moreau, but here the metaphor is pale and opaque with respect to the demonstration that ‘an invisible man is a man of power’. This invisibility is precisely a possible metamorphosis of imperfect man into an omnipotent demiurge who can transgress and go beyond human law, but his range of action is now limited to just money. The objectives of pure comedy, prevailing over those of science fiction, are further satisfied in the episode of the inventor’s escape and his association with a pre-Beckettian tramp who philosophizes over a pair of mismatched boots. The novel, that is, tentatively borders, wherever possible, on a circumscribed picaresque, with the variety of street encounters, the surprises, the hitches, the dialogue scenes in dialect. This means that the sinister motif of the inventor is forgotten or rendered harmless, and that the dimension of a story full of turns prevails. In the epilogue the denouement occurs in the presence of the fellow student, to whom the invisible protagonist reveals himself confiding in his support; but even with this appearance the mark of the story is that of humour, because he embodies rationality baffled in front of the impossible. When the colleague denounces him to the police, rather than covering him, Griffin is the subject of a barbarian mass lynching. 7. In the purely scientific prelude of The War of the Worlds (1898), the best of Wells’s novels of its kind along with The Island of Doctor Moreau, the novelist exposes a relativistic vision of creation and of the inhabited

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earth, considered, but in fact mistakenly, as the centre of the universe. In other words, it destroys the geocentric illusion. The leading position of the earth is, unknown to all, threatened and endangered, because earth is scrutinized from time immemorial by Martians, who are intellectually far more advanced, so that man, delighting in his believed lordship of the universe, is not the dominator but is dominated. He is especially ignorant of a series of scalar relationships: between men and Martians there exists the same ratio, in the process of evolution, that there is between the analyst and the ‘infusoria’ in the test tube analysed at the microscope. Man is ‘vain’ and blinded by his vanity in not thinking that there is life on Mars. In this scientific prelude the bases are laid for the theory that life on Mars is closer to extinction than that on earth. Precisely for the more temperate terrestrial climate, and the fertility of the earth – one of the few real advantages – Mars, where environmental conditions have sharpened its inhabitants’ wits, longs to conquest and wants to colonize earth. From the perspective of the Martians, indeed, the terrestrial human being is underdeveloped. The scientific frame is therefore that of Victorian astrophysics, which induced and substantiated the Victorian apocalypses by Tennyson and Ruskin and their followers: solar energy, which ensured the existence of forms of life in the universe and the earth, was now running low, and the end of the world was imminent, due to a very near ‘cooling of the sun’ that would make ‘this earth uninhabitable’. This more or less serious and founded scientific motif is therefore joined to a plausible plot, with the anonymous protagonist, narrating in the first person, as the witness of this ‘war of the worlds’ or of the two worlds, and in the place, the greater London, where first the flying cylinder of the Martians lands.40 The narrative is conceived as a retrospective account, from which we can infer that the old world has survived in some form, and that the narrator is not dead and the earth is safe. Ironically this internal narrator is a quiet and gentle family head, perhaps a pensioner, and anyhow a bourgeois without clerical work, who dabbles in abstract philosophical and moral speculation, and is

40 First designated as a ‘thing’, the same word used for humanized animals in The Island of Doctor Moreau.

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brutally hurled against the reality of the landed Martians that with their flamethrowers,41 and their pipes emanating poisoned gas, emerge from the cylinders and, while wearing gigantic metal armour, and self-propelled on stilts, destroy everything they find around. Their advance moves to London, which is literally razed to the ground and gutted. This internal evolution of the story is slowed down on the one hand because Wells does not wish to be too precise about the movements and the physiological shape of the Martians,42 and on the other because he is also motivated by a realistic and often comic-grotesque intention, and often and above all intends to give a concrete overview of how humanity would react in front of such an emergency. Whole chapters are collages of small but sharp anecdotes, skits and gags of the danger, of the emergency and the heightened solidarity in the climate of disaster.43 Slim internal subplots are thus opened, resumed and closed, like that of the artilleryman who, the last survivor, believing that England is now in the hands of the Martians, proposes to the narrator to found for the future a subterranean ghost civilization, durable and mutinous like that of the Morlocks, from which the human race can be reborn.44 The hypothesis of a Martian invasion does not remove a series of other dangers, both historical and mythological, and in fascinating glimpses the novel plumbs the atavistic panic against the irrational and the alien. The tentacles of the Martians evoke the monsters that envelop and astound man, like the myth of the Gorgon or the rebellious Titans; the poor man who opposes his guns to the flamethrower is – in a scalar proportion – a David before Goliath, or even Ulysses trying to deceive and circumvent the devastating power of Polyphemus. A fearful priest is brought into the scene to offer the most automatic explanation, and one frequently heard among 41 Wells refrains from explaining how it works, but we could see it as a preview of the laser. 42 See Bergonzi 1961, 45, on Wells’s inaccuracies and vagueness in describing scientific contraptions, as well as the ‘time machine’ in the homonymous novel. 43 A significant part of the report, aimed at giving the testimony of the spread of destruction, is entrusted to a not too convincing expedient, the narrative of the vicissitudes of the London brother of the narrator. 44 And one that appeared to Bergonzi, 1961, 138, the first utopian formulation of the elite of intellectuals destined by Wells to rule the world.

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the Victorians, that of Ruskin and of all the apocalyptics, of a divine punishment decreed for the sins of mankind that has strayed from the right path.45 London is the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah which has unleashed the wrath of God, and another biblical precedent is that of the great exodus of God’s people, from Egypt and Babylon. London is also the Roman Pompeii buried under the flood of lava from Vesuvius. But Wells is not one with those predecessors and discards all metaphysical anxiety. Cyclical history suggested other examples of national scourges in the form of invasions of conquerors and of the razing of nations. In yet another scalar comparison, London is invaded by Martians as Russia was seemingly swept by victorious Napoleon. This emergence acquires mostly the same resonance as an event daily feared in England in the late nineteenth century, the threat of the Germans on the island or England’s ultimatum; at the imaginary level the two dangers overlap and to many who are unwary the danger of the Martians is at first even lower than that of the Germans. At a later stage Wells would describe and reproach the class of British intellectuals who similarly underestimated the danger of the Great War. 8. The War of the Worlds might thus even be said, in one of the above reverberations, a novel about the dreaded German landing, a Zukunftskriegroman like those of Chesney and Saki.46 Thus far the echo of past human and natural calamities; but what about the future apocalypses, described and forecast half a century in advance? Of Wells’s prophecies of entire regions and parts of the earth devastated by bombs and by far more evolved instruments of mass destruction? It is singularly ominous that Wells died shortly before the atomic bomb was actually dropped on Hiroshima,47 because The War of the Worlds sights and literally describes a rehearsal of the real ‘apocalypse’, inclusive of deportations and evacuations. Now this Martian in the novel, also called a Thing when operating his war machine, is a monstrous result of the genetic engineering of an unknown Moreau, who has, as it were, rationalized, refined, and improved the human structure, eliminating the superfluous, but with one 45 Ruskin’s prophecies had in fact been launched only about ten years earlier. 46 § 59. 47 The atomic bomb was in fact foreseen by Wells.

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major deficiency, the vulnerability to the bacteria to which man, got used to them in history through natural selection, is immune.48 That there is something beastly, or more precisely ichthyic, in these Martians transpires from the impression, or even from the certainty that they have tentacles instead of hands. The destroying machines march forward at the shout of ‘alloo’, which sounds like the grunts of Moreau’s animal-men. The round mass that is the Martian’s body is the repository of intelligence alone, with the reduction and the almost total atrophy of the limbs. They are only heads without bowels. Vampiric, they suck blood to other creatures and inject it into themselves. They do not have the digestive system, do not sleep, do not have the sex drive, and reproduce by natural sprouting like flowers. All these are like stabs to the plan of the human body, to the human passions and the same sex drive and its relative physiological deficiencies. Wells thinks and as always sets the temporal development not in terms of years, decades or centuries, but of eras. So he studies the succession of the human species on earth in evolutionary arcs of great magnitude. He often reiterates that the descent of the Martians surprises the unsuspecting terrestrials, too ready to believe in their dominion over the lower forms of life and in their subjection to them, just as the dodo – which obviously reminds us of Lewis Carroll – believed there were species subjected to it until the arrival of the ships of the sailors who would exterminate its race. Wells predicts menacingly to terrestrials the same future extinction. Earth devastated by Martians seems ironically another planet, or a lunar or indeed ‘Martian’ landscape according to the popular imagination. Humanity is saved, even if the Martians may reinvade the earth in the near future. The moral of the novel – similar to that of Giacomo Leopardi, in a certain sense –49 is that only the sense of danger can regenerate a terrestrial globe – ours or theirs, that is of Wells’s contemporaries – which was believed in a process of dissolution – or rather can only delude one that it is not. 48 Batchelor 1985, 28, wittily wonders what would have happened if the traveller of The Time Machine had arrived in the land of the Eloi and the Morlocks ‘with a mild cold’. 49  The Italian poet is evoked, apropos however another of Wells’s novels, by V. Wyck Brooks (CRHE, 226).

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9. Exactly mirror-like to The War of the Worlds is The First Men in the Moon (1901), just as agile and well defined but less apocalyptic, indeed a little masterpiece of Wells’s humour that violates, not to say routs the laws of its genre. Wells prophetically intuits that the central obstacle that the first actual human attempts to land on the planet in the 1950s would have tried to get around and eliminate was that of the force of gravity. The ‘Cavorite’ is the material that is free of it and with which the sphere housings Cavor the inventor and Bedford the writer is built; the latter accompanying the former tells the novel when the adventure is finished. The Cavorite-covered sphere can leave the ground, move in space, and glide gently on the moon, thanks to a smart and controlled dosing of the force of gravity exercised by the heavenly bodies; to gravity the spacecraft is subjected and subtracted by lowering and raising the shutters of the portholes. The scientist is however the caricature of a crank not devoid of practical spirit,50 and the writer is just a regular chap. Both defy the risk without being aware of it, and on the lunar surface prove cold-blooded and above all show a sense of humour all the more surprising as fear mounts. On the other hand, the two space travellers, once landed, destroy, tear and desecrate the poetic myth of the moon, every romantic and atemporal reincarnation of the ‘charming’ female muse. They land on a planet with impossible temperature changes, all dug in craters and inhabited by a species of hideous, humanoid figurines similar to erect ants wrapped by cylinders and having on their heads helmets with sharpened blades. Wells enacts his usual scalar imagination, and where the Martians were heavier and more subject to gravity, the humans on the moon are lighter and weigh one sixth of the weight on land, and an equivalent ratio of one to six regulates all other forms of life.51 A further scalar fact is that, as the Martians wanted to colonize earth, the terrestrials think halfjokingly to impose the ‘white man’s burden’ on the moon, and begin to do so by taking advantage of their superior physical size, that is killing helpless 50 In particular Cavor, without panicking before the Selenites, will argue once on the moon that instinct and reasonableness proper to man can and should probably be extended to all forms of human life of creation. 51 ‘The earth was to the moon what the sun is to the earth’, as the Grand Lunar reminds the scientist.

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people, as the terrestrials were for the Martians. This brings to light the symmetric and therefore also scalar relation existing between the two novels by Wells and the first two parts of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels: The War of the Worlds rewrites Swift’s first part from the perspective of the Lilliputians, while this rewrites the second from the perspective of a Gulliver magnified as a Brobdingnagian. The other aspect to which Wells the science fiction novelist is always sensitive is communication, which is invariably carried out on the basis of mimicry, as this must be between beings of different worlds. In this case, communication also becomes that between Cavor, strayed on the moon, and integrated among the Selenites, and the earth, done by a species of the Marconi wireless telegraph. The last part of the novel, which is the record of Cavor’s telegraphic communications about the organization of life on the moon, benefits from the fact that they are left unanswered because the earth cannot communicate with the moon, and that the scientist believes his travelling companion dispersed, and therefore does not spare his poisonous or humorous comments. The lunar society is a utopia that crosses into a dystopia, because the human physiology of the ant-men is indeed strictly functional, and many distortions of human society are straightened, but the social structure is too pyramidal, and absolute power rests in the hands a venerable Grand Lunar who is solely brain, and that in order to exist needs a large population of beings who are themselves only brute labour force. 10. The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth (1904) is at its date a frank and enjoyable satire on science that brings to mind Pickwick and the two stupid, Flaubertian annotators, Buvard and Pécuchet. There is nothing fatal, or sinister, in the two Wellsian, slightly abstract scientists trying to find the mysterious elixir of growth, by first experimenting on tadpoles, chickens and wasps. This is how the quite serious evolutionary theme of metamorphosis in Moreau turns into jest and parody, were it not that the animals remain such, that is animals, though the experiments make of them monsters or horribly magnified animals. Wells operates again within the theme of genetic engineering, and the effort of rendering human size gigantic is a new inspiration from Gulliver. The clumsy and ridiculous Bensington has, like Pickwick, a bald head and round glasses; the subsequent track is that of a playful string of numbers that remind one at the

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same time of the adventures of the ‘three men’ in Jerome K. Jerome’s boat. The joke becomes serious, however, when it begins secretly to prove that science can get out of hand: the rats come out of their caves, which evoke the ‘holes’ of the Martians, to threaten and even bite humans, so that he has to fight a victorious war against them. But the funny atmosphere is restored when the divine manna gives rise to a lusus naturae or to more than one, that is another fruit of scientific research detached from real need, because this is a gigantic monster avoided by all and therefore unhappy. The rest of the novel is fragmented into small incidental episodes in a gradually increasing fairy-tale atmosphere, to illustrate a world of changed proportions, that is, inhabited by exceptionally gigantic beings. The War in the Air (1908), written at the zenith of the mad euphoria of aeronautical progress, is a prophecy of the First World War, set in the context of the German world attack psychosis, which writers had been at the time long exploiting and made vibrate at the highest pitch. But, as with all apocalyptic prophecies, this too is easily adaptable to the Second World War, especially since the war becomes truly global (as only the second would be, unlike the first, mainly carried out on ground) for the imaginary involvement of China and especially Japan, and for the double front that America must support. Wells sounds therefore anything but detached and ironic as in his science fiction plots or in his stories about cranky inventors of harmless elixirs. In themselves the Germans invading America are the last of scalar variations in Wells’s narrative fiction: they are like Martians for the terrestrials or the terrestrials for the lunar, superior by virtue of a more efficient weaponry; but the spectacle of a razed New York has acquired the status of prophecy of a much later tragedy, the attack on the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001. From this deadly conflict the world comes regressed to ancient, primordial barbarism, and must be entirely rebuilt. Prefacing this novel in 1921 Wells literally anticipated Orwell, as he argued that the world was by now to be thought as divided into areas, and each subsequent war would have no winners or losers, but would have resulted in a ‘collapse of civilization’, and politically in a climate of ‘greater indecision’. The War in the Air, therefore in turn a prophecy of Nineteen Eighty-Four, is narrated, like that novel by Orwell, from the point of view of a stranger, the usual, harmless British citizen who is casually involved in the planetary conflagration, and

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becomes the voice of pacifist reasonableness. Wells the scientist is compelled to point out that insensate and fanatical scientific progress would fuel the winds of war. § 15. Wells III: Odysseys of a salesman Wells’s naturalistic novels, which superseded the science fiction ones, ran dry in the first interwar period and with good reason, because they were at once subjective and objective and because in both cases the material was gradually saturated despite the variations it underwent. Wells’s skill in these novels is having treasured an autobiographical scenario and known how to break it down economically, concealing a single exemplary event in parallel pathways, and by changes of voice. The protagonists of this phase are ultimately a single character who overshadows Wells himself, however much he changes the sex, and however much the author imperceptibly calibrates his attitude towards the current alter ego. To better explain, Kipps, Ann Veronica and George Ponderevo are followed from childhood and, moving from a condition of orphans real or in spirit, all three converge on London from the suburbs, and here they start or complete their process of emotional or professional maturation. It is no coincidence that all three of them undertake scientific or technical courses of study, biology in two cases. Emotional maturation takes place through the mistakes of unhappy relationships and marriages. The objective, if not documentary, aspect of this route between a rough and ‘primordial’ childhood in the suburbs (almost always in the south of England) and the absorption, the brutal engulfing by labyrinthine London, is that the heroes and heroines are sometimes involved witnesses in the ideological ferment of the early twentieth century. Thus Wells also has a means to feel the pulse of an Edwardian society in transformation, always relative in a country in which, he believed, a landowning aristocracy still predominated and an ambitious but amateurish middle class struggled to get ahead, and the proletariat vainly agitated behind the scenes. The hero or heroine thus becomes entangled in the great and typical ideological disputes of the early years of the century. On the one hand, he or she tries to keep pace with the aspirations to luxury of this new Edwardian belle époque which is an embryonic twentieth-century society of frenzied consumption; on the other hand, he or she is drawn into the swirling revision

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of imported ideologies. It was the time of Wagner and Nietzsche, who were being talked about by everyone; it was the time of Russell and Huxley and a sweetened, non-atheist evolutionism (Ann Veronica declares at one time that God is ‘the substratum of the evolutionary process’); it was the time of the feminist battles and suffragette demonstrations, of socialism and Fabianism, of Shaw and the Webbs; and of the Salvation Army. 2. The penultimate novel of the science fiction group revealed a certain weariness, and then again was bending and tempering the scientific context in satirical and mocking endings, enhancing the caricatures surrounding it. Once this inspiration had been extinguished,52 Wells found a new impetus in 1905, and the urge to begin composing medium-long sagas partly satirizing anti-heroes, set in the south-east of England, with protagonists who are figures from the merchant classes. Having to turn over a new leaf, he did not worry in the slightest about innovating; any experimental solution is always denied him, and deliberately so. He composes, from the first of these novels onwards, texts of scientific flavour and construction, subdivided into concise chapters with titles, which have the curiosity of being in turn subdivided into sections of very few pages – marked with the sign § – and even of just a few lines, as in scientific manuals. But the most surprising fact is that this novel, though built around a single protagonist with the necessary surroundings, spreads around itself a thick dust of dark pessimism about any manifestation of the new: it seems to withdraw towards

52

The passage from one genre to the other is not clear-cut, because in 1900, in the middle of his career as a scientific novelist, Wells had begun to exploit his autobiography in the novel, also rich in caricatures, Love and Mr Lewisham. The hero is a science student who puts aside his dreams of glory and setting up a family he settles into a bourgeois existence, and thus the novel prefigures the Wellsian motif of untamed eros which often disrupts man’s rational plans. This realist comedy, in turn, was preceded by the funny and grotesque saga of a cyclist divided into episodes (The Wheels of Chance, from 1896). Some science fiction or mixed science fiction and realistic comedy novels, such as In the Days of the Comet (1906), were also written after Kipps. The comet represents the utopian intervention, with a newfound parody of the paraphernalia of the Nativity, which instils socialist order in the broken and degenerate world.

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conservation. With these a new Dickens appeared on the horizon.53 With the bragging middle classes posed in amateurish attitudes of false pretence, some young intellectuals followed the ‘pernicious’ preaching of Nietzsche and aped the superman. Masterman, the socialist ideologue in Kipps (1905), is hardly a socialist because he is a sort of old whiner who keeps repeating that the world is ‘out of joint’, and is a contrarian. And the tradesman class is reactionary and apathetic, because they had recently come out of the Boer War. The readiest solution was, then, that formula of the Victorian novel, especially that of Thackeray and Dickens, which is the satire of manners. Kipps represents a doubly safe move, since it covers its back twice and it is completely and utterly an authentic copy of Dickens and of an autobiographical Dickens with the necessary retouching and updating. Wells shows how fruitful and easy that winning formula was to imitate, and with a very good chance of success. His childhood did indeed resemble that of Dickens and it does indeed follow some of its tracks, and in Kipps Wells demonstrates it. In this masked autobiography the Dickensian details almost all come out. The child Kipps is an orphan, son of a mother who ‘vanished’, who is in the running for the most classic of late denouements; and instead of the ferocious Murdstones the boy is raised by his gruff and unyielding uncle and aunt, fanatical sticklers for etiquette. As in every Victorian Bildungsroman, there is the inevitable school chapter, another chance to mock and indeed fiercely satirize the educational system of the boarding-school. The targets are the caricatural headmaster, the predictable scenes of the dormitories and the skirmishes with one’s companions. This sense of déjà vu is, however, refreshed by some sincere, true and lively episodes, because we can obviously guess that Wells’s own autobiography lies behind it. The fourteen-year-old Kipps’s small adolescent passion for Ann, the daughter of the upholsterer, is excellently told by probing the immature reticence of a small idyll.54 So Wells’s self-representation in Arthur Kipps follows neither the forms of 53

More precisely, as Orwell termed it (OCE, vol. I, 488), a ‘modern analogue’, but it is an analogy that is very noticeable and ubiquitous in Wells criticism. 54 Kipps’s sketch on the coach to Folkestone is shrewd and touching, with the request to the driver to stop so that he can get off and get the small token of a sixpence from the panting Ann, who has run after him.

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the heroic epic nor those of the elegy and pathos, except occasionally. But this is not the only discrepancy between Wells and Dickens. Wells is an all-out denier, and cuts his poor alter ego in half. Around him revolve only figures of pretension, an entire gallery in which no one and nothing is pure, except for that very much implied, introverted, undeclared little teenage crush. At such a distance Wells can be much more cursory and brusque, and above all brutal; his humour is anything but jovial and expansive, but rather slightly acid, if anything Thackerayan. And his satirical dryness is new. He has it easy in making this alter ego, in his first twenty years of life, a stunned, lethargic, clumsy and inexpert witness who is therefore a vehicle for the satire on the environments in which he is brought up. After school the Copperfieldian path must foresee, for the young, feckless, unprepared and passive petty bourgeois boy, the episode in which he is employed as an apprentice. Here too, almost everything is lifelike and vivacious, with caricatures of exquisite quality in the landlord Shalford, with his strange, Dickensian verbal tics and caprices and other megalomaniac obsessions. This environment, the spirit and combinations of which will pass to the equally Dickensian Lawrence in Sons and Lovers, is teeming with other successful larger-than-life characters, and the chapters set in the fabric shop illustrate the atmosphere of falseness and fear, and the hierarchies ever ready to change, even in scale, within.55 Kipps’s emotional development proceeds according to the still Copperfieldian template that goes from a primitive monogamous love in adolescence to a sort of platonic and promiscuous Donjuanism. After Ann, Kipps falls for a drawing teacher at a night school, but the passion remains immature, awkward and undeclared. This sentimental episode is also livened up with obvious vicarious forms of passion: wanting to play the hero in front of the teacher, Kipps breaks a window he is trying to open, cuts his wrist and is treated for bleeding. At a certain point he is even defined as ‘a mute, inglorious Dickens’, primarily because he has extremely vague aspirations to become a writer, despite mangling the English language whenever he opens his mouth. This literary vocation could 55

This environment is made up of caricatures which are amusing but incidentally critical of the reactionary middle class, like the salesman haranguing against Indians getting the vote.

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become a reality in the caricatural episode that is the least successful of the novel, though it occupies much of the first third. Inevitably Dickensian, and an eccentric caricature, Chitterlow is a third-rate actor and also a boasting playwright whom Kipps meets by chance one evening when he stays out all night, with the result that the next day he is sacked for his escapade. But that night he spends with the self-proclaimed playwright is exceptionally expanded, thanks to the stream of boasts flowing from the mouth of this ham, who also gets his random interlocutor drunk.56 3. Basically Wells has already launched Kipps much earlier as a Dickensian and Victorian picaresque, which must out of principle revolve around adventure, incredible chance and coincidence. One of these is that the new drama of this scribbler is based on a case he read in the newspaper, and from a notice that the heir of a certain Euphemia Kipps, who is none other than Kipps himself, is being sought publicly – as in Collins’s far-off Armadale. And there is nothing more Victorian than the device of the miraculous will which arrives at the unexpected heir who is thrashing around in a sea of difficulties. All or nearly all of the last two thirds of Kipps are less incisive and more fringed with anecdotes, after the news of the unimagined fortune, with a few residual flashes. Wells is far less able in describing the slow crumbling away of Kipps’s dream, which he really only ever half believed in, of becoming a gentleman thanks to his inheritance. Here the template of Dickens – and the novel becomes an amalgam of David Copperfield and Great Expectations – is followed with less success. Kipps’s first and predictable ambition is that he marry above his station, and the drawing teacher is there on the verge of saying ‘I do’ – but amiably insisting that he take some training to smooth off his rough edges (although it is comical how frequently Kipps consults the manual of good manners, yet still ignominiously fails and commits numerous gaffes).57 Proletarian

56 This miles gloriosus rewards Kipps by making him believe that he has some artistic talent, but he also serves as a sounding board of the state of the English stage, a moment, that is, when a confused dramatic ferment was being sifted through by William Archer, and Ibsenism was rampant. 57 Having fled Folkestone and the oppressive upper-middle-class environment, in London Kipps is at the centre of a Dickensian sketch which does not completely

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or lower-middle-class common sense in the end tells Kipps, or makes him realize, that he does not belong to the semi- or pseudo-aristocratic bourgeoisie and, in crisis, he looks for and marries his old flame from the village. Therefore the Dickensian thesis, or moral, that money cannot buy happiness, and that one should not marry outside of one’s own class, is blatantly reinforced. The proletarian newlyweds celebrate their rediscovered love, content with honest little pleasures, as had often been narrated shortly before in the novels of yet another disciple of Dickens, Gissing. Ann, Kipps’s bride, who had, from the tomboy that she was, become a comely waitress, has a brother, Sid, who is Kipps’s childhood friend, and who has become a craftsman and a socialist. Kipps does not embrace socialism, but is introduced to the ideologue Masterman. He is a socialist but of the apocalyptic type, whose catchphrase, as I mentioned, is that ‘the times are out of joint’, in other words that there is an unstoppable degeneration, especially physical and astrophysical, of the world, even though Masterman is unaware of it. He is a mouthpiece for Wells the scientist, and a half-serious echo of his science fiction novels. Humour successfully gets the upper hand: Sid has in fact set up a family, happy with little and united, a real socialist community in practice, but Kipps represents the rich whom Sid rails against; and Masterman, too, finds himself face to face with the enemy. The final pages of the novel show the trial of strength between the simple Ann, who does not want to dress up as a great lady and shuns luxury, and Kipps, anxious to maintain a high and rigidly decorous and regulated standard of living. A third Dickens novel, Our Mutual Friend, is recalled at the end when Kipps’s fortune goes up in smoke, and the poor couple adapt with pleasure to living the life they are best cut out for, that of small but happy shopkeepers. It is the classic sickly sweet ending, that of the happy family with a chirpy little child, and that is the scene of domestic bliss that closes Victorian novels. 4. Ann Veronica (1909) already gives the idea of a stinging and topical thesis fictionalized in a narrative plot, and there demonstrated. It is not that it is a bad novel, on the contrary: some of the scenes are fresh and hit its mark, when at the Grand Hotel, in the midst of a shocked clientele, he turns up in the dining hall in slippers.

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striking, and the narration is never shabby; except that the rhythm slows gradually, and at the end visibly falls off. With this novel Wells thus joins the ranks of the defenders of progress and advanced ideas, and rises up as the champion of female independence and women’s rights. He adopts the voice of the feminist and fights his corner in a needful campaign of enlightenment. And his demonstrative protagonist becomes a woman, a beautiful and frank and virtuous person who is absolutely normal, and seeks only to think and to do that which is or should be done by every free person: to live her own life, fight prejudice against women in a male-dominated society, re-establish the relationship between the sexes. Little by little, though, the disconcerting result is that Wells is not completely convinced about the campaign he has put together and to a certain extent supports. Naturally Ann Veronica Stanley is not ridiculed or pitied like Kipps, and she is buzzing with a dignity that cannot be sullied, although she fluctuates too often on her ideological journey. It is actually organized socialism, Fabianism and feminism which Wells accuses of being confused and fanciful.58 The clash between Ann and her family, a reactionary family with an old father who is the guardian of ancient prejudices, with the house guided by the proverbial and irreproachable maiden aunt, takes place in the outskirts of London.59 Wells feels the pulse of the period to discover, agreeing with many other contemporaries, the shameful and persistent discrimination against women. Still, if not especially, in the first decade of the twentieth century, women did not count for anything, they were playthings, ornaments; and they were the private property of men. This old-style middle class of course saw the new progressive literature as a smokescreen; and a model for Ann is Shaw’s Vivie Warren, the young enterprising and independent student in Mrs Warren’s Profession. Now the straw which broke the camel’s back is a fancy-dress ball, which the father forbids his daughter to attend: the confrontation is won by the father, but the daughter rebels and goes to live in London, deaf to the scandalized implorations of her father and 58 59

The chapters on the Fabian conferences and assemblies are cutting, with Shaw himself turning up. There is a ‘Gwen affair’, the family’s guilty secret: the older sister who long ago ran away from home to marry an actor.

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aunt. Thus the girl is the mouthpiece of autonomy, emancipation, women’s independence, and the aspiration to become a professional figure outside of the shadow of the male-husband. On the one hand, Ann must for the moment reject the idea of a marital regime structured in this way, that is, based on male supremacy, and in particular reject two equally emblematic suitors, the Ruskinian aesthete – who turns up, Sesame and Lilies in hand, like a serving medieval knight,60 and in fact props up the disguised historical disparity with his pangs – and a simple sympathizer of women’s rights. She must also, on the other hand, join the militant movement for female rights, in the field and in the ranks of the suffragettes. Wells finds himself forced to take sides well beyond the mere documentation of the problem. As already in the figure of Masterman in his previous novel, he does not hesitate to aim the odd satirical quip against the latest champion of progress, a lady whose preaching is a bit too marred by symptoms and tones of fanaticism. Wells does not seem completely convinced, indeed he almost slips away from the cause he is meant to be supporting. Ann is the emblem of a possible women’s rebellion in the early part of the century – a controlled, lucid rebellion without any uproar – towards an independence that must temporarily do without the institution of marriage, and claim her own professional sphere. These were the same remonstrations that echoed through Gissing’s novels, and in Virginia Woolf ’s pamphlets shortly afterwards, and which, however, on closer inspection, repeated in literal terms the controversy of nineteenth-century feminism. Another male had espoused the cause in verse, Tennyson exactly half a century earlier with The Princess. Wells’s novel has its heavy argumentative and debating part, and dialogue after dialogue converges on this dispute. In London Ann shows courage and fighting spirit. She is taken to be a prostitute, and followed by sleazy individuals; she is looked upon with suspicion. She understands the key point of feminism: that a single independent woman, a Vivie Warren from Shaw or, say, a Virginia Woolf, is the exception that confirms the rule of the millions of other imprisoned women. Ann is a mouthpiece or alter ego of the author especially when she does everything she can to resist the feminist 60 This function as simple knight is also required of George by Marion in the following novel Tono-Bungay.

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fanaticism in which she is caught up; it is only circumstances that lead her to become a demonstrator, and end up in jail. She is in fact persuaded by a rich suitor who, claiming to support feminism, lends her money to continue her studies in biology and then blackmails her. The strongest and most fast-paced scene, vaguely melodramatic, is the attempted seduction of the naïve Ann in a hotel room, after an invitation to the opera in which Wagner’s Tristan acts as a jarring counterpoint to the mounting, vulgar sexual passion of the male.61 The suitor throws off his mask and reveals his vileness. Wells’s final solution is the same as Tennyson’s, that women cannot renounce love, because it was in the name of a principle repudiated by the feminists that Ann became a demonstrator: ‘the real reason I am out of place here [in prison] is because I love men’.62 And everything is done for true love, which must be discovered for the second time after a blunder, and this happens when she falls in love with the biology assistant at college. This communion is daringly premarital and extramarital, a total dedication of body and soul which skips the institution of marriage. Ann throws herself purely and chastely but totally into his arms, with an untamed and scandalous spirit of initiative. This departure into the unknown, resonating with challenge to conventions, and in a relationship which is for both at least partially extramarital, historically comes after Hardy’s scandalous frankness, and is even, about twenty years early, a timid, more prudish preview of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.63 5. Marriage (1912) at first sight reduplicates Ann Veronica because it focuses on the friction between a father and a daughter who is fighting for self-determination in marriage. It is a beginning, at the same time, of Trollopian drowsiness and greyness, late Trollope, to be sure, with the first 61 62 63

Another recurring counterpoint, because the same music – the ‘shepherd’s music’ to be precise – plays in the background when George and Beatrice fall in love in Tono-Bungay. The fact remains that she invokes a reproductive system ‘by sexless spores, as the ferns do’, or even that which exists in Mars in The War of the Worlds. The final pages are, however, dull and colourless, especially because they must describe a happiness and a harmony already attained. The curtain falls on a compromise solution, nonetheless: Ann and the assistant legalize their position and marry, and the rebel runaway is reconciled with her father and aunt.

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part taking place in the tranquillity of the London suburbs and the wellto-do Edwardian family in their cottage immersed in luxuriant greenery and amusements, and a small gallery of eccentric and incidental little portraits. The beautiful Marjorie is herself the young dithering girl of many of Trollope’s novels, and she rejects and then accepts the forty-year-old hopeful Mr Magnet, but without intimate conviction. And indeed, as in a play by Shaw,64 Trafford descends miraculously from heaven, a young professor of crystallography with a passion for flying. This is the very timely entrance of the aviator – a recurring theme in Wells’s novels from the first half of the century – miraculously saved in his aeroplane which lands near Marjorie’s garden. This suburban comedy, however, is closed when Marjorie, rebelling against her parents’ authority, digs her heels in and marries the professor as soon as she comes of age. The final mark of the novel is Hardyan and even pre-Lawrencian tragedy. The flame of love is extinguished – paradigmatically, as the title indicates – in daily domestic life, and the story, which at the beginning was about Marjorie, becomes that of the professor’s slow and inexorable psychological decline, while Marjorie is attracted by all the progressivisms in vogue. It also has a bizarre dream-like vein, because Trafford, aboulic and absent-minded like Lawrence’s Aaron, sets off for Labrador in dire straits accompanied by his wife, and amidst the snows of Canada ends up almost being killed by a lynx. But equally in dire straits in the short final chapter, the couple gets back together and returns home. 6. Tono-Bungay (1909) is one of Wells’s most laborious novels, although the author defined it as his most ambitious65 and many critics speak of it as a masterpiece. If his early novels were even too curt, this one is a torrent of words and incidental digressions. It can no longer be defined as naturalistic because it returns based on the multiplied peripeteia and it even strays into fantasy if not science fiction, with its central idea of the elixir of life – whence the title – discovered and launched with changing fortunes, indeed with a series of deadly setbacks, by an inventor, or rather a likable but abstract charlatan, of the sort that appeared in The Food of the Gods. The story of the inventor and the invention, though, turns out 64 Misalliance, as Batchelor 1985, 103, also notices. 65 Experiment in Autobiography, vol. I, 53.

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only to be a cunning supporting structure.66 At the outset Wells seems to want to strike a new chord, because he sets the events in an ancient manor house in Kent which acts as a kind of Regency residue a good half a century late. There the rules of decorum and good manners are cultivated, and what Wells calls the rigour of the ‘system’ can be perpetuated – that feudal structure that existed before the democratic principle of ‘life open to talent’ unseated it. The description of the rigid rituals suddenly evokes Thackeray’s tutelary deity in novels such as Pendennis.67 Except that the air of a mummified eighteenth century reaching its final gasps, from whose anonymity emerges the figure of George Ponderevo, the son of a lady-in-waiting and a dissolute late father, cannot but make us immediately think of Thackeray’s parody par excellence, the mock-heroic Barry Lyndon. This Thackerayan exuberance re-emerges intermittently, even when this eighteenth-century-style episode is over. Though Wells writes a new Bildungsroman and a picaresque based on the figure of the orphan thrust into life, and that George is therefore an older brother of Kipps, it must be added that in this case his alter ego is more lively, reactive and dynamic, and more captivating, and that his transgressions and hereditary gasconades arouse a heartfelt fondness. That George Ponderevo is such, a second and ill-concealed alter ego, is ascertained right from his arrival in London to study biology without any help – a constant – and thanks to his own talent alone; and from his eagerness to keep abreast of socialism by then in the ascendant. Already before, still in the aristocratic mansion, the clue to a mischievous childish idyll had been planted, with a headstrong and naïve girl, Beatrice, which, we immediately suspect, will not be dropped. However, the initial experiment of a parody of parody, an imitation of Barry Lyndon – and the novel is written in the first person – with a hint of 66 In the finale the hero, himself an inventor of air-houses, unspecified flying machines and destroyers, catches a ship to Africa, as suggested by his uncle – and Conrad comes to mind – to get hold of quap, a miraculous radioactive substance whose emanations destroy the ship on the way back. On a rudimentary aeroplane nephew and uncle, now being hunted down by creditors after their bankruptcy, flee their homeland, and with a crash landing find themselves in France where the uncle dies. 67 Which may match the indications, given by critics, of other predecessors, such as those of the eighteenth-century mock-heroic tradition, and Fielding in particular.

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the Meredith of the first chapters of Feverel, is far from convincing. Wells does not have Thackeray’s taste for causerie, and above all he does not have his elegance and esprit, and page follows half-hearted, contrived page. The emergence of the inventor Edward Ponderevo is due to the reckless young man’s expulsion from the static realm of rules and his being taken in by this paternal uncle, an intolerant and ultra-dynamic but ultimately not very practical pharmacist. Not even the chapters about the young biology student’s settling in in London stand out from narrative obscurity. The best part of the book, and the most linear and essential, is when George falls in love. Wells efficiently tells of the eruption of a purely physical passion, an entirely carnal desire, in George, who believes he can satisfy it with Marion, a woman who turns out to be cowardly, conventional and, above all, frigid. The episode works well because Wells investigates and stages the deromanticization of love already from the moment when the two start to take an interest in each other. The portrait of the colourless Marion is completed by those of her parents, specimens of a petit bourgeoisie distressing in its stupefied banality, and their house whose bleakness is perceptible to the naked eye. But Wells also points out his protagonist’s blunder. It will lead to a divorce due to an extramarital relationship, still daring because only sexual, with a typist, which by its very nature is equally short-lived. The rise of the protagonist therefore begins above all due to the extraordinary initiatives of his megalomaniac uncle whose partner he becomes. He will reach his zenith and create a small ‘Napoleonic’ empire, his uncle becoming a financial speculator ever followed, albeit grudgingly, by his nephew. The background sociological fact is people’s gullibility, the new system of advertising on a vast scale which characterizes and stimulates consumerism, the frantic rush to speculate in a milieu which looks like the modernization, almost 100 years later, of the Victorian economic miracle of the 1830s reflected in Dickens, when the financial crash was always just around the corner.68 This ending, once the pinnacle has been reached, also strikes the inventor Ponderevo. If his previous love for Marion is deromanticized, 68 An additional echo may be that of Trollope’s novel on the stock market in the 1870s, The Way We Live Now, but without the complexity of its plot and its dramatic construction.

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it seems clear to George himself that that for his rediscovered Beatrice is ‘romantic,’ and like all romantic loves it remains unfulfilled. 7. The History of Mr Polly (1910) also responds to Wells’s habit of picking up a story again after a time, and it may seem at first to be an unmistakable remake, even a duplicate, of Kipps. Wells does not manage to separate himself from this recurring script, and he serves it up again with barely disguised variations. Whole episodes are thus déjà vus. In the story, all retrieved backwards, the protagonist is a thirty-seven-year-old shopkeeper, unhappy with his job and disorientated in a brutally concrete and habitual milieu. But Wells has him think back to his childhood and youth, and thus the novel retraces the stages of the orphan’s growth, his schooling, his psychologically and for Wells narratively inexhaustible experience of apprenticeship at the fabric shop, his comradely episodes and his misadventures.69 Yet right from the opening lines it seems clear that Wells wanted to diversify this plot and make it autonomous and self-sufficient. The novelty with Polly is that the boy grows up to be a daydreamer who lets himself be influenced by a series of bizarre readings which he did himself, in a disorderly way, and which all fall under the topic of romance. In terms of how he speaks, the lesson from Dickens reveals itself in an unexpected tic which consists in Polly using nonexistent or coined or sometimes mangled words, and his talking in the form of telegraphic messages which leave his uncomprehending listeners speechless. This idiolect is Dickensian, and perhaps brings to mind Jingle’s monosyllables in Pickwick, and at the same time it is an echo of Carlyle. In terms of how it is put together, Wells still, or for the last time, wants to 69 It does not happen to Polly, but to another apprentice, to be ‘changed’ by an act of indiscipline, as happened to Kipps. On the other hand, Wells repeats from Kipps the fortunate sketch with the bicycle, but making it a decidedly more surreal incident, by having the protagonist end up in a hardware shop, after which there is a row of proverbial incomprehension. At a certain point Polly’s life as a tramp, together with his movements by bicycle, reminds us of Beckett’s Molloy. Wells was the most famous and widely read narrator of the old guard in the 1910s and to those born in the early years of the century (as Orwell noted in OCE, vol. II, 171), and it cannot be ruled out that Beckett learned from him. There is a page in Wells’s novel, in which all of Polly’s possible and very particular tasks at the riverside tavern are listed ‘serially’, which would not be out of place in Beckett’s Watt.

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demonstrate that he can write a well-written novel, and one made up first and foremost of characters and lively episodes – indeed, a homely comedy which takes place in the retail sector. The device of a string of sketches and short scenes (the funeral, the wedding), perfect in every detail, and spoken in the colourful dialect and earthy turns of phrase of the south of England, even has the démodé flavour of the early Victorian novel. Even better than in Kipps the story is filtered through the protagonist, with an impressionistic but refined and meticulously defined vein, as is possible only in a more circumscribed narrative and temporal frame. It is even strange, or unheard of, that Wells decides not to thrust his alter ego into the classic disputes of the turn of the century, and has created a detached, disoriented naïf and a dreamer who, resembling in no small part Eichendorff ’s good-fornothing, lives in angry but entirely introverted extraneousness towards his surroundings. The novel’s limit is that the story is not paradigmatic, nor is it fast-paced; instead it is rather static, and the protagonist unrealistic. His inevitable childhood idyll with a girl called Christabel, filtered and almost materialized by his disordered readings, is less pungent than that of Kipps, despite deriving from it. His rather unconvincing marriage to the chubby and slightly dowdy Miriam immediately strays into matrimonial disappointment. Polly’s aestheticism, natural, rustic and rugged, is forced, and his speech seems to be mainly a linguistic game which Wells delighted in, almost as if he also wanted to gain credit for being an important experimenting novelist, and not just one with robust ideas. 8. In reality a sharp turn tears a rut and a clean division, since the novel, before narrated backwards, is from this point on narrated forwards. The dawdling narrative rhythm is shaken up and trembles with suspense, and Wells ceases to be satisfied with the inept and asocial hero, and unmasks him with a certain satirical force. Polly wants to commit suicide with a razor and also burn his house down, but he is then, fearful and repentant, the first to try to put out the blaze which has spread throughout the neighbourhood, and having saved an old lady the town is grateful and honours him.70 The 70 In one of the longest behind-the-scenes interventions, Wells paradoxically excludes setting a fire from the domain of moral responsibility; indeed he hopes that many bad old things of the world might be burnt!

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most incisive moment is when, once the panic dies down, he suddenly realizes that he has not accomplished his plan to kill himself. With his flight from home towards to the unknown and a life outdoors, Wells tries out the motif of metaphysical dissatisfaction, outside of any conditioning from current events and any social duties, thus dropping the story into a surreal, fabulous atmosphere, dazed and eccentric, of wonderful adventure, which once again makes one think vaguely of Beckett. Wells recreates the wonderment of a nature which perhaps no longer existed in reality in England in such a pristine state, in the form of the asocial Polly’s long stay at the house of ‘a fat woman’ who owns a tavern along the river, and who Polly works for as a servant, the protagonist of numerous mock-heroic gests. The epilogue, however, withdraws to Victorian denouement and sensationalism, as Polly, presumed dead, turns up again to his abandoned wife after five years – but not to stay, because he immediately returns to his vagabond life. § 16. Wells IV: Three intellectuals, Wells’s ‘alter egos’ facing history In talking about novels of ideas, and of the third section of Wells’s fiction, one refers principally to three novels, The New Machiavelli, Mr Britling Sees It Through and The World of William Clissold. These are works of considerable dedication and great, if not decidedly excessive, size, and of a vitality at least intermittent which has assured their survival at least amongst specialists if not for the general public. They are such, novels of ideas, because they are almost entirely made up of dialogue or the analytical presentation of opinions, and because Wells cannot, indeed perhaps does not want to, disguise the compromise between pure essay writing – and the diatribe of ideological, philosophical, political and historical argument – and the needs for plot and characterization. However Wells, by then an experienced if not thoroughbred novelist, manages to grab the attention of the reader with numerous episodes that impose themselves for the occasional refinement of the psychological study or their descriptive success. He was basically able to write three very broad overviews of England in transition in as many crucial historical appointments; it is these which twice recharge an ideologue and thinker who one might have supposed had by now said everything he had to say. The three heroes are the same

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character, the progressive and problematic intellectual, a witness guiding change in an English scenario before (1911), during (1916) and after the Great War (1926). 2. The New Machiavelli (1911) attempts to impose or suggest right from the beginning a relationship of conscious and ambitious reincarnation, and the protagonist Remington, who is writing this account in the first person, feels like an even more embittered Machiavelli, brimming with palingenetic projects but frustrated and impotent. In reality this is a very loose correlation, also because the true and secret term of comparison is, in the disparity of values and even under the veil of a frontman in the case of Wells, John Stuart Mill, with his Autobiography conducted, like Wells’s, on two tracks, private and public, emotional and ideological. The novel is, indeed, muddy and extremely slow, and it is also of a boundless and rare aridity, with frequent stylistic collapses into the shabby and generic and standardized expressions (such as: ‘she was, of course, tremendously discussed’).71 It is clandestinely an account of the last Victorian decades and the Edwardian interlude; the plot fails, becoming dull, without high points, stuffy, colourless, and so it and the characters are a pretext for this panorama of the epoch. Behind it we struggle to perceive the same formative pathway of the Wellsian hero in yet another variation on the theme. Remington is taken up from his childhood, he is orphaned and follows a tried and trusted school pathway, although after the commercial schools he is admitted to Cambridge. This procedure is interrupted by the narrator, or it is interrupted at every step, to open a vast reconnaissance of the state of the kingdom in that thirty-year period, or of the slow formation of the protagonist’s ideas. It is by turns the epoch of Kipling, the epoch of Meredith, the epoch of Shaw; even the epoch of the updated religious diatribes, created for example by Mrs Humphry Ward. Thus before us parades a cultural calendar in evolution whose intersections are also, in parallel, those of the intellectual development of the protagonist. His fervid programme of socialistic and utopian reforms should transform and

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The catalogue of similar anonymous and generic designations could continue ad infinitum, and one of the first reviewers discusses this (CRHE, 193).

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renew the kingdom, make it a dynamic country, above all capable of closing the gap between rich and poor and thus abolishing privilege. Wells’s new Machiavelli is already on the road to formulating that absolute centrality of the state, or even that supranational government which Wells will soon see as the solution to the problems of the world. This liberal laicism considers various suggestions of the programme, of almost a century earlier, of John Stuart Mill. Equally predictable is that the lead in rationality, and thus also in the political vocation at the service of the community, is threatened by instinct, in particular erotic instinct. Remington espouses the theory of absolute freedom in sexual satisfaction and even promiscuity in premarital relationships. Nothing changes the ideal procedure of Wells’s alter ego, who becomes an accomplished intellectual in London and a member of Parliament. Margaret too, his intellectual wife, is a reworking of the frigid and incompatible Marion from Tono-Bungay, and the more hot-blooded and sensual Isabel is contrasted with her. Except that at the level of this novel the treatment of the erotic affairs has by now gone downhill, and Wells no longer manages to narrate them in a lively way. The onerous final phases detail the purely ideological challenge that follows the unexpected passage from an ‘initial social-liberalism to the conception of a constructive aristocracy’. Remington leaves the liberals for the Tories with a programme and a platform which, suspicious of populist democracy, focus on the policy of expanded education, the function of art as a remedy for a technological model, the measures to be taken in the face of a now imminent European war, the equally urgent English abandonment of India, and women’s selfdetermination. The resemblance to Mill’s autobiography is then perfected when an alternative passion grows in Remington for another woman, which is also an ‘intellectual sympathy’; but, much more so than in Mill, the dark feelings of guilt mar the supremacy of reason. 3. Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916) is a second big novel of ideas, and a conversation piece according to the formula of Mallock’s The New Republic. The few years that had passed since the previous one had been dense with turning points at a national and European level, with the slow repudiation of the Monroe doctrine and America’s entrance onto the European chessboard. Before the outbreak of the Great War England was facing Irish nationalist ferment, which at the time of the novel would also erupt with

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the Easter Rising in Dublin. These are the arguments on the table when the novel begins, as it presents a cultured American of English origins arriving in England to meet the famous and accomplished intellectual Hugh Britling at his country residence. The citation – of the situation par excellence of Henry James’s novels – is manifest, but for his part Wells gives a slightly satirical and mocking portrait of the American. From this point on he reports, without apparent cuts, the articulated scrutiny which the American and the Englishman pronounce on the differences between American and English culture, having to admit and set aside their reciprocal prejudices. The country estate is an ideal and representative theatre, because various races and classes have been convened there. Wells, of course, does not carry out this operation mechanically, but with one eye also tries to perform, by way of stage directions, the task of the pure novelist, and to identify each of the members of Britling’s family who inhabit his mansion, amongst whom a German tutor adds his opinions on racial characteristics. Except that the rapport between words and action remains decidedly uneven. From the passionate debates which take place during the American’s brief stay at Britling’s house, Wells puts together the portrait of a vicar-of-Bray England in which ‘everybody talks of change and nothing ever changes’. In the static context of this meeting, where they converse in turn and review numerous topics, Britling gradually emerges as the descendent of tolerant and enlightened English liberalism, and as such driven by an almost blind optimism. He is also the emblem of English individualistic pragmatism which recoils from the militaristic structure of the Prussians. The first turning point in the action is when, just after Britling has reconfirmed his certainty that no war will break out and that sensibleness will win out, offstage Wells sounds the shot in Sarajevo. It is the first debacle of tolerant and utopian English pacifism. But at the emotional breach Wells is also awaiting his hero, who turns out to be one of those who are by now steadfastly rational and intellectually tempered, but emotionally unstable. Eros in Wells is always the thorn in the side, and a flaw or an open wound which the hero cannot come to terms with. Britling’s emotional record is marked by promiscuous, even avid, affairs which do not bring him happiness. In the historical background, nonetheless, in summer 1914 British intellectuality was caught off guard by the outbreak of war while in its isolation Britain

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feared, if anything, a civil war, in the form of an Irish insurrection. Unity of time – one solar year, the first of the Great War – is there but it does not feel like it for the slowness and the inconclusiveness with which Wells follows the evolution of the protagonist’s attitude toward the conflict. The novel is a calendar of this year seen above all through the echoes arriving from the Continent to the island, reawakened to the reality of war after the British declaration, general mobilization, the departure of the volunteers, the Territorial Force, the ever more numerous refugees arriving on British soil,72 and above all the Zeppelin raids.73 In the continuation Wells writes one of the most noble and fervid English novels on the Great War. As a scholar of imaginary wars, an expert in planetary conflicts that had been always feasible and imminent in the past, he could not avoid writing a novel on this authentic and real ‘war of the worlds’, and even describing it in medias res, when any chance of summarizing it was still impossible. Britling becomes the representative of the British intelligentsia taken by surprise by the outbreak of hostilities, and who at the end of the novel ‘sees it through’. At the beginning the country was wallowing in disaffection, but it gradually mobilizes, and assumes the messianic role of saviour of a Europe in danger and the rescuer of civilization under threat. Britling’s intellectual procedure moves as soon as possible to the question of how the employment of intellectuality in war was possible and feasible. But his is also a realization. England had too naïvely underestimated the German threat, believed that the war was only a remote possibility, and the nation was completely unprepared militarily, except for the navy. But Britling also explores the racial and national diversity of the two sides, having to give up the idea that the war had been declared by a small group of militarized fanatics, when instead it was an entire people that was belligerently agitating behind it. The reality of war calms the flame of eros, because as the

72

Who in the novel, housed on Britling’s estate, supply new bait for conversations and confrontations of opinions on national diversity. 73 On the nightmare of which Kipling also wrote stories (Volume 6, § 269). One of the soldiers at the front, whom Britling’s son tells him about in his letters, feels like Kipling’s Ortheris (Volume 6, § 266.4), who had become proverbial as the image of the dull-witted and pompous soldier.

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situation deteriorates the intellectual gets involved as a volunteer, giving it his all in the patriotic rescue operations. 4. Britling has a progression which is always too flaccid and slow and does not know any law of narrative economy, as I mentioned. It could have become an English War and Peace with reduced proportions. Instead of compressing it into the dimensions of Polly, Wells decided to stretch it and deform it: to make it dilatory, and full of repeated lucubrations. Yet some touching, profoundly human episodes do nonetheless stand out, such as the profound emotional relationship that develops between Britling senior and Britling junior, who leaves for war thirsty for action and, as we could easily deduce and foresee, dies in the war, but not before sending his father numerous letters from the front. These letters form an unexpected but welcome change of voice in the novel, because they describe with many nice and satirical details the unpreparedness of the British army, the periods of stagnation in a war fought solely in the trenches, and above all because they put together a sort of apathetic banalization of the war itself.74 This young soldier, Hugh Britling, is yet another representative of the throngs of young British academics, often poets, mowed down on the European fronts – the representative of the wartime slaughter of British youth. Courageously closed when the war was still open and the results were indistinct, Britling fades out on the torment of fathers and wives crying for the dead; but one of these miraculously returns home alive. From the heart of the war Wells, through Britling, proclaims and predicts an immediate rebuilding of the shattered world based on the ‘federal world-republic’.75 Britling, who had shown all his weakness at the beginning, discovers the immanence of his God, slightly different from the Brontëan one ‘of creeds’, and is extravagant in acts of sensitivity towards other grief-stricken fathers. This possible religious conversion sui generis, which some attributed to Wells himself, was nonetheless immediately denied by the person concerned. 74 They are also letters that sweeten, and expurgate, so to speak, life on the front of the foulest details. 75 Orwell (OCE, vol. II, 166–72) contested this recipe, which Wells had by now adhered to, in 1941, ‘for the past forty years’, partly contradicting his own idea of the novelty of Wells’s thought. Orwell also criticized Wells’s utopian pacifism as ‘essentially hedonistic’.

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5. The World of William Clissold (1926), a tour de force which challenges, wears out and only occasionally rewards the patience of the reader, has a synthetic and summarizing value in Wells’s writing and attempts decisively and consciously to be a, or the, supreme spiritual and ideological testament of the writer, a good two decades early of course. At that time Wells could no longer pretend not to know that the novel had developed rules throughout Europe and that those rules were no longer his; Clissold can be considered Wells’s response to the modernist novel in his essayistic version of Proust or Musil. Otherwise it would be incomprehensible why he insists so much in the preface on defining it a novel despite everything, indeed above all a novel.76 Such an aesthetic revision rests on the prevalence, above passion and action, of ideas. The title is motivated because the curtain rises on an entire ‘world’, thus, as already in the previous novels, on the ‘life’ and especially the ‘opinions’ of a particular representative of an intellectual class in the third decade of the twentieth century.77 But the implicit dialectic and polemic with the canons of the modernist novel lies in the fact that in this very preface it is denegated, and therefore confirmed, that Clissold is a self-portrait: this and the other two previous novels are thinly veiled autobiographies, and Clissold is all the more so because Wells tells it in the first person. The amusing and concealed game of identities comes very cleverly to the surface when Clissold introduces one of his own ‘distant relatives, Wells’, author of a book on theology which Wells had actually written. In the second of these sleights of hand, the self-reference is a stratagem to sketch out the evolution or the revision which have taken place in a thought.78 The first pages even delude us that this book might have been stimulated by Proust or even by Joyce and by 76 In truth there is a little known manifesto, in An Englishman Looks at the World (1914), in which Wells lays down the guidelines of the new novel of ideas: no to the relaxing and entertaining novel; yes to its discursiveness and to elasticity of form, able to merge varied material; and yes to a ‘central platform of discussion’ (quoted in WAR, 28–9 and in Parrinder 1970, 88–9). D. H. Lawrence, in an impatient review of Clissold (Phoenix, vol. I, 346–50), dwelt perplexed at the start and end on Clissold’s aesthetic status, which did not seem to him that of a novel. 77 On Wells’s admiration for Sterne, and on the Sternian idea of the, especially late, Wellsian novel, cf. WAR, 29. 78 Indeed the stratagem is carried along up until the epilogue, presented as written by Clissold’s brother, since Clissold the writer died unexpectedly in a car accident.

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the recent experiments in the stream of consciousness. In fact it begins like a fluvial rhapsody, a flow, a stream. Had Wells suddenly decided to keep pace? Had he taken up the challenge of the younger generation, he the doyen? It is surprising to hear him say so, with the voice of Clissold, that is, in the first person, that it was the revisitation of a beloved childhood place, and to have seen the ‘sodden horse-chestnut leaves scattered over the wet stone pavement’, that had triggered ‘this group of memories’. Such a question, which makes its way – if Wells has suddenly opted for a narrative reminiscent of Proustian and Woolfian ‘moments,’ or Joycean ‘epiphanies’ – immediately finds a negative answer. Such associationism is very limited in the novel, and the purely lyrical impulse absent. Wells is not thought of and would never be imagined as a poet and if anything a poet of reverie,79 too given as he is to rationalizing and ordering, and thus cooling down, memory. Instead there prevails the much more proven and traditional module of the retrospective of the dying or at least the senescent, and thus of the prose monologue, with the same discontinuities that we find in Browning.80 Despite passing without apparent order from the past to the present, the narrator is always more given to talking at length not about emotional experience remembered and mimed in its convulsive breath, but about intellectual experience coldly reviewed and above all objectified. This metanarrativity strays into diary writing, since from the past Clissold re-evokes to himself, without connections, meetings, discoveries, lucubrations. And it is perceptible because Clissold knows and declares that what he is writing is not a book, but, as in Browning,

Like Moses, Clissold prophesied but was not able to see the realization of his utopia. 79 Wells confessed in Experiment in Autobiography (vol. II, 439) to having published ‘only four lines of poetry’ in his life, but to have privately written much light and playful poetry. Examples of the latter, accompanied by ‘picshuas’, pen and ink sketches, are reproduced in his autobiography at the beginning of the second volume. These cartoons, which Wells is proud to present passim, denote in reality an uncertain and vague sign and a modest artistic talent. Wells openly acknowledged (vol. II, 541) that he was ‘not made to understand theatre’, and indeed in his immense corpus there are no plays. 80 Or George Eliot, with the short story ‘The Lifted Veil’, or Gissing with Ryecroft.

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the project or preparation for a book.81 At other times the incoherence of a diary is perceptible in the form of the unexpected anecdotal digression, the offhand barb, or pure table talk. 6. The reader, having discovered the underlying aesthetic plan, must then sooner or later express a judgement on the quality of the ideas addressed. Clissold’s ‘world’ is largely the intellectual world of someone superseded.82 Wells starts him off again with that same debate between faith and science that tormented the sleep of Matthew Arnold and many other Victorian ‘honest doubters’, and gradually brings him to a scepticism that is not mocking but pensive, and thus to a positivistic belief not far removed from that Arnoldian concept of a god ‘not ourselves’ and just ‘righteousness’.83 Clissold’s intellectual coordinates are therefore still the framework of mid- or late Victorianism, compelled by biblical criticism, evolutionism and, above all, scientism to ballast the positions of a naïvely transcendent religion. Thus a series of anecdotes emerge which are not new, those often stubbornly read in the purely non-fiction agnosticism of those writers (like the question of how priests, especially Catholic ones, can believe in the entirety of the faith that they preach). Clissold creates expertise which, supported by cold science, orders the world; he also forms an unswerving faith in the lay progress of humanity, and he is a confident positivist who believes in the magnificent and progressive destiny of humanity.84 The parenthesis itself, which Wells accustoms the reader to ever

On closer inspection Clissold evokes – every time the writer is metanarrative, and sees himself preparing the manuscript and discusses its making, or judges it ‘arid and abstract’ – the monologues of Browning’s lawyers in The Ring and the Book, of course with the exuberant playfulness removed. 82 A ‘first Victorian’, according to Lawrence in the review cited above in n. 76. 83 Volume 6, § 27.1. Batchelor 1985, 69, rules out Wells paying attention to Arnold, but he often traces his presence on closer scrutiny (cf. 78–9, 87). 84 This ideological evolution, set off by a scientific upbringing, is also corroborated by Clissold’s fruitful meetings with privileged interlocutors. The statute of the text, oscillating between real autobiography and one that is imagined and attributed to a fictitious alter ego, is also proven by the fact that Clissold comes into contact with recognized authorities of sceptical thought, such as Shaw and above all Jung, and with other purely invented characters. 81

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more often, is in itself a trick of the same nature as Ruskin’s ‘transition’:85 for example that found in Fors Clavigera. These two books, by Ruskin and Wells, can be compared as two archives of the contemporary world half a century apart. They are reports on the state of creation, both all-inclusive, supremely meandering and idiosyncratically utopian, both of them hoping for a revolution – despite being, in the prescriptions and the medicines suggested, diametrically opposed. 7. The second ‘book’ of Wells’s novel, which continues retrospectively up until the two Clissold brothers’ adolescence, exemplifies Wells’s method. Clissold is geometrical and symmetrical, because it is divided into six books which are partly – but only partly – monographic, almost as if the writer had proceeded to a calculated and prior subdivision and to an inventory of ideological material, and had then assigned it to the corresponding parts, each of them almost an exact number of pages long. Only partly, as I said, because in some of these books a controversy already discussed is taken up again and repeated, so much so that the suspicion arises of pure faithfulness to the quantitative plan. The novel thus proceeds in fits and starts, and goes up and down. It effects a sort of technique of communicating vessels, because the autobiographical reconstruction is interrupted, and instead a polemic erupts which is of the writer writing in 1926. Each of the six books ends up containing one of these parentheses and thus singling out one aspect of his life; and in these parentheses Wells overcomes his alter ego and makes the reader forget him, and the divergence of identities is bridged. In the great parenthesis of the second book, Clissold mulls over the failure of the principal ideologies of the late nineteenth century, individualistic anarchism, communism scuttled by his own father, that socialism which claimed to impose a rational order on the world. The most enjoyable moment is a satire on Marxism, ideologically torn apart because, allegedly, it attacked at full tilt a capitalism which did not exist. Wells attributes to Clissold the report of a journey to Russia which supports his own theory. The closure of this parenthesis is the formulation of the ‘world-state’, an objective to be attained through a revolution headed by an elite of aristocratic intellectuals,

85

Volume 6, § 38.1.

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thus an oligarchy.86 But the parenthesis is not really closed, because Wells tries to compress, in an extra twenty-odd anthropological pages, the process by which modern monetary culture formed and was established after the primitive and barbaric barter economy. Some of these parentheses, as the calendar moves on, are shrewd sociological chapters, such as the one on the space which advertising creates for itself and on the invasiveness of occult persuasion. Clissold’s brother glimpses on the horizon the advent of a media-driven society, and a prophetic phrase is that of the imminent ‘web of modern life’. 8. The fourth book, on love affairs, seeks to covertly ape Proust: all women leave Clissold unsatisfied and bitter, and so Wells, always confessing that he is unable to tame the sexual impulse, bestows on him not only perennial unhappiness but also his own misogyny. It is a gibe that in describing his affairs he renounces the ‘intricate faithfulness of a Henry James’; and invariably narcissistic that Clissold, now in a purely platonic relationship with his young governess Clementina, hears her pronounce an ardent declaration of love and begs her to marry him. Other writers of the time – Orwell, Eliot – spoke and wrote outside of the inventive domain, but like Wells merely designed a new cultural model. Clissold is for the most part destruens, and the protagonist a classic naysayer who picks holes in all the political and ideological formations and in any innovative proposal which is not his own. Orwell would have classified him as one of his defeatists. Except that having burnt his bridges, Wells through Clissold sets out the lines of a revolution. Such a complete metamorphosis has its origins in his faith in the repeated axiom of ‘panta rhei’. All the old politics should 86 Also called, dangerously, a board of ‘directors’. The previous and more orderly formulation of this oligarchic utopia is in A Modern Utopia (1905). There the world is divided into five classes, the Samurai, the Poietic, the Kinetic, the Dull, and the Base. The first are the noble and disinterested caste in power, the Poietic the creative class, the Kinetic are those able to work by intelligence; only the Base could never become Samurai. It is impossible not to notice that it is here that Orwell must have started off in coming up with his three-class structure, a bit simplified compared to Wells’s more pleonastic one, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, with the similar lifetime exclusion of the ‘proles’ from acceding to the ‘inner party’; but also with the difference that Wells’s is an optimistic utopia, while Orwell’s is a dystopia.

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be scrapped, and global coordination of forces and social components is necessary. This disillusion derives from the failure, precociously sighted, of the League of Nations, which even Wells had at first believed in. One of the cornerstones of the transformed society is the reform of the educational system, the traditional sore point for utopians; another is the reform of the family system. Wells notes yet again the centrality of the sexual urge, recognizes the penalty imposed on women throughout history, and votes for the dissolution of the institution of the family, as he had already outlined in his first novel and in the utopian society of The Time Machine. Marriage should, if anything, be temporary, the time limited to the period of upbringing of the children. Of these prophecies, launched after statistical and also colourful and always thriving factual documentation, and after numerous excursus, some are naïvely utopian while others are very close to what did later come to pass. Dramatic issues of today picked up on by Wells are the necessity control of births, sustainable economic development, the problems of the third world. Wells was a pioneer in considering forthcoming any reinterpretation of the phenomena of life in a global sense; all the organisms of associated life were to be transformed and reinvented in a planetary scale. The overall picture, the total ideological framework, are once again Millian – although mysteriously Wells never explicitly names this predecessor of his, Mill – because they are those of  ‘liberalism’ which emerged in the previous two centuries. § 17. Arnold Bennett* I: A Victorian photograph album It will be best to introduce both Enoch Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) and Galsworthy against the backdrop of Wells and late Victorian fiction, and investigate the relationships between them as well as the constants, because these writers, as has been said, made up a triad or a trinity which was a starting point for Woolf, Lawrence and Joyce and the whole modernist ferment. Now, Bennett, to be sure, is not strictly speaking part of the ‘interstitial’ literature. Taking his novels of the ‘Potteries’ and of ‘the Five Towns’ of his native Staffordshire1 as a privileged observation point, he *

Reprints of the novels by Arno Press, New York, of various dates. Letters in 4 vols, ed. J. Hepburn, London 1966–1986, and diaries ed. N. Flower, London 1932–1933

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seems to be one of the many late-coming Victorians moved forwards in time. With this epithet are designated novels written, for the most part, in the Edwardian or even Georgian era, but set in the proverbial English region where pots, cups, plates and mugs were manufactured, and novels temporally located in the second half of the Victorian era, with its starting point in the 1840s and 1850s. Their main characters are people born at the height of the Victorian era, reaching forty and maturity before 1901, and being thus the novelist’s contemporaries. They share with the great Victorian novels a reciprocal correlation, that of the saga, and they renew, then, the internal construction of the cycle. They are not, though they seem to be, written in the golden age of the serial; and Bennett has, with good reason, been compared to Trollope for his meticulous and heroic conscientiousness in planning his writing. 2. At the end of the century, Bennett was a budding novelist who was looking around trying not to reuse hackneyed formulae, undecided which genre to opt for. The title of his first novel ties together some key

(abridged edition ed. F. Swinnerton, Harmondsworth 1954). G. West, The Problem of Arnold Bennett, London 1932; D. C. Bennet, Arnold Bennett: A Portrait Done at Home, London 1935; J. B. Simons, Arnold Bennett and His Novels, Oxford 1936; G. Lafourcade, A Study of Arnold Bennett, London 1939; W. Allen, Arnold Bennett, London 1948; F. Swinnerton, Arnold Bennett, London 1951, and Arnold Bennett: A Last Word, London 1978; R. Pound, Arnold Bennett: A Biography, London 1952; V. Sanna, Arnold Bennett e i romanzi delle cinque città, Firenze 1953; J. Hall, Arnold Bennett: Primitivism and Taste, Seattle, WA 1959; J. Hepburn, The Art of Arnold Bennett, Bloomington, IN 1963 (ignored by other experts, it studies, albeit in mostly minor novels, Bennett’s unsuspected constructive wisdom, confirming him as a modernist); edited by the same Hepburn is CRHE, London 1981; D. Barker, Writer by Trade: A View of Arnold Bennett, London 1966; O. H. Davis, The Master: A Study of Arnold Bennett, London 1966; J. Wain, Arnold Bennett, London 1967; W. Bellamy, The Novels of Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy: 1890–1910, London 1971, 71–87, 144–64; M. Drabble, Arnold Bennett: A Biography, London 1974; J. Lucas, Arnold Bennett: A Study of His Fiction, London 1974; K. Young, Arnold Bennett, ed. I. Scott-Kilvert, London 1975; R. Squillace, Modernism, Modernity and Arnold Bennett, Lewisburg, PA 1997. 1

Actually six, all ingeniously renamed by Bennett.

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words from his first narrative, because a man moves from the north to London. Bennett works, like all beginners, on the autobiography, but that was an exemplary route of the petty but almost well off bourgeoisie, from the outskirts towards the magnetic metropolis. There a varied humanity which worked in offices congregated and settled, exactly as in Thackeray’s very first stories and sketches of eighty years earlier. Wells also had his alter egos merge and emigrate to London, where they failed because they were so intrinsically coarse and proletarian. So Bennett could proceed to a sort of blocking of part of the visual field: London is a magnet par excellence, but Bennett’s characters roam the London of music halls and French restaurants, of fanciful, but not pitiful, writers. It is a London which is trying to be a little amateur Paris or, worse, a Babylon or a Sodom of pleasure,2 where a certain Puritan morality has broken down, the grip of religion has loosened and people seek amusement and fun without any qualms. Bennett’s first novel can be defined as the inspiration of this exemplary journey of this small-town aesthete, green and amateurish, who seeks but does not obtain professional, literary and sentimental training. Apathetic and remiss, he is also disadvantaged by the fact that he is an orphan, unconnected, all alone, with no friends or relations to guide him. But there is a fire of the senses burning within him that his relationships with women cannot satisfy. Bennett’s second novel, on the other hand, is a cul de sac, a romantic detective story inhabited by marionettes who are inconsistent and flat, and deliberately so in order to act within an artificial plot, played out on paper and without tangible links to the real world. To get out of this impasse he turned to the saga of the organic community of middle-class traders, with families whose names are repeated at every step, the Baineses, the Tellwrights, the Clayhangers, and with doctors, bakers, chemists, the main square and the Methodist chapel as the cardinal points. In these vast canvases a young man or woman feels a growing need to escape, and can satisfy it in a vicarious way and by creating their elsewhere in their own birthplace. One can be a prisoner for life or a rebel and exile. The ever-open 2

In the eponymous novel, the Grand Hotel Babylon is so called from the name of the owner, ‘and does not refer to the nickname of London’: but the author gives a wink to this homonymy.

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conflict is between the generations, and fathers and sons and daughters are at loggerheads. There is the scene of the father’s death, often after a long and paralysing illness, with the son and daughter at his bedside discovering their profound pain after prematurely denouncing their subjugation. Generally speaking the conflict Bennett works on is between dreamy romanticism and concrete commercial spirit. Therefore, novel after novel, the writer sets himself the task, like a new Tolstoy, of being a historian of the last halfcentury, encapsulating in it the inventive story of a middle-class nucleus in the town of Bursley. Bennett scrupulously reconstructed these scenarios or backdrops like Joyce with Dublin. Bennett’s first historical presentation was indeed that of an open camera lens,3 in front of which he let life flow by without any apparent selection criteria, and a life which was in principle ‘interesting’ in the unhierarchized multiplicity of its minute events. The French writers got close to him owing to personal, fashionable readings, and through the first real British witness there, George Moore, who was not from the Potteries, but whose debut novel was set there.4 3. The striking dividing line between him and Wells, to provisionally close the comparison, is that Bennett does not have ideas to field, nor does he transform philosophies or visions into his fiction, but rather only vague sensations of humour-tinged nostalgia for a closed but obsolete world; by definition he closes his eyes to the ideologies that should awaken him from this trance of remembrance. Neither does he have links to science, those links that make Wells’s early novels so ‘modern’.5 He is just a talented entertainer, a highly skilled imitator of the great masters of 3 4 5

On the recurrence of the photographic metaphor and label, cf. CRHE, 381, 471, 472, 487, 526 and passim. Volume 6, § 126.3 and n. 12. In reality Whom God Hath Joined (1906), on the controversies of divorce, is a novel influenced by Wells, or perhaps only related, and advocates progressive legislation; and also The Lion’s Share (1916), comparable to Ann Veronica by Wells, sympathizes with a heroine who flees the family home and becomes a suffragette, but is then thrown into a series of multiform melodramatic experiences in the heart of Paris. Bennett is as sceptical as Wells on the subject of female suffrage. In Sacred and Profane Love (1905), a woman from the Potteries, curious about fashionable reading, falls in love with a pianist, breaks with convention, and abandons herself to passion. Proverbial,

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Victorian satire and comedy. His light prose, or those passages from his great serious novels steeped in a scathing and caustic, but of course always good-natured, humour, have the shine and elegance of someone who is outside of the fray, and are quite worthy of a Dickens or Thackeray. One symptom of contemporary fame, together with Bennett’s insight, is to have titillated Edwardian, and indeed timeless, nostalgia, for something just a little bit aged, which has more appeal than the authentically antique; and he did that by stopping almost all his storylines, at least those of the five towns, at the threshold of the new century.6 After 1911, or at most 1916, Bennett is, however, a different storyteller, and once his ‘vintage’ decade, 1898–1910, had passed and the cycle of the five towns and its inspiration had ceased, his fiction disappeared from the front line, and it never took off again. Bennett is today the author of a great masterpiece, albeit such in the domain of imitation rather than originality, and then of much else that is negligible. This fact, in itself also Victorian, decidedly Victorian – untiring productivity and thus dispersion –7 cannot by now surprise us. Bennett had gradually become rich, almost a millionaire, with his almost mechanical production which was numerically similar to Trollope’s. The proceeds Bennett received for his plays, even higher than those for his novels, are dizzying figures which few others could boast, perhaps never seen again in history. Much of Bennett’s fiction and also theatre, then, is part of a conscious compromise within the literary industry and consumption literature. He divided himself between high and low literature, and sometimes he was able to write a well-written, high-class novel with his right hand and a commercial crowd-pleaser with his left hand.8 The comand Wellsian (§ 15.4), is the scene of the spiritual-carnal unison with the music of Tristan und Isolde in the background. 6 It comes as no surprise that Bennett has been reassessed very close to us by writers who are nostalgic, typically insular, rooted in tradition, and a bit xenophobic, like Larkin, or Margaret Drabble. 7 In turn the result of a sort of overturned retaliation: Bennett had a stutter and was also often taciturn. 8 In ‘Fame and Fiction: An Enquiry into Certain Popularities’ (1901) Bennett acknowledges the divergence between aesthetic novel and consumer novel, and in the first category he includes Moore, Gissing and Turgenev. The American novelist and critic

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partments of his fiction are strictly three: realism, humour and sensationalism. It is basically true that Bennett was demolished by a small modernist manifesto by Virginia Woolf, 9 and by the parodies of Pound, Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis. To Henry James – and a bored Bennett laid down The Ambassadors after having read about a hundred pages – we owe the notification that that dense and ordered array of facts had ultimately no sense, no direction, no ‘interest’. Aiming at the heart of the problem, it was claimed that his novels were mere photographs. Not a trace of stylistic experimentation, of a single variation of the narrative point of view; only the odd, timorous echo of the stream of consciousness. The omniscience is cumbersome and dominating, especially when the storylines are followed from varying focal points, like the consecutive plots of the two sisters in The Old Wives’ Tale. But all the historical preludes and interludes and the emphatic stage directions are his own. Even Bennett’s renewed efforts after 1910, and even more so after the war and until 1930, do not authorize us to say that his art acquired a true and convincing revitalization after that magical decade of ‘the five towns’. 4. Belonging to the middle class by descent, Bennett had left school at sixteen to go and work as an accountant in the law firm of his father, who had previously been a school teacher, potter, moneylender and finally a solicitor in one of the five towns of Staffordshire. He passed the entrance exams for the University of London, but never enrolled. He nevertheless moved to the capital as soon as he reached adulthood, against his family’s wishes, to work as a shorthand typist and to try his fortunes as a writer. The

9

Howells (CRHE, 310) first wrote wittily about two Bennetts, doubles of each other. The extravaganza Buried Alive, of 1908 – which Hepburn 1963, 167, rather questionably judges superior as a ‘comic’ success to The Card – is about a painter living in isolation who, when his valet, who had been taken for the painter himself, dies, assumes his personality. Young 1975, 28 n. 1, reminds us that the painter Turner lived for ten years under a false name; to the Italian reader the plot is more than anything reminiscent of Pirandello’s Il fu Mattia Pascal. Woolf was responding to a previous theoretical reproach by Bennett, who considered the characters of Jacob’s Room to be flat and lacking in vitality, according to the principle that ‘the foundation [of the novel] is the creation of the characters and nothing else’.

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high number of his heroines and his uncommon ability to penetrate their psychology was also due to the period he spent editing a weekly women’s magazine, in which he signed the most varied and serious articles with a pen name. His first story was published in the Decadent magazine, The Yellow Book, and with good reason: his debutant aesthetics respected the French sense of pattern, and it put form, treatment, ‘presentation’ avant toute chose; but with the passing of time these positions were overturned and his conservative idiosyncrasies increased. He did not hesitate to admit that he was obtuse and incapable of understanding the younger writers who were digging his grave, even though he helped some of them to get published; his literary tastes had also been bourgeois, reactionary and even philistine, and his favourites included Ouida, a novelist who accompanied him throughout his development.10 Those modernists who were just a little bit younger objected in essence that he was simply an unspasmodic aesthete. Sociable and gruff, fickle and neurotic, he lived well and did not hide his wealth; he cultivated his passion for cars and yachts, dressed impeccably, wearing legendary starched white shirts and bowties and polka-dot ties; he had grizzled whiskers and a foppish fringe, he acted sporty and had himself photographed on the tennis court, racket in hand; but other photographs show him in more clumsy, cumbersome and awkward poses, his face certainly not oozing brilliance. In him D’Annunzio’s ostentation lived again. Rummaging through his papers, in fact, it can be seen that Bennett was indeed an admirer of the Italian aesthete. In an opinion from his diaries of 191011 Bennett deprecated the incapacity of English novelists to truthfully represent women, and praised the treatment of the heroine in D’Annunzio’s Forse che sì forse che no as ‘extraordinarily sexual’, finding the kiss scene unsurpassed and incomparable.12 A certain group of younger writers reproached him for not having, despite himself, the eminently modernist requisite of

10 11 12

Barker 1966, 39. Quoted in Lucas 1974, 63. The most recent criticism has reconstructed the absence of any closet homosexuality in Bennett, who was married to a French typist for ten years and, once separated, got together with an English actress. On his neuroses and sexual perversions, cf. Young 1975, 15, who disagrees with the ‘relative sexual coldness’ found by Hepburn 1963, 43.

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obscurity – for not polishing his work and using the unit of measure of the single ‘right’ word, and for being rather a mere word factory. Likewise often ridiculed were the snobbery and lack of taste of a writer who, after the war, started talking freely to a gullible public from the columns of the popular daily The Evening Standard. Critics of an aesthetic-Marxist bent accused Bennett of not having represented more carefully and thoroughly the rise of the workers’ movement in the Potteries, or painted a broader and more objective picture of the Paris Commune! The mistake of Arnold Kettle, but also of Forster in Aspects of the Novel, seems to be that of challenging a priori the specific aesthetics of Bennett’s novels, which always or partly try to present themselves as an overview of a historical transition as seen through the eyes of a community which is living through it. D. H. Lawrence himself, who started off when Bennett was at his peak, criticized the vision of lifeless, passive and resigned characters, like Anna and Edwin, who are not capable of real rebellion, and of giving ‘a great kick at misery’.13 While however he is being torn to pieces, one can sense a sort of ill-concealed shame at saying out loud how beautiful and intense Bennett is whenever he is that; and indeed more than once the prejudiced snap judgements are contradicted by an accurate critical interpretation of the texts. Once historical Modernism had been archived, there was still the occasional sporadic academic defence after even Bennett’s disavowal of Edwardianism came to an end. One book14 has ingeniously shown that Bennett’s novels are structured, have design and balance, revolve around patterns and also around internal representational and isotopic chains, and are not thrown together randomly; and it observes at the same time the function played by prediction, suggestion, prolepsis, and oppositions, networks of allusions, allegories and mythicization, even motivations and onomastic associations – with a few too many gambles – as in the great modernist palimpsests. Bennett has even been timidly revalidated as an astute storyteller, one who disseminates clues, rather than being ‘natural’ and instinctive.15 13 14 15

CRHE, 21–2. Hepburn 1963. Yet it is also true that Hepburn cannot give meaning to the isotopies he traces, such as that of the ‘pit’ or the execution, perhaps because Bennett himself had not given

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One cannot but agree that Bennett too, like Wells, must be filtered; and observe that, after the seven or eight works that stand out above the rest, it is true that anyone these days can ‘save’ other ones ad libitum, according to personal preference if not through capricious fickleness, shouting about the tiny misunderstood and forgotten masterpiece. Often a novel torn to pieces by one critic receives high praise from the next, such is the seesaw of impressionistic taste. Several were, first and foremost, an object of belated shame on the part of the novelist himself and were disowned.16 These and others, even today, may be classified under the hackneyed label of ‘potboilers’; it must be added, however, that Bennett got offended and angry when that label was pinned on him too readily. After the publication of Lilian, a mediocre 1922 novel (about a typist who marries her rich boss), and the hostile reviews it received, Bennett wrote a fastidious letter to the papers in which he insisted on the axiom that ‘almost all writers write for money’ though ‘not only for money’, and that even when they write for money ‘they try to do their best’. What is swamped, and has disappeared from circulation in the Bennett canon, is above all the dramas. Some plays were dramatizations of novels; two were big hits with the public and the box office, The Honeymoon and Milestones. Bennett can boast a small place in the history of a certain theatrical branch or subgenre, that of reworkings of the story of Don Juan. His Don Juan de Marana (1923) was only printed, although a musical version of it was adapted by the director and

16

them a meaning. Bellamy 1971, too, finds A Man from the North to be ‘formally unified’ and organized by four deaths, and sees the action of a ‘central complementarity of the “scientific-therapeutic” and “aesthetic-symptomatic” modality’ of the narrative of the 1890s (Bellamy 1971, 71). The relevant chapter, dedicated to this novel, applies mostly discordant Freudian frames, though, and the critic is also strangely careless (Bellamy 1971, 77, 81), when he refers to Adeline as Aked’s ‘daughter’ rather than niece. In general the critical literature on Bennett has been a dialogue between deaf people, and scholars even seem to ignore their predecessors. Lucas 1974, a rambling book with an old-fashioned evaluative procedure, lets slip, for example, that Bennett is not really interested in the design and structure of his novels (Lucas 1974, 12), and adds (Lucas 1974, 41) that Bennett was not a symbolist. Drabble 1974, 84.

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composer Eugene Goossens; some reviewers rightly found such subject matter ‘wholly unsuitable’ for Bennett.17 § 18. Arnold Bennett II: A provincial in the city In the impressionistic prelude to Bennett’s first novel, A Man from the North (1898), in which we straightaway get an idea of the writer’s empathic language and lyrical, allusive and effusive presentation, a young man from a northern town watches as a train leaves the station heading for London; in the second chapter he has emigrated to the metropolis, where he arrives at a boarding-house and goes out straightaway to see and explore the city of his dreams. If the city is experienced erotically, like a voluptuous woman before whom to prostrate oneself, it acquires a precise meaning that Richard Larch should abruptly buy himself a present, in reality equivalent to a homage to the feminine city: with an expensive watch, which he has no need for, he satisfies his desire with wastefulness. At first the immigrant or the Northerner down south satiates a hunger of the senses which he was vaguely unaware of, and which he tries, almost involuntarily, psychically to satisfy, but it only vaguely declares itself and is never realized. These early stages are punctuated by fleeting visions of women who seem to smile at the disoriented newcomer in the big city, and wink at him and entice him, only to then disappear. This sensuality instils itself, almost as soon as he arrives, during the night at the Ottoman theatre, where it is tempered above all in the dream of pleasure and lust. As a counterbalance of the dancers are chaste and prudish effeminate figures, like the landlady’s daughter, who bears the prosaic surname Rowbotham. Once he returns from the theatre, the young man is annoyed with himself for not having had the courage to make a move on a prostitute who spoke a few words of French. The main character’s sexual inconclusiveness is the Flaubertian éducation sentimentale. His spirit of initiative is not lacking, but he does not seize the moment. Young and mature employees of his ilk are still situated between romanticism and pure eroticism, and they are boasters. The ill-concealed eroticism is ready to overflow, but for now it is 17

CRHE, 130.

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channelled into ersatz. At the edge of the road a mistress awaits her lover, the cashier of the restaurant seems approachable, the nurse of a colleague at death’s door is also provocative (‘alluring’, an oft-used adjective). The idyll with the niece of the dying Aked has a slow and unpronounced development, even though it is the longest episode in the novel. Adeline is at first an anonymous girl, devoted and obliging, only slightly mischievous; after her uncle dies she is more alert and evasive, a bit snobbish, or rather amateurishly so, because once she receives her inheritance she acts like a little grande dame. Richard comes out and proposes to her, but Adeline ditches him to go off to America, without the two of them explaining their feelings, except perhaps on the platform at the station; but they are still only hinted at. Larch goes with prostitutes, retries his hand at literature, unable to give a Flaubertian finish to what he writes. In reality from now on the novel languishes, and Bennett does not seem to know where to go with it. The closure is partly Wellsian: once Larch sets aside his aestheticisms, he marries a simple and common shop girl. 2. The parable of the novel is at the same time that of the writer who is overly refined, unrealistic and aspiring in London’s literary labyrinth. A few years late, it is thus a small update and rehash of Gissing’s New Grub Street, and indeed this writer is surreptitiously quoted. Richard forces himself to work as an employee in a solicitor’s office, where another aged, and slightly megalomaniac, employee is also trying to become a writer, though failed and never blossoming. Completing this Gissingian network of writers is Aked’s niece, who loves painting and sings – but with a second-rate repertoire, hardly Schubert’s Lieder – and later on a nurse who is a wouldbe poet. The impossibility of emerging seems to perpetuate itself, and the hotbed of literary art smoulders, smothered by work. The Gissingian connection is natural, as many of the scenes converge towards the reading room of the British Museum. Here Aked and Larch meet up and decide to write together a vast ‘Psychology of the Suburbs’, or rather to expressly deal – excited, hoping it will be a publishable, even sensational, work – with the ‘latent poetry of the suburbs’. It is ironic that the two aesthetes, who dream of escaping the wretched milieu of the depersonalizing metropolis, should plan a work which clashes with their objectives. Previously, Richard Larch had made pathetic, and above all contrived, attempts to make a name

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for himself in the literary world with improbable newspaper pieces. Also Gissingian is the fact that Aked, who has the occasional flash of lucidity, dies of bronchitis before the first word of that mythical book is written. 3. A Man from the North can be placed outside the current of the comic, humorous and satirical Victorian serial, the same genre into which Wells had deviated from science fiction. It is a tiny picaresque, a clerk’s odyssey, or that of an employee in a solicitor’s office, or a typist; but Bennett composes in the short term, does not exploit the sensational stunt, nor does he try to hold back or stop the narrative in order to sculpt larger-than-life characters and caricatures: in the solicitor’s studio, as favourable an environment as any, there is only one such character, Jenkins the bully. The lesson from the French can be found in a prose which is more brilliant than that of Wells, who still looked only to Dickens’s turgid expressionism. The stylistic result is a Frenchified and Latinate English, often a bit unnatural and affected. Obviously Bennett himself is Richard, looking at himself from a distance, and he sympathizes with, and thus sometimes smiles at and sometimes derides the vain ambitions and amateurishness of his alter ego. In his aesthetic religion, Richard must be irreligious, even though, since the novel is presumably set in the 1890s, he lets himself get caught up in the cult of aesthetic ritual, and attends Catholic churches, but only to enjoy the exterior beauty of the liturgies. 4. The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902) is a complete novelty, both because it does not repeat or adjust the previous novel, and because few novels at that time had dared to use its structural plan. The young male protagonist, clearly the author’s alter ego, disappears, and we pass from masked subjectivity to objectification and detachment. This is shown by the fact that until almost exactly halfway through the novel the location is indoors, and even afterwards there is a lack of outdoors, and therefore the novel, which almost entirely consists of dialogues alternating with stage directions, could even be taken to be a sort of play, or at least be easily dramatized. Bennett at first misleads us into thinking that he has launched a burlesque comedy that is slightly lame and difficult to drive onwards, but soon spices it up with a bit of a thrilling storyline. And for the absence of any psychological depth to the characters, removed from both realism and romanticism, and made into improbable and incoherent puppets with no past; and for the growing

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intrigue, and also a death on stage, it takes his inspiration from light crime fiction, pre-empting Agatha Christie. An unreal and surreal pastiche, a string of unlikely vicissitudes of a pair of Americans, father and daughter, who want to be, insist on being, amateur detectives, and who stubbornly refuse to involve the police and sometimes guess right: such is The Grand Babylon Hotel. The absurd and delightfully improbable tone of the plot is confirmed in the rapid sketching out of the initial stages within the sumptuous Babylon Hotel in London, named after the owner. Here we witness, with no preamble whatsoever, the rudeness of the American millionaire ordering his favourite aperitif, which the proud head waiter refuses him, the analogous affront of demanding steak and beer for dinner, thus violating the sacred code of etiquette, followed by the coup de théâtre, the rich American buying the hotel there and then. Only a dash of formerly Trollopian satire is directed against the stupid or just pragmatic mentality of the Americans; just as a few words and a few deadly quips are enough to break through the wall, so to speak, of the hotel’s legendary irreproachability and decorum; and similarly few are employed to dispel the assumption that those of satire are the primary objectives of the novel. The new American owner – and as in theatre the unity of time persists in this sort of first act of the play – starts to suspect, and then has the confirmation, that the head waiter, the one with whom he had a brusque exchange of views, is pulling the strings in a political intrigue, and the shrewd and cheeky Helen, daughter of the magnate, as an almost professional detective tries to shed light on the affair. It is only then that the unity of place breaks down and the novel, now with a double focus, moves to Ostend, where the intrigue – at the expense of the ridiculous prince of a minuscule German state – comes to light. Since the novel is not plausible in the slightest, and the intrigue is dismantled and the spectator or reader deliberately alienated, and also bearing in mind the German connection, it comes naturally to think of a slight Ruritanian imitation.18 The political and dynastic intrigue is deliberately complex for the pleasure of declaring it hypothetical and improbable: at the centre is a King of Bosnia who wants to marry a princess who instead prefers an 18

As one reviewer noted (CRHE, 150).

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indebted minor German prince who must therefore be made to disappear. The amateur detectives’ game goes on, and the fantastical details are straight out of a chilling Gothic novel, whose chills burst like a soap bubble and evaporate into the humorous comedy, and thus in misunderstandings, always and only temporarily, at the edge of probability. The ending is exciting and almost like a fairy-tale. All sorts of fanciful vicissitudes play out, and the villain, the ex-waiter, is pursued and finally captured but, as slippery as an eel, he dies alone; in the meantime the German prince in desperation attempts suicide, and is saved by the magnanimity of the two Americans, because the millionaire kindly lends him the huge sum necessary to wed his princess. And his uncle of the same age ties the knot with the astute little lady that is the millionaire’s daughter. The fairy-tale happy ending, with the honours bestowed on the magnanimity of the Americans, occurs without the intervention of a single policeman. 5. Bennett maintained a fondness for the crime genre and came back to it any time he wanted to earn something by writing an enticing text of pure entertainment, according to an infallible formula. Hugo (1906) is one of these quick crime novels, all built on action, adventure and plot twists,19 and of shallow psychological exploration, whose art lies in concealing or denying art, because conceived according to the anticipatory technique of the estrangement of the crime novel itself. The plot hinges on three brothers pitting their cunning against each other to obtain the love and the hand of a woman, a beautiful shop assistant; of the three, one is the villain who, to win her over, resorts to numerous stratagems which in turn set others in motion. One of the three suitors has everyone believe that the woman is dead by placing a perfect imitation in the coffin, made of wax by a sculptor. The eponymous character, the owner of a department store, acts like Des Esseintes and every morning wakes up to the sound of Wagnerian choruses and leitmotifs. The action is set in Bennett’s second place by election after the grand hotel: the department store, or rather the futuristic multi-store of the third millennium, where every commercial need associated with life 19

The intrigue comes to light thanks to a sort of Beckettian Krapp’s last tape, a recorded disc, listened to on the gramophone, by the shop girl’s husband before dying a natural death.

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can be satisfied. The phenomenology of the department store is sketched out in masterful overviews; it swarms with life especially when there are sales, and the effect is a foretaste of Harrods. § 19. Arnold Bennett III: The Five Towns novels I. ‘Anna of the Five Towns’ Anna of the Five Towns (1902), still small-scale, is another change in direction and another unexpected test: one more hopeless option, in some ways, in favour of a third genre in which to try oneself and bring out a more personal note. Indeed it turns back towards the region of Staffordshire whence Richard Larch had departed, and when in one of the five towns the matronly figure of Larch’s aunt, Mrs Vernon, reappears, Bennett reminds us of Trollope and other Victorian narrative cycles in which some characters are transplanted to a series of novels related to each other by the unity of place. There seems to be no double of Larch himself, though, in this new storyline, a sign of Bennett’s striving for an objectification, even if the protagonist is a girl of the same age who, being female, shares Larch’s penchant for daydreaming, escapism and luxury, but she conceals them and represses them. If we knew nothing comprehensive, profound and precise about that male hero’s place of origin, now, since this female heroine is imprisoned in her native region, Bennett can tell us all about it. This northern area has an antique flavour, and the novel is anachronistic, almost a parody of the decentralized and provincial Victorian novel. For this very reason it conjures up familiar characters and atmospheres and does not seem to be very far from an imitation of well-known models, that is stories written about the oppression and repression of natural instincts, and about spiritual suffocation, in which religion and family wield the main influence. The intrigue of passions and the suffused and smothered throbbings of twenty-one-year-old Anna Tellwright, daughter of a miserly speculator,20 a fresh and prudish Sunday school teacher, was therefore following in the footsteps of a long tradition. Bennett really wants to shelter himself under the protective wing of a Dickens, especially of a George Eliot, a Gaskell and a Hardy. The usurer and the motherless son or daughter are the quintessence

20 ‘Miser’ is the term almost always used to designate Anna’s father in the novel.

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of Dickens, from Nickleby to Dombey senior to Scrooge.21 George Eliot, on the other hand, had imposed a monopoly on that same area, more or less, ambiguously insisting on the at once hampering and progressive effect of Methodism. The female oppression which Anna is a victim of is a result of history, but religious practice is jointly responsible for it, and Bursley where she lives is a Methodist enclave. Bennett, irreligious and calmly atheist, cannot but describe, but without any resentful polemic, the surviving fanaticism of the Methodist chapels,22 for example in revival week, referring also to the religious fanaticism that strikes the congregation listening to the preaching of an impassionate minister.23 As George Eliot had shown in Bulstrode, the Methodism of the mining and industrial areas could be a rather immoral pretext, and conceal a speculation that was anything but charitable, since the teachers and organizers of the religion are also the small but enterprising local industrialists. This also illustrates a village capitalism which no longer has anything to do with that religiousness it hypocritically leans on. But, with Hardy, Bennett is suddenly a regional and sociologist

21

22

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Old Tellwright does not evict the tenant Price, and keeps him on the verge of bankruptcy, because he would then have to upgrade the furnace, which nobody would be interested in due to its derelict state: he limits himself to claiming a small share of the back rent every so often. This too is a reinterpretation of old Casby in Dickens’s Little Dorrit. As in Dickens, human nature is unpredictable, and the cruel egoist Tellwright fathers two daughters who are the epitome of altruism. The chapel-goers are mostly women, and the weakening of Methodism’s grip on the working classes is inexorable, as is by now the detachment, if not the gap, between work, enjoyment of life’s pleasures, and faith. The Methodist chapel is half empty as were the much more numerous ones in Coketown in Dickens’s Hard Times. It is also true that this transitional phenomenon means that the daughters of sanctimonious rich women are now painters and musicians who have taken up a lifestyle more in keeping with the times. Anna is portrayed as an archaic icon of early Pre-Raphaelitism, and often the novelist applies to her the metaphor of the cloister and the image of the nun. A reproduction of Hunt’s painting, The Light of the World, hangs on the dining room wall (Bennett’s familiarity with art can also be seen in the description of Willie Price’s eyes, which have ‘the meek gentleness of Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat’). But the great Methodist spiritual retreat fails to kindle in her more fervent feelings of faith, and instead leads her to the brink of abjuration.

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narrator, whose premise is that the character is the result of the context where he lives. In an overview Bennett illustrates the historical stratification which has occurred since the time of King Alfred, and looks back nostalgically to the uncontaminated purity of a nature strained and violated by the Industrial Revolution, in a mixed landscape in which the old country house overlooks the modern construction, the farm and the factory. We are, nonetheless, compared to George Eliot’s ‘scenes of clerical life’, to Adam Bede, and especially to Middlemarch, one quarter and three quarters of a century ahead respectively, and Bennett’s novel no longer revolves around the mine now, but around the area of the furnaces which produce pottery. 2. The second part, more monotonous and static, still restrained and restricted to the area of the town and based on a few characters on stage, hurls Anna into a moral maelstrom from which she barely manages to save herself; or rather she loses herself and succumbs. The first obstacle is her father’s rough insensitivity, which she must support against her will, having to visit the poor tenants and persistently demand the rent; the second is sentimental, the love which blossoms in her for the young Methodist industrialist Henry Mynors, who is also her father’s partner. Mynors is not a negative character, he is reasonably sensitive and frank, reliable and thoughtful, even though his Methodism is the same as the others’, that is subsumed, at the end of the day, by self-interest. Anna’s intimacy nevertheless remains the focal point; on the one hand she feels the pangs of dutiful compassion towards the poor Prices, and she feels morally guilty for driving Price’s father to suicide; on the other hand she experiences a Gaskellian24 emotional ambiguity that leads her to reluctantly accept Mynors’ proposal of marriage,25 and to realize too late that she loves Willie Price more, when 24 As well as the partly recurring scenarios, this fiery femininity, albeit prudish and obliging, hiding beneath the ashes, is really conspicuous in the novel. Bennett dedicates a couple of pages to the admiring description of Anna’s neat and tidy kitchen, which is so spotless that ‘you could eat off the floor’. It is the same kitchen, dining room or living room that corresponds to ‘house-place’ in Gaskell’s novels and short stories (Volume 5, § 104.5). 25 In the long episode, itself well told and varied, if dilatory, of the holiday on the Isle of Man, which is the symbolic place, all too close, of escape for Anna, and where the declaration of love therefore takes place.

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he is already on the point of emigrating to Australia. It is on Anna that the burden of Methodism weighs most heavily, because she deludes herself that she loves Willie more and does not realize that what she feels is only remorse and a sense of compensation. Too late is also the attempt to transform her plight into a paradigmatic feminist parable, with Anna realizing the ‘profound truth that a woman’s life is always a sacrifice, small or large’. 3. The reservoir of stories about the Five Towns became inexhaustible from then on, at least until 1916, and Bennett’s major novels are complemented by other minor ones and collections of stories and tales set there. One such collection, The Grim Smile of the Five Towns (1907), confirms that there was in the geographical area of the United Kingdom more than one omphalos from which one could recount the phenomenology of provincial life. This series of thirteen short stories precedes Joyce’s Dubliners by a few years, even though it certainly does not revolve around the central idea of paralysis. They are all effectively set almost contemporaneously for the many internal references and proofs, but in the Five Towns the pace of life was always relative, and a relative standstill. Nor does the wind of modernity really blow in these short stories, even though the community strives and craftily applies itself in order to improve their material life. Bennett, though, has slightly, if not radically, changed the tone of the story. Earlier he was, and he would have been immediately afterwards too, the Homer of provincial epos and pathos; now he discovers bathos. The demythologization, however, gives rise to a new mythologization: life within the closed perimeter of the town – because everything still happens in Bursley – is a senseless and absurd puppet show, a farce then, or an occasionally fierce satire which closely examines pettiness and pretensions, and the fall of ideals and aspirations.26 The result is then not all that different from that of Joyce, albeit by a different route. Indeed even Bennett has the makings of a pure portrayer and raconteur, and there is not a single case 26 See this beginning, from the tenth story: ‘We are a stolid and a taciturn race, we of the Five Towns. It may be because we are geographically so self-contained; or it may be because we work in clay and iron; or it may merely be because it is our nature to be stolid and taciturn. But stolid and taciturn we are; and some of the instances of our stolidity and our taciturnity are enough to astound’.

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in which the story is not a narratively infallible device. The human cases are local, contingent as well as universal, and are those of the twilight of Romanticism, overwhelmed by purely material reasons.27 The short novel The Card (1910) is in turn a ‘career’, an appropriate eighteenth-century term because the protagonist Denry Michin is not a libertine or a trollop, but simply a likeable braggart, the son of a poor seamstress who with initiative and presence of mind, and with amiable stunts and boasts, gets on well in Bursley. The template remains that of Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon, with time and place only slightly adapted: the rise of the tenacious son of the people. The stages of his career, all opened by the astonishing exploits of the bold Denry, are narrated with supreme grace and lightness by a brilliant consummate comedy writer as ever Bennett is.28 The Card in fact deserves an important place in the universal anthology of English humour for the 27

28

The story of the brothers Horace and Sidney is worthy of Boccaccio: the latter is sickly and cared for by his brother, whose girlfriend he steals in the end. The final story is the pure macabre farce of an undertaker who slips some gorgonzola into the coffin of a dead child who has miraculously come back to life. In other stories the focus shifts to the revealing neuroses of social awkwardness. The manager of the power station pretends that there is a power cut so that he can be there at his young son’s bath-time; or two brothers do not speak to each other for ten years, communicating by means of a blackboard, after fighting over a woman. A sharper satire is directed at the snobbery described in four interconnected tales, that of Vera Cheswardine, wife of a pottery magnate; they make fun of this snob’s exhibitionist urges, her obsession with luxury and her comical or pathetic faux pas. ‘The Death of Simon Fuge’, the longest and most excessively praised of these short stories, and almost a short novel in itself, in its varied and lively plot shows on the one hand the philistinism of the community that barely knows the name of a famous painter from the town, and on the other hand reveals how undeserved his fame is. One parameter by which to measure the still Victorian setting of this story is, in one of the stages of his career, Denry’s job as a rent collector from destitute tenants for an intransigent landlord. Denry represents the paradoxical kindness of usury as a Dickensian, kindly rent collector, who pays people’s rent from his own pocket after agreeing a small interest payment: in this way he saves many from being evicted. An even more impressive project, which he carries out, is the foundation of a local savings bank. Denry, then, always stands, morally speaking, on the dividing line between honesty and cynicism; in practice his neo-capitalism is, at least as a by-product, always philanthropic.

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number of exhilarating episodes which in turn beget others of a comedy which is always fresh and sparkling. Denry is the classic accidental hero gifted with the guile and level-headedness necessary to turn difficult situations around in his favour, and even to profit from them, encouraged by a sixth sense that tells him that ‘life is a series of coincidences’ and that ‘all great changes find their cause in coincidence’. His is the ‘calm sagacity in a supreme emergency’. The far-seeing intuition of small- and large-scale speculation is precisely the Thackerayan consequence of the psychosis and obsessions of fools or less cunning people, who await nothing other than the exploiter to come along and exploit them. The most exhilarating episode, overflowing with endless humorous and satirical implications, is that, quintessentially Dickensian and Thackerayan, about the middle-class holiday in the seaside town of Llandudno, where Bennett yet again shows himself to be worthy of his predecessors in intensifying the pretensions of holidaying folk, and where Denry offers an astonishing demonstration of his business flair by exploiting people’s curiosity. The very pragmatic Denry marries a lively daughter of middle-class parents but cultivates a reciprocated, keen interest, which is both romantic and chivalrous, and therefore impossible to satisfy, for a countess, from whom the still callow Denry, having sneaked into the bigwigs’ ball, asks and obtains a dance; this female phantom reappears in another comical situation, the race through the streets of the town on a cart pulled by a frisky mule to get the countess to an important ceremony on time.29 § 20. Arnold Bennett IV: The Five Towns novels II. ‘The Old Wives’ Tale’ The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), the most beautiful and intense of all Bennett’s novels, is an absolute masterpiece, and could very well challenge Conrad’s Nostromo for the title of the greatest English Edwardian novel. The two novels are, however, completely different. Without the slightest formal experimentation, The Old Wives’ Tale can be defined as the last of the Victorian saga novels after the temporal and official end of 29 The Card had a less fortunate sequel in The Regent (1913) and in Mr Prohack (1922), the latter an employee at the treasury who unexpectedly inherits £ 100,000 which allow him, without losing his wits, to wallow in luxury and to witness post-war euphoria.

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Victorianism; and it therefore demonstrates that Victorianism is timeless, and endowed with absolute narrative rules, which are such by definition. It seems like a perfect replica, a fake, an imitation, and its position would ideally be between George Eliot’s Adam Bede and Middlemarch, and together with the great and small Victorian comical and therefore satirical sagas of Cranford, Barchester or Carlingford; and though these are not entirely the settings and characters of Thackeray, and the more powerful tragedy is lacking, Bennett’s all-seeing, detached, Olympian viewpoint would also remind one of Thackeray, the Thackeray of Vanity Fair. For this very similarity, it has the breath of the great polyptychs, the majesty, the solemnity often tinged with humour, and the epic tone, of War and Peace and Les Misérables. Being ‘Victorian’ then, this masterpiece lacks by definition an examination of the most secret and jumbled layer of impulse, for example sexual, and it is a considerable tardiness. 2. In his private macrotext, Bennett has finally found his way, he has established a continuity, and decided to base a long string of novels on unity of place, though not exactly of time; and the distinctive places of the town of Bursley recur unchanged and are cardinal points; except that the fulcrum of life and the town economy are now no longer earthenware, but a glorious fabric shop, that of the Baines family. The novel is constructed like a cathedral, with its imposing total bulk, its complex subdivision into books, in turn subdivided into chapters and subchapters. And the parts form almost suspensive scansions, with closures referring to imminent openings and turning points that are not always easily guessed at. However, if indeed it is a cathedral, then it is a Baroque cathedral: the loom is overflowing, the warp made up of a thousand threads, whirling and teeming with minor characters and local digressions and separate little scenes, the miracle of which is that they are never contrived, but absolutely natural. Bennett has given in to a veritable anecdotal frenzy. The other aspect of the antique slant is a historical novel, or if not historical, at least backdated, which almost always hides its dates under allusions, and whose time frame spans from 186230 to the time of writing. Were it not that, all in all, it is largely a 30

The start date of the plot, 1862, can be determined from the fact that Bishop Colenso had ‘just staggered Christianity’ and the American Civil War had just broken out.

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half-century-long story about a family and two sisters taken up from their adolescence, which could even be said to be mid-Victorian. The test of a replica, a reconsideration and a remake comes from the narrator’s gaze, which should be benevolent rather than harsh and condemning, which confirms the impartial position of a Thackeray.31 Bennett has no friends in this novel, he does not choose targets for satire, but neither does he have enemies; above all, he has no spokesperson, or contrastive icon. He had showed the rebellion at its root in his first Five Towns novel, now he seems to return to that root never before described and stay there for a while. His presumed modernity was liquidated in A Man from the North. With this arises a detached, classical vision of those facts that belonged to Bennett’s own father’s generation. The aspects which make The Old Wives’ Tale a second Vanity Fair, as has been said, and even a pale imitation of War and Peace are, amongst others, at least two. Bennett has a lucidly, not tragically, pessimistic vision of history and of the tail end of the Victorian period. It is, therefore, a vision that is on the whole melancholy. Nostalgia for the immobility associated with the old pottery village is hidden by weakness, narrowmindedness and hypocrisy. Like all English country sagas, from George Eliot to Trollope, that of Bursley is a saga of human stupidity, of vain ambition, even of the pity inspired by man. Bennett too, like Thackeray, is seeking a hero but cannot find one. The Baines sisters, so fresh in their puberty, are already corrupted, ruined and embittered by little signs which we detect in the opening scenes. Straightaway Bennett pretends to genetically diversify them and to try and impose on them, which he effectively does, the conflict between Constance’s static duty and Sophia’s evasive romanticism. The objective of the novel is to show that these are two solutions leading down different roads of an identical disenchantment and disappointment: the sober life of a mother and wife is no more fulfilling and gratifying than the life of the paramour sister far from the family home. Constance and Sophia are not different and they both end up disappointed. A similar premise is supported by the fact that the characters naturally degenerate, deteriorate and, by some strange and capricious Darwinian law of heredity, are thrust 31

Bennett preached that the novelist should have a ‘Christ-like, all embracing compassion’.

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into a largely presumed romanticism which turns out to be a boomerang. Constance does not realize that she married an idiot who, though, is at least stubbornly devoted to his family and work; Sophia makes a colossal mistake in believing that she loves the ne’er-do-well Gerald. But Bennett does not hide the fact that Cyril, Constance’s son who falls in with a bad crowd, looks strangely like his aunt Sophia. It is, in conclusion, a representation of the English merchant class and the moral dead end in which it was stuck at the end of the Victorian miracle. 3. The Old Wives’ Tale is representative, especially representative because it wants to be or at times is incapable of not being so. The storyline, so planned, must translate routine of middle-class life onto the page without ruffles, but the historical background autonomously gains the upper hand over the inventive story. Such references are incidental, given en passant, at other times more forced: the effect is that of a chronicle play in which the story of the two sisters is set, and not vice versa. The crisis of the organic model of the English middle class of the unspoiled suburbs unfolds before our eyes, focusing on long-brooding impulses ready to explode: sensual urges – Sophia – and irreligious and immoral urges, not only emotional but also moral indiscipline. Bennett then, by virtue of certain apparently dilatory episodes, leaves behind the realm of Thackeray and enters that of Dickens with its revealing tics. It is a fact that in the novel Sophia and her nephew Cyril, joined by a bond unbeknownst to them, are not only scruffy and often not very clean, but also liars and kleptomaniacs. The model of the law-abiding Methodist middle class is crumbling at its supporting pillars. And that is not all; a small-time village hedonism prevails and gains the upper hand:32 the murderous folly is especially Dickensian. Not only is a crazed elephant punished by death – a surrogate – but also the bestknown baker in the village murders his drunken wife in a fit of rage, which

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The litmus test is fashion: crinoline goes out of fashion in the town much later than anywhere else, and one day in 1893 Cyril turns up as a ‘new man’, described, with the not very successful and too excessive technique of estrangement which Bennett often resorts to, as ‘secured […] by means of glittering chains’. The ‘modern’ Sophia, just arrived in Paris, must admit that her clothes are old-fashioned and the first thing she does is to pay a visit to a dressmaker.

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lifts the veil on two scourges, not only that of murder but also of female drunkenness, the cause of which is to be interpreted both sociologically and psychologically. 4. The opening stages seem to be written by a writer wishing to respond methodically to the criticisms that can be raised against Bennett’s previous novels, which were in fact short stories with modest action distributed over a short period of time, and with a much reduced pool of characters. The first sixth of The Old Wives’ Tale turns this structure on its head. The model of the Victorian provincial novel flashes past in the spatial and temporal prelude, especially in the meticulousness with which small and often even insignificant actions are lovingly and humorously described: in the epic of the chores of a timeless village and its habits, customs and traditions, and in the decision to broaden the range of characters who, especially the incidental ones, are given a very Victorian introduction complete with profile of their life and works, and above all their idiosyncrasies. The narrative focus is of course always on a closed space, a haberdashery, but this basin is crowded with figures and larger-than-life characters, and open to visits from customers and neighbours. These incursions of minor ­characters – shop assistants, the maid,33 the chemist, the doctor, relatives – make the narrative flow at the very least comfortable and copious. So the novel is multifaceted, the story of everyday lives in a village in a still static region of England, and as much a story of little signs of transition in a sleepy, old-style milieu, as it is the case of the two Baines sisters who soon begin to stand out from the other characters. At times, the first intention almost prevails, that of offering a diorama of this England, which in 1908 had been definitively swallowed up. It is the second time that Bennett chooses the empathy of a female character. Nor can he hide the fact that, although he has decided to build the novel around the two sisters, it is Sophia, the romantic, rebellious and runaway dreamer, who is his alter ego or the closest to his alter ego. 33

Maggie the maid is taken from Dickens, in whose novels the maids often bear this name: she lives in a kitchen which is like an underground cave and, by the happy coincidences of the Victorian novel, leaves her service at the Baines household to marry a travelling fish-monger who appears in the opening pages.

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5. Bennett manages for the first time to keep a huge narrative web going. In the first part, which covers the period from 1862 to 1867, as already mentioned the point of view is within the Baines’ shop adjoining the spacious house which looks onto the main square in the village of Bursley. As in Emily Brontë, the undivided unity of the two sisters, two perfectly equal halves of a single whole, diverges as they grow up: one, Constance, nomen est omen, becomes the repository of the solid middle-class values of business; her feet are firmly on the ground, and she is indifferent to dreams and fantasies. The other, Sophia, is the life of contemplation and dreams, the romantic Sehnsucht, of course adapted to the values and parameters of the static province. The Baines family and the routine of the shop offer a chance for humour which is sharp and biting, but never coarse and intrusive or giving rise to gags just for a laugh; rather it is contained and restrained. However, all Bennett actually does is to repeat, with taste, balance and efficacy, a script already used a thousand times in the well-worn Victorian macrotext. The Old Wives’ Tale could also be given the Chekhovian title of Two Sisters, though it is in fact a wink at an Elizabethan play of the same name by Peele.34 But Victorian narrative and poetry really is overflowing with stories about two contrasting sisters belonging to a family of the merchant classes. This contrast between good sense and folly, between adventurous romanticism and attachment to routine, is the same as that the two sisters in ‘Goblin Market’ by Christina Rossetti.35 Although not sisters, it is that of Becky and Amelia in Vanity Fair; of Rosamond, Mary and Dorothea in Middlemarch. And Sophia also shares a timid country Bovarysm. In fact 34 The term ‘wives’ also occurs in Gaskell and her unfinished masterpiece Wives and Daughters, which can also be counted as one of the models for this novel, for the title, the content and the binary structure. Bennett’s two sisters are stepsisters in Gaskell’s novel, and in their portraits she injects that little bit of devilry and dreaminess which is unknown to Bennett. Concerning this doubling of the heroine, Bennett claimed to have ‘gone one better’ than Une vie by Maupassant; but in the field of French models, Allen 1948, 63–4 (who refers to Lafourcade 1939) indicates a lesser novel by Balzac. 35 Particularly Rossettian is the page describing the two sisters sleeping in the same bed. The adolescent Sophia, like Rossetti’s Laura, is also caught wandering the city streets alone in the early scenes.

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the transgressive and impatient rebellion against the rules on the part of Sophia, divided and lacerated by a double allegiance, is announced in small portents. Her denial is proverbially fed by school and by reading: first she refuses to work in the shop once she has finished her studies, and she asks for and is granted the possibility to teach in a school; then she falls for the exotic in the form of a travelling salesman who lived for a while in Paris. The death of her father is emblematic, because he dies from suffocation at precisely the time his daughter, yielding to her romanticism, neglects her duty to tend to him in his sickness. Her remorse at being the cause of the calamity does not last long. The consequences of Sophia’s elopement from the family home together with the travelling salesman is something of a sensation in the static climate of the village, and it is a hard blow for her mother. 6. The Old Wives’ Tale, which has a lot of material and temporal development and broadness of scope, skips over various events as it moves forward, and in the second part Constance is already married to the stupid and clumsy shop assistant Samuel Povey, who has already featured in episodes bordering on the grotesque36 which illustrate just what a dimwit he is. This too is an error, and it turns out to be such in due course. In a new section, which opens with the sisters now mature, Sophia shows up in Paris, whence she sends a Christmas card, and in the meantime Mr and Mrs Povey force out the old owners of the shop. The stupid Povey, who is still a blunderer, turns out not to be so stupid because he adopts the status symbols of successful middle-class people: he gets himself a dog which performs acrobatic tricks, which is also a reference to Dickens; he smokes cigars, carries out innovations and modernization at the shop. A few creaks are noticeable because Constance, who is not romantic, is still more romantic than her stony-faced husband. But this second part begins as a transition, and accumulates episodes which are more or less incisive and enjoyable, but comical, approaching a climax which looms and waits. It is narrated from

36

Like the two sisters’ inspection of his mouth, where there is a dangling tooth which Povey is afraid to have pulled by a dentist; later he believes he has swallowed it, but in fact one of the sisters had removed it while he was asleep.

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the point of view of Constance, not with the pendulum-like rhythm of the previous chapters, one by one dedicated to one or other of the sisters (as in Thackeray, who springs to mind – Amelia Sedley – when the narrative fabric has to account for the routine and the daily chores of her own household, with no high notes, something very difficult in a novel). It is dead calm and needs revitalizing, which is done via two expedients: Povey becomes ever more obtusely and blindly middle-class, Constance lives her life solely for her son Cyril, but Cyril goes off the rails, he is depraved and violent, and also a petty thief; he also becomes, following a model that reminds us of Thomas Mann and Buddenbrooks, an artist, and therefore also a scruffy young man with little regard for cleanliness. He is, in other words, son of the secret moral weakness of both Constance and, especially, Povey. The other dilatory expedient is only just plausible, because it leads indirectly to the death of Povey himself and the widowing of Constance. There is a scandal in the village, as a cousin of Povey kills his own drunken wife and is then tried and sentenced to death. In itself this sensational and sensationalist parenthesis makes up one of the signals that the historical backdrop is slowly changing over the course of the 1880s, and reveals that the small-town staticness itself starts to wrinkle after all; it is a symbol of a psychological oppression by now uncontainable. Customs were slowly evolving, or we could even say being corrupted. But Povey, to get his cousin acquitted and pardoned, destroys his health and suffers the consequences. The author’s comment, the epitaph on his death, which is so similar to Thackeray’s remarks in Vanity Fair, is a rather explicit declaration of poetics given in person by the narrator Bennett, and it reconfirms the attitude over the parts which he assumes or recites before his polyptych: ‘Samuel Povey never could impose himself on the burgesses. He lacked individuality. He was little. I have often laughed at Samuel Povey. But I liked and respected him. He was a very honest man. I have always been glad to think that, at the end of his life, destiny took hold of him and displayed, to the observant, the vein of greatness which runs through every soul without exception. He embraced a cause, lost it, and died of it’. An oblique heredity, as I was saying, instils Sophia’s romanticism and indiscipline in Cyril, the son of Constance and Povey. But Cyril is an adolescent before and right after the beginning of the 1890s, and Bennett, as an astute and plausible historian,

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makes him an independent, dishevelled, small-town aesthete, and a decadent bohemian. If this style was the closest to that of the young Bennett, Cyril is a substitute of Larch from his first novel, and indeed the young man leaves the village one day to venture towards London, with the same vague baggage and ideological objective of a life of pleasure and profligacy. 7. Sophia threatens to become another key character in Victorian fiction, and therefore yet another reprise, the ‘fallen woman’. The runaway’s disagreements with her husband Gerald Scales crop up the day after their f  light to London, and the romantic disillusion explodes as soon as they set foot in Paris, where the couple intend to live, cut off and inconclusive, a life in which romanticism proverbially wilts and loses its novelty. On the one hand the novel fatally reveals the weakness and lack of depth of the psychological narrator in this third stage; on the other hand, however, assuming that Bennett has taken refuge from psychology in pure representation, his truly superb ability to spice up and rekindle scenes already seen is reconfirmed and pleasantly verified. A fugitive English couple in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century is of course nothing new in English novels. And Bennett leads his couple into the usual venues of the Hotel Meurice, the dressmaker, the restaurant. Here at least Gerald’s true wretched and stupidly and inconstantly whimsical soul is gradually revealed to Sophia, whom we knew as a romantic, but who, facing human weakness and the falsity of Parisian affectation, dusts off her English common sense and withdraws, showing herself to be a solid and decent middle-class woman at heart. Gerald is a scoundrel: he lives off his inheritance, pleads poverty and urges his wife to write home asking for money; he is a narcissist, a liar, a scrounger, and is unfaithful to Sophia with prostitutes. All this is exemplified in anecdotes which are remarkably effective in terms of scene, dialogue and pure representation. Gerald unwittingly demonstrates his villainy, his meanness and his cowardice during a dispute at the restaurant; but Bennett’s masterpiece of representation is the protracted episode of an execution in Auxerre – in itself an event that obsessed Victorians, depicted ad nauseam in novels and poetry – when the husband’s stupidity and boastfulness and Sophia’s trepidation place themselves within the mass movements. This picturesque polyptych has a remarkable overall effect while conveying the minutiae and acute, even humorous, psychological details. With her

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remote and residual common sense, once her romanticism has subsided, Sophia in a short time sees her dream of escaping come to an end, and the colossal gravity of her error about her husband and about passion all too suddenly burnt up. And, mindful of George Eliot’s Romola, Bennett has her enter into a typically English phase of firm and lucid regret. In the second half of the Parisian part, Bennett really shows off his narrative skills, always great when synthetic, descriptive and objective, and now just as great even when used analytically. He could at most just recreate with his imagination or from history books, or by hearsay, the atmosphere in Paris at the end of the second empire, the Prussian war, the siege of the city and the Commune. In fact this vast episode does not contain a single scene which does not seem real and come alive on the page, as if it was from an eyewitness. We watch as Sophia’s metamorphosis unfolds, which, with her ice-cold English pride, imposes a sort of ‘moral superiority’ over the weak and corrupt Parisian France. This metamorphosis begins with a symbolic fever, caught after the abandonment she suffers at the hands of Gerald, and which really could make her a ‘fallen woman’:37 cured of the fever and cared for by two sympathetic French ladies who live hand to mouth, she sets about bringing back order, organization, discipline, shrewd work and duty to the chaos that surrounds her. She gradually comes to understand that this is the compensation for and the narcosis of her emotional misadventure, and she becomes a lucid and prudent hosteller.38 Of course the belated price of her hasty and foolish elopement and of her giving in to romance is the negation and expulsion of her eros; it is even the unconscious re-emergence of the thrift and foresight of a merchant’s daughter, or ex-daughter. The small economic empire which Sophia establishes in

37

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In the first draft of the novel Sophia was to become a prostitute like one of Zola’s, a ‘magnificent courtesan’ (CRHE, 218). A courtesan, but Parisian, who marries a rich, fifty-year-old Englishman, is at the centre of Bennett’s 1918 feuilleton, The Pretty Lady, which was attacked by English Catholic groups (CRHE, 83) because the prostitute is somehow ‘respectful’ and prays to the Virgin Mary. Bennett repeats the episode of the lodging house or hotel, always unavoidable for him; even when Sophia returns to England she and her sister spend a short time in a hotel.

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Paris is based on a capitalistic speculation which is, fundamentally, morally just, not exploitative. Yet the ruthless expulsion of eros, which is successful against the numerous advances of her customers at the boarding-house, is more fragile than the character herself can believe, and Sophia is on the verge of succumbing to the journalist Chirac, who courts her sincerely and prudishly, and again romantically, in the midst of purely bestial shudders. 8. In the field of objectivity, Bennett gives us what is probably the best English imaginary reconstruction of the Paris debacle of 1870–1871. He might be accused of chauvinism, but unjustly. He is undoubtedly lethal in getting to the heart of the collapse of a France immersed in careless luxury, uninhibited prodigality and moral indiscipline, and creating a terrible image of itself in its representatives ever covered in vainglory, carelessness and sloppiness. In Sophia he highlights the superiority of the English, almost advocating a sort of benign colonialism on the part of the neighbouring civilized nation, and almost alluding to a sort of Kipling’s ‘burden’ which the English would have had to take on in order to come to the aid of the French nation in distress, as fruit also of the ever ill-concealed anti-Prussian sentiment of his fellow countrymen. The aid lavished by Sophia can be applied with those eminently practical and organizational functions she had previously looked down on, so much so that it could be interpreted as a late tribute by Bennett to the model of the composed and calculating middle class which he had previously derided. Except that this apparent chauvinism is made relative by the mean-spiritedness just described of the English village, and by the English, as stupid and ridiculous as the French, who crowd Sophia’s boarding-house after normalization. These English people had come back to visit France as tourists, says Bennett, thanks to the stories of George Augustus Henry Sala, but Sophia rented the boardinghouse from previous owners named Frensham.39 Like the models it draws inspiration from, this grand post-Victorian novel also makes its way to its closure with a denouement bestowed by pure coincidence, though less improbable than the miraculous ones of those models. Sophia is in fact recognized as a Baines, as Sophia Baines, the much talked-about sister

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‘French + sham’.

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of Constance who ran away from one of the Five Towns, by a friend of Cyril’s, Constance’s son, on holiday in Paris. This happens as the result of an assumption borne out by the physical resemblance between aunt and nephew, thus confirming the oblique heredity I have mentioned and the spiritual closeness of the two characters, at least originally, in the symbolic sphere of the romance of escape and indiscipline.40 9. The final part once again shows the exasperating slowness with which the novel had begun. The scene of the meeting at the station attempts to describe the awkwardness of the two sisters seeing each other again after more than thirty years; but it is awkward and more conventional than usual. In reality Bennett opens and closes this part under the mark of an isotopy, that of the desolemnifying reduction of the epic to the mock-heroic. From the train, before her owner, alights Fossette, a little dog who goes on to form a pair, in the old Baines house on the square, with a fox terrier, and the hilarious skirmishes and the countless amusing developments of this close-knit duo keep the rhythm of the story, which formally closes in 1902, of the household affairs of the two reunited sisters.41 Indeed the reader has always wondered about two things while judging the plausibility of the inventive plot: how come Sophia never felt a desire to see her sister and family again, or even to inquire about them, and to try to find out what fate had befallen the husband who abandoned her. She has barred her heart, and her pride is like a rock, but the chains are fragile and crumbling. In this further and final phase of the novel Sophia is always the one who tries to bring order and a rational purpose to chaos. She seeks concretely to resolve and cure the obsessions of her sister, who is devoted to the house and has a limitless veneration for her son, who does not deserve it. Old age shows itself in the will of both of them to oppose the new, and by the inability of both of them to accept it. This inexorable transition is indicated by humorous incidents, such as the unexpected indiscipline of the housemaids, the electrification of the trams, the new railway lines, the first cars, the noise of the gramophone, and even the political and administrative ferment to 40 Cyril’s mother also notes that he and his aunt are ‘of the same type’. 41 These two frisky dogs have a long and distinguished pedigree in Dickens, Gaskell and Meredith.

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amalgamate the Five Towns into one. Constance, who ‘was suffering from disgust with the modern world,’ is, above all, the tireless bulwark of the archaic, the stubborn custodian of antique values, and behind her is the deluge. Her interpretation of Sophia’s life and death is still the Calvinistic settling of accounts imposed upon a life spent in sin. Sophia in fact dies after being struck by the same paralysis or palsy inherited from her father. It hits her immediately after the second denouement of the novel and the final coup de théâtre. To prevent any possible advantage for pathos, Bennett has her arrive late at her husband’s sickbed when he turns up again; but Bennett also removes and suppresses any repentance or belated regret by having her stand before a repugnant corpse, corrupted by the marks of a horrendous decrepitude. The harmonious death of Constance soon afterwards, the result of her leaving the house to vote against the measure for the administrative fusion of the Five Towns, gloomily announces the end of a cycle and the beginning of another. The closing knells are Cyril’s indifference, and his absence from his mother’s funeral, and the extreme vitality of Fossette the dog, the last of her kind, the only surviving link between the present and the Baines family.42 § 21. Arnold Bennett V: The Five Towns novels III. ‘Clayhanger’ Clayhanger (1910) has the same internal tempo as The Old Wives’ Tale, and its point of departure in 1872 with a male adolescent who, like Sophia and Constance, has finished school; it closes earlier, however, in 1892. But it is not simply a repeat, because from the first lines, having already allowed for this difference in sex, the reader also perceives a more unstructured, weary and unadorned narration, and he misses the lavish and sumptuous sparkle of the previous novel, in which every little movement and every little action seem crafted and studied with infinite care. And the narrative pace has also changed, from that time almost blocked and immobile in the meticulous and microscopic overviews, to broader and more synthetic phases following on from each another. But perhaps it is an illusion: Bennett consciously wants to dry up a style that might have seemed to him 42 On this finale cf. Hepburn’s (1963, 64) interesting comment.

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excessively flowery, which can undoubtedly stand out and displease those who come to it immediately after reading his previous masterpiece – an impression made worse by the breaking up of the story into chapters, in turn divided into very short sub-chapters. The plot struggles considerably before it gets going and defines itself, and heads off monotonous and anonymous. The small-town humour, however, is shaken up by the climaxes of the rows between father and son, and intermittently after we meet Hilda Lessways. This character repeats the success of the Baines sisters; with her entrance, and gradually up until the end, Clayhanger eventually becomes a novel quite different from the one it started out as, that is a detective story in the style of Collins and of Pirandello, or perhaps just a conjugal sensation novel revolving around duplicity and the mystery of a person who at first everyone thinks is unmarried, then claims to be married and is suddenly a widow, and who, as it leaks out, was not married because she wed a bigamist: a novel that, for that very reason, is close to a feuilleton, or to Lady Audley’s Secret, especially in the scenes of the holidaymakers in Brighton, or not far from becoming so. Bennett always holds the reins as an omniscient narrator, but with Hilda Lessways he foregoes his omniscience and reduces it, and pretends to have the same level of knowledge as his characters. 2. Bennett’s Five Towns novels, then, have the peculiarity that each one concentrates on a different commercial activity or trade: after the pottery furnaces, after the fabric shop, a small ‘steam-powered’ printing business seeks to promote itself and make its fortune. But comparable and renewed is the study of the conflict between romanticism and brute materialism in the merchant classes, first reflected in Anna in the contrast between gruff father and sweet daughter, and, until it is dissolved, in the two Baines sisters; here it is taken up again with a son instead of a girl. Edwin Clayhanger comes into the limelight as a green sixteen-year-old who discovers the sense of his individuality, and tries to win his father’s affection but fails in his first trials in a career in his father’s shop. He aspires to his own space in a penthouse where he can enjoy himself freeing his creativity with pastels, and he has his first timid, forbidden escape into the anti-Calvinist realm of the village variety show, where a slightly succinct dancer performs the clog dance (a very chaste reawakening of the senses, and an image which

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will not stop flashing in his mind). His father, who had pulled himself up by his bootstraps, thinks only of business, and there is only the printer with the great voice and a passion for singing who is close to Edwin.43 Edwin earns his stripes when, after the installation of a new machine,44 the f  loor of the rickety workshop is on the verge of collapsing. It is symbolic that the rebel son, who harbours the idea of liberating himself from his father’s slavery, maliciously wishes that the floor really does collapse and that his father’s business be destroyed, but with his presence of mind and with a stratagem he fixes the problem. Suddenly his father warms to him and promotes him in the firm. From here on Clayhanger continues with temporal hiatuses – turning out to match or follow along the same lines as the previous novel,45 but less sumptuous and dressed up, and more linear – the development of a young, imprisoned and dreamy man in the provincial confines of family, education and work. The plot still flows against the backdrop of the changes taking place in the 1870s and 1880s, as seen from a different epicentre in the town and from a different commercial enterprise. Despite the movement that there is, that pronounced sense of small-town staticness thus returns to make itself felt; so Bennett is always the historian of change. 3. That district of the Potteries was an enclave of apocalyptic fatalism. Even as an adult Edwin does not manage to free himself from a certain reverential fear that his gruff father instils in him. He has to lie to him, he never earns his trust, he is always wary. Then there is a whole repeated and recurring religious dispute, the religious dispute typical of Bennett’s novels. Edwin, secretly rebellious, has Calvinist religious practices forced down his throat, and seems like a second Mark Rutherford, who was also the son of a Calvinist printer, in soon having to vilify those devotional practices he is obliged to follow. Even as late as last decades of the nineteenth century the Wesleyans of the English Midlands would still wake up at five on Sunday 43 A noble portrait: when he learns of his boss’s illness, out of respect he promises that he ‘never will […] raise [his] voice in song again’. 44 A symbolic parable of modernity: the ‘steam-printer’ as an example of its imminence. 45 Indeed the Baines’ shop is mentioned several times, and is quite visible in the heart of Bursley, St Luke’s Square.

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mornings to attend the meetings of a debating society, and on one such occasion, in 1873, Edwin publicly supports Bishop Colenso, the f  lag-bearer of all the progressivists; and it is the first sign of his complete loss of faith. Edwin makes acquaintance with art, visual and architectural, discovering one day in Bursley a fine Georgian building which nobody had noticed until then. The flame of rebellion is rekindled, and he writes a cataclysmic letter to his father asking his permission to study to be an architect rather than working as an accountant at the shop. The love of beauty of this escapist who does not escape extends to rare and antiquarian books, another passion that his father cannot comprehend and for which he reproaches him. Finally there is his emotional maturation. The early phases of the novel hint that Edwin might fall in love with the sister of his friend, known as ‘the Sunday’, son of an architect, the very architect who is working on a new house for the Clayhangers, unenthusiastically paid for by the father, who is no spendthrift and begrudges parting with even a single penny. At the Orgreaves’ house, Edwin fleetingly meets a strange guest, a certain Hilda Lessways, who takes an obvious liking to him, which she hides by being coarse and rude. Edwin is intrigued even though she is by no means beautiful or attractive. One of the scenes which really stands out, amongst the many second-rate ones, is the one in which Hilda, unseen by Edwin, follows him on a visit to the building site of his house under construction; in the darkness of night the two of them exchange casual remarks which mask an affinity, especially, for the moment, intellectual, made up of love of poetry and atheist leanings. Edwin, who has just declared his rejection of the faith, has met a kindred spirit who is writhing in the same torment of unbelief.46 4. This new hero, or half-hero, still lives in his town at twenty-six years of age, even though he has created a sort of aesthete’s paradise in a house filled with modern conveniences – even hot running water in the bathrooms – and above all shelves containing sumptuous antique books, books to be handled and admired rather than read. The clash with his 46 An aspect better developed in the sequel, Hilda Lessways, in which the character’s Catholic leanings are used to explain her strange predilection for the poetry of Crashaw.

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father is predictable: he knows nothing of books while Edwin completes his education leafing through the classics, such as Byron, Swift and Voltaire, and even enjoying Bach’s easier preludes. The character of Hilda, and the lightning romance she is at the centre of, save the novel by lending it some belated suspense which reverberates right until the end. Hilda fascinates by virtue of her enigmatic and mysterious behaviour, as well as with her unpredictable comments, which bewitch Edwin. Love is kindled and fanned by friction, by her brusque attitude and sardonic ripostes, as happens. And by her reticence: nothing is known about her or her past and she does not say anything. The rushed engagement with this girl of only twenty-four could bring about a turning point, but she suddenly has to depart: the phrase in a letter she sends Edwin from Brighton long buzzes in his mind, ‘every bit of myself is absolutely yours’, and the ingenuous lad is anxious and believes her only to then find out that she has just got married to another man. He takes the blow, and resigns himself, apparently turning his back on love. This phase keeps us captivated because, like Wilkie Collins, Bennett creates a conjugal detective story fuelling the mystery surrounding the figure and letting the reader sense that it will not all end like that. In the meantime, from the historical point of view, Bennett is as ever skilful with secondary and collective sketches aiming to reflect social and political evolution. Even in the static village of Bursley the workers clamour, strike and demonstrate. In 1887 the region is excited and euphoric for the queen’s Jubilee, and one day the local paperboys sell copies of newspapers hot off the press reporting the parliamentary proposal for Irish autonomy and Gladstone’s famous speech; another phase coincides with the death of Parnell, and one day Edwin is invited to the local dinner for Tory-voting bigwigs and industrialists, and vows to back Labour and vote for the party even if it is defeated. The finale shows an Edwin who, in a prolonged crisis of will, resigns himself, continues to fight with his father, and a few times he even wins, but only because his father falls seriously ill. He leads a sort of aesthetic and amorphous life making a virtue out of necessity; he savours the jealous pleasures of reading in his room, but in that provincial town; and has forgotten about Hilda, or so he believes. Listless, a bit distracted, and inconclusive, he succeeds his father, attempts to modernize the business, but is not made of the same stuff. A steady stream of slowed-down

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chapters is dedicated to the father’s progressive illness and finally his coma. This rude and taciturn character pontificates more than ever, rising to an almost King Lear-like greatness,47 tough but tender on the inside. It is all a wounded pride and sombre introversion that must, however, cave in. The scenes at his bedside capture the contradictions between the dying and the living: Edwin internally loathes his father, and awaits his death as revenge for everything he has had to go through; but he attends his final wheezes with pity and admiration; the scene in which the exasperated son struggles to understand that his father, by now unable to speak, wants to give him the gold watch on a chain is also touching. Edwin is very resilient, and many storms pass over and through him without ruffling him. It is also true that after the scene in which he kisses and falls in love with Hilda he is alienated, disorientated and stunned. It gradually comes to light that Hilda has a lodging house in Brighton, but she is not doing too well. The similarity between Hilda and Sophia Baines is real: both are glamorous and feisty women, but Hilda does not have Sophia’s head for business. Her haughtiness, her extraordinary ability to keep men in check with her mystery, are a cover, the cover of a woman who is married to a bigamist, and who is up to her eyes in debt. Now the boot is on the other foot, it is the man who is jilted even before he gets married.48 Edwin, never very courageous and lacking in initiative, cannot resist the urge to visit Hilda once he learns that she is widowed, but he cannot manage to get any sort of explanation out of the tight-lipped woman, who dismisses him with few words in several inconclusive meetings. This in itself is a recurring motif in Bennett’s fiction, that of two acquaintances meeting, earlier two sisters, and the awkwardness that goes with it. Thus Bennett successfully manipulates a subtle psychological war, in which Edwin switches from 47 The comparison was made, less convincingly, between King Lear and Earlforward in the novel Riceyman Steps, by the reviewer J. Douglas (CRHE, 411). In Edwin’s father Bennett of course reflects the despotic character of his own father. 48 There is growing affection between Edwin and Hilda’s son, left by his mother with friends in Bursley, but the repressed vengeful fury of the forsaken fiancé is given vent in certain exaggerated attentions, for example in the way Edwin pushes the swing much too vigorously for the boy.

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the role of victim and guilty party to that of brusque benefactor, giving the woman the money she needs to save the lodging house from being repossessed. With this act of generosity, Edwin morally overtakes Hilda. A whirlwind of vicissitudes and a steady stream of revelations conclude the novel. Hilda’s young son is almost at death’s door and his mother is forced to run to Bursley, where she reveals at least a part of herself and of her story to her benefactor Edwin. She manages by the skin of her teeth to justify herself, with the phrase ‘My heart never kissed any other man but you!’. The curtain is too quick to fall, suggesting for that very reason that Edwin will marry Hilda. 5. With the final words of Clayhanger Bennett declared closed the first act in a Clayhanger trilogy. Hilda Lessways (1911) goes over the same story from the point of view of Hilda, and is therefore a parallel and retrospective novel which flows towards that day in the plot of Clayhanger in which the young woman reveals her mystery to Edwin for the first time. On a much larger scale this re-examination of the story from a different viewpoint was the same idiosyncrasy of Browning in The Ring and the Book,49 but Bennett does not do enough to experiment some perspective or relativistic effect. The book is hardly successful, with its plot lacking in shocks and high points, spelled out with a professional hand and sheer expertise; moreover, large parts are, inexplicably, a literal repetition of scenes already described. In 1878 Hilda is twenty-one years old and fatherless; combative and emancipated, she has poetic and eclectic tastes, but she is also touchy and moody and ‘generally acted first and reflected afterwards’: a small-town Hedda Gabler, imprisoned in another of the Five Towns and dreaming about a different life. Her passion for the slimy and brash George Cannon50 stems from when Hilda works as a typist at a law firm; the death of her mother accentuates in her, as is often the case in Bennett, a sense of guilt for not having reached her sickbed in time for selfish reasons. The mystery is now exclusively that surrounding the solicitor George Cannon. But, in the company of her 49 This analogy was already clear to the first reviewers (cf. CRHE, 285, 297). 50 However, George turns out to be ‘more sinned against than sinning’ due to the case history of his early marriage. This ‘innocence’ of his is made clear in the successive novel.

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friend Janet, Hilda sees Edwin on the street and, mysteriously even for her, an equally ‘romantic’ passion for the son of the local printer is born. All Bennett does is to retell without variation their first encounters in the hospitable and musical house of the Orgreaves. Browning’s technique only works because Hilda romanticizes from her point of view a character who in his own novel is not romantic at all, and of course she is wrong. By another outcome of relativism, Hilda is subdued with the charming and confident George, haughty and regal with Edwin. In her fragility she lets herself be subjugated by George and marries him, drawn into commercial speculation, that of hotels. In light of the backstory, it is a little Victorian scandal that Hilda has kissed Edwin and got engaged to him when she is already married. But the implications are once again Browningian, and therefore also worthy of a sensation novel, because Hilda, having mended her ways, is about to get engaged to Edwin, and only now do we learn the true reason for her refusal, the fact that she is expecting Cannon’s child. These Twain (1916), which opens and concludes before 1901, remains Victorian in time frame. It follows in slow motion the imperceptible crumbling of a marriage, although the two spouses are always able to patch things up at the eleventh hour. This third act does not shine either, as far as tension is concerned, but trudges forwards at the sleepy pace of a feuilleton. It could be the mimesis of the depreciation of the heroic, because the plot revolves entirely around arid and trivial matters of money, wills, buying and selling houses and business expansion.51 Edwin just married is radiant and there seems to be no apparent reason for a new novel. The blind disagreements arise by mere pretext, because Hilda gradually falls back into the frustration of provincial life, tries to act more like an aesthete and introduces the rituals of a presumed high society of the area; tennis and musical soirees relegate the print shop to the background. The central part is just a little more lively because the case of George Cannon reopens. Hilda appears more than ever as a tempestuous, restless, even trembling, Hedda Gabler. Her ex-husband is nothing more than an alibi for Hilda, who wants to reembrace a romanticism that is suffocated in provincial life, which does not 51

To give an example, the couple’s rows and sulks focus on the opportunity to get new glasses for their stepson George in town rather than in London.

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suit her and which she rebels against. Edwin, in the only dramatic turn of events, must face up to the bigamist when he gets out of jail and pay for his journey to America.52 § 22. Arnold Bennett VI: Trying to keep up in the post-war era As is automatic with Wells, one cannot avoid the temptation or the curiosity to compare Riceyman Steps (1923), a novel which came out after the fateful watershed of 1922, and the most durable and highly praised of Bennett’s post-war novels, with the modernist landmarks of Lawrence, Joyce and Woolf, and to see if Bennett has maintained a position of passive and indifferent defence or of timid acquiescence, or even hurriedly chosen to get in line with them. Apparently the structural changes are showy. Bennett has broken the magic circle of the Five Towns; with that he has also closed with the late Victorian epics and the sagas of the potters, the haberdashers and the printers. The first word of the novel unequivocally proclaims its date, 1919. The unchanging parable of the young man or woman, rebels seeking romantic escapism, has itself given way to the story of a lukewarm and cautious adult passion between an unmarried bookseller and a widow who runs a cake shop, both of them over forty. And this plot unwinds in the heart of London, but is banal and without any aura of the heroic, with a slightly surreal and bizarre tinge which at first brings to mind Meredith’s ‘insipid’ stories. Elsie, the general maid, prudish and honest, who cleans in the two shopkeepers’ houses, displays all the disenchanted purity of Murphy’s fiancée in the eponymous and certainly later novel by Beckett, which will also seem to be itself derived in large part from Meredith. Ultimately, however, one is waiting for a formal renewal, rather than just a change of theme and scenario. Bennett, if he has understood and learnt something from the modernist ferment, has decreased the level of his omniscience. He tries to reserve and contain his invasiveness as a narrator-spectator by using the perverse and often lethal between-the-lines quip, and adopts a neutral and more factual 52

The trilogy became a tetralogy with the even more non-descript The Roll-Call (1918), dedicated to Edwin Clayhanger’s adopted, and Hilda’s biological son, George Edwin Cannon, who in London, before enlisting, is an architect who resembles Constance Baines’s son, Cyril, in his apathy.

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tone with a deliberately naturalistic bent; he has, above all, imperceptibly learnt, and transferred onto the page, the division of the psyche. We often hear, below the spoken and direct dialogue, the unspoken words or thoughts which contrast with what is said; thus the conflict between thought and word emerges. The language of the psyche is intermittent, it moulds itself on the succession of the most varied thoughts, intentions, improvisations, mementos. Psychic mimesis enters the scene. These brushings with the stream of consciousness could of course be completely fortuitous: it is not the first time that characters talk to themselves, mutter or speak fragments of phrases which on the page are linked by the three suspension dots, or that the narrator reads their thoughts by identifying and empathizing with them. In reality almost everything is the same as before, beginning with the place, which is an exact transposition in space and time of the square or squares in Bursley.53 The whole novel takes place in this Riceyman Square in the Clerkenwell area, a square which the eponymous steps lead to, shielding the space of the novel like a closed and circumscribed place. The time frame itself is more compressed, but indeed all the action happens in a small square in a self-sufficient and self-enclosed neighbourhood: more precisely, it is limited to two protagonists who live in two houses opposite each other, and by marrying each other they end up living in just one of them, with their maid Elsie becoming the third protagonist. Earlforward is a forty-year-old bachelor and bookseller who hitches up with a widow who runs a grocer’s: another novel about shops and businesses. Bennett has not changed his spots, and he hastens to add that this district and area of London, where we hear the clattering of the underground, was once a pastoral oasis of balsamic springs and monastic sanctuaries. 2. About ten years later Orwell will seize on the idea of a second-hand bookseller in the novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying.54 Bennett’s bookshop is an early mise en abyme of the past and present readership and the printed book’s path to popularity, as well as of the spheres and layers of consumers in the early 1920s. There are books on display in its two windows which 53 More or less the same is noted by Allen 1948, 42. 54 At the same time, Earlforward is not the secret agent type of Conrad, who admired the novel, but a romanceless shopkeeper with a romantic wife.

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attract two different customers, the general reader and the collector; but the shop is already out of place in a working-class area where hunger is rife and the only things people read are the sports papers and the gutter press, and the customers come from other areas and even from abroad. Orwell will be even more precise, by having his protagonist matching the position of books and genres of books on the various shelves with the frequency of demand and the market trends in almost constant evolution, according to an imaginary diagram of popularity. Earlforward has carried out this survey even if his own bookshop is more like chaos or Babel than Gordon Comstock’s meticulous order. The analysis of the social situation, and the alienation of the socialist intellectual who perceives the inconsistencies of ‘parlour’ socialism, turns out to be alien to Bennett. Earlforward is not exactly an intellectual, nor is he a socialist, although he knows the books he buys and sells, has a nose for business and knows how to do his job. Joe, the fiancé of the widowed maid Elsie, fought in the war and suffers from the traumatic psychosis due to bombing, a shell-shock in the language of the time.55 Such are the peripheral facts, the allusions to the post-first-world-war chronotope. And yet, as I was saying, this is anything but a documentary novel of the post-war period of anxiety or mental illness.56 Elsie too, widowed by the war at twenty-three, is an example and

55

56

It is irresistible to note that this Joe, driven mad by the war, who is about to commit something as crazy as killing his fiancée in a fit of rage with a kitchen knife, is the germ cell of Septimus in Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, who criticized Bennett with good reason. The war passed without leaving lasting scars on Bennett the novelist, and it remains a generic backdrop in his post-war novels The Pretty Lady (cf. above n. 37) and the above-mentioned The Roll-Call. On Bennett’s apathy cf. Lucas 1974, 17. Lord Raingo (1926) is a political roman à clef in which many protagonists of English politics during the war appear under imaginary names (from Lloyd George and Churchill to Bonar Law), and which was found to be similar to Disraeli’s Sybil and to Trollope’s Phineas Finn in its toing and froing between public and private life, although it closes with a classic Bennett scene, the lord’s illness and death. Bennett acquired this material during a brief period in which he was a government functionary. He had also visited the trenches during the war, and written some patriotic journalism.

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an emblem of the wartime crisis, but transcends this emblematic value.57 Earlforward’s sudden anti-communist phobia attempts to convey the sense of menace that was felt even in England due to the socialist uprisings across Europe, but it is more than anything part of his persecution complex and paranoia. 3. From the opening lines of the novel, Bennett misleads the reader by introducing yet another romantic character into the story; later on he tears his protagonist apart. If nothing else, Earlforward loves the past, and is curious about history and local traditions; his ancestors, the Riceymans, gave their name to the square, and his shop bears this glorious signage. He is, therefore, obstinately anachronistic, serves a clientele that no longer exists and keeps alive a little white elephant, his second-hand bookshop. Interestingly, the first two books he sells in the novel, or tries to sell, are a complete works of Shakespeare, which however is not wanted for its intrinsic value (‘Shakspere was a volume, not a man’), and a cookbook. Thus Earlforward might appear a just likeable, cautious, eccentric misanthrope, and the antidote to progressivism and driven consumerism, since he scrimps on light bulbs, electricity, gas, clothes, toothpicks and even food, and lives in dirt and disorder as a healthy rebellion against the rules of sterile living, and a lucid adherence to a ‘practical philosophy’. The new fact is that the misanthrope is attracted to the nice, dynamic, charming and truly healthy widow Mrs Violet Arb. The final or perhaps the only romantic gesture which Earlforward makes throughout the novel is to give the second-hand cookbook as a gift, though in large part also opportunistically, to the widow, who considers the price of one shilling excessive. Out of that is born an idyllic and slightly surreal courtship: and this surreality becomes a main ingredient of the novel until near the end. The two not-so-young lovers briefly enjoy the already half-extinguished flame of their idyll dressed as a mediaeval or Renaissance knight and damsel in the Sunday streets of the neighbourhood that Earlforward, as a little tour guide, and dominus of the 57 However, the description of the three-storey block of flats where dehumanized families live, and where Elsie too, the Earlforwards’ maid, has a room on a sublease, is of exceptional vigour and Dickensian vividness. The flash of bitter comedy on the stormy relationships between these families of plebeian residents is equally effective.

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place, shows his lady, unearthing ancient remains covered by the sign of the modern. This excursion around the area, and the honeymoon, spent at Madame Tussaud’s waxworks, are the only real ‘exteriors’ in the novel, which from here on is set entirely in closed places, and mainly in the newlyweds’ house, Mr Earlforward’s house with bookshop. 4. It would then be no surprise to learn that this novel is the prose version of a text or an idea conceived for the theatre. The closure of the spaces functions to represent the worsening and the progressive degeneration of the idyll of the two middle-aged suitors towards a case of psychopathology and obsession. This possible dramatic palimpsest could be defined as Bennett’s reworking of Molière’s L’Avare in twentieth-century English guise. Bennett seems to illustrate the adage of the first day of matrimony being a violent disenchantment of the idyll of betrothal. Earlforward’s first eccentricity is that, being cheaper, it will only be a civil wedding; and he sells the widow’s old ring to buy a new one. Violet is as her name suggests, a fresh, healthy flower who must first accept, and then complain and snap when her husband’s paranoia reaches its peak. An increasingly surreal scene, and one similar to those bizarre and often odd stories of Meredith, or which provokes the early sensation of some of the young Beckett’s prose, is, on returning from the ‘honeymoon’, the wife’s present to her husband, that of having engaged in the meantime a cleaning firm to make the interior of the house habitable and respectable.58 Earlforward is rolling in money like all misers, but he never spends a penny; his personal safe is bursting with banknotes and gold and silver coins. Like every miser, Earlforward is continually asked to perform acts of generosity and has to sweat blood to come up with some last-minute stratagem to hide the baser and more wretched side of his stinginess, stratagems which sometimes turn out to be even more costly. He refuses to eat so as not to spend money, and imposes this frugal regime on his wife and maid. His superficial disease, which 58

The presents are revealing: after Violet’s, similarly kind and humorous, as well as traditional, is Elsie’s old, used slipper. Earlforward, on the other hand, gives his wife a symbol of his miserliness, a safe in the bathroom in which she can, if she wants, keep her personal belongings, while she would like to hold everything in common. Earlforward wants to keep the household economics rigorously separated between the two spouses, and pays for his wife’s funeral with the savings she herself had put aside, having died of malnutrition merely to indulge her husband’s whims.

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makes him ill, is psychosomatic, stomach cancer which presents itself as an ambiguous inability to swallow;59 he suffers from a sort of male bulimia that is the opposite of the insatiable and voracious appetite of the maid Elsie. The latter, a twenty-four-year-old widow, exploited without realizing it, is like Browning’s Pippa, stupefied by work but devoted, obliging and merry,60 who lives her own separate or parallel little plot, at the Earlforward household and amongst the poor and the young thugs of the neighbourhood, romantically and chivalrously sought after thanks to an enticing charm of her own. In her sweet and lovable stupidity, this woman is the source of many exquisite, fabulous and surreal acts. With her second self – her sensible and intelligent side – she tries to save her master from going astray, but unsuccessfully. With this second side of her character she plays a part, that of unwittingly outsmarting and cheating her raving master. The roles are reversed, and the maid becomes the mistress; but Elsie sinks back into her stupidity and foolishness when she is the only one to feel sincere mourning at her master’s death, while, as in Dickens, all the inhabitants of the neighbourhood have instinctively marginalized the asocial miser with their indifference. The closing note is the farce of the puerile and whimsical excuses with which Earlforward keeps the doctor in check at length and with success when he wants to admit him to hospital; it is also that of the scene, recursive in Bennett, of the patient’s slow death.61 5. Imperial Palace (1930), not quite Bennett’s last novel, is nonetheless the last of sizeable proportions, and it closes the circle of his parable with the same unity of place, the luxury hotel, with which it more or less opened, in Grand Babylon Hotel. But the sensational intrigue of the detective story has been laid aside to concentrate on the varied and less varied routine of 59

Earlforward attributes this ‘indigestion’ to another of the maid Elsie’s exquisite acts: the cake she gave as a present to the couple on their wedding day. 60 Particularly charming are the maid’s little scruples as she, also malnourished, tries in vain to resist the temptation to eat the leftovers, often caught red-handed by the master who reprimands her. A long quarrel ensues over a piece of leftover steak which Earlforward does not want to ingest and which, after much wrangling, ends up being eaten by Elsie. 61 With Bennett’s distinctive sting in the tail against Wesleyan Calvinism, and also as an ‘absurd’ and burlesque epilogue, as the miser’s entire inheritance goes to a brother who is a minister of that confession.

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the hotel staff, although the plot revolves partly around the pretext of the negotiations of sale and the hotel is bought by an American millionaire. The style, the visual slant, the perspective are unusual and new: everyday life in the grand hotel as told from behind the scenes, and from the unusual viewpoint of the staff, shifting the centre of gravity from the guest to the employees who see to his well-being. Therefore it sometimes seems like a documentary, and the descriptive focus moves from personal cases to the workings of the laundry and the kitchens, staff turnover and promotions, the array of characters amongst cooks and waiters and maids with their respective jealousies, tantrums and the inevitable disagreements. The idea of the hotel as container and place of confluence and intersection of storylines and human cases which are both public and private is therefore commendable, and Bennett deserves recognition for this;62 but it reads like a rambling and meticulous report63 which rarely digs below the surface. In a few rare moments the hotel is humanized, anthropomorphic, a living creature, but Bennett is too dry in spelling out each individual event. The decidedly inconsistent, generic and random plot tries to liven itself up with the impossible love story between Evelyn Orcham, the mature manager of the hotel, and the provocative daughter of the American millionaire. After all in Evelyn hides the never-subsided romanticism of someone who seems to have eradicated passion. He is a fussy and obsessive manager who, having been widowed, has banished from his thoughts the idea of remarrying; an organizer, a reserved and detached reasoner, quiet and introvert, he has drowned his emotional life in the fanatical cult of duty, but in moments of inebriation he feels like Kubla Khan who has magically erected his own pleasure-dome.64 Gracie Savott is the dissolute American tired of life, but desirous of freshness and metamorphosis, a fatally romantic dreamer. The 62 Swinnerton (CRHE, 502) pointed to a widespread fashion for ‘grand hotel novels’ at that time, citing the novelist Vicki Baum; for a short history of the genre up to the present day, cf. Drabble 1974, 83. Even the young Auden, together with Isherwood (with the Hotel Nineveh: see Volume 8, § 4.6) makes it a cornerstone of the theatrical farces preceding The Dog Beneath the Skin. 63 A ‘huge epic of boredom’ for Allen 1948, 35. 64 The structure of this novel, and the two protagonists amongst the hotel staff, Evelyn and Miss Violet Powler, may have influenced Kazuo Ishiguro in the novel The Remains of the Day.

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ambiguous carnal flirtation between a lady-killer and the young American who changes his life and demolishes his aplomb takes place in Paris. But it is just a fleeting passion, and the manager keeps his feet on the ground, although he is ready to discover the more domestic and ordinary, but prudish, charm of the personnel manager. § 23. Galsworthy* I: The funerals of aristocracy A little under half the novels of John Galsworthy’s (1867–1933) mature years, the first going back to 1906, have as a common and continual theme the commemoration and celebration of the entrepreneurial upper middle class. After making their fortune in the final decades of the Victorian era, this class lived more and more off their interest in the Edwardian and Georgian eras, and was assimilated in name and in practice to the aristocracy. This evolutionary and historical design was that of Galsworthy’s own family, so that he aimed at the same time at an ambitious, proud, narcissistic self-glorification. 1

*

The Manaton Edition, 30 vols, London 1923–1926; The Grove Edition, 27 vols, London 1927–1934; Plays, London 1929; Collected Poems, London 1934; Letters from John Galsworthy 1900–1932, ed. R. Garnett, London 1934. S. Kaye-Smith, John Galsworthy, London 1916; E. Guyot, John Galsworthy, Paris 1933; H. Ould, John Galsworthy, London 1934; H. V. Marrot, The Life and Letters of John Galsworthy, London 1935; F. Dupont, John Galsworthy: The Dramatic Artist, Paris 1947; R. H. Mottram, John Galsworthy, London 1953, and For Some We Loved: An Intimate Portrait of Ada and John Galsworthy, London 1956; D. Barker, The Man of Principle: A View of John Galsworthy, London 1963 and 1967; R. Sauter, Galsworthy the Man: An Intimate Portrait, London 1967; D. Holloway, John Galsworthy, London 1968 (an illustrated booklet of little value); W. Bellamy, The Novels of Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy: 1890–1910, London 1971, 88–102 and 165–204 (often debatable and tenuous interpretations, like those of the other two authors, as I highlighted in the respective sections; Fréchet 1982, cited below, 176–9, keeps his distance from them); C. Dupré, John Galsworthy: A Biography, London 1976; A. Fréchet, John Galsworthy: A Reassessment, Eng. trans., London 1982 (succinct and lively overview, but with the unexplainable exclusion of the theatre); J. McDonald, The New Drama 1900–1914: Harley Granville Barker, John Galsworthy, St John Hankin, John Masefield, London 1985; J. Gindin, John Galsworthy’s Life and Art: An Alien’s Fortress, Houndmills 1987 (a massive critical and biographical study); S. Sternlicht, John Galsworthy, Boston, MA 1987. Galsworthy has been almost ignored in English studies in Italy; to the only and very early Galsworthy is dedicated the introduction by M. Domenichelli to the Italian edition of the short story ‘A Knight’, Venezia 1995.

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In a more objective perspective the story of the Forsyte family is the mise en abyme of a social class. The obvious contradictions of this simple diagram, which may be caught from an empirical reading of the famous saga, derive from several factors. The saga begins in 1906, is then interrupted for almost fifteen years, only to be taken up again with another eight volumes for a total of nine; and the historical time frame Galsworthy covers is five decades. We meet the Forsyte clan from the moment of their zenith and their maximum and shining expansion; as time passes it faces its contraction. It is no coincidence that the individual novels are punctuated by, and even more often open and close with the births of new heirs and the deaths of the older Forsytes, and one of these deaths happens to coincide with the grand state funeral of Queen Victoria herself. Galsworthy cannot but take note of the waning of a system – an economic system but also an ethical and deontological code – inexorably overtaken by modernity. But the downfall of the Forsytes is due to history as well as to the subtlest and unavoidable intervention of a sort of destructive, Wagnerian and Schopenhauerian ‘great passion’. The binary procedure, in terms of symbolism and content, which we already see in Bennett, continues in Galsworthy as an archisemic conflict between disinterested romanticism and material acquisition; and it assumes the form of a clash between possession and beauty. So there is a surreptitious, ancient Arnoldian thought structure, as if the Hellenic sweetness and light could at least dampen primordial barbarity. The gap from 1906 to 1920, however, is also ideological and political. Since his origins, and especially in the theatre, Galsworthy composes on the stylistic feature of the ‘parallel stories’, without reciprocal imperilment but also without declared or apparent partiality: there is a frontal collision which cannot be reconciled, but which generates pity and compassion for the efforts of the injured party. The first novel of the Forsyte saga, therefore, was read as a satire on and thus a critique of the very system of the Forsytes and of entrepreneurial capitalism. It is true, Galsworthy in 1906 was juvenilely ambiguous and, attracted by subversive ideologies, glorified the middle class but without complete conviction, and indeed realized the limits of that model.1 Later he attenuates, but without 1

The Island Pharisees, the novel which revealed him, aroused the suspicion that Galsworthy was ‘a bit socialist’ (Gindin 1987, 143). Galsworthy was certainly a liberal, who at the time, in common with many liberals, had been opposed to the Boer

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being able to hide, his nostalgic affection for an outdated clan forcibly decimated by time. Galsworthy approves that phrase of Soames Forsyte – his aphorism – that declares that ‘the world reached its highest point in the Eighties, and will never reach it again’, and attends first to the glorification, disguised as satire, of the entrepreneurial model, of individualistic male chauvinism, and of the capitalism, of the stockbroking and financial power of the Victorian mercantile classes. The follow-up is a slightly ambiguous entrenchment within positions of more uncompromising refusal. The third Forsyte trilogy sings the praises of a group that is no longer the middle class, but an aristocracy, or even a spiritual knighthood. And Soames Forsyte is, or rather becomes, Galsworthy’s alter ego. 2. Looking at the European panorama, Galsworthy converges towards this type of synthesis, backdrop and focus: the story of a family down the generations, a common and salient feature of late nineteenth-century fiction up until the eve of the Great War and even afterwards (and a scheme that also runs through Proust and Thomas Mann, and was influenced by Nordau’s ‘degeneration’). In the most circumscribed range of early twentieth-century English fiction, Galsworthy, like Bennett, is the illustrator of an identical temporal cross-section because he studies the inexorable flow of time and thus the same basic theme as Bennett.2 If we make this kind of comparison and confrontation, Galsworthy is no different to him, because he aims with his most fundamental work at the polyptych, the broad backdrop, the wide-ranging overview of a section of society in a large time frame, moving from the late Victorian era. He too is a historian, although he finds a different formula to Bennett: he does not create an addition of novels squeezed together by unity of place, but paints a dynastic fresco over successive generations. The very concept of interstitiality seems to waver with him. Perhaps he is the least interstitial of the three major novelists straddling the two centuries. He detaches himself from Victorian comedy, of which

2

War. After the publication of A Man of Property, Conrad had jokingly suggested that the socialists should award Galsworthy a plaque in recognition (Gindin 1987, 176). In 1907 Galsworthy declined Wells’s proposal to enter politics with the Fabian Society, but at the time of his American trip, in 1911, he was still considered ‘an ardent socialist’ (Gindin 1987, 302). BAUGH, vol. IV, 1557.

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there is no longer any trace; he does not rely on anecdote, he abolishes nineteenth-century models, he leaves the orbit of the great Victorians. He is an authentic realist of the England of the forty years from 1890 to 1930, and one who writes with a partially satirical and nostalgic vision. There is no longer the sensation that the public is around the corner, and materially and physically present, almost directly addressed; and that the author is writing to please, flatter and entertain them. Gone is the lighthearted gag, banished humour and wit, nor is there any longer the feeling of an actually or notionally serial narrative. Abstractly and originally, Galsworthy attacks prejudice and privilege, and like Wells defends progressive causes (the fallen woman, the struggle against imperialism, tolerance, humanitarian justice), but he resoundingly refrains from the à thèse or propaganda novel. These facts, and these self-prohibitions, are part of the ‘modern’, but then we notice that the theme of Galsworthy’s fiction can indeed be summed up as the transition from the ancient to the modern, and that this modern is not anticipated but exorcized; and that Galsworthy is then all the more strictly interstitial. And yet the formal order and the general symmetry of the macrotext really are instances and proofs of the modern which distance him from his predecessors, as are an astounding dialogic skill and an attenuated, partly imitated, but nonetheless convincing version of the stream of consciousness technique, as I will show dealing with the only and original giant amongst Galsworthy’s characters, Soames Forsyte. To provisionally conclude, Galsworthy was no modernist because he was not an eclectic and was not gifted with a conspicuous natural talent, because he did not know other languages and was not a polyglot, because he even stumbled in French, did not paint nor did he play an instrument, although he loved music and art. Compared with the modernists he was an amateur, and his poetry is almost ridiculous. Nor has he left behind important manifestos of aesthetics, or luminous critical writings as a thoroughbred critic. After the beginnings, he patented his own narrative measure which he would never abandon, that of an uninterrupted series of novels which are similar not only because nine of them have the same common denominator, the Forsyte dynasty; but because even those which are not have distinct foci and are therefore multifocal to a greater or lesser extent, besides being of the same calibrated length, and perfectly balanced in the number of their

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parts, chapters and even words. Galsworthy’s multi-storey building may be judged monotonous and not very varied, and in fact he does not allow himself renewals of themes, narrative modules and phases, and lacks for example interludes, digressions, jesting and whims; but he is certainly consistent, and the most unitary of the three great writers before Modernism. 3. Above all the middle novels of the first two Forsyte trilogies are the fruit of a matured and well trained art, just a little too prone to fall into the temptation of the melodramatic. Their additional merit is to have sculpted an immortal character, Soames Forsyte, well able to cut a fine figure in the gallery of the most outstanding protagonists of twentieth-century English fiction. This opinion is not widely shared today amongst the public or in academia, and Galsworthy is a writer in decline. When he was still alive, or right after his death, the Marxist intelligentsia rubbed salt in the wounds of his fearful and prudent political ideology; and the modernists like Virginia Woolf, and the spasmodics like Lawrence, criticized his deficient vision of man in his psychic and historical specificity. According to Lawrence,3 Galsworthy – and here we are not far from Woolf – describes materialized and materialistic man, not human but ‘social,’ plagued by fear, and driven to attach security only to money and wealth. Orwell in turn gave, in 1938,4 one of his rare and very able summaries of Galsworthy’s ideological career, which amounts to a paradigm of English literature of the 1920s and 30s verifiable in Auden, Isherwood and Spender among others. He blamed him for having sweetened the bitterness of his initial vision of life, which had given his early books an uncommon power. After a certain era and dividing line it had become ‘tripe,’ but earlier – and Orwell cites The Man of Property, The Country House, Fraternity and the play Justice – he had ‘left behind them a kind of flavour, an atmosphere […] of frustration and exaggerated pity, mixed up with country scenery and dinners in Mayfair’. In other words, and Orwell liked this, he had shown the chasm, the social gap between a class of crass aristocrats together with various power-wielding classes – the Church, politics, finance and the professions – and the

3 4

Phoenix, vol. I, 539–50. OCE, vol. I, 342–3.

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destitution of the slums, the artists, or women forced into prostitution. And indeed he seemed to him like a Don Quixote busy attacking impregnable opulence and Edwardian capitalism, and engaged in a sort of ‘personal battle’ against property. This battle had ceased perhaps because – Orwell does not hide the fact – the objective conditions of the proletariat had – or had begun ‘to seem’ – improved. The logical conclusion is that from that point on Galsworthy had identified with the targets of his attack, his weapons had become blunted, and the writer decreed and proclaimed that all was well and the only things necessary were a few innocent tweaks to the existing order. This optimistic and slapdash reformism was obvious to Orwell from the way in which Galsworthy proposed to solve the problem of economic disadvantage – with emigration.5 Now, though, Orwell, with a sort of sting in the tail, closes his verdict with a merciless and restrictive diagnosis: Galsworthy was basically a bad or mediocre writer whom only some internal ‘trouble’ managed to improve. Once cured of that malaise, ‘he reverted to the type’.6 The Marxist critic Arnold Kettle later attacked a weakling who is not capable of sustaining the satire of the aristocracy, and pollutes it with sentimentalism, which is a form of approval.7 Kettle coined the classification of ‘middle-brow’ literature of which Galsworthy is the most noteworthy exponent: a series of novels, his, which were lapped up by the middle classes who could smugly admire their own reflection without thinking critically about their own values and faults, and in which the rich may be in competition and disagreement amongst themselves, but always present a united front against the outside world. Almost at the time of his death, the Nobel Prize (1932) suddenly made Galsworthy an ‘immensely 5 6

7

Especially in the marginal but recurrent episode of Foggartism, a phantom ideological current endorsed by Soames Forsyte’s son-in-law Michael Mont, a member of Parliament for a while (see below, § 26.2). Orwell, however, hurls his most derisory and direct criticism against Galsworthy in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, when two inveterate non-intellectual readers consider the Forsyte saga the non plus ultra and Galsworthy ‘so broad, so universal, and yet at the same time so thoroughly English in spirit, so HUMAN’ (cf. Domenichelli 1995, 54 n. 18). KET, 87. Galsworthy is not mentioned in the critical writings of F. R. Leavis, who adhered to Lawrence’s critical views (Fréchet 1982, 4).

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popular’ writer, widely read and famous, even in Italy. A complete Italian edition was launched from 1928, and the Forsyte saga translated by Elio Vittorini. The film and television adaptations of that cycle were the coup de grâce. Galsworthy’s mummification in a popular classic was completed a few decades later, when on the centenary of his birth in 1967 the BBC produced a 26-hour serialized telefilm of the saga, which was bought by practically all the world’s television. § 24. Galsworthy II: Skirmishes against self-righteousness Galsworthy began as an objectifying storyteller who, long before his contemporaries, managed to forego his autobiography, except in measured transmutations; his work is also constitutionally devoid of the almost obligatory ingredient of childhood and youthful narratives, and we do not find in him childhood odysseys8 or hefty school or university episodes, despite his having been through Harrow and Oxford. Also little exploited, with respect to the average, are his long and numerous journeys. He is also a relatively late novelist. He never excelled in public school, except as an athlete: footballer, distance runner and cricketer. At Oxford he dressed like a dandy, was the most elegant student and went around wearing a monocle; he also sported a pair of bushy moustaches which enhanced his sullen handsomeness. He studied law because he had no specific interests, and he cultivated an apathy and reserve which were clear to everyone. To his acquaintances he was anxious, neurotic, ethereal, withered to the point of appearing listless; seemingly controlled and unflappable, but emotional below the surface. At university he had developed an ethical humanism without any real religious faith. He received an incentive to pursue the arts only after one of his sisters married an artist of German descent. From the early 1890s, after graduating, he was sent around by his father, who wanted to make him an expert in maritime law,9 on various missions in 8 9

The often ‘childless’ marriages in Galsworthy’s fiction, with the absence of children from the scene, were disapproved of in a verdict by Quiller-Couch (cf. Fréchet 1982, 120). Fréchet 1982, 14. His father also wanted to distract him with these trips from an illsuited relationship with a music teacher.

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far-flung corners of the globe, where he collected experiences of different climates, landscapes, peoples and human types. These long sea journeys, with their forced inactivity so favourable to reading, took him to Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the ‘South Seas’ and their islands (proverbially inspirational to the young literary talents which were flowering at that time), Fiji, the colonies and Russia. On one of these voyages the idea to visit Stevenson in Samoa did not meet with success, but on the Torrens in 1893 Galsworthy met Conrad who was the Chief Officer, and the acquaintance, over the 56-day crossing, was mutually fruitful. From that moment Conrad became an unconditional admirer of the early short stories that Galsworthy, arriving back in 1895, set about writing in his solicitor’s office at Lincoln’s Inn. But before he became a writer, a woman came into his life. Ada Cooper, illegitimate daughter of a Norwich obstetrician, and thus daughter of a single mother and therefore a Victorian ‘fallen woman’, was married in the early 1890s to Galsworthy’s cousin Arthur. However, the marriage was a bad match and Galsworthy and Ada became lovers for ten years unbeknownst to Galsworthy’s parents until his cousin conceded a divorce, allowing the couple to become regularly married. Elegant and attractive, but very aloof, Ada was a pianist and traveller, and a translator from French. She had a domineering personality, so much so that some biographers believe that she not only stimulated Galsworthy, but also advised or even guided him, to the extent that she was presented as coauthor of his novels; others believe she also hobbled and chained him.10 The novelist was very reserved and evasive, and very little was known about his private life until recently. 2. The reduction of the Galsworthy that matters to a calculated mathematical canon in multiples of three – his Forsyte saga – obviously leaves some remainders: such a selection ignores his more confused, asymmetrical, even random and inevitable beginnings, and obscures the titles that come between the individual books of the saga, as well as his plays. The relentless ternary structure of the corpus is contradicted by the bundle of more 10

On the disagreements between the biographers Barker 1963, Dupré 1976 and Gindin 1987, cf. Gindin 1987, 71–94. Also Fréchet 1982, 51–2, gives his version. Barker 1963, 11, considers Ada to be co-author of the novels.

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predictable and tributary short stories and novels which Galsworthy wrote up until 1906. As a novice, the aspiring writer confided in Turgenev and Maupassant, like Bennett but unlike Wells, and like any other writer who wanted to devictorianize himself and show himself to be more up to date and cosmopolitan. Maupassant and the French naturalists had also been a beacon for the two greatest writers a decade older, Conrad and Kipling. The short stories in From the Four Winds were written under the pen name of John Sinjohn (that is ‘John son of John’). Galsworthy carried out the most automatic and predictable operation in the wake of Kipling and Conrad, and inspired by the scenes and fascination of his exotic voyages – Africa, America, Canada, the East Indies11 – he put the Englishman in touch and in contrast with the native cultures of the colonies. With an eye to Conrad’s stories within stories, and a certain melodrama which rewards honour even in the rogues, many of these short stories had an uncertain reception, were not republished by the author, or were even disowned. Even before and after the launch of the Forsyte saga, Galsworthy’s fiction is dedicated in a disorderly way, and with dull and unrealistic results, to the theme of the great passion and thus to erotic passion outside of – fatally outside of – marriage, with the male characters, as in Hardy, having to acknowledge the end of approved and monogamous marriage, and the couple thus fluctuating towards divorce; but this theme is imperfectly combined with a sort of social, and even socialistic, novel of a vaguely ‘Christian’12 kind, as in Disraeli and Kingsley in more distant times. Jocelyn13 (1898), which the mostly hostile reviewers found ‘morbid’, has as its protagonist a thirty-five-year-old, the educated, sensitive, indolent, worn-out and also sexually frustrated Giles Legard; a student at Oxford, he is afflicted by a marriage to an invalid (the reverse of Lady Chatterley). The story reflects his autobiography because Giles falls in love with Jocelyn, his wife’s young friend. The interludes of the chaperone aunt, a hardened gambler, reveal 11 12 13

In some, set in South Africa, the hostility between the British and the Boers is depicted, with the natives in the background. Volume 5, § 150.2–3. This and the next novel were published by Gerald Duckworth, Virginia Woolf ’s half-brother.

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a flair for pure comedy which never blossomed. The adultery is at first refused, then gradually committed in a hothouse atmosphere which, as many have suspected, owes much to D’Annunzio. The wife dies, and the two lovers, aware that they cannot live apart, meet up before the hero leaves for Singapore. The novel is a brazenly and unimaginatively inverted and transposed version of Galsworthy’s situation with Ada, who is made even more fatal and exotic in Jocelyn. Villa Rubein (1900) also dips into his autobiography, with the nineteen-year-old Christian as the bride of a German artist of peasant stock, as the novelist’s sister Lilian did in real life, a marriage between bourgeoisie and art of which, amongst the English ‘Pharisees’, only one non-formalist uncle approves of. Except that at that time Galsworthy was already involved in trying to make his ‘critical’ côté prevail over his ‘emotional’ one:14 in other words, he was slowly moving on to that narrative objectification that was also the naturalistic phlegm of his Russian and French models, and which could also be attained using the Conradian device of the external narrator or the imbricated story. This lesson is absorbed in the four short stories that make up A Man of Devon (1901).15 Conrad, who kindly read everything Galsworthy churned out, advised him to have a ‘more sceptical’ attitude, and to hold back a bit more from rooting for good in the struggle against evil.16 But Galsworthy availed himself of other readers and advisors, such as Ford and Garnett. 3. The Island Pharisees (1904), the novel which revealed him, bears a pretentious title and suggests an accusation of insular, that is, English, pharisaism. Therefore a metanoia of values must take shape. This revolutionary programme, which will be carried out on a small scale and on the quiet, is gradually appropriated by the protagonist, the rich bourgeois Richard Shelton, who enters on stage at Dover station, dithering about whether or not he should buy – it is no coincidence – Carlyle’s The French Revolution

14 15

16

Gindin 1987, 124–5. A girl, the lover of an enterprising smuggler, slips on a cliff and dies; in Montecarlo an old soldier from Garibaldi’s Thousand, in fact an American, venerates the memory of his first wife and inveighs against the prejudices that sully a lady; the owner of a company kills himself after facing some strikes. Gindin 1987, 146.

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at the newsstand.17 This first scene contains in a nutshell the ideological development of the novel and fixes its quality and also its demonstrative force. Shelton, who has just returned from a long, symbolic journey of unconscious searching which is also an indicator of his spiritual fumbling and his sense of doubt, has indeed decided to travel in third class, and into his compartment board a philosophizing Belgian vagabond, Ferrand, and a ‘fallen woman’, abandoned and ticketless, whom the other passengers recoil from in horror. The scene should demonstrate first of all Shelton’s otherness to the class he belongs to, his exceptional enlightenment relative to the pharisaic clouding of the affluent English middle class, and the catalyzing function of the Belgian natural philosopher, who is destined to turn up again meteorically throughout the novel, by offering himself as a challenge and litmus test, as well as a tangible proof of the ignorance of destitution and poverty, and of the rootedness of prejudice in the ruling class in England. So Ferrand is like a second Zarathustra who steeps the learner or student in his truths, plants them in him and lets them grow and swell every time he comes down to see him.18 The doubt concerns the expedient and thus also the weakness of the demonstration, and the meagre appeal and obviousness of the exemplifying occasions: in other words the plot is a tribute to a sort of allegory, in which the characters reveal the inconvenience of being the representatives of a class or of the ideological variety of a class. Shelton is a rare bird, a strange rare bird: an aristocrat or upper-class fellow on the road to Damascus on the verge of illumination, or the moment in which his eyes open and he sees. The overview of an empty society, wallowing in boredom and unfeeling complacency, does not rise to any apex of intensity, and the novel of the Disraelian two nations, which can sometimes shine through, never really takes shape; the attack, which should be launched against the entire gamut of English hypocrisies (home

17

18

Shelton is Galsworthy, because Shelton, an alumnus of Eton and Oxford, is a law graduate who returns from a long voyage at the beginning of the book. It may also be a foretaste of the bourgeois who has estranged himself from his class in Orwell’s early novels. Ferrand will also appear in a play and other stories. The real character who inspired him had actually met the novelist in Paris (Gindin 1987, 8 and 136, and § 28.3 n. 67).

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affairs, foreign and imperial policy,19 poor laws, workhouses, the national economic model, religion,20 artistic and literary culture), is watered down; and the disinherited class never comes irresistibly to the fore. The philosophic tramp Ferrand, educated but estranged by his own efforts from the class he belongs to, is Shelton’s symbolic and unreachable double, and shows him the path to exile and desertion; but he gives the realistic plot a certain surreal and absurd flavour. Shelton, apathetic, alienated and dazed, also often bored by the empty rituals of upper-class society, symbolizes and indeed effects this abandonment, and the novel recounts the stages of his disenchantment, first hesitation and then decisiveness. He will join and get to know some tramps;21 then he will renounce a marriage which would have imprisoned him in the very mesh of that hypocrisy, that habitual rut that perpetuates the drift of the bourgeoisie, which he wants to flee from. But this development reflects more the desire to close the parable than the laws of narrative realism. § 25. Galsworthy III: ‘The Forsyte Saga’ I. The threat of entrepreneurial security In a more general overview, the Forsyte saga is divided into two parts, one before and one after the Great War. In 1906 Galsworthy was not thinking about a saga,22 and the inaugural The Man of Property is a freestanding novel. After this Galsworthy turned to other subjects, and put together the cyclical construction fifteen years later with In Chancery. In the first few years of the century and halfway through the Edwardian 19 Shelton is of course anti-Kipling as far as imperial policy is concerned. 20 ‘the more Christian the nation, the less it has to do with spirit’. 21 Ferrand had made Shelton realize that to understand what an outcast is one must share his life. ‘Both outcasts’, he says to himself when he leaves his fiancée’s house forever and breaks off the engagement. However, the following night scene, which should describe in St James’s Park the downgrade achieved by Shelton, who gets to know another tramp and spends the night outdoors – like the bourgeois protagonist turned proletarian of another, slightly different, ‘awakening’, that of the Orwellian ‘clergyman’s daughter’ (Volume 8, § 25) – does not come off. 22 He had, however, introduced the first of the Forsytes in one of the stories in A Man of Devon, from 1901.

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period, writers turned towards the form of the family saga, and studied the neo-capitalist model which, once it has reached its peak, collapses through internal implosion, so that successive and younger generations are no longer able to defend the code of ‘property’ and heritage with the religious devotion of its founding fathers. It is an approval of the ideologies of disintegration and degeneration with which the last decades of the nineteenth century are imbued.23 Bennett is a late starter, Galsworthy after his first piece temporarily abandons the project and takes it up again when Bennett has already definitively ended his Clayhanger cycle. Without knowing about each other, Bennett and Galsworthy initiated two sagas just a few months apart. Galsworthy’s six novels of the first two trilogies are the best; the second of the six is perhaps the best of all. They are all written with consummate shrewdness, that of a narrator who really has very little material at his disposal, and who artfully stretches out his storylines and every so often broadens them and fills them out with incidental anecdotes. At the beginning of each new novel, a good portion is used up in recapping. The first cycle, at least, grows and improves in its single constituents and should be judged in its semi-entirety; and in this guise it is a product which is refined and becomes more than dignified. The opinion that the two novels after the first one, which is the masterpiece, the basis of judgement and the yardstick, are a decline should be overturned; the exact opposite is true, and both of them improve on it. As for the general sense, the Forsyte saga is the proud defence of a class which is, in a transposed version, the author’s own family tree. Galsworthy was infused with dynastic pride, and he venerated the figure of his grandfather and his father.24 His great-great-grandfather, the legendary Dosset in the saga, was a farmer in Devon; then his son moved to the city and created a small empire in London, having set his five children on the road to the financial sector. They eventually became agents, speculators, investors, stock-market consultants. Galsworthy’s father, the patriarch of the family, died in 23 As Fréchet 1982, 67, 118, also notes. 24 The novelist remarked that the first syllable of his surname sounded like the word ‘Gaul’, to highlight his French ancestry and, at the same time, according to the etymology, his alienness (Gindin 1987, 18, and Barker 1963, 14).

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1904 and had multiplied his fortunes. The Man of Property is a deferential salute to this figure. Such a generation of solid, tenacious, upright wealth accumulators was in decline in 1900, ‘not altogether for the advantage of the country’. Galsworthy does not identify with the Soames of the first novel, but with the figure of old Jolyon’s son, and Soames’s cousin, young Jolyon. The second generation breaks the compactness of the model by taking an interest in art, an art which is directly experienced and not merely something which can be invested in and bought and sold – getting close, that is, to a form of supreme disinterestedness. The figure of a writer is missing, in order not to draw too much attention, but just for now, and painting is an ersatz. The end of the second trilogy sees the entry of the destructive nemesis of passion, symbolized by the ‘flame’ as eros and by an actual fire. Fleur wanted to die, but her father dies in her place, struck by a Goya painting that depicts and represents passion itself. Both Soames and Jolyon are ‘connoisseurs’, and have the house packed with paintings and objets d’art; and they show guests their private gallery with echoes of erotic frustration similar to those of Browning’s duke of Ferrara.25 The six novels are held together and cemented, then, by Soames Forsyte. It is his consciousness that is gradually opened, dismantled, read inside, an emblem of the nineteenth century or of its tail end; this character can even present himself as a classical version of early twentieth-century consciousness, together with Bloom, Dedalus, Mrs Dalloway and Mrs Ramsay, or the Brangwen sisters. Galsworthy has him soliloquize with those jolts and those idées fixes characteristic of those other great protagonists.26 The historical left-wing critics could not digest the fact that he was a materialist who had a possessive concept, or prejudice, of marriage, and that he kept his wife ‘like a negro slave’; but they forgot that Galsworthy, like Joyce, aimed to offer, as a detached narrator, a purely psychic phenomenology. 25 26

See in particular the ‘bronze Venus standing on a tortoise’. It is also true that four of the six novels are later than Ulysses. Orwell in fact compared The Forsyte Saga to Ulysses (OCE, vol. II, 236), and Galsworthy’s saga came out the worst off, even comparing the first of the nine novels, which are the best of them. Their range was ‘comparatively narrow’, though Galsworthy intended to give a summary of a historical moment. To Orwell, Galsworthy had the defect of lionizing the rentier class and restoring its honour, finding it to be human and sensitive at heart.

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Soames is, however, less lyrical, less imaginative and whimsical, not in the slightest poetic, and more concrete, and his thoughts are always moralistic deep down, and often end in an indignant attack against modern society. When he is not thinking, he is a determined and winning character, defeated only by his great passion – resignation ‘had no part in him’; he is also someone who does not believe too much in the afterlife, and who has to and wants to do everything before he dies. It is, then, a schizophrenic consciousness. He is not really cultured, has no real intellectual life, he is superficially intuitive; he neither reads nor is seen reading, and claims that literature is rubbish. He loves painting but in an ambiguous way: his tastes are conservative, he does not understand the avant-garde, and his legendary art gallery is in large part fruit of a speculation, and the paintings are valuable for their investment value; nor do we ever hear him pronounce an attempt at a critical or even subjective judgement about these paintings. But what exactly does Soames do, then? A late novel classifies him as a ‘tea merchant’. We must wait for The Swan Song to find out from the man himself that he grew up in a slum, that he is a ‘self-made man’ and a ‘realist’. In fact Soames and the Forsytes live a false and unreal life: it can be said of them that, as the bourgeoisie in Dickens, they do not really do anything and live off unearned income. Indeed we never see them working, only thinking, recalling, plotting, and especially walking, in other words moving circularly from one house to another where relatives live, and where the dialogues are always what we might call subtly phatic, demonstrating to themselves that the Forsytes are still the Forsytes. The life goal of the members of the clan is to stay on a world that is slipping away beneath their feet, threatening their dissolution. 2. In The Man of Property (1906), which begins in 1886, Galsworthy is the detached narrator who belittles and mocks his characters, sparing precious few. Bennett, for his narrative alter ego, invoked a Christ-like,27 infinite mercy, and therefore his saga is heroic and mock-heroic; Galsworthy’s is coldly, dryly and analytically satirical. As a consequence, Bennett immediately seeks and willingly repeats the clean scene, the humorous cameo, or even heart-wrenching pathos; Galsworthy is no longer a humorist, and 27

§ 20.2 n. 31.

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works with successions of static and monumental scenes, and often in closed spaces. The degeneration of the Forsyte family, from the forefather down, however, is due to the same conflict that we see in Bennett: the refusal by some young family members of the entrepreneurial codes, and the yielding to more or less destructive forms of romanticism. On closer inspection, this is the novel of a senile caste: that of the circle of the Forsyte brothers, the parents and forefathers, who are all on the wrong side of seventy and on the verge of extinction, despite trying to pass on their codes, some debatable, others acceptable. June Forsyte got engaged to an architect who trampled on the codes of speculation and reduction of values to the purely monetary. Indeed she is the daughter of a Forsyte water-colourist who left his first wife and lives apart from the more respectable nucleus of the family. Rebellion against the Forsyte model, or code, is the embracing of art or an unconventional life, or even a scandal caused to respectability, and we find it in three characters: young Jolyon who married a governess, Soames’s wife Irene, and the architect Bosinney. They are the ones who choose a life of poverty or lack of affluence. Old Jolyon is the only who is half in and half out, appreciating art, both painting and music, for itself, not only for its monetary value. This is what the fine art paintings hanging on the walls of the houses suggest. Bennett’s saga is held together by the unity of place, the manufacturing zone; Galsworthy takes London as his epicentre and, as he hastens to add, the upper middle class. Bennett’s loom is less crowded; Galsworthy, on the other hand, squeezes in too many brothers, too many sons, and too many grandsons in his weft. But both write Victorian and late Victorian epics beginning in the final decades of the nineteenth century. The two modifications to Jolyon Forsyte’s will, in favour of his grandchildren, are as classic a scene as any in the Victorian novel; as is also the scene of the trial, in which Soames Forsyte wins his case against the architect Bosinney,28 who built him a luxurious country home which cost him more than the quote. Soames wanted it as a status symbol, a sign of his overf  lowing affluence and also as a gift to regain the now spent affections of his wife, who has taken a wild fancy to the architect,

28

A name which is pronounced as a dactyl, as Galsworthy specified.

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who in turn is engaged to his niece.29 The homes of the nouveaux riches, who only a few decades earlier were struggling to survive, are decorated with garish objets d’art of dubious taste; they are not refined connoisseurs, they have only a veneer of culture which is cracking and peeling. And art is currency, for its purchase price and its sale price. This Forsyte family believes in its own proud kind and knows it exists for the sole purpose of an endless genetic transmission; it is a clan, but one with internal rivalries and splits. A very meaningful isotopy is that of animals: birds of prey, spiders, then predators and felines ready to pounce; some of them are somewhat ‘Quilpish’.30 Before, Galsworthy showed the two nations, now there is only one. The perspective range is only that of the upper middle class, shielded from the spectacles of the proletariat. The London made up of layers of different classes and trades does not exist on the page and never takes shape. The novel’s main virtue is its intuition of the group spirit which keeps the members of the family bound together: they are a phalange, a battalion, an army heading out to conquer the world, indestructible because it is the spirit of the clan itself that is eternal and which, manifesting itself in each individual member, can be listed and broken down into a handbook, a genetic code, and in blood laws. If almost half the plot is a series of conflicts of position which delve into the past, something stirs when jealousy is unleashed: June Forsyte eavesdrops a nascent affair between her aunt and the architect, and Soames is himself on their trail; and the novel rises in intensity even more when Bosinney, left penniless after the outcome of the trial, and grieving over an impossible love, gets knocked down by a bus (the inquiry does not establish whether it was suicide or an accident).31 At the end Soames and Irene separate though they do not get divorced, and Irene gets by giving music lessons and, like Christina Rossetti – we are in 1892 – works as a helper in a hospice for redeemed prostitutes.

29

Galsworthy’s father had in fact built a country villa, in hilly country from which, as in the novel, there was a view over the Epsom racecourse (Gindin 1987, 23). 30 Volume 5, § 33.6. 31 According to the retrospective of To Let (father’s letter to his son Jon), Soames would have ‘reasserted his rights over her’ the night after the suicide: in other words he would have forced her to have sex, perhaps meaning in extremis to have a son with her.

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3. The Man of Property seemed profound to its readers at the time,32 but it is not totally new, because the Forsytes have been rightly identified as the descendants of Thackeray’s Osbornes, whence the model of the triumph of basic human feelings over the coldness of the economic man is taken. The title refers to Soames Forsyte, the great magnate who discovers that money cannot buy the sincere and fulfilling affection of his wife, the beautiful but icy and mysterious Irene, whom everyone admires but who no longer loves him. In fact, along the way we are convinced that Galsworthy is quite an unstable writer. No sooner has he mercilessly torn to shreds, in two great and vast initial group scenes, the meanness of spirit and moral deficiencies lurking behind and inside the grandeur of the Forsytes, than he immediately surprises us with a decidedly elegiac chapter on old Jolyon Forsyte who ‘goes to the opera’, and on the way there – nostalgic, moved, pulsating with genuine paternal affection – thinks over his long life and its still painful torments. A doubt becomes certainty: the true protagonist is the oldest of the brothers of the first generation, old Jolyon himself. This character is the hardened magnate who is, however, more open to the feelings of his heart, his memory, mercy, tenderness. In an internal template he is the author of a multitude of reconciliations and acts of forgiveness, and provides his son, another romantic and defector from Forsytism, with a share of his will; and he dotes on his granddaughter, the daughter of young Jolyon from his first marriage, and in the interlude or postlude he is the protagonist of a senilely sensual, and chivalrous, idyll with the separated Irene. He thus restores a certain family roof to forgiven and forgiving Forsytes, no longer based on the bond of marriage, succeeding his nephew Soames, from whom he has bought the now disused villa. In this way he represents the good side of the Forsytes, and their redemption. And Soames, despite his lucid economist brutality, should we not take pity on him too for his frustration in loving a novel Helen who eludes him? Galsworthy at least distinguishes between the old guard, which he honours and which is upright, straightforward, armed with authentic old-fashioned values, and the younger generation, more disjointed and wavering. It is in the area of

32

Although not to Orwell (OCE, vol. II, 236, 238).

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construction, of forms and techniques, that the novel reveals its weakness, despite a modernist affectation which is badly assimilated. It opens and continues along the lines of very long and analytical chapters, extremely slow and laborious in their development. They are mostly group scenes, but followed by others focusing on one of the members of the large family. One of these group scenes, difficult to handle and to move along, and which Galsworthy does not completely manage to perfect, is the opening one. Old Jolyon is celebrating the engagement of his favourite granddaughter, the daughter of a debauched, anti-Forsytian son, with an unsuccessful architect. The slowness of this first scene is due to the fact that Galsworthy feels he has to give us a psychophysical portrait of almost every single guest, like a painter in words, with an insistent hatching which does not produce caricatures but only powerful Rembrandtian chiaroscuros. Unparalleled is the disorientation of the writer, who must clarify as soon as possible who is who, and provide the backstory in the least awkward way possible. The reader’s difficulty in A Man of Property lies in the fact that it should be read backwards, or paradoxically from the end of the saga itself: Soames is a character who becomes clearer gradually, and who completes himself, and can seem schematic in this first novel. 4. As in Bennett and his saga, one of the non-human protagonists is time. Old Jolyon feels it slipping away and experiences this passage, and there is a chapter reserved for him in which two actions should be separated: he goes to the opera and is happy that it is not an opera by Wagner, but by Beethoven; on the way home, he too being romantic and sentimental, he gives in to the temptation to see his disowned son again after many years, although he has opened bank accounts for his grandchildren from his son’s first marriage. But the drama tinged with the forefather’s sadness and melancholy and emotional starts sees the entry in scene of the ‘man of property’ Soames. Technically, the novel settles like old multifocal novels, but it lacks the bulk, since it must pass from focus to focus without highlighting completely the variety of the characters. Ultimately the status of the novel is that of melodrama, as it is built upon collective scenes and clashes between two characters in turn, which result in static tableaux slightly redundantly recording every little facial expression or incidental action, but which should only reiterate certain character traits. The narrator chooses

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from the continuum, and invents, discrete and salient occasions, of pomp and circumstance: an engagement party, a great banquet, a funeral, a ball, a trial. It is more phenomenology than psychology. The only sign of variation is that Galsworthy hides his omniscience, presenting the facts as if seen or, especially, espied by other members of the clan. His is a Catherine wheel of visual foci. The scene spied, glimpsed, sometimes with the complicity of the fog, or the phrase overheard, mumbled, incomplete, said with a wink, make it difficult to work out what is going on between the two flirters. Just about the only scene in which there is no screen, and Galsworthy narrates omnisciently for all to see, is the face-to-face between Bosinney’s rival lovers in his empty studio. Irene is an elusive character who, like those of Henry James, reveals little about herself in scene, and who is read, in her enigma, through the outline of the other characters, and in her phenomenology. Apathetic, taciturn, elusive and allusive, she is the image of a stereotype, the languid, tired, diaphanous, inert woman who awakens and rears up only for some shudder of romanticism, some desire, to distract her from the routine, a victim of an English Hedda Gabler nature, always attenuated and very subdued.33 Finally, The Man of Property can be defined as a ‘high-society’ novel that tries too hard to be a chronicle and a snapshot, or the scene of aristocratic rites, which it describes sometimes as ends in themselves. We can reconstruct what these Forsytes ate and drank, since Galsworthy is always very informative about the menu, the delicacies and titbits which they permit themselves and the brand of champagne they drink. On every single occasion the list of courses for the lunches and dinners and banquets is double-edged. It is a silver fork, or a serious parody of it, and therefore it turns out dangerously close to the standing of an Ouida novel. 5. No fewer than eight novels fill in the gap between the first and second acts of the Forsyte saga. The Country House (1907) had reviewers crying ‘masterpiece!’ for the exceedingly and exceptionally dense plot, for the efficacy of the binary clash between town and country, the uncommon 33

Particularly melodramatic is the episode in which Soames realizes that, as in Verdi’s Don Carlos, ‘she never loved him’. The melodrama lies in the obvious, generic, slightly outdated comparison; in the hyperbolization, the conventional solemnization, as a stereotype.

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definition of the characters, and a never so vigorous and blunt narrative style.34 Once again exploring the theme of great passion, which is mixed and adulterous and therefore impossible, Galsworthy has George, the son of a traditionalist squire,35 fall for the beautiful wife of a captain in London, but the divorce request is thwarted with the final return to normality. The novel on the rural world, which was reflected by the scenes of Devon where Galsworthy wrote in complete tranquillity, was a leap back in time, and this scenario is resurrected with good-natured nostalgia and also to see its decline, now close to dissolution. George is already a good-for-nothing rogue, but the clash of values closes with an impartial nothing.36 Hilary in Fraternity37 (1909), which is a dull and too programmatic rehash of the novel ‘of the two nations’, is a second self-portrait of Galsworthy, insofar as he is an intellectual, a writer to be precise, who comes out of his privileged class and reaches out ‘fraternally’, and also chivalrously, towards the class of the have-nots, represented by a sensual and slightly naïve model and then scribe whom he falls in love with. Hilary’s wife Bianca is jealous of him, but Ada, who helped Galsworthy with the novels by transcribing them and correcting the proofs, is also ambiguously reflected in the girl of the people. The latter, nonetheless, offers her services to a relative of Hilary’s, an old man who raves about a possible future society in which class differences have disappeared. The action is therefore typically binary, and swings from scenes of high plot, involving the well to do to the low plot of the proletariat. Fraternity, which is one of the trio of ideals of 34 35 36

37

The scene, all in telegraphic parataxis, of Mrs Bellew pawning her jewellery, is famous. This crass traditionalism has the proverbial name, based on ‘Forsytism’, of ‘pendycitis’, from the name of the Pendyce family. In reality the modern vice of restlessness also spreads to George’s mother, a partially romantic character who is also nostalgic for youthful passions. The contrast between property and exploited countryside is at the centre of the later novel The Freelands (1915), in which the son and one of the daughters of the landlords are Christian socialists. For this element, Fréchet 1982, 81–2, thought this novel too derived from Turgenev. According to Fréchet 1982, 71, modelled on Turgenev’s On The Eve (1860). The first provisional title was Shadows, and according to a forced symbolism it was supposed to mean that every bourgeois has his own double amongst the proletariat.

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the French Revolution, remains unrealized and unachievable, and poverty can be reduced only in individual cases without undermining generalized privilege.38 The well-off make various and vain incursions into the world of their counterparts without really understanding their problems, despite their good intentions; and the protagonist finds he has to disappear from the scene after having given a symbolic offering to the ‘little model’. The Patrician (1911) confirms Galsworthy incipient turn towards a critique of the aristocracy which is tempered in the secret celebration of a more socially responsible class, which in the protagonist of this novel checks anarchic passion in order to serve the nation, with a superhuman effort that was compared to the tragic conflicts of Hardy. The Dark Flower39 (1913) presents the novelty of being a more lyrical, more romantic novel deprived of any pressure to deal with social issues; it is also, and especially, a romance that is rigorously tripartite and temporally demarcated in chapters which, named after the seasons, follow the flowering, the maturation and – the first episode is the spring, the final is the autumn – the vanishing of the young, adult, and finally middle-aged protagonist’s passion. Unattainableness, or Sehnsucht, is what Galsworthy is trying to portray without really having a romantic temperament, and without really knowing how to represent intoxicating and burning passion; the tone is that of three random attempted and failed adulteries, with nothing of the aura of great Tristanian passion. The structure might seem taken from Hardy’s The Well-Beloved,40 were it not that the phenomenology of passion is studied alternately in the man 38

In an unusual scene Hilary takes the young model to buy shoes, and is surprised to see her threadbare and darned tights and her toes protruding from holes. 39 Inspired by Galsworthy’s brief love affair with dancer and actress Margaret Morris. The scenario of multiple lovers, with the implicit repudiation of the indissolubility of marriage, is shifted to the feminine role in Beyond (1917), a feuilleton on whose borrowings from Maupassant, Tolstoy and Bennett cf. Fréchet 1982, 82–4. 40 It is no accident that at the end of the first episode Mark Lennan goes to Rome to be a sculptor – like Hardy’s Pierston – after falling for an older woman, the wife of his Oxford Greek professor (to these analogies should also be added the weavings acutely investigated by Gindin 1987, 328–9). From 1880 in the first episode, we move with the second to 1887 and 1908 in the third. Only in this third episode does Mark fall in love with a woman who is younger than him. As Fréchet 1982, 144, notes, Mark,

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and the woman, and that there is no real bewildering repeatability of the female archetype, such as that which obsesses the Hardy’s alter ego in that novel. In reality, the first story seems rather to parody the life of D. H. Lawrence, and makes us imagine a sort of far-off preview of Women in Love. Mark is the young student who steals the thirty-six-year-old dissatisfied Austrian wife from the slightly absent-minded university professor; and the first half of the story takes place in the Dolomites – though not in Tyrol, they were at that time under Austrian rule – where Lawrence’s novel also ended.41 The lovers of the other two episodes are both married women, with husbands older than them. 6. It is little less than a miracle that a writer in his fifties, who had exhausted most of the variations of his art, and given his all without appreciable critical success, could hold in store his best series of novels, unexpectedly drawing the renewal card. Coming back to the saga,42 with the novel In Chancery (1920) Galsworthy could not help but update the genealogical plot, with its deaths and losses and new marriages and the new vicissitudes of the children’s children, and above all the structure and method. This is no longer a melodrama, neither is it entirely a feuilleton; it is still organized as a polyptych, in separate scenes, the by now ever more wretched and miserable cases of the survivors continuing in rotation, but while new family forces, new also because they no longer seem bound by the Forsytian code, root out the old ones. The novel is still, therefore, a multifocal, but Galsworthy has refined his introspective technique, and the stream of consciousness, in the air, is visible in the more frequent use of empathic thought, in the dramatic and interior monologues, in the psychic brooding without captions. Without touching the masterpiece, Galsworthy has perfected the mechanism of his previous novel. There is no shortage of monotonous or perfunctory writing, of lapses into the conventional and

together with Soames Forsyte, is the only Galsworthian protagonist followed over a long biographic time frame. 41 Another, involuntary, link is that Mark becomes jealous of a ‘beastly’ violinist, who may be a forerunner of Lawrence’s Loerke (§ 114.6). 42 The last of the Five Tales (1918), all about cases of divided and tormented consciences, is the seam between the first and the other Forsyte novels.

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into sentimental or mawkish clichés; the plot is richer but several chapters are mere filler, and too often the characters are caught remembering and digging up scenes from the past. And too frequent is the recourse to the family meeting to make a certain turning point happen. But Soames Forsyte is a more central character, even though the novel dedicated to him was the first; for this reason there is a more unified storyline built on a smaller number of characters who are consequently more focused and well rounded. The broad spectrum of the previous novel is reduced to a main plot and a subplot, the former, sentimental, about the adults and mature characters, in turn doubled up – by two divorce cases – and the latter about the younger characters, cousins and sons, with the immature idylls that they produce and the enlistment, marked by mourning, for the Boer War in South Africa. The sense of the story is summed up in the following phrase: ‘the type gets thinner with each generation. Your son […] may be a pure altruist’. This transformation does not take effect in Soames, who is entrusted the role of standard-bearer of the old values of the Victorian model, understood as the triumph of entrepreneurial individualism with the recognized limitation of ‘hypocrisy’, which is also unauthentic taste, superficial culture, and the ineradicable mental distortion corresponding to its materialism. Soames’s ideological adversary is his cousin Jolyon, who knows he is a bastard, half Forsyte and half other, and is significantly on Irene’s side in memory of his father. He marries Irene because only an anti-Forsytian romantic like him could marry the only romantic woman infiltrated amongst the anti-romantics. Just as The Man of Property had been written twenty years after its internal time, Galsworthy has events inch forwards from the harbingers of the Boer War, which was also a fact from twenty years prior to 1920. The pulse of the new era, the exact end of the century, is found in a relaxation of marriage customs, and at the same time in the air of crisis surrounding the world of the stock market and weakening the value of property as a consequence of the threat of war. A complex web of deaths and births thickens around the year 1901, the final year of the novel, which is the year of the death of Queen Victoria, whose funeral procession paraded through the streets of London just as two heirs are being born, to the joy and disappointment of the two main Forsytes of the second generation.

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7. The framework is now the divorce proceedings filed and prepared by Soames, who has now been separated from his wife Irene for twelve years. He would like to communicate this late intention of his to his relatives; never having lived in the villa of the scandal, which was passed on to cousin Jolyon, he settled in a luxurious home on the Thames, increased his holdings, and now loves a certain Annette, daughter of French restaurateurs, still a young girl who seems to be the very personification of demureness and freshness. The satellites to this central plot are the cases of the other relatives. With these we can feel the moral fibre and professional ethic giving way. One of Soames’s sisters is ditched by her husband, a horse enthusiast, for an Argentinian dancer, and so Soames has to advise her on how to conduct herself at this delicate moment. The psychological question hinges on the necessity to pass on, morally and genealogically, the Forsyte heritage: the grandparents’ generation, tough and steadfast, impervious and severe, is about to be decimated, and sees dark clouds and the Apocalypse on the horizon, as old people being demobilized always do; concretely, this means passing on the baton to slightly limp-wristed descendants who have other things on their minds, infected as they are with the signs of modernity, and to create a lineage tout court. To have a son to leave his property to becomes Soames’s obsession. In young Jolyon, on the other hand, a compromise is active: as an artist he also thinks about money, and has come down from romance into concreteness; he has inherited, and has become the mature Jolyon, the double of his father. Irene, like Hilda Lessways from Bennett’s second novel in the Clayhanger trilogy, is now a changed woman: she lives alone, a shadow of her romance and her mystery; pragmatic, disenchanted, she has taken the bitterness out of the distant scandal and archived the past. Imperceptible rotations, though of course a bit unlikely, make Soames retrace his steps and set him against Jolyon, who chivalrously, but without first knowing it even sentimentally, defends Irene and takes her side. The two cousins thus find themselves fighting over the same woman. The Victorian magnate’s hypocrisy lies in the fact that Soames loves Annette, and is keeping a place in her heart with a declaration of conditional love: he does not tell her that he will marry her only if Irene refuses his final desperate assaults. These repeated assaults highlight the incorrigible bad taste of the suitor, who resorts to

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the rhetorical and blatant gesture of offering Irene some extremely expensive jewellery to overcome her refusal, and completes the gaffe by adding that it is only a son that he wants from her. In this scene, one of the best and most quick-paced, Irene, in the name of dignity and her unshakable romanticism, refuses the badly devised, clumsy proposal with the words, which could be melodramatic but are also seriously humorous, ‘I would rather die’. Equally preposterous and surreal is the fact that Soames hires a detective agency to follow his wife and catch her in the company of a lover to have the winning hand in court. The world of Trollope comes to mind when Soames, always prudent, verges on the madness of Trevelyan in He Knew He Was Right, and the stupid detective takes him to be the suspected paramour! Jolyon, being in love with Irene, cannot in the end hamper the procedures that will make her a free woman and able to marry him. In the subplot the young Forsytes, students at Oxford, devote themselves to vice, gambling and horses and are vaguely reminiscent of those of a second Trollope novel, The Duke’s Children, with the self-same gap between the ideologies and mentality of the old and young. Unexplainable hostilities form and grow in these second cousins, as well as affection at first sight, or perhaps derived from the inextinguishable male competitive spirit; but for now it is a countermelody of young, inexperienced people, who are not really conscious of the burning spirit of rivalry. June Forsyte leaves for the war with the Red Cross, and seems to represent the definitive extinction of the gene. In this much greater attention to the context, that of an England and of the very Forsyte clan divided between those for and those against, Jolyon’s son falls in battle and another young Forsyte returns mutilated. The circle closes in the exact moment in which Queen Victoria dies, and in the private plot Soames ties the knot with Annette in an expedient marriage, for the sole purpose of producing an heir. Soames’s great passion is frustrated and untapped, but is still alive and ready to ignite; Irene marries his hated cousin Jolyon, and he and she are the ‘rebels from the Victorian ideal’. The villa destined for Soames’s and Irene’s happiness becomes the tabernacle of affection and the witness and background to many events. Now Irene lives there, but with another man, and has a son with him; for the sake of symmetry Soames, on the other hand, must face a trick of fate, because his long-awaited heir only arrives after a distressing

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dilemma, because his wife is close to losing her life to give him his longedfor heir, who then turns out to be a girl. 8. To Let (1921) confirms an evolutionary principle in the development of the Forsyte saga, which seems like a law governing a much more restrained, fast-paced and powerful one, Wuthering Heights. From the tangled and undisciplined crossovers of the first generation, the pattern of a binary opposition has emerged – in culture, temperament and personality – between the devotion to the original root values of the Forsyte clan and the equally radical overcoming of said values; and this feud was born within the same family in a branch which was already eccentric and marginalized. But this evolutionary law is that, just as the second Catherine unites with Hareton, the children of enemies become friends, and from hatred and aversion springs love. In To Let Val and Holly, children of enemies, are married, and so could even Jon, son of the ‘rebel’ young Jolyon, and Fleur, daughter of Soames, be;43 but their thwarted union signals the triumph of the ancient rivalry. The internal deadlock, from which all the action derives, is this: Jolyon, a watercolour painter, came close to ‘property’ and the code of accumulation, while maintaining a prevalent bent for romantic rebellion, and his partnership with Irene, who is also a bit deromanticized, bears witness to this. Soames, who collects paintings but does not understand contemporary art, and defends the ancient family code against the onslaught of time, is remarried to a French woman, and has approached romanticism – he was already half romantic when he wanted to marry Irene – but with an absolute prevalence of the Forsyte mould. So Galsworthy sets out an allegory of the struggle against the past, which some want to unavoidably project its shadow onto the present, and others try to neutralize and cushion for the sake of peace. This contest also has the implications of a restoration of, and a desire and nostalgia for, a lost era, swept away by the

43 From Soames’s marriage is born a strange creature that is floral like her name, Fleur, and natural and primordial, and looks like the Moorish, Mediterranean woman in a painting by Goya. This physical trait is also remarked upon excessively. Jon in turn is a ‘Viconian’ recurrence: he wants to be a farmer like his ancestor, but he also follows in his artist father’s footsteps, though pursuing literature and poetry rather than painting.

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war, on the part of the now disoriented older generation: the era of cars which represent that which the first locomotives represented for their parents, or of the demise of the top hat, or of the advent of modern art, a change which Soames Forsyte attributes to the rebellion of Irene, that historical catalyst, that watershed between past and present. The very tiny lag between writing and the internal time frame makes the novel militant, of an almost synchronic development, contained within a year. The plot is suddenly post-war, and no longer places any temporal padding between internal time and the time of writing. In the only political page, Soames thinks he can feel the old model falling apart, fears the expropriations and the threats to his economic fortune, and owns up to being a Victorian individualist cut off from the social fabric, who, apolitical, looks only to his own interests, supporter of a perfect and extreme laissez-faire.44 Soames is now one of the numerous old survivors battered by the past, and falsely dominating the present, who illustrate the axiom that money cannot buy happiness. His injury is blatant: he must reaffirm his cold interpretation of life, the principle of combatting, always fighting, with his libido transferred and almost dried up in the accumulation; but several times human sentiment and weakness get the upper hand. Galsworthy torments him, and does everything he can to avoid him being happy. Annette is unfaithful to him, but Soames discards the idea of having her followed and spied on too to find out who her lover is. He does not react, but rather he challenges his wife to reveal it. Cynical and much younger, Annette takes back a part of her life that she has not been able to live. The title of the novel, in fact, refers to Soames’s final change of mind, which sees him romantically renting that villa that, being the repository of his burning tragedy – the loss of the woman he was madly in love with – he would never have wanted or thought of acquiring; but he does, and it is a clue to the division that is raging inside him. It is the slow via crucis of the individualist magnate, the cornerstone of Victorianism, letting himself live, and whose points of reference are running away.

44 In The White Monkey ‘non-commitment’ is defined by Soames as ‘the only attitude for a sensible man’.

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9. Soames, the formerly reactive husband, who is now covering up his wife’s affair and does not want scandals, may seem a far-off echo of Proust’s Swann. But that accusation of sentimentality directed at Galsworthy really is legitimate, at least in part: he too often prefers to depict the static, statuesque, immobile character who, against the backdrop of a landscape which should work as an objective correlative, but instead is vague and an end in itself, commemorates, regrets and feels sorry for himself; and he digs over those few facts that are at the origin of his plight, and which start to sound pleonastic after reminding the reader of them so many times, while this yielding ‘to the waves of memory’ tries to provoke, even reinforce, a heart-wrenching pathos. Galsworthy’s at least dilatory art cannot be concealed, especially at the first raising of the curtain, in pages and pages wasted in repeating the backstory, measuring the time passed, re-informing the reader with other glimpses and other summaries. It is also an implausible art, because it tries to get the reader to tolerate the carelessness and ignorance of the parents who let the two second cousins, Jon and Fleur, go out with each other, sure of the fact that they will never find out about their parents’ skeletons in the cupboard. In itself the blossoming of this love is a fresh and free-flowing, even playful, episode that domesticates the allegorical framework: it is not Fate that brought them together but chance, otherwise To Let would have the same device as Armadale (‘it almost seems like Fate. Only that’s so oldfashioned’, comments Fleur’s aunt).45 The scene in which Fleur, rummaging in a drawer finds, underneath her own childhood photograph, that of a woman whom she recognizes as Irene, Jon’s mother, is not melodramatic but fatally ironic. And it is curious that a feud for motives that are material, of greed and rivalry, is considered ‘romantic’ by a generation of young people ‘paying no attention to any sort of decent prejudice’. The psychological drama becomes refined and interwoven almost as in a minor Proust: Fleur manages to make her father confess the past, and also to make him admit his disapproval of a love between her and his hated cousin’s son; so in the name 45 This is also a dilution of Greek drama, and a temporary and hoped-for negation of its concept of Fate. If the two young people, new forces, fight to throw off the conditioning of the past, to release themselves from it and dominate it, render it harmless and unusable, that is also the scenario of T. S. Eliot’s almost contemporary plays.

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of this same ‘grand passion’ that her father confesses to her, for the woman he has lost forever, Fleur tries to win him over and to make him approve and support her own ‘grand passion’ for Jon (her father, however, challenges this definition, and retorts that it is only illusory and will pass). In the tragic ending Jolyon seems to boldly wish for the need for premarital sex between the engaged couple, because sex can reveal a love that is tragically wrong, as it was for Irene; but he feels more confident recommending it to his son in a letter. He, Jon’s father, demands this sacrifice from his son so as not to hurt his mother, a dilemma which Jon settles decisively by leaving Fleur. In the end his mother wins, believing that history can repeat itself, and that Soames’s daughter is ‘possessive’ like her father. In this finale we realize that Soames’s emotional wound is still open, and cannot be healed for eternity, because, urged to visit his first wife, he takes his leave by asking for an ersatz handshake, which is denied him. It could be guessed from the first pages that Galsworthy had a very dubious card up his sleeve, one that was a bit postiche and random, as in the worst of the Victorian novels: a slightly stupid young nobleman interested in Fleur, with conservative artistic tastes and his head in the clouds. And Soames rashly decides that he should marry his daughter. § 26. Galsworthy IV: ‘The Forsyte Saga’ II. The melancholy calendar of the generational turnover After the first three novels, Galsworthy could now write by memory, and had elaborated a well-oiled diegetic mechanism, easy to carry out in its variations and its branching. The Forsyte material, emotional and narrative, in the second trilogy also known as A Modern Comedy (1924–1928, 1929), is no longer enough in itself, but is effectively padded out, and when even this is lacking there is always recourse and possible remedy in meetings between survivors, who can be moved from the edges of the frame to the centre of the picture, and turn out handy to remind us of the past epic and to pretend to update first and foremost themselves. Progress is minimal, but the routine is interrupted by scenic flashes and occasional episodes which set themselves apart and even sometimes surprise us, carried out in the tradition of the bewildered and surreal, even absurd, scene which goes back to Dickens and reminds us of Gissing and even Forster. Galsworthy must integrate it by having extraneous elements end up within its range;

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in one case he breaks his rules and exceptionally relies on the exuberant character, although this entry turns out to be suitable for an unexpectedly political subplot. Only in the second novel of this trilogy is the pattern of friendship and passion that blossoms in the children of enemies hibernating; but it wakes up again in the third novel. 2. In the first ‘act’, The White Monkey46 (1924), the plot line about Soames Forsyte, who as the honest and incorruptible manager of a finance company wants to shed light on certain crimes, and after creating the scandal walks away solemnly, is particularly contrived and lifeless. The Forsyte duties do not just lead Galsworthy to give continuity to this key character, but necessitate an update on the life state of the now few survivors, because even Soames’s last cousin, and penultimate of the nineteenth-century male Forsytes, ends his days. Even more acute and scornful is the nostalgia for the Victorian model in this survivor, and therefore the critique of the modern world, in which the narrator’s own ill-concealed voice echoes, using Soames as a filter and mouthpiece. His is a planetary apocalypticism, or the sighting of a historical point of no return. Not only does he warn us that ‘mind was steadily declining’, but rejects one by one all the results and signs of the modern.47 The first chapters, however, focus on the domestic life of Fleur and the publisher Michael Mont; and they are experimental chapters, and as chapters of this kind sometimes are, they are unrealistic and not very successful, as they try to give the idea, dash in an impressionistic way, and with lines of dialogue extrapolated, with a wink, just to reel in handfuls of names which are then never developed dash of London high society in the mid-1920s. Of course the characters of the previous novel are largely unrecognizable: Fleur is now a rich young lady of the world who, a bit over the top with her mischievous little Chinese dog, receives up-to-the-minute writers and artists of the most diverse tendencies and statures into her sitting room. Excited and whirling 46 This title contains a further allusion to the artistic taste of Soames Forsyte, since the monkey is the subject of a Chinese painting which he gives to his daughter as a present. 47 In a page in which Soames is more explicitly an intermediary, Galsworthy shows no mercy for psychoanalysis. On his incomprehension of the subconscious and the interpretation of dreams, cf. Fréchet 1982, 132.

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scenes of previews follow on from each other with a flurry of jibes which are lost on us today and no longer have any force – an unidentified guest writes poetry which resembles that of Shelley and ‘sometimes […] the prose of Marcel Proust’. Desert, a poet, is the non-fallen in war, thus the disillusioned survivor; naturally he has only the name of Wilfred Owen, who really did fall, but with the difference of one letter, Wilfrid. Michael Mont works conscientiously and is a sensitive and generous happy-go-lucky chap. The heart of the second storyline is Fleur’s desired but never realized adultery with the poet Desert. Michael suspects, ascertains, and is jealous, but is afraid of a showdown, and pretends not to see; on the other hand, Fleur holds herself back from the edge of the abyss and gives her husband, and above all her father, an heir. Fleur is just bored, and nostalgic for her unsuccessful ‘great passion’. Her jealous and slightly cowardly husband could be a transposed echo of Joyce’s Bloom, chiefly because Galsworthy frequently listens to him thinking and brooding, in inserted interior monologues that ape those of Joyce’s character. The introspective technique has now taken this direction, that of empathized thought in a Joycean mould. The return to a multifocal structure is based on the third plot line, the only true positive innovation in the novel. Still, it says it all that Galsworthy must resort to this for lack of events, in an often dilatory and slow narration that frequently gets wrapped up in itself. We follow in fact the little odyssey of the book packer, Bicket, in episodes in a naïve and surreal genre, not lacking in freshness and congeniality, because he steals books from Mont’s publishing house, but only out of necessity.48 This proletarian is tricked, and then fired, according to the perverse principle that if everyone robbed all the workers would go hungry, so it is better to endure. The Dickensian foci get even closer and touch when Bicket – like a proper neo-capitalist! – starts selling coloured balloons outside St Paul’s Cathedral, and Soames buys two of them, even though he has no children or grandchildren to give them to. But the associations reinforce each other, and Soames immediately thinks of how to urge his daughter to produce an heir, inflates these useless balloons and hurls them into the air in a gesture of well-wishing, and they deflate and end up on the hat of his son-in-law who 48 It is one of the few cases in which Galsworthy imitates Gissing and his proletarian novels or, further back, Dickens and the tripe seller of his Christmas stories.

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is returning home. For her part, Bicket’s wife, Victorine, to earn the money she needs for the crossing to Australia to start a new life with her husband, unbeknownst to him poses nude for an artist, with the candid boldness of carelessness. Galsworthy thus timidly returns to the novel ‘of the two nations’, and creates intermittently a provocative and tragicomic fairy-tale parable of 1920s society, close to the depression and the strikes of 1926, when only by subterfuge and moral compromise can one make ends meet: otherwise the only solution is the surreal one of the balloon seller. The first and third state are elbow to elbow in the picture gallery, where Bicket stupidly delays waking up to reality that the woman in the painting is not a lookalike, and another woman. Galsworthy shows clear echoes of Forster’s Leonard Bast, in the patronizing of the proletariat by the upper classes. Bicket is as deluded as Bast, but less ambitious to acculturate, and his wife is rather more naïve. The odyssey has a happy ending, but to be happy the couple has to emigrate from the London inferno. 3. The Silver Spoon (1926) does not borrow from Gissing, rather it is an approximation to the political novels of Trollope, which had always been, in a permanent tangle, political, emotional and legal. But the copy is far inferior to the original, and results now in a really tiresome and dull novel, the emptiest and most inconsistent of the whole saga. The plot is nondescript, stuffed with some insignificant collateral episodes, and it is dragged along by leaving excessive space for moaning and freewheeling rumination on the state of things by the various characters concerned. Melodrama re-emerges as the mostly gratuitous and superfluous intensification of emotions, reactions and intentions. Galsworthy must take note of the humorous inadequacy of the nineteenth-century political utopias in order to face up to the now explosive crisis of society; and he must also begrudgingly dismiss the Forsyte ethic as outdated. The direct historical background is the country on the eve of the general strike of 1926. Michael, Fleur’s husband, closes his publishing company and runs for Parliament as the mouthpiece of a vague plan for the social and economic renewal of England.49 In the private storyline, Fleur is the target of libel by an eman49 The central points of the programme – that goes by the ironic name of Foggartism, containing the word ‘fog’ – are mass emigration of young people to the Dominions,

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cipated woman with advanced ideas, Marjorie Ferrar, a sort of Diana of the Crossways in Meredith; the following libel trial, always postponed and perhaps even avoidable, closes in the final pages with Fleur’s acquittal. Soames is once again the deus ex machina, because he is the one who takes offence at the slur on his daughter found in a newspaper article, and who demands that it be immediately vindicated. Plausibility is breached because it is an improbable storm in a teacup. It is only a secret sign of Soames’s old imploded drama, that in that newspaper article appears, and he immediately notices, the term ‘buccaneering’, said of those who want easy success in today’s politics: and ‘buccaneer’ was the nickname of Bosinney, his rival, and that is enough to unleash his resentment. The affront is understood to be directed more at himself than at his daughter. The plot is a sort of Ibsenian drama of the dead that awaken, because Jon or his ghost, which had been thought exorcized, has also turned up in the guise of his American brother-in-law who comes to visit Fleur, so the extinguished fire reignites without her noticing; and indeed even Fleur seeks an outlet against her slanderer.50 When the trial comes around, the question arises of whether Galsworthy wants to aim at objectivity, and see absolute truth defended, or if he is trying to set the old morality against the modern one, as in an allegory or a metaphysical agon. Or is Soames’s pig-headedness just a figurative outburst of the old passions and a sign of impatience? The accused, Marjorie, attacks the residual hypocrisy of Victorianism, approves premarital relations also for women; she plays the part of Olivia in Wycherley’s risqué The Country Wife, and supports the abolition of censorship. The clash of viewpoints cannot but have a foreseeable result, because a now anachronistic and philistine crusade for antiquated morality is unthinkable. The phases of the debate highlight the fact that morality is a relative concept, and that fathers, and not their daughters, would have been, and are, scandalized. Everyone realizes, on the other hand, that the which can obviate the scourge of unemployment, and increase salaries and allow agricultural productivity to recover. Bicket writes a letter from Australia to his benefactor Mont. 50 This can be seen from the fact that Jon’s American brother-in-law explicitly and instinctively sides with Marjorie.

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debate centres around a quibble about names and forms – Fleur is accused of being a ‘snob’ – and that a case is built around this that ends up a parody of Wilde’s trial, also because Marjorie upholds, scandalizing the audience, the ‘aesthetic’ absence of any relationship between life and art. At the end of the trial, in which Fleur is victorious, public opinion ends up supporting the loser of the case. Galsworthy has defended Soames, but solely because after the first instinctive reaction his common sense prevailed, and he tried in vain to arrive at a peaceful reconciliation. 4. The formula of Swan Song (1928), carried out in an undoubtedly pleasant way, is the pairing of the socio-political backdrop with a new emotional combination which is actually old, because Galsworthy draws from his magician’s hat the easiest and most obvious, which also means the most improbable, solution. This is Jon’s return to England, and thus the gradual flare-up of that passion in Fleur, which had equally unexpectedly and inexplicably been extinguished. This rekindling takes place during the general strike of 1926, which Galsworthy reads as an emergency dictated by the confrontation of the two parties, government and trade unions, to ‘save face’. While the strike fizzles out and is called off within a week, love grows over a longer period, because the narrator purposefully keeps the two old flames apart at first, and then brings them together, has them recognize each other, and only at the end of the novel does he stage its explosion. In the meantime the author never misses a chance to go over times past yet again according to the characters’ line of thinking. By now it is a consolidated technique of Galsworthy’s to capture them whilst they are lost in thought, and these numerous interruptions in the diegetic flow could be considered the best thing about the novel, and a complete reversal of the balance between life as lived and life as thought. Virginia Woolf used to criticize Galsworthy among others, but her Mrs Dalloway is remarkably similar to Fleur going out first thing in the morning and seeing flowers, though she does not buy them. The dialogue is idle chatter for the most part, but it is also real dialogue, made up of terse phrases, which sometimes are no longer than half a line, and which demonstrate and enhance Galsworthy’s dramatic expertise. Of course Soames, now over seventy, is acting behind the scenes, and he is entrusted with the meditation on speed as a characteristic of modernity. Its distinguishing mark is lack of continuity, mobility and fickleness: ‘Nothing

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lasts with you modern young people’. And so the second chapter shows and demonstrates how certain actions are arranged through a series of phone calls, where five novels before they would have been agreed upon by visiting in person. The prevailing economization is also active in the language and, in an emblematic scene, Soames gives a lift to a young warm-up actress and notes her slangy expressions and swallowed words. He is the conscience of the old days which never misses a chance to commiserate about the tempora and the mores which are no longer what they were:51 he is more than ever an oracle which emits harsh aphorisms about an empty age and a land which in a certain sense is also ‘waste’. A secondary character observes that one cannot be dishonest, because ‘he was born a gentleman’; Soames retorts: ‘That means nothing nowadays’. If there is a conservative wall with regards to the workers’ unrest, and European socialist agitation, it is Soames. In reality not only him, the young people themselves do not seem to miss a chance to remember, afflicted by nostalgia and moist from the flood of memory. Remembrance is in itself an attribute of modernist narrative conscience, but Galsworthy, who has borrowed from this tradition, cannot manage to make his characters think of anything but the salient moments of their passion, or other events which are always the same, with no turnover. Such can also be said of the two young people revisiting the places of their childhood, and it is precisely during a visit by Fleur and Jon to that memorial to affection, and also to aversion, that is the villa built but never inhabited by Soames Forsyte, that their passion is reignited. Throughout the entire novel Soames fights to stop that passion, which he knows may flourish once again, from having a chance, and he wants to obstruct and smother it; but it is yet another battle lost at the outset, the battle against ungovernable passion, the only unbeatable and fatal enemy. Finally Galsworthy explains once and for all the ‘evolutionary’ interpretation of his alter ego, who still defines Jon as ‘the son of his supplanter’: and he justifies him because ‘people in the eighties and nineties didn’t understand how disgusting it was’.52 Some fillers are 51

52

In one of these emblematic, but slightly peripheral, episodes, a young man of good upbringing is broke, and steals a precious keepsake from Soames’s sister; when he is caught, he returns it in exchange for 10 pounds, which they give him rather than calling the police. The phrase refers to his possessive treatment of his own wife.

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devised so as not to arrive at the climax too soon;53 but the plausibility of the plot leaves a lot to be desired. Jon who before had implausibly left for America, equally implausibly returns to England with a wife who is just a token presence; Fleur is carefree, stubborn, heathenish, not madly passionate. And why did Galsworthy decide not to bring in Irene, and keep Soames’s wife, Annette, away? And why is Jon so terrorized by the sense of sin and marital infidelity, even though his parents, especially his mother, have a history of transgression? The adultery is refined, consumed in fade-outs and euphemisms, quite unlike a brutally realistic one narrated in those years, that of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley. Tragedy is in the air because Soames shortly beforehand visits his ‘roots’ and the village where the Forsyte lineage hails from, and his final meditations contain unusual hints at wills and death. The allegory of the victory of the great self-destructive passion is complicated and melodramatic, and also partly mock-heroic: Soames does not die yet, after having saved with great difficulty many of the paintings of his collection from a fire (which evokes in the reader those of analogous punishment and immolation in Aurora Leigh and Jane Eyre). In saving his daughter from suicide, and to exorcize her passion, he himself is mortally struck by passion, in the form of a copy of a Goya which falls on him and breaks his skull.54 It is an extreme form of the neo-Gothic pattern of the portrait which kills. § 27. Galsworthy V: ‘The Forsyte Saga’ III. Nostalgia for chivalrous times In Maid In Waiting (1931), the first of the three far-from-breathtaking novels of the third trilogy entitled End of the Chapter, the Forsyte saga is to all intents and purposes finished, with the trailblazer and standardbearer of the eponymous dynasty now deceased. Fleur and Michael Mont are relegated to the background, now anonymous supporting roles,55 and 53

Thirty years earlier, Shaw had grotesquely tackled the problem of slums and advocated a solution, which is what Michael tries to do with his new political programme. 54 Throughout the whole trilogy this imaginary copy of a Goya, entitled La vindimia, depicts a woman in Moorish attire, and symbolizes Fleur in her passionate nature. 55 Galsworthy has to make Dinny declare to Fleur: ‘You’re modern, Fleur; I’m mediaeval’. But, comments one character referring to Fleur, ‘after her father’s death her behaviour has been exemplary’.

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distant relatives and friends of the Forsytes step into the limelight. The story of a community gets underway, and so a new small saga, the saga of the Charwells; and this community is the emblem, or an oasis, of the ancient aristocracy flailing around in its death throes in the grip of the modern. The saga is also that of the country house, which from its bosom sends members of Parliament to the Commons, and which is faithful to the rituals of the hunt; it is also that of the caste of Anglican rectors and military officers, former fighters in the theatres of war, first the Imperial wars and now the Great War.56 A large chunk of the novel is used up in pure and pleasantly useless mundane chit-chat; and Galsworthy does not concern himself with the other side of the coin, and does not create for it any realistic counterbalance like, for instance, an alternative, proletarian subplot.57 The crisis of the aristocracy, which clings to a sense of honour now vanished or dying out, lies in antiquated formality applied to an equally formalistic content. Hubert Charwell, a captain returned from a legendary scientific expedition in South America, had killed a Bolivian mule driver in self-defence when the latter had tried to kill him because he, uncivilized as he was, was whipping the mules.58 In other words he killed in order to administer and safeguard order and discipline and to suppress insubordination – and, in the final analysis, for the mirage of Kipling’s white man’s burden. On the other hand, back home, the libel trial is dragging on, and the accused could have been cleared a long time ago, if Hubert had only accepted his accuser’s retraction, due in part to the love for his sister, Dinny. Galsworthy misses the chance for a narrative variant, that of the legal novel, with which he could have reconstructed the Bolivian backstory, perhaps through fragmentary extracts from Hubert’s diary, thus at least breaking narrative omniscience. In reality the hidden allegory behind this judicial action is that of democracy which no longer respects the glorious aristocracy and even casts doubt on its credibility: in Hubert, and with Hubert, an 56 57 58

Expressly, the Charwells are ‘thirty years behind’, according to Fleur Mont. The scene of Dinny’s meeting with the prostitute, in Flowering Wilderness, is fleeting and moreover very vague. It is a pale reflection of the strenuous campaign against hunting and cruelty to animals fought by Galsworthy since 1895.

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entire caste is in the docks, and, as Dinny herself says, ‘with Hubert’s fate was wrapped up the fate of her beloved home’. The law is no longer deferential, and indeed now seems to have it in for the aristocracy. The Bolivian backstory, always recalled fleetingly and therefore blurry and generic, is an intrigue worthy of Graham Greene, but it is anything but enthralling. In fact there are two actions or legal proceedings going on at the same time, and the second, more intriguing and realistic, concerns the case of a maniac who escapes from the asylum, reaches his wife and children and stays at home for a few days desperately trying to recover, but inexorably falls back into the jaws of madness. 2. Dinny Charwell is the eponymous heroine who sacrifices her feelings to maintain the family honour. She is still more of a protagonist in Flowering Wilderness (1932) which, together with the third book, tries to propose her as the new heroine of a modern antiquity or of an antiquity which is thus fatally updated, capable of demonstrating a valid ethical code for the changing times, based on accepting with parsimony and in many other cases resisting;59 moreover, she is, like Soames Forsyte, a mirror and therefore a witness to a slightly later epoch.60 It is the first time that Galsworthy focuses seriously on religion.61 Dinny updates Victorian religiousness in her respectful but staunch agnosticism, sustained by a purely secular code of ethics. She therefore is like Shelton from one of Galsworthy’s early novels, because she challenges the pharisaism of her fellow countrymen who formally declare to be, but are not authentically, Christian. An uncle sings the praises of Confucianism which is equivalent to an ‘ethical’ philosophy, a cult of origins and ancestors, the moderation of behaviour, love for animals and stoicism in the face of death. Wilfrid Desert is brought back and reintroduced as the Oxford cadet who escaped from, rather than 59 This kind of oxymoron is alluded to in the title. 60 The plot is strewn with small and clever signals of a changing custom, like the pyjamas women wear now, or the definitive disappearance of the horse-drawn carriage, replaced by motor taxis. 61 Apart from the modest pre-war novel Saint’s Progress (1919), based on the crisis of conscience of a vicar challenged by his daughter – a ‘clergyman’s daughter’ as in Orwell (Volume 8, § 25) – who has had a baby out of wedlock, by a man who died in the war.

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falling in, the Great War, and is therefore one of those ‘shell-shocks’ whom we also find in Bennett’s novels. Wilfrid, threatened with death during his oriental peregrinations, has converted to Islam as a paradoxically providential gesture of protest against a Christianity that has caused ‘more misery in the world than any other mortal thing’. This rebellious and irredeemable bitterness is the result of his experience of war, interpreted as the ultimate and most emblematic of the miseries created by Christianity and western Christian civilization. The couple of new prophets struggles in vain against the prejudice that blocks and hinders their love, and against the ostracism which the new convert is a victim of, in a story that overflows in the long run into the most antiquated melodramatic plot. Dinny, with a supreme masochistic effort, is able to forget or smother the memory of Wilfrid, who leaves, destroyed by his own anxiety;62 she is demoted again to the rank of altruistic and unswerving housemaid, and heads backstage to make way for her sister Clare in Over the River (1933, posthumous). The first part of this epilogue is brisker and less dilatory, beginning in medias res with the arrival on a ship from the Orient of a displeased and offended wife, Dinny’s sister, who during the crossing has accepted the apparently chivalrous and platonic flirtations of the sincere and honest Tony Croom.63 The Wellsian thesis novel, pro-feminist against male oppression, and in favour of free love and divorce, has no place here owing to the levity with which these militant themes are skilfully touched on in dialogues made up of terse, elliptical and wandering quips by the educated upper class. Galsworthy touches on, and indeed grasps, some thorny issues. It is apparently incredible that, in modern times, a relationship between a man and 62 News of his death in the Orient reaches Dinny by telegram; she gets married, at the end of the novel, to her sister’s guardian. 63 This Clennam-like character, returning penniless from Ceylon where he managed a tea plantation, arrives in the England of 1932, afflicted by unemployment and devaluation. The reasons for the disagreement between Clare and her husband are never completely explained, but he is often described as a ‘brute’, and we are given to believe that this alludes to sexual perversion. He vainly begs his wife to halt the divorce proceedings, but only because it would be damaging to his career. This episode is probably a rewriting of the relationship between Galsworthy’s cousin, Arthur, and Ada, Galsworthy’s wife (Gindin 1987, 77).

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a woman can be maintained on pure affection and held back from sexual union, limited to a few kisses on the cheek. This is the version the two defendants strenuously maintain at the trial. It makes up another case of unverifiable truth, and of versions that can be believed on trust. Not even this time does Galsworthy attempt to take advantage of the possible illusion of pure love, or even of the deliberate falsification of reality, and stop keeping the real version of events in suspense and confirm with his omniscience the case of an innocent, sexless love from the age of chivalry. The novel starts off soon, and inexorably, towards a divorce hearing with debate, the ace up Galsworthy’s sleeve. § 28. Galsworthy VI: The dramas In 1905 Vedrenne and Granville Barker,64 the praiseworthy discoverers of new dramatic talents, invited Galsworthy to write a play for the Royal Court Theatre. Thus began a series of works regularly performed, and often receiving flattering reviews, which in little more than twenty-five years of work constituted a canon of sizable if not astonishing proportions, no fewer than twenty-seven works, an average even Shaw could not beat. Many fell into oblivion due to their scenic and dramatic evanescence; but half a dozen, Galsworthy’s truly didactic and political plays, are clear-cut and vigorous and are still valid and worthy of a second look, and in a separate discussion rather than in the gaps between one novel and another. In truth, Galsworthy constitutes a small stylistic and thematic chapter in the history of twentieth-century English theatre, and one of the voices that 64 The largely consensual puzzlement that has always enveloped the figure of Henry Granville Barker (1877–1946), such a far-sighted and practical impresario, concerns his difficulty in devising simple and streamlined plots in his own inventive theatre, which was first launched along the channels of thorny and problematic drama (The Marrying of Anne Leete [1901] and Waste [1907], with Lawrencian plots concerning, respectively, a middle-class woman who runs away with her gardener, and a woman who has an abortion) and finally lapsed into a production destined only to be read. The Voysey Inheritance (1905) is gripping enough in the first two acts thanks to the revelation that the highly respectable family firm has squandered and mismanaged its customers’ savings, causing the heir a crisis of conscience which is too drawn-out and paralysing.

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contributed to dramatic neorealism and naturalism. They therefore have little to do with the novels, of which they are not, except in a few cases, mere adjuncts: if anything it is the other way around. Not a tribute to nostalgia for the aristocracy, they are gestures of condemnation of social iniquities, and so directly pertinent to the current reality. The character of dialectal extraction, such as a striking worker or the cleaning lady, talks in scene without being hidden and normalized. This decision seemed revolutionary to some, although it was not exactly the first or only time that theatre lent voice to the proletariat, a violation previously found in Synge and, in the same years as Galsworthy’s plays, in Lawrence. In the scenic structure the conventions are still those of ‘well-made’ theatre in three acts; but the sense of dramatic action is pronounced and natural, in the best cases being concise, peremptory, and not yielding to the temptation of the secondary gag. It is demonstrative, tangible, gripping theatre, as the main producers of the time, Basil Dean, Gerald du Maurier and Leon Lion, realized, repeatedly contending for Galsworthy and launching him onto the big stage after his debut in experimental theatre. More cardinal and structural than average is the setting in stalled situations, with no mediation or reconciliation between two opposing parties, and therefore reflected in exasperated extremism; these unsustainable stalemates did occasionally have a practical effect and managed to produce some reform of the system. This ‘binary’ and divisionist theatre, based on the feud and the clash of factions, classes, groups and clans – an almost constant mark of Galsworthy’s theatre repeated over the years – suddenly explains both the derivative nature and the novelty of the slightly later – or rather, from a certain point onwards, ­contemporary – dramatic work of Auden, of Paid on Both Sides and of those plays which merged into The Dog Beneath the Skin, or of the political, national and family clash on which On the Frontier65 is based. 65

A late play which had extremely limited success, Windows (1922), may even evoke the very early Beckett of Eleutheria (Volume 8, § 110.3) and the beginnings of the theatre of the absurd. A young woman who has just come out of prison for suffocating her baby son in a fit of panic, comes to clean the windows of a disjointed middle-class family. The appeal of the play, which was and is normally considered a dialogue with

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2. The early and still immature The Silver Box (1906) establishes the most typical of Galsworthy’s theatrical grammar with its studied excess of combinations, its strict scenic and moral divisionism, its didactic structure as an ante litteram Brechtian parable with very sparse dialogism and without competing plot lines, hinging on paradox to induce the audience to truly revolutionary awareness and action, once the unsustainability of the ongoing social situation has been established. It is a theatre that is thus militant and protesting, springing from the same inspiration as The Island Pharisees and from the twenty-year-old novelist’s premature astonishment in front of the night spectacle of the London slums.66 But we should be careful not to take Galsworthy to be a more socialist and revolutionary playwright than he actually was: the case of the theft of the cigarette-box, which poverty is forced to commit through desperation and destitution, is only posed, not resolved; and the play is entirely consumed by the denunciation, without pointing to a solution: the charge against a young heir, gone astray, of an aristocracy which is also in power and could reform England, and the pity at the same time for an honest proletariat, albeit now close to moral collapse. This repeats, more or less, a situation of still Victorian satire. The juxtaposition, also scenic and spatial, of masters and servants, with privilege granted and denied by justice, was to become in Galsworthy an overused artifice, like the curious habit of choosing for his plays titles consisting of single, abstract or concrete terms, anticipating modern advertising strategies. These titles are a proof of the playwright’s unsuspected brilliance, and a prolepsis of the plot, which they announce with pregnancy and an ever-evocative ambiguity, and for this very reason they are not at all easy, as we will see, to decode in the entirety of their allusions. 3. Strife (1909), the best of Galsworthy’s plays, has a greater density of characters, is richer in action and more insidious in its political meaning. The atmosphere is that of worker and trades union theatre, since the neither head nor tail about a series of disparate themes with no link to the action, constitutes, if not its merit, its novelty. It is no coincidence that it was found to be ‘boring’ and ‘tiring’ in the reviews, and Galsworthy himself called it a reflection on the ‘general absurdity of life’ (quoted in Gindin 1987, 472). 66 Barker 1963, 42–3.

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striking workers and the bosses confront each other in an imaginary factory on the Welsh border, without either of the two parties concerned giving an inch regarding their own requests. Each side increases its difficulties as a result, but it is the families of the workers who are starving and perishing with cold. The allegory is that of a double and inhuman extremism, but personified by two human types from a bygone era who nurture a private and frenzied hubris which exceeds and definitively overshadows the class dispute which they should embody. Both the boss and the worker are now the only ones to stubbornly carry on the stalemate as if in a sort of personal duel: the former resists for fear of an overturning of roles between the ruling class and the workforce, the latter confronts the dilemma between his principles, and the cause of the workers, and the persons and the loved ones, since the continuation of the strike could put his wife’s life in danger, and indeed she does die. Galsworthy, while dwelling on the exquisite acts of compassion which take place between the females behind the scenes of the male action, does this time hint at a political solution, which is that of supporting a spirit of mutual collaboration which nonetheless leaves essentially intact the exploitation of the workers. The worker’s blind Marxism and maximalism and the boss’s intransigence are criticized with the same impartiality with which Gaskell discredited John Barton and humanized the bosses in her political novel Mary Barton. In the end the negotiating spirit wins over, and the two duellists must give in to the decisions of the majority. This reformist appeal had its main result when, as happened in the novels of Charles Reade half a century earlier, Justice (1910) succeeded in making the British Parliament change the internal rules of prisons. This play, however, is much weaker, and its derivation from a novel is more evident, especially in the judicial Act II, in which the playwright gets too carried away with lawyer verve. The binary construction seems to have been set aside, but it has not, because the parties of inflexibility and tolerance do clash, applied to the case of an employee who forges a cheque to romantically help a woman married to a violent husband. A similar crime had been committed in Victorian novels, and the plot then centred on it, an infinite number of times; the target here – that it is not only desperate poverty that forces people into delinquency but the imprisonment of destitute, unhappily married women, who cannot seek and obtain a divorce – is also the same

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as those of Galsworthy’s numerous humanitarian campaigns, in the wake of those of Wells and others in the Edwardian decade. The young employee’s suicide is melodramatic; when released he is psychologically branded by the prison system and made forever unable to return within the ranks of society. The weak paradox of the fantastical and at the same time burlesque The Pigeon, which got a lukewarm reception at the Royal Court Theatre in 1912 having as co-star Galsworthy’s lover Margaret Morris, is that the rich man’s indiscriminate charity to the destitute man does not improve his situation;67 it legitimizes his inertia and begging, and is a pure and utopian whim, not a credible political measure. The play unleashed others that salute, honour, and at the same time condemn, the figure of a modern Don Quixote. The Mob68 (1914) was written and performed in 1914 on the eve of war, and returning to the contrasts and dramatic conflicts of Strife it turns on the same dilemma between absolute principles and sentimental reasons in an upright pacifist politician, who in the end earns – in a scene with no words, with the curtain rising – the phrase ‘Faithful to his ideals’ on his gravestone.69 The parish priest in A Bit o’ Love (1915) is also a quixotic 67 Since Ferrand knocks at Wellwyn’s door and is put up by him, this painter is the same Richard Shelton from The Island Pharisees. 68 This intriguing title refers as much to the ‘mob of newspapers’, the popular press which opposes the work of the politician from philistine and interventionist perspectives, as to the public opinion which the popular press represents, that is, the masses which, ever more agitated, kill the inflexible protagonist in an ambush. The scenario in The Foundations (1917) has become the futuristic one of a possible English revolution due to a worsening of the domestic situation after an illusory post-war expansion; and it is believed that a terrorist has placed a bomb at the ‘foundations’ of the home of a liberal politician. Galsworthy was not a good utopian writer, and the play gets bogged down after a promising start; nor was he a revolutionary, and the two inevitable adversaries, the liberal aristocrat and the worker thought to be a Bolshevik, once they have got over the stalemate of the early dramas, come to a sort of compromise and foil any threat of a revolution. 69 On the subject of anticipations, The Forest (1924) may perhaps have vaguely inspired Auden and Isherwood’s The Ascent of F 6, because on the eve of the Boer War a company of Brits arrives in Africa to look for diamonds and is decimated due to an inhuman leader and the hostility of the natives. Also for this reason the play was found to have Conradian echoes.

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idealist who deludes himself in his candid and Franciscan tolerance that he can have his unhappy wife live with her lover without getting divorced, but is derided and persecuted by another philistine ‘mob’ – his parishioners. 4. The Skin Game70 (1920), which broke every record on the London and New York stage, despite not being a great play in itself, and also having a distantly Victorian flavour, established Galsworthy as a successful playwright in the wake of the Forsyte saga which was now taking shape. It is a return to the unshakable clash and thus the duel, in an allegory of national change in the post-war period, when an aristocracy in its twilight, nostalgic for the old codes of honour but impoverished, must give way to the brutal and crushing initiative of the nouveau riche middle class that expropriates agricultural land to put up factory chimneys. The ‘retaliation’ is doubleedged, and refers to the extortion of the aristocratic bosses, who want to hamper the middle class with the threat of divulging a dirty little skeleton in the middle-class family cupboard; this skeleton is not so much Ibsenian but one of those sex scandals that often surface from the past in Victorian novels to upset the quiet life. Both the families in the end have to painfully acknowledge that they have lost the game, and recite ‘let he who is without sin cast the first stone’. The gripping detective drama Loyalties71 (1922), which in turn beat the records of the previous play thanks to this formula, figures the eternal resurgence of English anti-Semitism, as it investigates the apparent sympathies of its several protagonists for a rich Jewish parvenu robbed of a huge sum of money, mixed with impalpable racism, in the setting of an aristocratic residence. Precisely because of that, since the suspect is an aristocrat who swears that he is innocent, the play examines the credibility, including the judicial credibility, of the aristocracy, as in the novels of the third Forsyte trilogy. In reality the bitter realization is that the word ‘gentleman’ still exists, but not its content. The stinging and provocative Escape (1926), Galsworthy’s last great public success, is also

70 The title can be taken to mean, more or less, ‘retaliation’. It comes from an American card game. In 1931 Hitchcock based one of his minor films on this play. 71 The plural means loyalty to the truth, but one outdone by loyalty to one’s own class, when the suspect, or rather the perpetrator of the theft, turns out to be a valorous war hero.

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formally the most experimental of his plays, being made up of a prologue and nine episodes which kaleidoscopically comment on the variegated attitudes of the social classes towards an escaped prisoner on a symbolic heath. Galsworthy, who attempts in some of these episodes the funny and dialectal gag, plays on a razor’s edge celebrating a borderline case of modern and romantic chivalry, because the escapee is a good criminal, and he only defended a woman unjustly taken to be a prostitute, and in so doing involuntarily brought about the death of a policeman. He is comically absolved by a parish priest in the final episode, but not wanting to make him lie, he turns himself in. The last of Galsworthy’s plays, The Roof (1929), exploits and even perfects the same expedient and, subdivided into seven scenes, contrasts the reactions of the various patrons to an emergency, the fire which has broken out at a French hotel. This too is an allegory of the spirit of chivalry in dramatic form, and it takes advantage, as in the plays by the pioneer Boucicault, of ‘cinematographic’ special effects, such as fire on stage, smoke and, especially, the shifting of the scene between different floors and different rooms.72 But already after Escape producers, reviewers and, especially, the audience had practically turned their back on Galsworthy. § 29. Forster* I: Against the falsity of the educational tradition. The bridge between the two cultures There is no sense in moving Edwin Morgan Forster (1879–1970) forward in time, and what all historians say should be reaffirmed, namely 72 *

Shortly afterwards, Bennett’s last important novel (§ 22.5) had the very same setting.

Abinger Edition, ed. O. Stallybrass, E. Heine and P. N. Furbank, 20 vols, London 1972–2004. Selected Letters, ed. B. N. Furbank and M. Lago, 2 vols, London 1983, 1985; Journals and Diaries, ed. P. Gardner, London 2011.   Life. P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life, 2 vols, London 1977–1978; N. Beauman, Morgan: A Biography of E. M. Forster, London 1994; M. Lago, E. M. Forster: A Literary Life, New York 1995; W. Moffat, E. M. Forster: A New Life, London 2010.   Criticism. R. Macaulay, The Writings of E. M. Forster, London 1938; V. Woolf, ‘The Novels of E. M. Forster’, in The Death of the Moth, London 1942, Harmondsworth 1961, 140–51; L. Trilling, E. M. Forster, London 1944; R. Warner, E. M. Forster, London 1950; J. McConkey, The Novels of E. M. Forster, Ithaca, NY 1957; H. J. Oliver,

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that he is an Edwardian writing before the advent of Woolf and Lawrence, and in particular of Joyce, even though his last novel was later than some of their masterpieces. Should we believe his own words, he placed himself even further back in time, and belonged to the ‘fag-end of Victorian liberalism’. It is difficult, likewise, to exalt his modernity when his formal



The Art of E. M. Forster, Melbourne 1960; J. Beer, The Achievement of E. M. Forster, London 1962, also editor of ‘A Passage to India’: Essays in Interpretation, Totowa, NJ 1986; F. C. Crews, E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism, Princeton, NJ 1962; K. W. Gransden, E. M. Forster, Edinburgh and London 1962, 1970; E. M. Forster: A Tribute, ed. K. Natwahr-Singh, New York 1964; A. Wilde, Art and Order: A Study of E. M. Forster, New York 1964; D. Shusterman, Quest for Certitude in E. M. Forster’s Fiction, Bloomington, IN and London 1965; Forster: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. M. Bradbury, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1966, also editor of E. M. Forster: ‘A Passage to India’: A Casebook, London 1970; W. Stone, The Cave and the Mountain: A Study of E. M. Forster, Stanford, CA and London 1966; L. Brander, E. M. Forster: A Critical Study, London 1968; F. P. W. McDowell, E. M. Forster, New York 1969; Aspects of E. M. Forster, ed. O. Stallybrass, London 1969; J. R. Ackerley, E. M. Forster: A Portrait, London 1970; CRHE, ed. P. Gardner, London 1973, also author of E. M. Forster, London 1977; J. Colmer, E. M. Forster: The Personal Voice, London and Boston, MA 1975; J. S. Martin, E. M. Forster: The Endless Journey, Cambridge 1976; G. K. Das, E. M. Forster’s India, London 1977; F. King, E. M. Forster and his World, London 1978; G. Cavaliero, A Reading of E. M. Forster, London 1979; J. S. Herz and R. K. Martin, E. M. Forster: Centenary Revaluations, Houndmills 1982; C. Gillie, A Preface to Forster, Harlow 1983; C. J. Summers, E. M. Forster, New York 1983; P. J. M. Scott, E. M. Forster: Our Permanent Contemporary, London 1984; A. Singh, The Novels of E. M. Forster, New Delhi 1986; E. M. Forster, ed. H. Bloom, Philadelphia, PA 1987; N. Page, E. M. Forster, Houndmills 1987; A. P. Ganguly, India, Mystic Complex, and Real: A Detailed Study of E. M. Forster’s ‘A Passage to India’, Delhi 1990; S. K. Land, Challenge and Conventionality in the Fiction of E. M. Forster, New York 1990; N. Messenger, How to Study an E. M. Forster Novel, Houndmills 1991; J. S. Herz, ‘A Passage to India’: Nation and Narration, New York 1993; A. A. P. Lavin, Aspects of the Novelist: E. M. Forster’s Pattern and Rhythm, New York 1995; E. M. Forster: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. J. Tambling, Houndmills 1995; P. K. Bakshi, Distant Desire: Homoerotic Codes and the Subversion of the English Novel in E. M. Forster’s Fiction, New York 1996;  B. May, The Modernist as Pragmatist: E. M. Forster and the Fate of Liberalism, Columbia, MO 1997; Queer Forster, ed. R. K. Martin and G. Piggford, Chicago and London 1997; Icon Critical Guide: E. M. Forster’s ‘A Passage to India,’ ed. B. Jay, Trumpington 1998; N. Royle, Forster, Plymouth 1999; M. Edwards,

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and stylistic models are Jane Austen and her homely comedy, or Meredith. His art rejects breaks and formal cataclysms, being one of ‘subtlest hues’, of ‘tones, semitones and quarter tones’.1 Hence the thinly veiled mockery of modernists. Anyone who reads Forster – with the exception of Maurice – after Lawrence, to name but one, will agree with Leavis, who untiringly repeated that Forster deals with eros, when he deals with it, in and with a ‘characteristic spinsterly touch’. Virginia Woolf noted how direct and tangible the contact of Forster’s characters with their time was, how clearly and distinctly certain habits and certain customs of early twentieth-century English civilization stood out. Katherine Mansfield noticed in turn that Forster warms the teapot without ever going beyond that: the teapot is warm but one waits in vain for the tea. Forster’s rare winning characters are never Siegfrieds, but pale, lifeless and larval.2 The possessors and mouthpieces of ‘connection’, his most famous thematic word as we shall see, are above all two female figures, Ruth Wilcox and Mrs Moore, who are led by Forster up to the final, almost mystical, threshold of enlightenment and who are therefore also old ladies, tired and moribund; but they come out of this mystical bath not strengthened but exhausted, having definitively explored the nothingness of existence. 2. There is nonetheless a perceptible discrepancy, or disparity, between Forster the novelist and the Bloomsburyan theoretician and aesthetologist who believes under his breath in the autonomy of art and in the almost Paterian function of the critic, that is the study of the artistic object abstracted form reality, and declares himself against the historicity of art.

E. M. Forster: The Novels, Houndmills 2001; E. M. Forster, ed. J. Bristow, London 2002; D. Medalie, E. M. Forster’s Modernism, Basingstoke 2002; M. Shāhīn, E. M. Forster and the Politics of Imperialism, Basingstoke 2004; The Cambridge Companion to E. M. Forster, ed. D. Bradshaw, Cambridge 2007; F. Kermode, Concerning E. M. Forster, New York 2009; R. Advani, E. M. Forster as Critic, London 2016.

1 2

F. Marenco, profile of Forster in CAB, vol. II, 57. The only ‘Siegfried’ in Forster’s works is Stephen Wonham in The Longest Journey, which is partly structured, as E. Heine demonstrates in her lavish introduction to the Penguin edition of the novel, Harmondsworth 1984, 1988 (cf. especially x-xv), on the analogy with Wagner’s Tetralogy.

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Aspects of the Novel, in which Forster in 1927 collected a series of lectures delivered at Cambridge University, follows two routes: it establishes the laws, and explores the components of the novel tout court and throws light, undoubtedly late, on Forster’s own poetics as a militant novelist. The definition of the novel is quantitative: a text of about 50,000 words. While recognizing that it is not necessary to talk about fiction written in other languages (since the English ‘have never been much influenced by the Continentals’), Forster agrees to refer to it in perfect accordance with one of his most resistant themes, that of the English halved, reduced to natural size, and even improved by Continentals or non-English (Italians, Indians). When he evokes a synchronic or simultaneous vision of novelists from every epoch, intent on their work in a British Museum readingroom, he launches another self-harming attack, that is against the class of ‘pseudo-scholarly’ academics, and against culture as a weapon for climbing the social ladder and a key to the employment market. The novel is based, and Forster adds unfortunately, on a ‘low atavistic form’, because it is a story which must arouse the reader’s curiosity, and the more it abides by chronological precision, the more it does so (the only writer who tried, and failed, to abolish the temporal dimension is Gertrude Stein, but the ‘time-sequence’ cannot be destroyed without dragging with it into the void whatever was supposed to replace it). Forster, as Roland Barthes would later observe to an exaggerated degree, sticks his finger ahead of time into the wounds of the irrealism of realism, which is still an interpretation and selection of life. Moll Flanders is plausible yet ‘bookish’. On the treatment of characters, Forster exhibits notions of compositional technique which he has personally practiced. The novel is based on collisions between ‘flat’ characters, caricatures built on a single idea and quality, and summed up in a single phrase, and ‘round’, that is, complex and unpredictable.3 On the storyline, he bravely disagrees with Aristotle in affirming the lesser role of action or the unnecessariness of an outlet in the action for feelings and passions. Absolute equilibrium is what he advises for the storylines, which must not squash the characters, as he accuses Hardy of doing. Forster is very modern in wondering whether a novel freed from the tyranny of plot 3

On the derivation of this classification from Aldous Huxley and some of his notes on Chaucer, cf. WEL, 140–1.

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can and should exist, a novel not predetermined and able to accommodate and enclose the whole of life: an almost ‘open’ work. 3. An essential in Forster’s novels, all or most of which are ‘coming of age’ novels, is the perspective of an alter ego taken up from childhood, and from that emotional world that was his origin: dominated and held back, that is, by female presences, and thus an experience of chains and unnatural psychic loads. The boy’s unease increases during his primary-school days, and then at public school. But it fades and he beats it and gets over it, and at the end of this journey enlightenment or some illumination smiles on him. The boy’s thoughtlessness is at once psychic, psychological, social, cultural and, above all, sexual. The boy and the adolescent are not yet self-aware and Forster leads them timidly but also occasionally ardently along the road to Damascus. Culturally, the Forsterian character must firstly dismantle social prejudices, the concept of class and the condescension of the middle class towards the lower classes and the proletariat. Politically, he must unmask the hypocrisy and the presumed missionary spirit upon which British imperialism is founded. Psychologically and sexually, he must objectively inspect his own urges, and in particular deny the Victorian hypocrisies of procreative sex and the ideal of the family. In his own case he must reject the one-way development of the middle-class Victorian-Edwardian male, who after school and university enters into society and becomes its supporting pillar. Forster’s homosexuality is a double challenge: at the beginning of the century it was still an unspeakable vice as in the times of Wilde’s trial; but Forster is also a fierce critic of half-hearted homosexuality, of the student’s fling which he then gets over and dismisses, and which above all he has practised with other students of his class. Homosexuality is in Forster an ideal cause, and it assumes the additional guise of an obscure compensation to a subordinate and mistreated class, that of the poor and the inferior, while also being the metaphor of a new emotional democracy. He paints the utopia of a society built on other principles: he yearns for a world freed from and cleansed of hypocrisy, made up of equal beings that believe only in unselfishness.4 Together with two other terms, ‘connection’ forms the skeletal articulation of his novels: the starting point is always 4

In his life this ideal was confirmed by an emotional relationship with a married policeman, Bob Buckingham.

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the person stuck in or self-condemned to a ‘muddle’, an expression Forster often repeats – meaning the tangle, the spiritual marsh, the quicksand, the inertia and the aberration from which his heroes are called to come out. The rescue party of relatives gets going in every novel, but has an ambiguous ulterior motive: its aim may be to save the muddled from the muddle, or else to throw an enlightened person into it; and this is more frequent. 4. The recurrent question, the unsolvable enigma, concerns the reason why after 1924 Forster fell almost totally silent as a novelist and creative writer. Born in London, the son of an architect who died shortly after his birth, he studied first at the hated boys’ boarding-school in Tonbridge, renamed Sawston in his novels, then at Cambridge where he graduated in 1901. In 1912 he went to India with the historian Dickinson, a Greek scholar who taught ataraxia and the force of reason, and made many of his contemporaries lose their patience as they ate dust and mud in the war. Having served during the Great War in the Red Cross in Alexandria in Egypt (where he met Cavafy, recalled in his collection of essays Pharos and Pharillon in 1923), Forster, having had by then published five novels (one came out posthumously, while a seventh was never finished), settled for practically his whole life in his beloved Cambridge without devising any more grand projects. There are two paradoxical and contradictory explanations of the above enigma: Forster, theoretician of ‘connection’, no longer understood the chaos of the contemporary world, and he loved to complacently present himself as a melancholy, resigned and by now vegetating survivor. The other reason was that that unconnectable world was still hampered and paralysed by too many prejudices, and denied the writer the freedom to deal with eros in all its variations, including especially the homosexual one. But the almost fifty-year silence can also be explained by the historical placing I have attributed to him, and by the incapacity to accept the formal challenges of a literary genre transformed and revolutionized by Virginia Woolf and especially by Joyce (always misunderstood and of whose Ulysses Forster wrote that it was ‘a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud’). On closer inspection, moreover, his silence was not total. The first addition to the original canon of five works is firstly made up of a small group of early short stories, predating the novels and revolving around the constant representative of diversity against

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the backdrop of apparent middle-class normality: from the group of fakes and hypocrites or phoneys a free and true character always emerges. They are instances of the fantastic that was in the air at the end of the century (Garnett, Machen with his novella ‘The Great God Pan’, earlier Pater), or were influenced by the revival of Irish myth and folklore, from Yeats to Stephens. The ‘panic’ in the homonymous story is the excitement of the ancient god and the intoxication of his possession and visitation – the future ‘panic’ of the modern technological civilization in Howards End is quite another thing.5 These fantasies and supernatural stories, which impose the exile of the loner from human society as the price of enlightenment, almost systematically exploit the Gothic or neo-Gothic device of accentuating the fantastic by virtue of the narrating voice being entirely extraneous and sceptical about the subject and the events of the story itself. Forster’s silence was further broken by eight short stories published after the decriminalization of homosexuality, which met with perhaps excessive favour and were hailed as small masterpieces.6 Written between 1922 and 1958, they are all explicitly centred on homosexual relationships between lovers of different social classes. 5. But Forster is not only a novelist and short-story writer; he is also an essayist,7 a literary critic and an ideologist, though not a poet. The fact that he shares many of these facets, together with the coordinates of his thought, make us think of a new Matthew Arnold updating twentiethcentury liberal humanism. The shy Forster has always bravely spoken out against what Arnold called ‘shibboleths’, and especially against patriotism. Forster’s quip, that between his country and his friend he would prefer to betray his country, reminds us of the antipatriotic disdain of the English Enlightenment from Johnson up until Arnold, and it is what made Forster 5

6 7

Forster expressly cites Barrett Browning’s poem ‘The Dead Pan’ and the sailors’ shout, ‘Pan is dead’, at the birth of Christ; but this is denied in the story. Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’ is the prediction of a levelled world and of the abyss of technological development. Collected in The Life to Come and Other Stories (1972). See his two volumes of essays, notes, reviews and public speeches, Abinger Harvest (1936) and Two Cheers for Democracy (1951).

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a small idol amongst the poets of the 1930s.8 Theology is the only thing he lacks in order to be the inspirer of a new synthesis of values, not exactly in line with the chaotic contemporary world in transformation. Connection, then, also means almost the same thing as the Arnoldian ‘sweetness and light’: open-mindedness, flexibility, balance, and a unified, reconciled, cooled vision. It also represents the need to combine conflicting aspects and facts; it is a philosophical, cultural, civilizing capability. Forster confronts the non-deferrable nexus between ancient and modern, between the civilization of poetry and of prose, the carriage and the car, stasis and flux, the same task Arnold had set himself almost half a century before when he wished that the Bible and faith would modernize themselves so as to avoid being swept off the face of the earth. Thus connection seems an apt and astute paraphrase for Arnold’s ‘seeing it whole’.9 Forster detests the civilization of machines and industrialization until, not being able to exorcize or abolish it, he strives to improve and refine it. Stone’s 1962 book is an excellent if long-winded spiritual and cultural biography of Forster which shows the indelible results and the stages of his university education, highlighting the links with his ancestors of the Clapham sect,10 with Matthew Arnold and the liberal, Romantic tradition from Coleridge on, with the Cambridge Apostles, with certain precepts of the philosophies of G. E. Moore (the good as a mental value, not of practical or pragmatic interest) and McTaggart (the mystical value of friendship), and the crucial friendship with Dickinson, Carpenter and Fry, a whole community which was fervently Hellenic, and therefore also homosexual, and likewise fervidly believing in the superiority of the male homoerotic relationship. § 30. Forster II: ‘Where Angels Fear to Tread’. The immature hearts Where Angels Fear to Tread 11 (1905), together with A Room with a View, the partly autobiographical fruit of Forster’s first trip to Italy in 1901, 8 9 10 11

HYN, 302–3. Volume 4, § 154.4 n. 110. Specifically Henry Thornton, a central figure in the Victorian Clapham Sect devoted to philanthropy and reform. The title was suggested by Forster’s friend, the musicologist E. J. Dent, in place of Monteriano, the Tuscan town masking San Gimignano, as unmistakeable descriptive

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was rightly seen by Virginia Woolf and Leavis as Forster’s best pre-war novel; I adopt this judgement with the partial exception of Howards End. In particular, its depiction of the rigid, calculating, obscurantist and repressive conformism of the English middle class is unsurpassed. The general theme of the novel is the inadequacy and unpreparedness of young English people in confronting the ‘wider world’; and it is an inadequacy emphasized by Italy and the Italians, although the comparison is carried out in a paradoxical and barely plausible situation. But it is precisely the implausibility of the plot (a rich English widow marries a penniless Italian) that acts as a test bed and touchstone. Lilia Theobald, widow of the late Herriton, runs into this inadequacy when, in a mad and reckless gesture, marries a dentist’s son in a wedding which ends up on the rocks straight away. She is the first defector of Forster’s work, and it is a point in her favour, if she were not overly inadequate, so to speak, since she rebels against the dominant codes but with a gesture too extremist and therefore bound to failure. But Philip Herriton, her brother-in-law, is also inadequate, a half-way rebel suffering from congenital aestheticism who goes from one humiliation to another even though he is holding, or thinks he is holding in extremis, the lifeline and redemption. Finally, Caroline Abbott, the third English protagonist, is also inadequate, embracing renunciation, though ennobled through suffering, despite being the most alert and aware of this trio of characters. Forster asserted that the heart of the book is the sudden, surprising and almost unconscious ‘improvement’ of Philip Herriton, who in the final scene, in an exceptional clarifying conversation with Caroline Abbott on the train back to England, even ‘surpasses’ her. Up to and including the fourth chapter, Philip actually acts in the background, and the story seems to ‘belong’ to Lilia, and to be focused on her in the midst of other variously negative characters; then Lilia essentially disappears from the scene by dying, and Gino, Lilia’s Italian husband, Philip and Caroline Abbott become the protagonists. There are legitimate doubts surrounding Philip’s maturation. In the final chapter, which should put the seal on it, he suffers details reveal (such as the many towers). There is still some doubt as to whether the angels are angels in general or represent the English, fearful of disturbing the tranquillity and the clear, age-old harmony of the Italian sky.

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yet another humiliation; Caroline Abbott is in love, not with him, but with Gino, therefore Caroline herself finds the key to the problem but through voluntary sacrifice decides to let it slip through her fingers. 2. Lilia is the thirty-three-year-old widow of Charles, son of Mrs Herriton (who is in turn a widow), and twenty-one-year-old Caroline Abbott is Lilia’s unlikely chaperone. The voyage in Italy is just an ultima ratio, dreamed up to distract her from the flirts of her exuberant widowhood and to stop her causing any more dishonour to the family. Lilia’s backstory is supplied in the form of recapitulations by the narrator, but with the subtle bias of Mrs Herriton and the ‘prigs’: Charles’s marriage to Lilia was opposed by Mrs Herriton; and once it had taken place the mother-in-law did her level best to improve Lilia, even snatching her daughter, Irma, away from the negative influence of her maternal grandmother. The opening scene – a group scene, since we find all the characters, except for Gino, together, rich in imperceptible shades which unmistakably bring to the surface their hidden tension – is punctuated by Lilia’s uncontrollable bursts of laughter which contrast with the veiled and unexpressed uncertainties of the other relatives. Once the sketch is exhausted, Mrs Herriton, not content with having, as she believes, entrusted Lilia in good hands, also tries to find a way to re-educate Irma, who is just like her mother and therefore also tends to break out of the binding codes of decorum. Mrs Herriton is the greyest, darkest and most cynically calculating character, with the clearest and firmest wrong ideas and, in her very refined diplomacy and hypocrisy, the most negative in the novel. Her daughter Harriet is a sharp-tongued and puritan spinster, and so anti-Catholic, unlike Philip who lets himself be seduced by the poetry and art of Italian churches. When the news arrives from Italy, like a bolt from the blue, that Lilia is engaged and is about to marry an Italian, Harriet is disheartened and crushed while Mrs Herriton faces up to the situation without batting an eyelid like a general before a sudden reversal, giving clear-headed and terse orders and making the most inspired and resolving decisions. With consummate nonchalance, she does not let on to anything in front of Irma; once she has got rid of her granddaughter, it is a masterpiece of satirical humour when she starts looking for Monteriano on the map and then in Byron and Mark Twain; almost with disgust she opens for the first time Baedeker’s Italy. After such

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an eventful day, and after getting her son to pack his bags and hurriedly sending him off to Italy to remedy the situation, that evening she forgets about the peas she has planted in the garden but not covered due to the arrival of the letter. The final misfortune of a bad day is that the birds have eaten all the seeds, and that the pieces of Lilia’s letter, like some kind of sick joke, remain visible on the ground.12 3. It is difficult to think (Forster skates over the question) that Lilia embraces and decides on her marriage with Gino, as she insists, through authentic love; it is rather a slap in the face of convention, as also seems to be clear in her discussion with Philip, who has hastily arrived to bring her back into line. Gino, moreover, makes no pretence of being a noble character, but excessively demonstrates his insignificance. The failure of the marriage is as logical as it is immediate: Gino does not adapt to Lilia and Lilia does not integrate into her new life in Italy; she is lonely and does not interact with the community of the town. She has severed ties with many conventions, but is still an Englishwoman: she has no interest in Gino’s relatives, she dismisses with horror the idea of educating Irma in Monteriano, and to get over the monotony she tries to anglicize the town by organizing afternoon teas. In short she begins to regret her mistake, all the more so because Gino neglects her and, she discovers, even cheats on her. When she once attempts to ‘assert herself ’ and threatens not to give him any more money, Gino is on the verge of beating her, although he comes back to her begging forgiveness. Another time Lilia secretly goes out and almost finds the courage to stop the coach which would take her to Empoli and from there towards England. She dies shortly after writing a desperate letter for help to the Herritons. Amongst Lilia’s relatives gathered at the station to greet her, Philip distinguished himself as a naïve idealist who gets worked up and excited at the idea of the Italian romance and swears by its ennobling influence, or rather a dreamer who ‘in theory loved 12

Mrs Herriton shows supreme diplomacy and readiness of wit in explaining to her granddaughter the mystery of her Italian little brother when she discovers by chance a postcard with a view of Monteriano addressed to her. Only once does Mrs Herriton lose her cool, and it is when she orders Philip to set off a second time for Italy to warn Caroline Abbott.

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outraging English conventions’, without approving or being able to understand or justify unconventionality and Lilia’s need for liberation; he had been on his mother’s side, though with some reservations. Philip is greatly cut down to size towards the end of the first chapter, when his acclaimed love of Italy suffers a blow with the arrival of the telegram announcing his sister-in-law’s engagement to an Italian. When he sets off for Monteriano, full of vain confidence (‘It was the first time he had had anything to do’) he meets with a veritable debacle. Upon his arrival he watches his Italian romance collapse, and in front of Gino and Lilia all he can do is unsuccessfully repeat his mother’s words about ‘social position’. 4. In the second descent the charm of Italy begins to work its beneficial effects on Philip. The tonic and liberating power lies not in the Italy of the past but in that of the present: grotesque, chaotic, melodramatic, noisy, exterior, superficial and even vulgar Italy, but where everything is put right and everything is the blurring of limits and boundaries.13 Despite having come to take the newborn from Gino, and driven by a proud hatred of Italians, at least Philip and Caroline Abbott (who preceded him) open themselves up to a feeling of ‘benevolence’ and gratitude towards the people of Monteriano and the whole of Italy. The day ends with an evening at the opera, where Philip and Caroline Abbott are enraptured by this cackling and exterior Italy as an antidote to British composure. The scene – the three English people watch a performance of Lucia di Lammermoor – is a wonderful sketch, from the kitsch furnishings to the florid soprano, from the irrepressible jubilation after the main aria to the throwing of the

13

Philip’s arrival in Monteriano provokes overly bizarre reactions in the inhabitants; the scene of the evening at the opera is likewise remarkable but excessive, as is the story of the sainthood of St Deodata (the local saint after whom the town’s church is imaginatively named), a humorous recollection of Catholic paroxysm, which is not, however, agnostic or derisory. The scene of Philip and Caroline meeting in the church the day after the great festival in honour of the patron saint lets us reexperience the concluding scene in Browning’s ‘The Englishman in Italy’ with all its superstitious and exterior implications. Forster recognized that he had reinvented Italy basing himself on his limited direct observation; that he had, above all, created Gino from scratch and that Gino was never meant to be taken for a typical Italian. Forster adapts him to a stereotype that was in vogue, that of the crafty, scrounging, lazy and also violent and brutal Italian.

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flowers. Caroline Abbott leaves an initial, surprising sign when in front of Philip, shocked by the news that Lilia’s marriage has already taken place, does not stigmatize Lilia but defends her; she reveals herself fully when, back in England, she supports, again in front of Philip, Lilia’s freedom of choice, even seeming to be her secret inspiration; and as for herself, if she can be accused of anything it is of being afraid, of having lacked courage: ‘Lilia needed me […] I might have got influence over him’. Like Lilia, Caroline hates Sawston, and unconditionally criticizes its listlessness and hypocrisy: ‘We were mad – drunk with rebellion. We had no common sense’. Caroline, however, clarifies Lilia’s significance in the novel when she admits she was wrong to advise her: Lilia’s rebellion was sacrosanct, but she lacked the strength to reap the full benefits of the new situation. Caroline herself, with resignation, closes this important conversation, stating that every rebellion is doomed to failure and that from now on she will try to make amends, to such an extent that she now sees Monteriano as the place of sin. But for her too, Italy acts at least as a catalyst, so much so that Philip discovers that there are two Caroline Abbotts, one from Sawston and one from Monteriano. Caroline’s moral stature stands out even more in chapter seven when, after arriving at Gino’s house to wrest the baby from him, she suddenly changes her mind and feels pain and remorse at seeing him as a potential victim of educational impositions, a mere pawn in the hands of others. To her eyes Gino, who acts as a mother to the child and lovingly cares for him, redeems himself and acquires dignity. When Philip comes into Gino’s house and finds him and Caroline busy drying the baby after having bathed him together, Caroline seems transfigured to him, a Virgin with Child. 5. Nothing comes of the negotiations to get Gino and Lilia’s son; in fact Gino, Philip and Caroline end up exchanging niceties and promises to meet up again in the future. Both Philip and Caroline are completely convinced, as a result of the ‘enlightenment’ brought by Italy, that they are morally obliged to leave the child with his father rather than take him away to England; but Harriet is not of the same opinion. The tragedy, told with sober efficiency and with the combination of sinister premonitions,14 14

Philip cannot find his sister, but the town idiot comes to him and communicates in half-comprehensible words that Harriet is waiting for him outside the Siena gate.

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demonstrates even further Caroline’s lucidity and determination and the unpreparedness of Philip, who first faints, while Harriet, in the final analysis responsible for the baby’s death, starts ranting and raving. The snatching of the baby is the very first example of an aberrant, tragic rescue party in Forster: everyone is guilty, even though Philip blames himself for his ‘weakness’ of character. Indeed he deludes himself that Gino will understand him and calmly accept the announcement of the tragic news, but Gino reacts by hurling himself at him, and only Caroline’s arrival breaks up the scuffle and pacifies them. Philip in reality does not notice that the timid and discrete brushing of her lips against Gino’s forehead betrays the passion that has been ignited in her. Philip nonetheless comes out of it reinvigorated and fortified: ‘he underwent conversion. He was saved!’. Caroline Abbott comforts and calms Gino and Philip who pause to drink the milk meant for the baby, and they literally ‘communicate’, a very pregnant scene, vaguely foreboding, in its sacramental setting, of the moment of communion between Stephen and Bloom in the penultimate episode of Joyce’s Ulysses. So Caroline Abbott closes, with perfect consistency, a journey which had always seen her, though certainly not blatantly, on the side of the ‘enlightened’ characters. Forster, nonetheless, pessimistically has her embrace relinquishment and repression: on the train back to England she actually communicates to Philip her decision that she never wants to go back to Italy, and that, although she has seen and experienced a ‘broader’ life, she wants to withdraw to Sawston and almost punish herself: she explains, almost sobbing, that she is in love with Gino (and it is slightly comical that Philip is expecting her at any moment to declare her love for him), but also confesses to renounce this love because it is too destructive for her to have the courage to nurture it. Philip, for his part, announces his decision to leave Sawston and go and live in London, and it may indicate his desire to get away from his overbearing mother and go on a quest for independence. But it is Caroline herself who nails him to one of the Meanwhile the weather turns bad, it is raining and the paths are thick with mud, which contributes to the accident: in the darkness the carriage of Philip and Harriet (who has snatched the baby) overturns and crashes into that of Caroline Abbott, and in the crash the baby dies.

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most incisive restrictive definitions: ‘you look on life as a spectacle; you don’t enter it; you only find it beautiful or funny’. The conversation ends, symbolically, with the arrival of the train in the Gotthard tunnel, and with Harriet bolting the windows so as not to get dust in her eyes. § 31. Forster III: ‘The Longest Journey’ The Longest Journey15 (1907) has a placid and absent-minded pace and a mixed technique, omniscient but with epistolary sections, and also numerous between-the-lines comments by the author. It is reminiscent of Hardy’s lesson, taking place first in the university environment and then in the countryside of the south, in the natural clearings teeming with demonic presences and imperceptible primordial vibrations. It is the usual coming-of-age novel concerning a specific maturation: the autobiographical hero, besieged by conventions, economic goals and hypocritical fears, declines the prospect of a middle-class marriage empty of true love, and launches himself into a male fraternal union, conquering his independence. It is therefore a secret, covered, transferred parable of the vaccination of heterosexual love, after a timid and distressing approach, and of the discovery of homosexual love. Therefore it is a tragic, sacrificial parable, because the hero dies to preserve the life of his half-brother, whom he had in a way deprived of the life and opportunities wrongfully and undeservedly granted to himself. Such a hero is Rickie Elliott, a twenty-year-old orphan and clumsy, fragile, weak, effeminate Cambridge student. His shortened name, Rickie, evokes the adjective ‘rickety’, observes Forster; his infirmity is symbolized by a limp, which requires raised shoes to allow him to walk with a normal gait; he aspires to become a writer, but to write about vague Greekish dreams, like mythological maidens and dryads who blend with the bark of trees, and pagan gods coming back to life. He also embodies the living debate between a woman’s love for one man, and male love for the whole of humanity. Some of his Cambridge companions reelaborate the philosophy of Berkeley and his disciple Moore, wondering in the opening scene what exists – if ‘the cow is there’ – and if it exists 15

The title is taken from a line in Shelley’s ‘Epipsychidion’, on his love for Countess Viviani, with whom the poet soon became disillusioned.

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outside of the mind and as an extramental reality.16 Will that generation of idealistic students and classicists be able to keep up with the times, will it be able to deal with the materialism surrounding it? The alternative myth of the athletic male, Greek body and English face, presents itself in the form of Gerald, the fiancé of Agnes Pembroke, daughter of family friends. Gerald dies young, Agnes and Rickie get engaged, but cannot marry for want of a dowry. 2. The novel turns abruptly half way through when Stephen Wonham, a workman on Rickie’s aunt’s farm, enters the story. He is the second if not the true hero. Stephen is a sort of enfant sauvage who embodies the synthesis between a materialist philosophy of which he has a smattering and a spontaneity lived in the moment, at his fingertips. He represents one of those mythological larvae that Rickie psychically perceives: he is a kind of Pan or good and largely oblivious, and therefore naïve, satyr. In his swinging back and forth between a realistic character and the incarnation of a pagan spirit, Stephen is one of the last ancient gods of Heine and Pater fleeing to the north. But actually he is also Rickie’s secret alter ego, or other half, or his unknown entelechy. The further development of the plot lies in the proleptic event of Stephen rescuing one of two brothers from the wheels of the train carrying Agnes and Rickie to Cadover. The two half-brothers Rickie and Stephen, who have not previously met, hesitate to get to know each other and indeed obscurely reject each other, but slowly they unconsciously attract one another, as in the fatalism of a Greek tragedy. The novel must tend towards their denouement, delayed by the fact that Rickie and Agnes are called to the school of Herbert, Agnes’s brother, in Sawston, when Rickie finds out he has a brother but Stephen remains oblivious to the fact. Rickie keeps the secret, persuaded to do so by his relatives, because it would be scandalous to admit to having as a brother such an uncultured satyr who drinks and carouses and likes 16

Forster was a member of the Cambridge Apostles, a student debating society of which Tennyson had been a member a century earlier (Volume 4, § 78.2). Land 1990, 84–5, is one of the few critics to mention Berkeley’s frame of mind. ‘Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow’ are, perhaps by sheer chance, the first words of Joyce’s Portrait.

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a good fight. But Rickie feels an urgent need to reveal it, though coerced and restrained by the influence of his circle of friends. Agnes is hunting for his aunt’s dowry, which will of course end up with Rickie. As a writer Rickie is not successful either and he is invited to write science fiction or travel literature, not mythology; he is especially soon disappointed with love and marriage (a lame daughter is born to the couple but soon dies). In the end, Rickie finds the heroic redemptive surge when he saves and rewards his half-brother, moved by a sense of justice and brotherly love, and also by the desire to compensate him. The cheque with which Agnes tries to buy Rickie’s silence is refused. Stephen, Rickie finds out, is the son of his mother, not of his hated father, and the revelation strengthens the love between the two of them.17 Here Forster inserts the Lawrencian backstory of a farmer who, educated like Mellors in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, fell in love with Rickie’s mother and who, in an incredible episode worthy of a Victorian sensation novel, drowned while bathing in the river. After a long time spent roving, Stephen meets his half-brother and is welcomed by him. Rickie, who has left Agnes, justifies this fellowship by saying that Stephen is there as a man, not as a brother, and that he has left that woman for whom he himself was only a substitute, because she still loved Gerald, her first love. With Stephen the complete and total union between males can take place. The finale of the novel is sacrificial, and the previous proleptic scene repeats itself, with Rickie saving his brother from the train but dying in the process, and he is then judged in a bitter, mocking epitaph as someone who has never achieved anything, and never been alive. But Stephen legitimately inherits his property. § 32. Forster IV: ‘A Room with a View’ I. The stubborn self-deception of a tourist in search of herself The difference between Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View18 (1908) lies basically in the happy ending: the two protagonists 17 18

It is his classmate Ansell who reveals it to him at school, in a scene generally objected to for its implausibility. There were three successive versions of the novel: in the first, entitled Lucy and then Old Lucy, and written between October 1902 and December 1903 on his return

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Lucy Honeychurch and George Emerson, thanks once again to the Italian apprenticeship, manage to happily resolve their existential ‘muddle’, and finally overcoming conventions, hostility and the crippling and pernicious influence of their respective environments, and often struggling against their own blindness, crown their love and return to Florence where it first bloomed. Forster exposes the asphyxiating conventions that leave no way out for the individual, who almost inevitably chooses the opposite path to his or her real emotional interests, hoping conversely that one’s feelings will develop freely, spontaneously and harmoniously, and wishing for the most absolute self-determination. The novel makes up for being less dramatic with an effective and meticulous psychological study. The stages of Lucy’s spiritual evolution and her self-revelation, and the seesaw of pessimism and optimism of George who has glimpsed in her his only handle on life, are followed with the detached levity of the sometimes pithily eighteenth-century narrator; humorous, satirical, sketchwriterly, even comic streaks abound especially in the supporting characters. It is a drawing room comedy in form, both for the preponderance of dialogue and because a large part of the action takes place in drawing rooms,19 and for the presence of the same characters in rotation; and those dialogues are skilfully held, or rather uttered, by characters skilled in the art of speaking, with Forster imitating and echoing Jane Austen and Restoration theatre as never before in his fiction. 2. The symbolic itinerary is from darkness to light. An imperceptible framework of images consequently gains importance. The title itself hints, in its juxtaposition of ‘room’, a closed environment, and ‘view’, the solution to closedness, categories, poles, and also transformations that come up

19

from a trip to Italy in the winter of 1901–1902, the main action is a charity concert which is to be held at the Pensione Bertolini. The second version was begun as The New Lucy, in December 1903 and interrupted at the end of 1904. This second draft ended tragically: Lucy and George were to elope by bike and George died when he was smothered by a falling tree. The project was taken up again from June 1907. Indoor chapters alternate with outdoor chapters, and outings with returns to the hotel. The three parts also follow the change of the seasons: the first takes place in spring, the second at the beginning of autumn, and the third again in spring.

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again at every step. The motif of the ‘room with a view’ takes shape at the beginning of the book. Lucy and Charlotte, just arrived at the Florence boarding-house, complain at the dinner table that they have been cheated of their right to have rooms with a view as promised, and Mr Emerson, overhearing them, interrupts to offer them his room, which has a view. His phrase, ‘I have a view’, can be understood in both a literal and a symbolic sense, since it is the room but also alludes to his more human and more enlightened vision of life. Likewise Charlotte Bartlett, the chaperone, is decidedly ‘without a view’, indeed in pitch darkness. Settled into the rooms offered to them by the Emersons, Lucy, liberating herself from the ‘fog’ of Charlotte’s embrace, opens the windows and lets Florence in, the scented air and the Arno with its lights and scenery, while Charlotte locks herself in her own room and warily and suspiciously checks that there are no secret doors. The following morning, when Lucy wakes up she opens the window again and takes in the panorama, receptive to everything that comes from outside, but is immediately called to respect common decency (she is still undressed) by Charlotte who rushes to close the windows. Lucy’s journey towards the light (her name itself derives from the Latin ‘lux,’ ‘light’) will not be easy or straightforward, but scattered with timid sorties and short-lived yearnings, invariably overwhelmed, up until the miraculous epilogue, and with fears, hesitations, contradictions and, worst of all, lies told to herself. 3. Up until the end of the first part, set in Florence, Lucy moves – thanks to the ‘view’, the life and humanity of Florence – towards the liberation of herself (hindered by checks, some of which are rooted in her, other imposed from outside), a careful and impressionable observer of the life around her, and in turn observed. Each character in the novel studies the others, and the task occupying and disturbing Lucy is that of deciphering and classifying, not only herself, and with the imperfect tools at her disposal, but also the English and Italians, and, amongst these, especially those apparently ‘ill-bred tourists’ who are Mr Emerson and his son George, like them guests at the boarding-house. Lucy finds herself in a ‘state of spiritual starvation, and would have been glad to have seen the waiter’. She takes her first steps towards emancipation when she puts aside her Baedeker; then in her pilgrimage à la Dante, with a highly untrustworthy

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Virgil (like the novelist Miss Lavish),20 which indeed results in both of them symbolically getting lost – to be precise in Santa Croce, yet another place of seclusion.21 Left alone by Miss Lavish in search of inspiration, Lucy is assisted by Mr Emerson according to a small rescue party of a spiritual kind. After this episode Lucy no longer looks down on the Emersons, indeed she is attracted and intrigued by them; but though she even starts to like the father, George seems to her for the moment ‘worthy of compassion’ but ‘absurd’. The next chapter shows the irresistible spreading force of gossip. Lucy is still faced with a dilemma: are the Emersons nice or not? In the end she decides that they are. The rain forces her to stick to the piano in the boarding-house, and she romantically seeks an antidote in the music and while playing accentuates that optimistic je ne sais quoi of Beethoven’s ambivalent creation, quite differently to Helen Schlegel’s interpretation in Howards End.22 At the end of the evening, while everyone else decides to stay at home, Lucy decides to go out. This brings Lucy and George physically and spiritually closer, because in the end she will feel that she has passed a test and crossed a ‘spiritual boundary’; and George himself will feel encouraged and returned to life. Lucy goes out driven by the desire to feel spiritual shocks after the ‘boring conversation’ with the hotel guests. She wants something ‘big’, and thinks that a trip on the tram with the wind blowing in her face might be just what she needs. But her rebellion is for now intermittent and unrealistic; she is living substitute experiences as though in a dream, beginning with the postcards she buys instead of going on the tram, which she had intended to do but renounced. 20 Miss Lavish is modelled on Emily Spender, Stephen Spender’s great aunt, whom Forster met in Perugia (and there is a clear word play on ‘Spender’ and ‘Lavish’). She is a novelist seeking inspiration in Italy for conventional novels, an emancipated progressive but basically superficial. Her ideas place her partly inside and partly outside of ‘respectability’: though she declares herself a ‘radical’ she nonetheless has an unusual and pompous concept of democracy; she speaks ill of Queen Victoria and Victorian values and suggests a visit to Prato instead of Fiesole. 21 In Santa Croce Lucy feels Italy’s ‘pernicious charm’, an ironic statement that hints at the future development of the novel. Santa Croce in fact shares the novel’s negative judgement on closed and cold spaces, which are seen as repressive and inhuman. 22 § 36.1.

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The postcards themselves are a small compensatory transgression (the nude Venus, the first and symbolic photograph she bought, is counterbalanced by the Ascension of St John and by the Marys). The ‘gateway to freedom’ opens for her with the fight she inadvertently witnesses, when a wounded man, who later dies from being stabbed, seems to turn to her and have ‘an important message for her’.23 Unprepared to face the intensity of life by herself, she faints, and is still upset when George takes her in his arms and tries to escape from him. Above all, she straightaway returns to being a prisoner of conventions when she asks him not to tell anyone about what happened. For now all Lucy can do is to avoid the obstacle, flee Florence and take refuge in Rome, or else turn towards her England where ‘nothing ever happens’. The kiss, which she gives and receives from George at the end of the group’s trip to Fiesole, almost despite herself, temporarily seals the initial ascending phase of her maturation; but it is too serious and transgressive a step to coldly receive the approval of Lucy herself, not to mention Charlotte and the other educating agents. And indeed right after this peak there is a sort of general muddle, a disarray almost caused by Lucy and George’s ‘infraction’. Everyone has lost everyone else, and a deafening hurricane is punitively unleashed. The irresponsibility of the driver who took Lucy to George, interpreting her most hidden desires, unknown even to herself, as well as those of George and Lucy, is in fact ironically struck by the lightening which blasts the pylon of the tram wire. As for Lucy, after her timid outing she clams up and regrets it, ultimately still unable to read in herself, needy of authentic love and yearning for growth and resolution. § 33. Forster V: ‘A Room with a View’ II. The rescue of the ‘buoni uomini’ With the eighth chapter there is in the novel an abrupt jump in time and place. Several months have passed since the holiday in Florence, and back in England Lucy formally agrees to get engaged to Cecil Vyse, whom she met, or met again, in Rome after running away from Florence. Cecil 23

The fight and the wounding are like ersatz sex, with the gushing blood as a clear reference to deflowering. George realizes shortly afterwards that Lucy, whose photographs he has thrown in the Arno, did not know what to do with them, since they are only surrogates, or intermediaries.

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Vyse seems to be a reincarnation of George Eliot’s Casaubon, and Lucy indirectly starts to resemble a Dorothea Brooke. Cecil is an aesthete who detests mediocrity, scorns the mundane and professes a totally inauthentic democracy which Lucy is quick to sniff out. He lives in an exclusively bookish, literary dimension,24 and in his eyes Lucy is not a flesh and blood woman but a Leonardesque portrait. As such he disdains any physical activity, is all head and no body, and withdraws from every recreation, declaring it ‘violence’. The effect Italy has had on Cecil is the opposite of that which it had on Lucy. Promising to marry him, Lucy squanders and compromises for the moment all the good Florence had done her.25 Laboriously deciphering the past, she seriously deludes herself that Cecil is really the husband she needs, and only slowly manages to discern in him his true worth. Their love story is a sort of parody and ironic reversal of that with George in Florence; and it parallelistically repeats the scene of the kiss with George atop the hill in Fiesole.26 Lucy, in other words, realizes the intimate and spiritual value of that kiss she gave George. Chance has it that the Emersons later come to live near Lucy’s house, and the wound reopens: she is distressed and takes refuge with Cecil in London, still well disposed towards Mr Emerson, and confident, because she is protected by Cecil. Indeed Cecil and his mother intend to ‘refine’ her, but it is actually an unsuccessful attempt to cool her down and sterilize her. She unconsciously reacts to this attempt with a ‘cry of nightmare’ which Cecil symptomatically does not hear as he is sleeping soundly. Unconsciously she tries to 24 The first word he utters in the novel is Italian, and a literary pun (‘I promessi sposi’, referring to himself and Lucy to whom he has just got engaged, and to the well-known novel of the same title by Manzoni). 25 The description of Windy Corner, Lucy’s house, is all about closedness: the curtains are drawn and keep out the ‘radiance’, the fresh air, and shade or attenuate the light. 26 There is a comic, ‘bathetic’ scene when his pince-nez gets between their two faces, falling. Lucy and Cecil’s kiss is, moreover, a ‘disaster’, something feeble and limp, hardly virile. Sexually, Cecil is condemned, or at least assigned, to the realm of celibacy; he is the ‘ideal bachelor’, as Reverend Beebe says, paraphrasing Wilde. The title of the final chapter, ‘The End of the Middle Ages’, marks the defeat of Cecil and the values he represents, and the defeat of his darkness and bodily repression and the victory of the freedom of the senses.

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shut her unconscious and the ‘strange images’ coming from the ‘depths’, and he blames them on her nerves. A masterful orchestration places right at the beginning of the seventeenth chapter a series of anticipations and premonitions at first sight inexplicable but justified by the development: it is essentially past events in Florence coming back to the surface. And indeed the chapter opens with Lucy at the window observing unseen the landscape, but quite a different Lucy from the one that had looked out upon Florence the day after her arrival: she is observing in a certain sense Italy, but that bookish Italy that Cecil is suggesting to her and that is useless to her. Or rather, the strength of her experience in Florence, which she believed placated, expresses its hidden effectiveness when superimposed on the English landscape. She seems to have forgotten, but that experience makes her more receptive, more observant of things English. Lucy and George’s reconciliation takes place through the fortuitous reading of the novel Miss Lavish based on George and Lucy’s kiss in Florence, a novel that ended up in Cecil’s hands. But Lucy still does everything she can to resist George’s beneficial influence and his promise of liberation. It is Cecil himself who gives Lucy the decisive push to break off the engagement by involuntarily repeating that he is made only for books. Once she has broken up with Cecil, but before returning to George, Lucy literally sinks into the darkness when she swears not to marry; thus she enters into the disorder of the ‘benighted’ who have renounced passion and truth. She has no hope of getting out of this obscurity since she has lied to herself, to George and to Cecil; the lie being that she chooses once again a surrogate, a distraction, a way around the obstacle (a trip to Greece), rather than aiming straight for the heart of the problem. In the penultimate chapter Lucy miraculously escapes towards the light and clears up her muddle thanks to the deus ex machina, Mr Emerson. With the final lines of this conversation we also arrive at the solution to the basic symbolism of the novel: Lucy sees the darkness receding and manages to look within herself and into her soul. With the utmost effort, a flash of inspiration of which she cannot make sense, she now recognizes in Mr Emerson her guide and rejects ‘indirect’ values in favour of ‘direct desire’. The novel closes circularly with a return to the scene of their first meeting, at the Pensione Bertolini where, with a final temporal hiatus, Lucy and George have gone back on their honeymoon.

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Forster, who loved Proust, has them searching for lost time, while they read the past and interpret it before their eyes as in a kaleidoscope. But, just to show that the ending is perhaps utopian and imaginary, and almost dream-like – and not wanting to mention the later sequel to the novel, having the ironic title of A View without a Room –27 George and Lucy are like two children messing about and pampering each other. The snow brought to the Mediterranean by the Arno, however, is a symbol of both purity and fertility. 2. In the room with a view which the Emersons let Lucy and Charlotte have, the latter, once she has moved in, is surprised to find a huge question mark drawn on a poster left there by George: it is the character’s cipher. George Emerson could be taken for a naïve person (and he continues to be so in many situations). His father describes him to Lucy, in Santa Croce, as ‘in Hell’, and needful of affection also because of a childhood trauma involving his mother;28 and, quoting Carlyle,29 he wants him to let himself be conquered by life’s ‘everlasting yea’, and will openly and subtly try to make him fall in love with Lucy. Lucy will be the needle of the scales of

27 Written in 1958, when Forster tried to imagine a follow up to the novel more than fifty years after its publication. Lucy and George lived happily in Highgate until the First World War, in which George does not fight since he is a conscientious objector, like Lucy. When Mr Emerson dies, George and Lucy find themselves homeless. George takes part in the Second World War, is captured in Italy and passes through Florence again but does not find the Pensione Bertolini (the ‘view’ is still there, but not the room). As for Cecil, he is a member of the Intelligence Service and is still a ‘mixture of mischief and culture’. Forster watches, so to speak, the twilight of his heroes in a degraded and impoverished Europe, living its last days on the eve of a feared third world war: an apocalyptic Forster, à la Orwell. 28 Only at the end is the Ibsenian skeleton in the cupboard, mysteriously introduced at the beginning, revealed: Mr Emerson tried to emancipate his wife from religion by not having George baptized, until her son contracts typhoid fever and she interprets it as a sign from God which makes her believe again. But Emerson stood his ground, after which his wife died thinking about the punishment inflicted for the sin she has committed: this is the meaning behind Reverend Eager’s mysterious phrase, which keeps turning up again, that Emerson had ‘murdered his wife in the sight of God’. 29 The Carlylean theme of nudity is announced by a sign on display at the Emersons’ villa: ‘Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes’.

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George’s mood. The kiss on the hills of Fiesole is only an illusion to which Lucy and, especially, George brutally put an end, so that when in England he came to live with his father a stone’s throw from Lucy’s house, George sank back into apathy and despondency. The scent, and finally the sight, of Lucy then restore the character’s will to live and to win. The community dip in the pond (a scene with myriad implications and meanings) is for George, even before he receives the decisive influence of Lucy’s presence, a fortifying reclamation of primordial nudity and ‘camaraderie’, of a sense of belonging beyond the barriers and conventions, and indeed in blatant violation of them: it really is a moment of euphoric, childlike isolation and oblivion from the world, in which, significantly, the three bathers, without clothes, speak more openly and even more irreverently. George especially, ‘world-weary George’, is galvanized by the swim (despite falling in the water almost against his will) and in the end we see him catch a symbolic fish. For the whole of the novel the Emersons have been a rare example of harmony. Emerson senior, who has a baby face, is the slightly parodic mouthpiece of the novel’s philosophy, secular, vitalistic, anti-ascetic, and sanity of instinct and passion against repressive religion, concepts which it will shortly fall to Lawrence to re-elaborate and absolutize. 3. The prejudices of the English once again assail Italy, which in the novel does not correspond to the image one has or would expect. Forster depicts Italy and the Italians, or he wrongly makes his characters consider them, as the epitome of underdevelopment, only just above, or a few degrees below, India and the Indians in A Passage to India. The English haughtily look down upon them from a higher level of civilization, and Forster repeats a cliché common to all Victorian visitors to Italy (as in Browning, for example): the discrepancy between the Italy of the past and the Italy of the present, a faded if not unrecognizable copy. The epitome of such an attitude is Cecil and, in the first part of the novel, Reverend Eager, who places between himself and the Italy of the present the membrane of art and, a nostalgic observer of the corruption of the day, evokes and invokes the desecrated Italy of the likes of Dante and Savonarola. The beginning tellingly captures the characters as disoriented and in search of the ‘real Italy’, just as the English in A Passage to India will seek the ‘real India’. ‘Was this really Italy?’, Lucy asks herself. Certainly not, just as the ‘unreliable

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Signora’ who owns the boarding-house is not (she too is Anglo-Italian). The real Italy is that which Lucy contemplates from the window on the morning of her second day in Florence, an impressionistic festival of life uncommon to English eyes: disorganized, chaotic, primordial, with young scamps clinging to the trams and aping the pathetic soldiers on parade. The authentic values of the real Italy become progressively clear. The epilogue points to the role of indispensable mediation played by Italy in Lucy’s maturation: ‘all the fighting that mattered had been done by others – by Italy, by his father, by his wife’,30 George will tell her. In particular the real Italy of the present is embodied by two minor figures who are, especially the second, of really remarkable symbolic importance. As representatives of that ‘eternal league of Italy with youth’, and its most penetrating interpreters and champions, these two figures take the field. The first is a seller of artistic photographs who is one of Lucy’s early allies in the Florentine part of the novel, where in Piazza della Signoria he accosts Mr Eager who is teaching Lucy and Charlotte a stern lesson, and in so doing he satirically diminishes his stature. The photograph seller is a first ‘opening’ agent (it is no coincidence that he sells ‘panoramic photographs’) who is inevitably sent packing by the obscurantist Mr Eager, who speaks of ‘vulgar views’; but Lucy has fond memories of him in the final chapter. The second and much more important Italian character is the driver who takes the whole group of tourists on a trip to Fiesole, and whose almost divine and divinatory role as the ‘Primum Mobile’ of the happiness Lucy had then attained is recognized by all: in retrospect he is the only one to whom an achievement of instinct is acknowledged, as the interpreter of the ‘message Lucy had received five days before from the lips of a dying man’, while all the other English people are obtuse and, in a foretaste of Howards End, incapable of establishing ‘connections’. As such he is worthy of that mythical, timeless halo which Forster attributes to him, rechristening him, as a driver and as an Italian, like a Phaethon ‘all irresponsibility and fire’, another echo in the present of the mythological world, as frequently occurs in Forster’s stories, but here with an ironic nuance. The driver leads the party while flirting

30 Italy is called ‘only a euphemism for Fate’.

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with his beautiful Persephone, and his flirting acts as a counterpoint to the long-winded and cold erudition of Mr Eager and his arrogant superciliousness. Such flirting is a test for the English spectators: the couple’s freedom and casualness arouse Lucy’s envy; Emerson and Miss Lavish defend it, one through a spirit of tolerance towards the legitimate enjoyment of natural and sensual happiness, the other to challenge conventions; while Mr Eager moralistically condemns it. ‘Phaethon’ can only lead Lucy towards a beneficial experience, that is towards George Emerson, rather than towards the two clergymen who Lucy is looking for after the picnic: George is the ‘uomo buono’, the ‘good man’ for Lucy, as ‘Phaethon’ interprets it beyond the letter (and indeed finding people is ‘a gift from God’, and Forster ascribes specifically to the Italians the gift of intuition and insight). Thanks to her guide, Lucy enjoys a liberating experience in a meadow of violets where she pairs off with George against an oozing and primordial natural backdrop. This scene following Lucy being led to George is as in slow motion. A kind, exquisite gentleman, Phaethon has the phlegmatic, noble and almost holy gestures of a wise and omniscient god. His leading Lucy to George is not therefore a mistake, but a deliberate and enlightened act: Phaethon can hear Mr Eager’s voice but passes by on purpose; and liquid images abound, the rivulets and cataracts of violets ‘irrigating’ the hills with blue. It is telling that Miss Bartlett’s repressive icon stands out and is silhouetted against the view. § 34. Forster VI: ‘Howards End’ I. The three nations With Howards End31 (1910), Forster returns to a tumultuous drama of people and at the same time to an unexpectedly alarmed allegory of the state of the nation at the beginning of the century: more precisely, to the rise of a new entrepreneurial class lacking in spiritual values and driven by a pragmatic and profiteering spirit, and to the bleak outlook for a proletariat torn from its rural roots and catapulted into a system that does not care about it, and by which it is brutally crushed. The novel has its five main 31

The title is the name of the country house which is the symbolic and emotional epicentre of the novel; but making reference to Howard, Ruth’s last ancestor, it also alludes to the end of a dynasty.

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characters in the two sisters, Helen and Margaret Schlegel, Ruth and Henry Wilcox, and Leonard Bast.32 Paradigmatically they are the representatives of as many social strata, whose stories intertwine with each other giving rise to emotional relationships with tragic or thwarted consequences. The first is that of Helen Schlegel, who has just been disappointed in love and finds a compensation conceiving a son with a simple office worker, Leonard Bast, who is a passive victim of the delusions of modern life. The second is that of Margaret, who marries and tries right until the end to ‘improve’ a widower, a middle-class parvenu and cynical womanizer. The third is that of Leonard Bast, that same debauched and pathetic pen pusher who tries in vain to gain respectability but comes out defeated. The Schlegel sisters are the enlightened middle class, the Wilcoxes the nouveaux riches, Bast the proletariat. Forster thus extends to three the ‘nations’ which need to unify and connect, rather than the two which Disraeli contrasted with each other in his nineteenth-century novel, Sybil. Arnold too had presented this triad hoping for a reconciliation between culture and anarchy. At the beginning the Schlegel sisters are driven by an optimistic, Arnoldian utopia of ‘light and love’, and put its formative power to the test. Forster nevertheless stages a broader debate around the fortunes of the modern world, through the two sisters’ political ideas and utopias. Property speculation has disfigured the features of the metropolis leaving it anonymous and untrustworthy, with its suburban sprawl, new houses and jerrybuilt neighbourhoods with names like Camelia Road or Magnolia Road, pitifully and ironically contrasting with their squalor. The effects of the urbanization of peasants are the disorientation and maladjustment of those who emigrate to the city drawn by the mirage of new and better-paid job opportunities. Always

32

In reality, these are camouflaged versions of the same characters Forster always employs. Mrs Munt is the recurring figure of the chaperone, a guide, also and especially in the moral sense, but a clouded, interfering guide, a slave to prejudice and formalisms. Helen is at the same time Lilia from Where Angels Fear to Tread and also Lucy from A Room with a View, more educated and intellectual, but like her unprepared to face emotions of great intensity. Finally, though Italy is absent from Howards End, the house Howards End assumes its values; and the two sisters are two English ladies once again put to the test.

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attentive to the movement and mixing of social strata, Forster presents Bast as ‘grandson to the shepherd or ploughboy whom civilization had sucked into the town’. London dehumanizes a primordial corporeality which, in Bast’s case, has gone in search of the spirit, producing disharmony as a result: the city is ‘satanic’ and the sky is ‘infernal’ almost as in a paraphrase or an echo of James Thomson B. V.’s famous poem. And London is not only the concomitant cause of Bast’s tragedy, but it also sends Ruth Wilcox to her grave.33 The dominant features of the urban civilization eclipsing the values of the spirit are materialism,34 industrialism and mechanization. A fundamental rift, then, is that between the world of ‘personal relations’ and that of ‘outer life’, summed up in the slogan ‘telegrams and anger’, which seems to have taken hold. The exploitative and opportunistic entrepreneurial bourgeoisie is a class that does not make or create, but exploits a youth it gives work to, leaving it in its degradation. Forster points to the symbol of this empty and superficial middle class which disfigures nature with its industrialization: the motorcar, which is the object of Wilcox’s morbid passion and fanatical attention.35 Can the modern world be saved? Can it be redeemed? Only through the wholesome interference of some symbolic and spiritual categories. If the modern world is the realm of ‘flux’, then salvation lies in ‘permanence’; if the modern world is fragmented and atomistic, and its disease is rootlessness, then salvation lies in rediscovering one’s roots and the value of ‘connection’. The drama of the Wilcoxes is rootlessness, perennial nomadism, not having a home anywhere, or rather having many houses, many buildings, but no true home. Howards End is, in this sense, a game of houses and moving from one house to another, some of which are homes, depositories and custodians of family affections; others are mere buildings, houses left, desired, disputed, refused.36 Connection, the

33 34 35 36

London anthropomorphized is ‘a monster […] with a human face’. Christmas in London is a spectacle of vulgarity, dominated by the commercial spirit. Naïvely, Forster banishes it because with its speed – also synonymous with modern civilization – it does not allow one to enjoy the beauty of nature and takes away the sense of space, which is the basis of every form of beauty. In the three letters which make up the first chapter, Helen, a guest of the Wilcoxes at Howards End, after she and her sister had fleetingly got to know them during a

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opposite of Forster’s muddle, mess, chaos, confusion and fragmentation, is the authentic redeeming paradigm pointed out by Forster, the hopedfor goal that for some characters is completely out of reach, for others is the ideal of life to which to cling. There are many other nuances to the term: it adumbrates the utopian political project that should lead to the harmonious unification of the classes, relying on the comfort of nature as a common mother and guarantor of a historical-temporal continuity which can act as a catalyst to the brotherhood of man. But connection is above all an ideal and a spiritual category. Philosophizing, Forster theorizes it as a fusion of prose with passion, the monk with the beast, so that humanity will no longer be ‘insignificant fragments’. It is a heat that projects towards others and breaks the isolation; it is above all an intuitive spirit, an almost mystical interpretative ability. The true distinction in the novel, as we shall see, is that between characters who connect and others who do not connect, between insightful characters and hopelessly obtuse ones. And will the values of the ‘invisible’ and of ‘connection’ manage to overcome the muddle in the end? Howards End moves towards catastrophe, but, perhaps a bit too easily, after the catastrophe there is catharsis and reconstruction. The ‘horror’ is not the end: Helen and Bast’s son will be born, but Helen is sceptical about the force of love after having dreamt of it for so long, and she is disheartened even though Margaret comforts her. Despite Margaret’s final efforts to ‘connect’, the end of the novel at least reveals the utopia of

trip to Germany, is surprised at how the house – covered with vine leaves, and with a wild elm in the courtyard into which, according to tradition, some pig’s teeth have been stuck as a cure for toothache – differs from her expectations: it is not modern, like an ‘expensive hotel’ (which would be like an extension of Mr Wilcox’s world), but ‘old and small’, and built of red brick. This country house, which for Forster had precise autobiographical echoes, being modelled on that of his happy childhood, often throbs with human life. It is everything for some characters and nothing for others: while for the two sisters houses like Howards End are Proustian ‘cornerstones of the world’; and while Ruth lives in Howards End and dies in London, where for her ‘there is nothing worth getting up for’, for Henry Wilcox, sensitive to its monetary value and not to the charm of its history and its legendary past, it is just one amongst many. He has even modified and distorted it for the current demands of progress, and has built a garage where there was once a meadow for the horses.

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hope. The final touch of Henry Wilcox’s obtuseness and rigidity, and his incapacity to connect, is that he defines his first wife Ruth’s donation of Howards End to Margaret as a mere whim, or the act of a madwoman. 2. Making the Schlegel sisters the descendants of a German family transplanted to England is a rather forced expedient. Their intense spiritual life and ideological and speculative interests derive from their father, who is painted in quite an implausible light: an advocate of the return of idealism and light, he is at the same time critical of contemporary stupidity and of the thirst for expansion (his apostrophe-condemnation against increasing standardization has Carlylean tones). The two sisters’ ideas constitute the premises of what happens to them, while their brother Tibby soon becomes apathetic, insensitive to their values or not willing to fight for them. In their basic contrast, Margaret is an incurable optimist, Helen submissive: Margaret accepts, in order to reform and correct it, that modern world represented by Henry Wilcox, which Helen rejects as beyond redemption. Margaret tries to connect the ‘invisible’ to the ‘visible’, Helen is completely absorbed in the ‘invisible’. Margaret investigates how ‘a few human beings […] under present conditions […] could be made happier’ (her perspective so formulated has a vague utilitarian appeal), while Helen rejects any reconciliation or possibility for correction by fleeing towards utopian solutions, and all in the purely individual sphere. Margaret, a ‘theist’, not a Christian in the traditional sense, is not so to the extent that she neglects material values. Her downright cynical and paradoxical glorification of riches, during a reception in which there are abstract discussions on how best to allocate an inheritance, forms a sort of match for Bast’s denunciation just after he leaves the scene: ‘the very soul of the world is economic’.37 Margaret is more of a realist than Helen and foresees Bast’s drama: the abyss is not the absence of love but the absence of money; at the same time she is more pessimistic than Helen, who believes that the gap between rich and poor can and should be closed. The debate on the most effective way to help the less well-off was customary during the era of the rise of utopian socialism, 37

The unwitting reference to Bast no longer eludes us when a reference to umbrellas is made, because it was a lost umbrella at the concert that brought Bast and the two sisters together.

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but it is only typical of Margaret that she maintains that it is necessary to donate money to the poor, that ideals take second place after money, and that money is the ‘warp of the world’. In defending her decision to marry Henry Wilcox, Margaret praises the Wilcoxes’ entrepreneurial skills to Helen, saying that this guarantees well-being, progress and civilization. But – Forster adds – is England indebted to entrepreneurs or to dreamers? Helen cannot see any possibility for fusion, Margaret can. § 35. Forster VII: ‘Howards End’ II. Who shall inherit England? Ruth Wilcox is the main alternative to the world of the non-values of business culture. Her attachment to nature and her spiritual closeness to the garden and flowers contrast with the modern hobbies of the rest of her family, such as golf, croquet and cars. She enters the novel with a blade of grass between her fingers. She belongs to the house and ideally to the great elm tree overlooking it; she has the wisdom of the past and listens to the voices of the ancestors, unlike her husband who has no past. Her debilitation, her fragility, her eternal tiredness grate with the physical thews of her husband and sons. In London it is perfectly natural that Ruth should waste away and die. At her parting, after having gone out with Margaret for the Christmas celebrations, it is as if Ruth is swallowed up and imprisoned by the lift, and going up towards a sooty heaven. The two women’s friendship is the most intense celebration of ‘personal relations’ as a point of contact with the ‘infinite’: the postponed visit to Howards End, just like that of the Ramsays to Virginia Woolf ’s lighthouse, is the rebellion of the imagination. The readiness with which Ruth pays heed to her husband shows, moreover, Ruth’s tact and spirit of sacrifice and also her sympathy, but also the exile she is subjected to. It is quite natural that the Wilcoxes fail to understand Ruth’s will. For the Wilcoxes Howards End is a house, for Ruth it was a spiritual value which is not easy to pass on to an heir, who Ruth in the end identifies as Margaret. Howards End is that gift which Ruth had not been able to give to Margaret during their Christmas shopping trip. A doppelganger of Ruth, Margaret feels she is and is found as such by one of the minor characters most dedicated to the faculty of ‘connection’. In fact it is a sensational shock that Margaret, entering Howards End after Ruth’s death, finds the house furnished with her

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own furniture and her books; and it is in this way that the housekeeper, Mrs Avery, tries to intensify the symbolic identification between the two women. Margaret and Ruth are therefore bound by their feelings towards the house where family traditions, roots, affections and memories rest and are safeguarded. And it is a meaningful parallelism that the Schlegel sisters also had to sorrowfully leave their house in Wickham Place and that their family emigrated from Germany: in other words they too are exiles in search of roots. Ruth and Margaret’s friendship could be, though it is not, confirmed, Ruth in life, by a visit to the ‘holy of holies’, Howards End. From Ruth’s death Margaret nonetheless receives an ‘inheritance’ and her hopes are given a boost. At the same time, she thinks of the Wilcoxes’ standard of living as a ‘real force’. The second, longer and more crucial moment in Margaret’s novel takes shape when by chance, after Ruth’s death, she sees Henry Wilcox again one evening and learns that Howards End has been rented out, her heartache exacerbated by the matter-of-fact way in which Wilcox explains the house’s strengths and weaknesses like an estate agent. The ‘love story’ builds on this. A redemptive will inspires Margaret to save Henry’s soul with love. In truth, the first steps are anything but promising. The invitation to lunch reveals to Margaret a cynical and nonchalant Henry, connoisseur of the world, and the scene in which he declares his love is highly embarrassing. Margaret turns poetic and evocative but Henry soon starts ‘talking business’, which furthermore falls on deaf ears. The sordid conversation is observed, and parodied, by a group of youngsters. The passionless kiss they exchange is also routine. 2. Margaret and Henry’s marriage, like that of Lilia and Gino, of Lucy had she married Cecil in A Room with a View, and of Adela and Ronny in the forthcoming A Passage to India, is yet another example of a bad marriage in Forster’s fiction.38 Henry and Margaret’s relationship takes a dramatic turn during the sumptuous celebrations at Henry’s country residence for

38

While Cecil is an ascetic in A Room with a View, Henry is defined as an ‘incomplete ascetic’.

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the wedding of his daughter Evie, whom he had with Ruth.39 This is a highly dramatic chapter because the wedding feast is ruined by the arrival of Helen with Leonard and Jackie Bast; and that’s not all, the final twist being the revelation that Jackie was Henry’s lover. Helen and Margaret’s paths diverge here: Margaret will go to extreme lengths to try to connect; Helen in the meantime has adopted a sarcastic and desperate radicalism, throwing away all bourgeois values, God, philanthropy, the succour of the needy, and has arrived on the far side, that of ‘disconnection’. If Margaret grudgingly forgives Henry, giving him one last chance after having even offered to divorce him, from this moment on her preoccupation becomes rescuing Helen and ‘reconnecting’ their relationship. Henry deals with the situation with the efficiency of a businessman, while Margaret acts politely and delicately. She welcomes the stratagem of luring Helen to Howards End to capture her and make her see a psychiatrist with the following words: ‘it’s madness when I say it, but not when you say it’. Margaret must go along with this sinister, ambiguous and dishonest rescue party, but Henry notices her fragility, and it is only through good luck that he fails to leave Margaret herself out of the capture plan. She bitterly regrets it when she hears the psychiatrist her husband has called treating her sister in the same way as a cold clinical case. But Margaret in turn resorts to another stratagem to thwart the capture of her sister, who is now pregnant by Bast. It is memories, and the rediscovery of the entrenchment of a series of objects and affections, what brings the two sisters together again and help them to overcome every reason for a rift. Howards End is then their own house, since it is there that all the books and furnishings from Wickham Place are gathered. Henry, for his part, reacts like a hypocritical and scandalized moralist at Margaret’s request to spend a night with her sister at Howards End, but in good faith considering how obtuse he is. As a great novelist, Forster orchestrates an excited dialogue to the point of forcing Margaret, as a last resort in the face of Henry’s hypocrisy in insisting that Helen’s pregnancy is scandalous, to dig up his past affair with Bast’s companion: ‘It is those who cannot connect who hasten to cast the first stone’. The novel 39

The accident in which the cat gets run over on the way preannounces the analogous one which befalls Adela in A Passage to India.

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closes in the idealization of rural tranquillity, with two children (one is the grandson of the housekeeper of Howards End, the other is Helen’s son) playing in the freshly cut hay after Margaret has patched things up once again between Henry and Helen. But it is only a personal and fleeting tranquillity: London and its civilization and its values stand out menacingly, that is the nomadic civilization of movement and flux that Margaret hopes will one day be opposed and tamed. In the end Margaret is assigned that house which the dying Ruth, with perfect intuition, had donated to her, as a keeper of values foreign to the Wilcoxes: the house, taken away forever from the Wilcoxes, will later be inherited by Helen’s son, a donation which seals the parallelism, and the redoubling relationship, between Ruth and Margaret. 3. In his Protestant-like entrepreneurial activism, in which his carnality is sublimated and confused, Henry Wilcox represents the class which according to Forster is dangerously grasping the rudder of England. Forster dreads the propagation of their dynasty by virtue of that ‘sense of flux’ which Henry is associated with, as against the values of ‘permanence’ so dear to Margaret and Ruth: a dynasty that could one day inherit the earth.40 On the symbolic axis Wilcox is the most absolute disconnection, the physical force which lacks all interior depth: unpierceable obtuseness, an exclusively exterior life, the prone adhesion to the fetishes of the moment, embodied in the motorcar. Helen’s political vision clashes with Henry’s ideas of the absurd law of free enterprise, the poor staying poor, free development of the market and the progress of civilization. More sinisterly, Henry denies the social issue all credibility: he is a conservative with a quietist religion as his stooge. He is indirectly responsible for Bast’s ruin, when he carelessly suggests he resign from the insurance company he works for to find a more secure job. Bast finds himself in the gutter and Helen blames her brother-inlaw, who justifies himself with the latest slogan: ‘It’s part of the battle of life’.

40 Thus closes chapter XXI, an ‘interlude’ – as it is defined – which is a chilling scene of domestic life, with Charles Wilcox and consort surrounded by their young children: ‘Nature is turning out Wilcoxes in this peaceful abode, so that they may inherit the earth’.

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§ 36. Forster VIII: ‘Howards End’ III. The urbanized farmer welcomed back into his habitat It is a paradox that Helen, on the first page of the novel, comes on stage enthralled by the Wilcoxes. In Paul Wilcox she has seen a romantic dream made flesh; as in A Room with a View, their kiss opened up for her, though in the nature of a ‘passing emotion’, a paradisiacal vision. But her confessed fascination contradicts her admission that right after the kiss she felt that the whole Wilcox family was a ‘fraud’, a ‘wall of newspapers and motor-cars and golf-clubs’, or even ‘panic and emptiness’. The mark this momentary and immediately subsided flirt with Paul has left on Helen becomes clear in chapter five, the Beethoven concert at the Queen’s Hall. The first part of the chapter coincides with Helen’s proleptic and prophetic reading, in the light of her falling out of love, of the third and fourth movements of Beethoven’s fifth symphony. She sees ‘goblins’ entering the scene, a pessimistic expectation which returns twice in the music, first in a minor key and then a major, but both times chased away by the composer, first with a deafening explosion of the thunder and lightning of victory, and then with an optimistic and triumphal closure. But Helen does not have Beethoven’s confidence and leaves the concert with the fatalistic certainty that the goblins might return. The goblins are the deniers of the heroism and splendour of the world, as Helen thinks in light of her flirtation with Paul: ‘panic and emptiness’ seems to her to be their cry. Beethoven’s optimism is not that of the Wilcoxes, but a deeper and more intimate one, and indeed an extremely ‘bad’ goblin does come back only to be defeated again. The gist of Helen’s interpretation is that the music ‘summed up to her all that had happened or could happen in her career’. Leonard Bast, who makes his appearance in this chapter when Helen takes his umbrella by mistake, becomes her second and most powerful unsettling and disintegrating element, and the materialization of those goblins which so sinisterly slipped into the symphony. For Helen, this becomes the trigger for a challenge of a political nature, and the purely abstract referent of an ideal project. Politically, Helen’s creed can be summed up in the axiom that the better-off classes must help the poor, and in the radicalness of this faith she donates 5,000 pounds to Bast to pull him out of the abyss. Meeting Bast unbalances Helen, who cannot manage to shake her sister or, obviously,

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make Henry take pity. So she flees England as a sarcastic desecrator of the family lares, to become the typical Forsterian character stuck in a muddle. If Helen decides to unite sexually with Bast it is for a bizarre motivation that has nothing to do with sexual attraction: as an exponent of the wellto-do middle class, Helen must make common cause with the destitute proletariat represented by Bast, who is not a ‘man’ but a ‘cause’, a political and social problem, an ideal. Helen’s gesture is an act of reparative pity; on another level it is also the conclusion of an interrupted relationship, that with Paul Wilcox.41 2. The most tragic and most desperate part of Howards End is associated with Leonard Bast, yet another figure of modern, desublimated and deheroized adventurer of twentieth-century English fiction. Bast is the product and the emblem of a historical and social phenomenon, the eclipse of rural England with the advent of industrialization. His grandparents, natives of Lincolnshire and Shropshire, are the blatant confirmation of a reckless, disastrous urbanization. Bast the former farmer sets out to find his rural roots but only when it is too late. Transplanted into the big city he suffers its disharmonies and alienations. At the age of twenty-one he ran away from home to live a miserable and abject existence with a companion who is older than him, a faded beauty with a murky past who dresses in a vulgarly garish way with a plump body and vacant mind. Forced to do a job ill suited to him, he isolates ‘a few corners for romance’ from his grey life. Like Kafka, he is an insurance broker. He desperately tries to communicate, for example with a Cambridge student he meets by chance one day on the train. He is dying to escape. Far from being satisfied with his own squalor, he is the uneducated pauper who wants to escape his condition and snatch that cultural refinement, together with its exterior signs, that belongs to the rich. He turns to Ruskin, but Ruskin is too distant from his horizons and his needs, which are not only spiritual but, especially, material and mundane. Bast’s hunger for promotion, his resentment and his spirit of revenge are attributed by Forster to democracy, which establishes

41 Hence Katherine Mansfield’s famous quip that Helen was impregnated by Bast’s umbrella.

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equality in an abstract way, mixes up the classes and blurs the boundaries between them. It is in his attempt to integrate, to at least pretend to be like the rich on the outside, that Bast goes to the Beethoven concert at the Queen’s Hall; and it is here, due to the umbrella incident, that his life comes to intertwine with that of the Schlegel sisters and the Wilcoxes. In notifying that which, due to his mistrust, he sincerely believes to be theft, Bast presents himself at the sisters’ house with a phrase which he has learnt by heart, and fears a conspiracy and feels he is the victim of a scam. When he returns home with his battered umbrella, he has – an unmistakable sign – the ‘lilting step of the clerk’. Bast, however, immediately starts to embody the suspicions Helen had had a few minutes earlier: the trace he has left is symbolically that of the ‘goblin footfall’, and it reminds the two sisters that there is also squalor in life, that unhappiness also exists in the world, ensconced behind the superstructures of riches and art.42 He will return two years later looking for the Schlegel sisters, and, tired of his companion Jackie, he will try in vain to remind them of the incident with the umbrella. His slight maturation and increased self-awareness are due to the fact that he has discovered that books are not the only way to better himself, and there is also human contact. After having given incoherent explanations, Bast recounts his own imaginary voyage, and the two sisters listen attentively. The story can be seen as a reworking of Forster’s fantasy ‘The Celestial Omnibus’, in other words as the imagination’s voyage in a populous universe created by books. Bast wants to come back to earth by following the pole star, and he wants to make this journey through the literature of the imagination; but Forster corrects him: literature does not put food on the table, and Bast confesses: ‘I was very hungry’. The next time he is invited to tea at the Schlegels’ house, he almost flies into a rage when he finds himself being interrogated by the two sisters about his job, because he wants to talk about books and resents the infiltration of his life as a clerk into the romance, since for him this visit is a way to escape from Jackie and the monotony of his everyday life. Margaret tries in vain to explain to Bast that he is in a muddle, and that he has to let the 42 It is a sinister premonition (which refers back to a similar episode, Margaret’s breaking of the framed photograph of Dolly in chapter VIII) that when Bast comes home he smashes the photograph of Jackie.

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romance into his everyday life in order to harmonize. At Evie’s wedding reception, Bast has almost completed the journey of his disillusionment and discovered that ‘poetry’s nothing’. So his dream of climbing the social and cultural ladder has come to an end. Indeed he repeats to himself from the far side the words of Henry Wilcox, that ‘there always will be rich and poor’. Bast goes on a second journey, much more appropriate and fitting, though with tragic consequences; and it is that, at daybreak, from London to Howards End, motivated by remorse and the need to ‘confess’. This journey, told by Forster in a chapter of magnificent inspiration, is accompanied step by step with the visitations of nightmares and hallucinations. As the city fades away and the countryside opens out before him, Bast feels refreshed and comforted: and Forster, pre-empting Lawrence, lingers on the farmers by the side of the railway waving to them as ‘England’s hope’, and contrasting them again with the imperialist destroyer, that will inherit the earth, but an earth that will be ‘grey’. The circular closure of the novel operates in the reprise of the ‘goblins’ who return to tread the universe and help to affirm joy by expurgating superficiality. Bast experiences his death passively, but it is as if he is sublimated and redeemed by it: ‘Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him – that is the best account of it that is yet to be given’. § 37. Forster IX: ‘Maurice’ Written in 1914, revised several times during the sixty years that passed until its posthumous publication in 1971, Maurice tells the story of a journey that is vaguely parallel to that of Joyce’s Portrait, via the erosion of the educational precepts handed down and inculcated, and focusing on selfawareness and challenge. In other words it follows the gradual discovery of personal autonomy, with the help of a non serviam to religious faith and apostasy, and the complete liberation and the free enjoyment of erotic urges, with the sole variant that those of Forster are homosexual. But they are phases which branch out from childhood and primary school, up until grammar school and university and up to the moment in which the hero himself takes off in a daring leap of Icarus. The style is blunt, terse, more so than that of Joyce, and it somehow brings to mind the phenomenology of Woolf ’s early attempts in the 1920s. This opacity ultimately derives from the fact that Forster, who thought not to publish the novel because of its

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thorny subject matter, had written it mainly for himself, like a private letter, or a very slightly transposed memoir.43 He also admitted to have focused on an objectification and an identification of himself in a homosexual simulacrum different from him; the novel is not autobiographical, although some figures, such as Risley who is modelled on Lytton Strachey, did have living counterparts. To Forster a double objective was important: to write about and desublimate his own homosexuality and to legitimize the ‘foul vice’, launching a campaign for its complete depenalization and acceptance. The primary school teacher explains to Maurice Ruskin’s lesson on the devotion of the chaste husband to his domestic Virgin, in other words in covered or even slightly explicit words, and with rudimentary drawings in the sand, the concept of courtly and sublime love. The fourteen-year-old Maurice feels not satisfaction and liberation, but disgust of women and rejection of heterosexual love in the face of this incomplete explanation which is too linear and too predictable.44 Forster himself speaks of stages, and the one after public school brings the discovery of solitary sex, and the first homosexual attraction towards his classmates, but with a mysterious premonition in a dream of a ‘friend’ he would sacrifice himself for. Already at nineteen his family has his life planned out for him in the usual vein: marriage, children, work, honours, death. The erosion begins from afar, with his rejection of the fundaments of the faith under the action of his fellow student Clive Durham.45 At twenty Maurice has recovered his sexual entelechy while Clive on the other hand is cured, or rather falls ill with a mysterious disease which is healed by the presence of a nurse: 43 In other words a less scandalous Teleny, more prudish and less exaggerated and fetishist; except that in the final note Forster explains its unsettling and lewd origin, which is that of a friend, Merrill, who, as he did to many people, one day felt Forster’s bottom, transmitting to him both a physical and psychological vibration which unleashed the flash of inspiration for the novel. 44 Maurice will meet this master again, in an effective bind, at the British Museum in the company of his lover Alec, but Maurice will pretend not to recognize him; indeed he will say that his own surname is Scudder, that of Alec, his lover. 45 The rejection of the faith is a consequence of the rejection of every other faith based on being rather than on having to be: the Christian faith expressly condemns homosexuality.

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thus he has, under pressure from society and family, repudiated a superficial inclination, and having recanted his nascent homosexual entelechy returns to Greece charged with Greek love, that is with a male or even hermaphrodite fondness which is foreign to Maurice. The mistake about the distinction between health and disease also strikes Maurice who, overwhelmed by conformist pressure, believes himself to be abnormal, and that it is necessary to cure a propensity which, as he will find out, is actually perfectly natural. The most scathing and ferocious scenes of the novel are those in which Maurice undergoes two medical examinations; in the first one the doctor misunderstands his problem as sexual impotence or syphilis contracted from prostitutes due to a lack of control over his heterosexual urges, while during the second one he is subjected to hypnosis as a cure. Clive embraces a career as public official, and after languishing for so long, the book, which is deliberately averse to plot twists, takes off in the final quarter, from the unexpectedly accelerated moment in which the gamekeeper Alec comes in through the window.46 Maurice begins a satisfying relationship with him which is at first awkward but later equal. Alec’s forbidden love for Maurice is the expected fulfilment of his character as much as a socially and politically proper act. Alec candidly expresses to him his request for compensation for the impositions he has put up with as a servant and underling, and Maurice obeys this ideal reprimand with the same enthusiasm as Helen Schlegel for Bast. Maurice must dissuade the leaver from leaving, though he is being blackmailed by him but is also convinced of what he must know, that love knows no class divisions and goes beyond respectability. This interclass love must also take note of its social significance, and of the ongoing charge of discrimination that surrounds it, and in its realism must also freely pronounce the four-letter word which would echo in Lawrence, actually after the publishing incidents of Maurice I have already mentioned. In reversed terms, Forster pre-empts Lawrence and many of the controversies of Lady Chatterley.

46 It is a nicely surreal, dream-like scene: it is raining outside and the soaked gamekeeper comes in through the window by climbing up a ladder which was leaning there to fix a leak in the roof !

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§ 38. Forster X: ‘A Passage to India’. The unreconciled diversities Walt Whitman had celebrated the opening of the Suez Canal as the future and tangible link between east and west;47 but in A Passage to India (1924), Forster is more in agreement with Kipling, who had said that ‘never the twain shall meet’, although with his liberal humanism he disagrees with Kipling’s one-way imperialistic point of view, substituting it with an albeit very pathetic possibilism, always precarious and unstable. The novel is based on and stems from a symbolic and incomprehensible incident involving the two communities, English and Indian, in the city of Chandrapore, and more precisely in the Marabar Caves, where Aziz, a local doctor, had perhaps made advances to an Englishwoman who was engaged to marry a magistrate. Forster’s objective is to depict a microcosm of British India, and for this reason the novel unfolds along the lines of the many encounters between representatives of one community or the other, to see how open or closed, arrogant or affable, enlightened or narrow-minded, hopeful or disheartened in a politically and culturally fruitful agreement they are. The Forsterian controversy par excellence, that of ‘connection’, has reached this additional stage. Save a few vigorous high points, the story is placid, if not flaccid; the successive phases which are aimed at defining and redefining the essence of Englishness and Indianness are too repetitive and concentric; and the novel is, moreover, practically over when Doctor Aziz is cleared, but it goes on for another hundred less necessary pages. The opening sketches in this symbolic city of Chandrapore are set against the backdrop of the question whether in India it is possible for Indians and Englishmen to be friends and get on with each other. And the sceptical Indians say no, perhaps admitting that at the beginning the English may be open and sincere but that they are not slow to be corrupted, and from sincere friends become suspicious,48 arrogant and, above all, racist. The malign and corrupting effect of India as a place is the same one that Kipling often explores and masterfully demonstrates in his Indian fiction. Forster’s pessimism, which establishes

47 On the title coming from Whitman’s poem, cf. Beer 1962, 147. 48 To Orwell (OCE, vol. IV, 524) suspiciousness was rather the ‘besetting vice’ of the Indians, as hypocrisy was of the English.

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that at the moment there is no way ‘to bridge the gulf between East and West’ and no hope of an equal merger between the two communities and the two cultures, is already on the table. Except that for a while Forster believes that there can be exceptions, and has them take the field. In the wonderful scene in the mosque, Doctor Aziz entertains Mrs Moore and we witness in this place of worship a miraculous refutation of the rudeness, the insults and the ill-treatment the doctor has just been subjected to: theirs is an encounter between equals, without prejudice, with a spontaneous and immediate agreement about the great values of the culture of coexistence and respect for religions. Mrs Moore, the most dematerialized character in the novel, is here the bearer of the values of a secular and broad Christianity whose commandment is that God wants everyone to be equal and created the world out of love. She is vaguely Woolfian, extramundane, ecstatic, like Mrs Dalloway, especially in the seesaw of her wandering thoughts, as in the perception of the ubiquity of the numinous and the acceptance of death or its presentiment. And nonetheless, right after this scene, the failed ‘Bridge Party’ at the English club, to which some local dignitaries are grudgingly invited, reiterates and deepens the crack between the two communities. In reality Forster creates a clean division of the field along the axis of prejudice and loyalty. Of the five main characters the other three are the enlightened Fielding, a schoolmaster, the slender, fragile, idealist Miss Adela Quested, Mrs Moore’s future daughter-in-law, and her fiancé Ronny Moore, the stupid and short-sighted functionary of the Raj. Moore entrenches himself as a formalist behind his role as guardian of the peace, as loyal executor of orders from above which prevent him from thinking, and thus as the mouthpiece of the most sinister white man’s burden. And yet Forster does not even hide the fact that India is slumped in a muddle of its own, owing to the variety of the religious sects and local ethnicities, and that it has much to learn and, especially, much to despair about (‘no one is India’). He is far from dualistically siding with one of the two communities, and ascribes to each of them small or large shortcomings. 2. The novel moves towards mystery from when India begins to emanate its elusiveness, its store of mirages and illusions: since the car accident caused by a hairy animal, perhaps a hyena, the details of which are never explained. And this is perhaps India’s initial spell on the weak and

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impressionable personality of Adela Quested. On the other hand, Aziz’s Sunday sensuality is biting – a widower who reminds us of Joyce’s Bloom with his daydreams of the Orient – given that he met and played it up with Adela who seemed to lead him on. On the eve of the expedition to the Marabar Caves, Aziz undoubtedly goes through a phase of smug national and patriotic pride and an itching of the senses, and Adela Quested, for her part, is even more captivated by the spell and the mystery of India. Adela and Aziz bring their weaknesses and their contradictions into the caves: Adela knows she does not love Ronny, in the grip of a certain autonomous fumbling, fluctuating and wandering of thoughts, as if the caves were her own tottering psyche.49 Forster, who lingers on the disorientating effect of the echo, deliberately skips the details of the visit to cut to the result: Adela runs out in a panic and Aziz finds himself holding her binoculars with the strap broken. Perhaps the event is a fit, caused by telluric forces and animistic presences which have clouded their reason and loosened their control. Even Mrs Moore experiences the feeling of failure at the caves, and has the mystical intuition of a total loss of the value of life, very similar to the horror of Conrad’s Kurtz. The whole universe is sucked into this process of nullification and annihilation, such is the stupefying effect of the echo.50 A Passage to India from here on is a judicial novel, with the noble Fielding who, as a defector, passionately defends Aziz, of whose innocence he is blindly convinced. For a while he plays the chord of the nineteenth-century or even Conradian relative and relativistic uncertainty of the truth. Aziz is a sensual man and intended to visit the brothels of Calcutta; but at the trial Adela contradicts herself, does not remember, and in the end retracts the accusation. With the accusation retracted, Aziz is cleared, but there is an uproar amongst the locals that threatens public order. Having been a possible convicted criminal, Aziz now seeks monetary compensation. The court case has embittered spirits rather than placating them, and for a moment Aziz believes the rumours that the incorruptible Fielding has looked after

49 In other words he falls, as Beer 1962, 149, effectively argues, into a Forsterian muddle. 50 This mystical experience of nothingness is due to the terminological recurrence, for example of ‘nothing’ and other grammatical negations, as is accurately documented in the essays of Stone, 16–26, and Beer, 44–58, in Beer 1986, which share the same hypothesis.

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his own interests and married Adela. But it is a misunderstanding, because in fact he has married Mrs Moore’s daughter; this is an ideal transition, the security for a better tomorrow. The final tableau of the novel is pessimistic, but with the auspice that India become an autonomous, independent nation, able to fuse all its souls, ethnicities and sects. § 39. Beerbohm* I: Reanimating aestheticism Since the final years of the nineteenth century, Max Beerbohm (1872– 1956), baronet from 1939, had rapidly earned the complacent and unanimous 51

The Works of Max Beerbohm, 10 vols, London 1922–1928, is largely incomplete, and a collected edition of both the fiction and essays and the artwork is lacking; anthologies of one or the other are Parodies: An Anthology from Chaucer to Beerbohm and after, ed. D. MacDonald, London 1960; The Bodley Head Beerbohm, ed. D. Cecil, London 1970; Beerbohm’s Literary Caricatures: From Homer to Huxley, ed. J. G. Riewald, London 1977; The Prince of Minor Writers: The Selected Essays of Max Beerbohm, ed. P. Lopate, New York 2015. Letters to Reggie Turner, ed. R. Hart-Davis, London 1964; Max Beerbohm and Arthur Conan Doyle: Correspondence, Hanover 1969; Max and Will: Max Beerbohm and William Rothenstein, their Friendship and Letters, 1893–1945, ed. M. M. Lago and K. Beckson, London 1975; S. Sassoon, Letters to Max Beerbohm with a few Answers, ed. R. Hart-Davis, London 1986; Letters of Max Beerbohm, 1892–1956, ed. R. Hart-Davis, London 1988.    Life. S. N. Behrman, Portrait of Max: An Intimate Memoir of Sir Max Beerbohm, New York 1960; D. Cecil, Max: A Biography, London 1964; B. R. McElderry, Max Beerbohm, New York 1972; N. J. Hall, Max Beerbohm: A Kind of Life, London 2002.    Criticism. E. Cecchi, ‘Max Beerbohm’ and ‘Ricordo di Max Beerbohm’, 1945 and 1934, collected in CSI, 9–23 and 24–9 (pleasant chameleon-like features, imitating the style of their subject); J. G. Riewald, Sir Max Beerbohm Man and Writer: A Critical Analysis with a Brief Life and a Bibliography, The Hague 1953, The Surprise of Excellence: Modern Essays on Max Beerbohm, Hamden, CT 1974 (as editor), Remembering Max Beerbohm: Correspondence, Conversations, Criticisms, Assen 1991, and Max Beerbohm’s Mischievous Wit: A Literary Entertainment, Assen 2000 (by the meritorious pioneer in the study of Beerbohm); S. N. Behrman, Conversation with Max, London 1960; E. Moers, The Dandy: Brummel to Beerbohm, London 1960; J. Felstiner, The Lies of Art: Max Beerbohm’s Parody and Caricature, New York 1972; G. Franci, Il sistema del Dandy: Wilde, Beardsley, Beerbohm. Arte e artificio nell’Inghilterra ‘fin-de-siècle’, Bologna 1977, 271–332; L. Danson, Max Beerbohm and the Mirror of the Past, Princeton, NJ 1982, and Max Beerbohm and the Act of Writing, Oxford 1989; F. Buffoni, Max Beerbohm: la violenza della maschera di cera, Padova 1983; P. Santaniello, Max Beerbohm. L’uomo e l’artista, Napoli 1983; R. Viscusi, Max Beerbohm *

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reputation as a sort of model of a literature perfect in style and content, and the reading public appreciated his tender and not too malevolent parody. They also admired a certain strength and moral rectitude in the writer and in the man, who had been capable of remaining upright and unscathed having passed through the infected crucible of the Nineties. Those who compared him to delicate butterflies like Dowson and Beardsley might also have added the name of Firbank. Beerbohm’s refined, miniaturist, terse manner, with its clear boundaries, is the opposite of the cloudy, neurotic, elliptical style of that slightly younger writer who had however died many years earlier. They are both fantasts, but quite different: Firbank is romantic, Beerbohm classical; Firbank torments form, makes it dynamic and swirling, Beerbohm immobilizes it. Behind him we glimpse Pope, and indeed Beerbohm grasps his pen as if it were a brush or a chisel, and produces precisely carved cameos (this brush, then, is not that of Turner but of Longhi and Canaletto). To consider him an imitator, a successor and a follower of Thackeray is a flattering compliment because, like Thackeray, Beerbohm possessed order, discipline and the ability to lay down a dry, urbane and controlled prose.1 The critique and satire of Decadentism are carried out in Beerbohm from inside, but, as Praz never tired of repeating, this striking of his is at once a caressing and a respecting. Thus he creates a calculated game of ambiguity. Often Beerbohm defined himself as someone ‘from the last century’. Already at the age of twenty-four he behaved like a neutral who represents and objectifies. He knows he is part of the vices and follies of the aesthetic era but remains aloof from them. A measure of his immunity and of his wise aestheticism is that he did not let himself get sucked in by Catholicism, that he remained a Protestant, but not too fervent or passionate a one. And the sacred and sovereign myths of

or the Dandy Dante: Rereading with Mirrors, London 1986; R. F. Kiernan, Frivolity Unbound: Six Masters of the Camp Novel, Thomas Love Peacock, Max Beerbohm, Ronald Firbank, E. F. Benson, P. G. Wodehouse, Ivy Compton-Burnett, New York 1990; N. J. Hall, Max Beerbohm: Caricatures, London 1997. 1

His main praise for Thackeray can be read at the end of ‘The Ragged Regiment’. On Beerbohm’s predilection for this writer, cf. Cecil 1964, 32–3.

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Decadentism, in their hybrid and mixed form, are knocked down one by one by his parody: that of Salome falls, the desire and aspiration to sainthood fall (and the saints, he says in Zuleika Dobson, end up forgotten about for their insipidity, the sinners on the other hand leave their mark: Judas, as in Graham Greene, is the disciple who everyone remembers and even venerates and emulates). For this reason parody itself is an act of love and devotion, as it is also an admission of inferiority. All in all, Beerbohm has thus shot at his contemporaries with blanks. In his pen portraits, which are à clef and thus conceal a precise living target, he seems to try to ridicule the amateurism of the aesthete (an Enoch Soames, a Ledgett), strike at their affectations, their poses, their arrogance, the exaggerated sense of their own importance, and their oracular presumptuousness; then this offensiveness is softened and moderated by pity. Beerbohm has accomplished a rhetorical and demonstrative tour de force. Given the age gap, he entered the fray of the 1890s from further away, and later, acquiring the benefit of observation and objectivity. His main concern is to extol the virtues of aestheticism as a healthy, uninfected movement; to recognize in it a positive capacity in order to redirect English art, to de-Victorianize it, to reduce truth in favour of beauty. What did Beerbohm, who was only eight years old, know about 1880, the year from which one of his essays takes its title? He arrived on the scene one fatal minute or hour late, thus being able, paradoxically, to turn towards that atmosphere with nostalgia already. While lauding Beau Brummell, he does not praise the affectation, the emptiness, the most pejorative sprezzatura of dandyism, but an ethical code of balance, of Spartan sobriety even. However, as the years went by, having idealized and promoted a healthy aestheticism, Beerbohm saw it overwhelmed and overcome by later climates. It is, then, normal that, feeling the whole potential for subversion of the Nineties and the originality of the movement – the religion of beauty – that rejected conservative Victorian hypocrisies, he should then be the defender of a normality relative to a progress that he no longer felt his own. He often denounced the vulgarity of the period after 1920; he felt out of place and disoriented. Practically since ‘Diminuendo,’ which is from 1896, he had been declaring himself paradoxically finished, a relic left behind in the glorious epoch of Beardsley. The temporal Eden, already difficult to impose as an ethical code

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tout court, increasingly acquired the sentimental value of a golden age with each successive period that passed. Like Thackeray, exactly like Thackeray, Beerbohm wants to keep alive and taut, simply existing, this link with times past, after having tried to keep the present alive. The motif of values overwhelmed by time becomes his essential chord. In his numerous short stories about imaginary writers, Beerbohm imagines the action of time on fame, for example how a writer would have been appraised 100 years later.2 Unfortunately, pessimistically, he himself would be swallowed up by oblivion. At the height of Modernism he confessed to not understanding Eliot, Woolf, Joyce and Pound,3 another honorary citizen of Rapallo;4 and the essay ‘Laughter’ candidly admits his complete lack of patience for the more abstruse philosophical speculations. Beerbohm does not have evolution, he does not keep up with the times, even in an exquisitely literary sense. Hence this implicit interstitial placing for a writer who is different from Bennett and Galsworthy but, like them, re-evokes and celebrates an outmoded era. 2. Beerbohm excessively underestimated himself declaring that he was without intellect, only gifted with insight and sense of humour. In the said, late essay ‘Laughter’ we hear him insist so much on classifying himself for posterity as an ‘absolute fool,’ and admitting his own stuffy stupidity, that we are led to suspect that he is talking tongue in cheek. Indeed Beerbohm’s merit ranking is, in order, that of cartoonist, essayist and novelist. Another much-lauded expertise that falls outside the realm of the written word is that of conversationalist. He is therefore credited with a meagre or scant creative skill, which he moreover always exercises on the boundary between non-fiction and inventiveness. His productive peak fell between 1890 and 2 3

4

The morbid uncertainty of posthumous fame, together with the frightening anxiety of influence – in this case of Meredith and Maupassant – echo throughout his autobiographical essay ‘A Relic’. The possible Jewish descent of a writer is always the object of morbid enquiry by English-speaking critics, and Beerbohm was and is considered Jewish by many, even, and especially, by Pound, as can be seen in his poem ‘Brennbaum’, to which Beerbohm responded with a few caricatures. He denied being Jewish, however much he desired to be so. Cf. Danson 1989, 8–9 and n. 9. On his analogous deafness to the avant-garde, in particular to Marinetti’s Futurism (‘there’s no future for the Future’), cf. Cecil 1964, 250.

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1920, thirty abundant years, after which he produced very little. In 1911 he moved permanently to Rapallo and almost entirely ceased his activities, except for short radio chats during the war and a few insignificant footnotes to his written and graphical work. This enigmatic gesture was interpreted as a reaction of disgust against a Forsterian ‘culture of telegrams’ which he no longer understood – a gesture, therefore, of resignation if not fear and cowardice.5 Nonetheless, in the last thirty years, Beerbohm the essayist, a supremely witnessing and objectifying writer, has been thoroughly investigated with the tools of psychology, psychoanalysis and gender, and transformed into a subtly subjective writer, so that even his flight from England has been subject to various and even imaginary explanations.6 § 40. Beerbohm II: Exercises in style The youngest of the nine children,7 from two marriages, of a wealthy corn merchant of mixed origins, Baltic, German and Lithuanian, Beerbohm, a student at Charterhouse and Oxford, which he left without completing a degree, had his debut in the Yellow Book, and immediately afterwards (1896) became the twenty-four-year-old author of a collection of essays entitled, with a burlesque humour worthy of Browning, The Works of Max Beerbohm. Of course it was not his complete works and, to add to the lighthearted joke, it included a bibliography by the director of the Bodley Head, John Lane, which aped the pomp of critical editions and added a biographical profile and other pedantries. At the heart of these essays is the already more tired, staid and objective celebration of the decadent dandy. ‘Dandy and the Dandies’ recalls the Brummell of the Regency and other later myths of this figure imposed by popular magazines, such as Wilde. The dandy is explained not according to the abundance of its effects but as reduction, sobriety, essentiality, and the spirit of symmetry. In reality the authentic

5 6 7

He maintained in an epigram that by taking refuge in the past he had defended himself from the present. Muggeridge maintained in 1965 (cf. Danson 1989, 10) that Beerbohm escaped from two nightmares, that of his Jewishness and that of his homosexuality. Herbert Beerbohm-Tree, theatrical agent and actor, was his half-brother, a wellknown figure on the London dramatics scene.

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dandy was by now irretrievable, and Beerbohm was already applying the mechanism of the degeneration of the shining example and of the departure from the origin: Brummell is a Moses of dandyism and all successive dandies are judged as a falling off from the prototype. Or else, when he introduces the ‘good prince’, the future Edward VII, he forces himself to find in him an example of nobility, of the absolute absence of vanity and vice, and a model of devotion to the people: ‘Though it is no secret that he prefers the society of ladies, not one breath of scandal has ever tinged his name’.8 ‘1880’ represents one of the many attempts with which writers at the end of the century tried to demarcate the times according to a subjective vision. In that year there was a great Renaissance, specifically of beauty, and Beerbohm is the historian of that revolution and lays out a chronology and a roll call of Decadentism. ‘The Pervasion of Rouge’,9 as convoluted as Beardsley’s prose, salutes the panacea of the artificial and the return of pleasures formerly obsolete or prohibited, like gambling and makeup. The prejudice that the use of makeup was the mask of a foul and wicked mystery was at an end. This is the true scourge of Victorianism and, echoing Wilde, and Baudelaire before him, Beerbohm unmasks some aesthetic aberrations of the period, like the reverence for nature. For this reason the frozen figure and the marmoreal and funereal prose of Pater are attacked and derided in the romping banter of ‘Diminuendo’. Beerbohm maintains that, at the very same moment in which, at eighteen, he arrived in Oxford, the veil between imagination, and thus also expectation, and reality was revealed to him: Oxford was a myth read about in books or from hearsay, which vanished as soon as he set foot there for the first time. In reality, this essay recalls, crucially, how Beerbohm soon related rationally with this myth and understood the impossibility and the futility of its survival. That

8

9

To Edward VII is dedicated a series of much harsher cartoons (1903, commented on in Danson 1989, 54–5) entitled ‘The Edwardyssey’. Beerbohm acrobatically challenges Thackeray and nostalgically approves the corrupt eighteenth century in his historical essay on George IV, who only wanted to live as a dandy and enjoy, à la Pater, the speed of life in its pleasant moments. First published in the Yellow Book under the title ‘The Defence of Cosmetics’. The essay was talked about and received as scandalous.

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is equivalent to calling it a disguisedly falsifying essay which assumes the disconsolate tone of the ‘mask of age’ and announces the withdrawal from art into contemplation. Already at the age of twenty-four Beerbohm felt old-fashioned, or rather he acted old-fashioned, and even apocalyptical: ‘All the while that we are prating of progress, we are really so deteriorate! There is nothing but feebleness in us’. 2. The essays in Yet Again (1909), gleaned from the periodicals which he wrote and was active in, about various and curious topics – small-time anecdotes which are also absolute and of a witty and indulgent bent, cardindexes of the eccentric phenomenology of human behaviour, with added anthropological or psychological remarks – seemed to his contemporaries to be written with such politeness and self-control, such conciseness and complacency in their polished style, as to recall Addison and Steele, or Lamb and Stevenson. The author, thus received into the pantheon of English essayists of all time, was thereafter cited as Max by antonomasia, like a darling of the public. All in all, the collection is a series of embroidered recollections punctuated by the ever re-emerging refrain of Où sont les neiges d’antan and by the veiled and implicit admissions of the vulgarity and dreariness of the present; they are, then, the demonstration of ‘man’s innate tendency to exalt the past above the present’.10 Like many late Victorian essays, especially those of Thackeray, they are by an egotist who revels in his own diversity and estrangement, thus subtly aesthetic – essays, that is, by someone who candidly confesses his sovereign, scandalous abstention from the fray, and his apolitical temperament; and who pacifically admits the shortcomings of his character and his little acts of roguishness, with a pseudophilosophy

10 Some of the satirical sketches strike at the idiosyncrasies of the human races and ridicule the Americans and the absurdities of the new civilization. One essay informs us and explains how to cure a nervous breakdown, another laments the demolition of the London clubs. The planning of Edwardian London had been redesigned by mediocre architects lacking in imagination, who had obliterated the vestiges of the past and rebuilt the city with a cacophonous jumble of styles. The traditionalist still longs for the finishing schools of yore to teach and learn a code of gentlemanly behaviour and etiquette.

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of resignation which at times sounds like an echo of Montaigne.11 For that very reason Beerbohm comes close to and even echoes the Biedermeier essay writing with the heartfelt satisfaction of staying at the fireside, with the hat-box that has seen its fair share of shows, every label pasted on it rousing memories and associations:12 with the repeated exhilaration of the journey, in other words, which was once by carriage but now by train. The only mark of modernity is a lucid and anticipatory analysis of the language and of the languages which nowadays we would call jargons. Journalistic language is taken apart in its registers, especially against the backdrop of the great oratory of the ancient world, parliamentary and legal; and the essay on the renaming of roads sides with the theory of the arbitrariness of the sign, since a street is what it is, and its nature and essence do not change simply by giving it a new name.13 Whistler was surprisingly hailed by Beerbohm, not only as a great artist, or as a dandy and author of mottoes: he also had ‘an extraordinary talent for writing. He was a born writer’. 3. The seventeen parodies in A Christmas Garland (1912) seem to point to Joyce ahead of its time or, but it is a more superficial analogy, to be the resounding herald of Queneau’s Exercices de style. Some writers had preceded Beerbohm, but without his prodigiously systematic spirit.14 In almost all cases, Beerbohm hits the bulls-eye. Of Wells he parodies not only the hypothetical reform of Christmas in the future utopian world, but also the idiosyncrasy of subdividing the narrative discourse like a treatise, with paragraph symbols; he arrives at really absurd results with his imitation of Galsworthy and Bennett; and the desecration of Hardy is dizzying. His imitation of Gosse, which describes the fiasco of a meeting in Venice between Browning and Ibsen,15 is the only creation by Beerbohm that is 11 12 13 14 15

The double chosen by Beerbohm could also be Francis Bacon. Beerbohm supports the Baconian theory of Shakespeare’s plays in ‘On Shakespeare’s Birthday’. ‘Ichabod’, a charming essay in which the author lays bare his little fears and fixations. ‘The Naming of Streets’, in which Beerbohm anticipates Saussure and shows he is aware of the distinction between denotation and connotation. Cf., for a few predecessors, Danson 1989, 144. Florence Khan was an Ibsenian actress who in 1910 became Beerbohm’s wife; she died in 1951, after which the writer married, a month before his own death, Elisabeth Jungmann, the former secretary of the playwright Hauptmann.

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authentically so, perfect in its wit and humour, because imitation plays second fiddle and because this is the genre, that of evocation – see the piece on Swinburne – that Beerbohm was best at. The place of honour in And Even Now (1920), another collection of essays of varied nature, has always in fact been recognized as belonging to ‘No. 2 The Pines’,16 with Swinburne described and caricatured rather than truly ‘criticized’. This vignette’s merit lies in its visual impact, its illumination, its vivid detail, like the electric hands of its subject, or the lunchtime playlet, in the selection of the dialogue, and the accentuation of idiosyncrasies. The essay is in reality double-edged, and Beerbohm turns his attention to Swinburne as much as he measures his own reactions, which are those of the religious and at the same time witty revisitation of the past and, especially, the mediocre pen pusher’s uneasiness towards the grand figure. It is, then, yet another experiment in Beerbohmian ‘self-abasement’. ‘Hosts and Guests’, a historical and anthropological parenthesis on hospitality, also turns out to be a selfdiagnosis until the confession that the author himself was psychologically a ‘host’ and a guest, and thus almost a parasite, not a lead role or a leader, but someone who gets lost in the crowd, ‘glad to fall back into the ranks’. The contour of the other sketches confirms the obsessiveness with which Beerbohm examines cases of failure, and human weaknesses bordering on blatant contradiction. A writer, William, claims to be a socialist and then denies it; a clergyman from Dr Johnson’s day, in a supremely calibrated anecdote pretending to be narrated by Boswell, must endure a searing affront. § 41. Beerbohm III: ‘Zuleika Dobson’ and other sketches ‘The Happy Hypocrite’17 (1897), a flowing and polished story, elegant but never gaudy, is indebted to Wilde not only in its title, being a fable apparently directed at ‘younger readers’, and on the subject matter and the variation loved by the Decadents, of foul vice miraculously redeemed – and thus unredeemed, because the fable is not reality. Beerbohm sets it in his own Regency, from whose hedonistic climate he invents the imaginary figure of a lord and dandy, George Hell – and the name is the first sign of 16 17

The title refers to the address in Putney where Swinburne lived with Watts-Dunton. First published in the same year in the Yellow Book.

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the story that is coming. Hell is in fact a den of vice. He is an insensitive conman who starves the poor without scruples, and of course has at his side a no-longer young mistress. In its initial phases the story pre-empts Zuleika Dobson, because all of a sudden at the variety theatre the immoral dandy, pierced by Cupid’s arrow, throws himself at the feet of a very spiritual sixteen-year-old dancer, who must tread the boards to earn a crust. Her reluctance is not that of a femme fatale, but that of a respectable little person who dreams of great pure love,18 and so she immediately realizes that the lord is the very embodiment of vice. He himself, like the Duke of Dorset in Zuleika, eyes up the river and wonders if, rejected and ‘a victim of love’, he will have to commit suicide. But he is more experienced than the green Oxfordian he is a foretaste of, and so he resorts to a stratagem. One of the most polished stories within the story is the parable of the mask-maker, invented to explain how Apollo, the sun god, fashioned a mask to see what mankind gets up to at night. The lord buys a saint’s mask from him and, presenting himself again with the face of true, pure love, he conquers the prim and proper object of his desire and lives with her in an Arcadian hut in Biedermeier style. The story has its miraculous ending, which in one interpretation may be the Wildean ‘truth of masks’. The mask is not enough in theory, and in life, to change one’s life and to act the saint and become one; the clothes should not make the man, but they do. The lord is so metamorphosed by the pure and chaste maiden that, like St Francis, he rights his wrongs, gives back the stolen money, donates to the poor, and deserves a prize. When he is forced to show his true face and, so he believes, unmask himself, his sincere repentance has made his face identical to the mask which had concealed it. 2. Perhaps there can be no regrets, judging by Zuleika Dobson (1911), that Beerbohm never wrote, or finished,19 a second novel for the rest of his long life. The feeble plot is better suited to a short story, and before climbing towards the epilogue it decelerates and gets bogged down in deferments 18 19

Behind her is twenty-year-old Beerbohm’s first love, the fifteen-year-old actress Cissey Loftus. The Mirror of the Past, of which only fragments exist, is reconstructed and discussed in Danson 1989, 210–37.

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and digressions. This same drawback is, however, intrinsic to his parodying experimentation. Sterne is the first of Beerbohm’s parodies, as this is a novel which is at once polymorphous, non-fiction, commemorative, tragicomic, fabulous, fantastical and metanarrative, with the respective and sudden changes of register. Each one of its pages is enlivened by an aside to the reader, who is regularly informed of the narrative aims, and by the witty conversational tone, by estranging remarks, by the bathos with which the poetical clichés are resoundingly smashed, and not least by the ironic use of mythology and by recurring mannerisms. One of these, in itself cloying in the long run, concerns the ‘busts of the Emperors’ surrounding the Sheldonian like a sort of living Greek chorus whose facial expressions are the thermometer of the action. The parody lies above all in the counterpoint – or rather in downgrading and banalization – which takes place between the solemn and stark past and the frivolous and foolish present, and thus between tragedy and comedy or tragicomedy. The course of present events unfolds along the template the narrator conjures up, that of distant deeds of myth or history. Mélisande, Zuleika’s lady-in-waiting, is engaged to a Pelléas, and Zuleika, a ‘hyena woman’, is a playful and updated version of Wilde’s Salome and the man-eating femme fatale. But what a violent devaluation, as between the authentic original and the false imitation! Ultimately the protagonist of Zuleika Dobson is Oxford itself, and the parody hits above all its myth, or rather it recreates or stokes it. In a note in the 1946 reprint, Beerbohm underlined the fact that his story belongs to the fantasy genre, so it would be natural to think of Firbank; were it not that Beerbohm’s fantasy does not resemble his because, as Beerbohm was careful to warn, his own has a ‘solid basis in reality’, which indeed is the general characteristic of Beerbohm’s fantasy. Today’s Oxford is the parody of ancient Oxford, and Beerbohm is awake to wandering shadows and the ghosts of the great actors of English history and civilization who walked the streets and the crossroads, for whose feats Oxford was the theatre; so he anthropomorphizes the monuments, the statues, the paintings and the frescoes on the walls of the halls. This spectral continuity pulsates until the farcical swerve of the reference to the now faded Tractarian battles. The self-immolating Duke of Dorset is a pale imitation, and thus a degeneration, of the martyrs Latimer and Ridley. The parodic and irreverent track, then, is also that of

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the Oxford novel and on university life, overabundant in the Victorian age. Oxford is a deformed phantasmagoria from memory and dream, a downfallen alma mater which in 1946 was invaded by the troops and besieged, but which, already in 1911 – ‘the old magic is fled’ – could arouse the student’s nostalgia. That something which is essential to parody is vigilance, and Beerbohm, who may have depicted himself in his Duke of Dorset who falls head over heels for an amateur Salome or a Circe,20 steps back and observes him from a distance. His is a controlled game which does not abandon itself to the magic of transfiguration, and the pleasure of hyperbole is always ironic. Zuleika Dobson is itself a sort of oxymoronic name, an amalgamation of the marvels of the Oriental odalisque21 with one of the more common and insignificant English surnames. Her suitors cannot manage to accept that she is a minor and amateurish sorceress, that hers is a banal beauty that only seeks to cause a sensation amongst the masses, and does not merit that fascination. Beerbohm can now smile at that algolagnic perversion of Swinburne’s, that is, man’s sadomasochistic devotion to the man-eating femme fatale, or belle dame sans merci with her ‘unrestrained, imperious, cruel beauty’.22 His smile is expressed by turning this plot, overused and continually reworked by the Decadents, into a fable, and by extenuating its tone and its rhythm into those of melodrama or operetta23 – so that Zuleika becomes a deadly but more happy-go-lucky Turandot. The young Oxford students’ collective rush towards suicide for the love of Zuleika is an indulgent symbol of poetic and fanatical weakness. Snatched from homosexuality, the Duke of Dorset, in other ways a favourite of the gods, is the mystical dandy who must avoid contact with others and with women, and is celibate out of principle. Dorset is D’Orsay, the dandy who for Beerbohm was not Brummell. His Hamletic contortions lead him judiciously to renounce suicide dictated by love for the shy

20 The number of chapters, another parodic cipher, is twenty-four, like Homer’s epics. 21 The name Zuleika, according to Beerbohm himself (cf. Cecil 1964, 472, and Danson 1989, 115) is pronounced [zuˈli:kə]. 22 Volume 6, § 154.1. 23 The rococo scent, like Firbank’s fantasies, has sometimes led to the inclusion of this novel in the canon of ‘camp’ literature.

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lady, but in the end the duke must be faithful to the promise he made in accordance with a stupid code of honour – to the mirage, that is, of saving the mass of the other students with his own sacrifice – and, more ironically, to the omen which fate has sent him and he has taken to be an injunction.24 The young, bewitched and befogged Oxford students are ‘one great passive monster’, such is the barely concealed moralizing understatement. They throw themselves in the river for the old handicap of the emotional immaturity of young Oxford students, although the ‘virgins’ had recently been admitted into the colleges. 3. This distancing of the authorial voice grows and becomes clearer because Beerbohm the narrator enters into the plot, and so he is not the Duke, but an immune observer who can look without veils, although he is not able to keep silent about his admiration for the beauty of this gratuitous suicidal gesture, an ambivalence which impairs the force of a vaccination against folly and the errors of aestheticism.25 This is so because antidotes to Zuleika begin to emerge in the form of fresh, quick-witted, spontaneous, simple, common girls, like the cleaner, Katie, or the milkmaid; and a pendant to the duke starts to take shape in Noaks, a rough, ugly, proletarian, but wise study companion. But Beerbohm has a twist in the tail in store for us. The story, which is creeping along, becomes an explosive whirligig in the final quarter. As in a fairy-tale, Zuleika Dobson throws herself at the feet of the duke who no longer loves her and whom she now loves, although the unbending duke must die anyway for a passive obedience to the divine injunction. He finds out that Katie has always secretly loved him, but he tricks her and commits the mean act of giving her Zuleika’s pearls; then he wants to die like a dandy, pompously, wearing his Knight 24 Two black owls perched on a ledge at the ancestral home, a premonition of the imminent death of the last descendant according to dynastic mythology. The news is communicated with gusto to the duke by telegram, to which he responds with another telegram ordering the immediate preparations for a funeral. 25 For Beerbohm one can always, if not die, at least punish oneself for the love of a woman, as Robert Coates can testify, accepting to make himself ridiculous by reciting Shakespeare’s Romeo in Bath: ‘he was a great Fool. In any case, it would be fun to have seen him’. These are the final words of the sketch ‘Poor Romeo!’, in The Works of Max Beerbohm.

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of the Garter uniform. Common sense looking at him now has a better treatment. The duke sinks below the waters of the river all dressed up, followed by the student masses. But Noaks is living since, out of fear, he had only pretended to follow the others, and hid instead, being found by Katie safe in his room. This cowardly gesture would seem, however, to be the only act of lucid courage, and Katie and Noaks vow eternal love, and it seems to be the Victorian triumph of the positive forces and the opening of a new chapter. In reality it is the triumph of small-mindedness, of squalid self-interest and low calibre makeshift. Mercilessly unmasked – and so the effect is that of comedy and farce to be performed live – Noaks, who still loves Zuleika, dies by throwing himself out of a window, and the sorceress’s booty is thus complete. The final pages contain yet another twist, and an apparently repentant Zuleika communicates her decision to become an Anglican nun; but, changing her mind, she catches a train to Cambridge, to take her scourge there too. Beerbohm thus seems to harbour a cynical, Thackerayan inability to evade the charms, however spurious they may be, of the femme fatale, and to pessimistically deny any way out towards sanity, as much for the aristocracy as for the common man. 4. Seven Men and Two Others26 (1919) is, almost forty years early, practically Beerbohm’s last creative effort; it is still related, however, with parody and still in the form of sketches half way between the essay and creative writing. The nine ‘imaginary’ portraits are centred on the role of the writer straddling the two centuries – a conceited amateur writer, fixated and slightly alienated. ‘Enoch Soames’ (1912) is an inexistent but realistic writer from the Nineties who, Beerbohm complains, is not included among those studied by Holbrook Jackson’s classic work, and who is known, but not much appreciated, by Harland, the editor of the Yellow Book. It is a delightful embroidering of the real and the imaginary, moving in and out of the critical or bibliographical essay, the fake reading note or the review. Beerbohm, by then impartial, can intensify the posing, the presumptuousness, the

26

The collection acquired this title in 1952, when two more sketches were added to the 1919 edition. The ‘seventh man’ is Beerbohm himself, who, as narrator of the stories, plays a part in each one of them.

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boasting, the foolishness of the minor – and, why not? the major – figures of the Nineties. The critique of the evanescence of the movement – and limits are imposed even on Mallarmé – even seems to flow in an adopted falsetto tone, and a voice that is not Beerbohm’s own. This marginal writer is a tragicomic or grotesque figure, the aesthete thirsty for present and future recognition that is not smiling on him; and who torments himself and slowly wastes away. The visionary contortion consists in the fact that this ‘Catholic diabolist’ meets Satan and makes a pact with him by which he will be able to confirm his fame in a hundred years’ time. The work therefore parodies many targets and referents, from Wells to Goethe, and at the same time satirizes the literary system and cocks a snook at criticism itself. ‘Hilary Maltby and Stephen Braxton’ also unfolds as a fantasy about the failure of an amateur writer. Two hacks split public opinion as once did Dickens and Thackeray, but ahi quam mutati ab illis; the story does, however, tend towards parodying the mystery tale and that of the double, or of the diabolical persecutor, of the supernatural and of the ghost. ‘James Pethel’ is the gambler who always wins, or only appears to, and thus he too is a failure who, ever eager to face mortal risk and to stake his life in challenges which are a surrogate for the ultimate contest against death, is an equally satanic figure who dies, but in a completely banal way. ‘Argallo and Ledgett’ returns to the sketch of literary life, with Beerbohm himself entering the scene as a spectator and intermediary between the two figures of Argallo, a gloomy and broody nihilist of obscure Spanish origins who in the end commits suicide, and Ledgett, the amateur who suffers exclusion from the highest literary circles, whom all the great writers tear apart, ridicule and avoid. The good-natured and humorous joke is that Beerbohm, who identifies with the nonentity of Ledgett and exorcizes himself in him, does not only create deadly gibes directed at Ledgett in the letters and conversations of the contemporary literati, but, moved by pity, persuades the righteous Argallo to pen some letters in defence of the abused writer, which encourage him and even perk him up to the extent that, from the amiable chap that he was, he suddenly becomes arrogant and standoffish. In Ledgett, Beerbohm returns to the ‘damned’ notoriety of the obscure writer, which, not forthcoming, consumes and frustrates him. Savonarola Brown, the protagonist of the eponymous pastiche, is also an amateur writer

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persecuted by his fellows ever since his first days at school. His ‘decision’ to write a play in blank verse on Savonarola – random, extravagant – is a bloody scratch on the Romantic concept of inspiration effused from above or bestowed by the muses, because it has degraded into pure opportunism learnt from the recipes for success of contemporary theatre.27 At the same time, Beerbohm parodies, if not desecrates, that Victorian sub-canon of the ‘Savonarolian’ novel or text28 which in the nineteenth century is represented first and foremost by George Eliot’s Romola. Beerbohm presents himself as the literary executor of his friend Brown, and pretends to transcribe his play in the state in which it was interrupted, though recognizing its weaknesses, and he adds a fifth act by his own hand. This Savonarolian play in verse is a festive and at the same time discordant space-time uproar, insofar as historical characters from the most diverse epochs arrive on the scene, such as St Francis and Dante. Beerbohm craftily camouflages, and parodies, the aestheticist motif of the temptation of Salome and of St John, because he has Savonarola meet Lucrezia Borgia and has him temporarily falling in love with her.29 § 42. Chesterton* I: The crusade against contemporary isms A harsh and restrictive profile of Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936) might present him as first and foremost the creator of the Father Brown detective stories, which still enjoy the enduring fame of all pure, absorbing, 27 28 29

*

The immediate target, as Danson 1989, 173, notes, was a pseudo-Elizabethan play in verse by Stephen Phillips, on which see Volume 6, § 285.2 n. 7. Volume 5, §§ 199–201, and Volume 6, § 194.2 and n. 53. ‘O thin, / Cold, tight-drawn, bloodless lips, which natheless I / Deem of all lips the most magnifical / In this our city…’. Lucrezia also recalls Zuleika, since she must and can love only those who flee her. In the pastiche of Act V fugitives Lucrezia and Savonarola poison themselves. Collected Works, 9 vols, London 1926, now replaced by The Collected Works, various editors, 37 vols, San Francisco, CA 1986–2012. Anthologies include G. K. Chesterton: A Selection from his Non-fictional Prose, ed. W. H. Auden, London 1970; The Bodley Head G. K. Chesterton, ed. P. J. Kavanagh, London 1985. P. Braybrooke, G. K. Chesterton, London 1922; G. Bullett, The Innocence of G. K. Chesterton,

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unusually tense and captivating fiction – thanks to its genre – and paradoxically came from an otherwise wordy and elephantine writer; then as the author of a few rocambolesque passages from The Man Who Was Thursday and of the breezy tirades of the oriental magician in The Flying Inn. To these we might add, in poetry, the bubbly, so-called wine songs, which support the opposite of the defeatist philosophy of an Edward FitzGerald, another singer of inebriation. His other fiction is anonymous, lacking depth and bite, and his plays are few and far between and not very significant. Apart from that, Chesterton is very versatile: an apologist for Christianity and later Catholicism, a controversialist, a literary critic, a humorous arts columnist whose fleeting writings have been collected in an imposing series of volumes which cannot conceal that origin. Eight is the number of his literary biographies, amongst which those of Dickens and Browning stand out, constituting landmarks in the criticism of these writers. To these we London 1923; E. Cammaerts, The Laughing Prophet, London 1937; M. Evans, G. K. Chesterton, Cambridge 1939; M. Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, London 1944 and Harmondsworth 1958, and Return to Chesterton, London and New York 1952; H. Kenner, Paradox in Chesterton, with introduction by H. M. McLuhan, London 1948; C. Hollis, G. K. Chesterton, London 1950, and The Mind of Chesterton, London 1970; M. Praz, ‘Gilbert K. Chesterton’ and ‘Conversazioni con Gilbert K. Chesterton’, in CSI, 94–111 and 112–17; M. Carol, G. K. Chesterton: The Dynamic Classicist, Delhi 1972; D. Barker, G. K. Chesterton: A Biography, London 1973; L. J. Clipper, G. K. Chesterton, New York 1974; G. K. Chesterton: A Centenary Appraisal, ed. J. Sullivan, London 1974; I. Boyd, The Novels of G. K. Chesterton, London 1975; M. Canovan, G. K. Chesterton: Radical Populist, New York 1977; L. Hunter, G. K. Chesterton: Explorations in Allegory, London 1979; G. Sommavilla, ‘Il cristianesimo cavalleresco di Gilbert K. Chesterton’, in LET, XXXVI (1981), 271–90; A. S. Dale, The Outline of Sanity: A Biography of G. K. Chesterton, Grand Rapids, MI 1982, and The Art of G. K. Chesterton, Chicago 1985; J. D. Coates, Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis, Hull 1984, and G. K. Chesterton as Controversialist, Essayist, Novelist, and Critic, Lewiston, NY 2002; M. Ffinch, G. K. Chesterton, London 1986; G. K. Chesterton: A Half-Century of Views, ed. D. J. Conlon, Oxford 1987; M. Coren, Gilbert: The Man who Was G. K. Chesterton, New York 1990; D. Ahlquist, G. K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense, San Francisco, CA 2003; I. Ker, ‘The Dickensian Catholicism of G. K. Chesterton’, in The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845–1961, Oxford 2003, 75–107; W. Oddie, G. K. Chesterton, and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC 1874–1908, Oxford 2008.

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may add a very well known and priceless short history of Victorian literature; two hagiographies or biographies of saints, St Francis and St Thomas.1 These are complemented by numerous books on diverse subjects, be they sociology, history or various aspects of culture. This whole complex, however, is governed by and permeated with a single, romantic and passionate ideological consistency, and made unmistakable by a typical style, a style that was proverbially the man. His most conspicuous characteristics include his considerable girth, those silvery moustaches which Emilio Cecchi often defined as ‘Gallic’, that monocle, those musketeer capes, that widebrimmed hat; then his inexhaustible eloquence, his way with words and concepts, his nature as a neo-Metaphysical juggler who ends up intoxicating himself, and making the concept pass into its degeneration, concettism. Chesterton duelled like a gentleman and with fair play with all the adversaries he encountered on his way; he therefore was immediately likeable, even

1 In St Francis of Assisi (1923) Chesterton rejects a ‘secular’ approach, that of someone who only sees an ecologist ahead of his time and a critic of affluent society; he also rejects the merely hagiographical approach, that is what St Francis says especially to the English, to those same moderate or sceptical rationalists who, like Matthew Arnold, had admired and glorified him, but always at arm’s length and in a reserved way. Speaking of St Francis’s ‘wonderful friendship’ with St Clare, Chesterton combats English prejudices by using a very original comparison between Clare and Shakespeare’s Juliet. Another aspect of the saint which was proverbially unstomachable to the English, his miracles, is dealt with in a long and at times confusing apologia for miracles against the post-Enlightenment and anti-Catholic scepticism of his fellow countrymen: ‘A man in Voltaire’s time did not know what miracle he would next have to throw up. A man in our time does not know what miracle he will next have to swallow’. Chesterton gives an ingenious and daring interpretation to Francis’s well-known nickname, ‘the jester of God’, and reduces its metaphorical halo and scrutinizes its literal implications, providing an example of his parallel demonstrative acrobatics: Francis really does perform acrobatics when he emerges from the night of the soul ‘walking on his hands’. Some very intense pages describe his road to Damascus experience while engaged in these acrobatics: ‘He who has seen the vision of his city upside-down has seen it the right way up’. The biography of St Thomas (1933) is generally considered Chesterton’s best theological work; the leading authority on Thomism, E. Gilson, saw in it the signs of an ‘inspired work’. Cf. Ker 2003, 103–6, for a deeper discussion of Aquinas’ concretism according to Chesterton, that of the philosopher ‘of thirst and hunger for things’ and of common sense.

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to those whom he did not see eye to eye with. Like Carlyle, he can still be read for the mere pleasure of reading, for the ringing out of paradoxes – of which it has been said and was often written he was the twentieth-century ‘master’ – no matter whether they are really pertinent to the point he is making or not. As in Carlyle it is thus difficult to reduce Chesterton’s essay writing, with its bizarre, fanciful and meandering reasoning, to a handful of linked and perspicuous statements. The short history of Victorian literature, which has often been approvingly quoted in the course of this work, is a minor masterpiece, if not Chesterton’s critical masterpiece, because Chesterton restricted himself, and was restricted by the nature of that work, to the short cameo, and so to an adherence to the author and text which is eclipsed in his longer studies. In the latter Chesterton goes off on a tangent, without managing to create a true explanatory relationship between the work and his imaginative readings, which are to be considered, and persist as, purely personal reactions. His art of essay writing is that of embellishment, punchy phrases and shocking exempla; his argumentation that of sweeping and peremptory judgements and absolutization; he sees and writes in black and white, in the mode of contrast, not in chiaroscuro; and in the domain of apologia he is never touched by doubt, nor does he ever speak in a doubtful way. He then is a mainly agonic, or rather agonistic, writer: a tough, bold little dictator, a despot who is however not acknowledged, indeed rejected, by most.2 His apologetics identify enemies one by one, corner them and knock them out, or try to. All of his invectives are allegories. They are directed against the contemporary isms, those which proposed themselves as a sharp alternative to his aboriginal Christianity. First of all atheism, materialism and pessimism; then Islamism, negative existentialism, vegetarianism and teetotalism. He is one of the few English writers who would have authentically wanted to turn the hands of history back a few centuries. He tried to reintroduce into England the system of crafts and guilds, leading the nation away from capitalism and towards the regressive utopia of ‘merrie England’. I shall have to mention the name of Matthew Arnold as well as that of 2

Dr Johnson is compared with Chesterton by Orwell in OCE, vol. III, 20; Chesterton loved playing the part of this ‘doctor’ in his own play The Judgement of Dr Johnson (1927).

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Carlyle later in this presentation; Chesterton did not admire them because they were not believers to a sufficient extent, but the recipe is, with a few variations, the same for new apocalyptic times whose emergence required utopias which were primarily regressive.3 A close analogy would seem to be Hopkins, but this is not the case. Hopkins flirted with a medievalism marked by gloom, penitence and mortification, whose symbolic setting was the cloister, or rather the hermitage; Chesterton was nostalgic about the good cheer, the carousing, the revelry and the drunken songs of that age, whose symbolic site is Robin Hood’s forest, or the tavern.4 The name of Hopkins never appears in Chesterton’s writings as far as I know, but the theory that the bane of England had been the Protestant Reform, which had unyoked England from the European wagon, was an idea of the old Catholics, and one which Hopkins believed in with the passion of a convert. 2. Such a crusade had initially targeted Victorianism, in the bosom of which Chesterton was born. He attacked Victorian pessimism, and pessimism in general, and also its economic theory, by advocating ‘distributism’ together with Belloc. He therefore waged war against the concentration of power and property, and also against the total confiscation of private property from individuals, since every man had the right to ‘a few acres and a cow’. At the time of the Boer War, despite not being a pacifist, he condemned it as an unjust war. He later gave his blessing to all wars and disagreements in which a small ethnic group or nation was resisting against stronger powers, and set himself up as a theoretician and inspirer of rebellions against the English imperial forces in the small colonized countries. He could not fight in the First World War because he was unfit for service; but his brother Cecil, whose ideas were in perfect harmony with his, did fight. From 1922 Chesterton was the pioneer of the mass conversions which took place amongst the British intelligentsia disillusioned

3 4

The metaphor of the sick and healthy body, often used by Chesterton as we shall see, seems to be taken straight from a famous essay by Carlyle, ‘Characteristics’ (Volume 4, § 14.5). Ker 2003 traces this idea of the Middle Ages back to Dickens, with whom Chesterton had a pronounced ‘affinity’ (84). Ker pushes himself to demonstrate that the Dickens monograph is Chesterton’s ‘greatest book’ and, still less plausibly, that Dickens was an unconscious Catholic, although it is true that Chesterton tried to make him one.

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with socio-communism or the extravagant Catholicism of the Decadents. During the thirty years before and after 1900 Chesterton’s is a paradigmatic parable of intellectuality and English art: he is a fourth witness after the trio of narrators formed by Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy, and is above all the counterbalance to Wells. He could also be that to Shaw, and he was, but Shaw was an even older witness who preceded him by almost a generation, and who had started off when Chesterton was practically still in swaddling clothes. It has often been said that in Chesterton the distinction between pre- and post- does not exist, and that his formation is a continuity. His Catholicism was conservative and reactionary, and struggled against contemporary secularism. Orwell, who had an ambivalent attitude and admired Chesterton the humorist, glimpsed in him the shadow of the longa manus behind the column of Timothy Shy, or ‘Beachcomber’, in the News Chronicler, which, during the Second World War, derided, in the name of Catholicism, every aspect of institutional Protestantism.5 His tradition was that of thinkers with an unquestioning belief who fought a vain and stupid crusade, as Orwell put it, against new Enlightenment thinkers such as Russell and the Huxleys. Orwell also condemned the pro-French delusions and the blunders of pleasure-seeking and bellicose Latin militarism.6 Such was the spiritual source of ballads which, to Orwell, made all other warmongering poetry pale in comparison. Chesterton, it goes without saying, is the only Catholic who tried to create a close-knit group, where other Catholics were and would operate spread out. And yet only one of two affiliates was formed. This duo was crudely called Chesterbelloc, 7 like some kind of monstrous, two-headed dragon. Chesterton and Belloc were in fact two kindred spirits and two baying hounds against the century and its ideas. Belloc was the finer intellect and was also the most long-standing Catholic, and it was he who inspired his friend to convert.8

5 6 7 8

OCE, vol. III, 205–6. OCE, vol. III, 414–16. The expression was coined by Shaw (Ward 1958, 94). Coates 1984, 8, suggests that experts on Chesterton consider Belloc’s influence to be ‘completely negative’.

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§ 43. Chesterton II: The myth of the tavern Son of a London estate agent, Chesterton was an early versifier at grammar school, and in 1891 he left with the intention of studying art, and indeed he remained a talented cartoonist. Greybeards at Play (1900) is a small collection of a few light-verse or nonsense quatrains, along the lines of the pretence or the game alluded to in the title, of two old men who become children again and contemplate natural spectacles in fantastical and naïve inventions. Marks of Edward Lear are evident in the slightly alienated gestures, against the logic and order of common life, and because every quatrain is accompanied by a cartoon illustration; but the familiarity with nature and dangerous animals recalls Kipling’s jungle books. A zoological inventory is gradually built up, a parade of exotic and ferocious animals which are calmed down and become tame. One section sees a good pirate as protagonist, with the telling of little fantastical anecdotes, so that Chesterton has moved on to Carroll and his Hunting of the Snark because a ragtag gang of pirates is acting at the edge of reality. But even Coleridge is the object of the parody, with the melancholy, listless, and very surreal fish which the pirates feel sorry for. The Wild Knight and Other Poems (1900) marks the true beginning of Chesterton’s poetry, and it is one of the collections against which his uncommon poetical talent should be measured. He leaps over any recent influence and dodges any Nineties contagion; he did not cultivate and toy with Decadent myths and symbols,9 nor did he echo the agnostic pessimism of a Housman.10 Even in his few love poems there is no emergence of the icon of the femme fatale with her ambiguous, destructive charm and her carnal eros, rather that of the medieval domina of tournaments, exalted by heraldry, and within the context of courtly love. Yet there is also no trace of the language of the most recent impassioned

9 10

Excepting the vision of paradise, which is slightly Rossettian and Pre-Raphaelite, in ‘The Mirror of Madmen’, a vision which dissolves when the dreamer awakens and turns out to be a drinker in a tavern. Against pessimism, and in favour of ‘fame’ and ‘joy’, is the lyric poem ‘The Pessimists’. ‘The Song Against Songs’, from the 1915 collection, says in choral singing and without beating about the bush: ‘The song of the cheerful Shropshire Lad I consider a perfectly horrid song’.

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and Baroque religious poetry of the likes of Francis Thompson, and perhaps, through him, of Hopkins.11 Chesterton’s paradoxical parables, which to a certain extent seem to defend the idea that they mean to dismantle, remind us indeed of the arguments found in Browning’s poetry; but when Chesterton retells episodes of the gospel, or carries out sacred meditations and confessions, and the form is dried and stylized in the slightly monotonous measure of the regularly rhymed quatrain, it is Herbert’s cold and cerebral concettism that comes to mind.12 The general organization of the work is that of a bold sacramentalism which interprets the world and creation as an ‘incarnation’ of the Creator.13 In a few even more sober poems Chesterton echoes the ‘eternity in a grain of sand’ from Blake;14 although on a few occasions – ‘The Human Tree’ – God is invoked to appear and show himself, throwing off his invisibility, with the spasmodic inflections of the Victorian ‘disappearance of God’. For the moment, Chesterton the poet could be said to be an old school, ‘muscular’ religious poet who rejects subtleties and prudence. Fearless heretics following in the footsteps of Christ shout curses at cowardly guardians of the law which turn out to be true, and they are then punished and crucified while screaming their love for the world. Boundless love for creation, insisting that the world ‘is’, incessantly matters and is not a ‘bubble’ – and it is a burden loaned from Browning: the feeling, that is, of a freshly sprung, pulsating world which could be said to still be in the creation phase, ‘finished yesterday’,15 and

11

The late Auden’s (1974) ‘The Gift of Wonder’ (Conlon 1987, 319–24), noted from his point of view an ‘obsessive tic’, that of imitating Swinburne’s alliteration and, more perceptively, the difficulty in deciphering various lyrics based on references to places, facts and people not made known, forgetting that he himself had practised this form of obscurity in his early poems. 12 As, for example, in ‘“I am,” he says his bankrupt creed; / “I am,” and is again a clod’ (‘Ultimate’). The donkey of the homonymous poem, the ‘parody of all things that walk on four legs’, had its moment of glory when he carried Jesus to Jerusalem on its back. 13 ‘The Beatific Vision’. Another lyric from 1915 bears the same title. 14 ‘The Holy of Holies’ sings the presence of all the heavenly hierarchies ‘in the heart of a primrose’. In ‘A Fairy Tale’ ‘every flower’ leaps ‘to the stars’. 15 ‘A Novelty’.

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the basis for ‘escalading the sky’. The mark of this faith in the world and in life as immediate divine testimony is the violence and impatience with which every doubtful and ascetic, and thus also partly denying, mysticism is attacked: ‘And I knew there can be laughter / On the secret face of God’.16 It is a creed which rejects any melancholy and nursing of doubts, and not at all penitential. The world is not yet a festival, but from on high God proclaims that life is a holiday, and nature frolics with mankind, and mankind yearns to ‘drink from God’s own goblet / The green wine of the sea’.17 2. From short poems Chesterton goes on to medium-long ballads and dialogic compositions. ‘The Ballad of the White Horse’ (1911), in the now epic form of the old Anglo-Saxon poem, tells the story of King Alfred’s exploits against the Danes in eight books of alliterative verse in various metres. The story is history but it is above all allegory, or its great events are, and the valorous resistance of the pious and visionary King Alfred against the Danes is a cosmic struggle, between native and still virgin and gushing Christianity, and the apparently confident and scornful, but failing paganism. Chesterton, in his historical design, was tracing a historical apocalypse in the fall of Christian Rome and the opening up of the borders to barbarian hordes. Caesar was not the colonizer of England but the first of its Christian missionaries; for this very reason, at the turning points of history a long-lasting battle between north and south flares up which, if shifted, is the same in other geographical contexts, because for Alfred, King of Wessex, the Vikings were the ‘men of the north’ par excellence. The unequal struggle is ‘the judgement of the earth’, and the ‘death-grip’. The blind spirit of the Crusades permeates this English enterprise, and the visions of the Virgin Mary make Alfred a warrior saint who hurls himself against the pagans, like Constantine with his in hoc signo vinces. Once the pagans are expelled, in an unexpected prophecy Alfred explains the allegory inasmuch as he predicts the future return of the pagan Danes in the form of books and the ink their hands will be stained with. This prediction regards Luther, whose heresy was to spread thanks to the invention of

16 17

‘The Fish’. ‘The Mariner’.

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the printing press, and thus also the Reformation. Wine, Water and Song18 (1915) leaves a pronounced and unmistakable mark. Its few compositions brutally and vulgarly slash sedateness, compunction, lack of backbone, and a certain resigned, spiritualized, defleshed and slightly hypocritical religiousness. On the other hand they praise daring, the virile clashing, the vigorous candour of the well-fed and well-watered body. So it is a collection which is symbolically placed under the banner of wine and of the tavern, conceived as a site where food and drink are offered and consumed in large and generous portions, in a civilization that does not know profit and in a climate of unchecked merrymaking. In veritable choral pub chants, singing the praises of drinking, Chesterton idealizes an ancient English stock of the full body to save the soul thanks to divine indulgence,19 launching his first attack on Puritanism as a code of sacrifice. Even before the missionary monks landed, the English island was devoted to drink and adventure and knew how to turn the world into a party, rather than fasting and leading a life of austerity while waiting to die. The texture of the collection is that of frank, provocative, humorous and violently caricatural ballads that subvert the stereotypes of the saint or the suffering and defeatist believer, and openly rouse every effeminacy and every British submissiveness in the present. The opening canto praises a different St George, different from the many traditional noble and spiritual knights, and a St George who is above all English, who must have a full belly and a wet throat if he is to successfully take on the dragon. Noah liked his wine, and he especially liked to keep it undiluted in his hold. ‘The Rolling English Road’ is in the anthologies for the celebration of the symbolic teetering gait of the English drunkard at the head of a band made up of all the classes, from the parson to the landlord.20 The poems later than 1915, collected in Poems (1915), The Ballad of St Barbara and Other Poems (1922) and New and Collected Poems 18 Collected from the novel The Flying Inn. 19 Against Manichaeism Chesterton wrote the later poem ‘The Modern Manichee’. 20 The crooked, bendy road is contrasted with the American street plan full of right angles – and is thus the symbol of an unadulterated and non-Americanized British authenticity – in the later poem ‘Americanisation’, which rejects every form of bastardization and seeks to maintain English customs and ways of speaking.

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(1929), are fatally occasional, and on the one hand they temper religious inspiration in more anonymous and declarative formulae by adding a few Christmas oleographs, and on the other they seem to have kept reacting to the more varied contemporary requests with excessive impulsiveness and an intensely militant spirit.21 They are counterpointed by songs of indomitable heroism and martyrdom, and sumptuous and decorated and therefore exterior historical ballads which aim to glorify English compactness before the Reformation, or, as in ‘Lepanto’,22 the successes of the Counter-Reformation; and finally apocalyptic and worried visions and prophecies about the future of an England in which ‘men accumulate and riches decrease’, and little sarcastic parables about Europe coming out of the war destroyed, unrecognizable and worsened. § 44. Chesterton III: Heresy and orthodoxy The polar terms referred to in The Defendant23 (1901), a collection of short essays and journalistic writings published in the form of a column in The Speaker, are today and antiquity, often the Middle Ages. Closer to him, the historical ridge was the early Victorian period, when man had humiliated and impoverished himself. Chesterton partly rehabilitates and partly overturns. He defends by turns humility, slang, popular literature, heraldry. He seems to be but is not the voice of the philistine. His objective is to contrast the artificial with the genuine; it is no surprise that the praise of children, who always see with pure eyes, spontaneously springs forth, with the hymn to the rediscovery of Hopkins’s ‘freshness deep down things’, the sense of the primitive, awe in the face of creation, the poetical outburst in the face of the divine and the sacramental. Against pessimism,

21

22 23

The formal solution of certain satires against contemporary figures is that of the ode in rhyming couplets as in the eighteenth-century verse letters, and as in Auden’s later playful poetry. The ‘proletarian’ songs and choruses, divided according to guilds, are often ostentatious and pompous; but ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’, which quotes the title of Gray’s famous ode, sings in only three stanzas the unburied soldiers in the war, criticizing the rulers safely at home in England. The urgency of the rhythm is taken from Kipling, but the content is the opposite. Not in the sense of a court case, but here really a ‘defender’.

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Chesterton states that the true revolution is always that of the optimist; and the modern age is the one in which solemn vows and promises are no longer made, being symbols of sanity, nor binding vows, denied by aestheticism and ‘Decadence’. The human skeleton and skull are the beauty of man, not the revulsion of death. His dream is to bring back to life an ancient dispensation: ‘it [is] much open to question whether the world has not lost something in the complete disappearance of the ideal of the happy peasant’. Nietzsche is the leading proponent of the school of egoism and the ideological extermination of the weak and defenceless. Heretics (1905) is the first summa of Chesterton’s thought, and perhaps his most vivid, most fortunate and most resistant book of theory and polemic. It imposes Chesterton as the Carlyle of the next century, especially by identifying the twentieth century as the age of the emergency, for which instant prescriptions and radical medicines are advised and administered – but the sweet urbanity of the eloquence, which never gets heated in vicious and violent attacks, can lead one to mistake him for a Matthew Arnold. Carlyle and Arnold are in fact praised at the end of the book because they were at least dogmatic, and being dogmatic, albeit aberrantly so, was always better than being a relativist.24 That leads Chesterton to define himself without difficulty as dogmatic, because it is man’s duty to build himself a systematic philosophy of life. And note: ‘A man cannot be wise enough to be a great artist without being wise enough to wish to be a philosopher’. Except that it is typical of Chesterton to argue along the lines of rare associations in Baroque fashion, and with a lavish and intemperate procedure in which the exemplum ends up going beyond its purpose. It is therefore already in itself a long book which can be reduced to a few aphorisms and diagrams. The paradoxical verve is clear in the word play which opens the work: the ancient heretic defined himself as orthodox; the Inquisition, official thought, the consensus of the intellectual community were heretics. Thus at the time when Chesterton was writing, everything was to be overturned: the heretic 24 Chesterton the political thinker points the finger, after the fashion of Carlyle, at the lack of democracy in the English model, which has not resolved the problem of the poor: ‘modern laws are almost always laws regarding the governing class, not the governed’.

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was proud to be so, he exulted in it and received homage, and the orthodox was derided. Chesterton’s target is contemporary ideological chaos, the absence of fixed points, the relativism against which Pope Benedict XVI yesterday battled; an upturned world needed to be righted and put back on its feet. Behind this, as an inspiration, was Nietzsche again, who preached that ‘the greater and stronger a man, the more he would despise everything else’, whereas ‘so much greater and stronger is a man when he bows before a periwinkle’. ‘So that man may be something more, we must be something less’. These presuppositions could be traced back to aestheticism, to art for art’s sake and to domestic and international political life. Carlylean strongmen were lacking; as for T. S. Eliot25 blasphemy was lacking, which may sound scandalous were it not that blasphemy is merely overturned faith which cannot exist without faith. In its heart the book turns against various thinkers disguised as writers, and against various maîtres à penser. In Ibsen, morality, the practicable search for good, eschatology and its queries, are in suspense; Shaw is caught out when he does not see things as they are, as he proclaims, and instead adapts reality to heroic and superhuman models. Wells embodies the scientific approach and indifference towards the soul, and harboured a ‘vague relativism’. A sad and not very cheery philosophy had been announced by FitzGerald, who invited one to drink, but only in order to drown one’s sorrows. 2. With Orthodoxy (1908) the indispensable diptych of Chesterton’s socio-theological works is formed. Chesterton himself warned that it was an extension of the pars construens of Heretics, there only sketched out, and, mindful of Newman, he presented this one as a new ‘apologia pro vita sua’. Of course the diptych should be understood in an antiphrastic sense: when Chesterton says heresy he means his orthodoxy, and vice versa. But the analogy with Newman is boastfulness. The starting phases are no masterpiece, and they flow onwards more than usual without any clear order; the suspicion almost arises, transforming into certainty, that the nature of the writer feels more at ease destroying, counterattacking, than really constructing and proposing. The argument tries to be brilliant, but

25 § 105.3.

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is lost in masses of striking examples with no bite; the points put forward are more than ever few and far between and simplistic, despite the adopted elaborations. The first of the two theological books is more than enough, and the second is almost a superfluous footnote to the first, along the same lines as the relationship between God and the Bible and Literature and Dogma in Matthew Arnold. Chesterton just cannot resist coming back to the obiter dicta, and flogging numerous dead horses, including Nietzsche. Christianity is celebrated as the only true guarantee of morality and order, liberty and human progress, despite the awareness of original sin which still weighs on humanity. On the one hand Christianity battles against science; on the other it beats every other religion of ‘inner light’ (derived from Marcus Aurelius) or every other pantheistic religion; a third victorious conflict is that with every other Christian faith, or rather ‘heresy’, and with the other non-Christian religions. Subscription to the creed is attained with the imagination (the world does not explain itself, and it is magical, a source of wonder for children), in combination with a healthy rationalism. It is not therefore an attack on reason, but only on the suicide of reason, that contemplated and practised by many modern isms, firstly evolutionism, which implements a veritable hara-kiri.26 Other trite targets are subjected to summary executions, with the author trying to deny profound philosophical foundations with simple wisecracks. The freshest pages, which can still be read today without getting put off, are those of the commemoration in autobiographical form of his own youthful development as a ‘pagan’ and sceptic up until his slow conversion. The young Chesterton had therefore observed in dismay the contradictory nature of the historical accusations made against Christianity, but only to be forced to conclude that such disagreements were due to the squint of the observers of a perfectly normal ‘thing’. Christianity is presented as the peaceful coexistence of opposites, tensions which do not exclude but complement each other, like action in the world and asceticism – and according, then, once again, to that coincidentia oppositorum so dear to the Baroque mindset. 26 This ‘freedom’ granted to reason to cooperate with faith rather than oppose it, is emphasized in the sweeping and enlightening essay by Sommavilla 1981 (cf. especially 274).

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The final defence against the long historical list of rebukes levelled against it establishes Christianity as definitely dogmatic, but likewise as certainly not obscurantist, not a propagator of sacrifice and self-punishment, and indeed an authentic historical agent promoting joy. 3. The Everlasting Man (1925), written to discredit the agnostic vision of history according to Wells, starts off by saying that the best way to look at Christianity, after that of being within it, is to stay outside of it, and also quite far away, and the brilliant thing is that the best observation point is that of a Confucian; but from any position whatsoever one would end up arriving at the admission of the absolute rightness of the object under analysis. There are two theses, that man is not a superior animal, but is differentiated from other animals by numerous aspects, and it is still a theory that is against any idea of gradualist evolutionism (and Chesterton had already said that there is some vague similarity between man and ape, but also a fundamental ontological difference); and that Christ is not a being who is more gifted than normal, but has a divine nature in a real sense. With this very long book, considered essential by some scholars, Chesterton is once again flogging a dead horse, because, essentially, its diatribes form an integral part of an ancient nineteenth-century debate. Strangely, though, it met with success amongst the younger twentieth-century doubters, helping them to get past the impasse of late nineteenth-century scientism. § 45. Chesterton IV: Two fantasies on the present and the future The gap between Chesterton and Beerbohm, almost contemporaries, is bridged when one recalls that they are both parodists, and that Beerbohm parodied Kipling, Chesterton himself and Belloc. Both begin in the field of fantastical caprice;27 but we should not forget that their stylistic trademarks – classical and blunt in Beerbohm, romantic and intemperate in Chesterton – are polar opposites. In the first chapter of The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), Chesterton carries out a meta-literary discussion of the utopian genre and, dealing with the contemporary uproar around the numerous forecasts about the future, he controversially disputes that 27

The ‘whole world of reviewers’ recognized Beerbohm in Auberon Quin (Ward 1958, 126, and Coates 1984, 140).

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prophecy or utopia should, by understanding the supposed signs of the times and blindly adhering to the phantom of progress, prefigure mechanized cosmoses whose signal symbols are sterile order, the spaceship and the time machine. The target is clearly Wells again. On the other hand, the future could be, one would hope, a restoration of the good things of the past and a motion backwards. Let the new be the old, the outdated, the antique. Without making a show of it, Chesterton commits to Ruskin’s and Morris’s regressive utopia, but with a different baggage of ideas. In reality it is perhaps preferable to consider The Napoleon of Notting Hill a utopian fantasy and a far-fetched extravaganza in the service of a theory.28 The scenario is shifted forwards eighty years, but it is a trick in order to say that it is shifted backwards a few centuries; basically the London of 1984 is the same as that of 1904. The political facts of the future are, according to Chesterton, the absence of revolutions and the very aspiration to change the world; mankind lives in a state of lethargy and the police force is reduced. The regime is one of monarchical despotism, and the kingship is elective rather than hereditary. The true regressive revolution can be ignited only by the misfits, the dreamers, the eternal children, the divine idiots. The government employee Auberon Quin is such a sort of freak of nature: he has a taste for the ‘absurd’ and thus the necessary grain of madness. Nominated as the new king, he sets up a court and enacts a series of innovations which in their odd unrealities prefigure the world of Firbank. He has the idea of reinstating the medieval regime of the city-state, and subdividing London according to the ancient boroughs, governed by a provost who is guardian of traditions, with complete decision-making autonomy, and customs including dress, following the fantastical fashions of the era. Every township rediscovers its pride in its history and defends its rights and heritage of traditions and

28

Fantastical and incongruous, and detached from the main plot, is the meteoric initial appearance of the destitute president of Nicaragua, who cuts his hand to dye a handkerchief red and wrap himself in the colour of his country’s flag. In itself the forced anecdote tries to strike a blow against American imperialism, insofar as Nicaragua was recently colonized. But in the discussion with the three government employees criticism also emerges against every super-state that smothers small nations and small local civilizations.

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autonomy against neighbouring towns. The ‘ancient spirit of the London townships’ resurges; walls are rebuilt and the civic guard is re-established, standards are raised, uniforms are worn and coats of arms glimmer, and a war cry resounds for each district. This Chesterton converges with Orwell’s key point in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and it is an involuntary coincidence that the year of both novels is 1984:29 the battle is fought on the one hand against the super-state concentrations looming on the horizon in international politics, and the world politically divided into blocs, and on the other hand in favour of subsistence and the continuity of historical memory. The conflict arises when decisions have to be made entailing a reduction of or infringement upon autonomy, and the story consists above all of the efforts of the Provost of Notting Hill, its Napoleon, to ensure the inviolability of his district’s rights. The metaphor or allegory is that of a return to the small units of measurement in a contemporary cosmos which seems to be tending towards political amalgamation and colonization. Chesterton did not yet know the myth of the third millennium, globalization, which would bring about the gradual but inexorable obliteration of the traces of every local and thus differentiated civilization; but he warns of it. A sort of motorway must cross the three territories, and it is a provision, made after ten long years of negotiations, to which Notting Hill is opposed because it would disfigure and mar the landscape of the district, and would mean the destruction of a street rich in history and tradition.30 An Ariostesque recital of medieval warfare, fought with halberds and harquebuses firing nails and with mock-heroic stratagems, bloodily ensues, and it is a war at once symbolic of the new, and the so-called modern, against the ancient. The provost Adam Wayne, a boy who never grew up, and King Auberon are ‘two lobes of the same brain’; he romantically venerates the myth of his district as the navel of the world, and organizes its defence against the neighbouring boroughs by arousing patriotic feelings. Chesterton bends 29

C. Hollis, ‘G. K. Chesterton’, in Conlon 1987, 227–32, on the other hand, considers it to be deliberate. 30 In the street in question is an inevitable Chestertonian tavern. Another nostalgic traditionalist was lining up against the destruction of the ancient London roads in that same period, Beerbohm, whom Chesterton admiringly quotes in this novel.

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over backwards to justify this glorification of the ‘particular’: the utopian model of Notting Hill ‘is a thing like Athens, the mother of a mode of life, of a manner of living, which shall renew the youth of the world – a thing like Nazareth’. The fundamentalist Adam clashes with the arbitrating provosts of the neighbouring boroughs, but finally succumbs, after a twenty-year ‘empire’, to the same weakness as his collaborators. With him dies the flame that teaches also ad extra the commandment of respect for tradition and the preservation of memory. 2. An insane and impossible crusade – the regressive dream of an ideological battle of yore – is the basic idea behind The Man Who Was Thursday (1908). It is not a response, if not for specious reasons, to Conrad and his novel of the previous year about London anarchists, The Secret Agent, as it might seem and indeed has seemed to many. Rather it criticizes the aestheticism of the poet, and of a particular poet, as symbolic of an art cut off from the course of events and history. At the beginning of the century the emergency was dramatic, and if art had not intervened to rescue society as its last hope the world would have been destroyed. Now, though, in 1908, for Chesterton there were not only passive and innocuous poets, but also pernicious poets and artists, and thus pernicious art. Art, even unwittingly steeped in ideology, had become the voice of anarchy and nihilist destruction, and of the rampant preaching of every absent distinction between good and evil and right and wrong, and of Nietzsche’s superman. It was art without laws, and a law unto itself, according to the aestheticist precepts. The allegory of The Man Who Was Thursday is that of the ultimate metaphysical struggle, the biblical battle of Armageddon. It is no accident that Lucian Gregory, the anarchic poet, resembles a Pre-Raphaelite poet; and an anarchist is someone who experiences Pater’s intensity of the moment by throwing a bomb. Gabriel Syme is – as suggested by his name, in contrast with Gregory’s undeserved one, Lucian – an archangel who believes in poetry as order and respectability, and above all defends the beauty of the predictable. The debate between the two poets, which opens the novel, makes a clean slate of all romantic aesthetics, though something that is actually romantic survives in Chesterton’s dream of art as the voice of and the demand for reorganization. The due realization of an anticipated phenomenon is, to Syme, the well-being of those who know that with that they

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have eluded the imponderable one more time at least: it is not the disappointment of those who are always expecting the new. Syme is, therefore, the embodiment of the Chestertonian paradox according to which the revolutionary’s thirst for ever more driven and definitive revolutions ends up, through the insatiability of his own needs, ‘revolt[ing] into the only thing left – sanity’, in other words the opposite of every revolution. In the fantastical plot the anarchist Gregory wants to show the Catholic Syme that he is a serious and not a fanciful anarchist, and once he has promised not to reveal his secret of being an anarchist to the police, he leads him to an anarchist assembly in which he himself is elected as Thursday, a member of a London dynamite cell whose members all have days of the week as codenames, with the mission of staging an attack in Paris. In the chivalrous duel Syme extorts another promise, that Gregory in turn will not divulge the fact that he, Syme, is actually a knight of the faith, a member of the ‘philosophical police’ created with the task of rooting out ideologies which threaten to destroy the world. He was appointed as such with a sort of masonic rite, a voice in a dark room bestowing on him a blue card with the predictable words ‘The Last Crusade’; thus the sense of a neo-medieval war on heresy and against modern ideological sin is consolidated. We once again get a foretaste of Orwell, both because Syme is the name of one of the minor characters in Nineteen Eighty-Four, a philologist and an expert in ‘Newspeak’, and because the philosophical police is a reverse analogy of Orwell’s ‘thought police’, and it is an entity whose task is not to discover orthodoxies and suppress them, but to fight against errors and root out the ideological weeds. Anarchism itself is organized into two ‘parties’, internal and external, the former decision-making, the latter innocuous and merely a façade. During the secret meeting, Gregory realizes Syme’s reason for participating, though he cannot openly denounce him and is obliged to reinforce, rather than weaken, Syme’s delusion that no anarchists are really serious. So Syme ably gets himself elected as Thursday and becomes an infiltrator and a spy – his ulterior motive. It is then that the novel starts to unsettle its readers, shattering its own presuppositions; and that Chesterton deconstructs himself, to all intents and purposes devising one of his paradoxes, the ones that often play on a knife-edge and end up not holding together. The six presumed horsemen of the Apocalypse

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discover each other as all disguised philosopher policemen incognito, and the story unfolds as a comedy of errors and a grotesque uproar led on by a taste for electrifying adventure which makes for a pleasant and surprising spy novel, full with irony and not unworthy of Buchan. Chesterton perhaps shows that anarchy is a scarecrow that no one must fear – and in fact not a single real anarchist appears on the horizon,31 and the only such is, ironically, the poet Gregory. The very mystery of who the president of the Council of Anarchists, known as Sunday, really is, seemingly the only true anarchist out of the seven, melts away with the revelation that he is the chief of police himself who appointed them all, and who wanted to put on this game knowing full well that it was harmless. In the end it is he who is chased through the streets of London in other fantastical developments, before he comes back to summon his policemen to a masked ball. This fat joker is a hypostasis of Chesterton himself who freely pulls fantasies from his sleeve, but fantasies which make you think; he is also, surprisingly, the Victorian hypostasis of a God dressed up as an ambiguous and two-faced jester.32 Chesterton, in a much later note, still recalled the risk involved in this prank of his, and that many had interpreted ‘such ambiguous being as a serious description of the divinity’ – an error which could have been avoided by taking into account the subtitle, ‘a nightmare’. § 46. Chesterton V: The Father Brown stories Chesterton did not go to university, and in his critical works he does not adhere to any strictly philological criteria or any analytical procedure; thus he shamelessly honoured the forms and manifestations of popular literature. In an essay from the collection The Defendant, ‘A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls’, he dispels any halo of ostracism against pure sensation literature for the less well educated, as long as it is wholesome, and against the need for low-cost fiction and romance. In a second piece, ‘A Defence of 31 32

The theoretical discussion on anarchism is taken up again before the French peasant, who, being a smallholder, cannot be an anarchist: to Chesterton only aristocrats and millionaires can be. Those who have examined the matter further have found analogies with Kafka’s God, and this comparison is practically ubiquitous.

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Detective Stories’, he argues in favour of the genre, defining it as ‘a perfectly legitimate art form’ which was creating the mysterious poetry and even mythology of the metropolis for the future, for example in the ‘fantastic form of the minutiae of Sherlock Holmes’, which combine ‘romance of detail’ and the ‘unfathomably human character in flints and tiles’. From 1911 the detective priest Father Brown33 becomes the protagonist of a series which is extremely popular all over the world even today, and with which the name of Chesterton is inextricably linked in the public imagination. Over the years the round number of fifty stories was reached, subdivided into The Innocence of Father Brown (1911), The Wisdom of Father Brown (1914), The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926), The Secret of Father Brown (1927), and The Scandal of Father Brown (1935). The five collections, all built around this figure, present a detective different from the classic emblems of twentieth-century crime writing, and the shrewdness of an unassuming, often naïve, priest who disentangles criminal cases without being a professional. But why did Chesterton venture into this genre of detective story? The answer is that Chesterton is writing and assembling a theological detective story. The priest applies to the crime both a Catholic priest’s confessional knowledge of souls and the theological resources of exegesis and hermeneutics themselves, in the sense that would be inherited by Graham Greene, or perhaps according even more to Waugh’s concept of the Catholic faith.34 It must be said that Chesterton may have come up with the idea for these tales from the story of his own conversion: he was a sinner or an unbeliever who was brought back into the fold by a priest like Brown; he was big and tall like Flambeau, the strange delinquent who can hold his own discussing theology with the priest, and in the end he converts, and from an elusive thief that he was he becomes a private detective.

33

Modelled on the Irish Monsignor John O’Connor, a great friend of Chesterton’s who guided him in his conversion, officialized in 1922. The lateness of this conversion, decided upon many years earlier, was out of respect for his wife’s still Anglican faith; she nevertheless imitated him four years later. 34 As in the theology of Brideshead Revisited (Volume 8, § 47), Father Brown’s God keeps the wrongdoer on a leash and is ready to recall him with a ‘twitch upon the thread’, the same turn of phrase as in Waugh.

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Such coordinates are cast since ‘The Blue Cross’, which launches a cycle within the cycle because, as well as the priest and the great uncatchable French thief, there is also the infallible Aristide Valentin. Flambeau is the negative of Brown because his robberies are based on the same ‘sweeping simplicity’ that is the weapon Father Brown uses to unmask them. The theological allegory behind this trio is even excessive: Flambeau is the thief of the Cross ready to repent and to relapse, therefore redeemable and redeemed;35 Valentin is the unredeemed sceptic, Father Brown is the faith that makes converts, and the longa manus of the Creator though depen­ ding on man’s free will.36 The complete series is a sort of Divine Comedy halved, a merry-go-round of sinners, some punished and others being purged, but with no Heaven. In one of the few anamneses Chesterton attributes to Father Brown a good nose for evil and an intellectual hunger for truth. Valentin and Brown do share, up to a point, an epistemological method and a theory of consciousness. Valentin represents cold logic, which can, however, become perverse because it is sceptical and aberrant; his is an imperfect and badly used rationalism. Such logic is so lucid that in some cases he must admit its own impotence, and rely on chance and the unexpected and even the illogical or irrational. The way in which, in that first story, the defenceless Father Brown prepares him a sort of guided treasure hunt is indeed to plant illogical clues – veritable signs – all within the common denominator of association and quid pro quo, to put him on the trail of the thief, who is trying to steal a precious cross inlaid with sapphires from the priest. It is also symbolic of Flambeau that he is looking for a cross, and a symbol of the Cross. Father Brown sniffed out the disguised priest in Flambeau since he expounded a theory of the faith which he deems ‘not a good theology’: that faith and reason are antithetical, and that there are cosmoses which are ininterpretable and irreducible to

35 36

This evangelical detail is expressly remembered by Father Brown in ‘The Man with Two Beards’. ‘A man isn’t fated to fall into the smallest venial sin, let alone into crimes like suicide and murder’ (‘The Doom of the Darnaways’). On the question of free will, and on the ‘boldest’ and at the same time ‘most sublime’ pages of Orthodoxy, in which free will is even extended to God, cf. Sommavilla 1981, 283–6, and Ker 2003, 94.

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reason, and also possible worlds free from divine justice, which is a vaguely Nietzschean hypothesis. The whole cosmos is, rather, intelligible and thus rational to the Catholic faith, and the Church holds reason as supreme. The thief has unmasked himself. Except that, as in the myth, we will always see Flambeau reappear as the thief who attempts the hit and repents, and is set free, in other words the eternal thief on the road to redemption; and he himself will end up converted, and will become Brown’s right-hand man, telling a story, that of his last theft, ‘in his very moral old age’, and solving other criminal cases in collaboration from then on.37 The rational and 37

The apparent praise for Valentin’s methodology in ‘The Blue Cross’ is thus to be deconstructed, refuted and even relativized or overturned. With him reason is not praised, but its fallacies are demonstrated, and its ‘limitations’ of which he himself is aware. The exasperation of reason leads to blunders; it should be tempered, both when it hits a wall and stops and must be rescued by intuition, and when pure logic does not realize it is giving shelter to false syllogisms or prejudices. This background is built up from a copious theoretical aside by Chesterton in medias res and then reinforced by an allegorical reading of the investigative plot line. It is symptomatic that the setting described in ‘The Blue Cross’ is a Eucharistic meeting descended from a legendary event belonging to the supernatural order and thus resistant to reason, and that Father Brown brings to that meeting a cross, the symbol of another event which reason cannot contemplate, and to exhibit and thus prove its reality and irrational and fideistic power. ‘The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen’. The cross and the Eucharist are first of all brought and displayed to Flambeau who is on the road to conversion. The roles they form are those of Valentin the genius detective, Flambeau the ‘colossus of crime’, and Father Brown the half-witted Catholic priest. The story erodes and subverts these roles. Valentin’s deontology is limited and even aberrant. His procedure in the search for Flambeau is a logical path up until a certain exemplary point, but only up to a point. The rationalist, lacking reliable evidence, must correctly base himself on the clue, and a sum of homogeneous clues leads to evidence. It is an introduction or a handbook of authentication. And then Valentin proceeds by counter-evidence. But it is not enough, because he lacks the supplementary capacity to be able to discover and admit that there might be someone disguised as a priest and that a real priest can be clever. The superficial and fallacious inference that makes the rational case decisively collapse is his prejudice against Father Brown: in allegory it is Enlightenment scepticism that scorns reason bolstered by faith and thus by the imagination. Valentin will have to bow to the superiority of Father Brown, like Flambeau. Flambeau here is disguised as a priest, and thus only a monk because of the habit he is wearing, but as we will find out he is

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atheist French detective Valentin, on the other hand, disappears after the second story,38 and by virtue of one of Chesterton’s flamboyant allegories, because it is Father Brown himself who unmasks him as a murderer, and an ideological murderer, thus a symbol of the impotence and frustration of atheist scepticism, since he killed a rich American who intended to leave his immense fortune to the Catholic Church.39 Father Brown succeeds in the exploit by applying the exegetical devices appropriate to Aquinas’ Summa: ‘I used to be able to paraphrase every page of Thomas Aquinas’. It is almost axiomatic that the crimes are committed, and the culprit unmasked, according to particular articles of Catholic theology forgotten or wrongly applied by the criminal. The Father Brown stories afterwards become ideological pretexts and almost target practice, but without losing their shine and their fresh and pure crime-story genius. This is perhaps because the case is that of a Scottish puritan, or of a socialist who denies that there can be any type of private property, or of some new religions of Apollo and of his murderous Nietzschean priest, or of Spiritualism.40 2. In myth the jurisdiction of time is deactivated, and in Chesterton’s Father Brown stories the characters are summary codes and types with their psychologies sketched out and reduced almost to a single dominant trait.41 Above all Father Brown is mythical, as he has no definable age and is always the same in all fifty stories, with the Pickwickian roundness of his

on the road to Damascus. Chesterton takes up again with him the stereotype of the ‘Newgate criminal’, the delinquent as a likeable braggart in yellow gloves, exuberant and refined. Flambeau steals but has never killed, he is a delinquent artist, and his hits are works of art or at least feats of ingenuity. This aspect shines through in the conclusion of ‘The Blue Cross’, when he bows and kneels down before the maestro. 38 ‘The Secret Garden’. 39 Valentin is therefore a Chestertonian ‘anarchist’ whose objective is to ‘break the superstition of the Cross’. A second person commits suicide because he is an atheist in ‘The Three Tools of Death’. 40 Satirized in the story ‘The Blast of the Book’, in itself however the butler’s joke on the great sceptical professor who does not care about him or his fellow man. 41 In his essay ‘Chesterton’s Father Brown’, in Conlon 1987, 133–9, R. Knox notes that, chivalrously, only one woman is found guilty in all fifty stories, and that all Irish characters are innocent.

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head, the classic priest’s black hat, the umbrella he always loses, the appearance of a stout and slightly sluggish, awkward and forgetful figure; he is a caricature because he is also of infinitesimal stature. Wandering around England and Europe,42 he transmigrates to America and South America where some of the stories are set. In Mexico, where he is once witness to the conflict between anticlericals and traditionalists, there is not only an echo of Conrad’s stories of the ‘outcasts of the islands’, which many English writers will be interested in,43 but also a foretaste of Greene’s The Power and the Glory.44 Time does not pass and much further on we learn that twenty years earlier Father Brown had served as prison chaplain in Chicago. But he does not seem old, indeed he has the fresh skin and the ingenuous curiosity of a child. Nor is there a backstory or background, and what little there is seems like a joke. He is never seen officiating, but always pops up at the scene of the crime, like clockwork; he is either just passing by pure coincidence or he is there because he is on friendly terms with the English Catholics there. His private life does not exist. Father Brown is just a lively and intuitive intelligence and a series of proverbial physical traits. Gradually Chesterton humanizes him with a few little flaws or harmless vices, because he smokes cigarettes, cigars and a pipe. And he is an epicurean teetotaller who every so often ‘eats a load of kippers’. His skill as a detective lies in his spirit of observation of pure human idiosyncrasies and in his profound knowledge of psychology. His method is empathy, hypothetically committing all the

42 In the benign and fabled bandit-country of southern Italy (‘The Paradise of Thieves’) there is no lack of unexpected irony, because Father Brown unmasks an English conman. 43 Volume 6, § 273. 44 The ‘scandal’ of Father Brown, in the homonymous and exceptionally witty story about one of his ‘not too orthodox’ or ‘debatable’ deeds – helping two adulterous lovers to flee, in fact the reuniting of two legitimate spouses – occurs in a ‘quaint Mexican inn’. Father Brown’s aphorismatic words in ‘The Man with Two Beards’ recall Greene: ‘every conceivable sort of man has been a saint […] every conceivable sort of man has been a murderer’. Cf. also this definition from chapter XII of Heretics: ‘All men can be criminals, if tempted; all men can be heroes, if inspired’.

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murders himself in his head, putting himself in the shoes of the culprit.45 He is a Sherlock Holmes in a cassock.46 Chesterton’s school, and his canon, are in fact close to those of Conan Doyle – the measure of his stories also follows his – and very far removed from the supernatural school of Collins, Le Fanu and Poe. Even the ‘resurrection’ of Father Brown, who falls victim to an attack in the story of that title, is a natural occurrence, not a miracle. Reality is unreliable, misleading, it deludes us with its false bottoms, and lures us into verdicts and reconstructions of the crime which are false and to be discarded; but that does not mean we must yield to the charm of the supernatural. The defence of human and natural aetiology of evil becomes strenuous. In one of the more theological stories47 it is clearly stated that the nature of a miracle is that it has happened and can also happen again, but no criminal case is ever explained, much less demonstrated by Father Brown, as such. Nor can truth be verified with the automatic aid of machines. In ‘The Mistake of the Machine’ Father Brown demonstrates the ‘psychometric’ error of the machine, which can neither tell the truth nor lie and, above all, is not infallible because the statistical result is ambiguous and must be interpreted by human faculties. A huge number of stories can be defined as the deconstruction of Victorian and neo-Gothic ‘curse’ stories. Indeed Father Brown is called to deal with cases of supernatural curses and obscure primordial legends, like that of the ‘dagger with wings’ in the story of the same name, which he ends up explaining rationally, that is dispelling any suggestion of magic. ‘The Miracle of the Moon Crescent’ reasserts the deceptive appearance of miracles, insofar as a philanthropist hangs himself under the influence of a curse; but it is the act of a human hand, and it is the materialists who call it a miracle, and who are always ‘balanced on the very edge of belief ’.48 For that very reason the suspense that mounts in each story almost from the very first page is that of a mystery, the same as in an apparent subversion of the natural order, explained to the slow-witted by 45 46 47 48

This is from the ‘metadetective’ story ‘The Secret of Father Brown’. This possible analogy is laughed at in ‘The Resurrection of Father Brown’. ‘The Wrong Shape’. ‘The Doom of the Darnaways’ is a parody of the eminently Gothic and neo-Gothic curse-bearing portrait.

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the superior intelligence of the priest, who overturns the manifest evidence. Various clues lead to a presumed culprit or even to supernatural action; but the apparent culprit is exonerated and Father Brown explains to everyone, even to the professionals, how events really unfolded. 3. Four Faultless Felons (1930) contains four detective stories with titles quintuplicating, with the addition of the frame, the oxymoronic nature of the main title and repeating the motif of the discovery of a crime which is the exact opposite of what it appears to be. The first one hinges on the murder – actually only feared, and which turns out to just be a wounding – of a pompous and completely imaginary governor of Egypt, carried out by the very detective who exonerates all the suspects by overturning the evidence. In the second, a doctor, a family friend of an eccentric artist, is forced to intern him in a psychiatric hospital in order to get him away from the perverse orchestrations of someone who is trying to have him arrested under false accusations of having killed an old acquaintance. In the third, which may seem vaguely similar to Galsworthy’s The Silver Box, the disowned and disinherited son of a rich biscuit manufacturer returns to his father’s house as a burglar, and then starts stealing even from the poor to make up for the lack of scruples on which the prosperity of his father’s company is founded. But during the trial we find out that the supposed thief has been giving money to the victims rather than stealing it. In the fourth and final story, which is the best and most coherent, an uprising is about to break out in the make-believe, sleepy, backwards and repressive Balkan kingdom of Pavonia, but the plotters evade capture on the night of the foretold coup. In this case too, appearances are deceptive: the conspiracy is nothing but an ingenious stratagem of a completely peaceful patriot who asks the hand of the princess in return for informing, thus becoming grand duke and enacting a series of reforms to bring about equality. The police, led by the informer into the plotters’ den, discover that he did it all by himself, dressing up and impersonating all four of them. And playing on the conflict between appearances and reality is also the false frame: an American journalist is pursuing an extravagant Parisian count, apparently a devotee of the most unbridled hedonism, but is surprised to find out that he is dealing with a most chaste ascetic. The first and fourth stories contain a veiled but unmistakeable critique of imperialism, while in the third the

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theological detective-story card is played concerning a reprehensible or even criminal action, which however either prevents a much more serious one or even paves the way for something good. Chesterton pins a resurrection or regeneration or mystical revelation on the ‘aesthetic’ thief, which guides him through his mad but greatly beneficent banditry. § 47. Chesterton VI: Other works of fiction The primordial struggle between faith and atheism is translated, in The Ball and the Cross (1909), into the bitter and never-ending conflict between a ‘Stevensonian’ boy and a sincere and devout atheist, both from the Scottish Highlands. The two foes must put off their deciding duel indefinitely, and move from theatre to theatre without ever being able to do battle. The spark is a manifesto which the atheist, who runs a newspaper, publishes, alleging that the virgin Mary is an adulterer and that Jesus is her illegitimate son. The development gives rise to a series of adventures with a playful bent, because the two contenders fall in love with two ladies professing opposing beliefs to their suitors; except that the disagreement is serious, especially in the context of the world’s indifference which trivializes this ultimate battle of opinions. Manalive (1912), an essay against contemporary pessimism and the catastrophic philosophies of negative existentialism, renunciation and despondency, does not quite manage to take off from these pedagogical objectives. The protagonist, whose name, Innocent Smith, says it all, arrives at a boarding-house where a weary humanity is vegetating, and he brings a breath of fresh air and a renewed will to live and to dream. He speaks in a disconnected way like Dickens’s Jingle; he is striking for his extravagance and his dragonfly-like acrobatic manoeuvres, and he acts like a madman escaped from the asylum, or an aerial Peter Pan who never grew up. His hazy speech backs up an old Christmas saying, that life is beautiful and worth rediscovering, if only we would look at it with fresh, pure eyes, after throwing off all the, especially recent, western philosophies, but not because they have not been read, but because once read they all turned out to be ruinous and destructive. In the rather pallid storyline, of lifeless, affected and insipid acts, Innocent must defend his name from accusations of being a wanted criminal, a thief and a disguised Don Juan, an abductor of women, a bigamist and a polygamist. The half-baked trial that is held

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against him at the boarding-house, in the form of testimonies and letters, is a sort of parody of Wilkie Collins’s novels. From these documents it transpires that Innocent has kept the bullets from his revolver to threaten the pessimists; the most successful reconstruction by letter is that of the gun pointed at the temple of the Oxford professor, an expert in Schopenhauer, hanging on the windowsill, so that he will admit and confess that life is not evil. The other accusations fall down as a consequence during the debate. The tale is then a Carlylean gospel of antitheses, that man is not dead but must live again, that the only true revolution is to turn the world upside down to restore it to its truth, that life is a quest to get ‘back to Eden – to something we have had, to something we at least have heard of ’, and that man is ‘still a man alive, walking on two legs about the world’. 2. The play Magic (1913), Chesterton’s only noteworthy attempt at theatre, bizarre and obscure to the point of seeming enigmatic, is a parody of demonic exorcism. The devil appears as a hooded stranger who arrives at a mansion and, speaking on behalf of the world of elves, enraptures an old duke’s granddaughter, who believes in fairies. Right afterwards, inside the house, and in the first and best of the three acts, Chesterton’s allegorical and agonic genius shrewdly brings up the question of teetotalism, or at least regulation of drinking. An Anglican priest espouses the idea of a ‘model public-house’, the old-fashioned doctor is against it: ‘How can the Church have a right to make men fast if she does not allow them to feast?’. The duke is munificent but donates the same amount to each cause, and allegorically represents the middle way or compromise, which is fatal and thus a dangerous tolerance. The stranger is in reality a conjuror invited to please the granddaughter who grew up in Ireland, but the other grandson is sceptical about all natural phenomena. Act II is a boring diatribe about belief and doubt, especially in spiritual situations; the duke bestows allowances for and against legerdemain. The ‘stranger’ is a modern Sludge from Browning, a demonic spiritualist, who departs in the same way as he arrived. 3. In the acrobatic capriccio The Flying Inn (1914) Chesterton allegorizes yet another struggle, between east and west, or rather, now, a nightmare, the Islamic threat and its bellicose backlash, and the growth in popularity in the ideologically pliable England of the early years of the century, of Oriental lore, which led to cries for a new defensive and offensive

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crusade. The real issue at stake was the preservation of the western and especially English – and, for Chesterton, Christian – mark in England. But with a chain reaction the fantastical plot is a pretext for taking a jab at other contemporary fads, like Futurism or Bible criticism or Spiritualism, in not strictly necessary and well amalgamated digressions. Therefore the risk, only partially overcome, is that of setting up a platform from which to spit poison against any kind of modern ideological discord. It is the ‘sailor’ who claims that this ‘reorientation’ of civilization will be its downfall: there is no common ground between Islam and Christianity. The action has a binary procedure, following the conversation-piece discussions in the English residence of Ivywood and the adventures of the flying inn in the woods. In the first there is the biting satire of the affected progressive aristocracy listening enthralled to the Islamic charlatan ‘prophet’ attacking the pillars of English tradition and preaching not only the total abstention from drink but also from meat. These private lectures are in themselves delightful little pastiches, and rival in their content the speciousness of Swift’s scientists of Lagado. The starting idea is the fantastic parliamentary measure limiting the institution of the inn and the pleasures of eating and drinking, especially to the advantage of poor people. A barrel of rum and an entire cheese are taken around in plump comedy scenes on the threshold between the castle and the woods and to the sound of carnival and carousing songs,49 but with a gradually fading narrative and fantastic quality. The Return of Don Quixote50 (1927), Chesterton’s final work of fiction of any interest, is in fact a repetition of his first, because in yet another utopian exercise he describes the conjuring spell of an amateur actor who, acting in a medieval pageant, cannot and does not want to break the spell and, like Napoleon and Auberon in Notting Hill, attempts to reintroduce the medieval system in contemporary history, starting with bizarre costumes and lack of mechanization. The didactic efficacy lies in the estrangement and overturning between modern and ancient, so that it is the modern that appears anachronistic 49 Collected separately in Chesterton’s poetic volume. 50 Interest in the legend of Don Quixote is examined in Chesterton’s essays, and retraced in the polarity between Auberon Quin and Adam Wayne from The Napoleon of Notting Hill, by Coates 1984, 98–123.

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and outdated and vice versa. A craftsman who is about to be thrown into the asylum turns out to be the only sane person; the real democracy of the feudal system is illustrated by the proverbial anecdote of the yellow-gloved socialist, who only looks after the proletariat and the workers in words. § 48. Belloc, C. S. Lewis, Tolkien Hilaire Belloc* (1870–1953), the less well-known and shadier face of that two-headed monster whose name was invented by Shaw’s imagination as we have just seen, is nowadays for most people an adjunct and a by-product of Chesterton, and almost an unknown person for the unskilled.1 But in a militant poem, if nothing else, Belloc could speak of ‘his Chesterton’, of a writer who he himself had coddled and helped to create, and of himself therefore as the true supporting pillar, the mind and not the arm, of that partnership. Catholic by birth and not by conversion, Belloc was the son of a French lawyer father and an English mother with a streak of Irish blood, and was born near Paris; but he was educated in England, under Newman in Birmingham, and at Oxford, and he became a British citizen only at thirty-two in 1902. A militant and cantankerous protagonist of English cultural life for more than half a century, he was a politician in the Liberal ranks, newspaper director, reviewer and journalist, multifaceted writer of a sizeable number of books on history, criticism and travel and some ‘fugitive’ essay writing, and also a poet and a half serious and half facetious novelist. Some of his works were illustrated by Chesterton, who was at least better than him as an artist and cartoonist. Being an old Oxonian had left its mark. Belloc is an old-school humanist, a ‘defector’ who knew Greek and Latin, a wandering cleric who indeed bestows much praise on

*

C. C. Mandell and E. Shanks, Hilaire Belloc, the Man and his Works, London 1916; R. Haynes, Hilaire Belloc, London 1953; J. B. Morton, Hilaire Belloc, London 1955; R. Speaight, Life of Hilaire Belloc, New York 1957; M. H. Markel, Hilaire Belloc, Boston, MA 1982; A. N. Wilson, Hilaire Belloc, Harmondsworth 1984; K. Schmude, Hilaire Belloc, London 2009.

1

Praz complained about it already in 1953 (‘Il pellegrino di Roma’, CLA, vol. IV, 21–5), in a feature, for once emotional, written upon news of the writer’s death.

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the parochial spirit of the university and his college. We can define him as a very late, perhaps one of the last, Tractarians, subscribing to the spirit of the defunct Oxford Movement, and one who took away from Oxford not the macerations of Froude or Hopkins, but the student spirit.2 2. As with Chesterton, the impressive mass of his works needs to be trimmed of much journalism and a great deal of other polemical, interventionist and ephemeral writings, and the three works of Belloc which can be saved and reread as representative are the travel book The Path to Rome, the historical-philosophical essay The Servile State, and the collection of his serious poems, after having picked off the playful ones and the ones for children. He decided upon the pilgrimage to Rome, in The Path to Rome (1902), following a vow he made to the Virgin Mary, but in this vow he already reveals the secret, global and symbolic motive for the pilgrimage itself: ‘[to] see all Europe which the Christian faith has saved’ – and ‘Europe’ should be in italics and I will say why in due course. A very unusual travel journal came out of it, which one might suspect was outlined on the hundreds of similar English and continental documents – the famous ‘voyage to Italy’ genre – practically from the beginning of continental literature onwards; only to be disappointed. It is true that the template is the description of the landscapes travelled through, the river valleys, the hills and then the Alpine peaks and the Apennine cliffs, padded out with scenes from village inns and taverns, with the landlords, landladies and punters, and with the predictable anecdotes of the road. The margins and borders that this diorama highlights are due first of all to its bizarre, eccentric and whimsical form. Belloc is a renowned and elegant miniaturist of late Victorian stature, but we relish the book not for the personal reactions to the landscape and the interesting sample of humanity, or to the curious and extravagant things of a new country; but for a series of artifices, stratagems and compositional extravagances. Belloc is an 2

It is no coincidence that Belloc’s poetry includes a funny and biting parody of the Newdigate prize, which put up for grabs future poetical fame for young Oxonians (Volume 4, § 1.3 and n. 3). In the section on epigrams there are some free translations of Latin poems which bring to mind those of another academic, Housman, mainly because they are ideally Catullian and above all Horatian in spirit.

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heir to Montaigne, Rabelais, Sterne, Ruskin and the romantic essayists as exemplified by Lamb. The preface is a half-serious and ironic discourse on the very custom of the preface and its sometimes stupid and hypocritical conventions. The story that follows is also occasionally flowing, but ever more frequently interrupted by impromptu digressions inspired by imperceptible associations, sometimes not even by those. Belloc is not interested in the suspense of the journey. This rambling pace, which breaks the rules of linearity, is the same as that of Ruskin, the master of discursive transition, or Sterne. And it is a pace that progressively empties and denies the genre of the diary or of the documentary travel book. The digressions are Sternian because they focus on marginal, pedantic or eccentric issues; and Sterne joins forces with Montaigne for this, that or the other curious hypothesis on human psychology, for this, that or the other bizarre, idle or unusual reflection. In this picaresque the sentimental blends with the funny and the grotesque, and the material does not derive directly from experience but is remoulded at a distance. And such a remake imbues it with a fake air of something still provisional: the cases in which some anecdote is announced, postponed, cut, summarized, or even removed, when its moment arrives, are innumerable. Another parodic eccentricity is the addition of illustrations, landscapes or details, or the route plan. Except that the most eccentric aspect is an intermittent inner dialogue between the author’s two selves, which are hypostases with a voice, like an auctor and a lector. With this expedient Belloc carries out a sort of Italian voyage after the fashion of Clough,3 because the ‘reader’ identifies with his critical conscience, which scolds him when the language becomes too sublime or abstruse, catches him out when he says inconsistent or contradictory things or tells tales that are beside the point4 – and, eminently philistine like Clough’s ‘Spirit’, yawns and gets bored when the diary gets too uniform and long-winded. So why is it necessary to highlight the word ‘Europe’ in the quotation above? Belloc’s pilgrimage resurrects and celebrates in the first place the ancient pilgrimage, that is one of the collective, and therefore also 3 On Dipsychus and the references made here, cf. Volume 4, §§ 143–145. 4 In themselves these interpolations of stories, some of which are enjoyable if not charming, are reminiscent of the construction of Dickens’s Pickwick Papers.

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literary, customs of medieval and Christianized European history. Unlike the merely touristic pilgrimage, it is a journey back in time and in history, and must therefore be a game of pilgrimage or one of its re-enactments. In principle it will be on foot, availing itself of ‘no wheeled thing’.5 Though the book surprises us for not being heuristic or an argued and abstract ‘way’ into Catholicism, it is itself an itinerary of a symbolic return to the fold. This fold is, at the end of the day, the dream of English Catholicism, either explicitly or implicitly as in Ruskin, to rebuild Christian Europe undivided by the Reformation: a Romance if not Roman Europe, which Ruskin saw destroyed the day after the victory of the Prussians over the French, and the Europe of Novalis, Carlyle and Hopkins. Belloc underlines how this Europe had also been united linguistically, and discovers and verifies along the way that people still understand a lingua franca that is a mix of Latin, the basis, with Italian and French, and thus also indirectly English.6 Latin was the tangible bond of this unity, before the religion was translated into the Babel of national tongues. Belloc’s itinerary stays away from population centres and big cities; and it seems to cross a timeless landscape and an unchanging nature rich in ruins. Technological civilization is still aeons away, and it is an entirely intentional archaic disguise. The wayfarer himself, the archetype of the ancient pilgrim, encounters people and experiences from another epoch, primordial and wonderful. This nostalgic leap backwards is not taken with the despondency and bitterness of someone who feels hopelessly exiled. Belloc is a live pilgrim, often hungry and thirsty, always devout but not bigoted; all that is missing for him to be a Boccaccian or Chaucerian pilgrim is the occasional carnal encounter with women. But we know that Chesterton and Belloc’s Catholicism was not renunciatory, and did not deny itself the pleasures of the flesh and of the table because they served to glorify God. Belloc’s wayfarer, during his travels and at the end of the day, in the taverns and inns, asks for genuine wine. The symbol and emblem of Belloc’s Catholicism is indeed wine, and wine together with Latin is the glue of the Christian Europe whose praises Belloc sings and 5 6

A rule he broke near Milan due to tiredness and lack of money to continue on foot. Belloc did not speak German, among other reasons because the destroyer of this unity was a German, Luther.

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which he idealizes: that wine which nourished, fortified, and had always been drunk by the ‘forefathers’ (at most also cider and the liquors distilled by monks were also admitted besides wine). In one page Belloc or his alter ego cannot help but scorn and reject the ‘Lutheran’ drinks which then competed with wine and even superseded it, like dark beer, spirits and gin. 3. Belloc was an apocalyptic at the turn of the century. For him, as for Ruskin, the world was on the edge of the abyss, and his voice, colourful and inflected like that of Ruskin, and capable of effrontery and ranting, joined that of others who were loudly invoking war to put an end to an unjust political and social system that was inimical to individual liberties. He was a defeatist in 1889 because he supported the theory that capitalism was absorbing into itself the objectives of socialism, and redefining them, just to crop and neutralize them. The Servile State (1912) revolves around the axiom that the proletariat was currently and would always be enslaved by capitalism unless there was a return to the medieval corporate system. This political proposal was naturally to be taken up and discussed by Orwell, who shared none of Belloc’s nostalgic medieval traditionalism, yet praised his ability to foresee, in 1912, many realities of two decades later.7 Belloc’s problem was that he did not know how to indicate any middle way between slavery and the return to smallholdings.8 Also, as a poet, Belloc is a staunch conservative of the old school which, until the Second World War, could be read in the journal Mercury. His poetry book, which was first published in 1923, and in a new edition in 1938 – not very thick, but rather quite slender – is made up of, apart from the delightful poems for children, several sections and parts, and the first of these contains about forty sonnets. This collection of sonnets seems to set itself up at the outset as the challenge of a tardy and provocative poetics. Open forms were taking over or operating in the domain of parody; Belloc chooses this closed form, the sonnet, after 1922 and The Waste Land. And all his poetry comes under the aegis of rhyme and rhythm, not admitting out of 7 8

He did not forgive him, however, for his veiled or even explicit anti-Semitism. Orwell’s eulogy of Belloc as a poet of light verse is also moving, and he quotes him several times from memory. OCE, vol. II, 32.

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principle the dispensation of the informality of free verse (the measure that predominates, as well as the sonnet and the quatrain, followed by the ballad in verse, often in rhyming couplets). In one sonnet, Belloc does not hesitate to attack ‘modernistic rot’. It should be said that the majority are regular sonnets in the English form, most of them rhythmically iambic, without any licence in the structure. Although it is a collection of mixed poems and not a monograph,9 Belloc is not ashamed to harp on classical and recurring themes in sonnet writing: nature as sacrament, the energetic call to those who are unfeeling towards it, the celebration of human divinity and the path to God through spiritualized eros. The opening is in a phatic and exhortatory vein, with which the poet addresses a community, as standard-bearer of another community. They are sonnets of exultation and incitement, and exuberant, even eager, choruses aimed at those who are deaf or have dozed off. The surrounding images are of those of a marine or terrestrial landing again on mother earth, thus of waiting. The lazy are spurred on. Nature is furnished and adorned for man to enjoy, but it is an instrumental enjoyment. And the predominant tone is then the spiritual well-being of those who have understood this transcendent reference: ‘Mortality is but the Stuff you wear / To show the better on the imperfect sight […] as you pass, the natural life of things / Proclaims the resurrection / […] And somewhat in me of the immortal sings’. The reference of which we are reminded is to Hopkins’s poems on mortal/immortal physical beauty, since these specific sonnets turn out to be like those of a tamer and more controlled Hopkins or Patmore. Hence also the escalating rhetorical interrogatives. The section on love sonnets expands on the well-worn theme of the absent lover, and is in memoriam. At no time does steadfast and confident optimism truly collapse, so there are only a few symptoms of doubt.10 Except that from the twenty-ninth sonnet onwards, thus the whole end part, we see a thunderous and self-parodying change of register, 9 10

Belloc the poet does not date his compositions, does not annotate, does not reference private and personal history; and so we should not worry about identifying connections, occasions and times. Cf. sonnet XXVII, which begins ‘Are you the end, Despair […]?’, naturally echoing Hopkins’s sonnet ‘Carrion Comfort’.

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firstly in the spirit of Shakespeare’s ‘all the world’s a stage’. The satirical and polemic poet comes out into the open. The sarcastic and mocking critic of hypocrisy and the senselessness of routine must now smash the high and dignified register of those who went before and, like Byron, impatiently declare that he cannot find a rhyme. A similar doffing of the attire of the hymn-writing and priestly poet is carried out in sonnet thirty-four, in which Belloc would like to live another life – but in the last two lines, broken up into four half-lines, he must resignedly return to his humdrum existence. The parody, and with it the even occasional variety, of the output follows on in the other sections of the book, which takes on a much more mixed, if not muddled, tone, and abandons any esoteric vein for a frank, explicit delivery, often of a well-simulated, and therefore planned and even more literary, coarseness. The playful wants to press on, and the occasional jolt and piece of mischief varies the rhythm and the thematic register, which ranges from nostalgic song to prophetic hymn and from war chant to anecdote. The pastiche explodes into poetical nursery rhymes and other polyglot lines, or verse penned in Latin with a translation. This latter chord is played in some Mariolatrical compositions which therefore touch a raw nerve with the Protestant English, but they do so with the naïve and silvery, simplified and querulous ditty.11 Militant attacks on enemies also make an appearance, like the exhilarating lampoon against Chesterton’s adversaries. Belloc’s archaisms rest on the derived form of the ballad of vaguely Arthurian flavour, and of course on drinking songs and praise of good wine or, better, of the pint of ‘pale ale’. A series of ballads, entitled ‘ballades’ because in the style of Villon and Byron, jarringly discusses the reality of death, apparently trivializing it. But by then Belloc’s poetic book, skimming the pages and the compositions, irremediably transforms into an improvised diary and a notebook of grimaces in verse against enemies

11

Just as pleasant is that of the de-automating story of the journey of the Three Kings to Bethlehem, called ‘Epiphany’. A modest simplicity is applied, in the third section of the book, to the tales of the nativity and childhood of Jesus, where there is an echo of Swinburne’s late ditties about children, and with childish chanting.

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and ideological aberrations,12 and of ruthless, ferocious epigrams against imaginary, but easily recognizable, characters. 4. Two residual figures contravene even the regime of interstitiality, and are culturally sedentary, traditionalist, even retroverted. A journey not exactly to Rome, but at least as far as the gates of Rome, was undertaken by Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963), in the exact sense that, brought up a Christian, he became atheist, went back to being a believer, first ‘theist’ then a combatant and apologist for the faith, and for that faith closest to Catholicism, Anglicanism, by definition the nineteenthcentury ‘via media’ between Catholicism and Protestantism. That is enough to understand that Lewis was the second crusader, Chesterton’s deputy and follower in the two decades after Chesterton’s death and up until his own. He renewed his unceasing, ever unfinished, passionate and militant twentieth-century duel of Christian fideism with agnosticism and ultimately with all the secular, scientistic and reductionist ideologies of his day. The continental orthodox Catholics and the great champions of the faith everywhere rubbed their hands together with satisfaction on learning that Great Britain (Lewis was born in Belfast, but to parents of Welsh descent) expressed and bestowed from its bosom a new apologist who lacked only the formal Catholic baptism to be able to be counted in an ideal troika with Chesterton and Newman. Lewis’s apologetics is understandably entrusted to a considerable mass of writings on pure theology and polemics; but more often it encompasses the range of mixed and hybrid genres of invention,13 and his verve and his imaginative eloquence are only a little less effervescent than those of Chesterton. As soon as he got back from the front, Lewis published some poetry collections, and in 1926 a narrative poem, Dymer, under the pen name Clive Hamilton, but

12 13

One ballad is against the heretics led by Calvin, and one epigram against the Puritan who, having unfailingly served God, finds himself face to face with him, but in hell. The abandonment of pure apologetics was also due to, or caused by, the results of a public debate held in Oxford in 1948 on ‘naturalism’ (not literary, but philosophical) between Lewis and the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe who, herself a Catholic, had got the better of her older colleague. Lewis accepted her position on rationalism in the following editions of the work Miracles (1st edn 1947).

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in both cases he passed unnoticed. Since then prose became his chosen vehicle, in the form of allegories, autobiographies, digressions, literary criticism, lay sermons, and especially theological fantasies and fables.14 For the wrong reasons and for an unfortunate spectacular exploitation, Lewis is today, with the stories or ‘chronicles’ of the Narnia cycle appearing on screen, even more popular and universally known than Chesterton with his Father Brown stories. Lewis himself reviewed his own human, ideological and spiritual development, subdividing it into two complementary books which it is best to begin with. Surprised by Joy (1955) is the story of Lewis’s life in its human and personal aspects, while The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933) recounts his exemplary and archetypal vicissitudes. Lewis’s father was a solicitor, his maternal grandfather a Church of Ireland minister, and Lewis was brought up a believer. But at fifteen he became an atheist, as he himself recalls, due to the attractions of theosophy and especially because of a wrong form of prayer, trying that is to emotionally internalize vague imaginings, and a subjection to ‘false duties’. And he also felt as if he had been thrown into a hostile and aimless universe against his will. Right afterwards he underwent a mysterious emotional episode with almost mystical premonitory repercussions on his future theological framework. During the war he met a fellow soldier, Paddy Moore, who, before he was killed, introduced his mother Janie King Moore, then forty-four years old, to Lewis, and entrusted her to him should he die. A single, enigmatic phrase in Surprised by Joy warns that Lewis had to and wanted to keep quiet about a single episode in his life, and the biographers are almost all in agreement that this refers to the fact that Lewis and the widow not only lived together, but also became lovers. Psychologically, or even psychoanalytically, this supposition rests on the painful loss of his mother when Lewis was only ten years old. Lewis’s academic biography formally closes at Cambridge where, in

14

A ‘spatial trilogy’, written between 1938 and 1945 as a bet with Tolkien, who did not finish his own novel, imagines the philologist Elwin Ransom – it is no coincidence that he bears the same surname as Auden’s adventurer (Volume 8, § 4.8) – being transported to the planets Malacandra and Perelandra (Mars and Venus) to observe the difference in the rise of faith in God as compared to the Earth.

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1954, he became professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature.15 But during the previous thirty years spent as a fellow at Oxford he had first met the Catholic Tolkien, with whom he had not only debated the subject of Norse mythology, but also started up theological conversations which in 1931 had led to Lewis’s reconversion to Christianity.16 This step was taken with the simultaneous repudiation of a substitute and idolatrous religion of Germanic myth as well as all kinds of occultism – above all, however, through the inner experience of joy. It is precisely in this spiritual phase that it is necessary to transfer our observation to The Pilgrim’s Regress, which, deliberately and cleverly quoting, or more precisely overturning, Bunyan, describes the pilgrimage of an autobiographical John through hill and dale and through cities. There he gets lost, fearful of a God who cleaves before him a menacing ‘black hole’ that is hell, and where he witnesses the criss-crossed temptations of many other ‘lords’ who are the ideologies and philosophies of the Enlightenment, idealism, irrationalism, reductionism and materialism of the previous century.17 The ‘regress’ is also and above all a Christian evolutionism that recognizes desire but purifies it of every material element and exalts it, and establishes that the object of desire is God, and this transforms it into the much purer sentiment of joy.18 The miraculous coincidence of 15

16 17

18

It was his the quip – moreover a theory of enormous truth laid out in The Allegory of Love (1936) – that the English Renaissance did not exist, or that if it existed it was nothing special: even Spenser was for Lewis one of the first English romantics nostalgic for the Middle Ages. Lewis and Tolkien, together with Charles Williams who was also much respected by Auden, had set up the small Oxford debating society known as the Inklings. The theme of evil and sin is at the heart of The Screwtape Letters (1942) and The Great Divorce (1946), a dream inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy: a Charon bus-driver transports spectral passengers who discuss the human tragicomedy and the boundaries between good and bad, and hell and heaven, so ‘without divorce’. Lewis’s titles are like Chesterton’s, wilfully provocative and announcing a thesis which is the exact opposite of that discussed and demonstrated; so even a book entitled The Abolition of Man (1943) reaffirms man’s supremacy. A thought continued, expanded and reiterated in The Four Loves (1960), and in a fairy-tale version in Till We Have Faces (1956), a reworking of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, above all its Christianization, in order to create a didactic parable of human passions when they become absolute, and of eros when it becomes love of self and

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Lewis’s life and spirituality is that in 1950 earthly divine joy came to him in the form of Joy incarnate, Helen Joy Davidman-Gresham, an American admirer who, already suffering from cancer, after a long exchange of letters met and married Lewis in 1957 in a religious ceremony. Narnia, which in itself means the Italian town of Narni which Lewis marked in an atlas as a boy, is a relatively late deviation into children’s stories: the form and the jurisdiction of the legend was intended by Lewis as a divine spark which would alight on the human imagination and conquer it far beyond any cognitive assent. The cycle of seven books tells of the marvellous adventures of four children who, opening a wardrobe in an old attic, launch themselves into a fantasy world, a cold and desolate land which metamorphoses into a natural flowery paradise.19 The mark of the successive episodes, rich in fantastical developments, is also dualistic, with the metamorphosis and reappearance of the wicked witch and the good wizard, and the all too exposed and edifying camouflaging along evangelical lines. 5. The reasons why Lewis never converted to Roman Catholicism are ultimately mysterious, especially in light of his friendship with John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973), who at Oxford had exerted his persuasion upon him, nevertheless in vain. If Lewis unleashed the enthusiasm of Catholics, Tolkien literally dragged them to jubilation and triumphalism, and The Lord of the Rings, when it appeared, was repeatedly judged by influential figures of that creed, and even by some agnostics, as the most beautiful fable of the last half-century; indeed ‘the greatest ever written’, even ‘one of the greatest literary masterpieces of all time’.20 Tolkien had converted to Catholicism with a perfectly natural gradus, and he had then guarded that unsated avidity. Moral law to Lewis basically expresses the continuity between pagan mythology and Christianity. His profound conviction, shared by Tolkien as we shall see, is that neither Norse or Greco-Roman mythology are at odds with Christian revelation, but prefigure and incubate it. 19 Which is also the itinerary of Four Quartets. 20 This latter is the opinion which the Jesuit Guido Sommavilla often expressed in his reviews and essays, gathered together in ‘John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973). Epica fiabesca metafora evangelica’, LET, XLIII (1988), 693–708. Another Catholic, Anthony Burgess, confessed (Corriere della Sera-Cultura of 29 December 1991, article translated by his wife L. Macellari) to never having been able to read Tolkien’s

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faith without the tempestuousness, tragedy and Titanism of other English converts. Born in South Africa, he emigrated to England at the age of three; his father died and, when he was twelve, so did his mother, who had not only passed on to him her love for languages and fairy-tales, but had also introduced him to Catholicism, having converted herself in Birmingham under the guidance of an Oratorian priest, the order founded half a century earlier by Newman. After having fought in the war he was a lecturer from 1921 at the University of Leeds, then at Oxford where he taught medieval literature until his retirement in 1959. In 1937 his first fantasy, The Hobbit, was published; on the wave of that success, the vast fantasy trilogy of The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955) took form. A third work, The Silmarillion, already begun in 1917 and unfinished at his death, was published in 1977. His son later unearthed other mythical stories from his drawers which reinforced a cult success of incredible proportions. Tolkien’s letters show a challenging variety of strong, often contradictory, opinions, from which it is possible to reconstruct the figure of a daring free thinker. Thus as Hopkins candidly declared himself a communist, Tolkien liked to introduce himself as an anarchist, an enemy of politics as art and exercise of power, only favourable to that of a divine Absolute. He mistrusted all forms of ‘organization’ and minimized demiurgic human demands, especially those connected with technological development promising omnipotence. In this sense he was against dictators and totalitarianism, a critic of mass ideologies and the politics of rearmament, racial segregation and anti-Semitism.21 It should also be noted that Tolkien was an epistemologist, an applied linguist as has been said, a scholar of the arbitrariness of language, and a creator of artificial languages which, once their rules are accepted, serve the same communicative aims (like Stoppard in the play

21

masterpieces ‘without feeling a sense of acute aversion’, an aversion motivated above all by the ‘absolute lack of erotic aspects’. A debate still raging concerns the nature of Tolkien’s stories as a possible form of escapism from the first and also the Second World War, or from the consequences of the nuclear threat, or even as a delayed reaction to the spread of industrial development. In The Hobbit the treasure is recaptured by a dragon with the meaningful name of Smaug (Sommavilla 1988, 694–97, 701).

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Dogg’s Hamlet).22 In its aesthetic statute Tolkien’s fable is a ‘subcreation’, or the identification of a story already embryonically contained within the Gospels: in other words prophecy, allegory, better still imaginary typology, in the exquisitely theological meaning of the term. The Lord of the Rings is a neo-genesis, a grandiose version of the metaphysical drama or struggle between Good and Evil or, more precisely, an attempt to emulate and exceed Paradise Lost or any rewriting of the Arthurian cycle. The story of the lord of the rings, and of the golden ring that is the contested symbol of power and sin, on the other hand, proclaims it conspicuously as the antithesis of Wagner’s Ring, even with the ideal complement of Parsifal.23 The imaginary but lifelike world of Tolkien’s stories is never completely redeemable; it looks to the transcendent but is conscious of its lapsarian stain, and its symbolic journey is that of the earthly paradise created, lost and regained. It has been subtly said that it is not a dualistic universe, and that for Tolkien one becomes evil and absolute evil does not exist, just as there is no absolute good, except in God. Tolkien thus believes in free will, and also in the grace of a hunter God who, as in the Catholic neo-Baroques of the late nineteenth century, casts man into the struggle but grabs him again and in reality always keeps him tied by Evelyn Waugh’s ‘rope’. Human freedom is that of the wizards, angels and therefore devils, and above all of the hobbits, fragile and sometimes also conceited halflings, who are to dwarfs as vegetable is to mechanical, and the freedom from power to collective egoism and gold fever.24 Tolkien, however, denied any metaphorical or hidden meanings, and thus the precise correspondences inherent in a prearranged or planned allegory: he admitted having written an intimately 22 23

Volume 8, § 198.2 n. 3. It really resembles Wagner because the golden ring was forged with a skill stolen from the gnomes, who are good, rather than from the wicked dwarfs, and cast in the forge of the volcano Mordor. The Siegfried of the story steals the ring from the baddies but then loses it and the ring ends up at the bottom of the sea, only to be found and appropriated by a bad and slimy dwarf. The saga tells of the phases and adventures undertaken to recapture and destroy the ring. 24 They were also seen as more traditional celebration of the innate goodness of the people of central England, isolated from industrial society: as a sort of promising and upright Orwellian proles.

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Catholic work and an allegory or biblical paraphrase, but insisted on having had providential or unconscious inspiration. § 49. The Powys brothers* The Powys family, who out of more than ten brothers and sisters we can here drastically reduce to just two authors of some established worth, 1 brought to mind at the beginning of their career, with a postponement of a few decades,2 the historical recurrence of the Brontë sisters and the Tennyson brothers. The evocativeness of this parallel is not merely external and superficial, but works in both examples, firstly because all three groups of three or four siblings were born and raised in that typical den of rivalry and savage neurosis that was the English parsonage, and which was still so at the end of the nineteenth century. In all three cases the father was a tyrannical evangelical minister who smothered his offspring in an asphyxiating and destructive embrace which, unfortunately for those concerned but fortunately for literature, became the principal nourishment for the written word. These origins backfired, though, especially markedly and notably in the Powys brothers, who committed themselves to theories and opinions of pantheism and nihilism and other kinds of rebellion against *

W. Hunter, The Novels and Stories of T. F. Powys, Cambridge 1930; R. H. Ward, The Powys Brothers, London 1935; W. C. Derry, John Cowper Powys, Boston, MA 1938; M. Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, London 1946; H. Coombes, T. F. Powys, London 1960; R. C. Churchill, The Powys Brothers, London 1962; G. Wilson Knight, The Saturnian Quest: A Chart of the Prose Works of John Cowper Powys, London 1964; K. Hopkins, The Powys Brothers: A Biographical Appreciation, London 1967; G. Cavaliero, John Cowper Powys: Novelist, Oxford 1973; R. P. Graves, Brothers Powys, London 1983; M. Krissdóttir, Descents of Memory: The Life of John Cowper Powys, New York and London 2007 (on which cf. the enthusiastic review by M. Drabble in TLS, 16 November 2007, 3–5). Among the few Italian contributions are M. Praz, ‘La filosofia del “tramp”’, in CLA, vol. I, 267–71, and the presentation by M. Goffredo, ‘John Cowper Powys’, in CAB, vol. I, 317–26.

1

Llewelyn Powys (1884–1939) was above all a minor author of travel books and disparate naturalist essays. Cf. Churchill 1962, 7, who notes (10), however, that the three Powys brothers wrote much less, indeed only a small autobiographical memoir, in collaboration.

2

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codified religion and unmasked the hypocrisies and weaknesses of ancestral faith. So they are, in their own way – one gaunt and skeletal, the other wordy and Titanic in their forms – theological novelists, united in their Blakean vision of irreconcilable polarities which battle each other in a range of contests. The Tennyson family was the only one in whose veins did not flow Celtic blood, because Reverend Brontë was Irish and the Powyses were originally from Wales, though transplanted to southern England; and this connection with their roots also breaks out even stronger. At the end of the day, though, the two Powys brothers now represent a minor and surpassed dynasty which, having won some degree of fame and created the occasional echo in the years between the wars, have today fallen into oblivion, the object of the acclaiming and slightly erratic cult of a few eminent eccentrics, like the illustrious Shakespearean critic George Wilson Knight. The literary historian is unsure where to place them, given their longevity which sees them still active long after the Second World War and given, above all, their estrangement from the literary movements and currents of their times. The Powys brothers founded no school; they were isolated, nor did they recognize the political responsibility of the 1920s and 1930s (except in the form of Welsh irredentism, but of a mythological rather than militant nature). Indeed they fought against it by taking refuge in a personal spiritual perimeter of archaic and timeless events; and neither did they share in the least in the formal ferment of Modernism. The only obviously modernist thing about them is their interest in Oriental mysticism, which makes them secondary precursors, in reality very little listened to or known at the time, of the beat culture and hippies. 2. Theodore Francis Powys (1875–1953), younger than John Cowper, began first. In Dorset, which he never left, he ran a farm, and due to his long-time familiarity was daily used to studying nature, the landscape and the weather and their interaction with the human family, and he knew how to bring out grotesque and hallucinatory metamorphic optical effects in them. Dorset itself already suggests various relationships: the sense of rural life with its beauty and its tragedies, the comic mixed with the savage, a palpitating Hardyan universe par excellence, also sung by ‘the Dorset poet’, William Barnes, or before him by Crabbe. Theodore Powys spent his energies as a novelist almost entirely within a decade, that of the 1920s, after

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which he considerably slackened his creative rhythm. His prose is usually simplified, essential, even tyrannically hasty, and it does not bend or flinch in the face of the most nefarious and gratuitous atrocities, nor even in the face of the most delicate gestures of abnegation. His novels are all similar for their absolute, though only implicit, spatial and temporal continuity, and because only the degree of fantasy and thus of removal from realism varies in them; or the level of humour, which can be grotesque, surreal and truly icy one moment and purely fabulous and thus cheery the next. There is not a single protagonist who stands out as a positive hero, but community scenes which, not having a brisk and tense plot, are put together a bit at a time as adjuncts to others which see the entry of caricatures, sketches, sprites often visited by some eccentricity or extravagance. The composition seems in all cases to be of theatrical derivation, and creates the effect of a fable or farce acted out on stage. Powys, from his first to his last novel, offers allegories of the struggle between prevailing evil and the inefficacy of good. Something does seem to have been absorbed from the pessimistic and nihilist philosophy of Emily Brontë, and can therefore be defined as a foretoken of Bataille. In one of his first philosophical works of 1916, Powys established a scansion between ugliness which is everlasting, like stone or mud, or the barrenness of the heart, and beauty which is always perishable.3 His frame of reference, no less backwards than his fictional poetics which is indifferent to any innovative ferment there might be in the air, was still stubbornly that classical Victorian one of the great doubters and agnostics from Froude onwards: whether there is a God and, mindful of Milton, how he operates on his creation. It is therefore also mindful of evangelical Calvinism, that of tendential damnation and the feared, ontological impurity of mankind. Powys’s God regrets his eternity because he can never approach anything that is beatific, and he approaches man to confess his torment and his regret for the suffering he inflicts upon him. In this spectral and overturned Everyman play, it is man who offers God forgiveness, which is actually death. In such a damned cosmos or microcosm sex is the thorn in the side. Mr Tasker’s Gods (1925) is a Swiftian zoological fantasy, 3

Churchill 1962, 20.

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blunt and without many frills, brutal in its brusque patency. The time of the action is deliberately covered up, every precise date of the setting silenced. For its atmosphere one might think once more of a Victorian climate, but it is not legible as a realistic story, if not of a livid and hallucinated realism, bordering on the surreal. It comes close to many novels of the middle years and decades of the nineteenth century taking place far from the metropolises and in static village communities, suffocating microcosms governed by bitterness, gossip, repression and neurosis in a regime of frightening, self-satisfied but ignorant small-mindedness. These were places of apparent tranquillity which, beneath the crust of habit, concealed and repressed volcanic stirrings. Powys is not interested in getting across tension in the plot, but rather in stopping it: he aims to spread out the observation of the various manifestations of mean-spiritedness, cunning, heathenishness and lack of elevation in the community. The young maids strut around knowing they are being ogled, and deliberately lift their petticoats to show off even just a slither of ankle, eyed up by the madam of a small house of ill repute where they end up, as old examples of ‘fallen women’, after being abandoned by their seducers. The still late-Victorian decorum kept the lid tightly on the pot where sensuality was boiling up. Mr Tasker’s Gods is an epigraph, a prolepsis, an allusion, a mise en abyme as we shall see; but it is an ultimately deceptive title, because it leads us to believe that the focal point is the incident of the pig farmer Mr Tasker, who predominates at the beginning and at the end. Whereas the novel is above all one ‘scene’, or a series of scenes, of ‘clerical life’. With the two poles of the story, farm and rectory, Powys has certainly tried to camouflage or attenuate the autobiographical nature of the novel, which basically revolves around a smarmy and absent reverend and his three sons of various moral standing, a context constituting an almost exact reproduction of his own origins.4 Separate episodes bring to life these superficial, worldly reverends who, without any spiritual flame whatsoever, do nothing but chase after the pleasures of the senses, and court and flirt with the coquettes. Turnbull the vicar is a classic case, à la Hawthorne, of the preacher who thunders against sin but who himself 4

At the same time Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley is heard quoted in the three superficial and pleasure-seeking reverends of the novel, especially in the initial phases.

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falls victim to it, revealing the extreme weakness of his temperament.5 It should be repeated that Powys is unflinching in his control of every single surge of pity for his weak and bestial characters, mired in the same mud; nor does he make any moralistic remarks, whether of approval or disapproval. But he creates an exception to his rule for the half-witted son of Rector Turnbull, almost a village idiot and partly the point of view of the story, and for yet another reverend who is the subject of gossip and now completely without faith, both to be sure marginalized and cut off, and sharing the same name, Henry. The farm presages immediately at the outset, in a really obvious way, the subversion and perversion of human relations, where farmer Tasker has deified the pigs and animalized the humans, starting with his own family. Tasker is not only blind and deaf to all feelings that are not money and profit (and for this reason he is one of the few who manages to sublimate lust and not chase skirts), but he is also tormented by a murky sense of hatred towards his father, in turn another debased being who lives on the run rooting around like a pig himself, and whom Tasker has killed by a dog and then feeds to his own pigs (previously he had not so much as flinched when the mongrel mauled and disfigured his own little daughter). 3. Mr Weston’s Good Wine (1927) is a tale of sacred and profane love, platonic and sublime or lustful and dirty, thus the barely objectified presentation of a sick Puritan, who now narrates with a much more omniscient storyteller’s voice. The initial idea is far from new: God, always traditionally accused by his believers of being absent, comes down to earth to see the true state of mankind and of his creation. As the duke dressed up as a friar in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, so God decides to turn up, in a parody of the Eucharist, in the guise of a wine merchant. In the thinly veiled reworking of the Don Quixote picaresque, the groom cannot but bear the name of an archangel, Michael, and humorously the white-haired divine lookalike arrives in a Ford van, an insight which will not escape Huxley in Brave New World.6 The plot is precisely dated 20 November 1923, and 5 6

He is himself the absent rector type, hidden away like Irvine in George Eliot’s Adam Bede, who makes his vicars do all the hard work. Volume 8, § 34.2.

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set in an imaginary village in rural England. In reality the atmosphere is imbued with a magical and dream-like realism and is arranged within a small macrotext of clear reminiscences. It may remind us of Dickens’s interpolated stories in Pickwick and of his Christmas fables; it oozes a certain flavour of the almost contemporaneous moral by Beerbohm and of ‘The Happy Hypocrite’; it anticipates, in its merry and untiring array of peasants ‘in frolic’, the climate of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, or, in its succession of really astonishing and unexpected scenes, the last two novels, equally frayed but glowing with surreal lights, by Angela Carter. A good half of the plot is arranged like a skewer or a polyptych of parallel scenes in a row, without depth or temporal progression, in which, as in a theatrical carousel, all the human components of the village follow on from each other. The novel has been widely praised and classified by numerous interpreters as Powys’s masterpiece, vastly superior to all his preceding and subsequent works,7 without doubt for the wittiness of some of the scenes which are, moreover, spoken in broad dialect. It nonetheless comes across, at least in the beginning, in my opinion, as too static if not tedious due to its excessive fragmentation and the amount of backstory relating to the various characters, told in the form of dialogues between the archangel Michael and the ‘divine’ Weston. The purpose of this preamble is to split up the human inhabitants of the village of Folly Down between the two poles of cynical and all too concrete despiritualized materialism and ingenuous and dreamy purity of the senses and emotions. The exceptions are the daughter of an unbelieving reverend, another one and another autobiographical element, who is in love with an angel and is waiting for him to come down from heaven, and a naïve Franciscan bearing the auspicious name of Mr Bird:8 two beings who are literally misfits, misunderstood or strangers. The allegorical meaning of the light and dark wine purveyed by Mr Weston – the light one is love whose price is requited love and the dark one is death – is decoded in the tragically transient nature of the sublime and in the permanence of the purely worldly. The wine is an aphrodisiac for the sensual and a memento mori for the spiritual, indeed a veritable 7 8

Cf. Churchill 1962, 23. See the humorous scene of a bull’s ‘conversion’ to Christianity in chapter XXII.

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stepping-stone to death. The theological implication is that God is the cruel, wicked, even satanical, Calvinistic God bringing an instrument for destruction to his mankind in the form of the gift of life itself. The whole of creation, and even its creator, is gripped by this self-destructive urge; in other words, the first candidates to perish are the most innocent, the most worthy and the most spiritual.9 4. John Cowper10 Powys (1872–1963) perhaps suffered the childhood turmoil of the parsonage even more than his brother, and lived a confused, apathetic, random existence, almost like a late Romantic bohemian, rootless, inept especially with publishers.11 Educated at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, he became a lecturer and essayist, first at home, and later emigrating to America for a long period, where he held successful and popular lectures on literary and disparate themes.12 From there he only returned in 1934 to settle until his death, at ninety-one, in north Wales. He is the more experimental and ingenious of the two brothers, able to challenge Bertrand Russell to a duel on the ‘failure of modern marriage’, and so respected as an intellectual as to be called to testify at the trial for obscenity against Joyce. His reception was controversial, and critics were and still are uncertain whether to assign him to the history of ideas, however popular, amateurish and improvised, or to pure fiction. He has many irons in the fire in both categories. It is nevertheless beyond doubt that fiction is instrumental to his philosophy and ideology. Powys was a gifted speaker with a highly aware histrionic ability, and he defined himself as an ‘actor’; others have called him a charlatan, a ranter, one of those crazed and fanatical prophets who used to speak ex abrupto in Blake’s day. This gift was fully exploited in his work as a lecturer in America, in which he did not simply explain

9 10 11 12

This Powys also wrote some fine Aesopian fables in which animals and objects tell the story, and collected in Fables (1929). This second name was given to him in honour of one of his mother’s ancestors, the eighteenth-century poet Cowper; John Donne was also amongst his forebears. The narcissistic bloating of his ego is confirmed in his vast autobiography (1934), which to some is one or his only masterpiece. Concerning the monograph on Dorothy Richardson, one of the first and the few on this writer, cf. § 123.3.

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such-and-such a writer, but, as he said, he tried to ‘make his soul transmigrate’ as in a dazzling empathy. Summarizing his thought is unwittingly like repeating various Blakean categories: the Powysian universe is sentient and not mechanical, especially the theatre of a millennial battle between the forces of good and evil. It is a Spinozian universe, a Deus sive natura in which man is intimately and mystically melted. Powys is a primitivist who is decidedly part of the current which rejects western mechanized civilization, analytical philosophical culture and abstract metaphysics, and who passionately upholds the theory that life is sensation and instant enjoyment, not sacrifice. Not to exalt or renounce or reject but to enjoy here and now was his objective and the theme of his preaching. And he found this beneficial and fulfilling lifestyle being lived by the still primitive African peoples, in accordance with a widespread historical and cultural mood at the end of the 1920s. But the primitivist was also by a fixed connection an enthusiast of his own ancestral and popular traditions and therefore a regionalist writer: the main standard bearer of the twentieth century, for all intents and purposes, of his Welsh ethnicity, of which he spoke with the image of a ‘literal iron’ which the English had thrust deep into the soul of a race which they felt was inferior. Of course the self-propaganda of Yeats and the Irish, another Celtic people, was not inactive. Powys as novelist is a completely apocalyptic fiction writer who uses the novel as a didactic, or at least illustrative, vehicle of such a redemptive and palingenetic philosophy. An oracular intention surfaces in the monumental forms of his novels which, in an abundant three decades beginning in 1925, are analogical summae and reductions of the whole universe, or even initiatory pathways. These grand novels which boil slowly, fluvial and jumbled, are the updates of the nineteenth-century novel-universe, brought together in great sagas with the same effort and megalomaniac objectives as over the years also affected Wyndham Lewis. Critics, in conclusion, have in the past dedicated numerous pages of fervid praise to him, while others not a single page; or else they have been abruptly harsh. But there is no doubt that in terms of pure talent and story-telling ability, Theodore Francis is more gifted than John Cowper. 5. The novels of John Cowper Powys can be roughly divided into a Wessex cycle and a Wales cycle, both vaguely Wagnerian tetralogies, the

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first realist enough, the second a decidedly historical fantasy. Whoever opens the immense narrative safe and pulls out the first prized piece, Wolf Solent (1929), expecting flamboyant writing full of digressions and a profusion of authorial invasiveness with airy and oracular conversations, will be surprised by the scholastic structure and the wooden pace, and indeed will regret the lack of greater focus and elaboration of details, and a less naturalistic scenic relief. The title is the name of an autobiographical alter ego, a thirty-five-year-old history teacher who leaves London embittered to return to his childhood home where this first divergence doubles into that of two opposing phantoms of the feminine, the sensual woman and the asexual woman, and triples into another dualism, Hamletic perhaps, that of father and son (because it also takes place in a conversation with his ghost at the graveyard). Wolf Solent matures in the same way as Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, accepting the multifaceted aspect of life, its make-up of unresolved dualities; but it is a false or optimistic closure, destined to reopen, because Powys’s world is eternally dual. Powys’s most colossal of the historical fantasy novels of Welsh inspiration, to which a table of characters was wisely appended, is A Glastonbury Romance (1932 and 1933), a laborious multi-layered tableau of the story of the Holy Grail reset in the present at that hub of reminiscences that is the eponymous city. It is structured like a modern fact-finding quest in the form of the contrast between the poetry of the past and today’s commercial exploitation of the mythical site. Porius, on the decline of Roman dominion in England, originally from 1951 and restored with a new look from the author’s fragmentary notes (London and New York 2007), seemed to Margaret Drabble, in the abovementioned review in TLS, a ‘mythical masterpiece’ worthy to stand next to Ulysses. § 50. Vernon Lee* Vernon Lee, pen name of Violet Paget (1856–1935), has in recent times come back to life and is still at the heart of a small and localized revival at 13

*

P. Gunn, Vernon Lee: Violet Paget, 1856–1935, London 1964; B. Gardner, The Lesbian Imagination (Victorian style): a psychological and critical study of ‘Vernon Lee’, New York 1987; V. Colby, Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography, Charlottesville, VA and

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least as a cult author. Various manifestations, conferences, study groups, books and new translations have brought back another victim of textbook silence. In actual fact Vernon Lee does not fall within our chronological boundaries, not completely at any rate, because the specific object of that cult is essentially two short-story collections, eight stories in all, of realist, fantasy, neo-Gothic and thus supernatural, or rather demonic, genre which, together with a novel and very little else, make up her meagre creative canon. This canon, however, lies entirely on the far side, not only of 1921, but also of 1901, and therefore within the Victorian fin de siècle. In a long and varied literary career, Vernon Lee wrote tenaciously until her death, and in a chain reaction scholars have rediscovered and examined with interest the outlines of that literary canon, expressed in numerous later books on history, aesthetics, sociology, literary and artistic criticism, show business and musicology; or in wonderful little masterpieces of impression and impressionism, even cameos, in which glows, it has been discovered, a spasmodic sense of genius loci and ‘a certain je ne sais quoi’, something resembling romanticism, or even quite similar to Proust. Putting together these pieces, we obtain the figure of an erudite woman who could derive from her numerous artistic interests myriad suggestions and stimuli translated into a series of short stories in a way that is not mechanical but inspired and original. A second reason for including Vernon Lee here is that it is no small thing that she was jointly responsible for, and then the twentieth-century patroness of, the birth of English studies in Italy. The young Mario Praz, as he recalls in various features, was diverted from following a forensic career by the interviews which the writer kindly gave him at the Villa Palmerino near Fiesole, her Italian home for over forty years. Under her guidance the young scholar wrote his first essays, carried out his

London 2003; C. Zorn, Vernon Lee: Aesthetics, History, and the Victorian Female Intellectual, Athens, OH 2003; M. P. Kane, Spurious Ghosts: The Fantastic Tales of Vernon Lee, Roma 2004; P. Pulham, Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Tales, London 2008, 2017; S. Kandola, Vernon Lee, Tavistock 2010. Dalla stanza accanto. Vernon Lee e Firenze settant’anni dopo, ed. S. Cenni and E. Bizzotto, Firenze 2006, contains my own ‘Miss Brown e il preraffaellismo “maudit” di Vernon Lee’ (186–94, also in IDM, 156–66), which can be consulted for further information on this novel.

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first readings, and did his first translations of English poets, and through her intervention obtained the post of reader in Manchester, whence began his academic career in the early 1920s.1 2. From a well to do and roaming, educated and extravagant family, daughter of the second husband of her mother, who was her brother’s tutor, this brother himself a poet of some merit, Vernon Lee is yet another late nineteenth-century English expatriate.2 Her exile began at a tender age, from 1873, when her first essays were duly produced within the decadent climate. But Vernon Lee is an independent daughter of Walter Pater, and her fiction is a criticism from within of decadent sensitivity. In 1880, already a child prodigy, she revealed herself with a book of studies and essays on eighteenth-century Italy, all derived from fantastical induction, and that some have compared for their value and importance with Pater’s The Renaissance. For the whole decade the writer’s theme remained pure and applied aesthetics, in a series of works only interrupted by her immature novel Miss Brown (1884). In it Vernon Lee begins her acknowledgement of the lack of heroism and virility amongst the Rossettians and the early decadents of the English literary scene, and probes without much result numerous options in search of a new femininity, which are the icons of the sacrificial woman, the maternal woman and the demonic woman in impossible coexistence. Miss Brown thus was not born of purely heuristic terrain, but at least partly from a recent visit to her homeland, from the direct viewing of the latest paintings of Rossetti and their satellites, and from the equally disappointing personal acquaintance of the celebrities of the day, 1 2

Cf. the three articles in PCS, 270–97, which also document Vernon Lee’s contemporary notoriety and her relationship with the Florentine culture of the day. Historically speaking, Praz has been the best interpreter and connoisseur of the writer’s works. For a long while until 1908, Vernon Lee and Ouida lived only a few kilometres from each other, one towards the north-east and the other in the south-west of Florence, without visiting or having much esteem for each other. Vernon Lee expressly mentions Ouida with no trace of admiration in one of her stories. Ouida was, of course, a rough and ready natural genius; Vernon Lee undoubtedly had a better education, and a much sharper and more refined pen. But this supposed follower of Pater, and a voice in the chorus of aestheticism, was, according to Praz, a bit like Ouida, ‘all permeated with the spirit of Voltaire’, yet paradoxically of ‘puritan morals’ (SSI, vol. I, 104, and II, 491). Praz reminds us that around 1928 Lawrence too lived in Florence.

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such as Morris. The perverse, daring name game, and also that of renaming people, always delighted Vernon Lee, and in Miss Brown many writers and artists are mentioned by name or more often recognized by colourful manglings. Within the male protagonist Walter Hamlin are merged the details and traits of Pater the experientialist, therefore closet homosexual, and of the Rossettian late-coming painter-cum-poet who seeks especially a feminine form of beauty to transform into ‘a magnificent aesthetic object’. The openly parodied quotation of famous Rossetti paintings is evident, as Venus Mystica, Victrix and others; and Rossetti’s function as a stand-in and target is accentuated by the references to his poetic corpus, modelled on the Stilnovo Dante. Ann Brown is the height of improbability or a pure utopian imagination, because she is an Anglo-Italian orphan whose education was paid for by this young English poet-painter, Hamlin, and becomes an attractive London lady. With her appears the myth always caressed and established by Vernon Lee who, small, thin and fragile, cherished the dream of a virile, statuesque and Amazonian woman. Since Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh the English women writers had sublimated feminine unease through the imagination of another homeland, especially a romantically Italian one, for their heroines. Against this ancient icon of femininity, which resembles Richardson’s Pamela, and of which Vernon Lee was not very convinced (because at the end of the novel Ann Brown sacrifices her professionalism, and also her eros), is artificially contrasted the bewitching devourer and enslaver of men, Sacha Elaguine. The scenes depicting this exotic and hysterical woman are narrated with a curiosity as impetuous as it is nervously clumsy. 3. Hauntings (1890), a collection of four short stories, is the cornerstone of Vernon Lee’s works as a writer of fantasy and the supernatural. They are broadly based on suggestions of the history and practice of Italian painting and music. They take to heart the Gothic technique of the framed story, being in the form of diaries, or exchanges of letters, or first-person retrospectives, a fitting device to lend an objectifying distance and to remove all morbidity from the subject.3 ‘Amour dure’, written in the form of a diary, falls immediately within the sphere of tales about the disturbing 3

Vernon Lee’s sensitivity, as Praz never tires from remarking on, is that typical ‘of the room next door’, of overhearing or hearing in a muffled way.

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or lethal portrait, and evokes innumerable nineteenth-century classics of this type, from Poe to Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ up until the almost seamless Decadent reprises led by Wilde. But one could say that the most burning recollection, in terms of atmosphere and macaronic names (Stimigliano, Oliverotto, Frangipani, Prinzivalle degli Ordelaffi and others), is that of the Rossettis’ Italian prose stories.4 A Renaissance scholar is obsessed with the portrait of a sixteenth-century noblewoman who was killed, à la Browning, by order of her husband the duke.5 The ravenous, tooth-and-claw, bloodthirsty woman who Vernon Lee frequently described, reappears in this portrait. The twenty-four-year-old Polish scholar, of Vernon Lee’s future immature male kind, is visited and possessed by the dead woman in an abandoned church and convinced to remove a statuette from the sepulchre, which should have limited her evil powers according to the duke who had had her killed. The next day the scholar is found dead, confirming the death-dealing power both of the living and the painted woman. The diary in the first person cuts off suddenly just before this epilogue, which is communicated by the meagre notice in a newspaper. ‘Dionea’ takes its title from a young castaway of stinging and seductive beauty who is taken in at a nunnery and bewitches a painter, who sacrifices his pregnant wife for her upon an altar consecrated to Venus. This is also a case of mythological reincarnation, and of the daughter of Venus, Dionea. For this reason it is a slightly varied Paterian story of the gods in exile, vainly Christianized, and on the contrary emanating their malefic power (there is a clever chain of symbolic references to this rejected and unconscious Christianization of Venus’s daughter). ‘Oke of Okehurst’ tells the story of an artist who is asked to paint a portrait of the eponymous nobleman’s wife, who strangely resembles one of her husband’s ancestors. The current husband goes mad in the face of this resemblance and kills himself in the grip of hallucinations. For this reason the story unmistakeably brings

4 5

On which see Volume 5, §§ 189 and 206.5, and a more extensive analysis in IDM, 83–94. Vernon Lee parodies Browning with the layer of rare, meticulous and obviously invented erudition that she attributes to her expert Spiridion. The city where the story takes place is called Urbania, a misnomer for Urbino. A dated cliché is the savage brutality of the historical climate of the Renaissance, also attributable to Browning.

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to mind Rossetti’s ‘St Agnes of Intercession’: ‘the resemblance was heightened by the fact that, as I soon saw, the present Mrs Oke distinctly made herself up to look like her ancestress, dressing in garments that had a seventeenth-century look; nay, that were sometimes absolutely copied from this portrait’. It is music that, though not deadly, is the persecutor, in symbiosis with painting, in ‘A Wicked Voice’, insofar as the portrait of an eighteenth-century castrato is insulted by a Norwegian musician who must suffer the singer’s revenge through the malefic power of the portrait itself. The story is a narration in the first person conceived in Venice, the universally ideal city for decay,6 and comes under the archetype of the diabolical power of music, often associated with stringed instruments like violins, and with performers like violinists,7 here however attributed to the voice, whose ‘great cultivator’ is the devil. 4. Vanitas (1892) is made up of four stories which in length are almost short novels divided into several chapters, with the action also taking place in long time frames. They are studies of especially male figures, all sharing the same weakness of character, staticness, or a dreamy and utopian aestheticism; all therefore vaguely Morrisian males who love beautiful and ideal things. They are knights brought forward in time, and Morrisian, because they are vaguely socialist and intent on transforming the worker into an artist. They are therefore also clumsy lovers, largely misogynists without admitting it to themselves. The objective is a satire on the ambiguous, suffused, blinded, enclosing and unprepared sensitivity which grips the male protagonist. As well as and perhaps even more so than Morris, Vernon Lee thinks of Henry James as her target, and these heroes of hers discover themselves with the aid of Henry James, one of whose novels they pick up one day. From James the inevitable setting of the story, within the range of cosmopolitan aristocratic society, is repeated, often overwintering in the Alpine resorts or in Venice or Tuscany. ‘A Frivolous Conversion’ takes place in a spa resort in Engadin, where a young idealist who is wasting away, confused and immature, unable to love except in a chivalrous way, falls 6 7

As in Mann, as Praz does not fail to note in PCS, 296. The most evocative and also powerful nineteenth-century story about this archetype is perhaps The Lost Stradivarius by J. M. Falkner, on which see IDM, 131–46.

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under the influence of a mature and maternal Russian madam. He seems converted, made a man, but the curtain falls violently and abruptly on a duel which he has foolishly let himself be dragged into, and in which he meets his death. ‘A Worldly Woman’ introduces another inept or listless male, a nervous, fussy, socialist aesthete who follows the Morrisian profession of an expert in antique vases, and who is surprised to fall in love with a woman with whom he is only killing time; it is a second portrait of confused and inconclusive idealism, or a further representation of male inanity. The Jamesian motif becomes explicit because the protagonist often wields a copy of Princess Casamassima. 5. ‘Lady Tal’ deserves a more in-depth examination. Vernon Lee is above all satirizing Henry James through the writer Jervase Marion, in part using James’s own weapons. In other words, she is lashing out at morbid and tortuous psychological fiction, which is compared to Venetian canals and alleys; at the same time, Vernon Lee is embroidering without result and satisfaction on an intermediate gender, which is not the enervated effeminacy of the male or the mannish femininity of the protagonist. The best and neatest moments are in the first part, after which the story falls apart into wordy psychological analyses. The opening in the sitting room of a Venetian villa in the summer heat, with the array of eccentrics of various nationalities and their hobby horses; the empty ritual skirmishes, the inane chatter in the stale heat and in the room full of smoke: it all sounds like a deliberate wink at Henry James’s favourite settings, and the story does indeed soon centre around a successful novelist taking a holiday, Jervase Marion is his name. At the same time, this writer paying a ‘visit’ to a sitting room is a resounding herald of Eliot’s Prufrock who, like Marion, lacks courage, guts and real masculinity. Vernon Lee uses almost the same verbs as Eliot: ‘Jervase Marion knew it all so well, so well, this half-fashionable, half-artistic Anglo-American idleness of Venice, with its poetic setting and its prosaic reality. He would have known it, he felt, intimately, even if he had never seen it before’. We can almost hear the ladies ‘coming and going talking about Michelangelo’. Lady Tal is tall like her name, sarcastic and teasing,8 8

The mythological echo (her name is an abbreviation of Atalanta) is wittily recalled when the lady buys fruit, here oranges, at the market, which are clumsily spilt along the

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and the counterpoint of gender gets moving stealthily as while Marion, with his androgynous name, is a worn-out and sexually undefined bachelor, the lady is ‘a bit masculine’, and thus at the very least Amazonian.9 He is short and bald, she is tall, imposing, statuesque. Marion is also an amphibious, ambiguous and androgynous personal name. It is no coincidence that he often hears his name mangled as Mary Anne. An Amazonian parody is the umbrella with the silver pommel which is the ancient lance with which Lady Tal can defend herself from attacks, were it not that the males she sees around her are cowardly and defenceless weaklings. Lady Tal is majestically chivalric, though a simple copy in a world without chivalry. The backstory of poor Tal with her horrible husband who blackmailed her, leaving her the inheritance only if she did not remarry, is of the same improbability as many Victorian devices of the sensation novel. That the woman is writing a novel puts her together with those amateur, female writers so reviled by George Eliot. The manuscript that Lady Tal submits to the novelist Marion is the expression of her soul, but it is in itself what George Eliot might have called a ‘silly novel’, a cento of female exclusion and Sehnsucht. It is also totally unappreciated by the spasmodic, Jamesian style enthusiast. In describing it, the talented Vernon Lee apes James’s own introspective technique. Marion finds himself bewitched composing the Jamesian portrait of an enigmatic, mysterious, elusive ‘lady’. He is then more than ever the clumsy intellectual with a shaken and atrophied sensual life, and one sense in particular is missing in him, the practical sense. In the far inferior and more stereotyped hospital scene, of which Vernon Lee perhaps lacked real experience, Marion turns out to be fussy and ‘aesthetic’, recoiling from the unpleasant, or repugnant, spectacles of life. The proposal of a new femininity could not ignore or not go through philanthropic devotion, and this is the meaning of the hospital scene, which is a test of charitable and helpful

9

road by the novelist Marion, who is a bumbling and improbable cavalier servente. This market scene on the Rialto is introduced by a superb descriptive prelude, like an impressionist painting in words. It is the ‘indeterminacy of gender’ which female writers often resort to, including Ouida and also Rose Macaulay (1881–1958), especially in her best novel, The Towers of Trebizond (1956).

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femininity. In the end it seems that the two protagonists, disgusted by life, join forces, but the curtain falls too suddenly, without letting us really understand the writer’s intentions. ‘The Legend of Madame Krasinska’ is the only story injected with fantasy and the only one focusing on a female protagonistic figure in Vanitas. It tells the story of a mysterious pathological case of transfer which happens to a Polish princess in Florence, who believes herself to be the reincarnation of an old tatterdemalion who lost her sons in the second War of Independence.10 § 51. Maugham* I: A humble, self-taught craftsman Shortly before and immediately after 1945 the novels of William Somerset Maugham (1874–1965), especially the middle and later ones, enjoyed respect and rating especially in Europe, unlike in his own country where he was and is still considered by academic critics to be a popular though gifted writer and the author of light works for entertainment. To give but one

10

Concerning Vernon Lee’s later creative works, never again so vivid, it is just necessary to mention Ariadne in Mantua (1904), on the subject of the sublimation of carnal love, and the drama of the horrors of war, Satan the Waster (1920). The story ‘The Virgin of the Seven Daggers’ (1889, but published in 1927 in the collection For Maurice) is fascinating especially because it is an extreme, camouflaged reworking of the Don Juan myth.

*

The Collected Edition of the Works of W. S. Maugham, 20 vols, London 1934–1963; Plays, 6 vols, London 1931–1934; Collected Short Stories, 4 vols, Harmondsworth 1963. C. S. McIver, William Somerset Maugham: A Study of Technique and Literary Sources, Philadelphia, PA 1936; R. Cordell, W. Somerset Maugham, London 1937, revised with the title Somerset Maugham: A Biographical and Critical Study, London 1961; R. H. Ward, William Somerset Maugham, London 1937; J. Brophy, Somerset Maugham, London 1952 and 1958; K. W. Jonas, The Gentleman from Cap Ferrat, New Haven, CT 1956; K. G. Pfeiffer, W. Somerset Maugham: A Candid Portrait, London 1959; L. Brander, Somerset Maugham: A Guide, Edinburgh 1963; R. E. Barnes, The Dramatic Comedy of Somerset Maugham, The Hague and Paris 1968; I. Brown, W. Somerset Maugham, London 1970; R. L. Calder, W. Somerset Maugham and the Quest for Freedom, London 1972 (on sources and influences), and Willie: The Life of W. Somerset Maugham, London 1989; A. Curtis, The Pattern of Maugham, London 1974; F. Raphael, Maugham and His World, London 1976; T. Morgan, Maugham: A

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example, in post-war Italy, which was trying to rejuvenate and modernize its culture, Maugham held his own, amongst his English-speaking contemporaries, against the Americans Hemingway and Faulkner and his fellow countrymen Huxley and Galsworthy, and almost all his works were translated, with numerous versions due to Elio Vittorini.1 Such a curious appetite can be explained by the cosmopolitan scenarios of his novels of artistic life, often set in Paris, with the upper-middle-class extraction of his protagonists living in the most unashamed luxury, and with the uninhibited treatment of eros and especially adultery: thus with a need for escapism. Maugham was ultimately a victim of the suspicion and preconceived ostracism reserved for writers who, though working hand in hand with modernists, were not modernists. He had responded with the repeated satire of the intelligentsia who snubbed him. He himself, in the pages of his autobiography, The Summing Up, showed that he was aware of his insurmountable ‘technical’ limitations, so to speak, and of his expressive weaknesses and of the narrowness of his vocabulary; but he almost prided himself on it. Because of these talents he conversely turned out to be popular with many contemporary conservative writers. Orwell, making a surprising exception, proclaimed him ‘the modern writer’ who ‘had influenced him the most’, and explained this by citing his ability to tell a story in a way that was ‘straightforward and without frills’.2 From this, as usual radiant definition, we can begin to clarify the essential aspects of the writer. 2. Maugham was proud to be, and in a certain sense he is, a writer who focuses on characters. His best novels are such because of the quality and vividness of the portrait that expands and radiates along the way, and Biography, London 1980; CRHE, ed. A. Curtis and J. Whitehead, London and New York 1987; J. Whitehead, Maugham: A Reappraisal, London and Totowa, NJ 1987 (mostly a series of paraphrases, some inaccurate); S. W. Archer, W. Somerset Maugham: A Study of the Short Fiction, New York 1993; P. Holden, Orienting Masculinity, Orienting Nation: Somerset Maugham’s Exotic Fiction, Westport, CT and London 1996; B. Connon, Somerset Maugham and the Maugham Dynasty, London 1997; J. Meyers, Somerset Maugham: A Life, New York 2004; S. Hastings, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, London 2009. 1 2

On the novelist’s appeal in France, cf. CRHE, 1–2, and Cordell 1961, 172. OCE, vol. II, 39.

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whose complexity, roundedness and richness is revealed as the story unfolds. Other novels of his, on the other hand, are written with a mind to the plot. Maugham is an inexhaustible raconteur, and he really does have the ability to continually forge supple and well-lubricated storylines, often superficial, but decidedly flowing. It can nonetheless be conjectured that Orwell, in that 1940 appraisal, wanted to emphasize the adjective modern, and that he would perhaps have modified or withdrawn the praise if he had been able to read, or had wanted to comment on, Maugham’s post-1940 production. Up until 1915 or 1921 Maugham, beginning his career, had indeed been one of the leading progressives, modern though not a modernist, and therefore a passionate critic of Victorianism, whose hypocrisies he had attacked with a virulence little short of that of one of Orwell’s champions, Wells. This controversy is hinted at in his first novel, still heavily influenced by the naturalistic stories of Maupassant and Gissing, and is completed and crowned in the autobiographical The Human Bondage, which suggests and hopes for a break of paradigmatic habits for an entire generation, and ideally moves from the pulverization of the restrictive world of the English parsonage to the enjoyment of complete human, sexual and artistic liberty, symbolized by Paris. This path was not unlike that undertaken by Orwell himself a generation later. Dedicating oneself to spasmodic and total art leads, if not obliges, one to leave everything; the artist with a capital A is a reverse Christ or St Francis who throws off his worldly clothes to embrace a life of complete realization of the ego. He may be an ultimate variant of the aesthetics of Decadentism, and the first novels of Thomas Mann and their precursors were not far off, and Maugham had studied in Germany in his youth. Other novels by Maugham are also Künstlerromane, novels of the life of artists, especially poets but also writers. And yet Maugham too can be included amongst the writers of the ‘waste land’ and of the collapse of values in a western world subjugated by luxury, money and sex without love. In novel after novel the individual is contrasted with the conventional and reactionary masses, and he is an individual corresponding to the type of the runaway, signifying the rejection of a false civilization and the quest for the authentic. With The Moon and Sixpence Maugham expressed the need for an escape from the jaded values of fin-de-siècle European civilization towards

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a natural, primitive life of complete enjoyment of man’s animal nature. Except that The Painted Veil, which is later corrected by The Razor’s Edge, sketches out a different solution, that of the renunciation of the senses and the adhesion to a programme of rebirth based first of all on the values of missionary Christianity and of the wisdom of Hindu mysticism. The fourth turning point in Maugham’s modernity, and another Orwellian myth, is the representation of man without idealism and removed, in his historical, psychic and emotional truth, from all teleology. Hardy seems to be the most appropriate reference for Maugham’s study of the mad, disoriented passion and the burning reawakening of sexual appetite, uncontrollable especially because not reciprocated. Women are capable of igniting such an insatiable appetite, and men do not have enough willpower to control it. There was only one thing lacking in Maugham in the Orwellian identikit of a writer, however essential, and that was political allegiance;3 but Maugham had taken care of that with a dramaturgy that at least pretended to denounce the classism still prevailing in the Edwardian period. I mentioned above that Orwell had not been able to take into account the intermediate and final developments of Maugham’s fiction. A certain yielding to a formula is already undeniable in Maugham after the 1920s, and this formula is that of a novel which passively follows the movements between the two or three worlds of a pleasure-seeking society, which is a foreshadowing of the international jet set, and flirts, loafs around, holidays, goes to parties and collects objets d’art. In this itinerant community we feel missing the true counterweight of a defector or an objector, just as the total openness of the view of the broader society, afflicted by its problems, is lacking. Maugham as a novelist was practically finished straight away after the Second World War, and his last novel appeared almost twenty years earlier than his natural death. § 52. Maugham II: Naturalist fiction and drama up to 1914 Born in Paris and raised in France, the son of a lawyer who looked after the interests of the British Embassy, Maugham was later orphaned, 3

The stupidity and incompetence of politicians is revealed in the first chapter of his intellectual autobiography The Summing Up.

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and painfully repatriated to England at the age of ten. Having gone to live with his uncle, an Anglican vicar in Whitstable, he suffered acutely the constraints of this educational model. At King’s School in Canterbury he was mocked for his French accent and, a phenomenon very frequent in bilinguals, his stutter. At seventeen he studied for a year in Germany, at Heidelberg, and returned home to find a job; he refused to join the clergy, and signed up for medicine in London. It was character building, and in the future writer there would be no trace of the atmosphere of university lecture halls, or the slightest seepage of classical learning, or a hint of systematic ideology. And he would always be an amateur in philosophy. He had made his debut with a biography of Meyerbeer and had finished Liza of Lambeth in 1897. A story of adultery amongst the working class, Liza of Lambeth was favourably reviewed, and convinced the author to leave the medical profession and set himself up as a writer. His model was Gissing, mixed with hints of Maupassant and, closer to him, George Moore. He was part of the family of naturalistic realism. In Liza of Lambeth the plot is reduced to the essential, and starts off as and remains almost a multiprotagonist story, with the dialogues prevailing over the authorial comment, and a balance between indoors and outdoors, with a slight preponderance of the latter. For this reason it prepares the ground for Maugham’s theatre. It is a story of a community, a community of workers living and operating in a poor district of London; there is not even a single middle-class person, much less an aristocrat, in this well-defined context. On the road that the local houses look out onto, emotional and recreational activities take place thanks to the summer heat in which the scene opens. In the morning the men go breathlessly to the factory, the women stay at home and look after the children, the old women fortify themselves with a few good pints of beer. Everyone looks forward to the evening to have some fun, at the pub, or the holidays. All age groups are examined and represented: kids playing cricket with anything they can find, young workers, busy housewives, old people. The leisure activities are trips to the countryside, evenings in the pub, walks in the park, local curtain raisers. A harmonious community, poor people helping each other and judiciously striving to make ends meet? Not in the slightest. Passions smoulder, stifled by respectability and the daily grind, frustrations flare up, and rivalries; and these give rise to drama.

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The reader is struck, in the opening scene, by the families which, though poor, have numerous offspring; the women breastfeed the babies on the doorstep but are already pregnant with more. The loyal and sympathetic spirit of friendship and assistance does not dominate at all amongst these inhabitants of the area and the road. The fact that Liza is a favourite of the children is deceptive. Brutality and degradation are openly revealed with a sole exception, linguistic reticence, the obscene words which the writer repeatedly refrains from transcribing. Sexual incontinence cannot slow the birth rate. The initial scenes also give the measure of the dynamic between sensual and sexual repression and its release. The uninhibited street dance of the young worker, Liza, is a way to challenge and let off steam. In this scenic moment the young worker makes her first appearance as a sort of village Carmen, whose thick black hair she shares and all the satisfaction of a dress just put on and of gaudy tights. She lifts her petticoat in the whirling movement and attracts the gaze and the appreciation of the young male public. It is no coincidence that Maugham has her dance in the background to an ersatz Carmen, the Cavalleria Rusticana. Liza, who looks like unbridled joy, in reality is suffering for an emotional difficulty. Vexed by her drunken mother, whom she must look after, she attracts but rejects a throng of young suitors like a young femme fatale of the streets. She yields especially to the charm of the older man, especially because her own father is dead. She is captured and seduced by him in a carnal relationship, like an animal prey seized at the end of the dance with a kiss. In the central phases Liza of Lambeth is still prudishly about the fallen woman, a classic motif which reveals the recent influence of Gissing. The relationship matures during a holiday picnic in the country, but ends in tragedy because in the narrow confines of the neighbourhood rumours begin to circulate. The worker’s wife finds out about the affair and, in a violent scuff  le, wounds a pregnant Liza, who loses her child and herself dies. The epilogue is the best part, particularly because, unintentionally and without authorial comments, it illustrates the green and self-punishing feminism of the female community. The wife’s reaction to the adultery is not against her husband, whom she is afraid of, but against the rival adulteress; but this is because of the state of subjugation and impotence which the women resignedly accept. The scene of the bloody fight between the two women

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is instructive both because no male, let alone female, is willing to intervene and call the police; and because this fight is enjoyed as a veritable free show put on for the poor people by themselves. Equally effective is the cynical naturalism of the ending, in which Liza’s agony is consumed in contrast with and against the backdrop of the mothers and midwives gossiping. This scene, especially in 1897, could have been yet another Victorian icon of piety and compunction; Maugham courageously lowered the curtain, obviating any kind of sentimentalism. 2. Maugham’s plays, the first of which are still dramatically very uncertain, sprang from a daring condemnation of the classism which was prevailing unchallenged in the just barely Edwardian society. But the playwright writing to survive almost immediately laid down his arms and gave in to the temptations and the prospects of the more lavish proceeds accruing from commercial theatre. The quality of his plays is obviously on a downward trend.4 A Man of Honour (1903) vaguely anticipates one of the motifs of Of Human Bondage, because Basil, a promising writer, marries a barmaid who is pregnant with his child. In reality the play goes beyond that towards another objective, that of the unbridgeable gap between the ‘two nations’, and the impossible historical marriage between the classes; but it is also dedicated to the nascent opposition between real and ideal. The protagonist’s brave decision causes a stir in the upper echelons of society, also due to the residual Victorian ‘double standard’. The nobility and the middle class could still easily cover up the incident but Basil is unshakable and feels irrevocably duty-bound to have a shotgun wedding. This contrast of positions, levity against seriousness, is served by a dialogue bursting with Wilde-style sardonic and humorous quips in the group of frivolous socialites, while Basil sometimes speaks in stentorian and melodramatic tones. The marriage later breaks down; the wife, Jenny, listening in on the feminism of the day, demands her rights, and her brother is unemployed. Basil cannot but admit the futility of his heroic act, asks for a separation and in a farcical scene is caught by his wife in the company of an old flame. The thesis of the play is confirmed by the desperate wife’s suicide. Indeed 4

This deterioration was noted in the witty reviews by Beerbohm in the Saturday Review (CRHE, 63–7 and 76–8), and even more sternly in one by Archer (CRHE, 92–6).

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it turns into a sarcastically overturned moral: that complying so conscientiously with one’s duties has caused more problems than it has solved, with the addition that God would not have punished Basil for his sin, but forgiven him. All in all the play was modestly successful, and with Lady Frederick (1907) Maugham fell back on sparkling comedy without any undertones of courageous condemnation, and with much better results. Set in Montecarlo in English high society, events turn on a not-so-young and indebted Irish widow’s attempts to ward off her creditors by squeezing loans and donations and thwarting marriage proposals from rich suitors. It is the age-old theme around which many early Victorian novels revolve, exchanging rank for money, and hence the numerous proposals and gallantries received by the impecunious lady. But the dialogues are rather deliberately affected by the verbal fire and the brilliant and polished parries and ripostes of Restoration theatre. An uncle tries to intervene in his nephew’s unfortunate plight, politely pulling some small skeletons out of the lady’s cupboard, which she tenaciously refutes. It is a shot at Victorian hypocrisy that the very upright father of the suitor, a minister, is found out to have been an actress’s lover in the past. The climax is the third act, often remembered because the lady, in a very distant parody of Beardsley’s cartoons and stories of Venus and Tannhäuser, makes her cicisbeo repent by having him watch her at her dressing table, thus making him aware of the tricks she uses to hide her true age. It is also an ironic demonstration of the need to do away with ideals. In the end the lady is completely redeemed as the healthiest character in the whole gathering, and therefore able to hold her own against the slanderers, with the happy ending assured on all fronts. The rather dull and contrived Jack Straw (also 1911) opens inside the Grand Babylon Hotel, of Bennett’s fame,5 as a punitive prank against a couple of upstarts. It is a trademark Victorian device, but as the play moves on some fantastical contortions anticipate Firbank’s works, 6 concerning mistaken identity and in particular that of a waiter who must 5 § 18.4. 6 Firbank was one of Maugham’s many homosexual friends. Maugham helped him to publish, as noted by Calder 1972, 23–3, who reconstructs Maugham’s love life, his homosexuality not having been openly revealed before the date of his book.

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impersonate the heir to the throne of Pomerania, and who unexpectedly turns out to be such in the final dénouement. § 53. Maugham III: ‘Of Human Bondage’. Bitter loves For ten years after Liza we see no important narrative works from Maugham, but rather the launch, as I mentioned, of a dazzling career as a playwright, especially in a series of farces which met with enthusiastic success with the public, but at most a controversial critical reception. In 1914 Maugham already had ten plays under his belt, and eight novels, though minor and mediocre ones because they had been written in a hurry to satisfy the fashions and the most varied demands of the moment, like the Boer War, the occult, the imperial question. Mrs Craddock (1902), defended by some and certainly the best of his intermediate novels, tells of a thorny case which is a foretaste of Lawrence and at the same time is often bouncing around in Maugham’s work. A well-off middle-class woman, with the classic, overused and evocative name of Bertha, falls in love with the attractive but dull farmer Craddock, and hastily marries him. It is a primitive study of passion, but love vanishes and the woman goes back to being free after her husband dies falling from a horse. Of Human Bondage7 (1915), Maugham’s most famous and most demanding novel, was released for printing when the author, too old to fight in the war but nevertheless admitted to the Allied Red Cross, was quartered in Dunkerque. Autobiographical, it necessarily looks to the great Victorian autobiographical novels and should be compared with the two by Dickens and, especially, with that of Butler. But the study of bewitching passion links it to Hardy. The school chapter, with its oppressive figures and the later attenuated unease, also evokes the narrative script of the other côté, the feminine one of the Brontë sisters. We sense a so-called family air with such masterpieces, especially in the narration by the orphan stuck in the cocoon of motherly love and then thrust into a hostile, icy and unsuitable environment. The only authentic and new things are the restraint and the understatement. Maugham does not want 7

The title comes from Spinoza’s Ethica, but is also unthinkably echoed from Ouida’s first novel, Held in Bondage (1863), whose plot, what is more, revolves around an officer who ends up in a mésalliance with a woman who turns out to be a bigamist.

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to overdo things and tells an ordered story without embellishments. And if we remember that the theme of the novel is the emotional and artistic upbringing of an alter ego who, destined for the profession of priest, leans towards abjuration, this impersonal style seems to vaguely match that of Joyce’s autobiography, already written in those years.8 But it is an impression that soon fades. The indisputable flavour lies in the cast, and of something old and resurrected. The Human Bondage can be included amongst those retrospectives of the tail end of the Victorian era, which appeared frequently in the Edwardian and early Georgian period. It comes seven or eight years after Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale, and recent at that time was Galsworthy’s Forsyte saga. Covering a period of twenty years, from 1885 to 1905, it is also almost a historical novel. So it is not alien to Maugham to attempt to write a novel comme il faut, a weighty one with a variety of episodes and an overabundance of characters. In fact it is in spirit a late three-decker for its measure, for its teeming with main and lesser characters, for the generosity of its incidental episodes. The sense of this commemoration, it must be understood, is not Bennett’s nostalgia nor indeed even that, ill-concealed, of Galsworthy; it may be the opposite, its cold and deliberate subversion: a critique, that is, and a satire on Victorian pretentiousness, on the falseness, closed-mindedness of an entire civilization. It had been an objective of the Victorian satirists themselves, but Maugham adds to it a candid, deaf scepticism, a cynicism, even a nihilism, which were absent before. Though it maintains the structure of a saga, the result remains inferior because Maugham does not manage to be completely an artist and the novel is too autobiographical. Its belatedness lies in the author’s omniscience, in a concept of a rigorously linear timeline, and in the lack of any ability to reshape the biography. To give it altogether as it is, even with a few harmless variations, is like giving up all recursiveness and cyclicism; and all internal symmetry. The novel is not divided into parts, rather it is a continuum of more than 100 chapters, but it is split into temporal sections. The further we read, the more we taste a post-dated Dickens and the picaresque of the now desperate alter ego on the verge of suicide; but 8

Of Maugham’s novel there also exists a first, early version, which is to the definitive one as Joyce’s Stephen Hero is to the Portrait.

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the fabric of the episodes is not so fresh and it communicates a sense of prolixity and excessive length. The ending is an unexpected descent into the pathetic and the sentimental. Of Human Bondage is a canvas, a backdrop, a surface, pleasant in its changing and varied colours and in its episodic sections, but without any real depth. 2. Maugham depicts a collective Bildung and studies a phase of national culture, that of an England breaking the banks of autarchy and getting rid of the spiritual aegis of the ‘eminent Victorians’. The country’s frontiers are being crossed and the youth, grown in the gardens of Oxford, is leaving for Paris and Europe. The English themselves must now learn: from Ibsen, from German philosophy, from French literature and painting. Once PreRaphaelite precepts are rejected, impressionists and symbolists mount on their shields. The educational and cultural endurance of that fertile and recurring cell or hotbed, the rectory or vicarage, or the parsonage, has come to an end; and it is symbolic that Philip Carey is an exile from it. If there is a ruthless satire it is directed at the false, pretentious Pre-Raphaelite and Paterian aestheticism. But the burning question is: once one model has been destroyed, which new model shall we rely on? Before Maugham tries to answer, his protagonist descends into conscious nihilism and realizes at his own expense that life is not worth living. The many, too many, surrounding episodes, the various parallel plot lines, confirm that life is nothing but driftage. Eros itself is the most powerful of the illusions. The title, happily found after many others were discarded, parodically alludes to being a slave to passion and to the impotence of reason. The novel’s alternative title could be ‘reason and the passions’, or another suggestive of the untiring aspiration to base one’s life on detached principles of behaviour which the heart smashes one by one. The deformity of Philip Carey’s clubfoot is a transposition of the author’s real-life stutter, and it provokes a spasmodic sense of inferiority and exclusion in him. But the fact that it is a subtly seductive requisite, a permit for love, is not lost. It is indeed the elective mark of the Byronic man. However, the ease of the erotic conquest brings with it Hardy’s law of tragically mismatched love: a man burns with passion and the woman only lets herself be loved; if you want to make a man fall in love with you, you must treat him badly; and if you treat him well he hurts you. At the eleventh hour Of Human Bondage opts for a happy

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ending. A community of raving and phony intellectuals and artists and middle-class dreamers, whose mark is sterility, procreative sterility, is left and replaced by a more genuine one, of humble working folk who, despite the hardships, are always ready and willing to help, to help even middleclass people who ended up destitute through their own stupidity. Could there be anything more Dickensian? 3. One fifth of the novel, Philip’s school days, is dedicated to the comedy of the seaside town – the setting is in Kent, around Canterbury, but the names are changed – and to the satire of the vicarage. This needed a new Dickens so as not to create a sense of nausea and repetition.9 The boy’s slow loss of faith is due to a religiousness which is false and restrictive, punishing, exaggerated and not liberating. An excessively demonstrative scene, behind which one senses Mark Rutherford and Gosse, is Philip’s prayer to God asking him to heal his clubfoot, since faith can move mountains. At the prep school – another obligatory passage in the Victorian coming-of-age novel – the highly sensitive boy seeks and finds peculiar male friendships, but with contemporaries who soon forget about him. As the pages turn, as has been said, the pace of the narrative becomes calmly f  luvial, and picks up a variety of anecdotes and new acquaintances along the way. There are no real comical or humorous peaks, it all flows routinely, even too anonymously, though correctly and amiably. The episode of the ‘German boarding-house’ – reminiscent of a collection of sketches by young Katherine Mansfield, though certainly independent – contains subtle satirical swipes against the meanness and stinginess of the landlady, and hints at the first small emotional storms in a teacup. Philip is weaned, and his eyes are beginning to open. In the rather vague cultural calendar, Philip, who is nine years old in 1885, at eighteen faces the temptations of the waning of Decadentism in the form of conversations with the Oxford aesthete Hayward, largely fake and amateurish. In that moment the battles for and against Ibsen and Wagner are raging all across Europe, with the 9

His uncle the vicar is negative, while it is a nice Bennettian touch that his aunt, harsh at first, reveals an unexpectedly open mind when she secretly donates her own savings to Philip, who wants to become a bohemian artist in Paris and has decided to pawn the family jewels.

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resurgence of Schopenhauer’s pessimism. In parallel, with religion and faith declining to their nadir, as in Joyce, the religion of art arises. This discovery is imagined and narrated as the reverse of Jesus’s expulsion of Satan in the desert, and takes place on a hill from which the young Englishman, emerging from his shell, contemplates the beauty of the Rhenish landscape. When, after a year in Heidelberg, Philip returns to Canterbury, he is an agnostic ready for love, and he undergoes his erotic initiation with Miss Wilkinson, the not-so-young, nor beautiful, daughter of a rector. This episode is short, f  leeting, but proleptic. Philip conducts this flirtation with the clumsiness of the beginner, and makes one false move after another. There is nothing romantic about the flirtation, and at the highpoint of the seduction he notices the inveterate spinster’s complete lack of attractiveness. His disappointment upon seeing his ‘sweetheart’ without makeup, and undressed, is searing, although he tries to delude himself and forces himself to see the f  ling through an ideal filter. 4. Maugham’s female portraits – all but one misogynistic in this novel – begin with this ‘actress’ woman, who plays the role of the forlorn lover. Philip’s brief interlude in London as an accountant is reminiscent of Bennett’s early fiction, although from there Philip does not stretch his wings towards the career of the novelist, but towards that of a painter in Paris, where fanciful third-rate artists get bogged down in alcohol, rivalry, mental fog and blethering proclamations, like symbols of an insalubrious art which seems so even to the deluded Philip. His artistic education, though, has moved forwards towards a point of no return: the idols of Victorian aestheticism have by now been destroyed, and Philip is on the side of Manet and the impressionists. Seldom does Philip confirm his first impressions and attractions: after Miss Wilkinson, Ruth, a mediocre artist, also reveals her repugnance to a more cynical eye seeing her without shoes or stockings, expressed in her oversized feet with a corn on both her middle toes. Once he has left Paris and decided to study medicine in London, Philip finishes a short self-taught course in philosophy, convinced that life has no meaning; but this disheartened nihilism is immediately threatened by his encounter with the waitress Mildred. This figure is often presented with good reason as one of Maugham’s immortal creations, because she is a bewitching woman without being a witch, and she bewitches with her apathy and her candid

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lack of attractiveness. Her complexion is greenish, her profile spindly and flat, and her back imperceptibly curved and thus hunched. Those who say she is vulgar forget that she is anything but coarse, that she uses plenty of euphemisms, and is only apathetic and skin and bone and, because of this, snobbish. She is not a femme fatale except in her diaphaneity. ‘I don’t mind’10 is her symbolic and pregnant catchphrase. And thus she is the contradiction and refutation of romanticism, and the reduction of love to cold calculation. Platonically promiscuous, she is as slippery as an eel. Pragmatic, cynical, she knows what life means and what it costs. Let us say, then, that she is an unrecognizable Liza of Lambeth disguised as Carmen. Philip, who tries to be vigilant, falls into the trap which he himself has laid. Attraction is always mixed with repulsion and vexation. Mildred surprises him one of the first times when she announces out of the blue, after having weighed up Philip’s proposal, that she is getting married to a rich merchant, and Philip turns his attention to the sweet Norah. But Mildred makes a comeback to belie his newfound control over his passions. Almost up until the final scene, Philip is at the mercy of these passions which he himself does not comprehend, and which he would like to eradicate but cannot. And Mildred, following her own exclusive interests, and oblivious to her horrible gaffes, wraps him around her little finger, reeling him in and casting him out at her own pleasure. Maugham undoubtedly narrates in a masterful way these anguished situations of his hero; and the squabbles between the two lovers have a dryness and efficacy of a theatrical kind. His best friend has just finished denying that he wants to seduce Mildred, encouraging Philip, when he writes her a passionate letter which Mildred calmly shows to Philip, who coldly and disconsolately observes yet another of the confirmations, yet another proof, that everything is false, that man is slavish, cowardly and incapable of noble gestures. This continuous conflict and sense of being played with and bewitched could have tragic effects as in Hardy (Philip is in a certain sense a male Tess), but Maugham manages to avoid the melodrama and tragedy of Hardy, though Philip would have

10

Much further on there is an effective superimposition of Mildred on a prostitute Philip meets in Piccadilly, who utters the same phrase to him.

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the will and the rage for it.11 His condition becomes pure masochism. The fact that Griffiths, the friend who snatched her from him, in turn gets tired of Mildred, demonstrates both the mismatching and the ephemeral nature, as a matter of principle, of love, another Hardyan chord. Griffiths has mended his ways, and Mildred is now crying and bursting with love! Passion is always ‘unrequited’, now by one party, now by the other. Philip understands in the end that Mildred is not without passion, and that it is he who did not arouse her sexually.12 When he goes back to Norah, such is his superficiality that he does not realize that he is treating her in the same way as Mildred treated him. In conclusion, Philip ends up bashing his head against a brick wall and is forced to retreat and salvage something of the values he has rejected.13 The bearer of these is the shop assistant Athelny, a character with an exaggerated resemblance to Micawber who is the voice of a philosophy of optimism and of the Chestertonian good life. An eccentric patriot and a lover of authentically English pleasures, he celebrates the enthusiasm that no every-day adversity can extinguish. In the bosom of his numerous and uproarious family, Philip recovers his long-time inborn goodness, banishing all clingy cosmopolitanisms. It is true that, now a doctor who heals his fellow man, Philip has a third and fourth relapse with Mildred, as a consequence of an umpteenth Hardyan inversion in the regime of the passions. Philip, in yet another cohabitation with Mildred that he hopes will be platonic, is now too indifferent, and it is Mildred who becomes passionate about his love! But the sense of family and his desire to become a father prevail in the struggle. After the liberating death of his uncle, and Mildred gone forever, Philip becomes a paediatrician and obstetrician and so symbolically assists life, he who even 11

12 13

Equally ‘dramatic’ is the diabolical dilemma which Philip feels at the bedside of his dying uncle, whose death he desires and wants to accelerate as much as possible to receive the inheritance which he has a pressing need for: whether to give him a lethal dose of medicine, which nobody would find out about. With an abstruse argument, which hinges on Maugham’s discovery of El Greco’s homosexuality, Whitehead 1987, 77, maintains that the reason why Mildred does not yield to Philip is precisely his homosexuality. This repentance extends to art, with the repudiation of impressionism for El Greco’s transfigured realism.

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before had loved Mildred’s little daughter. Sally Athelny is plump, hefty and full of life; she is the procreative life force as much as Mildred had been ‘anaemic’. The rushed marriage takes place at the end of a rural idyll, and after that festive episode of the hop harvest which is perhaps one of the reasons why Orwell liked the novel so much.14 § 54. Maugham IV: ‘The Moon and Sixpence’. The artist, integrated and disintegrated Freely based on the life of Gauguin, The Moon and Sixpence15 (1919) seems to be a separate episode taken from The Human Bondage, and left out due to the overabundance of chapters set in Paris. An anonymous alter ego resembling Philip Carey studies, examines even, a failed painter, similar to many with no future who lost themselves in amateurishness, although a second one, Strickland, who aspires to the role of absolute and authentic artist, is contrasted with him. The parable closes with a curious, stupefied suspension of judgement on the human sacrifice which dedication to art seems to require. The first-person narrative is used for a refined imaginary pastiche, and a novice writer pretends to be an expert, a friend, a witness to this great English painter, Charles Strickland, whose paintings, scorned and even ignored while he was alive, are sold for dizzying sums now that he is dead, earning him the appraisal as a universal genius of painting. The epilogue, the climax of the artist’s career, first in Marseilles and then Tahiti, is written in the Conradian form of a testimony of a testimony, that is in the form of memories of other acquaintances of the painter put together there. Initially Maugham, who leads us to understand that that beginning is the fin-de-siècle of the final blazes of Decadentism, places an unbridgeable abyss between art and bourgeois life, almost aping Tonio Kröger.16 The opening scene is set in the Art Nouveau atmosphere of a well-off London,

14 15 16

Cf. Volume 8, § 25.3, for Orwell’s frequent references to this job by which poor people rounded up their earnings. The two terms stand in opposition: the moon is what Strickland seeks, without seeing the coin at his feet (Pfeiffer 1959, 74). Calder 1972, 83, instead places this Maugham in the ‘apprenticeship novel’ which descends from Goethe’s two Wilhelm Meister novels.

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with the whiff of Morris in the furnishings and Whistler and the postPre-Raphaelites in the decoration. A genius must in principle flee from a philistine environment, but a genius can lie unexpressed and stifled, and above all unsuspected, in the bosom of a quiet bourgeois family whose apparent happiness seems complete. As above all the hero of Lawrence’s The Trespasser, the artist incognito, who in his everyday life is an exchange broker, rejects the deaf hostility of the world and the routine of the quiet life and flees to Paris, not for the love of a woman but to realize his own absolute entelechy as an artist. The internal double of Maugham on the one hand cannot hide the fact that he is arriving in the capital of art to correct the artist, and is the voice of that stuffy moralizing that he shares; on the other hand he cannot but overturn the amateurish aestheticism that Lawrence in the end rebuked his protagonist for, and treat his own with the greatest respect. In other words he recognizes the artist’s freedom from the internal moral imperative, even if it leads to complete, even cruel and sadistic indifference towards his fellow men. Kant, then, is overturned by Nietzsche. This disciple of the superman is at the same time in accord with the homme fatal, with the same effects as in the female gender, when he snares the wife of a mediocre and also generous Dutch painter, as a reward for his numerous attentions and prescient esteem.17 Behind the devoted artist hides a diabolical satyr, who temporarily has the upper hand over the artist. As always Maugham’s artist hates appetites, satisfies them and then goes back to suppressing and thus hating them. In Tahiti the artist’s parable – a parable of creative passion for beauty, passion that cleanses itself of any concession to the human and the socialized, and which can find no other orgiastic crowning achievement than death – closes in a climate of perfect but terrifying necessity. If Maugham exempts his alter ego from speaking out about the human and emotional sacrifice which this parable requires, his final word strikes at the hypocrisy of the painter’s wife who, having loathed her husband in life, can honour his art in death.

17

This Blanche is herself endowed with Mildred’s apathy and ordinariness.

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§ 55. Maugham V: Plays of the 1920s The 1920s marked Maugham’s prolific and more mature return to theatre, with widely successful plays which are still performed to this day, though varied in their intrinsic value, in other words experimental works of research and denunciation alternated with successful and artful pieces. Their realism is tempered by the fact that they reduce and limit the scene to the sitting room of a rich house in Mayfair and the upmarket areas of London, or to a country estate which is the stomping ground of the same society living in idleness, imbibing tea and playing tennis and bridge. Critics have often observed, with some reason, that there is here a debt to the early novels of Waugh and their protagonists, the ‘bright young things’. The Unknown (1920) is first and foremost a ponderous play with a theological basis. Being a remnant of the internal debate in Of Human Bondage, for too long it sets against each other a valorous English soldier on leave during the war, who has lost his faith having seen a dear friend killed by the bombs, and the local vicar, subtly Hawthornian like the missionary in ‘Rain’,18 who wants to win him back over to the Church. The vicar embodies the noisy and smug rhetoric of war based on the binomial ‘country and faith’, and which guarantees divine support for the war; the soldier has come back disillusioned and disconcerted. This conflict is strengthened and duplicated in the figure of a mother who has lost two sons in the war and raises the complaint to an impotent god to stop the spread of evil and death in the world.19 Particularly weighed down by the arguments is Act II, at the end of which the soldier finds himself not only isolated in his family due to his stubborn unbelief, but also abandoned by his religious fiancée. With a naïve faith in a miracle, the woman brings the man back to the sacraments with a stratagem, but fails to make him a believer. The play closes with a negative result because, except for the soldier, everyone is convinced of the divine commandment to carry on the war to cleanse the world of sin.

18 § 58.2. 19 This woman’s daring remonstration, after the loss of her second son, is: ‘You say that God will forgive us our sins, but who is going to forgive God?’. The point is reiterated in chapter LXIX of The Summing Up.

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2. The Circle (1921) goes in the opposite direction, towards brilliant drawing-room theatre with the great female lead roles, and bubbling with witty dialogue and farcical and embarrassing situations like the opening one. In this scene the wife of a parliamentarian summons to her country house his mother and the lover with whom she has remarried, whom she has not seen for a long time, and also her father-in-law, to measure the endurance of her own romance, as – as in the novel Theatre – she has a relationship with a young gallant bachelor. Despite the unencouraging example, of the two in-laws continuously arguing, and the photographic demonstration of romance vanishing in an old age without romanticism, she nonetheless asks and obtains a divorce from her husband. If dramatic material is always thin on the ground in Maugham, in Our Betters (1923) it abounds, and we are in the presence of an ambitious play which could even be said to be multifocal. In the first act an excessive number of characters turns up in the Mayfair drawing room of the American Lady Grayston, wife of a rich lord, having the sole task of expounding en passant their present and past matrimonial affairs. Such a device, which sustains no storyline, fails because dramatic time is tyrannical and there is no way to focus on anyone, with the characters only being able to reel off incidental lines which exhibit, behind the shine, the emotional disorder of the entire bunch and the pathetic emotional fragility and dramatic sentimental incontinence which makes them nothing more than puppets. Too long are the excerpts of drawing-room banter on matrimonial intrigues and liaisons dangereuses and the skirmishes between the sexes, the work of titled dames fighting over young lovers in a climate of whirling promiscuity, as in Coward’s contemporary plays, but not nearly so good as in Coward. Brief courtship duets stand out from this multi-protagonist farce and take centre stage. The idea behind the play, or its naturalistic diagnosis, is a slightly updated version of one found in some of Maugham’s novels: that of the aims of wealthy America to marry an Englishry that is economically drained but possessing titles of nobility (according to one of the few self-aware characters, ‘they marry for a trumpery title’). The scourge of American fatuity and the now decadent, anachronistic aristocracy isolated in their bubble, is a young American exceptionally chaste and pure, an ingénu. At first sight Maugham apes the hated Henry James in this play; but one realizes that

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it is really a version of Shaw’s Heartbreak House. Even the quite linear and concrete, but predictably mechanical, The Constant Wife (1926) imitates Shaw and takes the side of female autonomy, with a well-to-do woman who acquires and obtains economic independence and also full sexual freedom from her adulterous husband. Her composed reaction to the discovery sees her level-headedly paraphrasing Maugham’s ubiquitous aphorism: ‘Human nature is very imperfect’.20 Consequently she does not ask for a divorce but obtains a more important goal, and it is paradoxically the cheating husband who must in the end play the moralizing champion against the scandal. 3. The Sacred Flame (1928), one of Maugham’s most tense and unpredictable plays, exploits the dramatic thriller card. It is still centred around adultery, but without the usual frivolous, mundane and farcical implications. The wife who is unfaithful to a paralysed and sexually impotent husband, and is carrying her brother-in-law’s child, may seem like an independent reworking or a presage of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley (which came out in the same year as the play). In the absence of any class divide between the lovers, one cannot in fact insist on the symbolically expired sexuality of the aristocracy, and eros is unleashed, predictably and repetitively of course, against the backdrop, and in memory, of Wagner’s Tristan. The surprise is that the paralysed husband is poisoned by his permissive mother who did not want to deny her daughter-in-law a normal sex life and, above all, wanted to spare her son any pain, while the voice of rigour is entrusted to the nurse who brought the case to light. It is for this reason that the play is also provocative and invites the public to reflect on whether sexual morals are relativistic and can change with the times. For Services Rendered (1932) came too late on an overworked theme, the consequences and repercussions of long-range war on combatants and also on those not participating. In the southern English suburbs where the play is set, dragging itself between fits of rage, whims and vain senile flirtations and attempted seductions, we sense a Chekhovian, resigned lack of prospects. One of the survivors is now blind and must be cared for by his sister; a naval officer works as a mechanic and is in dire straits; a third soldier is a drunkard. The voice of 20 Constance refuses the role of the ‘modern wife’, which she defines as that of ‘a prostitute refusing to deliver the goods’.

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socio-political condemnation against the historically guilty parties is feeble; the main target is the psychological scarring. Sheppey (1933), in which there are a few echoes of Galsworthy’s social dramas,21 strikes us, almost uniquely for Maugham, with its first act set in a barber’s shop like a distant play by Pinero,22 and a dialogue of short and telegraphic lines just a few words long, which seems to jump from one topic to another. Maugham tries with his protagonist to do the loquacious braggart with a Cockney streak, a veritable wellspring of sayings and maxims of popular wisdom, and ironic, playful, apparently light criticism of the system. The surprise scene is the announcement, in the beauty salon, of his winning a large sum of money at the races, a blessing from heaven which the barber receives with the Dickensian calm of the proletarian and an immediate foreboding of the curse of wealth. For this reason Sheppey may be considered a variant of Boffin in Our Mutual Friend. The paradoxical apologue is that to solve the problem of poverty and the wealth gap between the classes, charity is necessary, given the inertia of the political classes. The doubt remains to the end as to whether Sheppey, who is examined and found to be mentally ill, got everything wrong or is the last providential idealist to put the teachings of the gospel into practice. The cynical Maugham tends towards the second option, and for undue religious infatuation, since Sheppey himself must realize that his charity does not miraculously cure the dishonesty of the recipients. § 56. Maugham VI: ‘Cakes and Ale’. The subtle, caustic, metabiographical suggestions of the life of Hardy Cakes and Ale: or, the Skeleton in the Cupboard (1930) confirms the impression that the imaginary biography of a possible artistic genius, thrown from his pedestal, and in the intersection between reality and invention, is the genre in which Maugham excels, and which he ever more frequently falls back on. It also confirms that one of his themes is the recognition of the respective calls of life and art, of the poles of compromise and the absolute, and thus also the de-mythologizing of literary glory. First Gauguin, 21 22

As noted by D. MacCarthy (CRHE, 274). Volume 6, § 285.4.

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now Hardy, although, or perhaps precisely because, the real author in the later preface denies that Hardy was behind the novelist Ted Driffield. On the contrary, everything adds up and matches for Hardy, since Driffield is the ‘last great Victorian’, though not a native of Dorset but of Kent, but with more than twenty novels to his name, with his grim and archaic English, his passion for music and architecture, his career abruptly cut short in 1895 by a scandalous novel vituperated by public opinion, and above all two loves. One is a barmaid, Rosie, who inspired his best novels before running away with a lover, and another is his second wife, a nurse, who presently intends to write an ‘official’ idealizing biography.23 In reality there are two overlapping biographies blended together. Maugham cannot help putting in his own variously idealized autobiography, which remains a central focus of inexhaustible developments, and continues to emerge and seep through. Thus developing and perfecting the strategy of Of Human Bondage, where every so often he stood aside and dwelt on the cases of others, here Maugham disguises himself as one of his previous alter egos, namely William Ashenden,24 but in essence he is still Philip Carey. The story of Driffield, of which Ashenden-Maugham is an intermittent witness, slots into his autobiography of a seventeen-year-old son of a rector who goes to London to become a doctor with the dream of becoming a 23

One of the few to pointedly exclude any connection with the figure of Hardy was Evelyn Waugh (CRHE, 187–9). In general critics prefer to list some aspects which unite and others which divide Driffield and Hardy. 24 Ashenden: Or the British Agent (1928), a collection of pleasant and varied short spy stories, inspired by Maugham’s work as a secret service agent during the First World War. The string is based on the figure of a writer employed in Geneva on some anti-German spying missions which create fantastic adventures as an end in themselves, some curious and sensational, others gallant, but hardly ever bursting with suspense. They influenced Ian Fleming and the 007 cycle (the head of the secret services in Fleming has the code name ‘R’, the same as in Maugham). Many of the movements – especially that of the last story, from Vladivostok to Petrograd – take place by train, inaugurating a device that seemed to re-emerge in one of Greene’s early novels, Stamboul Train. Greene (who enjoyed these short stories: cf. CRHE, 290–2) was to do much more, adding a whirl of vicissitudes to Maugham’s rather static paradigm. Lawrence, on the other hand, did not appreciate these stories about Ashenden (CRHE, 176–7).

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writer. The construction is now infinitely more agile, more mature, and more sophisticated, going back and forth continuously and often surreptitiously between narrative periods. Memorable snippets of the past alternate with returns to the present, beginning with the incipit which, set in the present, abruptly draws back from Driffield as an old man to the young Driffield. The particular metaliterariness of Cakes and Ale is that Maugham, with a divided consciousness, pretends to be a writer who can abstract himself from the fray, so as to be able to debunk the very literary world which he is a part of, with its conventions, its laws and its pretensions. An initial conclusion to arrive at through his alter ego is that English society was just as hypocritical in 1890 as it was in 1930. Ashenden is the grandson of a rector and is an innate puritanical moralizer, but he is tickled by the immoral and, especially, amoral life which the young Driffields give him clear and unprejudiced proof of. They reject and scoff at the codes of the day with a courageous ethic; they effect absolute superiority over rigid conventions, and precisely for that they are the very personification of scandal in the God-fearing village. Gently, merrily, primordially promiscuous, Rosie is glowing and benign in nature and gives herself to her fellows without discrimination (and Joyce’s Molly Bloom had already been a literary legend for eight years). Ashenden himself comes into her life and becomes her temporary lover and the expert in carpe diem, even, and especially, of the carnal variety. But the Hardyan law that passion is always ephemeral ensures that one fine day Rosie dumps the novelist and runs off with an old flame. Maugham treats Driffield as Henry James had incomparably illustrated Browning in one of his short stories.25 He is the example of a double life, one public and one secret. But he makes use of this to set up a sceptical and almost metaphysical discourse on literary fame. Will fame last? Was that of Driffield true glory? Will time not put even that enormous esteem immediately after his death into perspective, as often happens? No one, unless they have lived in close contact with celebrity, can then imagine the wretched, even annoying, consequences of fame. The writer’s career is also demanding, the accomplished writer must even

25

Volume 4, § 105.2.

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reject fame and its tiresomeness; with the only small compensation that he is free to get his own back and vindicate himself with the pen. Ashenden, this voice in the wilderness, sketches a juicy satire, a parody even, of literary life, of the literary underworld and the critical and biographical industry in the final instants of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Cakes and Ale is punctuated with digressive essays, naturally half-serious, of veritable criticism of Driffield’s, and thus of Hardy’s, novels, which delineate their themes and their hallmarks, and which parody the language of criticism. In perverse and cruel digressions Ashenden, the naïve writer, launches a bitter and philistine attack on the narratological and critical theories of Waugh, Forster and Muir. In the drawing rooms he frequents, he may meet the sponsoring baroness or the poet who is a fallen star. The biographer Alroy Kear is the amateur and mediocre writer who must bring Driffield’s supposed genius to light.26 Ashenden is aware of the skeletons in the cupboard, the weaknesses, the idiosyncrasies of national glory, which he is careful not to reveal to the official biographer. Cakes and Ale is thus the supreme parody of the Victorian biography of great writers, who often forbade biographies to be written to protect their privacy and hypocritically maintain the veil of discretion over their shortcomings and their low moral standards.27 § 57. Maugham VII: The amnesty of adultery The theme uniting many of Maugham’s principal novels between 1920 and 1940 is adultery, with the breakdown of a marriage believed to be ideal and indestructible but undermined. These cases all agree in admitting, without drama, the ease and suddenness with which erotic passion catches out even the most cautious and controlled. Except that the voice of the author, camouflaged in a few witnesses who are placed just outside the plot they are observing, refrains from expressing disapproving judgements: if anything it expresses pity. The spiritualistic suggestions and even

26 His equivalent is the writer Hugh Walpole. 27 Critical even of himself, Maugham discouraged any attempt to write his own official biography (Pfeiffer 1959, 19).

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the Catholic sympathies in The Painted Veil28 (1925) – which Maugham said was inspired by, if not directly transposed into modern dress from, the episode of Pia in Dante (Purg., V) – were to fascinate the problematic Catholic, Graham Greene, in The Heart of the Matter and A Burnt-Out Case.29 They are exceptional in Maugham for this reason. To all appearances there is more than a literal dialectic recurrence between this one of Maugham and Greene’s two much later novels. In his semi-dramatic novel, a chamber theatre script with stage directions reduced to a minimum and everything centring on the four protagonists, Maugham surprisingly writes a highly symmetrical parable of guilt, punishment and atonement, demonstrating a singular respect, if not an open sympathy, for a life model of responsibility, moral rectitude, altruism, and thus disavowing pleasure, hedonism and carnal passion. Greene is prefigured first of all because the plot is based on adultery in an exotic land, Hong Kong, although the adulterer is the woman and not the man. The setting is that of the upper echelons of the British imperial service. Kitty is the wife of a bacteriologist, and her lover, Charlie, is the charming colonial vice-secretary. The pair are caught in the act, but not reported straightaway, by Kitty’s husband, a clumsy, introverted ‘knight’ whom she married without love. A damper is put on the torrid and indissoluble passion which Kitty believes binds Charlie to her when he receives a frank warning that his career would be damaged and ruined by the scandal of a possible divorce on either side. Walter Fane, the bacteriologist, at this point shows the theological lucidity of Greene’s Scobie in offering his wife extortion and a test, namely, as an alternative to divorce, leaving for a region of China devastated by a cholera outbreak. It is a diabolical and at once providential dilemma: Walter thought it up to punish his unfaithful wife with probable death

28 Pfeiffer 1959, 89, considered Maugham, in 1959, to be ripe for conversion to Catholicism; Cordell 1961, 48, seems to deny it. Don Fernando (see also n. 35 below) contains a section of objective, respectful discussion of St Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises, and biographies of other Spanish saints. In the autobiography The Summing Up, Maugham notes the cultural and linguistic benefits which were lost with the ‘secession from Rome’ (chapter XII), and regrets not being a Catholic (chapter XV). 29 Cf. Volume 8, §§ 53 and 54.2, for the references to Greene made here.

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through contagion, but at the same time it is an ordeal from which she might emerge purified. In Greene’s A Burnt-Out Case, the accomplished Belgian architect finds a glimmer of faith amongst the missionaries in a leper colony in the Congo; in Maugham, Kitty is witness to decimation by cholera and, visiting the mission’s Catholic convent, embarks on a path of purgation. She thinks over what has happened, she mends her ways, she repents and, overwhelmed by more dramatic and greater realities, decides to help the nuns of the convent and become a missionary. In the middle of this Via Crucis she finds out she is pregnant, and above all she does not die of cholera but her husband does. Providence and divine justice preferred then to save the lost sheep, or perhaps to punish the husband’s sinful and diabolical intentions. But soon the nuns no longer need Kitty, who reluctantly returns to Hong Kong and, to demonstrate the precariousness of the renunciation of passion, relapses into the temptation of carnal desire. However, she is immediately disgusted by it. The daughter who is soon to be born will not end up like her.30 2. In The Narrow Corner (1932) Maugham studies a group of uprooted, transplanted and thus alienated Europeans who are hiding a distant stain and vainly trying to cover it up because it keeps on coming back to haunt them; they are powder kegs, dormant volcanoes, embers kept covered and ready to flare up. The origin and inspiration seem to be Stevenson’s stories of the ‘south seas’31 and those of Conrad on the ‘outcasts of the islands’, along with influences from Indian philosophy and, as we shall see, from Kierkegaard. Developing this archetype in a plausible story – that is, putting these psychologies in contact and having them interact – is a more inconclusive task. The beginning of The Narrow Corner is entirely occupied by an old English eye doctor who is considered a small local miracle worker, and is the first of the fugitives from the civilized world in the

30

31

A similar narrative structure is turned upside down in the story, and in the homonymous play descended from it, ‘The Letter’ (1927), set in Malaya, where at the trial an adulteress is acquitted of having killed her lover in self-defence against a sexual assault. The murder was dictated by jealousy for the man who was tired of her. The true version of events emerges at the end in the form of a confession. Whitehead 1987, 106.

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East Indies. He lives alone in a little house on the riverbank and confesses to having been struck off at home for some unspecified failing. He is a conscious ‘outcast’ who manages his alienation and alleviates it, not the pessimist but the natural and indulgent philosopher who helps humanity without idealisms. He travels to get to know and to feel the contradictions of human nature, and this is the initial sense of the not exactly compelling parable, which makes up for the lack of tension by resorting to scenes of landscapes and the sea and local curiosities, while still giving the vague idea of something looming. He and two other whites – a talkative captain with a shady and ambiguous past and a handsome Australian, Fred, who, we later discover, is on the run after having killed a man – form a colourful trio of personalities, each with his own skeleton in the cupboard or at least a story which he will later have to tell or confess in a string of recollections and flashbacks. Travelling, also metaphysically, in search of themselves on a rusty boat, the trio land on an island of the East Indies, where they meet up with another trio, forming a sextet. In the second white microcommunity a young, dreamy and unreal Dane, Erik, stands out; a sales representative, he continually quotes Shakespeare. Erudite, mild-mannered and neat, his head held high and never ignoble, his surname could only be Christessen; he is in love with Louise, the daughter of the rich planter Frith, and is engaged to her. The number of philosophers amongst the six rises to three, and the third is Louise’s father, who is passionate about translating from Portuguese, translates Camões’s epic poem, and above all explains the treasures of the Hindu religion of detachment and transmigration of souls. The human contradiction is demonstrated in Louise yielding at first sight to Fred’s courtship. Passion suddenly flares up without either of them realizing or being able to explain it.32 Tragedy is the result of the allegorical struggle between realism and idealism: having caught the two lovers and discovered his fiancée’s unfaithfulness, Erik does not kill anyone but kills himself, overwhelmed by the ultimatum33 or by Kierkegaard’s feeling of 32 33

This is in the scholastic, once again too predictable, contour of Wagner’s Tristan music flowing from the gramophone. As Pfeiffer 1959, 145, notes, Maugham’s women are prone to ‘yield suddenly and inexplicably to an impulse to fornicate’. ‘And so why not kill me or her, rather than himself ?’.

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anguish: Erik ‘killed himself because he couldn’t survive the shock of finding out that the person whom he’d endowed with every quality and every virtue was, after all, but human’. 3. Theatre (1937) revisits the world of theatre when Maugham had long since given up on writing plays. It is in fact a semidramatic novel, that is, with a lot of dialogue in closed settings. It is entirely built up around the senile carnal tremblings of Julia Lambert, an actress in the sunset of her career, who upsets a happy and fulfilling marriage by falling for a dull and common accountant who is a small, entrepreneurial poor man’s Don Juan. The marriage seems to be solid, but it is not, and it falls apart leaving her at first feeling rejuvenated; but the young man fatally dumps her for other lovers. In those days adultery was a predictable topic in theatre and fiction, and a few years earlier Waugh had dedicated A Handful of Dust to a crisis which a young and close-knit couple had not bargained for. Maugham is also more impassive than Waugh in not accusing the woman, who falls into the category of human ‘slaves’ to the risk of erotic passion; so there is no hint of moralizing in the novel. In the end, then, the actress draws on a sense of joyous liberation from erotic passion itself. The first pages of Christmas Holiday (1939) confirm how suitable and fitting Maugham’s childhood memories of Paris were, judging from the vivid and effortless account of the first impressions of the young Charles Mason, son of a rich family with vain artistic ambitions, upon his arrival in Paris. There is some pleasing resemblance between Charles and Philip Carey, but the novel soon runs aground and the story comes to a standstill when two further storylines are incorporated, that of his fellow student Simon who as a Paris correspondent for a newspaper has imposed upon himself a programme of self-discipline, including sexual and emotional, and dreams of a communist revolution in England; and, even more damaging for the novel’s development, that of the Russian prostitute, Lydia, who in various retrospective sessions recounts to the young Englishman her odyssey as a deportee after the Bolshevik revolution. The good, kind-hearted and uprooted prostitute nostalgic for a homeland she has never known is an unusual character in Maugham; the political and above all the religious motif which acts as a backdrop are also unprecedented. It is not depraved passion that led Lydia to sell her body in the upmarket brothels of Paris; if she has degraded herself it is to atone for the sins of her husband, a thief and murderous criminal.

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4. The Razor’s Edge (1944), the most famous of Maugham’s later novels, follows the deep-seated habit of composing non-continuous scenarios, made up of episodes always recalled after the fact by direct and indirect witnesses, and interspersed with temporal gaps. The calendar of events stretches from the very first years after the war until after the Wall Street Crash of 1929, in scenes set in the regions such as America, England, Germany, India and, inevitably, the epicentres in Paris and the Riviera. In some ways The Moon and Sixpence proliferates at a great distance, and Maugham writes a novel – an imaginary biography once again – repeating its structure. He enters the scene this time with his real name and surname and his true identity as a successful and worldly novelist, a curious traveller in the five continents, who now witnesses a parable the same and different to that of Gauguin’s double, ambitiously palingenetic to a world falling apart. A secondary internal character, called Elliott, only has a couple more letters in his surname than Eliot, and the ‘waste land’ is the middle-class America of economic success and luxury. Its saviour is Larry, traumatized by the war in which he was a pilot, and from which he returned to Chicago lethargic, apathetic, unable to reintegrate into society, and absent-minded enough to break off an engagement which would have assured him a comfortable life. Larry, an idling former serviceman, seems like yet another fugitive from conventions eager to follow his interior dictates; but he himself remains the main biographer and historian of his own thirst for answers to the meaning of life, at the end of which, after various instructive vicissitudes, he finds in India, and in the contemplative detachment from the passions, the motivation to return to his country and redeem it. The ending, which shows Larry departing in the guise of a preacher, is sui generis religious, at least in the sense that Larry demonstrates to himself the historical inadequacy of Christianity and experiences the astonishment of the answers to life in Hinduism. A good twenty years after The Waste Land Hindu teachings could still find a captivated follower in Maugham.34 But the whole recollection of the Indian experience is banal and Larry’s spiritual journey is 34 The charm of the Vedanta and Indian culture had of course come overwhelmingly back into fashion thanks to Huxley and Isherwood, with the mediation of Gerald Heard (Volume 8, §§ 14.4 and 32.4 n. 15). Critics often point to Isherwood as being

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diluted in many incidental scenes of pure external bordering. The journeys and cosmopolitan amusements of the rich Europeanized Americans can also be read as a Jamesian parody.35 § 58. Maugham VIII: The short stories Maugham authored 100 odd short stories, a considerable number which, together with the remarkable quality of a good many of them, confirms him as one of the greatest English short-story writers of the century. They follow the writer’s experiences, and his voyages and sojourns in various parts of the world. They were therefore written in several stages and this genre was cultivated right from the beginning over a period of fifty years. The device of his short story does not, however, change over time, and is somewhat classic. As in his fiction, Maugham passes unscathed through the literary revolutions of the early and later twentieth century, so the dating of each individual story can be comfortably ignored. Professional, well structured, often scintillating, they are never excessively profound, with a few exceptions. Often, but not always, Maugham appears in them in the flesh, with almost his true identity, as a witness and linking element. The narration follows the rules of the orderly short story. The physical and psychological traits of the characters involved are presented almost immediately; then a small plot line opens out, converging on a swift ending, in

35

behind Larry, with the habitual variations that Maugham was able to impose on the sources. Then and Now (1946), one of Maugham’s two final novels, brings Machiavelli and Cesare Borgia onto the scene, while the second, Catalina (1948), also historical, coming out fifty years after his debut, celebrates Spain, which the author had admired since his youth. The story reads like a fable with a few hints from Firbank, but it treats Mediterranean superstition at the time of the Inquisition with respect. A young and beautiful Spanish woman, crippled like Philip Carey, has a vision of the Virgin Mary who tells her she will be healed by one of three brothers; the healing is not carried out by the bishop, nor by the valorous captain, but by the third brother, a simple baker. Afterwards Catalina gets married, becomes a mother to six children and a successful actress on the Spanish stage. Also about Spain is the best non-fiction book by Maugham, Don Fernando (1935), notes for a novel never written, which Graham Greene was enthusiastic about (CRHE, 290–2).

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some cases ambiguous and enigmatic. But there are just as many cases in which the story – as in his novels – rather than moving forwards, goes back on itself, in the form of long recollections of previous events explained to the external witness, who has only noticed a few clues and seeks explanation.36 Of course there is always some form of screen and one cannot speak of realism. The range of observation and setting is limited to affluent society which has nothing to do and is unvaryingly to be found on holiday or having fun and amusing themselves playing tennis or bridge, or at the club being served liquors and cocktails. The common man struggling with the real difficulties of day-to-day life is nowhere to be found. At every latitude Maugham, who immediately after the war had begun to travel far and wide throughout the world, especially in the Indian subcontinent and Indochina, finds proof that human nature is weak, or even ‘odd’. This is conveyed in the form of aphorisms thrown around randomly, and disproportionate, commenting on dazed or common episodes which do not support them.37 A good deal of them are set in Malaya and the south seas, and the result is much the same as the diagnoses of Kipling and Conrad: the unease of the isolated, often also lost, westerner in colonial territories. One in two ends in paranoid suicidal or homicidal madness. 2. ‘The Bookbag’ effectively links the biography of Byron to the incestuous love of an English planter for his sister. ‘The Outstation’, even in its title, is a rather Conradian story; it also is in its development, because it centres on the tragic conflict of two agents of the station along the river in an almost literal allusion to Almayer’s Folly. ‘Rain’, Maugham’s best known and most quoted short story, takes place on the Pacific island of Pago Pago, and starts off with a sketch of a Hawthornian minister who in his crazed and apocalyptic delirium wants to eradicate evil and sin from

36 This technique of imbrication, which Whitehead 1987, 86, calls ‘Chinese boxes’, is perfectly orchestrated in the story ‘Red’, set in Samoa, made up of three stories encapsulated within an external frame and narrated to a sailor who arrives on the islands. 37 In ‘The Mother’, set in Seville, Maugham gives a sample of Hispanic fierce showiness and possessiveness. The habit of aphorism came to Maugham from having read La Rochefoucauld in his youth (Cordell 1961, 18).

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the world and have a prostitute expelled who is sowing immorality across the island. The modern sign of evil is a gramophone, which broadcasts bawdy and arousing music as a backdrop to dodgy parties in the crumbling hotel where, due to the torrential rain and an epidemic, the small mixed community of whites and natives are forced to live together. The minister is sure he will convert the prostitute, sings the praises of the miracle and quite inappropriately quotes the gospel story about ‘let he who is without sin cast the first stone’. In reality he who lives by the sword dies by the sword, and the crusade against evil predictably ends, during the nights in which he feverishly entertains the prostitute to read her the Bible and pray with her, falling into the very carnal sin that is his anathema. One morning he is found on the seashore with his throat cut. The story, as long as a short novel, struggles to get started, but rushes towards the unexpected and chilling epilogue, mounting an act of accusation against clouded religion and ringing out in defence of a more tolerant one and more willing to forgive, a New Testament religion rather than an Old Testament one. The missionary’s opponent is an enlightened doctor who, without any specific faith, applies a practical and tolerant ethic of aid. A vein of humour prevails in the stories set in Europe. ‘The Luncheon’ is the witty memory of a painful lunch at a luxury Paris restaurant, offered by the penniless Maugham, or his stand-in, to an attractive lady who, claiming never to eat more than a single course, orders the most succulent and, above all, most expensive, dishes. ‘Appearance and Reality’ is one of Maugham’s frequent and perfidious misogynous stories cloaked in humour. A mature French senator agrees with a younger rival to divide between them the love of a very young model, in a context that might appear cynical once again, were it not that the dialogue resounds with surprising foretastes of Beckett’s absurd. Female obesity, the obsession with diets, and thus the satire of the world of women are the ingredients of ‘The Three Fat Women of Antibes’, whose protagonists, tired of slimming remedies, in the end go on a binge. The plot loses ground to characterization, but a comical situation with Boccaccesque repercussions can be found in ‘The Facts of Life’, an account of the vicissitudes of the young English student who goes to Montecarlo and gets duped by the beautiful gold-digger who robs him, and is in turn robbed.

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§ 59. Chesney, Buchan, Saki and the ‘war of the future’ Strange and timely is the concentration of novels and short stories, around the long decade 1901–1914, which rave about the German threat against England, forming a small current called in German Zukunftskriegroman, or, in English, invasion literature. They are of varying artistic level, but higher than a more anonymous mass,1 and they are steeped in blind conservatism, oozing with revanche, apocalyptic even if sometimes playful, and nostalgic for an old, rural merrie England. We can here look at three of them by as many writers. The Battle of Dorking (1871) by George Tomkyns Chesney (1830–1895), a career soldier in India and Tory member of Parliament, is a very factual short story told as if by a grandfather to his grandchildren around the events of 1871 fifty years on, thus in 1921. It superimposes two events: the danger already widespread in 1871 after the Paris Commune and that which would recrudesce again in and before 1914, of a German threat which would lead to a world war. Considering the date of the novel, one cannot help but note the exceptional prophetic value, for, though he foresaw the danger, Chesney died a good two decades before his prophecy came true. A dystopian, Orwellian text, The Battle of Dorking foresees that danger of a German invasion would be unexpected, and would take place overnight; it was perceived, yet ignored. This invasion is, from the conservative point of view, England’s humiliation. It was the breakdown, the grandfather recalls, of a good social model, made such by free trade and affluence, and it was unwittingly a golden age. In 1870 it was a mistake not to rearm, a mistake due also to the radicals’ pacifism. The army and navy were recklessly dispersed in far-off wars. And the French disaster passed unobserved. In itself the little novel is a vibrant and prescient attack on the pacifist politics of the English radicals who, vetoing rearmament, weakened the nation and made it faint-hearted, as 1

A more complete map – of that which Bergonzi calls the narrative of the fin du globe, of the widespread sense of the end of a civilization in the closing years of the century – can be found in his own The Early H. G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances, Manchester 1961, 12 and 135 and n. 14. A fourth novel of this kind, often analysed, is The Riddle of the Sands, from 1903, by Erskine Childers (1870–1922), in which a certain Carruthers, a clerk at the Foreign Office, double-crosses.

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well as vulnerable to a possible German assault. The navy loses the battle and the land invasion leads on from that. The constant theme is that of tardiness: the horse had bolted, the political, and perspective, errors were irreparable. If the England that is lost is an Eden, this Eden is desecrated, sullied, deflowered by the Germans. The tone is soon like a news bulletin, and it follows the movements and the phases of the invasion and the resistance by the volunteers, of whom the writer pretends to be one speaking in the first person. Episodes of valour and pathos, and stoic heroism – the body of the volunteer’s little son placed alongside that of his fallen father, with the mother and wife doing all she can to help the other fighters as a nurse – punctuate a story which is nonetheless made up of pure military movements. 2. In the equally short novel The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) by the Scot John Buchan (1875–1940), Richard Hannay is Buchan himself just back in London from South Africa.2 Bored and listless, Hannay encounters an anti-Semitic American journalist on the landing of his flat in Portland Place, a certain Scudder, who reveals to him that a European conflict is about to break out which he must thwart: the Greek Prime Minister visiting London will be assassinated by a secret society. The Hitchcockian sense of menace is already felt in Scudder’s murder in the hiding place which Hannay had found for him. Once the spy has been eliminated, the secret society’s manhunt begins. The novel does not come alive so much from the sense of historical threat, that attack that unleashed the First World War, though it is a presage of it, as from the atmospheric and metaphysical, threat. It is a manhunt which the man foils in a rousing chase, resorting to the resources of intelligence and wise composure, proper to an accomplished detective (‘I wasn’t any kind of Sherlock Holmes’, but it is a denegation). Hannay’s first exploit is swapping places with the milkman, and from there he flees on a train towards Scotland, whence a fast-paced picaresque picks up, made up of encounters in the street and in the marshes and the countryside, as well as of unspecified symptoms of terror, and friendly, unfriendly and mysterious 2

Educated in Glasgow and then Oxford, Buchan emigrated to South Africa where he helped with the reconstruction after the Boer War. A lawyer, elected to Parliament in 1927, in 1935 he became ambassador to Canada, where he died.

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apparitions. All this is mixed with a colourful human variety of eccentrics and misfits and with a number of circumscribed episodes, like the one in which Hannay, rescued from a car accident, delivers a speech to a masonic lodge, pretending to be a supporter of free trade. Deciphering the coded language in a notebook, he has the revelation of a war plan threatening the very security of Britain. We breathe the now pregnant atmosphere of the eve of war, the moment of rearmament, especially naval, of the British fear of having lost or to be about to lose their dominion over the sea. Here lies the mark of the German threat, but Buchan flashes it in a relieved and humorous way. The trio of pursuers, the Black Stone, works for Germany, and a few words are exchanged in German. Within the chain of mistaken identities Hannay is besieged. He takes on the guise of a road worker and even gets questioned by the surveyor. The murder of the Greek minister cannot be thwarted, and in London Hannay is reintegrated; yet he feels that he must do something against the sense of impending menace, and he feels it as a simple citizen whose conscience is asking him to intervene. Then he plans to block the leaking of the news. Constant surveillance of the movements inside a villa discovers an apparently normal trio.3 Did he get it all wrong? The group’s arrest is happily successful, but until the end Hannay cannot identify the three who had been following him. And the war breaks out. 3. In the first and by far the best of the film versions, that of Hitchcock (1935), an analysis of which I shall allow myself to sneak in here, Hannay is suspected of the murder of a beautiful female spy. Hitchcock takes this romantic detour by hinting at a flirtation which could take place between the man and the woman. In reality there is a good dose of comedy mixed into this suspense: the opening scene takes place in a London music hall where an entertaining curtain raiser – a man who can remember dates and records – is interrupted by a gunshot which causes a general commotion. The beautiful Mata Hari is a guest in Hannay’s house (we do not know where he comes from, Canada, perhaps), but the woman dies in the night, stabbed with a knife. After the milkman’s sketch, which is in the novel, 3

The three-member Black Stone is caught and stopped in the zone of the 39 steps, tracked down after a complex search along the coast of Britain.

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Hannay takes the train to Scotland where the character that the spy was supposed to meet is, while Hannay’s photo is already all over the morning newspapers reporting the foul deed. The second sketch is in the train, where two travelling salesmen – blatantly homosexual – jest heartily, pulling out of their bags the female underwear they are selling. The third sketch takes place in the Scottish farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, where the rough Scottish Presbyterian owner believes Hannay has come to commit adultery with his wife. The woman, kept on short rations, takes pity on the fugitive – already being hunted by the police on the train – and helps him to f  lee when the police arrive in the middle of the night. The rest of the film follows the plot of the novel, always a nail-biter peppered with humour. Hannay ends up in the clutches of the very spy who wants to sell the secret, and who bears the mark of a chopped little finger; he is mortally wounded by him, or more exactly he is not, because in the inside pocket of his coat there was a bulletproof hymn book. Another chase, daring and funny, takes place, but of the hitmen of the spies, who catch Hannay at a meeting where he is an infiltrator. Another exciting episode is when Hannay and Pamela arrive handcuffed together at the Scottish inn, where they are helped by the conniving landlady who thinks they are a couple of newly-weds, while Pamela, at first recalcitrant, in the end understands that Hannay is not a murderer. From here on Hitchcock reduces the derring-do of the novel, creating not a remake but an almost autonomous film, which ends with the arrest of the professor with the amputated finger, during a variety show: he was about to obtain that state secret from that memory fiend who appeared in the first scene of the film. An imperceptible handshake clarifies to us that there is a happy ending for the couple. But nothing about the final capture, described in the novel, in the mysterious seaside town and the 39 steps. Hitchcock has thus transformed chaos, as Buchan’s little novel is with its swashbuckling twists and turns, into a lean and symmetrical script which is much more cohesive. In the film, for example, we relish, and see developed, an idea that was only hinted at in the book, or one could even say was absent; Hitchcock therefore exploited it as a field of free stimuli. So the fact of having cut from the film the ending in the maritime landscape of the 39 steps turns into an advantage. This is evident in the implied but unmistakable texture of the erotic or sensual hints, which

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starts from the fact that the spy killed at the beginning is not a man, as in the book, but a woman. Hannay is a dapper gentleman who we can imagine is a bit of a lady-killer, and at first his meeting at the variety show with Annabella looms like the classic seduction at first sight, the two of them arranging to meet immediately at his place with brazen nonchalance, so much so that we can imagine them soon finding themselves in bed together. This series of naughty insinuations continues on the train where, as has been said, the two salesmen sniggeringly show off panties and bras. The underwear theme is continued shortly with tights. The charmer Hannay meanwhile almost seduces the God-fearing Scotswoman with the overly chaste husband: she hides the gift and token of her love in the form of her husband’s coat with which she helps Hannay to escape. But the climax of these allusions and of playing with fire – for those days – is the friction and then complicity which is created between the two fugitives, Hannay and the beautiful Pamela. In the room at the inn where the seduction could take place, the attractive blonde first of all takes off her soaking wet stockings. Hannay goes to help her, but the woman brushes him off, though she reveals a bit of thigh and we see her unfasten her suspenders. Her stockings are then hung up in the warmth of the fireplace in full view. The pair are then so tired that they cannot commit adultery (they have devoured some sandwiches at least); but the blonde has time to wrap herself on the sofa in a blanket stolen from a sleeping Hannay. The scene is spiced up, offstage, by the sniggers and winks of the innkeepers. 4. The subtitle of When William Came4 (1913) by Saki is: ‘A Story of London Under the Hohenzollerns’, and it thus imagines that the feared moment has arrived and Prussian domination has been established over England after the years 1870–1871 described by Chesney (these novels and short stories are intertwined and echo each other). England invaded and subjugated in its freedom is viewed as an upper-class society of overly refined hedonists. The survivor Murrey Yeovil’s wife, Cicely, is fond of looking at herself in the mirror, she lives in the best possible way in the best possible world, cultivates decadent friendships with piano virtuosos, 4

On the collection of sketches by Saki cf. Volume 6, § 247.5.

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whom she consumes and thus gradually replaces, and is practically separated from her husband, just back from a long exile in Siberia. She dines on rare foods, like asparagus, mushrooms, caviar and crab, washed down with Rhenish wine; her entourage is pleasure-loving, exuberant and superficial. Murrey Yeovil has only one thing on his mind: how to resist, how not to grow accustomed to the fait accompli, accepted without a fight by the fainthearted and carefree bourgeois community, who live just as well thanks to the tolerance of the enemy occupiers. Yeovil was not in his homeland when the Blitzkrieg broke out and was lost. But it is not the war feared after 1871; it is, rather, a war following a colonial-type diplomatic incident which took place in east Africa. Yet the causes are the same, the superior armament of the enemy. The consequences are that the king has transferred his court to India, and a puppet Parliament legislates. Murrey returns to witness a Germanized country, and signs now in two languages. Alien and uprooted, an impulse of repulsion, protest and rejection rises in him. The novel is an unmistakable, umpteenth presage of Nineteen Eighty-Four, because Yeovil is, like Orwell’s Winston, the only one left who is capable of not letting himself be overwhelmed to accept the status quo. He uses reason and memory, he does not conform, he is the critical conscience of the nation. Unlike in Orwell, there is no dictatorship; society is oblivious, and memory falls apart and is drowned in every-day life. A vaguely similar situation, but painted in a merrier light, had been depicted at the same time in Chesterton’s first fantasy work, The Napoleon of Notting Hill. This enervated society in search of exquisite pleasures speaks in Wildean quips and wisecracks, and the drawing room resounds with them. The plot is flawed because it hosts incidental events which aim to illustrate the vacuity of the amusements that are all the rage, which Saki nonetheless describes with a verve that is always a bit affected (like the premiere of Gorla’s ballet). The ultimate question is: will Britain be assimilated in the end? The regime has imposed prohibitions and bans, overturning British tolerance; it is no longer allowed to walk on the grass in parks, and those who transgress are fined. How do the poor people get along? The inquiry is entrusted to Yeovil’s chance encounter with a priest who tells of general discontent and how the poor have wandered from the faith. But Yeovil, who is urged on by an old and moribund Scottish patriot, a woman, is apathetic and does

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not resort to violence: he senses, feels the nascent rebellion, but does not lead it. Moreover, the novel sinks in a series of disconnected and not always vivid sketches of dialogue, which demonstrate alternative scenes either of the rectitude of the less well-off, marginalized classes, or of the empty pomp of the well-to-do classes. One scene takes place is in a Turkish bath, and there they talk about the stages of a masked ball. § 60. The Georgian poets There were five anthologies of Georgian poetry (named after George V) edited by Edward Marsh (1872–1953), Churchill’s personal secretary, on alternate years from 1912 (six if a supplementary volume of 1933 is included). The initiative had a mixed aim: neo-romantic because sentimental embellishments, vague emotions, singsong rhythms, verbal music for its own sake, fantastical and dream-like lyric poems, and traditional technique were required of the poets. But at the same time the intention was also to react to Victorian pomp and grandiloquence with a diction that was more direct and bare. The general objective was to create a hortus conclusus against the influences of modern civilization. Hence the bucolic, rural scenes, together with a sense of exotic escapism. Lawrence reviewed the first anthology – apologizing for doing so as he was also one of the authors – in an apocalyptic, palingenetic and, towards the end, dithyrambic tone. Until the day before, Nietzsche had destroyed the Christian faith, Hardy faith in human effort, Flaubert faith in love, but from this carnage there sprang now ‘a note of exultation after fear’, a ‘joy in being’ and ‘in living’ after the nightmare of the utter demolition of the intelligible cosmos.1 It was indeed a platform open to debutants, to all debutants indiscriminately. Appearing in it was neither a guarantee of being Georgian nor of not being so: and the cases of Lawrence himself, and Pound, who were included in it, prove the point. The paradox is that Marsh refused to publish poets like Edward Thomas and Charlotte Mew, on the basis that they were too traditionalist. This apparently contradictory editorial policy was due to the

1

‘Georgian Poetry: 1911–1912’, in Phoenix, vol. I, 304–7. Lawrence had also published almost contemporaneously in the Imagist anthologies.

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founder’s vague and confused ideas. In fact Marsh had not put forward any programmatic aesthetic manifesto. The adjective Georgian was then quickly assimilated into the gamut of implicitly derogatory literary categories: it became synonymous with imprecision, flaccidity, weakness and lack of intellectual backbone. Its romanticism was mainly that sugariness known as Biedermeier. It is easy to talk about and criticize its defects from the point of view of Modernism which brutally ousted it: the Georgians did not have linguistic awareness – yet they were only a few years away from Yeats and Dylan Thomas – nor the cult of the word as an end in itself, of the symbol and image, nor a true intellectual temperament. It was, however, in time, a sign of reawakening and revival, and many thousands of copies of the anthologies were printed and sold. 2. Some of the Georgian poets already had a well-defined, and partly Georgian, personality before becoming so with Marsh’s publication, and continued along their way once that experience had been exhausted. Of these, some of sufficiently individual stature will deserve here a separate mention. It must also be added that some were also ipso facto, for reasons of dates, war poets killed in action, which was also a meteoric, miraculous regenerating experience for them, and one which took them beyond Georgian poetry. Here, with a small, now archaeological, operation (many of these poets were never reprinted), I shall pull from the pack figures who even a while ago did not pass completely unobserved, following them even before and also after the Georgian militancy.2 The publisher of the Georgian anthologies was firstly the Scot Harold Monro (1879–1932), who ran the Poetry Bookshop in Bloomsbury, a venue where young passing poets could recite their poems and also be put up for the night at a reasonable price, like a restoration of the Cheshire Cheese of the 1890s.3

2 3

The Georgian Poets, ed. R. Parker, London 2000, is a fairly recent selection of the Georgian anthologies which reduces to a small volume of only 92 pages all that is worth keeping. Parker himself is the author of The Georgian Poets, Plymouth 1999. Himself a poet of mediocre standing, Monro died an alcoholic leaving a book of poetry (1933) which alternates the playful Biedermeier (such as the poem about milk for the cat, or other childhood idealizations) with the pensive and visionary, even lugubrious. This book, however, boasted an introduction by T. S. Eliot. His

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John Drinkwater (1882–1937) is the weakest and most anonymous of the five lesser Georgian poets to be remembered at least in passing. His disengaged and naïve vein is illustrated for example by a ditty about apple trees bathed in moonlight which the poet describes with gentle and ecstatic self-satisfaction. In his poetic book purely scholastic and conventional scenes and descriptions of nature abound. The other side of this cheap sentimentalism is of contrived and stentorian lyric poems. He would remain more famous as a historical playwright (Cromwell, 1921), and as author of a vigorous play about the American President Lincoln (1918). The bizarre and eccentric Ralph Hodgson (1871–1962), a boxing enthusiast and dog breeder, distinguished himself for a lyric poetry which was not sporadic but decidedly continuative, betraying a singular, heartfelt identification with domestic and farmyard animals. Two poems stand out in a total production which gradually thins out and declines into curious and unusual anecdotes,4 and these are ‘The Bull’ (1913), the story of a dying bull tenderly and elegiacally evoked, and ‘Song of Honour’, also from 1913, an albeit too plethoric song about the ecstatic unison perceived between man and creation during a starry night.5 Wilfrid Gibson (1878–1962) was a combative and militant realist poet from Northumbria whose denunciation of the work conditioning of industrial civilization (the protagonists are humble miners, navvies, farmers and shepherds) resounds with boldness and coarseness, after Tennysonian beginnings, in a great number of collections including compositions often in dialogue or arranged as dramatic monologues. He has often reminded his readers of Wordsworth – a Wordsworth living 100 years later and returning to use a new language ‘really spoken by

4 5

Scottishness is perceptible in the frequent investigations of double identity. The periodical The London Mercury, active from 1919 until 1924, a supporter in the aims and in its readership of the Georgian anthologies, was founded and directed by John Collings Squire (1884–1958), whose happy parodic vein was restrained by his commitments as a journalist. Such as the very short poem ‘The Gypsy Girl’, described with vivid and colourful impressionism. ‘Eve’ is the story of the temptation by the serpent in Eden (a cobra!), turned into the estranging forms of light verse.

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men’ –6 and Masefield, for the prolificness of his inspiration, his individualism and his rejection of the persuasive manner of other Georgian poets. Without any explicit polemic, the opposite of Gibson – to illustrate the plurality of the Georgian fabric – is Thomas Sturge Moore (1870–1944), a calligraphic classicist and late aesthete since 1899 with polished, elegant, but rather too affected and even, in the long run, boring reworkings of Greek myths, including those of Leda and the swan, which Yeats admitted to having been inspired by, indeed to having ‘stolen’.7 3. The two greatest of the minor Georgians, so to speak, are Lascelles Abercrombie (1881–1938) and William Henry Davies (1871–1940). Four fifths of Abercrombie’s total production are in fact of the dramatic or semidramatic genre. Short or even long actions in dialogue of a topical or surreal nature would seem to indicate, apart from the blank verse, the influence of Synge (the wanderers on the moor, a vicar who comes in to comfort an immature philosophizing poet). In the numerous, free reworkings in verse of primitive Christian anecdotes, Abercrombie, who firmly believed that they were stageable,8 experimented a dramaturgy abounding with Elizabethan stylistic elements, but with results in practice disappointing. They are prolix, heavy, inert plays. This dramaturgical utopia overshadowed the highly gifted pure lyric poet and clipped his wings. Fresh, airy and captivating are however his few lyric poems and parables about natural personifications, such as the falsely ingenuous one about the stream that wants to sing and asks the pebbles on its bed to stand aside, or God sending to earth, adorned, hope and desperation. The remarkable, powerful ‘The Fear’ throbs with the same stunned apprehension of Seamus Heaney before the ‘Tollund man’.9 In the dialogue with the bramble the Virgin is tempted like Eve by treacherous serpentine figures, and other biblical subjects ever more over-elaborated

6 7

8 9

GSM, 492. The poet’s interest shifted onto Christian themes as in the ‘obscurely powerful’ drama (BAUGH, vol. IV, 1575), Judas (1923). His poetical language represents perhaps the sole modernistic or modernizing attempt by the Georgians, and has often been compared with that of Doughty. HAP, 29, reveals that he was shown Hopkins’s manuscripts beforehand by Bridges. On Heaney’s poem, cf. Volume 8, § 191.2.

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betray a pessimistic, warped, detached vision of human life, faced with a hostile and resentful nature, an instrument of the vindictive Victorian God of the Old Testament. The Welshman Davies, long a vagabond without fixed abode, left with only one leg after having tried to jump on a train in Canada, turned out to be an improvising self-taught poet upon returning to Britain after such an adventurous life. This abnormal and wild background was by itself certain to arouse interest in and fondness for the man, because Davies was outside the ranks and archetypes of the academic and erudite poet, and was a natural a bit like Whitman, a bit like Clare,10 a bit like Francis Thompson, a bit like Masefield, and of course also a bit like Rimbaud. He managed to make an impression on Shaw by sending him a book of poems printed at his own expense and asking him the price of ten shillings. Shaw agreed to write the preface to his autobiography, which he called that of a ‘supertramp’. Davies, whom the poet Edward Thomas took care of as if he were a brother in spirit, then received a civil list pension.11 Upon his death, Orwell wrote on him a detailed and sympathetic review12 which ends in a crescendo after beginning by stigmatizing the defect of monotony, and a feeling as if of fresh spring water which nonetheless after a while makes you want a glass of whisky. As Orwell argues, Davies is basically a late Romantic in search of relief and exorcism from life’s suffering in the arms of nature. His poetry book twists and turns like an uninterrupted string of short lyric poems – more than 500 in all – mostly in rhyming quatrains, and ‘lyric’ in the strictest and purest sense of the word, that of the ego that feels and reflects before the spectacles and anecdotes of human and natural life. A clear, silvery, innocent voice, like that of Herrick, it has often been defined, and of a soul that sees everything with childlike and exclamatory disenchantment, though with a streak of secret melancholy, with the veil being raised from time to time on less innocent and silvery spectacles. Orwell could not avoid observing that Davies, though a proletarian, is not a proletarian poet, and that one of his additional limits, 10 11 12

BAUGH, vol. IV, 1262. Both Edward Thomas and Francis Thompson are remembered by Davies in two elegies. OCE, vol. II, 54, and III, 79–81.

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evident and emblematic of Georgian poetry, is that it does not make you think. Undoubtedly the observations of popular philosophy are always uninspiring and simplistic, in Davies; the spectacles he describes are the quintessence of the conventional poetic, such as the beauty of nature in the spring or the magnificence of the sky and the clouds and birdsong; and his idea of life is of that of contentment with little rural comforts, cheered by a pipe and a flagon of cider, far from pomp and cities. § 61. The poetry of the Great War* From a sociological point of view, the Great War represents the greatest mobilization of the intellectual class1 after the Napoleonic wars and – as far as Italy and other irredentist countries are concerned – after the Risorgimento.2 Further back we can remember only the phenomenon and the type of the multifaceted intellectual in the hendiadys of thought and action, the Renaissance courtier and soldier like Sidney. Consequently there is a literature of the Great War as there was the Napoleonic novel,

*

Comprehensive surveys with chapters on individual poets are J. H. Johnston, English Poetry of the First World War, London 1964; B. Bergonzi, Heroes’ Twilight, London 1965 and 1980; J. Silkin, Out of Battle: The Poetry of the Great War, London 1972 (highly esteemed but often captious; the author is undoubtedly an expert but shows off a sort of monopoly on the subject, gleefully quibbling with other scholars; the title of the book is a pun on one of the most famous patriotic poems of the war, ‘Into Battle’, by Julian Grenfell [1888–1915]); J. Lehmann, The English Poets of the First World War, London 1981.

1

Including also painters and visual and mural artists in general, and musicians, not only the promising but unexpressed musician poet Gurney as we shall see, but also Vaughan Williams and Holst. Britten’s War Requiem, though written at the time of the Second World War, has for lyrics some of Owen’s compositions. In comparison, the novels and plays of the Great War are relatively unimportant, the former exhausted – except for Ford Madox Ford and the authors of the ‘war of the future’ novel (§ 59) – in a small group of best-sellers inevitably waning after a short time. Recent critics have also duly discovered the war poetry written by women. The parallels between the feared invasion by Napoleon up the Severn and the German invasion is expressly drawn by Edward Thomas (cf. Wright 1981, 153–4, from the bibliography on this poet, § 65).

2

§ 61. The poetry of the Great War

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like War and Peace, or novels of the Risorgimento. This support for action from intellectuals does not cease, indeed it spreads and even intensifies, in Europe and in Britain, when another wave of enthusiasm is unleashed at the outbreak of the Spanish civil war. After that intellectuals will think twice before supporting any conflict, and disillusionment, even a priori, will lead many to become conscientious objectors, or even to flee to neutral countries on the eve of the outbreak of the Second World War. The intellectual is naturally a pacifist, well balanced and non-violent, and a negotiator; but when faced with the German threat and the attack against the weak and defenceless, and especially against neutral countries, he rises up. All the English departing poets and soldier poets do not go lightheartedly to the front, divided as they are between a residual rhetoric and the perception of the emergency, aware especially of the possible realization of a dream of rebirth through war itself, the destroyer and re-creator. From the point of view of literature the Great War is the antechamber of the Waste Land. Some seek in war to overcome an existential crisis, a shattered, often penniless, life, and they do not know that they are about to enter into another crisis, one which is much worse. Others after having weighed up the alternatives, end up enlisting in the name of those patriotic and civil ideals. There was no conscription in Britain before 1916, and the army filled its ranks with volunteers after a training period. Poets and intellectuals came together in a regiment known as the Artists Rifles. In other words, war no longer mowed down only the poor farmers or workers sent unwitting to the front, or the aristocrats who fought out of tradition and vocation. Statistically there never was such a slaughter of intellectuals, and especially poets. The massacre was not just considered humanly deplorable, but was experienced as the elimination of the most prominent poets to appear on the horizon before 1914. Orwell, in a courageous outburst, mourned the fact that the government had not taken this into account, and insisted that these poets should have been discharged and kept far from mortal danger, being a national asset.3

3

OCE, vol. III, 298.

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2. In a more precise sense the ‘British war poets’ are, first and foremost, the fallen in battle, then the surviving combatants, then those who wrote war poetry without fighting, from afar.4 The sine qua non of content is to have made soldiers and scenes of war the backdrop of poetry. But there is a slightly younger fourth class to take into consideration. In his book Hynes demonstrates that the attitude to war of young Britons, who had all grown up protected, pallid, effeminate and enfeebled, was ambivalent: those who in 1914 were below eighteen years of age and unfit for combat were afterwards led to regret a missed opportunity: it was to be a vaccination, a rite of passage, a guarantee of maturity gained. These excluded young people continued to read the poetry of Owen, cursed the war and sang of its ‘pity’, though secretly envying those who fought in it.5 That meant that the poetry of Owen and the other poets was cathartic, or more seriously that it did not have the hoped-for dissuasive effect. The myth of war had not been destroyed but reformulated. That Owen had fought against the rhetoric constructed just shortly before by Kipling and Newbolt says it all. Indeed Owen marks the dividing line between jingoism and anti-warmongering, between dulce et decorum est pro patria mori and the overturning of this maxim. As for content the unspeakable horror of war is comparable only to that experienced by the Victorians upon the appearance of factory chimneys which blotted out the blue of the sky and disfigured the countryside, or the railways which sliced through virgin soil with the puffing arrival of that locomotive that looked like the devil incarnate. But the comparison leaves a lot to be desired. The possible features of the landscape are unrecognizably changed, and mud and filth entirely cover and saturate the confines of the visual field, in addition to the spectral appearance of a disfigured, amputated, bloodied, mutilated humanity.6 The unthinkable scandal that the war poets discover to their horror is that nature is no longer the unswerving companion of mankind: 4 5 6

Such is the ironic, mocking W. W. Gibson (§ 60.2). HYN, 21, who includes a revealing statement by Philip Toynbee. A possible fifth class was made up of those who were too old to fight, some of whom, nonetheless, like Ford Madox Ford, enlisted anyway. Gurney is the typical poet of the barbed wire by virtue of the poem ‘The Silent One’.

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in other words, Wordsworth’s axiom of man and nature in unison fails. Edward Thomas’s nature is of the old-school kind, a nostalgic exorcism of war;7 but other poets like Owen, Sassoon and Rosenberg, bear witness to a nature that has changed with the war. Unlike Thomas’s unison, nature derides the hostilities of war with its supreme insensibility, its indifference and, above all, its neutrality, and seems not to notice the absurd outrages which men perpetrate against themselves. It digs a furrow of extraneousness, it no longer has a common cause with man. Rosenberg studies this brutal contrast by describing the dance of the lice, chased out by the soldiers who found them in their shirts, or the turncoat rats who blithely skip through the two hostile camps; or the larks singing without worrying about how another song – the crash of the bombs – may descend upon the soldiers listening to them.8 By a strange coincidence these are images which pass from poet to poet, and they represent a small revolution in the hierarchies, as they put the animal or the natural element, always previously tamed or subjugated, sadistically above man. Sassoon too, in his poems and memoirs, mentions Rosenberg’s poppies and larks. It was thus a common idea, that of mirroring or contrasting human brutalization with nature’s apparent insensibility. 3. The harmony and the links between the individual war poets are limited to these. They do not really give rise to a unitary movement, let alone delineate its programmes by a manifesto. They did not know each other except for the occasional pair of acquaintances. Brooke was familiar with all of them, he was a beacon, but the only one; the others were at the front, they were fighting or had fought near each other, a few miles or even yards away, but given the circumstances they did not read one another.9 7 8 9

This unison is also celebrated, but in more external euphoric rhythms, in the poem ‘Into Battle’ by Grenfell, as I mentioned. In Sassoon’s poem ‘Suicide in the Trenches’, the soldier, suicidal due to the hell of war, ‘whistled early with the lark’. Although the war played out on various fronts, the main British soldier poets were all engaged on the French front, only two of them, Sassoon and Owen, as officers, the rest as privates. Only Brooke died during the failed attempt to defeat the Turks at the Dardanelles to relieve the pressure on Russia. British war poetry, then, is almost exclusively poetry from the ‘Western Front’.

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Hibberd, in his book on Owen,10 even comes up with a paradox, that the category of war poet is unusable, because it was a heterogeneous band, and the label a sort of broom cupboard in which to haphazardly toss poets who do not fit anywhere else. I will pick out from this group five major and five minor poets, sharing the judgement that the limits of this poetry are its monothematic nature, its lack of variety, its casualness or its value as simple documentation.11 The background against which they operate and against which they are partly fighting is Georgian poetry; some of them come from Imagism. It is, then, inevitable to interpret them as yet another hybrid, interstitial and transitional literary phenomenon. They are poets with one foot in the nineteenth century, or in the still timid early twentieth century, and the other almost on the boundary of the second half of the twentieth century and an equally timid Modernism. This Modernism is however apolitical, objecting and insensible to war (like that of Yeats, when he was asked for a war poem, and when he excluded all these poets from his 1936 anthology). The war poets who survived in taste and tradition are indeed distinguished by some attempt at rejuvenation of poetic language, but this is done in no radical fashion and with different means: some with pararhyme, some with a return to every-day poetic language, some with the parody of the Metaphysicals. Those who write about the war from a distance, like Read and Jones, or even Gurney, make use of Hopkins, and emulate Joyce and Virginia Woolf. § 62. Owen* The thin book of the war poems of Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) is first and foremost a chapter of content, as it overturns the rhetoric of warlike 12

10 11

Cf. Owen’s bibliography in § 62. The function of pure documentation of the war by poets taking part in it was nonetheless precious in the face of a press and war correspondence which still spread a heroic, rhetorical and thus false image of it to the uninformed people back home. The accusation against the falsifying press is systematic and bitter especially in Sassoon’s poetry.

*

Poems, 1st edn, ed. S. Sassoon, London 1920; extended edn, ed. E. Blunden, London 1931; ed. C. Day Lewis, London 1963, with a memoir by E. Blunden. J. Stallworthy

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patriotism and sings songs of condolence for the death of servicemen in the mud of the French trenches. But at the same time it is a precious incunabulum of forms, a timid and subdued reaction to the romantic-inspired and still persisting poetic dictions, and even more so the counterpoise to Georgianism and thus a forerunner of poetic Modernism in 1918. It is a novelty, then, just a year after the advent of Eliot with ‘Prufrock’ and in the same year as the publication of Hopkins’s poems.1 The immediately connected question is whether there is friction or rather mutual reinforcement between Owen’s innovations in prosody and rhyme and a material, and a poetics itself, emphasizing content over form. Both voice the disavowal of all oblique and mendacious language, place before everything else the naked truth, and must forcibly overthrow every ‘figure’ of sense and sound and form, in the name of the immediacy and albeit formless urgency of

is the editor both of the edition in two volumes of the complete poems with fragments, London 1983 and 1984, and the definitive edition of the poems, London 1990. Collected Letters, ed. H. Owen and J. Bell, London 1967. Wilfred Owen: War Poems and Others, ed. D. Hibberd, London 1973; Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. J. Breen, London and New York 1988; The War Poems: Wilfred Owen, ed. J. Silkin, London 1994. D. R. S. Welland, Wilfred Owen: A Critical Study, London 1960; G. M. White, Wilfred Owen, New York 1969; J. Stallworthy, Wilfred Owen, London 1974; D. Hibberd, Wilfred Owen, London 1975, Owen the Poet, Houndmills 1986, and Wilfred Owen: The Last Year 1917–1918, London 1992; K. Simcox, Wilfred Owen: Anthem for a Doomed Youth, London 1987; D. Kerr, Wilfred Owen’s Voices: Language and Community, Oxford 1993; J. Purkis, A Preface to Owen, Harlow 1999; Poets of WWI: Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg, ed. H. Bloom, New York 2002; G. Cuthbertson, Wilfred Owen, New Haven, CT and London 2014. The essay ‘Wilfred Owen’ by Dylan Thomas, originally a radio conversation from 1946, is in Quite Early One Morning, London 1971, 91–105 (1st edn 1954). 1

Dylan Thomas tried to foresee what direction Owen’s poetry would have taken if the poet had not died so prematurely, and prophesied that he would have turned towards indefatigable and tenacious formal experiment, towards the ‘final intensity of language’. He was to him one of the ‘most profound influences’ for the poets who came afterwards, along with Hopkins, Yeats and Eliot. It is strange, though, that Thomas does not remind his public of the pararhyme.

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communication.2 The all too easy and hurried temptation of critics has been to establish an accord between signified and signifier. Owen himself, in his only poetic manifesto, seems to authorize it, when he points out the essentials of his poetry in ‘pity’ and persuasion, and does not even hint at that bit of art for art’s sake which he gives proof of, and that poetry is also form, and to have led and carried out at least a careful innovative operation on rhyme. His is not free verse, just as the comprehension of an implicit, associative, logically elliptical diction rich in imagery is not immediate.3 The technical experiment associated with him by definition is pararhyme, an imperfect rhyme linking verse endings where the consonants of the final syllable are the same, but not the vowels in between them. Right away, applying elementary sound-symbolism, it was found that the vowel of the second word is lower in timbre than the first, thus giving rise to a dull and false sound, more precisely a dissonance, a cacophony even, a supposed descensional effect of unreality.4 In Owen hides an aesthete expelled from Eden despite himself, for whom it is the war with its spectacles that embodies ugliness, which intensifies nostalgia for an irretrievable beauty. In other words, he wanted first of all to write beautiful poetry and poetry about the vanished beauty of the world. Indeed since his youth he cherished the myth of Keats, and ended up making it come true with his death at only

2 3 4

Especially since pararhyme is often used and found in English in playful and humorous verse and in riddles and tongue twisters. It is doubtful and utopian that Owen could hope to ‘not write anything of which a soldier could say No compris!’ (quoted from a letter to Sassoon, in Welland 1960, 68). This has been known since Welland 1960, 104–24, who sketches a brief history of the stylistic feature, concluding that Owen knew neither Vaughan nor Dickinson nor Hopkins who had sporadically used it, nor the Welsh cynghanedd, and that he had probably absorbed it from the example of Jules Romains, a poet to whom the minor symbolist Laurent Tailhade had introduced him between 1914 and 1915, when Owen had been a tutor in Bordeaux. According to his sister, Owen, born a few miles from the Welsh border, would have ‘politely resented’ being called Welsh (quoted in Welland 1960, 107), which does not match the pride with which Owen frequently remembered the Celtic blood flowing in his and his family’s veins (Hibberd 1975, 5).

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twenty-five years of age.5 And Keatsian, sensuously Keatsian, were his early and immature attempts as an adolescent, because, like Keats, he dreamed of the perfection of art from the anonymous squalor of his family and social background (he was the son of a railway worker and a proverbially possessive, inhibiting and inflexibly puritan mother). From the Romantics on, his genealogy was that of the craftsmen poets, the poets of formal preciousness, richness and the mixing of influences. A native of Shropshire, he himself was ‘a Shropshire lad’.6 Critics hardly ever remember that he was born in Housman’s region, and that the work of the two poets is similar at least in the pronounced sense of the closed form, often in quatrains, in the marked definition of contours, in the precision of the term, in the blunt neoclassical sobriety, in the economy of words. Housman too had been a borderline writer, archaic in some ways, modernizing in others, and one of the precursors of twentieth-century poetry.7 Owen, though with no longterm or prestigious academic studies (he had studied at the University of London only for a few months), had worked as a teacher and tutor for a short time. He was then a self-made man, and prudishly flaunted a firstclass literary education, and an Eliotian individual talent which operates within the tradition. He had become a small-time classicist whose poems quote in their titles and body Latin mottos, but with a sarcastic intention and tone, and incorporate in a sophisticated way fragments and echoes of other poets of the tradition, perceptible only to the well-read, in a continuous dialogue. 2. A poet of narrow scope, obviously synchronic, of obsessive thematic fixedness, Owen can in reality be split into two short and meteoric periods, before and after his encounter with Sassoon. Sassoon edited the

5 6 7

According to Hibberd 1975, 12, Owen, after the religious crisis and the nervous illness of 1913, began to foresee ‘that his life would be short’. ‘Lad’ is often the specific term used for a young man going off to war, as in Housman. As well as precise literary echoes, such as that of the athlete who died young whose friends carry him in triumph after the sporting victory. In Housman too the frame of the poetic book is the enlisting of ‘lads’, but in a less terrifying and destructive war, the Boer War. Owen bought a copy of A Shropshire Lad in 1916 (Stallworthy 1974, 138).

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first edition of his poetry in 1920, when only five of Owen’s compositions had come out in his lifetime. His negligible beginnings had occurred in an explicitly imitative romantic vein, under the wing of Keats and Shelley, and so overabundant, plethoric, descriptive and mythological. Blunden defined it as ‘of Endymion’.8 His first time at the front,9 in 1916, marks the dividing line. Back home with shell-shock after the battle of the Somme, the friendly and assiduous literary conversations with Sassoon at a hospital near Edinburgh led him to suppress any residual Keatsian sensualism.10 Although he tried to get an office job far from the front, he asked to go back again in August 1918 as commander of a company; he died a week before the armistice and received the Military Cross posthumously. His sudden death reopened the classical controversy about critical editions: which version should be accepted and established amongst the many drafts, often not reliably datable; and whether and to what extent the collective editions should include his youthful poems rediscovered amongst his papers, or early fragments. Owen’s grace period, then, was limited to eleven actual months, from October 1917 to September 1918. The preface to his poems, written a few months before his death in preparation for an edition that he could not see or edit,11 and made up of concise words and aphorisms in a prose that seems arranged in verse,12 apparently overturns that of Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray, which it resembles especially because it establishes a vade mecum of instructions, incontrovertible but

8 9

10

11 12

In the memoir of 1931 contained in the appendix of the Day Lewis edition. Hibberd 1975, 14–15, maintains that no one forced Owen to join up and leave for the front: perhaps he only need money and also images and material to become a poet; after spending time in hospital Owen returned to the front ‘to have a clean record as a soldier’ (21), thus out of honour. But the controlled echoes survive: the poem ‘Exposure’ begins with the words ‘Our brains ache’, which echo Keats’s ode to the nightingale (‘My heart aches…’), and goes on to describe a state of narcosis and hallucination on a cold night spent waiting for the bombs. Left handwritten and incomplete, it was also often misinterpreted and taken the wrong way, as Welland 1960, 53, tells us. It is transcribed as such in the opening of Dylan Thomas’s essay, with the same whim or liberty with which Yeats printed in verse Pater’s Conclusion in his 1936 anthology.

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contradicted. There we read a polemic sarcasm which we will then often have to discover as a sharp and blunt weapon in the mild-mannered poet’s main poems. Owen is decidedly on the side of a poetry that does not sing of heroes and heroism, for English poetry ‘is not yet fit’ to speak about them. In reality it had even been too full of it, of the glorification of heroes. In Owen’s poetry the heroes still survive, conversely, but they are the opposite kind of heroes, the heroes of passivity, of stoicism, of acceptance. A counter-rhetoric arises in it, the myth of a new, losing hero. Even more surprising is, in the preface, the assertion that the poetry that follows will not be poetry and will not be about poetry, but a linguistic act of service, which will immediately be transformed into feeling, into the feeling of pity for the fallen. The final codicil is the goal of this poetic pronouncement, a warning to future generations. The ‘letter’ will vanish, but the Pauline ‘spirit’, the meaning, will survive. Yeats, grasping this unsuccessful objective, in his 1936 anthology of English verse criticized the excessive identification of the soldier poet with his fallen comrades, and Owen was not so bizarrely excluded by him, with the other war poets, because ‘passive suffering is not a theme for poetry’.13 The lyric poems on the war which he finished were no more than about thirtyodd, a corpus which can be visibly embraced. Expressionistic, visionary, f  lashing, bitter and strong in the synthetic execution, but always frugal and reserved in the warning that closes them, they essentially form a predictable and classic collection of samples of the mythology of pacifism,14 for all their having been written by a poet who enlisted voluntarily. The war industry and the devices of destruction that an advanced technology had provided the army with, like gas bombs, had however enlarged it to include bloody, horrific and abominable scenes which no poet had until then described, because they had not yet seen them, contemplated them or thought them possible. From this corpus, available for the first time in 1920, sprang one of the spiritual premises of that ‘desolation’ which English and European literature would choose as its invariable theme after 13 14

Owen was aware of Yeats, who is quoted by him at least in two dedications; this is a further symptom of the cultivated nature of Owen’s poetry. Owen was presented by Dylan Thomas as a universal war poet.

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1921. The individual poems are not arranged by the editors as an ordered story, and even Owen had not thought of them as such: they are rather a phantasmagoria of flashes of memory and imagination, and illuminations with no chronology, unconnected but unitary in their boundaries, and thus timeless paradigms of war. Two enemy soldiers, one the killer of the other, fraternize and forgive each other in the otherworld in homage to a noble Homeric code; a child plays with weapons, blissfully unaware that he will be the soldier of tomorrow;15 a mutilated man comes home and, now full of emotional regrets, feels disoriented in the places where he had once been happy and carefree; another soldier writes a letter home from the front;16 another comrade in arms dies in a gas attack and his horrendously disfigured body is flung onto a cart; a dead man is given a grotesque military funeral; the column of men leaving for the front, with ‘grimly gay’ faces, is seen off by women giving them flowers. Above all Owen, the believer who had lost his faith,17 accuses the Church leadership, the prime accomplice of warmongering, proclaiming and describing having seen ‘God through mud’.

15 16 17

‘Arms and the Boy’, which is another example of Owen’s clever winks to tradition, is a title which quotes not only the beginning of the Aeneid, as commentators point out, but also references Shaw’s Arms and the Man. In quite a different style are the letters from the front to Owen’s mother, so resolute, circumstantial and heart-wrenching that they are often anthologized, because they too are paradigmatic, and the collective voice of a generation of young war dead. For almost two years, between 1911 and 1913, the devout Owen served as a deacon in the vicarage of Dunsden, perhaps intending to take orders, or more exactly because he was tempted to take them through the pious desire of his mother; but the result was the opposite. In Owen there is no consistent heterosexual passion, and no love for a woman, and the biographies of his brother Harold, and especially of Stallworthy 1974, are today much criticized for having stayed silent and covered up some episodes of platonic homosexuality at the time of his stay at the vicarage, and all the more so the true nature of his friendship with Sassoon, who was openly homosexual, and with Robbie Ross, Wilde’s first lover. Hibberd’s three books (1974, and especially 1986 and 1992) are nonetheless puzzling for the exaggerated importance given to Owen’s presumed discovery of his own homosexuality and fascination for the male body, which allegedly happened in the few months of 1918 between his discharge from hospital and his second departure for the front.

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3. The thinly concealed literariness of Owen’s poetry jumps out in ‘Strange Meeting’, his more famous poem, with no division into stanzas, in iambic decasyllables fluidly linked in pararhymes, deliberately detached from chronology and isolated in limine by editors. The title is taken from Shelley, and the poem is a reworking of the descent into the underworld, a theme exploited from classical epic poetry up until Dante. In the imaginary meeting beneath the battlefield two enemies18 become friends, they agree with each other about the senselessness of war and look pensively towards the future. Every realistic dimension is transfigured in a veiled mythical climate, so much so that the landscape also flashes with the magical contours of Kubla Khan, with the tunnels dug in granites as if during ‘titanic wars’. Then the souls of two gentle poets begin to talk, exchanging elegies of a yearned for and lost beauty and the advent of a disfigured world. The second poet, who in an alternative version was explicitly a German, is the mirror image of the hypostasis of Owen, because he also regrets not having been able to distil the pity of war. Poetry is here recognized as a civilizing agent, a stepping-stone to peace, a token of peaceful coexistence; and in saying so it weaves a famous cautionary verse from Wordsworth into the elegy. This guide will be lost, but it is Owen, like Aeneas or Dante or any trained otherworldly pilgrim, who learns the lesson from it. ‘Insensibility’ immediately afterwards douses the flames of warlike enthusiasm. War makes one insensitive to the human factor, man is reduced to a shooting weapon and to a mere number, but we must not cynically become inured to the horror of war, instead we need to relentlessly carry on being shocked and grieved by it. ‘Apologia Pro Poemate Meo’ is Owen’s version of Yeats’s refrain that a ‘terrible beauty’ is born, that of the sense of comradeship, the bond of ‘war’s hard wire’ between the comrades in arms, the beauty of the soldier’s curses, of the ‘music in the silentness of duty’, of the ‘peace where shell-storms spouted reddest spate’. Owen goes so far as to say that death in battle is the crowning of this ecstatic, narcotic experience, and with the penultimate stanza he pronounces his own prophecy, the prophecy of 18

More precisely, the German was killed in battle by the Englishman, but raises his hands ‘as if to bless’. In the Dantesque aura we feel projected more into a limbo than into Hell.

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his death. The soldier fallen in war is glorified as the highest expression of human love and abnegation, a form of sacrifice superior to purely heterosexual love. In ‘Greater Love’ Owen seems to rush to death and yearn for it, so as not only to imagine this ecstatic and mystical crowning of the fallen: almost every poem is an emphatic imagination of death and of death in battle, and the prefiguration of its euphoria. And in this and other compositions the celebration of the venerable and sublimed beauty of the mangled, bloody corpse is almost Swinburnian, because litanic: the ravaged limbs, the bloodied face, the throat and mouth coughing up blood.19 Owen often wonders what decreed this holocaust and what there is afterwards, and thus what the function and reward for the sacrifice is.20 The funeral cortege of the fallen is the same rumbling of cannons and crackle of rifles, and the soldier ‘asleep’ in death in the homonymous poem can be welcomed into serene heavens far from the fray or, as in Dylan Thomas’s poems, return to the biological cycle of nature, ‘his hair being one with the grey grass / Of finished fields, and wire-scrags, rusty-old’.21

19

‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ wipes the slate clean of any transfiguration of the fallen and instead chooses the line of realism and merciless sarcasm to reject the lie in the Latin motto, renounced by the horror at the sight of a comrade in arms killed by mustard gas bombs. This is also the drone of the poem, in four parts, ‘S. I. W.’, rich in bitter cues on the rhetoric of honour and death in war, because the death attained by a soldier is piously presented as shining heroism to the parents receiving the news. This was also, partly, the truth of war which Owen attempted to reveal. 20 ‘Futility’ closes by casting doubt on the very utility of the primitive creative breath that ‘break[s] earth’s sleep’. 21 The only stylistic-thematic variants are a poem on the sacrifice of Abraham, who really does kill Isaac, some first-person monologues of soldiers, written in lifelike and incoherent Cockney, a stream-of-consciousness poem from the hospital attributed to Owen himself or a survivor, and the scene of the mutilated survivor with his dreams shattered and the meaningless life that awaits him. One of those monologues, ‘The Letter’, which is seemingly interrupted by a bomb, can be imagined almost exactly as that letter written home by Albert, the husband of Lil, in the section of the pub in The Waste Land, and it can be reasonably supposed that Eliot was aware of this, because the demotic speeches match and correspond.

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§ 63. Sassoon

§ 63. Sassoon* Long after the war, which he survived, Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) wrote one of his many books of memoirs entitled Siegfried’s Journey (1945), a wink to the Wagnerian resonance of his Christian name. But his life up until the outbreak of the war had not made any homage to this nomen omen, except for his hefty build and equine face worthy of a Nibelungian warrior. Instead he had lived in the protected and eccentric luxury of a country estate, locked up within Edwardian immobility, and deaf to the ferment of the nation. The well-off son of a Sephardic Jew, this racial stamp never pulsed in his veins and remained a real dead letter, to the point of being sensationally denied late in life with his conversion to Catholicism. His mother, a possessive intellectual with artistic talents and pure English blood, had brought him up to be a spoilt adolescent with snobbish attitudes. Having attended Cambridge University without graduating, he had nonetheless shown an authentic though superficial predisposition for poetry in poems imitating those of the late Romantics, the Pre-Raphaelites and Swinburne. In 1913 he had parodied an anecdotal poem, of typical and second-rate slovenliness, by Masefield. It had been a premonitory debut, despite the poem being excluded by Sassoon from his definitive collection because it adopted Byron’s typical taunt, that 22

*

Collected Poems 1908–1956, London 1947, 1961, 2002, which nonetheless excludes many juvenilia. I will mention in the text Sassoon’s several volumes of semi-autobiographical prose and his various volumes of letters and diaries. M. Thorpe, Siegfried Sassoon: A Critical Study, London 1966; P. Moeyes, Siegfried Sassoon: Scorched Glory: A Critical Study, Basingstoke 1997; P. Campbell, Siegfried Sassoon: A Study of the War Poetry, Jefferson, NC and London 1999; J. M. Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet: A Biography (1886–1918), vol. I, and Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches: A Biography (1918–1967), vol. II, London 1998 and 2003; J. S. Roberts, Siegfried Sassoon, London 1999; Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon, ed. H. Bloom, New York 2003; M. Egremont, Siegfried Sassoon: A Biography, London 2005; J. Moorcroft Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon: Soldier, Poet, Lover, Friend, London 2013.

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of striking a target by reworking his verse.1 Almost all connoisseurs of Sassoon regret that this ballad in rhyming couplets was excluded from the corpus, because in it can be seen the crumbling, at least, of the myth of the ‘gentlemanly paradise’2 and his uncertain realization of the plight of the common man. Like many young English aristocrats, Sassoon was rudely awakened from his enchantment when Britain went to war in 1914; indeed in the battle of the Somme in 1916 he distinguished himself for his valour and was awarded the military cross. When, in 1917, he was wounded and repatriated, his attitude to the war had radically changed. He wrote an open letter to his superiors, declaring that the conflict had been culpably continued when it could actually have ended: the war, from a defensive one of liberation, had been transformed into one of aggression.3 It was thanks to the mediation of the poet Robert Graves, a fellow soldier and friend, that Sassoon avoided being court-martialled. It was at the end of this separate incident that his and Owen’s paths crossed, as we have just seen, because the military authorities, rather than appreciating his lucid and noble courage, resorted to the subterfuge of considering him to be suffering from shell shock, and interned him in Craiglockhart hospital where Owen was also a patient. Sassoon returned to the front in 1918, emboldened by the same paradox as many other doubters, to fight to help end the war and to show solidarity with all the other soldiers already involved.4 Fascinated by Brooke, a first handful of Sassoon’s war poems had embraced Brooke’s rhetoric of rebirth; but Graves had upon him the same 1

2 3 4

The man condemned to death, for a tavern brawl following which he accidentally killed a servant, is already angry with those who go to church on Sundays and ‘cheat his neighbour on Monday’. Sassoon’s poetry book opens with a composition still celebrating the epos of the world of the squires, by means of the outdated stylistic feature of the dramatic monologue of the man pretending to be uneducated, a gamekeeper. DES, 162. It is also rumoured that he threw his Military Cross into the Mersey. Thus is explained and will be explained a widespread phenomenon, how so many people who were anti-war carried on fighting: even Rosenberg, and even more firmly than Sassoon, maintained that the war might even be just if defensive, but had degenerated into a war of aggression and should therefore be stopped.

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function as catalyst as Sassoon himself had upon Owen. His war poetry is not, of course, all that there is in his corpus, which develops beyond the war and without war, but it is undeniable that Sassoon the poet is best known, most enduring and imperishable for The Old Huntsman and Other Poems (1917) and Counter-Attack and Other Poems5 (1918). Graves had criticized Sassoon’s earliest poems as warmongering, predicting that he would soon change his mind. It is from this challenge that Sassoon’s satirical poetry was born, denouncing the authorities, the Church and the army leadership. Amongst his great variety of approaches and points of view, as well as his oscillating moral attitudes towards the war, Sassoon found his speciality, or a speciality, in the witty and bitingly lively dialogue sketch. He is not a crazed visionary weaving images together, an imagist in other words;6 instead he builds up minimal verbal exchanges from which the demonstration appears clear, immediate and entirely comprehensible. He is a dramatic and narrative poet with perspicuous and perfectly ordered diegetic scansions. Where there is no exchange of lines or dialogue, there is always a clear-cut anecdote which must speak for itself. Sassoon is motivated by a need to cast light, to expose the truth about the unknown life of the soldier and the unspeakable hardships of war; he also wants to attack the military hierarchies and castes who do not know what it is to fight because they are sat behind desks, or the jingoistic prelates, along with the press that idealizes the heroism of the British soldier and contributes towards creating a distorted idea of the war at home. He is the true and authentic anti-war Englishman because he reveals without reserve that beneath the hero is a normal man without a halo, who is afraid, withdraws, escapes and is also humanly cowardly. From the condemnation of rhetoric,

5

6

Between one collection and the other there is a section of ‘lyric’ poems which was not honestly suppressed by Sassoon, although it was in the most antiquated vein of late Romantic crepuscolarism. Cyclically this côté would have been presented again, as in the later collection The Heart’s Journey (1926), with too many poems which, to an Italian reader, seem to echo D’Annunzio. With exceptions: ‘Golgotha’ is a bewildering phantasmagoria which seems at first sight, thanks to the rats rummaging around undisturbed in the trenches, to come from the pen of Rosenberg.

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a certain descent towards rhetoric or at least towards the sentimentalism of anti-warmongering, or even towards the indifference of immediate appeal, is still easy. The success of Sassoon’s always short compositions is measured by how much the reader is touched even today:7 sympathy, a smile, a grimace and indignation, the fundamental objectives of satire. And in numerous poems this success is complete. 2. ‘They’ is like a single Dickensian act reduced to the minimum, because it hinges on the pompous rhetoric of the bishop who talks about a positive ‘change’ which the war will bring about, about the sense of moral well-being of the soldier returning from battle – Owen too criticized religions’ historical support for ‘just causes’ – where this ‘change’ is bitterly overturned, and for the worse, with the enumeration of the wounds which mutilated, broke, brutalized and sent the soldiers to the otherworld. It is the same working as Freudian humour, or the mechanism of the joke. ‘The Rear-Guard’ tells of the soldier’s address to a corpse in a tunnel, caught in the rigidity of death, with the underground passage becoming a hell strangely similar Owen’s, and which makes the battle raging on the surface seem like ‘a rosy gloom’.8 In the homonymous lyric poem an incompetent general sends his troops to be massacred with a frenzied call to arms. ‘Glory of Women’ makes those who are left at home aware of what fighting means, without distinction between friend and foe; it also reveals, in the manner of Hart Crane, the subtle dividing line between heroism and cowardice. In its effective anaphoric style ‘Dreamers’ does not hide the fact that every soldier had very normal and mundane dreams, similar to those Brooke confessed in ‘Grantchester’.9 This anthological list could be enlarged to see first-hand that in its own small way, for the anecdotal clarity, the elementary didactic aim, and not least the linguistic realism of soldiers talking amongst themselves in Cockney, the footsteps Sassoon

7 8 9

Sassoon used an image taken from boxing: the final stanza and verse had to knock out the reader with a punch in the stomach. The ambiguity of ‘For days he’d had no sleep’ is impressive, as it may refer to the living soldier in retreat or, with macabre irony, to the dead soldier. The common derivation of these impetuses towards Biedermeier normality is noted by Thorpe 1966, 133.

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is following in are those of Byron, Dickens and Kipling. Sassoon too told the story of the Great War in a discontinuous setting, but giving us his selected and emblematic snapshots, conspicuous and memorable. He is the poet who broadened this diorama of suffering, absurdity and cruelty the most; the most objectifying poet, who does not enter the fray but looks on and observes. 3. Reviewing them, Virginia Woolf complained that these poems ‘did not rise to the level of poetry’,10 and that they were the fruit of a reactionary and left-behind taste. Bloomsbury and Pound’s and Eliot’s Modernism could not in the least like Sassoon, a poet without indefinable evocative aura. On the other hand, according to him it was the historic emergency that invited, even obliged one to throw off the mask of falseness and the codes of every poetic diction, and that invoked a poetry of voluntary, crude sensitization, or rather desensitization. Sassoon’s poetic aesthetics, on which this war poetry was based, was expounded and clarified much later in his 1939 talk ‘On Poetry’. In it he formulated laws antithetical to other poetic creeds or gospels of the day, like those of the disciplined assertion, clarity, immediacy and the author’s control of the design of the composition. His aversion to contemporary critical methods had perhaps its unspoken target in Empson, the recent theorist of the ‘seven types of ambiguity’. Equally without naming names, Sassoon harshly dismissed any present poetry of indirection.11 Even when he became a spiritualist poet, Sassoon would not have looked to Donne but to Vaughan and Herbert.12 He might likewise have become a travelling companion of Spender, Orwell and the Thirties poets in denouncing fascism between the wars, and he had the credentials for it; but he never befriended them and remained

10 11 12

This claim is in WAR, 170. His enlightenment is reflected in the poem ‘To an Eighteenth Century Poet’, whose identity, however, remains unrevealed. This is his final period, of meditative and reflective poetry, represented by the collection Heart’s Journey, though with the countermelody of laid-back humour, flashes of irony, good-natured desecration always lurking. These are light, sparkling poems with an ancient flavour, also in the genre of the dedication.

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isolated.13 After the war he went back to being a country gentleman, never again attempting, except for one case, the didactic and satirical efficacy of the poems written before. For this reason, calling Sassoon a war poet and a poet of the Great War is inappropriate and incomplete as a general appraisal. Not only did he survive, but he also became a poet of the Second World War and, for the average English reader, no longer the poet but the prose writer and memoirist. The trilogy of novels by his alter ego George Sherston, a fake self-portrait in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man14 (1928), emblematically retraced for all his English peers of the same age and social class his own transformation from carefree hedonist to responsible member of civil society, as a result of exposure to the severe trials of a new epoch.15 In this work he did not miss the chance to sing the elegy of a world that had come to a standstill and of a harmony that had broken, in one word of a now vanished England. He did so with nostalgic and touching tones towards an uncontaminated nature which here and there remind us of Edward Thomas. Judging by the number of monumental biographies which have recently been dedicated to him, the English have been affected by yet another myth of the eccentric aristocrat, and proved eager to seek the skeletons in his cupboard, his tics and his boasts. There was no shortage of material because Sassoon never ceased to amaze and to set tongues wagging, right up until his death: in 1933 his marriage failed due to his homosexuality, and in 1957 he became a Catholic, having written much devotional poetry both before and afterwards. 4. Sassoon the war poet is thus not just an untruthful mummification, though the most famous one. He had within himself, all perfectly controlled and regulated by him, various tempers and various moods, and thus also various souls; he passed nonchalantly from one keyboard to another, often abruptly, surprising everyone with such modulations. Judged in his entirety, he is a poet continually changing his style, eminently objective and 13 14 15

On Sassoon’s condemnation of the political poetry of the 1930s see Thorpe 1966, 205. Sassoon’s conservative ideology, although he had been close to Labour after the war, was spread from the columns of the Herald, of which he was the editor. Continued in Memoirs of an Infantry Officers (1930) and Sherston’s Progress (1936). Thorpe 1966, 72.

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representational, not lyrical initially, although he became more prolific later as an intimist, mystic and worshipper.16 Immediately after the armistice, in the meantime, his warlike streak, so self-assured, vigorous and captivating, had dried up and blended (the compositional time frame, though, is indicated as 1908–1916) into the inexorable reverberation of the Georgian poet with his insipid, anonymous landscape scenes. To call him a chameleon may reduce him to a great imitator, as Sassoon certainly is. Anyone who tries to find in him hints or signs of innovation is indeed daring, because in his prosody, in his rhythms, in the omnipresent regularity of rhyme, and in poetic technique, Sassoon is a traditionalist. But if by Modernism we mean the quest for new solutions, which can even be the parody of past forms, Sassoon, at least with a delay, shares in this ferment. The exception and the maximum oscillation are in one of his brief periods of essayistic, caustic, discursive and courteous, circumstantial poetry on the arts and their very frequent relationships, by virtue of which Sassoon precedes the post-1930 Auden. Only Sassoon, with the exception of the later Tomlinson, approaches Auden and his taste for words, with delightful, icily elegant pastiches on music and the arts.17 In the section on the ‘Satirical Poems’18 of 1926, which consider the national post-war ‘pomp and circumstance’ in its various spectacles, which were duly emphasized by the music of Elgar, the immediate emergency no longer there, Sassoon as an objectifying satirist lashes out at other less conspicuous and less dramatic routine hypocrisies. He does so with rhymes on new, audacious words,19 not extracted from the poetical realm, and therefore with a strident, unprecedented, deliberate lexicon of terms coined ex novo in an ironic sense, and a staccato burlesque of brief hypotactic members. For this reason, at the same time, Byron is never very far away.

16 17 18 19

From the 1935 collection Vigils onwards, thus for about thirty years and for almost half of his total poetic book. ‘In the National Gallery’, ‘The London Museum’ and ‘In the Turner Rooms’ and others about painting. In the complete poetry collection some poems of this inside section are nonetheless dated 1931, 1932 and 1933. See in ‘Grand Hotel’ the rhyme between ‘Prima Donna’ and ‘upon a’.

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§ 64. Brooke* The idea that one might get of the poetry of Rupert Brooke (1887– 1915), and the consequent critical judgement thereof, depends at most on the internal division which one decides to cut out and select as representative, and thus on personal preference. In Brooke’s corpus, though for obvious reasons not very voluminous, various and even irreconcilable and dissonant thematic chords and formal layers alternate and are even indeed co-present. He is a confessional and conventional lyric poet in an intimate diary in verse, a calligraphic and precious sonnet writer of personifications and vague figural allegories of Rossettian inspiration, a concettist of frustrated amorous passion, a satirical cartoonist, a poet of travel and myth. He is also the author of two compositions that are apparently unclassifiable and in their own way astonishing, about the underwater life of fish, and he is the nostalgic exile from good, healthy, straightforward, even stuffy English life. The closure of this symphonic work, or rather of this concert, is, with a final non-synchronic chord, a handful of sonnets of a romantic 20

*

Complete poems with memoir ed. E. Marsh, London 1918 (reprinted without the memoir as The Works of Rupert Brooke, Ware 1994); ed. G. Keynes, London 1946; ed. T. Rogers, Gütersloh 1987. Selected prose ed. C. Hassall, London 1956, and in T. Rogers, Rupert Brooke: A Reappraisal and Selection from His Writings, Some hitherto Unpublished, London 1971 (with indispensable introductions). Selected letters ed. G. Keynes, London 1968. The play in one act Lithuania, written in 1912, performed and published in Chicago in 1915, on the classical theme of the prodigal son returning incognito and killed by his own family, is edited with a lengthy introduction and parallel Italian translation by N. Menascè, Milano 1989. W. de la Mare, Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination: A Lecture, New York 1920; K. Urmitzer, Rupert Brooke, Würzburg 1935; A. Stringer, Red Wine of Youth: A Life of Rupert Brooke, Indianapolis, IN and New York 1948; C. Hassall, Rupert Brooke: A Biography, London 1964; J. Lehmann, Rupert Brooke: His Life and His Legend, London 1980; P. Delany, The Neo-Pagans: Friendship and Love in the Rupert Brooke Circle, London 1987; S. Bigliazzi, Il giullare e l’enigma. La poesia metafisica di Rupert Brooke, Pisa 1994; M. Read, Forever England: The Life of Rupert Brooke, Edinburgh 1997; N. Jones, Rupert Brooke: Life, Death and Myth, London 1999; H. Maas, Rupert Brooke: Poetry, Love and War, London 2015. Praz’s feature ‘Rupert Brooke’ in SSI, vol. I, 93–6, which I discuss, reviews a book in French by A. Guibert, Rupert Brooke, Genova 1933.

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English patriotism, written shortly before Brooke’s death in the war in 1915, and almost presaging it. These latter works enjoyed very wide public appeal and are the ones most associated with Brooke, from then until the present day, largely eclipsing almost everything else. This is also because they received the immediate support of the young Winston Churchill and were quoted by the deacon of St Paul’s in a sermon. They were then read, recited and adopted as the collective viaticum of young English soldiers leaving for war after 1915, and before the violent disillusion about any warlike romanticism that would come in thanks to poets like Owen. However, the refined connoisseurs and the literary intelligentsia immediately dissociated itself from this appeal to the immemorial and tireless English sentiments about the honour and beauty of sacrificing oneself in defence of freedom, not finding appreciable intrinsic merit in Brooke but only the promise of a future poet.1 This preamble will by now have established that Brooke becomes a war poet, and he becomes one after a lightning prehistory that has little to do with the war. Indeed in his case the relative label is biased, unsuitable and even usurped, and Brooke, as a war poet, is the only poet in favour of the war in a chorus of poets against it, although time might have transformed him from apologist to adversary.2 Owen had really fought for many months, and died after three years in the trenches and just a week before the armistice; Brooke, on the other hand, had seen the war only from its peripheral and still romantic fringes, and he was not killed by the bombs but by an incidental illness. 2. Six years older than Owen, whom he did not know personally, and of nobler lineage, Brooke was a native of Rugby where his father was a teacher at the famous public school. At Cambridge he was hailed as a sort

1

2

Brooke’s effusive sentimentalism was criticized by Sorley (§ 68.4); ‘Grantchester’ received terribly and precisely damning judgements from Orwell (cf. OCE, vol. I, 552) as a catalogue of clichés of the bad middle-class conscience. Henry James, on the other hand (in the preface mentioned in n. 3 below), considered it an ‘adorably capricious poem’, and above all representative of an ‘ultimately very English comfort’; James also defined the five war sonnets as ‘admirable’ and ‘splendid’. Such a critical and disillusioned attitude to the war surfaces in his letters and testimonies, on which cf. Rogers 1971, 9–10.

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of magnetic ‘star of King’s’ like Hopkins had been of Balliol half a century earlier. Precocious in literary criticism as in poetry, a Fabian and caustic antiVictorian, he had been Marsh’s partner at the launch of the first anthology of Georgian poetry. A restless spirit, he had travelled far and wide, along the lines of Conrad or, better, Stevenson, in the seas and lands of the ‘south’.3 His voluntary enlistment in 1913 took place not in the ranks of the prosaic land army but in the navy, rich in historical glamour. Death overtook him not in action but through an equally romantic and symbolic blood infection in the seas of Greece. Owen was plain, while the figure of Brooke – a ‘young Apollo, golden-haired’ –4 contributed towards the burgeoning of the myth of the flower of the field cut down while still in the freshness of youth. Brooke’s meteoric rise seemed to be the fruit of a certain conspiracy of the stars and the twentieth-century version of the myth of the man of destiny. The island of Skyros where he was buried was a place laden with myth, and Bridges had written about an adolescent Achilles dressed as a woman in one of his plays just a few years earlier. Praz pointed out other coincidences almost decided on purpose by an intelligent demiurge, such as the fact that Brooke died on St George’s day and Shakespeare’s birthday,5 and not far from Missolonghi, and thus the yet unassuaged memory of Byron.6 T. S. Eliot, for his part, did not want to notice, or more precisely 3

4 5 6

His voyage was formally commissioned by the Westminster Gazette, and it gave rise to the esteemed, vivid, impressionistic Letters from America (1916), with a very long preface more airy and mysterious than usual by Henry James, or rather an elegy celebrating his, all things considered, ‘irresistible’ spontaneity (this adjective recurs at almost every step). WAR, 167 (the expression comes from the poet Frances Cornford). Cf. for other anniversaries Rogers 1971, 2. Brooke’s biography, once this patina has been scraped away, is in fact much less heroic and mythical; it is, rather, mock-heroic, rocambolesque, pathetic and even grotesque more precisely, beginning with the real cause of his death, which for some is a ‘sunstroke he got in Port Said’ (Praz, loc. cit., 94), and for others was caused by a mosquito bite. Eliot remembers this detail clearly in ‘Gerontion’, in which his alter ego regrets not having fought at Thermopylae, ‘bitten by flies’ (on the transformation of this image cf. § 95.4). The heterosexuality which can be guessed from the poems had been preceded by a homosexual interlude, when Brooke as a student was loved in vain by various young men including Strachey’s brother. He apparently lost his virginity to

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did not want to reveal, that Brooke was a second soldier poet ‘mort aux Dardanelles’, but the shadow of Brooke haunted him as did that of many other poets whose influence he wanted to suppress and deny.7 And Eliot and, above all, Leavis did not have the least sympathy for a poetry which they attributed to, and entirely established within the ranks of, Georgian crepuscolarism, without acknowledging any of its innovative ferment.8 In reality, the very admirers of Eliot and the other modernists later built up the alternative image of an incognito proto-modernist poet and of a subtle esoteric rhymester, who as a young student respected the Metaphysical poets shortly before Grierson’s edition, and had conscious and indirect relations with the more advanced and avant-garde sections of national and European culture. Contemporary critics have gone even further, maintaining that, pace Leavis and especially Eliot, Pound and Henry James, Brooke should be looked at through a reversed telescope, and that we must not

7

8

one of them (on his relationship with the ‘neopagans’ of Cambridge, who practised strict premarital chastity, cf. Delany 1987). The third of the Olivier sisters, cousins of the famous actor, was that shy and sullen woman whom we guess from Brooke’s sonnets of erotic frustration. He was advised to go on his long, romantic voyage in the south seas to recover from a nervous breakdown caused by the fact that Katherine Cox, or Ka as she was known, had loved him and given herself to him, but only out of pity and compassion, being really in love with a painter. In Polynesia this frustration was finally placated with carnal love for a native woman. The defence of Antwerp was the only military action which Brooke actually took part in, and then only for five days. On Jean Verdenal and Eliot’s dedication appended to Prufrock as a collection, cf. § 94.1. On the ambiguous, hidden relationship of Eliot with Brooke, and on its possible echoes in his poetry, cf. especially Rogers 1971, 14–17, and my own ‘Echi in T. S. Eliot: alcune illazioni’, in Hammering Gold and Enamelling: Studi in onore di Anthony L. Johnson, various eds, Roma 2011, 199–212. Thus it can be reasonably supposed that behind Verdenal was also Brooke in disguise. As A. L. Johnson (MAR, vol. III, 230) recalls, Eliot, always critical, nonetheless admired Brooke’s ‘extraordinary mastery of language’ in ‘The Fish’. As for Brooke’s even theoretical influence, Eliot’s acknowledgements are extremely sparing, and the name of Brooke occurs only a few times, perhaps only once, in Eliot’s essays. Leavis (New Bearings in English Poetry, Harmondsworth 1967 [1st edn 1932], 57–8) places Brooke on a different track and finds in him a genuine and at the same time vulgar Keatsian sensuousness, and declares the poet ‘safe’ from the influence of Donne.

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only blow away the dust and mould from Brooke the precocious pre-war poet, but also overturn the established verdict. The early Brooke is the one that counts, and he counts because he is a greater poet, or tout court almost a great poet, neo-Metaphysical and neo-Elizabethan. This poet is unrecognizable beside that falser one who used to sing, almost unnaturally, the self-satisfied middle-class soundness and boomingly hailed the youth going off to die shouting long live England and freedom. This counterreading is outlined in Praz’s feature dedicated to Brooke,9 and argued, as so often in Praz, through hypotheses and by questioning his motives, and from the premise that Brooke’s most valuable compositions are not those written by the soldier-poet. Due to common literary sympathies and elective affinities which are not difficult to make out, Praz makes of Brooke a repressed or self-repressed poet, a sort of intimist, verse-carving Tennyson whom the Crown asked to bang the drum of patriotism,10 but who secretly loved Donne and Marvell like a ‘modern Metaphysical’. At the end of Praz’s piece a bid is launched which, if true, must rediscover Brooke as even more modernist than the timid modernist Owen: a poem reveals Virginia Woolf ’s kindred spirit because it establishes the ‘immortality of the moment’ as in The Waves,11 and ‘The Fish’ is more precisely and authentically ‘metaphysical’, like ‘Heaven’. 3. Polite and fair, Praz had honestly admitted the non-pacific coexistence of rival canons; others invented a poet who does not exist. Brooke, so the theory goes, is not a modernist because of any formal experimentalism, such as the abandonment of rhyme, the breaking of prosody or rhythm, neologisms or compounds, the forcing of syntax and grammar, or other innovations. His poetic lexicon is basically the most traditional and unostentatious, his sonnet is even Petrarchan, as Pound found in an

9 10 11

Praz had been preceded by de la Mare 1920; see also, in more recent times, Kermode’s brief hint in KRI, 164. In ‘Tiare Tahiti’ Brooke, like Tennyson, longs for the type ‘whose earthly copies were / The foolish broken things we knew’. Praz does not mention what other supporters of Metaphysical and modernist Brooke notice, his ready interest, shared with the Bloomsbury group, in the philosophy of Moore and in ‘states of mind’.

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epigram, his discursive procedure regular and his poetic logic connected. The supposition that he is a neo-Metaphysical ultimately rests on the fact that he was indeed the first serious re-interpreter and re-evaluator of the Elizabethans, the Metaphysicals and Donne, and that his reconstruction of Metaphysical poetry is astonishingly contemporaneous with, or even precedes that of Eliot which, re-examined in this light, even seems like a paraphrasing or extension.12 In practice, with Brooke a slightly rash syllogism, undoubtedly valid for Eliot, has been applied, which is that a scholar of the Metaphysical poets must write Metaphysical poetry; in other words it has been too enthusiastically believed that the marks and proofs of this purely heuristic interest can be identified in Brooke’s poetry. The demonstrations of this neo-Metaphysical côté, because it is a mere côté if that, are carried out on the basis of the extrapolation of individual lines from the unitary poetic organism, on local, extemporaneous and often microscopic idiosyncrasies, and on vague analogies in the use of rhetorical figures. It is an absolutizing operation which aims to make a small esoteric canon exoteric and is forced to skate over huge sections of the corpus which do not correlate with the thesis; an operation which above all goes against established taste. There is little of Donne in Brooke, in my opinion, and conspicuously absent is Donne’s famous singular or abstruse comparison, though some compositions in rhyming couplets with a flowing and dreamy sound are reminiscent of Marvell, with some synaesthesia that can seem imitated or picked up. Rather it is true that, with the war, the rebel becomes a tamer and easier romantic rebel, and that there emerges in Brooke an astonishing parallelism with what is happening in the longer paradigm of classical English Romanticism, which declines from the high and ethereal peak of its early years to that domesticated and Biedermeier phase of its dissolution, and which celebrates the diminished and completely anti-heroic, familiar and domestic warmth of life.

12

Cf. the two reviews of Grierson’s edition of the poems of Donne, in Rogers 1971, 135–43, where Eliot’s theory of the association of sensibility is already overshadowed. A parallel between Donne and Brooke, which is also made up of light and shade, is in ibid., 188–9.

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4. Brooke’s poems were subdivided and organized by his first editor, his friend Marsh, into several separate sections which sometimes contain only a few poems, in one case only a single poem. Brooke had been writing poetry since 1905, and the first section, which has this terminus a quo, indicates the immature religious air of someone who does not yet know how to objectivize himself and only wants to write a diary in verse recording his feelings and, especially, his dissentions, erotic frustrations and irrational fears, and the appeasements in nature after the oppression of the classroom and studies. Many years, if not decades, later, Brooke picks up the model of the debuting Victorian students of the 1840s, like Clough, Kingsley, Arnold to some extent, or Hopkins. A thematic refrain was running through that Victorian poetry that is immediately obvious in Brooke, the torment over transient life, to be sublimated or, just for the moment, mirrored in the longing for an eternal and unchanging parallel world. This aspiration recurs since the early poems of the collection, where Brooke is the sad ‘exile from immortality’ yearning for ‘that which lies beyond’. The dawn that dissipates these shadowy thoughts and infuses energy will not always arrive so radiant and invigorating. Another early tendency is, however, oriented towards stylization and Baroque personification. Brooke describes the sight of the day dying as a pageant, more precisely a funeral cortege bidding farewell to a living person. A third chord is the realistic and lively ditty, blunt and rough, partly satirical, of minute observation of academic life. Ugly and miserable beings, wretched and hunched, write, but the poet feels a world of beauty hovering above, although this signal is ephemeral and the sensation of this beauty is fleeting and overwhelmed. In the background, Brooke did not hesitate to challenge good taste with such ‘malevolent’ poems. In ‘Dawn’ he describes two crass, bestial and coarse Germans on a train setting English chauvinism on fire. Arnold and Clough were able to capture moments of metamorphosis which vanish too soon bringing misery back to everyday life. Basically, even in Brooke the sense of a vanished and unrestorable glorious past can be felt loud and clear; the student and academic manages to get over suicidal thoughts, often with and in the Wordsworthian comfort of nature. Night-time is feared as a symbol of the end of natural and human beauty and love, and thus also of death. And in Brooke epiphanies and depictions of the transient side

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by side with an attachment to the all too ephemeral earth and the human spectacles always abound. His poems vaguely concern religious inquiry and metaphysical exploration, and the setting is that of the disappearance of, and thus the search for, God as in the Victorians, but disguised in a vein that is at once serious and seriocomic, hearty, jolly and excruciating, in explicit lines or small symbolic parables as in ‘The Songs of the Pilgrims’.13 ‘Failure’ dreams of going up to heaven to curse God but finds an empty, weed-infested place. The challenge is launched by love, which is by definition everlasting, and a form of salvation and eternalization. 5. Brooke is above all a writer of sonnets, and he tackles this form in only slightly varied and personal prosodic arrangements. Stylized, with Rossettian inflections, they prefigure mostly spasmodic waiting for the absent, a blessed damozel left behind in the world hopefully arriving in the limbo of the afterlife, welcomed in misty, damp, veiled, and thus surreal, scenes. He is intent on creating enchanting spells which take shape in the woods, by moonlight, at night, and vanish at first light. This small group of sonnets thickens the abstruseness and metaphysical and dreamy aura of the vision. One sonnet, ‘Day and Night’, is the most laden with the paraphernalia of courtly love, the most swollen with hackneyed images of the devotion of chivalrous love, insisting on allegorical figures, stylizations and heraldic personifications. ‘Menelaus and Helen’ are two Yeatsian narrative sonnets about the fatal passion which brings Menelaus, determined to get his revenge on Helen, to his knees, while she ‘sits’ high like Eliot’s Cleopatra. The second sonnet shows that the timelessness of the Trojan War gives way to time, and the reunited couple must face the miserable reality of aging. In the epiphanic flashes of ‘Dining-Room Tea’ the spectacles of transience are abstracted into immutability, as the same small and wretched objects of daily ritual are ‘freed from the mask of transiency / Triumphant in eternity, / Immote, immortal’. When we arrive at ‘The Fish’ we basically witness the unpredictable description, in rhyming couplets, of an underwater world in which the fish splashes

13

The pilgrims pray that at the end of the pilgrimage they can get to the divine altar amidst Blakean ‘forests of the night’.

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about without perceiving the realities outside or beyond, as in a soundproofed showcase, thus blind but happy. It is the intuition of irresponsibility that poets often envy inanimate objects for. Its match, ‘Heaven’, continues the metaphysical reflection on the veiled awareness, or indeed ignorance, which fish in an afterlife have, and of the absence of religious doubt. Piscine theology is a ‘natural’ theology which in Brooke’s lines sounds akin to that of Browning’s Caliban, because the fish, being a fish in the sea, can only conceive the divine figure in a ‘fishy’ form. The poem is a variant of Browning’s, an equally naïve and imaginative variant, and thus also comical. ‘A Channel Passage’ is about seasickness and the passenger’s urge to vomit, and this and other jolts are resounding and break the pace, and are frank tumbles into the bathos on the part of a poet who first and foremost is able to parody himself. ‘Grantchester’ is precisely the rejection of a manner and a mannerism that had become suffocating and oppressive. Thus Praz’s inference can be overturned, because it is possible to say that this is the real or a real Brooke, who had written previously poetry inspired by that refined plagiarism of late Baroque forms. However, he had done so as if for practice, due to panic intoxication or to parody, without giving it his all, and through erudite and mythological filters and exhibitionistic postures. The real Brooke, then, could be the one that appeared easy-going, satirical, scathing in those hapax compositions. In ‘Grantchester’ the poet of simple affection and low horizons is unmasked, the poet who caresses in his memory his ‘little room’ – the Biedermeier! – together with the exhibition of the spectacles of a familiar landscape, listed and revisited without layers of erudition. In it the anticlimax is revealed of a verse that, again in rhyming couplets, employs this prosody in a rickety and unsteady guise, as doggerel and light verse, no longer as the metre of a heroic theme. The central section is effective in contrasting the rigid and solemn pomposity of the Germanic world with English spontaneity, thus giving the vision of two civilizations at that time bravely facing one another, with the addition of a pinch of antiSemitism and an easily grasped apathetic invitation. This is the principal nostalgic poem of England perhaps since the days of Browning and his ‘Home-Thoughts, from Abroad’. Brooke, in short, is celebrating the magical eternity, proclaimed by a spell, of this native suburb as if projected

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outside of time. ‘The Great Lover’ is another revelation of off-the-shelf love and mundane passions. 6. In the first of six sonnets from 1914, anything but Metaphysical, but rather heroic, Brooke is aware of the risk that death might come for him but he challenges it, and asks for a small truce to be able to enjoy, just for another moment, the life of the imagination and exhilaration of nature’s most pleasant spectacles (‘The Treasure’). The five which deal more precisely with the war set aside any attempted or fanciful experimentalism, and substitute the esoteric voice with the call to broad and shared collective feelings and the exhortation to self-sacrifice embraced with enthusiasm. God rallied the English, investing them with a humanitarian mission, he guaranteed it and made them certain the soldiers set off to defend their country’s honour and at the same time that they were playing a role of male protagonists of history, challenging bodily danger and death itself, scornful of their lives. The slightly frenzied message has a Nietzschean bent with mysterious streaks of Hopkins: Brooke sounds this horn to his compatriots to shake them and change them from ‘half-men’ to men once and for all; so he identifies war as the chance to rescue history and regenerate ‘a world grown old and cold and weary’. The first of the five sonnets is entitled ‘Peace’, exactly like one of Hopkins’s which invoked within the reborn faith that same ‘cleanness’ which Brooke praises. If we did not know that Brooke was talking to the soldiers, urging them not to worry about dying, they would seem to be the trembling injunctions of a religious poet trying to convince his apathetic audience that death is the beginning of true life, because they employ the language of religious poetry in order to incite. As in Hopkins, a subtle and very human counterpoint rises, denying in the final analysis that the incomparable spectacles of life can be lightheartedly left and forgotten in favour of the ‘superior’ scenario, and platonic compensation, of death.14 ‘Safety’ and ‘The Dead’ play on the paradoxes and antitheses that the soldier must recite to himself as he disdainfully hurls himself towards 14

A possible and conscious dialogue with Hopkins, which would appear an irresistible deduction, seems excluded from the dates, even though Hopkins was known and read in private since 1904.

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battle and possible death, aware that death assumes him into the realm of everlasting things and is a form of eternalization (once again Brooke’s impetus and yearning). The two sonnets on the fallen argue the thesis that the fallen are in fact already risen.15 Only the fifth sonnet lies outside this subtle antithetical dialectic, but it confirms and hails the additional baptism of a small strip of land forever English in that foreign land where the fallen will have died. It will show everyone the valour of soldiers born and bred of that mother, thus erecting an everlasting monument to the eternal values of English civilization. § 65. Edward Thomas* I: Diaries and prose from before the war A piece of shrapnel sealed the fate of Edward Thomas (1878–1917) in April 1917 during the so-called battle of Passchendaele in Flanders, famed and sadly emblematic to the entire English nation of the time for the unspeakable slaughter that took place there. Thomas, rather unsure, had 16

15

The sestet of the second sonnet entitled ‘The Dead’ unconsciously echoes, almost literally, the vision of the flowery paradise which in the heart of the sea-storm the believing castaways mystically ‘see’ in Hopkins’s ‘Deutschland’.

*

Collected Poems, ed. R. G. Thomas, Oxford 1978 and 1981, now supplemented by The Annotated Collected Poems, ed. E. Longley, Tarset 2008, with debatable text selections (cf. TLS, 21 September 2008, 3–5); very useful and representative is, amongst many, the anthology Selected Poems and Prose, ed. D. Wright, Harmondsworth 1981. The Letters of Edward Thomas to Jesse Berridge, ed. A. Berridge, London 1983. R. P. Eckert, Edward Thomas: A Biography and a Bibliography, London 1937; J. Moore, The Life and Letters of Edward Thomas, London 1939, repr. 1983; H. Coombes, Edward Thomas, London 1956, 1973; E. Farjeon, Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years, London 1958, 1979; V. Scannell, Edward Thomas, London 1963; W. Cooke, Edward Thomas: A Critical Biography, London 1970; R. Mullini, Killed in Action. Saggi sulla poesia di Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas e Isaac Rosenberg, Bologna 1977; J. Marsh, Edward Thomas: A Poet for His Country, London 1978; A. Motion, The Poetry of Edward Thomas, London 1980, 1991; R. G. Thomas, Edward Thomas: A Portrait, Oxford 1985; The Art of Edward Thomas, ed. J. Barker, Cardiff 1986; M. Kirkham, The Imagination of Edward Thomas, Cambridge 1986; S. Smith, Edward Thomas, London 1986.

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eventually enlisted in July 1915, and after training1 was sent to the front in France, where he fought in the trenches for less than six months; his were and have been defined as a much more inglorious ‘hundred days’ (to be exact, they were ninety-eight). This meagre obituary exhausts and rather falsifies in its three specifications his record as an ‘English poet who fell in the Great War’. In 1917 Thomas was already thirty-nine, and could not be mistaken for the fresh graduate eager to take up arms in defence of his country and freedom.2 The enlistment was not, in other words, a frenetic and instinctive gesture which he then went back on. Thomas came to poetry through a flash of inspiration or, more precisely, through long incubation, and its irrepressible gush flowed almost daily in his last two years of life. But it was all written before, and not by or during the war he fought, and is not, then, poetry that at least directly or continuatively speaks of war, even though war remains its stated backdrop. Thomas, therefore, at his death had done a year’s less service than Owen, two more than Brooke. His distant, but never forgotten, Welsh heritage links him to Owen, as well as that fact that he died having only seen a few of his poems in print; with Brooke he shares the academic culture as an alumnus of Oxford. But that is where the analogies end. Thomas’s poetry, which reaches almost 500 finished poems, has from then on represented the peak of his work, and the English of average education – or even the conservative intelligentsia, much less so the sophisticated ones – are fond of him and respect him for their secret weakness for the poet who presents himself as instinctive and primordial, modest and mundane. Thomas shuns erudite and mythological filters and bombastic and palingenetic messages. His voice is that, querulous and calm, of the poet of humble and simple things, the engraver of clean little impressionistic scenes and small, illuminated spectacles of typically English

1 2

Prudently, Thomas had been trained as a ‘map-reading instructor’. The alternative which he had discarded, and which Auden was to embrace twenty-five years later, was to be transferred to America, accompanying the poet Robert Frost. Not even physically: the slender and long-limbed Thomas, who as a student had been a handsome young man, neatly dressed with blond hair combed into a parting, with delicate though already slightly gloomy features, at the time of the war appeared in photographs with his face lowered and glassy eyes lost in the void, as if in a trance.

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nature, which hardly even survive any more. His true-to-life illustrations of the countryside are often in the form of dialogues or verbal duels, and stylized from the point of view of a sometimes stoic disenchantment, though not a resigned one. In this simplicity and perfect naturalness Thomas is almost Biedermeier: the poem ‘For These’3 asks only a house, a garden, a pond, a stream and it is content with that frugal happiness and those small comforts. Edward Thomas is English to the core, carrying within himself a higher element of nationality than many of his contemporaries, and than the average: not Italianized, not cosmopolitan, he continually travels in a sort of motoric inebriation, but he does not stray abroad. He writes in an English that is still Anglo-Saxon and made of words that are for the most part monosyllabic; he uses few French or Latinate terms, he speaks the everyday language of everyman, just imperceptibly modulated; and he was a poor beggar.4 If there is a constantly rising poet of the twentieth century, it is Edward Thomas. 2. Though born in London, Thomas erased the urban landscape from his horizon with a gesture of clean and highly visible dissent against the typical literature of those years. He has and will ever have his mind and sights set on the English countryside. He is physically and mentally a wanderer of the countryside, from which he collects and catalogues random spectacles, roadside encounters and, above all, impressions of nature and the weather. This all seems anachronistic. That nature and that countryside that he presents were already no longer the current ones which could be experienced at the time: they were emotions relived in tranquillity or, rather, idealized, poetic transfigurations, myths of nature. Thomas deliberately dresses his nature and his human scenes up as archaic and timeless, and the concrete references to the present, of a historical and social nature, are muffled and veiled or, especially, rise to a mythological or epic value. What is archaic about Thomas is that we must think of him always travelling on foot, and that the automotive civilization of cars and aeroplanes is alien to him. At 3 4

The Biedermeier sensitivity is an integral part of the Georgian mindset, although Thomas never published in Marsh’s five anthologies. The thin line, or the ambivalence, between English Thomas and Welsh Thomas is taken up in Smith 1986.

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the beginning of his prose book The South Country (1909), he says that he purposely avoids cities on his journeys, does not look at maps and finds his way by means of the sun, and expects a surprise at every corner. The scandal of this alternative wayfarer is that he does not visit cathedrals and does not want to see them; that he is also disinterested in the associative links between the city and the place and any literary stars who might have been born there.5 His genealogy is that of the English nature poets, developing from the earliest medieval minstrels who sang that ‘sumer is icumen in’, and expanded by the airier Elizabethan and Metaphysical poets like Herrick, and the pre-Romantics like Thomson. His intuition of nature, however, is above all that of Wordsworth, and this is because nature is organic and maternal as in the Romantic poet, because the poet venerates it as an inseparable companion for the moral and didactic force it emanates; because its spectacles are classified with meticulous love, and always dated on the specific occasion that provoked them; finally, because nature is eternal, like the divinity of the religious creeds that it substitutes, and in its cycle or cyclical nature it reflects fallen and mortal man.6 Nature is, therefore, the realm of repetitiveness, which is a teleological guarantee confirming, if nothing else, that after decay, autumn and winter, spring and rebirth will come. It goes without saying that Thomas is a poet without faith in any historical religion, which was lost as his harsh family upbringing in evangelical traditions predictably backfired. Wordsworth does not rule out other affinities but integrates them. The names which spring to mind when reading Thomas are Clare, Ruskin, Hopkins, Hardy, Borrow and Jefferies.7 Thomas is a diarist and note-taker like Ruskin and Hopkins. Hopkins’s early diaries, spasmodically attentive to nature in its changeable aspects, resound irresistibly behind Thomas. Often the diary entry and the poetic incipit are

5 6 7

Thomas made trips and excursions on foot, then, but in reality also by bicycle. He had in common with Belloc, who edited a magazine in which Thomas collaborated, an aversion to the modern culture of mechanized locomotion (§ 48.2). ‘In its noise and myriad aspects I feel the mortal beauty of immortal things’, an unconsciously Hopkinsian statement. Some also cite, with good reason, the exquisite regionalist and ‘Dorset’ poet, William Barnes, who was loved by many of these writers.

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formulated in Thomas with the same, Hopkinsian gnomic timbre, or the same attentive enumeration of phenomena without comment. Hardy had displayed the same unsentimental, objective and even gruff attention to the totality of natural effects and the relationship that man and especially the peasant had with nature itself and the country life. Both Borrow and Jefferies had been gypsy or wayfaring writers, wanderers and stenographers of nature before Thomas.8 In all of them, humanized nature never disappointed and was always ready to help. Discouraged by human relations, nature is Thomas’s only trustworthy and authentic partner: ‘O exultation of the sorrowing heart when nature also seems to be sorrowing!’ (‘Leaving Town’). To vent, sublimate and cure the existential crisis through nature was itself an atavistic pattern in English poetry. Thomas is an alienated, desperate and belated writer affected by chronic and incurable depression, half mad and solipsistic, tenaciously studious of his ego. The family he had put together did not understand him, and he was always spiritually fleeing from it, though at the same time keenly aware of his responsibility to support it. He had many acquaintances but only two or three friends: the vagabond poet Davies, like him of Welsh descent, the reserved, weak, sickly Gordon Bottomley, and Robert Frost. The mild-mannered, kind, sensitive Thomas felt as if he had been hurled into a civilization that he did not understand. He had no foothold, he was drifting, with no loved ones, no future, no hope.9 This identikit was like that of other mixed-up, suffering, psychotic and alienated writers, and it reminds us in particular of another emigrant in London from the Celtic fringe, Davidson, who, like Thomas and more than Thomas, had toyed with, and indeed put into effect, suicidal ideas. Thomas is a version of the otherness of the writer at the end of the nineteenth and across into the twentieth century, of the person uprooted from his ethnic and sentimental fold: the spiritual exile,

8 9

Borrow had preceded Thomas with a book of excursions on foot in Wales (Volume 5, § 161). As it transpires exactly from his 1904 letter to Bottomley, quoted in Wright 1981, 41–2.

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unrealized, dispossessed.10 He made his crisis conscious but did not know how to get out of it, he felt prostrated, at the limits of resistance, and he confessed it. He saw the void and the non-sense in a rudderless cosmos gone mad. His prose is packed ever more densely with nightmares, or terrifying and fearful dreams. 3. It is impossible to forget that Thomas started off as, and had been, a prose writer, and for two abundant decades, before becoming a poet. His prose has a close relationship with his poetry because it is its natural reservoir, even to the point that his poetry may be said, in musical terms, the variation on or the transcription of the same score for another instrumental ensemble.11 This double nature and expertise should be noted, and the anthologies of his work do well to divide the space between both. The suppression of Thomas’s prose or, if we want to be kinder, the lesser appeal which it enjoyed, are the result of a misunderstanding. We cannot wipe the slate clean on a twenty-year crop of critical studies on the leading figures in English literature, which every enthusiast knows and has in mind and which are an integral part of the history of interpretation; nor on an additional bibliography which amounts to dozens of volumes of ‘topographical’ books and other collections of journalistic pieces. The mistake which has been committed is to consider this output as destitute of true art, and the work of a general hack who kept a roof over his head and supported his wife and three children by writing. Thomas is an exile from late nineteenth-century Grub Street and indeed seems like the reincarnation of a character from Gissing. From that famous novel, New Grub Street, he reminds us of Riordan, and he is even his lookalike. In reality, we discover a teleology and even an entelechy in this discordant and apparently chaotic output. Thomas’s prose is the faithful recording and indeed

10 11

‘Home’ is the home of thought and dreams, not a place or a non-place, and a home that cannot, therefore, be reached, and Thomas is content to half-close his eyes to the real. Thomas never lived in the same house for very long; he was of no fixed abode. With typical American concreteness and spirit of simplification, Frost recalls having advised Thomas to write poetry because his prose was already in the form of poetry, ‘though not formally written as such’, and to write it ‘in verse form, exactly in the same rhythm’.

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the mirror of his intellectual biography, and though commissioned, born of contractual clauses, the writer is able to infuse it with a style that is at once official and personal, and carry out and complete his own apprenticeship as a writer. Reading his topographical books one wonders how the publishers continued to ask them of him, because they are too beautiful and too personal, too magical and well-finished, too confessional and therapeutic, and too introspective to really be able to aim for great success with the public: too esoteric to sell, and thus a commercial failure, as in part they were. But then again, it seems natural to suppose that Thomas, as well as not writing them at all out of routine, welcomed these offers with great innermost joy, because they allowed him to satisfy his voracious need to bathe in nature, to not leave the only haven or motherly, humanized refuge that he felt close to him and where he could calm down, and to wander around as if outside of time and space in a sort of halo and dream-like and suspended glow. The teleology of this prose lies above all in the fact that it is born lyrical and poetic. Poetry and prose mean for Thomas, since his adolescence, cataloguing in diary entries thoughts and momentary sensations, and translating into words the changeable aspects of nature, the sky, the forest, plants, seasons. His writing is blunt because it is and will always be first and foremost the diary entry; his typical phrase often omits the verb, is paratactic, gnomic, factual; the individual page of the first diary is already, therefore, a poetical verse not only in nuce but de facto, and it is that same poetical verse, in many cases, that will explode twenty years later. The diary of seventeen-year-old Thomas ‘in the English fields and woods’ is the closest to the tones and language of the poetry that will blossom in 1915. 4. Thomas got married before graduating from Oxford in history, with modest grades.12 Immediately afterwards he lived, always and stubbornly, off the proceeds of his writing, at odds with his father and his family who wanted him to become a civil servant, so as to earn a regular wage. His first 12

His wife Helen, whom he married in a registry office when he was twenty-two because she was already pregnant, was the daughter of the critic and journal editor J. A. Noble, Thomas’s first mentor, thanks to whom he had already published various nature sketches in the journals, and even a book, when still at school. Helen, a nursery school teacher, left a book of touching, devoted memories.

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diary ‘in the English fields’, written at seventeen years of age, started off as a pilgrimage to the home country of Jefferies, of whom he wrote a biography in 1909. In the diary Thomas at first sight appears as a simple cataloguer, a late Darwin on a mission in the wilds and in the countryside to register natural phenomena. He catalogues predictable and common ones and other abnormal ones, and the whole teeming of natural life, invisible and overlooked by many. He is botanist, zoologist and entomologist all at the same time. Above all he looks upwards and pricks his ears to see and hear songbirds: the sky is criss-crossed by a veritable sampler of avian life, and each bird is named with competent terminology, each call and each flutter described and transcribed. He is thus also a Linnaeus. But it does not take much to realize that this is not aseptic and purely taxonomic precision, but brightened up by a shudder. It can be felt in the just perceptible and unmistakable metaphors, in the search for harmony and alliteration, in the work on coined or unusual compounds aimed at a more precise signification.13 In the middle of a resounding, lenitive and lovingly observed nature, the scene of the fortuitous human encounter already bursts forth from this diary. In these street, or rather path, sketches, Thomas finds another medium that suits him and is premonitory, and in a few lines often brings to life sapid and witty cameos. His prose has, in general, an added autonomous value because it could have had a different or complementary formal outcome, that of the long or short story especially with a prevalence of dialogue.14 The ecstatic lingering and the full and passive immersion in the spectacles of nature, in their minutiae – listening in on noises and calls and cries, especially of the cuckoo – forms as if the equivalent of the music of Delius, who wrote it in almost the same years with the same characteristics and the same sources of inspiration.15 Thus the instrumentalist tries out the instrument, in a score overflowing with poetical lines in the free or

13 14 15

See, for example, ‘Bow-legged beetles begin to climb clumsily about the grass’. Indeed Thomas did write two novels which even his admirers deem immature and badly done. The cuckoo is a central bird in the poetry and music of both (cf. § 73.9). Often Thomas describes the imperious flight of the kestrel, in terms which recall Hopkins’s windhover. The two poets share a love for and an interest in other birds which are

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trial state, of fragments of poetry, slides, epiphanies of nature, and sounds, noises, echoes in their enchantment. 5. In 1905 Thomas’s first commissioned book came out, with which began the many reports he would write accepting the requests of the publishing industry of the day, whose public was not so up-to-the-minute, not avid for accounts of exotic, far-off lands but nostalgic for healthy scenes of rural old England and its intimate essence. Thomas had to thoroughly rejoice at being able to travel his ancestral Wales on foot, because he was born and raised in London but his family was of Welsh descent. The local colour, the particular scents of the area, the rundown of atavistic habits, the calendar of countryside jobs are all brought out in a writing style that is not stiff, composed and listy and bureaucratic, but enlivened by flashes, shudders and jolts as of the witness communicating personal emotions which are completely his own. Life in the countryside, unchanging and unchangeable, is the counterbalance of the erased city life with its inexhaustible, overwhelming movement. Public history is exorcized and eclipsed, and its epic neglected, deafened, replaced by a new and true epic, a loving one that Thomas dedicates to the minute and microscopic events of country life. He is thus one of the greatest ever analysts of natural phenomena; he is, more precisely, their amplifier: suffice it to mention the truly obsessive pieces which he dedicates to the rain, in one of which it is described as a sort of instrument of the Last Judgement.16 Thomas’s ‘topographical’ books have pretentious and euphoric titles, such as ‘Beautiful Wales’ or ‘The Heart of England’, but are tinged, between the lines, with the writer’s melancholy and his solitude, and thus also with his neurosis. The entire series frustrates the purpose of the trip at every step with a series of personal and incidental reflections which overturn the original intent and also the destination, and which remind us at least a little of that ‘egotist’ essay writing of Thackeray, and above all leave an echo similar to that transmitted by the admirable book by another essay writer who ideally bid the city adieu, Alexander

16

often encountered in their prose, diaries and poetry, like the kingfisher and the lark; frequent observations of the thrush recall Hardy. ‘Rain’, in Wright 1981, 111–13.

§ 65. Edward Thomas I: Diaries and prose from before the war

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Smith’s Dreamthorp.17 On the page Thomas makes fun of his own contract and sadistically enjoys himself by denouncing its terms, and knows he will supply a product which contradicts and violates it: ‘The pen-pusher is requested to make ready all that which can be translated into words at short notice, and the collar he wears around his neck is never removed between six p.m. and nine a.m.’. Half-real and half-dreamed anecdotes are often centred around encounters with poorly defined, mysterious, fleeting human appearances which are, more than anything, doubles of himself, and other figures of flight and exile from civilization. It is a gallery of self-portraits responding to his need to objectify and to question himself. At the close of the first decade of the twentieth century, Thomas tried to decide for himself the subjects of his books. They take on a more personal note and in one case he writes a non-metaphorical autobiography which, however, remains as a fragment. One alter ego is Hawthornden, and the sketch about him is one of the thorniest it is also a little gem of prose which is reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. Through a third party Thomas recounts an anecdote he really experienced, his methodical return home at five in the afternoon for tea with his family, until one day he does not come home because he has run away, and is then found dead. A subsequent piece describes an attempted suicide attributed to yet another alter ego, who takes a rusty pistol out of a drawer, tries to kill himself alone, but returns home pretending that nothing has happened, but his wife smells a rat. This writing was at least in the short term (1911) exorcistic, and the suicidal temptation put off.18 Both of them are oozing with a sense of mental imprisonment, a lack of any way out, and oppression, but they objectify them. If we then add the piece on insomnia we have outlined the morbid syndrome which unites Thomas with the nihilists of the

17 18

Volume 4, § 228. The paradox of this mask, Hawthornden, is that he maintains his aversion to literary criticism, since for him there must be no filter or membrane between literature and its enjoyment. Thomas was against an age and every age in which criticism had the upper hand over literature.

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end of the century, Thomson B. V. of the ‘dreadful night’, or Davidson.19 Thomas’s prose is autobiographical because the crisis which he describes is his own private one, and its antidote is memory, memory of a childish Eden, often materialized in Wales and in Swindon where his relatives lived, which the autobiography discusses. 6. Thomas’s life played out from 1878 in parallel with the externally prosperous, isolated, protected one of initially late Victorian and then Edwardian England, an interlude of peace, well-being and hope, and a sort of national adolescence and youth. The only war-related events which Thomas could recall as a small boy were the death of General Gordon in 1885 and a certain print on the wall of a stabbed Moorish soldier with a fez on his head. He himself defined his holidays in Wales a paradise, and at night he did not dream, nor did he have nightmares. The two pieces entitled ‘Tipperary’ and ‘It’s a Long Long Way’,20 going back to the eve of the outbreak of war, are offered with an approach close to that of open-mic reporting, and Thomas appears as the impartial collector of diverse views, the length and breadth of England, and across almost all classes, on the possibility of the nation entering the war. It is a roundup, a review, a statistic. In reality they are cleverly interspersed with comments and brief identikits of the characters who alternate in the limelight, and by the contextualizations (the railway carriage, the tram, the pub, other public places) where these quick exchanges sparkling with wit took place. Thomas only adjusts a lively and erudite live speech. It feels like reading Orwell’s reportages, although Thomas is more unbiased and more interested in the funny, comical, humorous and sketch-worthy sides. In reality these two works come across like a theatre of the conscience, that is like a dramatization of the same conflict of opinions within the author on the war – like his own struggle

19

A fantastic, or fabulous, and less inspired sketch tells the dream of someone arriving at a house where he finds chests containing only ‘time saved’. Another concerns someone who lives in a glasshouse at which other boys throw stones. The sketch of the colonel entering a third-class compartment in a train and smoking a pipe without worrying about the other passengers, shows Thomas’s uncommon talent for satire, and his scathing impressions of haughtiness. 20 Splitting up the title of the popular song.

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and indeed his own anguish, externalized onto the level of the national community. This latter was first of all misinformed, often ignoring what was brewing and getting confused over the nature of what was at stake and the composition of the line-ups. A few phobias, a few mythologizations, a few nice misrepresentations of public opinion are revealed. The state of war was already causing repercussions on British industry and public employment, and some got rich out of it and some lost out according to the needs and necessities of the moment. The war united the country and abolished or made people temporarily forget about class divisions; at the same time the irony of the fact of a nation always seeing the French as the enemy to be defeated, and now transferring this hatred onto the Germans and the Kaiser, was blatant. At the end of the day people joined up ‘for hunger, for amusement, and not all to serve their country’. § 66. Edward Thomas II: The poetic songbook In the last piece of prose he wrote, addressed meaningfully to ‘this England’, Thomas justified his enlistment as an act of love for his country: a true and new love, just rediscovered, and the fruit of a flash of inspiration, and no longer an ‘aesthetic’, silly, slavish love, but like that for a loved woman whom one cannot hope to possess unless one is prepared to die for her. This beloved England, though, is above all its landscape and its nature: he ‘could not look again composedly at English landscape, at the elms and poplars about the houses’ and vegetation standing sentinel. At that time Thomas wrong-footed many interlocutors by openly declaring that he was not a ‘Hun-hater’, and to those who asked him for whom he went to the front he would reply: ‘for this handful of soil’.21 It was this sentimentalism, this devotion to the hallowed earth and the soil that the patriots liked, no less than the swaggering rhetoric of Brooke who declared that a small corner of a foreign field would be forever England, because blessed by the ashes of the English dead. Thomas wrote his first poems, aware of having changed his expressive medium, in December 1914, and they were shown and supervised by Robert Frost, then in England and whom he had

21

A much quoted anecdote, reported, for example, in Motion 1980, 25–6.

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befriended. They afterwards came out, a few of them, under the pseudonym Edward Eastaway, and then thrived in number up until the eve of embarkation for France. They were first published in their entirety in the 1920s, and a more complete first edition came out on the eve of the Second World War. Thomas, too, was in his own way a bridgehead towards a new diction in a period of ferment and transition like that of the first decade and a half of the twentieth century. The few, fertile months he spent with Frost make one think of a repeat, on a small scale, of the revolution of poetic language outlined by Wordsworth and Coleridge 110 years earlier in the preface and the compositions themselves of Lyrical Ballads. The two poets, American and English, declared ‘war on clichés’, placing much emphasis on a poetry which traditionally wrung the neck of rhetoric and abolished all distance from ‘common parlance’, with a clear allusion to that ‘everyday language’ which was the aim of the two Romantic poets. And it cannot escape one that, a few days after the declarations of Frost and Thomas, the poetry of Hopkins was emerging from the unknown, a poetry that included that very one amongst its aesthetic criteria. Such an unconscious analogy is even more evident because nothing is really extraneous to Thomas’s poetry as direct mimesis giving rise to a slapdash and approximate style. He insisted on a concept of crafted poetry, and on the Romantic election of the poet on the part of words – and expressly ‘English’ words – which indeed choose him.22 In Hopkins’s terms his was indeed a common language, but one which was ‘heightened’.23 The nature of Thomas’s contrast with Brooke is thus well highlighted: Thomas had also read and studied many poets, but he had not passively or mimetically absorbed them; rather he started from a deliberate zero degree in poetry, from a wild state of language, in search of new cadences and dismissing any effects and echoes, in the opposite direction to Eliot himself. Thomas wanted to demonstrate in the field that he did not write poetry according to the accepted and imparted rules, but it is still nonetheless impossible to define him as a linguistic, stylistic or prosodic experimenter. He occasionally seeks some formal trobar clus, but he is neither an acrobat nor a tightrope walker; nor is he, thus, 22 ‘Words’. 23 Also in the form of the frequent inversion of subject and verb.

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a modernist in disguise, although he is not a Georgian either. From the beginning he bypasses rhyme and composes in decasyllabic free verse, with a slow and often also markedly prosaic style. He will later always reject closed, codified forms, he will eschew the sonnet and other consolidated prosodies.24 He does, however, accept internal rhyme, alliteration, compounds and enjambments. He will move ever closer to airy Elizabethan or Caroline levity and sobriety, reducing the number of syllables in the verse and focusing on elliptical evocation. His speciality lies in the candid, naïve, silvery ditty with no cerebral frameworks, thus purely descriptive; gradually, however, Thomas moves towards that Elizabethanism and concettism that some recognize in Brooke (as in ‘Parting’, which has the past cover up and soften joy and pain, and thus make every current pain more acute, or others in which he describes very personal psychological phenomena and behaviours against the backdrop of nature). We can make out only a definite and gradual liking for the quatrain, but most often with only two rhyming lines. His other favourite form is the narrative ballad.25 Thomas’s lexicon is undoubtedly as English as they come, made up as it is mostly of monosyllables which shower, gush and pound on the line, smothering any occasional long or Latinate word.26 His beginnings, and also his later developments, were deliberately paratactic, often gnomic as in Hopkins, and they could be tabulated, dry and telegraphic like the following: ‘There’s nothing like the sun as the year dies…’.27 Just as frequent is the icy ending with the bitter parting twist. 2. In the long run a certain monotony and uniformity of theme can be ascribed to the corpus of Thomas’s works, since he does not stray beyond variations of auscultation and empathic visions of natural spectacles, or the

24 On Thomas’s seven irregular sonnets, and on his rejection of other consolidated stanzaic forms, cf. Motion 1980, 79–80. 25 In one of these appears Lob, with many lives spent in different historical epochs, and who as a good sprite, and with the same name, also appears in Dear Brutus by Barrie. 26 Yet Thomas has a strange contrary predilection for the word ‘silentness’, in place of the more common, and shorter, ‘silence’. Another frequent archaism is ‘naught’ for ‘nothing’. 27 Compare with Hopkins’s ‘Nothing is so beautiful as Spring …’.

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street or forest scene. He could be called a poet with no periods, and that would be a mistake, though only a very slight one. At first Thomas tries to situate his interior plumb line in the crucible or the cradle of nature, in order to study his identity and also his anguish about the future that awaits him. He even seems to have to chase his double in a poetry of existential surreality which is not his most successful one. When he set out, Thomas could think about a mere change of medium and genre, and of putting the human element at the centre of his composition, and reinventing or proposing again a poetry from another era, anecdotal and thus narrative, of a Romantic and Wordsworthian bent, with dialogues between the city dweller and the rustic, and thus a dialogue that is instructive to both in a communicative exchange. The model could have been Crabbe, above all Wordsworth’s ‘Resolution and Independence’. Is the next one successful, that of the pure or almost pure cameos? Do they not have the limits of the views of the landscape painters? Thomas is witness to the seasonal cyclicality of nature, and its moods are transferred to man as the vibrations of the Aeolian harp. The incipit is striking and gives off a flash, and after the development there is a reflective ending. But similar reverberations usually arrive at the steadfast observer heralded first by an intermediary: the imperceptible rustling of another nature, that of the birds which inhabit it even more closely and inside it. Many of Thomas’s poems can be designated as a salutation to spring, frequently announced by the chaffinch or the cuckoo. ‘Old Man’, which in its associative contortions seems indebted to Pater and Proust, is in reality the name of a herb or plant with a pungent smell, whose branches were broken and sniffed by the poet as a child, and which hold associations even for the adult, who however cannot recall what and which memory they were associated with, and so releases an empty but still impelling associationism. Nature is an interlocutor, often also an advisor, a friendly presence and agent, and voices originate from it asking questions, explaining, exhorting, comforting. All these are lyric poems that flow together to suppress the self, which just transcribes the natural phenomena impassively or with sober asides. They are thus sights, as in Hopkins, always within reach, ‘only the beholder wanting’: it is therefore only man who does not notice these tender and cheering spectacles, and must almost be ashamed, such is the obviousness, the force, the ‘instress’

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with which they catch the eye. Even the primroses in ‘The Penny Whistle’ ‘ask to be seen’. Each one of these little scenes is situated, as during a trip, or a country walk, and its epiphanies are those of a still ‘merry’ England, old-fashioned but hidden, to be sought for. Thomas rediscovering this genius loci is a nostalgic who feels the symbol of the sunset and finds its counterparts in nature, as in the charming ‘The Unknown Bird’, a bird which only the poet has heard twittering a beautiful song, and which is an unknown species, a relic from antiquity, a phantom or prehistoric bird. An owl, too, in the homonymous poem, speaks only to the poet and reveals to him things that others do not know, like universal pain and the ability to rejoice. Thus nature does not leave the observer indifferent, and he lists its pleasant aspects, but it is a changeable and fickle nature whose spectacles may hurt, though for a short time (the internal and personal negative symbols of Thomas’s nature are the wind and rain). In its crucible nature is however ultimately renewing, and in its bonfire the ugly and fetid are consumed and everything comes out pure (‘Digging’); it grants the wellbeing of harmony, and invigorates, persuades and urges on. Veritable word pictures can seem ruffled and blurred like those of Constable, like that of the reapers; and they are pictures in which man and nature are isolated in a mythical dimension, outside of time, eternalized in an exceptional epiphanic and harmonious moment. 3. War appears late, in ‘A Private’, in the form of a delicate and unsentimental irony, on the soldier of whom we do not know where he camped out before becoming a soldier, and of whom we do not know where he now rests in the battlefields of France. The flowers which lovers would pick could no longer be picked because the soldiers had gone off to die at the front (in only four lines in ‘In Memoriam’). A staunch melancholy exudes from the famous ‘Rain’, purifying and baptismal as it falls, as in Verlaine and Hopkins, and at the same time a reassurance before death. ‘February Afternoon’ feels that behind every soldier there are throngs of other soldiers who have lived the absurdity of war, dictated by a god without hearing or sight. Some testamentary poems seal the poetry book by harping on the prospect of death. Thomas sees in them his father and the hard, severe relationship that bound them together; two exquisite poems fabulously imagine the presents to give to his children, and a thought also goes out

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to the happy hours of a man and a woman who loved each other and did not think of war except vaguely. It is the memory of wasted opportunities, of hopes, of encounters which came to naught: ‘the past is the only dead thing that smells sweet, / The only sweet thing that is not also fleet’ (‘Early One Morning’). Blindness to the beautiful scenes of a nature always first seen with heart-rending emotion – this is Thomas’s final regret. § 67. Rosenberg* Another poet who is being greatly reassessed these days, perhaps more so than he actually deserves, and who in the aftermath of his death and even later and until recently was predicted to go far, very far, is Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918). He was the son of Lithuanian Jewish parents who had emigrated for political reasons. His father had failed to report for military service, a conscientious objector and thus a dissident, and this is a double presage because his son signed up voluntarily to go to war as a sort of obscure compensation, and because, for the same reason, Joseph Conrad’s father had been deported from Russia, and Conrad had later made up for it in France. From his native Bristol, Rosenberg moved with his family to the Jewish quarter of London where, having left school at fourteen, he found a job at a printer’s. With financial help from his community he attended evening classes at Birkbeck College and was able to enrol at Slade, London’s most respected art school, having demonstrated a prodigious and precocious 28

*

The Collected Works of Isaac Rosenberg: Poetry, Prose, Letters, Paintings and Drawings, ed., and with introduction by I. Parsons and preface by S. Sassoon, London 1979, which I cite as Parsons 1979, now replaced by the Variorum edn The Poems and Plays of Isaac Rosenberg, ed. V. Noakes, Oxford 2004, integrated, ed. Noakes, with the prose and letters in Isaac Rosenberg, Oxford 2009. J. Cohen, Journey to the Trenches: The Life of Isaac Rosenberg 1890–1918, London 1975; J. J. Liddiard, Isaac Rosenberg: The Half Used Life, London 1975; J. M. Wilson, Isaac Rosenberg, Poet and Painter: A Biography, London 1975, rewritten as Isaac Rosenberg: The Making of a Great War Poet, London 2007; E. Menascè, Guerra e pace nell’opera di Isaac Rosenberg (1890– 1918), Padova 1984 (rich in documentation of his entourage and Jewish heritage); Six Poets of the Great War: Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Richard Aldington, Edmund Blunden, Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke and Many Others, ed. A. Barlow, Cambridge 1995; D. Maccoby, God Made Blind: The Life and Work of Isaac Rosenberg, Northwood 1999; G. Akers, Beating for Light: The Story of Isaac Rosenberg, Edinburgh 2006.

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talent for poetry and painting. Suffering from tuberculosis, he joined his sister in South Africa and returned home in 1915 to enlist, despite being fiercely critical of the war, and willing to fight like everyone else for the sole aim of putting an end to the conflict.1 Having refused the rank of officer, he fought in France as a private and died there after a night patrol, close to the place where Edward Thomas had fallen.2 It is not to him that Rosenberg can be compared; instead there is a certain superficial, skin-deep similarity between him and Owen. They died in the trenches having seen few of their poems published during their lifetime; above all they came from poor families (Rosenberg’s was thoroughly destitute), and did not have a university education except briefly or as private students. Self-taught, then, each blamed their own God for the war and the world going to rack and ruin, the one an evangelical and the other a Jew, both abjuring him. The greatest similarity is a poetic origin in the wake of Romanticism for a good while, up until the metamorphic baptism and rite of passage that was the war, with Owen looking to Keats and Rosenberg to Shelley, Swinburne and Romantic theatre. Owen brushed aside praise and was reserved and modest; Rosenberg, though also very shy, awkward, almost mute in public, even too self-critical in his letters and unctuous towards the powerful, secretly harboured colossal dreams and aspirations of becoming a multifaceted and megalomaniac artist. The only genre which he left untried was the novel.3 He may remind us of Wyndham Lewis, but Rosenberg studied Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites more closely. His paintings, executed in a variety

1 2

3

Parsons 1979, 227. His enlistment also had the more concrete goal of assuring his mother received a war pension. Bottomley could have been the link between Thomas and Rosenberg, who strangely, however, in his surviving letters published in Parsons 1979, never mentioned Thomas and seems to have been unaware of his existence. It would undoubtedly have been an arduous task for two antithetical and irreconcilable poetics like those of Thomas and Rosenberg to agree; Thomas was unaware of Rosenberg’s early poetry, but he could have found in it a fresh target for his ‘war on clichés’ (§ 66.1). According to Parsons 1979, xvi, it was Bottomley and Abercrombie who introduced Rosenberg to drama, and some negative influences are attributed to Marsh, who despite appearances judged Rosenberg’s poetry coldly, and only published a single specimen of it – a dramatic one – in his Georgian anthologies. But see the prose sketches in the final section of Parsons 1979.

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of techniques, reveal in the first place not a complementarity of elements but a contrastive characteristic, those of vaguely ‘macchiaioli’ and impressionist landscape painting and of divisionist, cubist portrait painting sometimes in charcoal. The noteworthy end result is more expressionist. Owen and Rosenberg also share a taste for alienating and alienated images,4 and for the flash. Rosenberg goes further, and his hallucination is even more perturbed and irreducible to one meaning. He has left a chaotic corpus of finished and almost finished poems and fragments and half-finished projects, especially plays, imprisoned in a single book also containing almost all his paintings. His poetry is even rougher, more immature and grim than Owen’s, except for a few more direct lyric poems. Though we are forced to consider it mature, and a test-bed, it is a textuality that could one day have turned out to be a mere youthful apprenticeship. 2. I am not the first to realize that Rosenberg is not ultimately an authentic English poet in his mindset and in the language in which he expresses himself; and herein lies, as I mentioned, his radical divergence from Thomas, who in this respect is the exact opposite. His psyche is tormented and morbid, injected with nocturnal nightmares, anguish, inexplicable terrors; he has a wild and flashing imagination which overflows into phantasmagorias. It can be attributed to his Jewish Slavic origins. This ethnic ancestry, as Sassoon noted, espoused by fatal consanguinity the post-Shakespearian theatrical tradition of grandiloquent, Byronian, Gothic romanticism, of Shelley’s dramatic works and those of minor Victorians rediscovering heroic theatre. Rosenberg read Donne and showed that he was on the same wavelength as him, but he ended up preferring a more flourishing and luxuriant tradition that was less dry, cerebral and controlled. Such baggage partially intersects with the predilection for the favoured authors of T. S. Eliot, who, however, banishes pre-Romantic or intemperate traces or clear corruptions of Caroline or Jacobean theatre.5 Rosenberg really

4

5

This is the declared aim in his war poetry in, for example, the letter to Mrs Cohen, no date, in Parsons 1979, 237, where Rosenberg also criticizes the series of sonnets on the war by Brooke. The only composition by Brooke which Rosenberg repeatedly praises is the ‘cloud’ sonnet. The often made comparison between Rosenberg and Eliot, based on a few of Rosenberg’s poems which describe the degraded urban scene, seems to me to be

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read and became infatuated with Byron’s and Shelley’s plays, as can be seen from his letters. These Baroque-like traditions and dramatic intent, which Rosenberg’s poetry always tends towards, make us think of another Slav who is even less English and who integrated later or never integrated at all, Joseph Conrad. Like him, Rosenberg writes in an English with a sound and structure that are sometimes incorrect, non-native, wooden, apparently following another linguistic and phonetic pattern. His greatest credential as a modernist lies in the global effect which he produces: a dark poetry (which the author deprecated), tough, not comforting, gnarled, with a musicality that is in no way mellifluous. His letters allow us to follow this irregular, erratic formation of a free, eclectic taste, not moulded by the usual academic agencies, and off the beaten track. As a reader and judge of contemporary literature, suffice it to say that Rosenberg extols some irremediable minor figures such as Bottomley and Abercrombie, with excessive praise of the two authors’ dramatic works, which he claims are the future indelible mark of the age. From the age of fifteen Rosenberg assimilated the style and the cadences of the Bible, and he metabolized the redundant and imaginative language of David’s thanksgiving song and the triumphal battle hymn in not very personal school exercises leading up to the highly prolific year of 1912. The generating principle is the dream image and vision without the support of anecdote or occasion. The events behind some of the early poems soon disperse (as in the ballad of the poor prostitute, innocent and sad);6 the labyrinthine city, with its vortex, receives spasmodic descriptive bursts, but the poet distances himself from it in favour of pallid, indistinct and remote scenarios. In other words he reactivates escapist romanticism. He did not take long at all to make the lexicon, the tone, the turn of phrase and the clichés of late Romanticism his own. His verbal ability, his fluidity, the ease with which he weaves together images is striking, but he sickens and nauseates because his poetry gradually repeats itself and becomes a collection of poeticalities. His pedigree is that of Keats, the Titanic Shelley,

6

generic and essentially preposterous, because Rosenberg looks at the city through romantic escapism. The opening note is indeed that of a heartfelt salute to Zionist revivalism and the recognition in extremis of God’s providential reign over the world, chords which are soon muted, indeed frankly desecrated, as in the frequent depiction of a rat-God.

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inherited and absorbed through Swinburne; looking closer we can glimpse another main heir practising this tradition, Francis Thompson.7 These examples come to mind for the pompousness of his diction, the hyperbole, the synaesthesia, the metaphors within metaphors, the allegorical representations, the solemn, paced rhythms, the ancient vocabulary, the spectacular scenarios, the pageants, the sumptuous atmospheric descriptions, the long wave of the verse and the chains of adjectives. 3. Behind this there was an adolescent poet who had not yet lived long, who exaggerated and decorated meagre existential material projecting himself onto the lover rejected by an arrogant woman, or an outcast longing for the unattainable and dazzled by the prospect of panic purification.8 Rambling and excessive, Rosenberg would have ended up being forgotten like a crazed visionary, or even a latecomer, if he had stopped there, and this poetry of his would have been classified as a second-rate product of effusive imitation, rather than a short chapter of twentieth-century poetic renewal. The signs of change appear almost suddenly in rare compositions from 1913 in which the torrid vein of prolixity cools, the verse shortens in metre, prosody contracts into quatrains, the unrestrained imagination is toned down and disciplined, and a true content appears, both emotional and ideological or experiential, agitating behind it.9 Rosenberg’s corpus of poems is thus split exactly in two like Owen’s, with the war delineating the boundary, the disciplining and indexing element. Those who exclude this demarcation and do not take account of two discordant aesthetic and poetic proposals are wrong in my opinion. If anything it is surprising how for a while the visionary and prophetic, and grandiloquent, voice coexists with the bewildered and bare phenomenology of everyday life. As in Owen, the war corpus is not only necessarily short, it is also fragmented into a series of scenic flashes, synecdoches of the war itself. His singularity is the choice of 7 8 9

Whom he appreciated and thus read, at least according to the letter of DecemberJanuary 1912–1913 (Parsons 1979, 198, but cf. also 202). In ‘Night and Day’, a vast, excessive poem in post-Romantic style. In the erotic poetry which explodes in 1914 (such as ‘The Female God’) one can of course retrace the marks of Baudelaire’s mauditism, but filtered by his disciple Swinburne. Amongst these is ‘The Blind God’, God now targeted by the curses of his creation to which he remains indifferent; or ‘At Sea-Point’, which invokes the destruction of the cosmos as the bitter fruit of disappointment in love.

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an abnormal, bewildered detail, of metaphysical subtlety and extravagance, with the equally acute reflection which provokes and which follows. ‘On Receiving News of War’ traces the parable of the Christian Passion and Resurrection,10 and sees in the war a bloody phase which, as in Yeats, can restore a regenerated world; but it is also a violent and picturesque clash of colours, the white of the snow stained with the red of sacrifice, and thus an exceptionally Imagist, paratactical, fragmented poem in the midst of many others with sinuous syntax, thus inaugurating a small internal section of unusual bluntness.11 In his most impressive composition, ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’, a mouse hops onto the hand of an English soldier in the trench, but being ‘cosmopolitan’ it can then do the same with the hand of a German: it is a mediator of peace, an ironic ambassador which thus projects the composition onto the same imaginary wavelength as Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’. ‘Louse Hunting’ and ‘Returning, We Hear the Larks’ show that Rosenberg has acquired and now made an unsuspected macabre humour his own, and carried out an iconoclastic and irreverent overturning of the rhetoric of war. In the soldiers’ hallucination the ubiquitous and elusive lice start dancing a crazed dance mocking the war; in the second poem the larks sing, indifferent to the destruction and the slaughter and the ‘serpent’ lurking in the trenches. Rosenberg also carries off an impressive vocalic play which on the one hand may resemble Owen’s pararhyme, and on the other hand reinforces the semantic metamorphosis between the silvery and carefree song of the larks and the darker and more foreboding one of the death knell.12 Few in number are these poems which shift the spotlight from the great themes to the peripheral, secondary, insignificant details or to

10 11

12

In Judas’ ‘malign kiss’ which metamorphoses the world into ‘mould’. As in the ending of ‘In the Trenches’, which becomes fragmented and aphasic with the bomb that explodes on the trench floor scattered with crushed poppies, an objective correlative and a splash of colour. Some of these poems, in fact, and amongst those a few mature ones that came out before Rosenberg’s death, were published in Poetry on the, albeit very condescending, advice of Pound (Menascè 1984, 52–3). This is the chain: from the sense of menace that ‘lurks’ all around, to the strange joy that – ‘hark!’ – descends from the song of the invisible ‘larks’, onto which is superimposed the falling of ‘dark death’ from above, a visionary and auditory superimposition of music over the song of the larks.

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meagre spectacles or the chilling occurrences recorded without a murmur and without batting an eyelid, in fact extremely central. 4. Rosenberg’s aspiration to become a dramatist could not be carried out completely in some grandiose projects which were cut short and left as drafts by his death. Moses is a biblical dramatization in a single scene in the high-sounding manner of the Elizabethans or perhaps of the most pompous Victorian theatre, that of the Spasmodics, poets of the nineteenth century whose leading proponent was Bailey.13 This influence is evident in the high and round resonances, the obscure yet evocative discursive devices, the free and anarchic flow of images. As if to confirm this, the playwright poet claimed to have conceived such a project so as to produce a ‘gigantic play’.14 It is an ambitious parable of personal revenge, racial revival and regenerative utopia, created against rising anti-Semitism during the war and which hurt the soldier Rosenberg at the front. The critics were divided, either pointing out what a hodgepodge15 it was or – even more so today due to the general interest in the literature of the diaspora – highlighting its courageous denunciation. This would make of it one of Rosenberg’s key works. Moses keeps his brothers subjugated to work and they are gnashing their teeth; he realizes that he is a traitor, and he is also in love with the daughter of the Pharaoh’s minister. He becomes aware and rouses himself, he is about to smother the perfidious minister, thus sacrificing his love, but is struck by the javelins. Saul and other characters from his biblical book and epic are introduced in the fragments, often rewritten with variations, of the play The Unicorn. They are the radicalization of the internal tension in Rosenberg’s poetry, as Rosenberg’s verse is always somewhat declaimed, inflated and Baroque-like, and his poetry is always a secondary elaboration, hardly ever a spontaneous outburst. The unicorn seems like an unmistakable echo of Yeats, who had written a play about it in 1908, and is a symbol of the invasion of the irrational and the upsetting into everyday life. In the author’s own definition it is ‘the symbol of war and all the devastating forces unleashed by an ambitious and unscrupulous will’,16 thus postulating

13 14 15 16

Volume 4, § 225. Parsons 1979, 257. The term had been used by Marsh. Parsons 1979, 270.

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with that a Nietzschean irrational principle which is guiding the world, no longer a providential god. Rosenberg does not apply this apocalyptic design to Irish myth or to other real or fantastical epochs, but places it in the biblical epic of Saul, the most prophetic and tormented of the Israelite leaders. The protagonist, however, is a Titanic alter ego of Moses, who has a double and oscillating identity in the several versions, and hears the primordial call of the flesh more keenly than Moses, and is thus one of those devastating forces of which the action of the play is an allegory. But it is impossible, given the patchy state in which the work was left, to give a definitive judgement. § 68. Other war poets The anthologies, the reviews and the specialist books1 contain an impressive roll call of minor or semi-minor war poets, and form a sort of Spoon River and album of epitaphs, with corresponding careers, echoing or divergent approaches to the war according to particular emphases or points of view, both in uncritical support and in disdainful denunciation, yet all taking up arms and serving in that fighting army, from the heart of contradiction. The number also increases due to the presence of poets and writers who only passed through this war experience and then strayed onto other paths and thus survived. But those who survive always admit or demonstrate the delayed effect and the belated trauma of the war itself, and continue to talk about it in reverberations; or else this unhealed scar is reflected by their lives themselves, zeroed, marked, ‘shocked’. The chapter on the war poets also continues to be that of small formal innovations carried out on the invariable material; I will try to conclude it by following an experimentalist escalation. Having examined the major poets, the poetry of the lesser ones only just distinguishes itself and by deliberately trying to split hairs. Authentic originality is shown by a completely atypical short poem by Herbert Read, and the only clear and resounding revolutionary leap should be acknowledged in ‘In Parenthesis’ by David Jones. Working either side of 1910, almost all of these poets whom I shall shortly introduce undergo, to a greater or lesser degree, or pass under the scrutiny of, two avant-garde and reorganizing movements in English poetry around that time. These are Imagism and Georgianism, and from this thesis and this 1

Amongst which I recall Silkin 1972 from the bibliography listed in § 61.1.

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antithesis they arrive at a non-homogeneous synthesis, that is they become war poets, at least temporarily. All things considered it was the Imagists, converted into war poets, who aligned and made a connection between the two phenomena as a cultural revolt, the ‘1912 revolt’, a momentous and historic revolt like the war two years later. It will be and is difficult to separate with a knife where they remain imagists and Georgians and where they do not, and I will have to give some of them two different treatments. 2. Richard Aldington (1892–1962) more than anything else is part of another story, that of Imagist poetry, of which he could probably be called the main English exponent (at least in terms of quantity), and later in the century a disciple of Eliot. The right hand of Pound the Imagist in 1912, he wrote reviews for many journals including Eliot’s Criterion, and was an expert on French and Italian literature (he lived in France from 1928 to 1936, and after the Second World War until his death) and translated works from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. He also wrote three novels inspired by the war which have left a more profound trace, especially the first one, than his poetry. The thesis of Death of a Hero (1929), which Orwell considered the best English novel of the First World War,2 is that the war had inflicted moral and psychological damage on its combatants even if and when they survived. Aldington’s novels can be understood as the equivalent of Sassoon in prose, due to the accusation against false religion fuelling the war, hypocritical morality, the education system and middle-class philistinism. His war poems or poems commemorating the war display nobility of expression and high humanitarian rhetoric. They give voice to the layman asking an absent divinity explanations about the governing of the world. It is therefore religious poetry in the broadest sense, that written by the faithful in crisis, mostly like Milton and Hopkins, whose full and rounded sound, solemn and sculpted word, oratorical dialectic, often also some verbal echoes, cadences and discursive formulae it shares. ‘Vicarious Atonement’ demonstrates this firstly in the use of refrain, anaphora and parallelism. The poet reprimands God who has crushed man, and asks him why and promises resistance as the spokesman for an

2

OCE, vol. I, 261.

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anonymous community of stoics, fighting poets and artists, on behalf of a ‘you’, which is the rest of humanity, the rest of the world, for whom the community of poets is taking on the sacrifice, spilling its blood and dying. But other poets also benefit from it, the poets of the future. At the end of the day, Aldington’s is still a classical conception, Greek in particular, of heroism; his general tone is not that of Owen’s pity, but of the Promethean challenge.3 At stake is the survival of classical heritage, liberal culture and man’s humanistic dignity. ‘Vicarious Atonement’ also reveals the limits of Aldington’s war poetry. It is too explicit, resolved, indignant, even conceited in its challenge; the adjectives are too bare and emphatic and also repeated. Hopkins emerges even too clearly in the end, in the ‘terrible sonnet’ cadence which announces, in other words, that the poet will not ‘feast’ on the comfort of carrion. Of a parallelistic and anaphoric formula is also ‘The Retreat’, which also, as in Hopkins, invokes peace and the cessation of turmoil (the poems of Hopkins which could be a backdrop to it are ‘Elected Silence’ and ‘Peace’). Constructed and unconvincing is the poem in memory of Owen, which seems to have its emotional core in the luxuriant English landscape, vibrant and wavy, rather than in the ever inert dead. Aldington’s most important collection of war poetry is Images of War (1919), and the title is exactly and literally programmatic, but, as has rightly and often been said, Aldington fails in putting Imagism at the service of the poetry of the resentment of war. 3. Born in London but grown up in Kent, and educated at Oxford, Edmund Blunden (1896–1974) undertook an academic career at home and abroad after 1919, and held the chair of poetry at Oxford from 1966 to 1968, where he was a recognized expert especially in poetic Romanticism. He had gone to the front from 1916 until 1918 only to discover later that he was unable to grasp the tragedy of it at the time, seeing himself immediately afterwards as a ‘harmless young shepherd in a soldier’s coat’. His two collections of war poetry which came out in 1920 and 1922 bore titles – ‘the shepherd’ or ‘the waggoner’ – further attesting to the sudden bewilderment and violent disorientation of the young innocent hurled out of his environment. The 3

The often uselessly decorative function of Greek mythological imagery is stigmatized by Silkin 1972, 189–90.

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pendular mechanism of Blunden’s poetry bears witness to the destruction of the natural cosmos followed by the voluntary amnesia of this panorama, which leads him to remember the green meadows, farms and countryside rituals in his homeland. Such complete identification with nature brings him closer to Edward Thomas, and indeed they shared a common teacher in John Clare. Like Thomas, Blunden is ‘completely English’.4 The strongest emphasis is on his recovery after the war, the return of a primigenial order, and the wholesome practices of an archaic and immemorial life which are taken up again after the parenthesis, a concept that in Blunden is emptied of any theological or archetypal nuance or implication, unlike in David Jones, referring instead to that series of very earthly and everyday values which were also praised by Brooke.5 Blunden, too, ended up being better known for his war prose, thanks to Undertones of War6 (1928), which is a series of emotions recalled in tranquillity with the calmness and the wit, and the lack of horror, that the distance of the intervening time could assure him. 4. The exploration or unmasking of the ideology of war is delineated in the writings, letters and poetry of the meteoric, unexpressed ‘promise’ that was Charles Sorley (1895–1915), talented and cultured like a second Brooke, but his equal and opposite. Son of a philosophy professor, Sorley was not only aware of the inferiority of contemporary poetry, which he denounced with lucidity a ‘living lie’,7 and he had written early compositions with a vigour unknown to the Georgians. But from the front he asked himself existentialist questions on man enslaved and crushed by an inhuman mechanism, and on the metaphysical origins of the adventure he had been thrown into. A final sonnet on the fallen, found in his rucksack upon arriving from France, shows however that he did not conceive of death as heroic 4 5

6 7

WAR, 180–1. In the poem ‘Forefathers’ Blunden voices the elegy of rude health and timeless patriarchy of the farming class. ‘Almswomen’ lists, with a botanical precision only equal to that of Thomas, the flowers and plants adorning the garden. See also Orwell’s humorous review of a late book by Blunden (1944) on cricket (OCE, vol. III, 66–8), which does not fail to note that the war had ‘shattered the leisurely world [Blunden] had known’, after which even cricket was never the same again. Obviously a programmatic title. DES, 159.

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but pathetic, though loaded with a bitter sarcasm unknown to Owen. In other poems a surprising and mature political sense emerges, an awareness that the war is not a way to save the beautiful and mythical England of yore but the clash of two great nations blinded by hatred (‘the blind fight the blind’).8 Sorley does not fail to surreptitiously quote Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ in the line ‘But gropers both through fields of thought confined’.9 A personality like that of Herbert Read (1893–1968) in turn exceeds and surpasses the status of war poet to an extent decidedly greater and more significant than is the case with any other poet of that generation or that group. Read was an eclectic intellectual with an impressive bibliography in terms of variety and sheer volume; poet and novelist, critic and playwright, philosopher, political analyst and pedagogue, he was above all a renowned scholar and theorist of the visual arts; called to cover roles in the British civil service, he was also professor of poetry in America.10 His ideology, however, reduced to the basics, is not sufficiently original as to overshadow an ultimately Ruskinian origin, especially for the redemptive function ascribed to art in a milieu shifted forwards in time compared to Ruskin, but which turned out to be possessed by the same self-destructive and thus apocalyptic germs, although Read did not invoke any confusedly

8

9

10

Sorley had spent a year in Germany in 1914, and studied philosophy and economics in Jena before being arrested as a spy and expelled from Germany. His letters, however, show a strange and disconcerting impartiality about the Germans. It is certainly no accident that even Virginia Woolf ’s Septimus Warren Smith is a first-world-war victim of shell-shock, and that Sorley is in To the Lighthouse the surname of the lighthouse keeper’s ‘poor son’ whose days are numbered, due to his tuberculosis. On the other hand the exhortation to ‘Say not soft things as other men have said’, echoes and overturns that minor gospel of Victorian patriotism, already secretly emptied and resigned, which is the poem ‘Say not the struggle nought availeth’ by Clough. This eclecticism was clearly denounced by Orwell, though he largely admired Read, in a piece he wrote on the 1945 collection of Read’s essays, A Coat of Many Colours (OCE, vol. IV, 69–73). Orwell took exception to Read wanting to grant an audience to all contemporary progressive ideologies, but merely to show off his openmindedness, while his regional origins, from the ‘rustic and rough tribe’ of Yorkshire, would lead him to less ecumenical sympathies and stronger dissent.

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transcendent solution nor did he launch frenzied proclamations.11 Read had served with distinction as an officer in France up until the end of the war, accumulating memories and reflections that merged into a poetry marked by the ideological and metaphysical frames he applies to the phenomenon. It is natural to pair him with David Jones, but Read’s is an immanentistic philosophy, closed to the transcendent and the metaphysical, or intimately dubious, which bitterly studies, also in light of the Second World War,12 the miserable lie that the First World War was destined to end all wars; thus he denounced the futile sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of human lives. For ‘The End of War’ (1933) Yeats justly abandoned his criteria for exclusion of war poetry from his anthology of 1936. This poem had its origin in a bloody ambush which his battalion was drawn into on the eve of the armistice, but the pure and simple account is in reality entrusted to the introduction in prose, which coldly enumerates the gory and horrifying details of the scene of war. The body of the composition is in the dramatized and tripartite form of monologues and dialogues between entities who are above all metaphysical and in which those details blur and fade out. The novelty of the poem is an expressive medium different from the usual scene of war witnessed, 11

12

His original sense of corruption and a decline of history stemmed from the idealized innocence of his place of birth, as Orwell noted, as opposed to the squalor and greyness of the industrialized urban agglomerations (Halifax) where he grew up. Thus Blake is superimposed on Ruskin. Read’s early works in prose and verse could not therefore but be recollections of childhood innocence, and they bear titles which are explicitly Blakean. The Green Child (1935), Read’s only novel, partly reminiscent of Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill, acts out in allegory and fable the same parable of the adult alter ego returning to the ranks of childhood and nature, and thus the revenge of imagination and creativity. As an aesthetologist Read maintained the theory of ‘organic form’ taken from Coleridge and the Romantics (form which models itself on content in an indivisible whole), then transferring it to the anarchic and still utopian conception of an integrated society implementing a new form of cooperation. His debt with Ruskin re-emerges in his numerous books on psychology and sociology of art and, above all, on pedagogy, meant to reiterate the irreplaceable value of art both in the relationship between individuals and society and as an integral part of the school curriculum. Poems dealing with it are included in the complete poetic edition of 1953 (Silkin 1972, 178).

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heard, told or observed; it is an operatic aria or in the theatrical sense an empathic monologue, that of the German soldier leading the ambush and then being executed by the English, captured in that highly dilated instant in which the bayonet pierces him. It is the delirium, the almost Paterian experiential frenzy of someone who has no expectations beyond the grave and has embraced the war as a euphoric end in itself and a demonstration of vitality: ‘God we create / in the end of action, not in dreams’; or even as a nationalistic Germanic delirium demanding a crazed and ecstatic readiness to die. The Mephistophelian misbelief is proclaimed against the backdrop of a pious comrade in arms who has just died and whose faith the soldier speaking the monologue cannot share. The song of the horribly mutilated little girl, or medieval ‘contrast’ between body and soul, proceeds with variations on the arcane sublimation of pain, fused into a whispered and syllabified dictation practically without punctuation. In her candour the child is ready for that assumption into heaven that the German soldier rejects. The third episode of the poem is the song of joy for the truce and the end of the war, and the recognition of the divine guarantee of love. The monologue fades, also in terms of words in individual lines, up until the final two which are of only one syllable, in a way very similar to the end of The Waste Land, whose spiritualist but possibilistic message it echoes.13 5. Many scholars of Ivor Gurney (1890–1937), an alumnus of Stanford and Vaughan Williams, predicted him a future as the greatest twentiethcentury English composer. The war put an end to these hopes when Gurney, enlisted as a private and at the front for two periods interspersed with convalescence in hospital after being wounded, was sent home definitively in August 1917 following injuries incurred in a gas attack. Affected by schizophrenia already in 1912, the war exacerbated his mental illness; the veteran’s frequent suicidal fantasies and disorientation led his family to intern him for his last fifteen years in psychiatric institutions. As a musician, wild and demonic, apart from modest independent contributions, he could only set the songs of various contemporary poets to music, including Yeats and Masefield; but two collections of poems, drawn from his experiences 13

An analysis, partly specious, of the subtle meanders of the last part of the English officer’s meditation, can be found in Silkin 1972, 185–6.

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in the war, were published in 1917 and 1919. Gurney represents an evident parable, which from conventional and predictable results and forms applied to an invariable material attains and climbs to a metrical, verbal and syntactic experimentalism of uncommon efficacy. He was undoubtedly able to achieve this objective due to his mental illness, which distorted his logic, warped his discourse and brought him visual and de-automated hallucinations typical of any transmental poetry. The first period of Gurney’s poetry was a collection of predictable scenes of war counterbalanced and contrasted with nostalgic and elegiac memories of the countryside in his beloved Gloucestershire, which anthropomorphically shares in the grief, dresses in mourning, and celebrates the fallen hero (‘To His Love’). On the imperceptible elements of novelty, a sense of Georgian elegy prevails which was highly appreciated by Blunden, his first editor (1954). Later the descriptive devices become ever more hallucinatory, distorted and less limpid, and depend on a dislocated and muddled syntax which demonstrates that a rethink of form has occurred. Sassoon was also a diegetic and narrative poet of anecdotes; Gurney tells them with much less perspicuity and sense of order, in snatches, splinters and fragments, and with a more lyrical and impressionistic, or rather expressionistic, synthesis which does not aim, as in Sassoon, to persuade and shock. A third period, which subsequently came to light in its entirety after lying unedited in the archives,14 is that of Gurney’s madness, from which emerge, in snatches, desperate and stabbing externalizations, imbued with guilt, resounding with ‘terrible’ rebukes and impassioned defences and professions of innocence mixed with plaintive invocations of peace and tranquillity.15 Hopkins 1918 book had been lent to him by a friend and had an immediate contagious effect; but Gurney was on Hopkins’s trail even before encountering him.16 6. Poet, engraver and painter with a Welsh father and a mother of distant Italian origin, David Jones (1895–1974) is still a mysterious subject shrouded in legend, and therefore largely unknown to the general public 14 See Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney, ed. P. J. Kavanagh, Oxford and New York 1982. 15 These lamentations can be found, for example, in a poem with the fitting title of ‘To God’. 16 Silkin 1972, 121, who traces an interesting parallel between the two poets.

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even in Britain, where he has often left many readers and traditionally and professionally conservative critics more perplexed than appreciative. His paintings and graphics can be found in the most important and prestigious British and American galleries, being the fruit of a dogged expressive quest outside the mainstream of commercial art. His main literary title is the lyrical remembrance of the war, in prose and free verse, thus a poem in prose, In Parenthesis, which was begun in 1927 and published in 1937 with the support and help of T. S. Eliot, who predicted – though this did not come to pass – that it would receive exegetical attention as vast and extensive as his own poetry, the works of Joyce or Pound’s Cantos. Jones superficially resembles Gurney since he practises two arts which spill over into each other and are in symbiosis. In Parenthesis is experimental and even more advanced than Read’s ‘The End of a War’, the only war poem that stands up to comparison. Ultimately, however, the clearest and most important aspect which is projected onto this work is Jones’s awareness of his ethnic identity, intensified by the fact that he is a Welshman transplanted to London and that he rediscovered his Wales with an even more ardent and overwhelming love from exile. Jones therefore makes us think, more than any other contemporary writer, of Powys, the older of the two brothers, and of his fluvial and gargantuan Welsh epics.17 He makes us think of one of the Celtic souls, that hypnotically and fantastically more open to the historical viewpoint, and to the sense of history as layers of epochs in progressive relation and fusion, seen, felt and divined from the very land inhabited by the most ancient of the British races. In Parenthesis is on the one hand the final example of those monumental mythical-historical syntheses that came to us from Wales, in which universal myth and history virtually offer themselves from one of the most privileged vantage points. It is a summa of the Great War in which Jones has completely reflected and transfused himself rather than pulverizing himself in the habitual collection of individual short lyrics. Such an exploit was borne of a long incubation of experiences and a laborious period of ideological gestation and maturation. The young painter and engraver had fought with the fusiliers in

17 § 49.4–5.

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France until the end of the war; he had then joined in partnership with the Welsh sculptor Eric Gill, having converted to Catholicism, and had been part of an artistic commune or brotherhood which apparently revised that of the Pre-Raphaelites in a much more orthodox direction. His aesthetics, exposed in essays later collected in 1959, may seem to match that of Read in the accentuation of the creative character and the indispensable function of art in the individual and in society. In reality Jones is much more teleological and eschatological than Read, and imagines art as a co-creation, and the artist as a demiurge exercising and demonstrating his Catholic free will in art. These premises are sufficient to explain how and why In Parenthesis displeased and disappointed those who were expecting more factual and immediate accounts of the Great War, with the aim of stirring and scorning. Jones’s goal is the opposite, to arrive at the universal starting with the particular, to make the Great War simply War, to describe its universal prehistoric and historical palimpsest. Jones’s compositional process is not realism, but the counterpoint between past and present; it is also perhaps true that the work is now a period piece which could only have been conceived and realized in the twilight of 1930s poetic Modernism. 7. The vague structure of the plot of In Parenthesis, or its contemporary scenario, are the participation in the war by a certain John Ball, a Welshman, in phases that, in seven parts, go from enlistment and departure for the front to active service in war and daily life in the trenches. Wounded, Ball dies in the Battle of the Somme, just a year into the war. The poem proceeds with abrupt changes of register and brusque, diatonic associative shifts often difficult to decipher (and occasionally annotated by Jones himself, mindful of The Waste Land), compressing at every step a diegetic network packed with overlappings between past and present, myth and history, and above all daily little commentaries of war. This reuse of the method of myth and archetype, together with a filtered commentary replete with even more unusual literary references, is perhaps what impressed Eliot. John Ball is of course the name of the protagonist in a work by Morris.18 The later The Anathémata (1952) is basically a second, even more profound and longer

18

Volume 6, § 148.1.

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§ 69. Graves

exploration of the history of the world from a limited observation point. At least another two lesser and less successful works confirm the analogy with Powys, because they arose from the suggestion of the Roman rule on the island and the fate of the empire. A poet becoming increasingly rarefied, Jones ended his career with the esoteric but largely repetitive The Kensington Mass (1975, posthumous), which raises the associative principle to the highest level and effects a procedure and an internal evolution by now determinable ad libitum, but according to the counterpoint of the Catholic Mass. § 69. Graves* Had he tragically died during the war, Robert Graves (1895–1985) would have been forever classified as just another poet fallen in action. He died at the age of ninety, overcoming this phase, indeed relegating it to his distant and even negligible prehistory. But by his sheer longevity Graves then rendered obsolete even the later and gradually more middling labels appended to him, up until the one he died with, that of mythological poet or mythologist tout court, which he considered his secret entelechy and final identity. His starting pattern is déjà vu, with his first stint at the front, the anti-rhetorical accounts, the pity, the anger, the disappointment, the 19

*

Acknowledged as the author of about a thousand poems, on various dates Graves collected his poetical works in comprehensive editions, but neither his Collected Poems of 1959 nor that of 1975, including those of 1965, are complete works: Carter 1989, 12, 253 (quoted below in extenso), points out that only a third of the 1975 edition is comprised of poems included in the 1959 edition; therefore there is no variorum which includes Graves’s entire corpus with textual variants. M. Seymour-Smith, Robert Graves, London 1956, 1970, and Robert Graves: His Life and Work, London 1982, 1995; J. M. Cohen, Robert Graves, Edinburgh and London 1960, 1963; D. Day, Swifter than Reason: The Poetry and Criticism of Robert Graves, Chapel Hill, NC 1963; G. Stade, Robert Graves, New York 1967; M. Kirkham, The Poetry of Robert Graves, London 1969; R. P. Graves, Robert Graves, 3 vols, London 1986 (Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic 1895–1926), London 1990 (Robert Graves: The Years with Laura) and London 1995 (Robert Graves and the White Goddess, 1940–1985); D. N. G. Carter, Robert Graves: The Lasting Poetic Achievement, Houndmills 1989; W. Graves, Wild Olives: Life in Majorca with Robert Graves, London 1995; A. G. G. Gibson, Robert Graves and the Classical Tradition, Oxford 2015.

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wounding,1 the repetition compulsion, that is, deciding that he did not want to abandon his companions in arms at the front; then the regret at having survived such a slaughter. Graves’s poems from the front are the voice of the humanist who must forcibly put away his humanism and his detached cult of nice words or nice classical poetic subjects (such as a ‘poem about a faun’), in a circumstance that flings that humanist into another, harder and less poetic and gilded reality. Yet they revolve around the figure of preterition, because they dwell on a left-behind and future world in which, it is hoped, spring may return to reign eternally. Graves, however, would have preferred to define the war from afar and to describe it as a shadow cast on the smiling summer landscape, and an outburst of boasting collective fanaticism, with bold young men unfazed by death who see everything as radiant. The sarcasm is of a type reminiscent of Sassoon, and with good reason. As a young officer in the British army fighting on the Somme, he was the hero of a gesture of maturity towards the poet Sassoon who had imprudently railed against the British high command and risked being court-martialled. A decade after the end of hostilities, Graves’s Goodbye to All That (1929) immediately became a timeless classic and one of the best British war memoirs, for its pure recording of the daily life of the foot soldiers at the front with a sort of camera eye, without hiding anything or sweetening it up. Two years earlier he had written, together with the American poet Laura Riding,2 a groundbreaking review of new English poetry, A Survey of Modernist Poetry,3 which, half way between modernists and traditionalists, delivered the finishing blow to Georgianism4 while welcoming with open arms the poetry of Hopkins, Eliot and Yeats. Graves had come out of the war touched in his psyche, even destroyed, and with 1 2 3 4

Presumed dead, he wrote as a convalescent to The Times to let people know that he was still alive. Graves divorced his first wife, Nancy, whom he had met while in hospital in 1916, for her. The arrangement of which was mainly dictated by Laura Riding. Graves, in his poetical practice, is in fact the polar opposite of Hopkins. Eight poems by Graves had been included in Marsh’s Georgian anthologies. Marsh had wisely advised the young Graves to abstain from any archaism in his poetic language.

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a neurosis, and was in therapy with the psychiatrist of Owen and Sassoon. Enrolled at Oxford, he had taken to writing poems on obsession, spectres of the dead returning, or on the dark subject of evil, destruction and the maelstrom within and outside of the psyche. 2. The superimposed or successive identities in Graves – the poles of his personality, to which I referred above – arose ab ovo from his two genetic components: a predisposition to fantasy of Celtic origin and inherited from his Irish father, and Teutonic rationality from his mother, a descendant of the historian von Ranke. He harboured a Puritan strain which was at the heart of a contradiction between spirit and flesh and instilled in him a sense of carnal sin and moral corruption. These complexes were transferred into the emotional sphere, because Graves experienced romantic and thus unhappy love according to the definition of Denis de Rougemont.5 Since the early 1930s Graves became an old acquaintance of English literature. He was for all the child prodigy, the strange, eclectic and independent writer, an exile from the schools and traditions, anomalous, apparently unsystematic. Indeed he was only apparently not integrated, even a vagabond rejected by his home community, and an exile in faraway lands, though just another ‘conformist rebel’. Lowry and Durrell6 also come to mind, because like them Graves is an apocalyptic who sees the world turned upside down. When his literary and emotional partnership with Laura Riding broke up in the late 1930s, Graves became a confused and arbitrary theorist, first a defender of romantic, then classical, positions, and later classical-romantic, who as an impressionist, and completely lacking in diplomacy, often passed violently dismissive judgements and verdicts. His poetry, without periods after its early maturation, preserves

5

6

The initial arpeggios of his poetical works are on spectres reprimanding the self which feels oppressed by a dark sense of guilt for something he claims, as a second Kafka, to be innocent of, protesting against the horrid, moonfaced, twisted-maned Medusa head, the harbinger of the ‘white goddess’ (§ 69.3). In fact it is an ‘ancestral sin’ of which he is a carrier. Graves arrived in Cairo accompanied by his wife and Laura Riding, in 1926, a good decade before Durrell settled in Alexandria; but there was no mythical love for Egypt at first sight because, unable to adapt to the climate, he only stayed there one year. From 1928 Graves lived almost uninterruptedly in Majorca.

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the style of the Empsonian 1930s,7 with well amalgamated and, above all, personalized influences of American poets such as Marianne Moore, Tate and Laura Riding herself. As time went on and new aesthetics flourished, he was forced to reiterate the necessity of poetic discipline, the call to obedience to rules such as rhythm, metre, and a fixed, not fluctuating or wildly connotative, semantics.8 Riding had tried to force Graves’s traditionalism, without managing to dismantle it, and to turn him into a modernist rather than just a modern. She did help Graves, however, to fashion a lucid, noneffusive, agnostic, elegantly playful, or even absurd poetry. 3. Graves considered himself first and foremost a poet, and a poet for poets and ‘fine minds’, and like other contemporaries, at a certain moment, having decided to become a professional writer, he was inspired by a tried and tested stratagem: writing prose for the market to supply oxygen for an elite poetry. His two novels of 1934, free and fantastical reconstructions of late Roman life, I Claudius and Claudius the God, are deaf to the masterpieces of narrative Modernism, and even contentiously faithful to a ‘f  lat’ concept of character, the chronological order of the plot and the concreteness of the dialogue. Claudius is an emperor despite himself, alienated from the vortex that is whirling about him, more spectator than actor, and who, with secret republican sympathies, once on the throne strives to rationalize and moralize a corrupt and by now declining Rome. Much admired in their day and still best-sellers, the two books are anything but exciting. They form a very slightly romanticized historical diptych along the lines of Gibbon, and an example of high, polished and refined entertainment written with classical brilliance, though with little relief and estrangement. They are neither in the tradition of Pater (they avoid deep analyses of the conflict between Christianity and paganism), nor in the revisionist tradition of Powys, nor in the slightly later and iconoclastic tradition of

7

8

A section of A Survey demonstrates, based on sonnet 129 by Shakespeare, how much of the original meaning is lost or misunderstood with the modernization of punctuation and spelling. Empson was stimulated by it soon afterwards in Seven Types of Ambiguities. Preface from 1958 to a poetry reading at the University of Michigan, quoted in Cohen 1963, 6.

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Golding or Dürrenmatt.9 They are lacking, then, in stylistic eccentricity and in metafiction, despite being ventriloquist and written in the first person as the emperor himself (Graves presents himself as the editor of fake annals written in Greek and retranslated into English). The second novel is decidedly better, rich in pleasant asides, and well-told flashbacks and imbrications, and dwelling occasionally on humorous characters and events, but always avoiding sculpting or scrutinizing them too deeply.10 The only authentically estranged moment is a hint at the preaching and death of a certain Joshua or Joseph or Jesus, treated with that fake or amused or absent-minded nonchalance, that indirection and obliqueness with which the same fact is narrated in Browning’s famous monologues on the same subject (like that of Karshish): that is in the form of a letter from the governor of Palestine, followed by another meagre page in which the emperor recalls certain bizarre rites practised by a fledgling sect in Rome.11 History and anthropology later became an authentic and absorbing, no more instrumental, interest, introducing new and fresh blood into Graves’s poetry in an extraordinary decanting. King Jesus (1946), which reminds us of a similar work by George Moore, revolves around the theory or rumour that Jesus was not the Saviour but the unacknowledged heir to the throne of Judah, and a faithful preacher of the Jewish religion.12 Graves’s authentic exploit and turning point is linked to a sudden flash of mythological inspiration of the writer, who with The White Goddess13 (1948) offered a fascinating and far-reaching investigation from which all later English ‘shamanic’ poetry 9 10 11 12 13

Volume 8, § 143.1 n. 25. The Roman reinvasion of Britain calls for an excursus on the peoples who inhabited it successively, and one on the druidic religion, whence the writer’s mythological interests. One of these incidental rumours about Christianity ends with the words ‘But I must waste no more time over these ridiculous Christians’. Graves speaks though Agabitus, and presents subtle diatribes on the Synoptics, fantastical yet documentary theories on the three Marys, and on a Christ married to the third one. White is the colour of a woman’s body, of milk and snow, but also of the corpse, of ghosts and of leprosy. References are to the tenth, ‘emended and enlarged’ edition of the work, New York 1976.

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would flow, led by the poet Ted Hughes. The White Goddess has been compared to Yeats’s A Vision as a repertoire of images for Graves’s poetry, or to Burton’s Anatomy for the unusual and random encyclopaedic knowledge and the colloquial and wandering style.14 The ideological plan or the underlying messianic warning is that the world is going to rack and ruin, that the then present age was a suicidal age which is an enemy of poetry, and the only salvation is a return to matriarchal rule and the abandonment of cold intellectuality. The original mythical cell which Graves unveils is a civilization of the Mother, preceding Greek civilization and originating in the eastern Mediterranean. The spread and radiation of this religion was due to the migrations of the eastern populations along the shores of Europe. In more recent times this religion had been sung not by the Anglo-Saxons but by the Welsh and Irish bards. This cult was historically opposed to the ‘Olympian’ religion, in which women are pursued. Graves’s white goddess is the devouring woman who, reincarnated as a witch, kills babies, fills sleep with nightmares, and draws man into a mortal embrace; she relives for instance in Apuleius’ Isis and in Mozart’s Queen of the Night.15 In the beginning a queen sacrificed a king at the height of his physical vigour, according to a rite that is not new, but old, because it was to be propitious to a return of fertility (and the relationship with Eliot and, afterwards, with Frazer, is very clear). The naked king was crucified on a felled oak tree around which people danced. Graves’s Weltanschauung is in itself always binary, it is the age-old rivalry between Apollo and the Goddess, or the sun and the moon. It remoulds and reinterprets other binary pairs when he talks of Keats and other Dionysian romantics inspired by images of beautiful ‘dames sans merci’, as opposed to other Apollonian, rational, formal, academic poets. It is a late Roman superstructure, that of the possessed poet, of the furor and of many other metaphors which lose themselves in the mists of time. Praz could have recognized in Graves a descendant of Swinburne suffering from algolagnia: sadomasochism and misogyny operate in the myth

14 15

Or even to George Eliot’s Casaubon’s ‘key to all myths’ (Carter 1989, 206). P. Citati, in La Repubblica, 12 February 1993, 32–3.

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of the man who must fatalistically prostrate himself before the goddess, to be enslaved, punished, flogged and, indeed, crucified. 4. The very useful index of names at the end of The White Goddess confirms that Graves, who analyses the fear-terror of the white goddess in Shakespeare’s Sycorax, in Keats’s belle dame sans merci, and in some other specimens, does not nominate and does not consider Swinburne; just as he is also silent regarding Yeats. The twenty-fourth chapter, which deals with that fear-terror, is one of the few that can really be followed in a vast, almost unreadable compilation bristling with abrupt and Pindaric passages between one mythology and the other, with dates, names and esoteric and initiatory references. So The White Goddess belongs to the well-known category of the least read books amongst those most frequently quoted. It is moreover a work of Celtic philology and Indo-European anthropology as it were, nonetheless the fruit of a candidly admitted ignorance of ancient and modern Welsh, and thus of an incapability to work on the originals and trusting instead to mere translations, and thus amateurish. It could be called a sort of Sordello with a perspicuous introduction and postscript (from 1960), from which an abbreviated version could perhaps be derived or distilled, as has been done for Frazer’s Golden Bough, exemplifying its procedures and condensing its content. The theory of the white goddess remains remote, a bit too remote, against the background, and it is that of the opposition between rational scepticism introduced by Socrates and faith in myth and in that myth that according to Graves underlies, or rather overlies, the development of universal poetry. Every poet knows, says Graves, that writing poetry he is a worshipper of a goddess to whom he bows down, a moon-goddess or lunar deity who inspires every myth and demands that man pay spiritual and sexual homage to her. Equally explanatory is the twenty-second chapter which illustrates an eccentric theory and aesthetic of poetry, with ‘Celtic’ Catullus at the apex of the Latin canon because he is not tied to the tradition of verse as a celebration of male loyalty, but endowed with ‘a sincere love of women’, and therefore different from Virgil and Horace. Graves lists almost all the English poets who have been priests, be it Anglican or Catholic, from Skelton up to Hopkins, to demonstrate, as he believes, the ‘rift’ separating ‘Christianity and poetry’, and more exactly the sacrifice of the ‘poetic myth’ to the scrutiny of the confession-box.

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5. Graves came to have an Orphic concept of poetry in general, and of his own poetry in particular, and this is reflected in his poetic canon, which the poet tortured and redesigned as he saw fit, sometimes according to his mood. He was very harsh with himself, and expunged from successive collected editions poems which he felt had not been inspired by the muse, or rather by the white goddess, and which owed too much to Apollo. So from 1948 on The White Goddess functions as a natural sieve for Graves’s corpus, acquiring a sort of permanent and unlimited openness. Graves the poet does not really and ultimately belong to any precise school. One very early junction is that right in the political decade par excellence, the 1930s, he escaped from, and, already being a war poet, severed remarkably early the umbilical cord linking him to history and engagement. And his historical narrative is in its own way an amused and amusing exorcism.16 Some critics extol him and proclaim him the greatest English lyric poet after Eliot – apparently even ahead of Auden. These are undoubtedly erratic judgements which are not unanimously shared and are counterbalanced by others which are unmercifully scathing. But they nonetheless create a sensation. Graves’s poetic work is indeed in my opinion a great achievement, despite being that of an esoteric and ‘cult’ poet. He is Alexandrian in his calligraphic and cold elegance, and very few, or perhaps none, of his poems are shabby or bungled; finishing and polishing are his natural talents. They follow on from each other from the first page like little, perfectly formed word buildings both in free and rhymed verse, unparalleled in their exact and ever new choice of vocabulary and verbs, often coined ex novo,17 in the 16

17

One might counter this with an acrobatic link: that Graves does talk about contemporary man, and not exclusively about his own private fantasies, and talks in particular about the crisis of love, pathological and pathogenic states, mental fixations, paranoias, disjointed personality. One poem describes the slow creep of madness in a normal factory manager. ‘Lollocks’, a delightful visionary embroidery, describes the flight of a species of nonexistent and invisible mosquito or midge, and thus the term is not found in the OED and it is not possible to translate it. ‘The Naked and the Nude’ is a metapoetic, or rather etymological, ditty which distinguishes between nakedness as a simple phenomenological fact, and dictionary entry, and nudity carried out as an underhand, diabolical temptation of the senses. On Graves’s nonsense vein cf. Carter 1989, 169.

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absence of internal repetition and thus for an idiolect that is never predictable. Graves is, then, one of the most craftsman-like poets of his day. It is his esotericism that is his limit. He does not have great themes to support and momentous public disputes to debate; he lacks the authority and the inspiration, the booming and persuasive voice of the vates and the prophet. These are deliberate choices. They are mostly immaterial, inconsistent, capricious, strange, even muddled poems, soap bubbles and cerebral whims of an often macabre imagination. His ballads are so fantastical and twisted that they seem dream-like or pure nightmares; the poem very often breaks down into a nonsense nursery rhyme, pure punning, or the chain of multiple reversals, and thus mere syntactic play.18 The splendid ‘The Cuirassiers of the Frontier’ is a dramatic collective monologue which is just as good as anything by Browning, spoken in chorus by the Barbarians gathered at the frontiers of the empire, criticizing from the periphery the decline of Rome and the Christianity they do not believe in and contenting themselves with a ‘gaping silken dragon’, in other words an idol. In Graves, an Irishman though not full-blooded, there is always a clear attention to the enchanted and diabolic. From reality he comes out with fantasies played out on a razor’s edge, chains of abstract and hallucinatory facts, and bewildered imaginations.19 His poetry could be defined as spectral for the many times in which it goes beyond the bounds of reality to describe visions of ghosts and spectres at large, often emerging from their graves. One of his privileged zone is actually the boundary between life and the otherworld.20 All this may appear to be an updated form of the mortuary motif which was constantly at the forefront of the minds of the Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. Or else his insistence on spectres wandering about in the real world, his spectral phenomenology itself, could make us think of

18 19

Perhaps reaching its peak in ‘On Giving’, or in the witty ‘Possibly’. ‘The lost, the freakish, the unspelt / Drew me: for simple sights I had no eye’ (‘The Ages of Oath’), and it is a small declaration of poetics. 20 ‘To bring the dead to life / Is no great magic’, begins the homonymous poem, and it is an aphorism generally applicable to Graves. At the end of the poem the dead man, risen, has come out of his grave and the living man has gone in to occupy it.

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a neo-Gothic Graves and of a successor to Le Fanu and Stoker.21 Nothing could be further from the truth: the mental order is the same, but on the one hand in Graves there is no true, deep or anguishing metaphysical concern or unease, and on the other hand his devils, his diabolical and ghostly Gothic, are evoked with ice-cold objectivity, and in controlled and filtered sketches – with dry eyes, with phlegm and without participation, as an end in themselves. Graves is a ruthless anti-romantic who indeed manages to continuously churn out perfidious definitions of false, rhetorical, empty, transient love, giving proof of a grim, icy wit. In the love poems the mythological figure of the cruel and predatory woman shines through, wounding her delicate lover and inflicting on him, though innocent, the burden of a curse. The erotic relationship is by definition oppressed, precarious, bitter, wavering, and only rarely is the union rewarding, and if so in imaginary scenarios; impermanence is more often the subject. The classic poem about Graves’s idea of monadic eros, of impossible or only ephemeral erotic unison, is ‘The Thieves’, a demonstration of love as not a gift but a reciprocal theft, and thus a drier, non-ascetic and non-transcendental diagnosis, unlike what happens in Lawrence. Indeed, in positing the absence of ontological harmony between man and woman, Graves injects doses of ever more scathing wit. Aphorismatic, gnomic, definitional of love sickness, Burtonian, Horatian, Graves is in fact a misogynist. The two lovers, a man and a woman, hurt and wound each other, passing off a selfish and destructive urge as a gift. § 70. Masefield* John Masefield (1878–1967) is not even interstitial but epigonic. The scenarios of his poetry become gradually more anachronistic compared to 22

21

The typically Gothic abode, haunted by ghosts, is at the centre of  ‘A Country Mansion’. Furthermore there are a great many poems in which the poetic ‘I’ sees its double, or the suicide contemplates his shattered skull. ‘My Name and I’ cleverly examines the break-up of the personality into someone registered as Robert Graves and an ‘illegal and unknown ‘I’’.

*

W. H. Hamilton, John Masefield: A Critical Study, London 1922; L. A. G. Strong, John Masefield, London 1952; M. Spark, John Masefield, London 1953; C. B. Smith, John

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the time of their composition, and Masefield, keeping at a distance from the city and urban civilization, evokes the English countryside, mythicized out of time, as in Hardy or Barnes shortly before him. But the second reason of his belatedness is that he does not know melancholy, swooning or contemplative inertia; instead he celebrates the metamorphic and unexhausted energy he notices above all in the unison between man and the sea. He is thus one of the last English poets of the anthropomorphic sea, seen as a judge who can deliver a tempest but also a calm, thus a fatherly and motherly sea, and a stern but not arbitrary or unfair teacher. Fine, indestructible ships are often destroyed by the sea,1 and thus fighting against it is a typically Victorian metaphor for life. The sea is a habitat of the English, and the early Masefield makes the deck of the merchant ship the centre of the world. In themselves these facts would be enough to justify his election as Poet Laureate in 1930 after the death of Bridges.2 The position does not suit the absolute poet who savours private words, but the public witness, the illustrator of the national soul, the singer of the tenacity of the English and their tough resistance against the elements. Moreover, the common man immediately took a liking to such an allegorical and populist formulation, rewarding Masefield with sky-high sales of his poems, brought together for the first time in a collective edition in 1923. Thus the link between this figure and two other past Laureates, one official and the other potential,

Masefield: A Life, Oxford 1978; P. Binding, An Endless Quiet Valley: A Reappraisal of John Masefield, Little Logaston Wooton Almeley 1998. 1

2

On the real events surrounding the sailing ship The Wanderer and the two short poems Masefield dedicates to it, cf. CLA, vol. I, 165–9, a feature which is mostly anecdotal and digressive. One sign of Masefield’s anachronism is that he kept on offering the myth of the sailing ship in an age that saw the steam ship establish itself. His nomination was supported by the prime minister MacDonald, while many intellectuals would have preferred Laurence Binyon (1869–1943), a renowned classicist, expert in art history and orientalist, translator of The Divine Comedy, and a lyric poet with a delicate and pensive touch, albeit a bit conventional. Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’ is one of the most sorrowful English elegies in memory of those who died in the Great War. Yeats nonetheless included Binyon’s more calligraphic scene of a long dialogue between Tristan and Iseult in his 1936 anthology.

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Tennyson and Kingsley, has already emerged;3 and a third and fourth name to add to the list are Newbolt and Kipling. There is jingoism to be found in Masefield, simply because Masefield, xenophobic and a bit suspicious, contrasts the humble virtues of Jack Tar with the very dubious ones of other nationalities or historical periods. ‘Cargoes’, one of his poems which the English at one time knew by heart, is three stanzas long in all, and didactically contrasts the cargoes of exotic, and perhaps also useless, goods of the fabulous Egyptian and Spanish ships with those of the English ships bringing home coal, steel, firewood and tin, useful for everyday life and, above all, to the people. To call him a prolific author would be euphemistic. At the end of his career Masefield had shown his versatility and his eclecticism with repeated forays into all literary genres. Early naturalistic plays were succeeded by other historical ones, then by evangelical, then secular dramatic paraphrases, both in verse and in prose, more and more lifeless and inconclusive and only performed in private. One small prophetic insight concerns a Noh experiment in a 1915 play, in the wake of Japanese plays on military honour recently translated into English. As a sheer serial verse-making machine, a poetic animal and a natural force, Masefield has few rivals, and the only poet that comes to mind is more than half a century younger than him, Ted Hughes. His career reached its zenith in 1922 even though, more and more forgotten and marginalized from the heart of the national literary scene,4 he wrote tirelessly for another forty years, even leaving an elegy for president Kennedy. 2. A well-off son of a solicitor, Masefield was orphaned as a young child and worked for three years as a cabin boy in the merchant navy, stopping

3

4

It is normal, and predictable, that this spiritual heir of the great Victorian fighter should write, with King Philip, a play on the debacle of the Spanish Armada, having the defeated monarch sing of the heroic virtues of the English. English might on the seas was, shortly before the First World War, defensive. There have been few attempts to re-evaluate and re-propose him: of one recent 260page verse anthology (Sea-Fever: Selected Poems of John Masefield, Manchester 2005), the TLS reviewer (3 June 2005) wrote that it was ‘simply too long’, and that the poet could be better illustrated in half the space.

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off in America where he did occasional work of the humblest kind.5 When he returned from this odyssey he tried to join the Bloomsbury group, and in 1902 he started up as a poet. In those years of seafaring and roaming he had, like Conrad, accumulated an endless repertoire of yarns, and Salt-Water Ballads (1902) bears a pronounced thematic mark, like the paintings of some artists who know how to paint a single subject which they just vary. It is the fixity, the continuity, the emotional truth, the cohesion deriving from an experience he has passionately lived and taken part in, rather than from bookish cues. It is a saga of fatalism, vain ambitions, hardships, witticisms, mirages, fabulous tales and seaman’s nostalgia, often presented in the first person with the colourful language, dialectal cadences – in a word, the flavour – of sailors’ speech. Whether serene or spirited, they are all songs and hymns of setting out to sea, a symbolic progress which will restore or heal anyone who trusts in it of their irrational fears (as Tennyson had demonstrated in Maud).6 It is a ‘sea fever’. When he abandons his genre, the sea anecdote, and becomes a contemplative describer of landscapes, Masefield is only scholastic, and thus rather cold. From the short seafaring poetry he went on immediately to the long ballad in rhyming verse on narrative traces that could even have been set out in stories and short realist novels in prose. These central ballads from the early years of the century take up about fifty pages each, and are mostly written in stanzas of seven lines with alternate rhyme, a measure that came naturally to the poet, with an almost mediumistic automatism, and a consequent, pronounced mechanicalness of rhythm. But the sheer versifying skill is never in doubt with Masefield, of whom it is nonetheless useless to expect verbal subtlety and psychological refinement. They limit themselves to rough-hewing the marble, shifted towards the quantity of facts, the density of events, the summary nature of psychological conflicts, and, above all, the fluidity and pathos of melodrama.7 The intellectuals reacted with ridicule and parody, 5 6 7

WAR, 163–4, which also reconstructs his friendship with Synge, whose influence is visible in his early play, The Tragedy of Nan (1908). ‘It is good to be out on the road, and going one knows not where’. ‘A horrible sentimentalist’, as Lawrence considered him (13 March 1913 from his letters).

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one of which launched Sassoon’s career.8 Punishments for a life of vice and rewards for those who mend their ways are intrinsic to these ballads; but those who have erred can no longer have the whole reward that would have been theirs had they always kept on the straight and narrow. One can err, one must mend one’s ways, but with losses and sacrifices. The Everlasting Mercy (1911) aimed to expose the vice of the crass and hypocritical village, or even a quietist religiosity, with a fire started by the repentant scoundrel. It made a sensation, as it were, against the backdrop of tame, pastoral poetry, also for the realist coarseness of its language. The sailor’s consoling and guardian angel, the woman he is betrothed to or the wife he has left at home, becomes a temptress in the land ballads, the psychological lability of the male coming out of them enhanced. Masefield has Hardy’s same, perhaps autobiographical, terror of the diabolical charge which bursts forth from the rural and local femme fatale, like Bathsheba in Far from the Madding Crowd. Such is the destructive and death-dealing allure of the provocative peasant girl who bewitches an unwitting new labourer in The Widow in the Bye Street (1912), a poem which must now take note of a certain failing in Christian providence and accept God’s misrule of the world, since the mother of the bewitched man is a virtuous widow. In this long poem the scene of the seduction at first sight takes place in the characteristically Hardyan setting of a country fair; and the young man is gradually driven mad by love and jealousy, leading to murder. The Daffodil Fields (1913), an ironic and contradicted title for a context of the kind that Tennyson had dealt with in his late plays, reminds us more than anything else of ‘Enoch Arden’. A conscientious young woman is betrothed to a daredevil, one of Masefield’s typically untamed adventurers always on a quest for something new, who will return to marry her in three years: like Tennyson’s character he does return, but too late, only to see he has lost the woman, who is now married to someone else. The epilogue, with the death of both rivals, is in turn unlike Hardy, but heavily melodramatic. Reynard the Fox (1919), Masefield’s last ballad to enjoy a certain notoriety, oozes a conciliatory Chaucerian humour in its detailed heraldic parade of 8 § 63.1.

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hunters with their ridiculous idiosyncrasies of physique and clothing, and brings them together for a foxhunt, the event and the symbolic ritual of a rediscovered national solidarity after the war, and a test of survival of the British classless model. § 71. De la Mare* Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) is far from unique, because English literature is teeming with writers like him, alien to political allegiance and to any other kind of militancy and, like him, basically timeless, whose monotonous and grey existences were compensated by a secret life, dense and even incontrollable, of the imagination and of the subconscious, which is their unsuspected counterpart. De la Mare undoubtedly possesses a vivid, prolific and visionary imagination, sometimes masked and disguised as falsely innocent and naïve poetry and prose written as if from the point of view of the child. But we must not exaggerate in calling his a life without excitement, though indeed chaste. A Londoner, as a boy he attended the school at St Paul’s Cathedral, and without going to university he had a job with an oil company up until 1908. His self-taught literary genius revealed itself from 1902 with a collection of poems for children published under a pen name. His official biography is unconvincing when it describes him as a methodical and controlled young man. He was seduced by the glamour and fashions of the Nineties climate, and in that decade he wore his hair long and curly, dressed like Beerbohm, smoked with a 9

*

The Complete Poems, London 1975. A Choice of de la Mare’s Verse, ed. W. H. Auden, London 1963. R. L. Megroz, Walter de la Mare: A Biographical and Critical Study, London 1924; F. Reid, Walter de la Mare: A Critical Study, London 1929; J. A. Atkins, Walter de la Mare: An Exploration, London 1947, repr. Norwood, PA 1976; Tribute to Walter de la Mare on his Seventy-Fifth Birthday, various eds, London 1948; H. C. Duffin, Walter de la Mare: A Study of His Poetry, London 1949; K. Hopkins, Walter de la Mare, London 1953; L. Clark, Walter de la Mare, London 1960 (unbearably encomiastic); D. R. McCrosson, Walter de la Mare, New York 1966; L. Bonnerot, L’Œuvre de Walter de la Mare. Une aventure spirituelle, Paris 1969; D. Cecil, Walter de la Mare, London and New York 1973; T. Whistler, The Life of Walter de la Mare: Imagination of the Heart, London 1993, 2004; A. Bentinck, Romantic Imagery in the Works of Walter de la Mare, Lewiston, NY 2001.

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cigarette holder and used cherry-flavoured toothpaste.1 Cultivating a dream is one strain of Decadentism, and several fantasies by de la Mare owe much to Dowson, Johnson and O’Shaughnessy (like the hymn to the transfiguring force of music in the eponymous poem, ‘Music’). Other escapist poems by him have as a backdrop the rise of technology and the renewal of society, and can be classified as residues or echoes of Ruskin’s or Morris’s utopianism.2 Towards the end of the century, de la Mare got engaged to an amateur actress ten years his senior whom he desperately loved and whom in the end he got pregnant and married in a Victorian shotgun wedding. This devoted companion stoically tolerated her husband’s relationship, apparently also sexual, with a woman his intellectual equal, Naomi, but the long-lasting affair ended when the woman got married and converted, together with her husband, to Catholicism. For a good four decades after leaving his office job, de la Mare was free to vent his repressed vocation, which was instilled into three novels, an impressive number of fantastical and neo-Gothic fables, a substantial corpus of poetry and a number of excellent critical essays.3 As a consultant to publishing houses, he was entrusted with reading innovative historical manuscripts which he often timidly rejected, like the novels of Lawrence. His admirers and friends, such as Newbolt and Edward Thomas, also belonged to the second ranks of literature. De la Mare is a conservative sui generis, active in a climate of ferment and literary revolutions which he pretends to be deaf to; for this reason his current rating is controversial. To contemporary

1 2 3

Whistler 2004, 52–3. Atkins 1976, 28, recalls the shocked demonization of the train typical of the early and middle Victorians. An open admirer of de la Mare, Praz dedicates a belletristic and at the same time pointed feature to de la Mare’s book, Desert Islands and Robinson Crusoe (CLA, vol. I, 203–7), praised for a late and epigonic quality, that is for its painstaking erudition that reminds Praz of Browne or Burton, and at the same time for a diction and syntax which retrace those of the Romantic essayists and of De Quincey in particular. The article is pointed because Praz accuses de la Mare of an unforgivable oversight, that of not mentioning Lawrence’s short story ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’, and he summarizes it himself.

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readers4 he appeared much finer, subtler and less boisterous than two other conservatives of the time, Kipling and Chesterton. Until recently nobody was insensitive to his supposed shortcomings and clichés,5 but these did not suffice to deprive him of a deserved place in the pantheon of twentiethcentury poetry. It is intuitive that the surreal scenario of Memoirs of a Midget, his best novel, should arouse the curiosity of Angela Carter, who enthusiastically brushed the cobwebs off this precursor and its fantastical futuristic solutions. Midget is a back-to-front, reversed, upside-down Fevvers.6 2. It is my opinion that de la Mare’s prose can claim supremacy over his poetry because it is in prose that the writer finds the vehicle most appropriate to his investigation into the mystery, the strangeness and the supernaturality of life. In prose he feels freer, while in his poetry he is more a slave to formal duties and closed and conventional metres. De la Mare the prose writer began with Henry Brocken (1904), an acrobatic and partially original novel which tells the story of a candid alter ego revisiting the antecedent prairies of English literature in a sui generis ‘divine comedy’. The pilgrim is met in this reverse gallop by Chaucer’s Cressida, characters from Shakespeare and Swift, and even Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. The Return (1910) is already a demonic plot: a psychic falls asleep on the grave of a suicide who appears to him in a dream and tries to possess his body, a battle which is obviously an expression of an inner conflict. The exorcism is in the end successful. Regarding Memoirs of a Midget (1921), told in the first person by the protagonist with the artifice of the manuscript edited by a second narrator, Praz7 committed one of his rare errors of judgement in defining it a ‘robust’ novel, though he did add, more plausibly, ‘of a morbid strangeness’. Its reception was and still is very fluid. It is in truth, right from the pompous preamble, an exercise in grotesque and absurd humour, embellished with even nauseating verbal flourishes. Immediately going

4 5 6 7

Like DES, 142, who nevertheless makes some comparisons, in my view out of place, with Yeats. H. Coombes, in PGU, vol. VII, 142, gives a long list of them. See Volume 8, § 182.1. Carter’s preface to Memoirs of a Midget can be found in the Oxford 1982 edition of the novel. SLI, 643, and with a slight modification CLA, vol. I, 203–4.

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around in circles, and treading water, it dwells ad nauseam on bizarre and anomalous details. Far from being ‘robust’, this novel is, rather, as transparent, immaterial and diaphanous as gossamer. Despite foreshadowings of Angela Carter (the orphaned midget interprets the multicoloured and treacherous world as in The Magic Toyshop, and in a short final episode is taken in by a circus, like the protagonist of Carter’s Nights at the Circus), the impalpable atmosphere, detached from any form of geographical or historical realism, and the puppet-like movements, look back more distinctly to the world and manner of a Firbank, but with a variety of winks to tradition or to other related literary families. The sheer diegesis is as poor as in Sterne, who comes to mind for de la Mare’s rambling style and smug wordplays; the midget is often dubbed a ‘fretful midge’, quoted verbatim from Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’, and addressed with the nickname ‘Midgetina’. On the other hand, dwarfs and giantesses, like the ‘Marchioness’ in The Old Curiosity Shop, and thus deformed perspectives, are one of Dickens’s domains. If we really want to find a framework for the novel, it is the midget’s equivocal, and always frustrated, love for Fanny, the daughter of the hotelier who took her in. Fanny is a kind of enchanting sorceress similar to Coleridge’s Christabel, before turning into a Turandot who refuses her suitors. Because of her rejection they despair and seek death. For this reason the influence of Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson can also be felt. The exasperating skirmish between the midget and Fanny is interwoven with delightfully inconclusive dialogues always on the brink of things, and the events follow on from each other up until the end bordering on conduct that is largely hypnotic. As Angela Carter insists in her preface, if de la Mare’s characters do kiss, de la Mare rarely says so, and the author seems intent on suppressing anything sexual or sexed. 3. De la Mare’s fame as a prose writer rests in reality on his short stories, collected mainly in The Riddle (1923), On The Edge (1930) and The Wind Blows Over (1936). The earliest ones contain very little action, all or many of them revolve around the state of mind of children deprived of real affection, alone and thrust into the world. In the absence of parents they start bewildered and twisted friendships with equally misfit, outcast and alienated adults. The characteristic which is partly typical of de la Mare and not others, is morbid lingering. There is no real narrative

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tension running through it, nor true suspense,8 instead there reigns an almost tormenting, circling and exhausting pausing on ambiguous details and surreal atmospheres. In ‘The Almond Tree’, entirely written by the unaware child protagonist, the latter must guess the chain of events from ambiguous and enigmatic signals that are not explained to him, beginning with the behaviour of his father who takes a fancy to a woman, and the jealousy of his mother, who gives birth to a baby the day after her husband’s mysterious death in the snow. ‘Miss Duveen’ picks up the motif of the helpless child, often really or symbolically an orphan, who must face the treacherous, incomprehensible, enigmatic world of grown-ups whose emotional behaviour he cannot manage to completely decipher. Arthur is neither loved nor liked, he lives with his grandmother, and forms a strange friendship with a slightly deranged young lady with schizoid behaviour. The study of childhood unease is an old archetype derived from Dickens and Gaskell, but it is also close to Joyce and Kafka.9 Early atmospheres of Beckett and, especially, Pinter can be found in ‘Missing’, a theatrical story in which a regular at a bar tells another regular about a woman guest at his house who has mysteriously bewitched him and then one day vanished. ‘At First Sight’ is the long skirmish of a boy who always keeps his eyes lowered due to a mysterious injury, and who one day found a glove by the roadside and looks for its owner, finding her in a woman with whom he builds a bewildered and tantalizing relationship. It is yet another bitter and sinister, even angry, and remarkably exhausting story which emanates a pregnant sense of death as well as heavy doses of black humour. ‘The Green Room’, like many others, leaves its threads hanging at the end.10 Here the slightly naïve clerk in a second-hand bookshop unearths, in a ‘haunted’ broom cupboard, the handwritten poems of a woman who committed suicide after an unhappy love affair; bewitched, charmed and visionary, he publishes 8 9 10

As de la Mare himself acknowledged in a definition included in DES, 140. Angela Carter, in the preface to Memoirs of a Midget, excludes these similarities, and senses Borges and Christina Rossetti behind it. One collection is called The Riddle, which is also the title of one of the stories within it, in which reappears the not entirely benign figure of the grandmother, always sinister in de la Mare, unlike the hackneyed cliché.

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them. The stories based on children’s absent-minded visions were in time interspersed with others with adult protagonists finding themselves in surreal situations and implicated in the most ingenious and fantastical adventures, such as that of the seller of caged sounds. The later stories are of a freer vein. ‘A Nest of Singing Birds’ is a satire, as scathing as a sketch by Thackeray, on the vain literary ambitions of a young writer. ‘Sambo and the Snow Mountains’ attempts to play the pathetic humour card and also that of the Dickensian Christmas, with Sambo, a doctor’s poor black errand boy, who wants to become white at all costs due to the ridicule and discrimination he suffers. 4. With Le Fanu, and perhaps even with Harriet Martineau, de la Mare, whose distant French ancestors were expelled for religious reasons, shares the hereditary Huguenot propensity for hallucination and the fear for the return of the diabolical, or of Satan himself, into everyday life.11 As a necrophiliac writer, obsessed with graves and graveyards, the connection with Poe12 is also crucial. If it is then true for de la Mare that the delightful mystery of life is one aspect, and that the other is its macabre halo, there may be a distant analogy with Graves, another eminent craftsman of verse, of form and the word. Sometimes, as in Graves, sound or the sheer word play prevail over meaning in de la Mare, and he brushes with or decidedly touches upon nonsense and a poetry which catalogues auditory and onomatopoeic phenomena (and his occasional little bestiaries precede those of Ted Hughes by a few decades). The reader’s agreement with de la Mare’s poetry is that temporal, spatial or social contextualization, and 11

12

‘The Imagination’s Pride’ contains the invitation to rein in the imagination because if unbridled it goes so far as to verge on the demonic; and at the same time the invitation to trust in the divine, and the urge to redeem the world. The more Metaphysical poems are confessions and ordered outbursts by a poet who is not roaring but melancholic, sweetly resigned. De la Mare often imagines how the world might be in the future, if it will last and if its spectacles will continue to cheer the survivors, or he imagines it from the point of view of the dead from the otherworld. The protagonist of the mediocre non-fiction short story ‘A Revenant’, who for that very reason until the appearance of Poe’s revenant has a hint of the satire on the academic world reminiscent of Angus Wilson, is an expert lecturer on this predecessor, so greatly admired by de la Mare.

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thus a link with the real and the social, must not be demanded of it. The conservative de la Mare mercilessly attacked Marx and evolutionism, and his silence implied a form of harsh criticism. A violent rejection of the contemporary world and its civilization can be perceived, however subdued and unspoken.13 It is not, then, poetry of the city and urban scenes; its appointed places are the countryside and nature, the farmhouse or ‘the fields’, but they should be understood as timeless places. On the spectacles of nature and the weather de la Mare’s poetry focuses with the empathy of childhood poets, followers of a long tradition in England, and with the implicit revisitation of life through the eyes and sensitivity of a visionary, alert boy who, though alert, is also a dreamer. Reality is like a fairy-tale for the apparition of good and bad spirits, happy spectacles and some others which are threatening. Thus the formal type is that of short ditties always in rhyme, polished like miniatures, depicting particular states of mind or spells in the wilds, inside houses, in the woods, on the moors: charming scenes of nature sparkling in the sun or gripped with frost. De la Mare’s standard poem is an immaculate organism of traditional descriptiveness, and the shorter it is, even to the extent of a single quatrain, the better it works.14 The individual compositions can sometimes appear to be an end in themselves and to lack much meaning, except that of an intense and slightly morbid and suffocating state of mind. It is customary to praise their skill and metric and prosodic ductility. De la Mare never lacks elegance, though the same cannot be said of variety. The whole corpus does not present substantially differentiated and demarcated stylistic periods, and in many partial collective editions the poet does not feel the need to date his poems either. A euphonic, easy and free-flowing poet, he also has at his service an ancient, trusted, conventional and somewhat romantic lexicon.15 He brings back to life something of the Lyrical Ballads when he affably and openly tells the story of the shepherd or even of the nice but 13

The story ‘The Orgy’ is an early, heady satire on the culture of the department store, where the latest technological must-haves are sold. 14 Duffin 1949, 34, deems the few sonnets and the compositions in blank verse as failures. 15 Indeed streaked with archaisms, such as ‘aught’, ‘hither’, ‘wondrous sweet’ and others.

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stubborn donkey in ‘Nicholas Nye’.16 Soon the poet concentrates on the fearful vision which seizes the children alone in the apparently luminous natural world. Poems imbued with a distorted and visionary imagination, and therefore with a mysterious or threatening reality, multiply. De la Mare is the specialist in optical effects, in visual deformation which for children is often the transformation of the small or the normal into the gigantic and thus the terrifying. Some animate nature and bring it to life like a field of attraction and repulsion: in ‘Moths’, the insects, sung of a thousand times, are called or invoked by the flame, and in three elegant quatrains a microscopic, ‘metaphysical’ observation takes shape. ‘The Listeners’ opens the section of dream-like ballads, with the Gothic ingredient of the haunted house where, predictably, a wayfarer turns up by the light of the moon. The ballad insists on the boundary between the real and the imaginary as two realms with two classes of inhabitants. A throng of ghosts, unseen and not communicating with the outside world, listens to a knock at the door; as the grammar of the ballad demands, the wayfarer on horseback knocks three times and, not getting any reply, departs. De la Mare’s ghosts vanish as soon as someone wants to meet or get to know them.17 § 72. Stevie Smith A poet dying in 1971 has superficially all the necessary requisites (though these are not sufficient), and even implicitly the date of birth, to be defined or mistaken for a twentieth-century or late twentieth-century writer, or even, roughly speaking, a modernist by affinity or by contrast and polemical obligation. Stevie (Florence Margaret) Smith (1902–1971) indeed began as a poet in 1937 and published assiduously especially in

16

17

This donkey is the counterpart of Wordsworth’s idiot boy. ‘The Thorn’ is also the title of one of Wordsworth’s poems, although de la Mare’s poem is more reminiscent of Tennyson in its sorrowful mortuary spirit. One poem not by chance bears the title of ‘Lucy’. There are numerous pairs of poems by de la Mare which have the same title and thus a double execution. Two poems are entitled ‘The Ghost’, and there are a great many which introduce the ghost of a lost and missed loved one. These and other duplications have often led the critics to talk of monotony and repetitiveness in de la Mare.

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the period straddling the Second World War, though she attained celebrity much later, in the 1970s, and is today being completely reassessed. But it is the invariable continuity of her themes, and the nature of those themes, that advise one to ideally shift her somewhat further back in the periodization of twentieth-century English literature, and more precisely to an independent and timeless position of her own. Smith is one of the most unclassifiable authors of the mid-twentieth century, precisely because the genre she truly belongs to is fantasy, and fantasy has no time or has one single time. The cornerstone of her poetry is, indeed, the childhood view, populated by fairy-tales, fables, fantasies, fata morganas, and therefore distinct from the adult viewpoint, but empathized by adults with a good dose of ambiguous and ambivalent suspension of disbelief. Such a controlled game of childhood regression makes her a very close relation, though far removed in time, of Victorian nonsense poetry headed by Lear and Carroll and in the company of all the nineteenth-century enthusiasts of ‘light’ poetry.1 She lets us breathe the auras of those legendary sagas of Gondal and Angria by the Brontë sisters, and she makes us inclined to say that her direct antecedent, her starting and formative text, is de la Mare.2 Smith, in other words, strikes a jarring note if compared to the bluestockings between the wars and the male poets of advanced Modernism, and also the politicized ones of the 1930s who were just as much her exact contemporaries. Her poetry wends its way with sovereign indifference to public themes, without militant heat, free from ideologemes and without space and time leaving their mark, cocooned in its padded, soundproofed private world. And Smith was like that in life: a late Victorian silhouette, 1

2

To distinguish her categorically from light verse and nonsense, as some do, seems wrong to me, and does not take into account the fact that Carroll and, especially, Lear (cf. Volumes 5, §§ 218–220, and 6, §§ 89–96) file contemporary neurosis and the phenomenology of schizophrenia and alienation under that veil. At least Seamus Heaney underlined this relationship, this veering towards Lear, who to him was, wittily, both the Shakespearean king and the Victorian poet. Her debut novel, Novel on Yellow Paper (1936), resembles de la Mare with its scenes of London life seen through the naïve eyes of a young protagonist. It is a curious coincidence, but Smith was given the nickname of a jockey, Stevie, due to her small stature: she was, in other words, a de la Mare ‘midget’ (§ 71.2).

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an aloof spinster, set in her ways and quick-witted, for years she worked as a secretary at a publishing house and often supplied her poems with pen-and-ink cartoons, and she would recite and sing them in public. Her little anti-myth was amplified by a play immediately made into a film. Her old-fashioned verse fables thus began to appear at a moment in which de la Mare was still alive and active, and they have his forms and his clean, terse, immaculate cameo prosodies. They have, above all, his typical, pungent, grotesque, absurd implication. Smith keeps alive this tottering world which the axe of the principle of reality is about to come down on; and her poems resonate with the imminent fear of the end of the time of fables and the childhood realm itself. They are, it is true, also painful, barely concealed metaphors of the world-weariness of the poet, and of that poet that was Stevie Smith herself. 2. Smith, who had assumed a male nickname, often disguises herself as a man and speaks in many poems with a male voice, lending women ‘fatal’ traits; but attempts at a feminist deconstruction of this disguise have led nowhere. Inauspicious gestures, ferocious or even sadistic fits, especially accidents and drownings, are often told with nonchalance, in dream-like and veiled situations which detract from or attenuate any real sense of tragedy. There is a substantial series of poems on the figure of the orphan, as in de la Mare (or even in Elizabeth Bowen), either deprived of parental affection, or outcast, relocated, or misunderstood. In her ‘light’ poetry the world is upside down. In the rare infiltrations of history into her fantasy life, Smith’s view remains surreal: telling of a night vision in a graveyard (‘Night-Time in the Cemetery’), the visitors appear to her ‘stranger than strange’, and have the appearance of pungent ‘cheese’ and smelly feet. Even recurring religious settings, like the nativity or the crucifixion, are reworked with delightful estrangement. Affected by an incurable illness, Smith wrote in her final years with equally relieved indifference about death, which she knew was imminent and almost seems to invoke.3

3

On her affairs with the novelist Olivia Manning, to whom are dedicated poems which conceal her name and that of her husband, for whom Manning had left her, cf. § 176.4.

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§ 73. Edwardian music The symbiosis of the arts in England from the end of the nineteenth century until the first decades of the twentieth offers a framework of new semiotic comparisons or simply of phenomenologies and curiosities which can only be outlined here. The double or triple expertise – writers who are at the same time painters or graphic artists, or cartoonists or semi-professional musicians, like Chesterton and Beerbohm, Wyndham Lewis and Basil Bunting, Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield – are not of course specific to the late Victorian period or the Edwardian or Georgian age, or more numerous than in the past. Starting at the periphery of the phenomenon, Edwardian literature reflects, rather, a peculiar and distinct artistic custom, an increased rate of enjoyment and circulation and a closer relationship between art and society. In terms of statistical frequency, the typical literary character is no longer first and foremost, as in the mid-nineteenth century, the squire, or earlier still the orphan, or the developing young man awaiting his emotional education or his assimilation into the labyrinthine world of work, or the university ‘defector’, or the functionary and methodical clerk. Instead it is more and more often the common man or the middleclass eclectic, often also the skilled labourer, who have imperceptibly made Ruskin’s warning their own, that art embellishes life and makes us forget its everyday harshness. Playing an instrument has become an integral part of the educational curriculum, and recreation now includes the small household concert, outdoor bands and opera and even theatre, where a repertoire from across the channel is performed, though, in the chronic decadence of native English music. The only personalities of any standing, before Elgar, are Parry, Stanford and Mackenzie, not entirely objectionable composers of symphonies and operas, especially the first and second, but always little known and performed. The novel is a mirror of all this. High society was experiencing a moment of Wagnerian fervour and enthusiasm, as Lawrence and Virginia Woolf bear witness to in the numerous metaphorical and literal references in their novels. The German composer topped the bills and was the talk of the parlours, from Shaw onwards, after the decline in the prestige on English soil enjoyed by Mendelssohn.1 On the other hand it is 1

In the novels of Wells, set at the turn of the century, Wagner is discussed and sometimes distorted. Lawrence’s Aaron goes to listen to Wagner, but, as we have seen,

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a fact that two of the quintessential super-protagonists of early twentiethcentury English literature (Ulysses takes place in 1904, and is written in the middle Georgian years), are professional musicians; and that Lawrence’s Siegmund and Aaron are two members of an orchestra, one a violinist and the other a flautist. In a much more technical sense we see the formation of famous and close-knit pairs, that is the coming together of the great writer and the great musician: Edith Sitwell with Walton, Forster and Auden with Britten (and Auden also with Stravinsky and Henze). The poems of the poets are sometimes songs, meant for music or effectively set to music, thus also indirectly Lieder. The most obvious example is the formally Edwardian collection of ‘chamber’ poetry, created as lyrics for music, by Joyce. And Pater’s Anderstreben of musical and literary arts is booming, with chiastic structural relations: pieces of music called symphonic poems, and literary compositions which are songs or rhapsodies (such as one by Eliot) or chamber music (such as Joyce’s collection), but not always conceived as service texts to be set to music, and revolving around its simple evocative power. The librettos of Britten’s operas are in turn for the most part adaptations of well-known and less well-known pre-existing literary works – from Crabbe to Melville to Henry James – and therefore remakes. The analogies, attempted and experimental, between the two camps, on the other hand, are exactly radical when the literary text expressly mimics a musical form, as do Huxley’s Point Counter Point, Eliot’s Four Quartets, the ‘mermaids’ episode in Joyce, or at even closer range Bunting’s Briggflatts, modelled, so he says, on a sonata by Scarlatti, carefully labelled with its catalogue number. 2. In England 1900 saw the death of the famous composer of operettas Arthur Sullivan and of Sir George Grove, a pioneer of the musical renaissance with his support for Manns’ programme of concerts at Crystal Palace.2 But 1900 is above all the year of the premiere of The Dream of

2

Wells’s murky and thwarted seduction of Ann Veronica is carried out while Tristan and Isolde are singing and dying on stage. But these are just the first two examples which come to mind; others will emerge as I go along. He was also and above all the author of a Dictionary of musicians and music, which first appeared in 1879. In 1895 the summer season of the ‘Proms’, still very popular in England, was also launched.

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Gerontius by Elgar with lyrics by Cardinal Newman.3 T. S. Eliot was only twelve years old in 1900 and still lived in America, but at twenty-eight years old that rhabdomancer and acrobatic assimilator could not have titled one of his monologues ‘Gerontion’, also on the prospects of the afterlife, without this double precedent, as we shall see.4 Listening to and assimilating Wagner had transmitted to Edward Elgar (1857–1934, a surname of perhaps remote Scandinavian origin like that of Auden) the aspiration to great, grandiloquent and opulent works, but without suppressing a complementary vein as miniaturist and the predisposition for small, even frivolous pieces and the charm of incidental music commenting on and patriotically celebrating public events. Elgar has therefore been criticized for a series of limits: that his music is dispersive and not very exportable, in other words too typically English; that he has not written for the piano, since his largely preferred instrument is the violin; that he excels in orchestral work but has not written any great Lieder or music for vocal soloists; that he leans too far towards band music. And of course he is a conservative, and the partially correct criticism advanced against him is that he has not acknowledged modernity, was not an avant-gardist, and only breathlessly tried to keep up with the times in some unsuccessful later compositions. Elgar is, naturally, the still Victorian-Edwardian country gentleman who daily feeds his beloved dogs and turns up at all the ceremonies glorifying British power and prestige: a court composer, a sort of musician ‘laureate’ like the poet bearing that age-old title. It is for this very reason that he has something in common with Tennyson. Like him he is an exquisite, refined, sweet melodist, and when it suits him, and is asked of him, he can also put on a pompous and inflated voice. And like Tennyson, Elgar is capable of being belatedly Biedermeier. A good slice of his repertoire smacks of nineteenth-century salons, and borders on the cloying when it does not manage to be delightful as only many of Tennyson’s poems and ditties celebrating domestic warmth, fondness for the countryside, the platonic purity of emotions, sublime love. Even just the word and the genre, ‘elegy’,

3

Elgar, Delius and Holst all died in 1934, and here I shall look at them in the order of debut and importance. 4 § 95.1.

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is like a mise en abyme of the whole of Edgar. Except that there is another consequence. Elgar in reality comes close to absolute musical genius. His best music is intermittently spellbinding and stands out a long way to the listener’s ear. He is undoubtedly one of the last pure melodists, and his is a broad and solemn melody entrusted to strings in unison, often cellos, or more often still to the big winds, trombones, horns and tubas, and which goes from section to section and gradually finds its final formulation. Hence the fact that he is a very refined orchestrator of phenomenal timbric knowledge. With him the whole orchestra plays, and not only is there no major work of his that does not employ the brass section, but he also resorts to the small instruments, and the cymbals, the triangles, the timpani. And in the Enigma variations he seeks reinforcements from the organ at the end. Those melodic motifs, so sumptuous and sublime, are accompanied by other whistled ones and rapid, rhythmic patterns and meteoric figures. Elgar’s real and undeniable limit is, then, that of band music, because Elgar does not conceive of languors of any duration, and his music soon goes back to being audacious, electrifying, never limp for too long. Not is there any trace of true Mahlerian negative existentialism; his genre par excellence is, indeed, as he himself entitled some pieces, ‘pomp and circumstance’, and at a time when musician were requested to ‘wring the neck’ of traditional melody, and it was being wrung across Europe. ‘I have something of the soldier’s instinct in me’, he admitted; and it is true, and indeed he did not turn his nose up at composing marches and odes and other pieces of circumstance, claiming for himself the role of bard of the people, or troubadour. And when that melody is not fresh it even approaches light-classical music, dance music from films, accompanying and incidental music. Elgar, however, has no equals when it comes to the majestic, the stentorian, the imperious, the martial, the entrance motifs of clear, prolonged notes, a pattern of very few notes which form an indelible though slightly metallic motif. But he is also a specialist in the complete opposite, as has been said, a specialist of the sweet cantabile, entrusted in particular to the unisons of strings. 3. Elgar’s core works, to which I shall confine myself here, are the Enigma variations, the oratorio The Dream of Gerontius, the two symphonies and the two concerts for soloists and orchestra, the opulent overture In

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the South and, in the field of cantatas for voice and orchestra, Sea-Pictures. These works demonstrate, if nothing else, what we are interested in, that is, how much Elgar relies on literary texts, in equal or greater measure than his contemporaries. Enigma, whose title Elgar never explained, opens with a calm and placid theme made up of a few essential and briefly held notes; then the first variations enliven it up, embellish and decorate it, still in the realm of the pathetic and the pure cantabile embroidered by strings and winds. But more marbled, vibrant, whistled variations are added, thanks above all to the flutes, or others, playful and simplified, lively, audacious, with rumbles and rolls on the timpani. Elgar would always feel at ease both with the solemn and ample theme and with the short motif which is all and only rhythm, sometimes setting them against each other. The climax of the Enigma is in a central variation in which all of Elgar’s capacity for melodic elaboration shines, and the melody in slow spirals forms and rises in crescendo, vying with Wagner with the strings towering in unison, reinforced at the end by the tubas. The final variation is literally fantastic.5 The lyrics, some delicate and languid, syllabified and airy, of the five pieces in Sea-Pictures, revolve in part around the need for the sea’s protection, and they find it somehow satisfied. It is also a treacherous sea, though, and one inviting to solitude. The first song, with the watery atmosphere evoked by the quivering of the harp, is a lullaby; the singing is only just rippled, in spirals of purified sweetness. In the third, with words from a minor lyric by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the voice sings a farewell, but the immediately glimpsed sea electrifies it and the music livens up. It is the elegy of the marooned, but in spiritual union with those left behind. The God who looks on and protects raises the voice to slightly emphatic tones. In the fourth, the poet Garnett, grandfather of David, the author of the Swiftian fable The Lady into Fox, describes an imaginary journey to the coral islands in a beautifully sensuous poem; the music, delicate, elegant, moulds itself sensitively to the shape of the lines. In the fifth piece the 5

Enigma is perhaps Elgar’s most universally famous composition together with the five pieces of ‘pomp and circumstance’ music; for this reason it is often used in a number of films, sometimes out of place (as in the funeral in Women in Love by Ken Russell, the film based on the novel by Lawrence).

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initial recitative, steadfast and proud, gives way to the story of the happy encounter of two lovers.6 4. The Dream of Gerontius, which Dvořák perhaps had half a mind to set to music himself, and which led Strauss to call Elgar the first ‘progressive’ English musician, is widely considered ‘the greatest work of its kind in English music’.7 On the short dialogic poem by Newman, trimmed of almost half its lines by Elgar especially after the first 150, Elgar wrote a splendidly mimetic oratorio in the orchestral intermezzos which successfully manage to render the idea of a spellbound and imaginary atmosphere of the soul’s dream as it approaches Judgement and the sight of God. It is therefore dream-like music, paradisiacal or purgatorial to be precise; only slightly less satisfying, sometimes clumsy, in the solo parts. There is no da capo, and in general Gerontius’ tenor song is of the nature of the Sprechgesang, a melodic recitative rarely straying into high notes and embellishment (it reminds one distinctively of Britten’s music on lyrics for tenor and piano, for example the Holy Sonnets). The melody is the task of the orchestra. In

6

7

Elgar’s music does rely on eminent literary texts; but few such pieces have left a lasting mark apart from Gerontius. The Music Makers, on a text by O’Shaughnessy, incorporates motifs of Elgar’s already composed works, like the Enigma variations, and is thus a strange work in the form of a collage of self-quotations. The text itself of the poem, repetitive and slow, praises the creative and propositional ability of dreams (cf. Volume 6, § 151.1); this is why the music shakes itself up and vibrates when the text recites that the dreamers ‘move the world, apparently’. Falstaff, a series of variations composed late in life, comes across as less fresh and more lifeless. Still competent music, occasionally more built up, calligraphic, its quality flags and leaves us slightly cold; the type and genre are the old Elgarian department of heraldic music. The Spanish Lady, an opera left fragmentary at his death, was jotted down by Elgar on a libretto taken from Jonson’s The Devil Is an Ass. It is still a suite of scattered pieces which orchestrally, though not for the singing, are always exquisite and enjoyable, and thus reveal once again the unavoidable marriage of word and music in the refined, cultured musician. The obvious source which Elgar imitates is a type seventeenth-century music with dance numbers such as gavottes, jigs and other dance steps which acquire the unmistakable characteristics of Elgar. The stamp is a mix of late Renaissance – Purcellian – music and Elgarian blends, with the odd wink at Sullivan’s frivolous melodies. W. H. Read, Elgar, London 1949, 61.

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the prelude Elgar relies on the music which was universally most successful as a model of mystical ecstasy, that of Wagner’s Parsifal, with the profound and sinuous string unisons, especially cellos. It is a personal mould of Wagner, inspired and recreated from him, which spreads an atmosphere of transcendence of the human. We must hypnotically identify with the border zone between life which ends, death, and the opening of a view to the otherworld. The amazing piece rises at the climax in the middle part, where some melodic nuclei accompany the future phases of the oratorio: sweet, gentle, solemn, pompous, well articulated, pointed, at times inexorable. The oratorio then winds through alternating levels: the voice, which is rarely raised to full volume, flows leaning on comments, intermezzos and sometimes intense, sometimes sublime and exhilarating orchestral accompaniments (the trumpets of Judgement); the chorus intervenes in a spiritual, heartfelt way, sometimes against the backdrop of drumrolls; one episode is in adapted plainsong. The choral part is superior to the soloist one until the accompanying angel arrives with moving contralto roulades. The music, which in certain moments seems weary, revives with the dissonances of the demons who appear on the scene with their pungent and coarse choirs. The approach to the divine throne is fast-paced, with the last song of the angel, on the words ‘Softly and gently…’,8 which is a moving melody of Schubertian derivation, because it has its infinite, interior, steadfast and subdued sweetness. 5. The overture In the South, though entirely orchestral, was inspired by the poems of Tennyson and Byron, and alternates the thunderous and explosive with the stifling and the swooning, as in Beethoven’s male and female motifs. With such seesawing beautiful music can languish, but when Elgar reworks the stentorian and triumphal motif he leaves his mark. This is a piece of enormous orchestral elaboration, difficult even to execute in its ‘transcendental’ counterpoints towards the end. But what of the Italian colour? It could be perceived in the outbursts of the strings miming the froth and uncontrollable leaps of the waves. But in reality this is 8

Of Elgar’s three oratorios, The Apostles, set out like one of Bach’s, and thus a sort of Passion, is not one of his more unforgettable pieces, and the heartfelt inspiration of Gerontius is lacking.

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not a tone poem, even though the overture comes close to one, and Strauss is behind it with his cyclical returns of the constituent motifs. It is one of the most sumptuous and virtuoso of Elgar’s works. All of them, and this one in particular, are always similar to symphonies, simply for the reason that a classic overture is usually shorter, while In the South has its distinct internal movements. The contrast that separates and distinguishes them is also the forte, or fortissimo, and the piano. The second movement, without the piece’s continuity being interrupted, is elegiac and pathetic, and arranged on a sweet, shadowy, even bare melody offered by the woodwinds. And after the beginning and development into the interlude it returns to the initial theme, but now subdued, and as if gently reabsorbed. There is a centre in the piece which is quite marshy and amorphous and gropes its way forward, and the saltus arrives in the form of those motifs of tremendous solemnity and majesty which are always lying in wait in Elgar. Here the composer plays his hand, and really shows off several minutes of a music of the future in which, for that very reason, Bruckner and Mahler, especially the former, seem to be heard again. This occurs with a new and grandiose theme of few notes as usual, split up into free orchestral vocalizations of the brasses, trombones and trumpets, in the form of piercing cries in the muffled background of the timpani. The tempest is calmed and gives way to yet another elegiac episode, a melancholy serenade, the song or dirge of the cello solo, with a spasmodic slowing down and expansion and distillation of the sound. This motif is offered by an oboe (or bassoon) solo, which forms a further contrast in this very varied overture. But the music rouses itself, moves on, this time to imperiously pick up the heroic, Straussian opening theme again. 6. Listening to and studying Elgar’s symphonies, it is natural to wonder, first of all, whether they are actually symphonies at all and, if so, what kind of symphonies they are. Also, are they the core music of this composer? In response it should be remembered that they are symphonies of late nineteenth-century scope, imposing, cyclopean to be precise, each one lasting almost an hour, or even longer, and abundantly utilizing Mahler’s and Bruckner’s trumpets, trombones, horns and every section of the orchestra. They are anti-Beethovenian and also anticlassical in their transgression of the tyranny of tempo and rhythm; nor do they obey the established rules of

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symphonic music, and also proceed by inertia. Are they then camouflaged symphonies? Elgar adopts the cyclical principle from Franck, or rather he comes out, in the first for example, with his typical favourite theme, the majestic motif with few notes, as always dazzling and imperious, and then he often has the musical discourse return to this motif modulating it on the various registers. The first symphony was for a long time carried along with the title of ‘Gordon Symphony’, and it is a sort of Elgarian ‘Eroica’. The four movements are actually based on reciprocal contrast. In the first, the majestic beginning is followed by a quicker and simpler motif which often ends up merging chromatically with the first majestic one, even though in themselves the two motifs are different. And so on in the successive movements. In the first movement, a crescendo advances and rises to an explosion and to its greatest definition, and once again it leaves a memorable mark, in a context of heavy background syncopation. Immediately afterwards, the speed changes, and with it the orientation, with a quick and occasionally accelerated motif by the winds. It also moves from clear definition to rhapsodic music: Elgar announces, develops, then straightaway changes direction, almost as if one musical idea overcomes another immediately afterwards. From order to apparent chaos: but the initial order is recalled by the re-emergence of the leading motifs, which go through several instruments and are displayed again at various speeds, undergoing changes in rhythm. The thematic principle is lost and frayed, freedom of development prevails and with it the episodic principle. Is it anarchy? On the contrary, it is an eruption of material only vaguely related – that is why one speaks of the spirit of variation as Elgar’s DNA – and most importantly free, but only until the opening returns to keep off-duty musical ideas in check. The second movement jumps out like a slightly Stravinskyan ironic little march, agile for its use of small trumpets, and swelling with the tinkling of the cymbals. Elgar never lingers for too long on a motif, but dashes away, and with such variety of timbre and such departures, such ability to deflate the solemn with wit, parody, irony, humour, empty pathos, and thus the hint of the grotesque. Though the symphony is in four movements, the second runs smoothly into the third, which seems to open with a slow, sweet melody of the strings taken up and reinforced by the winds. But Elgar makes it merge into his opening motif in a more orderly development,

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with a less threatened and fragmented melody. From the primeval magma, and from a syncopated and stealthy pattern of pizzicato which acts as an accompaniment, arises the finale. Then a hint of the opening theme arises acquiring the status of a Leitmotiv. The new theme, bubbly, articulated and trochaic, with which we come back to the rather rhapsodic and chaotic principle of coalescence of the first movement, is made up of cells given and immediately submerged. It is music that knows no development, it must be repeated, and shimmering from moment to moment, except for the coordinating return of the Leitmotiv; thus a music of variations. Only some of the Wild West flare-ups and clangours are debatable. The epilogue is a contrapuntal monstrum which circularly evokes the beginning of the symphony, but it admirably weaves it into the rest of the thematic material. 7. In four movements, Elgar’s second symphony is almost an hour and twenty minutes long, and each movement lasts as long as a normal nineteenth-century symphony, even a long one. The first surprises us because it does not begin as we expect, with a pointed and stentorian motif; it is still solemn, but develops into a more twisted discourse, in one long, indeed very long, phrase, syncopated and without a break. The rhythm is deliberately slow and unlaced. When this phrase ends, the female theme comes in, with its spirals modulating slightly and passing from one instrument to another with a vein of waltzy melancholy. Here we begin to catch a glimpse of a new characteristic, which has to do with the assimilated models, Mahler and Bruckner. Elgar does in fact let the music apparently drift away, avoiding gathering it up; he obsessively dwells on motifs which seem to develop into others, but do not; he plays for time and thus inconclusiveness. One bewildered cell that sets up a motif is announced and set aside, and is a transitional formula leading to the jumbled centre of the movement, in which Elgar seems again to want to leave his material in a state of freedom. The music becomes really fragmentary, and without a point of reference. He comes out of it with a pressing crescendo, a bit funereal or sinister, a sort of witches’ sabbath with drums rolling obsessively in the background. With greater clarity the rhythm kicks in again and the music stretches out returning to the opening motif, embellished with fanfares and trumpet blasts. The second movement digs out that slightly ‘Gerontian’ cell of chords again from the first, and is music that makes the

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ultramundane world flash. Then it leaves it and dives into its new thematic motif, still sweet and beautiful, and truly poignant, enunciated first by the cellos. But the hinted drone of a funeral march seems to loom over it. Elgar, however, does not want to give the music rhythmic energy; he lets it wander and drift, in a series of offshoots and variations. One of these distinctly reveals the mark and the influence of Mahler, even though the romantic expansion is always pending. Here in particular Elgar challenges himself to a polyphony of motifs which always seem to get out of hand and become chaotic; only to then wonderfully, and miraculously, come out of it by grasping the strings again. This remains a heroic movement, not a traditional adagio; and the slightly ambiguous motif of the march still snakes through it, and the movement comes full circle to finish as it began, with the ‘Gerontian’ pattern. The third movement begins with a short, light, whistled motif – five rising notes, the last three tapped – then it evolves and varies, giving way to a more sustained, syncopated, even sometimes martial pattern; but the whole is jumbled, with at least a touch of  Tchaikovsky’s indeterminacy. Then comes the solemnizing and pompous backup of the trombones supported by the timpani, which is then almost immediately silenced. Here the abrupt transitions from the light and banal to the solemn, from the short motifs to the bass drum, are as pleasant as in the two great Viennese symphony composers of the nineteenth century. The fourth movement begins with a typical, splendid, serpentine Elgarian pattern, first in the background and then presented again in crescendo, staccato, diminuendo, and passed from one orchestral section to another. It soon gives way to the triumphal theme which closes the symphony. The two patterns are interlaced up until the end (even in a fugato episode). The closure in an elegiac tone is again stupendous, a slow extinguishing which lasts several minutes, with the final chord seeming infinite. 8. Of Elgar’s two concertos for orchestra and solo instruments, that for violin is one of his most important works; for Elgar the violin is the instrument, his preferred vehicle. It is also notably better than the cello concerto, and one of his absolute pinnacles. Extremely rich in ideas, its melodic material is as ever vast, and there is perhaps no other work that is more Baroque or Romantic-Baroque than this. The themes and developments are exceedingly decorated, immersed in sumptuous coils of sound,

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with generous helpings of trills and ornaments. How many of Elgar’s detractors must have torn it to pieces for this vein of prolixity and sugariness. The violin is the violin of the virtuoso, and stays in scene for almost the whole concerto; it has a gruelling part, flowing and varying from the fullness of the viola, warm and slightly dark, to the highest notes above the staff, even whistled, hissed, scraped. For this romantic, rhapsodic, free, unexhausted use of the violin we must think mainly of the model of Brahms. But it is not a particularly dramatic, masculine concerto, but rather pathétique. And it thus requires a thoroughbred, superlative performer like a Perlman. Typical of Elgar is the orchestral entrance, the introduction of the first movement, with a theme that is first masculine and syncopated, and then feminine, sweeter and cantabile. From trills and belcanto the violin then comes out in a cadenza of infinite sweetness and languor, though exceptionally simple, of five rising notes (G – A – B – D twice repeated). Admittedly it does smack of late nineteenth-century and nineteenth-century salon, but this whole phrase competes with the most touching ever written and thought up by Elgar. The development consists of spasmodic and passionate embellishments by the soloist. The second movement presents again the violin that trills and varies always retaining its sweetness and in some moments even exhaustion. The third movement, however, is striking in that it begins with flourishes and dissonant, shrill and even ludic vocalizations of avant-garde music, more modern and not pathetic, but then develops into a clear quotation of Bach, only to return to the Elgarian track and above all, circularly, to the opening motif of the concerto. In the developments appears another quotation, from Brahms, as is fitting. It is therefore a mosaic movement which at the end offers new virtuoso, and thus static, cues to the instrument. With Elgar’s concerto for cello and orchestra (1919), probably owing to the distance in time from the violin concerto, we face a conceptually different, and differently formulated, work. Elgar has abandoned the brilliant genre for the intimist. It is also on balance an uneven work, and it could perhaps be called – and I am aware of going against the grain – the least successful of all of Elgar’s great compositions for orchestra. This does not detract from the fact that it has risen to mythical status in the canon of Elgar’s works amongst the English, and that it has a proverbial fame at least on a par with the Enigma

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variations. This is due to various factors: the dramatic circumstances of its composition, which make it seem like a sort of swan song, and the strange association between the composer and the performer that came about in the 1970s, when this concerto became the preferred piece, and the f  lagship, which revealed to the world the cellist Jacqueline du Pré who, hailed by some compatriots as the greatest English performer of the last three centuries, was to die young in 1987, reviving the myth of the young genius unjustly cut down by fate in the flower of her youth, surviving in England since the days of Dickens’s Little Nell.9 The first movement, which opens with a vaguely Bachian embellishment, already highlights the fact that the Baroque and virtuoso treatment of the soloist instrument has come to an end, indeed is completely defunct. The work will turn out to be shorter and more concise, and shows off right from the opening bars a structure that is more classical, sober, severe, always slightly dark, if not decidedly lugubrious. It was indeed conceived after Elgar underwent delicate surgery, and above all after the anguish of the war.10 The days of great sonority and of the full orchestral sound are a distant memory; and it seems that the great winds are not there – yet they are, the trumpets and the fanfares, but, hidden away, they are used with parsimony. So everything comes together to make it more intimate, like chamber music, and sometimes elegiac. The basic motif of the first movement has a force of its own, and above all a sparkling and barbaric roughness, succeeded by a series of melodic passages, but always played sotto voce. In the second movement, or phase of the first, the cello comes out with a sound resembling a sort of flight of the bumblebee, curious and strange but nothing more. The concerto then starts to diminish in the successive movements, aching, exhausted, even forced, shattering any idea or vain hope of musical continuum. The 9 10

Volume 5, § 33.7. These paradigmatic and collective values are illustrated by the mention of the concerto in Priestley’s play The Linden Tree (§ 12.1), where the daughter Dinah, the bearer of hope after the Second World War, tries out the second movement of the concerto in the background, causing in her relatives a twinge of nostalgia for bygone days. In everyday life Elgar was a psychopath, subject to acute phases of ill temper. The loss of his wife caused a decisive stagnation in his activity.

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melodic pattern is either laboured or struggles to get off the ground with conviction. The third movement is whispered and stealthy, and the fourth comes out masculine and bold, and stretched out in a sort of rondo, which after the first bars, however, also loses its edge, except for a few splashes of Elgar’s good, old musical ‘wit’. Then a descent into slow and whispered, laboured even, and sorrowful cadenzas. The themes fight and contend with one another up until the end. 9. The son of German immigrants who came to England to dedicate themselves to the wool trade,11 Frederick Delius (1862–1934) did not aspire, on the contrary, except for a few cases, to monumental forms, but mostly limited himself to small and intimate ones, such as suites and short incidental pieces; and these are what he is most famous for. He is a musician of enervated and suffused melodies, who rarely raises his voice, and equally rarely rises from absorbed to solemn and accented tunes, or even to the orchestral forte or fortissimo. His distinguishing mark is to name most of his music after nature, the weather or specific events to which it corresponds: thus music signifying and describing natural spectacles, countryside, rivers, lakes, currents, seas, dawns, evenings, afternoons, hills, or even countryside fairs; and, as with the impressionists, according to particular tones of light or season.12 The titles themselves allude to direct translations, and are not so much paintings as music in words, and titles which could be and were given to their lyrics by minor late Romantic poets such as O’Shaughnessy or Noel Roden (but one composition is titled Deux Aquarelles, very short pieces of which the first starts off with plangent pathos, and the second is more ruffled, raised and flickering; both proverbially vanish and fade 11

12

The young musician spent a long period in Florida, at the behest of his father, as the manager of a plantation (of grapefruits or oranges!). Upon becoming a professional musician (thanks to Grieg, who won his father over), Delius lived from the beginning of the twentieth century, and died, in France, near Fontainebleau, in a cottage surrounded by nature and near a river, which was clearly the scenery that inspired his music. In MacDiarmid’s poem ‘Good-bye Twilight’, Delius is contrasted with Sibelius not so much because their names rhyme, but for an absence of real penetration into nature, where Sibelius discovers the magic of Finland ‘like the magic of Scotland should be’, in the sinews and bones of the Scots.

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away).13 The genre closest to his heart is the symphonic poem. With this overtly minor, fragmentary and fragmented vein, Delius the composer condemned himself to a selective reception. His pieces are rarely performed in concert and are not all recorded, and the few that are are picked and extracted from his operas. These themselves have been kept half-alive due to intermezzos, excerpts and interludes, sometimes exquisite in themselves. The interlude is another form that defines the music of Delius with evocative precision. In terms of his upbringing he was an amalgamator of different post-romantic musical backgrounds, in turn blended with spurious elements, like Afro-American folk music14 (the rhapsodic fresco Appalachia, not disagreeable though undoubtedly long-winded, is a vivacious reworking of ideas from folk music, especially negro spirituals). Among Delius’s most important music are Air and Dance, with viola and cello playing solo and sweetly releasing an unusual emotional intensity (after the ‘air’ the piece is followed by the dance, ending on the air in long, stretched out notes), and Brigg Fair, which shuns the full orchestral sound and relies on the little instruments, and whose area of reference, and not only here, is Debussy’s Après-midi. It is music that tries to soothe, almost lull to sleep, on the wave of the clarinets and flutes above a background of arpeggios (and Delius is a little maestro as well as an adept in these two instruments). The Capriccio for cello and orchestra is woven with sensuous and tranquil spirals of pure abandon, with the harp not disguised in the background. The double concerto for violin, cello and orchestra is a vast work in which 13

The catalogue includes, for good reason, songs on the words of similar poets, such as Dowson and Henley, as well as others on texts by Verlaine, Ibsen and Nietzsche. 14 In other words he belonged to no school, was solitary, indifferent to honours and approval (R. Hill, ‘Frederick Delius’, in British Music of Our Time, ed. A. L. Bacharach, Harmondsworth 1951, 30, 34). The various concertos for solo instruments and orchestra and the instrumental music form an almost alien repertoire. The concerto for piano and orchestra is partly Gershwinian and thus virtuoso, and therefore appears as a contradiction in Delius’s poetics; in the second movement, he seeks mysterious and hypnotic acoustics with a rhythmic, obstinate pattern. Ultimately he blends disparate calls in a relaxed and chromatic way, passing from Gershwin to Chopin, to Grieg above all, and at the same time looking to John Field, no less. It is a strangely passionate and romantic concerto for Delius’s habitual ways.

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the two solo instruments duet with very heart-felt, abandoned, vibrant roulades without malice or irony or humour. A heroic, martial pattern, in itself incisive, acts as a momentary pause, which makes us suspect or sense a cyclical work after the manner of Franck, who is not too far removed. Plangent, inebriated with pathos, and thus unperturbed, the two instruments continue to mew and twirl. It is, then, a rhapsodic concerto in which the boundaries between the movements are lost, formally disappearing into a single unbroken movement. Delius himself, three quarters of the way through the development, realizes that the music dramatically slows down, and starts up an allegro, so that the listlessness is broken by a more excited motif. The interlude from the opera A Village Romeo and Juliet is one of Delius’s most engaging pieces and, without euphemism, one that is closest to being a small masterpiece. It falls into his preferred genre, and perhaps the only one in which Delius expressed himself at his best, that of atmospheric music of swooning and drowsiness, which every so often shakes itself up as if gripped by shudders. Except that this study of swooning and dreamy and melancholic states of mind is broken, both by more sinuous melodies right from the start, and by a small central episode of truly admirable tragic solemnity. The refined use of woodwinds, clarinets, bassoons and saxophones, echoes Elgar,15 who could easily have put his name to this page, also for an excellent recourse to polyphony and parallel and entwined melody. A presage of Britten can also be felt, but we pick up above all Puccini and Mascagni, and they are brought to mind by the way the theme is formed from as yet shapeless glimmers which then grow and are enriched, in piano, until they explode into a fortissimo, with the strings usurped by the winds, a tragic remarking linked, here in Delius, with the theme of Romeo and Juliet. The free melodic, but still half-formed, unclotted, flow is held in check by the explosion, and as soon as the music starts to increase in volume Delius dampens it down, returning to that dematerialized whisper with which it began. The horns in the background are the engines of the melodic reawakening, and call on the composer, who would like to

15

Especially evident and obvious is a hint at Elgar’s beautiful ‘romanza’ for bassoon and orchestra, prudishly smothered straightaway.

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stop to vocalize and tune the instruments, back to the need for development. At this middle stage, and more so than ever, the music jams, wants to stop and tread water. The passage indeed seems as if it is about to wear out, but instead the flute, with a splendid scale, relaunches and reopens it, not without struggling to smother the trills of the violins; but here come the horns, which, as has been said, exert their propulsive action. Magically a melodic surge unfurls, which is perhaps the most beautiful moment in all of Delius, who rightly brings the piece to an end in the same way as it began, on a very suggestive material whisper. In a Summer Garden already reveals in the title the sleepy, lethargic atmosphere and the sounds which the music will evoke. A homogeneous piece, with a few crescendos and ripienos, with the woodwinds to the fore, it focuses on long, drawn-out notes. Song before Sunrise, vague, onomatopoeic and Debussyan, is one of the many serial pieces which are fairly hard to distinguish amongst themselves. Song of the High Hills is arguably one of Delius’s least successful pieces. It is a vast orchestral suite of semantic or associational music, with a chorus at the end (but, it would seem, without words and thus without lyrics, with mouth closed as in Puccini). The beginning makes us feel that these ‘high hills’ are numinous, ambiguous, sinister, frightening even; it could be the accompanying music to a Hitchcock thriller, as is underlined by an obstinate, if not jarring, motif which pretends to slow down, and which often returns. Gradually there is something delightful, even intoxicating, about the hills which comes to light and is attested in celestial and veiled patterns, the diabolical aspect of the hills, with its obstinate rallentando and dissonances gets the upper hand again. In particular, a counterpoint arises of ecstatic and suspended, or idyllic, moments, and others which are more menacing. The whole finale marks the apex of the slightly modulated, obsessive motif. The piece moves towards the exhaustion of the sound and thus its wearing out and silence. The ostinato passes to the choir before closing as it began, or rather reviewing all its thematic cells. Paris does not move away at the beginning from its atmospheric music, perhaps misty and a bit gloomy; from a sedentary, uncertain, interlocutory prelude it develops and livens up, also increasing in speed and intensity, only to die down immediately and return to the turmoil of long-held notes. The sound explosion does happen, though, in the second development,

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but is always restrained, to form oases in which the flute or the clarinet play. The trumpet reminds us of the almost homonymous symphonic poem by Gershwin (there are in fact sudden jazz solutions), and the castanets also come in. The musical discourse evolves from an initial indistinct jumble which may appear as a slow and foggy approach to a city that offers its signals from afar, as in a sort of perceptive reawakening. Bells accompany an obsessive, veiled pattern, with a decisive crescendo which dies down. Afterwards the Paris festive atmosphere breaks out, and a more rolling episode follows. But it is not yet the outburst of jubilation. The saxophones and the unturned trumpets, as well as the castanets may also recall Gershwin’s An American in Paris. As a musical impression of a city Delius’s Paris may remind us of Cockaigne by Elgar; yet Delius, compared with both his predecessors, is tamer and less roused, which also means that this is not completely program music. The day of perceptions and stimuli closes with the vague and hinted at return to the initial theme: mist, now presumably evening mist. Amongst the things that Delius could have done without writing is Sleigh Ride, which is no little thing or simple curiosity, but music of truly bad taste: it is too, indeed only, onomatopoeic, with sistrums, woodwind quivers, flutes playing easy little motifs. 10. Gustav Holst (1874–1934) is yet another product of easterners under dictatorships emigrating to the traditional stronghold of freedom; but he was not Jewish. Of distant German and Latvian origins (his grandfather had emigrated for political reasons), he counted pianists, harpers and modest composers amongst his ancestors. The son of a Swede and an Englishwoman, he had studied and practised the trombone and had received a scholarship to attend the Royal College of Music. As a result of poverty he had at first lived an unspeakably wretched bohemian life, and at the outbreak of war he was discharged for being shortsighted. His musical biography lists as principal details his early passion for Wagner and Grieg, the fact that he had eagerly read the whole of Berlioz’s treatise on orchestration, and his interest in theosophy. At not much more than twenty years of age, Holst, for his part, gave proof of that religious and mythological syncretism that would move the world years later in Eliot’s Waste Land. He was spellbound by the Bhagavad Gîtâ and the Rig Veda, he assiduously studied Sanskrit without ever mastering it, but wrote two melodramas of

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Indian inspiration, and casually passed from the orchestration of an Ave Maria to that of a Savitri.16 In reality, Holst seems completely devoid of an authentic religious sentiment – he is, if anything, a syncretist – and his Hymn of Jesus, which distorts and dissonates the Tantum ergo in its opening and its closure, not only becomes uselessly noisy but also vibrates with mysterious demonic reverberations. With eclectic tastes, curious about many manners and many styles, but without decisively committing to any,17 Holst had uncommon talents as a tightrope walker, but proportionally he reaped meagre results. In his day he was underrated, and his contemporaries rejected his exoticism without grasping some germs of the music of the future. He composed a single work which has survived the ravages of time and has not been permanently archived, The Planets. The fruit of his interest in astrology and the associations which the planets suggested to him, and finished between 1914 and 1916, The Planets is a suite in seven parts, the same number as the planets. The musician thus recaptures with originality – or even preannounces, to judge from the dates – Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev’s lucky formula. The opening motif is spellbinding, visionary music with angry and diabolical touches, which stands out against a syncopated ostinato of timpani which is every bit as rousing as Ravel’s Boléro. Holst must represent the spirit or the sense of war, and the piece triumphantly succeeds in the mimesis. The bangs of the timpani are like a boxer’s punches against a punch bag. The second piece, on Venus, passes 16

17

Death presents itself to Savitri, the wife of the woodsman Satyavan, but its seductions are blocked by chaste conjugal love. It is a chamber opera or operina, on an action of insignificant development, with melodic recitatives and firm song and speech often without orchestral accompaniment, and slight background music and short concertati. The leading role stands out Wagnerianly, but with typical eclecticism the dreamy atmosphere betrays Debussy, and the theme of the encounter with death is played out with echoes of Elgar. The end fades out in sfumato. The 1923 Concerto fugato (or ‘fugal’), is in its nature imitative of the concerto grosso of the middle and end of the eighteenth century, by Bach, Handel and some Italians, which it reworks. In three movements, thus not a suite, it gives particular emphasis to the woodwinds, flutes and clarinets, which have many solo episodes and dialogue amongst themselves. This short work was written in the parodic and imitative spirit of Prokofiev, but without Stravinsky’s tightrope walking.

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on to the music of the spheres in a style vaguely reminiscent of Mahler, especially for its relaxed and cleansed melody, mystical but interspersed with violin solos, and often slowed down, and for the variety of timbres (harp, triangle). The stealthy piece dedicated to Mercury is reminiscent of Dukas, or even Prokofiev. The music in the piece to Jupiter returns heroic, and right in the middle it delights us with a highly melodious pattern offered by the whole of the string section, and which has the intensity and the pathos of Elgar. Saturn unleashes an opaque, gloomy music with hellish and subterranean flashes, a funeral march or a witches’ sabbath, and again a frenzied use of the ostinato. Literally phenomenal is the piece dedicated to Uranus. Neptune comes back to more purified and sublime acoustics (the beginning almost reinvents Verdi’s ‘willow song’, and at the end the female choir comes in, emanating heavenly, then hyperuranian, spirals, with the end in sfumato). A few of Holst’s other pieces deserve only a brief mention. The Somerset Rhapsody of 1906–1907 is in the established vein of English symphonic poems inspired by places, thus of grandeur and timbric colour. It is a pleasant work that presents mellow melodies sent off by an oboe solo which adds arabesques to a sort of sinuous snake-charmer’s music, and develops into Delius’s tonalities of dreamy languor, just a little less intimate and lingering (though in the middle there is a martial explosion completely alien to Delius), to end up once again in sfumato (with the clarinet replacing the oboe). The other work by Holst that is worth mentioning is Egdon Heath, the English symphonic poem which is always able to emanate the genius loci, and in this case the moor that from the Brontë sisters onwards held a strange associative fascination (think of the numinosity of Delius’s ‘high hills’). Egdon is that of Hardy and The Return of the Native, and Holst mimetically captures its chaotic and impenetrable depths, the alienating capacity to magically and enchantingly disorientate. The initial pattern of double basses is a material, physical descent into the whirlpool of that receptacle of native myths, both pagan and Christian. The passage oozes this shadowiness, this thickening, this teeming mist for a while, and the woodwinds act as a reinforcement to increase the level of mystery and will-o’-the-wisp.

Part II 

Modernism

§ 74. England from 1922 to 1945 The salient political fact of the first post-war period is the scale of casualties everywhere, closely followed by the collapse of empires – not just the Central European ones, but the Ottoman Empire too, destroyed and dismembered partly with the help of Lawrence of Arabia, part-coordinator of the Arab revolt in the desert. New and smaller states founded on shared ethnic identities emerged from the decline of the imperial idea, or rather of empire as a way of gathering so many autonomous and separate nationalities and identities. In the run-up to the First World War, the socialists had offset their status as a foreign body by joining forces with the different nationalisms and effectively embracing them. In this way they had converted to patriotism and to supporting the war. In 1919 the connection identified by Orwell as crucial to the Second World War would have been that between Sorel and Lenin: from the war against imperialism, or dictatorship, a second, coordinated European revolution should have arisen. In Mitteleuropa, the area liberated by the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, a number of utopian socialist and communist republics were formed, only to be crushed overnight after a short-lived resistance. January 1919 saw a communist uprising in Berlin, snuffed out with the death of Liebknecht and Luxemburg. In May the Bavarian republic was crushed. By August the republic of Béla Kun in Budapest had also fallen. Effectively Europe as a whole was already oriented towards a new imperialist race, in which the emerging rivalry between the US, expanding into the Pacific, and Japan carved out the world into three blocs of Orwellian super-states. Up to 1918 the superpowers would have been four, to include Tsarist Russia.1 The peace treaties, imposing a peace called ‘Carthaginian’ by Keynes and others, aimed to make of defeated Germany a marginal state and, in the

1

The idea of carving out the world among a few superpowers was the founding myth of the new imperialisms, even of the democratic ones, like the British. At the outbreak of the Second World War Hitler had intuited this new world-order. Before unleashing the ‘Battle of Britain’ in the summer of 1940, he attempted to persuade the British government through diplomatic pressures and inducements to realize a new order that would have seen the world carved not into three blocs but into a British and a German Empire.

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face of Britain’s continued isolation, to invest France with the hegemonic role in Europe. The Versailles Treaty required of Germany a punishing payment of war debts for the sum of 126 billion gold marks (rising to 132 according to other estimates). Having suffered 750,000 casualties, Britain made its voice heard at the Paris peace conference, throwing its weight into imposing on Germany disarmament, the sale of its colonies in Africa and Asia and the destruction of the fleet, since the British did not like to have rivals or be surpassed at sea. In other words, Britain attempted to eliminate a competitor; with this degradation, or diminution, of German colonial power, after 1919 Britain had to contend only with France. But the intelligentsia and the British industrial class did not take long in developing a softer, more opportunistic line towards Germany, with the aim of regaining a business partner and restraining France (a line upheld even after Hitler’s rise to power). The pro-German campaign was supported by Lord Astor, owner of a newspaper chain, by G. Dawson, the then editor of The Times, and particularly by Keynes’s pamphlet, ‘The Economic Consequences of the Peace’ (1919), which did much to convince the British that Germany was their first and natural economic client,2 to the point where the British only very reluctantly agreed to the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923. Britain was also in favour of the formation of states along the border with the USSR, as an anti-Soviet and anti-German buffer. Finally, the post-war period also saw Britain being overtaken by the US as the first world power in terms of economic strength (a leap symbolically marked in currency term by the dollar’s rise against the pound) and political influence. But the stock market crash of 24 October 1929 – Black Thursday – produced seismic waves that extended all the way to Europe, by now mostly an economic satellite to the US. It particularly reverberated in Germany, frustrating the conciliatory politics of the Briand-Kellogg pact, with which in 1928 sixty-two countries had been persuaded to ban war. 2. After the Paris conference, America put itself forwards as the longterm bodyguard of Europe with the fourteen points of the idealist Wilson 2 Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day involves late reflections on this sentiment, as I discuss in Volume 8, § 188.4. On the influence of Keynes’s pamphlet see the excellent remarks in WAR, 12.

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(for Keynes a ‘blind and deaf Don Quixote’). One of those points stipulated the establishment of recognized borders between states in opposition to the doctrine of the balance of power; another proclaimed blind faith in an organization such as the League of Nations in its capacity to maintain the lines drawn on the European map by the congress of the victors.3 The failure of this ‘league’ among nations became evident when one by one the great fascist powers, Germany (which had joined in 1926), Japan, Italy, first disengaged from the League, then withdrew altogether. Members of the League – forty-four at the outset – imposed sanctions on those who threatened the peace and carried out attacks. But the League did not have an army and Britain was not willing to be the peacekeeper, having defined ‘aggression’ in very narrow terms. Lloyd George and Bonar Law had little faith in the League; at the other end of the political spectrum, Labour and the unions supported the League, with MacDonald paying a personal visit to the Geneva meeting and supporting the Geneva Protocol that would admit Germany to the League. But it was precisely the British hesitations – once MacDonald fell and the conservatives returned to power – and the Americans too who scuppered the protocol. The overall direction of British domestic politics until after 1945 lies in the transition from a liberal capitalist economy to the welfare state. The same period also marks the evolution or absorption of liberalism into the Labour party, and an ideological reversal on the part of the conservatives. For most of the two interwar decades, the first item on the agenda of British governments was poverty, linked to working-class unemployment, an item that had not been neglected before 3

Wilson was thoroughly defeated in his plans: he did not serve a second term, the treaty was rejected by the non-conciliatory states, and the USA did not take part in the League of Nations. He was succeeded by Coolidge, Hoover (who managed without success the post-Wall Street crash, vetoed measures to help 15 million unemployed and veterans, with repressions and victims), and Roosevelt. The Wall Street crash had been caused by the unchecked growth of unbridled capitalism, together with an excess of production that had not been absorbed by the market. Roosevelt stopped the bank crisis, abolished prohibitionism, and helped support agriculture with controlled inflation. His second New Deal comprised measures to support labour and employment in order to forestall the threat of revolution. Nevertheless in 1937 there was a second depression.

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the war, but which became more dramatic and structural in the years following. The war had forced the abandonment of economic liberalism: from 1915 onwards duties were introduced on imports4 and production was determined by the state. The state too designed a wage policy and imposed limitations on the workers’ freedom of expression and of movement in consultation with union leaders who having signed up to the government’s economic policy came into friction with the grassroots. High wages were even blamed for the fall in competitiveness of British exports, leading to a demand for their downward adjustment: workers, particularly colliers, earned too much! Labour’s share of the vote rose to 22 per cent in 1918; the conservatives for their part overtook Lloyd George’s liberals. But even though they considered different strategies to solve the workers’ problems, they were again beaten in the 1923 election. Labour formed its first government with liberal support in 1924, with Snowden as Chancellor. It managed to introduce some radical reforms in the fields of education and housing, but turned out to be unprepared to address the situation. The conservative government that came to power in 1926 decided to go for a strong-arm confrontation with the workers, resulting in a general strike that ended with friendly football matches between strikers and police and the return to a discipline to which the workers were called up by their leaders. After the strike – which still remains a relatively rare occurrence in the British system – the parties initiated a more collaborative relationship. Until the early 1930s the two traditional parties fought each other for power but without managing to find effective measures to address the economic conjuncture. They suffered an identity crisis that was compounded by the absence of charismatic leaders. Their ineffectiveness in the face of the political crisis of the interwar years contributed to the ephemeral rise and increased credibility of Oswald Mosley. Mosley, a Labour MP, formerly conservative, seeing his anti-crisis proposals rejected veered toward fascist positions, founding the British Union of Fascists (BUF), a political formation that never gained any seats in the elections and was dissolved when Mosley was arrested and imprisoned between 1940 and 1943. 4

This recalls the famous tax on imported corn and the subsequent formation of the Anti-Corn Law League of the 1830s and 1840s.

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3. At first remote because of Britain’s historical isolation, the European war drama came closer to home once conscription was introduced in 1916. The First War World was not a disintegrating but a cementing factor for the nation; it did not produce the typical polarization seen elsewhere between Bolshevism and creeping fascism, or the threat of regime change. Officially, conservative Britain opposed the advance of fascist regimes in Europe, together with France. But the line of non-intervention in Spain, endorsed also by France, left the field free to the Italian and German fascists. When Hitler came to power France and England naïvely believed that the Führer could be swiftly appeased by returning Germany to the role of great power; effectively they left him free to unleash war. On a visit to Italy in 1927, Churchill said that had he been Italian, he would certainly have been a fascist, that fascism had defeated Leninism and its ‘bestial appetites’, and had been the antidote to ‘the Russian poison’. He could not however indicate any positive feature of fascism.5 Mussolini’s March on Rome was seen critically in the liberal press, but The Times framed it as an attempt to impose ‘order’. In articles signed by Percival Phillips, Mussolini was compared to Cromwell; in America too he was spoken of as Garibaldi in a black shirt. Many British intellectuals flirted with fascism, initially attracted, then disillusioned. The two most striking cases are Orwell and Yeats, though they both distanced themselves from it at about the same time, in the early 1930s. Though the two did not agree on anything and hated each other – or at least Orwell hated Yeats – they shared an aspiration to a non-violent, non-extremist, ordered world. For all their snobberies they felt obliged to support those at the bottom of society, the poor. By itself this aspiration to a world ordered or reordered, but on explicitly Christian and feudal foundations, was also shared by Eliot. For the masses, British fascism drew nourishment from the demobilization of soldiers and officers, to whom Mosley successfully appealed. In Ireland, the Blueshirts of General O’Duffy 5

The chief theoretician of the uncontaminated purity of the Aryan race was the Russian-German Alfred Rosenberg, author of The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), which followed on from an earlier English text, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), by H. S. Chamberlain. Rosenberg was to hang himself at Nuremberg.

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(a body that was set up between 1933 and 1935, corresponding to the British fascists) were actually a splinter group of an existing party, a dissenting wing of farmers and landowners. Irish nationalism had already been satisfied by the achievement of independence in 1922. The little traction enjoyed by fascism in Ireland is attributed by some historians, like S. J. Woolf, to the hegemony of the Catholic Church.6 In the Middle East, one of the three theatres of British foreign policy, Britain had been promising the Arabs from the beginning of the century the creation of states for their ethnicity in return for their support against the Turks, but it also supported the imminent establishment of the state of Israel. In Ireland, once the Easter uprising of 1916 was suppressed during the war,7 Lloyd George concluded a truce on 10 July 1921. A few months later, on 6 December, the Treaty of Westminster gave Ireland dominion status, with the obligation of an oath of allegiance to the king. The Dáil ratified the treaty with some delay; Sinn Féin resisted it, then split, and the Republicans left the government. The independence treaty comprised twenty-six of the Irish counties, leading to the formation of the Irish Free State between 1921 and 1922, not without the resistance of the maximalists and outbreaks of civil war. An attempt to wrest two other Catholic counties from Ulster, and thus destabilize it, failed in 1925. In India Gandhi had many objectives in common with D. H. Lawrence, for example the critique of industrialism and mechanization, advocating a return to the primitive stage (spinning and weaving by hand, salt harvesting and civil disobedience were expressly promoted by the mahatma against British monopoly). Gandhi was killed by a Hindu fanatic because he had supported the moral right of Pakistan to exist. 4. The descent towards the Second World War began once Britain started to follow a conciliatory policy towards Hitler, fearing that a weakening of Germany would benefit communist Russia. Appeasement became a political doctrine with the naïve Neville Chamberlain, who was 6

7

By contrast, the Communist Party of Britain, founded in 1920, never achieved more than two seats in Parliament, reaching its highest recruitment in 1939 (at 18,000 members). From 1923, the Labour party refused to allow communists to join (M. Fforde, Storia della Gran Bretagna, Bari 2002, 265). Wells has his protagonist Britling (§ 16.3) voice the suspicion shared by many, that the Germans had been behind the Easter uprising.

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pro-German8 and argued that Germany had been punished too harshly by the Versailles Treaty. He was also conciliatory with the Italians in Ethiopia and thought Britain had no interest in Eastern Europe. Chamberlain had indeed made several advances to the fascist regimes: in support of Italy, he had opposed British participation in the Spanish Civil War;9 he also met with Hitler and recognized the annexation of Austria, while the Munich agreements of September 1938 did the same for the Sudetenland. Hitler’s subsequent invasion of Czechoslovakia was indirectly laid at his door, making it necessary to remove him as prime minister to the benefit of Churchill. Opposed to Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, Churchill succeeded him in 1940, combining the two posts of Premier and Minister of Defence and leading from then on the British resistance during the war. The entire nation was mobilized with the motto ‘victory at all costs’, which meant temporarily co-opting the working classes to the management of power, with the outcome of a significant redistribution of income both during and after the war. Already before the end of the war, Churchill signed with Roosevelt the Atlantic Charter in August 1941 for the defence of democracy and international cooperation. He fought to contain Soviet expansion, and considering imminent and inevitable Hitler’s collapse he was among the first to plan the future order for the west. If he was suspicious of Stalin, it was because he saw him as a rival in the restoration of British power; yet, as Orwell foresaw, the US too harboured similar hegemonic aspirations.10 A re-elected Roosevelt brought the US out of isolation, 8

Chamberlain’s attitude was shared across many different levels of the population and of national culture, from high officials to civil servants to industrialists such as, for instance, Gerald Crich in Lawrence’s Women in Love. From 1922, Lord Astor’s The Times under G. Dawson’s editorship favoured the Nazis too. 9 Most English intellectuals supported the Republican side, with the exception of Roy Campbell, author of ‘Toledo, 1936’. The first one to leave as part of the International Brigade was John Cornford, who sent two poems back home and was killed almost immediately, as was Caudwell. Besides Orwell, Auden went in January 1937, then Spender and Julian Bell, Virginia Woolf ’s nephew. Wyndham Lewis was among the Franco supporters; his The Revenge for Love (§ 90.4) deals with the Spanish Civil War. 10 At the Potsdam conference in 1945, Churchill was replaced by the Labour PM Attlee. The unanswered question is undoubtedly why the British people voted for Labour – giving it even a famous ‘landslide victory’, with an avalanche of votes, 343

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passing the law on aid to the allied powers and making Americans even more conscious of their role as world leaders and main bulwark against Nazism. It was though Truman, his successor, who in August 1945 authorized the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan. At the capitulation on 2 September 1945, the final tally would be 50 million deaths, of which 30 million were in Europe. Previously, between August and October of 1940, Hitler had unleashed the ‘Battle of Britain’, or ‘Operation Sea Lion’, bombing military and civilian targets (Coventry, Birmingham, London too in November 1940) with the diving Stukas. The operation was later dropped, but not before it had imprinted a series of indelible snapshots of a London full of rubble in the retina of scores of writers. Coventry was heavily bombed on 14 November 1940, with the threat (never realized) that other cities would be ‘Coventried’. In turn, the British response was a series of bombings on German soil (and elsewhere: Turin was bombed by the British in June 1940). But after the destruction of Dresden in 1945 Churchill forbade the continuation of the raids. § 75. Modernism It is always prudent to define any cultural and literary movement according to a minimum of shared characteristics, in order to avoid accounts of theory in contradiction with practice, but also conversely the risk of re-hashing self-evident and well-known generalizations. We can first of all agree that the essential frame of Modernism1 spans the forty years from 1890 to 1930, that its geographical boundaries are expansive, from the whole of Europe

1

seats versus 231 – right after the war, given Churchill’s unquestionable success as or one of the architects of the allied victory. The partial answer comes from the fact that the conservatives had counted, in the electoral campaign, on the danger to peace represented by the Soviet Union, while Labour gave precedence to economic reconstruction. But Churchill was not finished, and he returned to power in 1951 with denationalizing measures, and only in 1955 he abandoned active politics. As G. Cianci reminds us (CMM, 16–17), the term was coined in 1924 and subsequently adopted in L. Riding and R. Graves’s A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927). After lapsing from use, it became widely adopted in the 1960s. Cianci’s study further reviews an exhaustive micro-history of the subsequent reception of Modernism, alongside the critical debate it has engendered to these days. I note however that the term ‘modernism’ occurs already in chapter 35 of Norman Douglas’s South Wind (Harmondsworth 1962, 284), which was published in 1917, even though it is not clear

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widening out to America, and that its main axis is that of Paris-LondonNew York. More doubtful is where the temporal peak of the movement might be placed in a parabolic diagram, since its own advocates proposed several dates to fix the exact point in time when the so-called revolution in sensibility had been unleashed: 1910 (Woolf ), 1915 (Lawrence), or a few years after the war. Richard Ellmann, Joyce’s biographer, suggested 1900; Edmund Wilson went back all the way to symbolism, roughly establishing 1870 as the starting point. There is an all too easy temptation for critics and historians to push back the origins of the movement, with a consequent loss of specificity: some symbolist, Decadent, or even Romantic-Decadent poets like Rimbaud, Rilke, Valéry, even Baudelaire are considered to be proto- or paleo-modernists. On this criterion, even the naturalists can be said to have preceded the modernists on a thematic level, with their acute and obsessive investigation of the city and its alienation, to the point where it would be rather easy to bring back to the fold of Modernism a Gissing or even a James Thomson B. V. – but it would be too much. Undoubtedly the point of highest creativity for Modernism is the period preceding the First World War, particularly the four years between 1914 and 1918. Following many other authorities, I have implicitly opted for 1922, when the results of that pre-war incubation became tangible, long-lasting and consequently less whimsical and ephemeral. A further, neutral premise is that Modernism is cosmopolitan, transnational and international; it is therefore homogeneous, even though with some native inflections, across all the national cultures in which it arose. Equally true is that Modernism was a phenomenon found across the arts, we may even say an inter-cultural one, since the term is operative even within the field of theology, where it has however no relationship to the arts. To get back to our field, within the arts a correlation can be easily established between non-figurative painting, atonal music, poetic free verse, the stream of consciousness in the novel – all phenomena that emerged roughly around the same time. 2. The question ‘What is the specificity of Modernism?’ cannot then be evaded; the reply, though, must be that there is no unambiguous definition. Modernism is a galaxy, a movement of movements, it has been from the context whether the term refers to the literary or theological sphere. On Douglas, see Volume 8, § 32.3 n. 7.

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said, a scattered array of -isms, of all the European avant-gardes that share a rejection of realism and Romanticism. Recently there has been much insistence on setting apart the pre-war avant-gardes, fiercely destructive and destabilizing, from the post-war normalization of Modernism due to the long arm of T. S. Eliot. This is evident in the stance of a number of modernist poets, not just Eliot, but also Pound, Yeats, Lewis too, who all became more conservative and right-wing, even fascist in the interwar period, with Joyce the sole exception.2 The surprise here is actually that Modernism would have arrived at a state of coexistence with the movement that preceded it and against which it fought. For some, Modernism had its antagonist in Romanticism and its model in classicism. But authoritative critics like Alvarez and Kermode, and Bloom and the Yale school, have in fact argued for a derivation from Romanticism, with which Modernism shares a keen interest in subjectivity. On reading the various reconstructions of the system of Modernism, one is amazed by the acknowledged lack of a synthesis, as well as by a series of facts and propositions that cannot be reconciled and tend to spill into their opposite. In one of the many volumes dedicated to Modernism, by Bradbury and McFarlane,3 for instance, the two scholars seem to be unwittingly repeating and paraphrasing what J. H. Buckley was writing about the ultimate indefinability of Victorianism back in 1966, stressing the chain of irreconcilable oppositions proper to 2

3

It is symptomatic that totalitarian regimes like the Bolshevik should have been against Modernism (which Lukács saw as a form of Decadentism). The exception here is the intimate connection, the strong intersection of Futurism and fascism. Marinetti considered fascism to have been ‘born’ from Futurism, while Mussolini ‘copied Marinetti directly in his oratorical stances’ (M. Verdone, Il Futurismo, Roma 2003, 21). The Futurists articulated an aesthetic of war and the myth of the beautiful war, a spectacular and dynamic event. Marinetti, Boccioni, Russolo the musician gave voice to the sonic and tonal spectacle of new weapons, attuned to changes in the landscape and to new forms of perception. Even advertisement was used to exploit or rather produce mental images in favour of war. Photographs, postcards, sketches, trench newspapers became conduits for broadcasting among the population a speedy synthesis of the war; they became systems that mediate the horrors of war, instruments of persuasion aimed at making war harmless, adventurous, explorative, even poetic. Italy came late to radio broadcasting. In Britain, though, the BBC was founded in 1922, while television first broadcast in 1936, but had its programmes suspended during the war. BRM, for example, 44 ff.

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it. Adding to the confusion are the critical gaffes or blunders on the part of modernists themselves, which testify to the uncertainties of the movement – such as, for instance, William Carlos Williams’s judgement that with The Waste Land Eliot had not advanced literary sensibility but moved it back by twenty years. It might be easier perhaps to build an identikit of the European and American modernist writer of those forty years, or rather of their most reliable and common features as they are expressed on the page. Modernist artists tend to be uprooted, as great artists almost always are by definition. They then put down new roots in frontier cities that are meeting points and crossroads, intersecting with other writers without a country. In this alienated urban space the stateless, exiled artists dedicate themselves to the redefinition of their art and their emancipation. Theirs is a meta-artistic and metaliterary art, the product of an aesthetics that is no longer pragmatic or implicit. In their questioning of language the poets proceed epistemologically from the premise that language cannot be revived, because there is a widespread perception that the edifice of western rationality is crumbling, as Lord Chandos argued in his famous letter. The hope of retaining the mimetic link between words and things finally gives way, as does the belief in an iconic relationship, or a correlation, between language and things, just as in Heidegger and in the crisis or decay of language.4 Literary language will therefore only mirror a virtual reality: visionary, illusory, futuristic, utopian. At the opposite end lies the response of Dada and surrealism: automatic writing, language left to itself. In Eliot’s famous definition, myth orders the chaos of contemporary life; it is perhaps even a kind of delusion, that is that history might be salvageable because myth makes it forgettable, softens it – at least up to the point where it sharpens the unredeemable contrast between past and present. Modernists forge 4

The distinctive trait of this English crisis is the notion of separation. This term designates a dissociation of two kinds: of being, in the missing integration of body and spirit; and of history, society and the world. In literature it is reflected with varying objectivity and detachment (Yeats, Joyce), or through a spasmodic immersion into it (Lawrence, Woolf ). The severance of the ‘I’ that cannot fuse together body and spirit is Yeats’s and Lawrence’s theme, who not incidentally referred to each other. In emphasizing the separation of emotional and erotic life from the world, they are outside the world. ‘Separation’, a Lawrence idiom, can be translated as alienation or nihilism. Even though he does not have a tragic conception of life, Yeats elaborates one of tragic joy.

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their own private myth, a cosmology that uses the old religious symbols in a new way. Their leitmotif is that history has come to its last stop, where an abyss opens up and apocalypse looms. Salvation lies in adopting a number of philosophies and mythologies of recurrence, thus devising cyclical principles. The results are works like Eliot’s Four Quartets, where Christianity and myth are blended together as buttressed dual embankments against the linear concept of history, to support a recursive historical rhythm. The distance between that work and Finnegans Wake, written and published almost in parallel, is then not as wide as it may seem. At the same time, literature too is over for the modernists, since the prevailing mode is that of parody or of a collage of quotations, which paradoxically ends up by inventing a new literary form. 3. In modernist poetry the rejection of the long form is well-established and noted, as it had been since Poe. Grandiosity has no place in Modernism. If anything, it is the sequence of short, coordinated lyrics – the series – that re-emerges. In a luminous essay, Pagnini5 established nine categories for poetic and literary Modernism, starting with its practitioners’ reaffirmation of a shared sense of the exhaustion of acquired language, of its ontological inability to deal with a fluid and elusive external reality, and therefore of the decline of the century-old metaphor of the ‘world-as-book’, a world for which language is no longer a mirror, but which has become illegible and undecipherable. In drama, Japanese Noh theatre influenced Yeats, who discovered it through Pound and Fenollosa.6 This Japanese vogue7 raged 5 6

7

M. Pagnini, ‘Difficoltà e oscurità nel modernismo letterario’, Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate, XLIV (1991: 4), 311–31. Poets use images but no longer know to what they refer, neither do they control reality (1); they give life to non-referential verbal objects, so that ‘making poetry becomes the very subject of poetry’, poetry that is therefore ‘autotelic’ (2); they become a disintegrated, no longer monolithic ‘I’, with recourse to masks (3); they express a fragmentary, juxtaposing vision of reality, in contrast with the linear, causal one of the past (4), a vision that is intrinsically ambiguous (5); they are fascinated by the irrational (6); they destroy the syntax of representation (7); they are lyrical poets inclined towards monologue, speaking to ‘themselves’ or ‘no-one’ (8), through quotations in a patchwork of erudite cuts; these modernist writers are ‘dumb, lost among the ruins’ of their own culture (9). Fenollosa died suddenly after seventeen years of teaching in Japan. His notes and translations were published by Pound, who took some dubious editorial decisions and

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across Europe between 1865 and 1895, or even well beyond for Yeats. The block prints that were so popular effected a stylization of representation and disorganized composition by distorting the naturalistic perspective. Even the London Imagists – Flint, Hulme, Tancred, Storer, Campbell, Farr – were not exempt: they studied and imitated the haiku. The narrative stream of consciousness is undoubtedly the epochal discontinuity of Modernism. With an excessively mathematical precision, it is often correlated with the emphasis that modernists put on subjectivity and solipsism. It has also been connected with the conception of human psychology itself and consequently with that of the literary character, from Bergson and William James down all the way to Freud, who had just re-conceptualized human beings as a field of conflicts or more precisely the unregulated flow of states of consciousness. The stylistic trait of the stream of consciousness reflects then more accurately the cessation of the historical era dominated by an integrated human consciousness, of human beings identified with their public roles. It therefore also mirrored the advent of a chaotic history, running and left to run on its own steam, and of so-called alienation. In another one of his writings, Pagnini contributes to a bulging bibliography by confirming the correlation of this stylistic feature with the modernist ideology of a non-theocentric cosmos without any ‘demiurgic support’.8 Heuristically the adoption of the stream of consciousness rests on psychology, whose task Bergson had identified as that of ‘explorer l’inconscient’ [‘exploring the unconscious’], but also with deeper roots in the associative psychology of Hartley and Locke. Closer to the modernists, the term ‘stream’ is due to William James, brother of the novelist, who first described consciousness as a ‘river’ or ‘flow’. The role of literary pioneer in the technique is usually ascribed to Dujardin, but it was in fact the Russian Garšin who deployed it first in a war story of 1877. The enduring issue about stream of consciousness is whether it really offers an approximation to the concept of

8

made contentious cuts. On the poor standard of Pound’s edition see R. Taylor, The Drama of W. B. Yeats: Irish Myth and the Japanese Nō, New Haven, CT and London 1976, particularly 40–1. Pound included one of Fenollosa’s essays on Noh in ‘Noh’ or Accomplishment (1916); with Yeats, he edited Certain Noble Plays of Japan (1916). ‘Il continuo mentale nella sua rappresentazione narratologica’, in PLE, 161–79, from which come the observations above. For a wider framework, see E. R. Steinberg’s work, chapters II, III, and IV, 13–61, cited in Joyce’s bibliography, § 128.1.

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interior language as it is studied by psychologists and philosophers of the mind. Psychology has established that thought is not formed in words: it is made of shadows, of stages, and of pre-conscious ‘fringes’; being linear even when it is turned inwards, literature cannot capture or render the simultaneity of thought, but only approach and simulate it. The other issue with stream of consciousness lies in the question of whether it represents the first historical instance of an intense psychic realism, nourished by Freud and Bergson and making all psychological techniques in the fiction of the past appear partial and rudimentary; or whether it is on the contrary a technique like any other, part of a frantic race for the pursuit of novelty and experiment, and an end in itself. In the young Joyce, truth is a binding standard, of Aristotelian and Thomistic inspiration, but later reabsorbed and devalued in a literature conceived of as play. Never hegemonic in Ulysses, stream of consciousness is replaced and flanked by other techniques within that text, then totally removed in Finnegans Wake. Spender reminded us that this technique, though truthful, performs the same distortions as Francis Bacon’s paintings or Henry Moore’s sculptures.9 For Woolf, the use of stream of consciousness is more closely tied to her understanding of the contemporary psyche, even more so for Dorothy Richardson, the third great adept or pioneer of the form, who defines it as the only suitable technique to render the female psyche, as if woman’s consciousness were ontologically more fluctuating than the male. 4. The history of Modernism, or at the very least of the English avantgarde, goes hand in hand with a chaotic profusion of self-financed magazines, admittedly bold but also often threatened by immediate closure for lack of funds. Their average life span was of two to three years. By nature these ‘little magazines’ were aimed at a very select audience, with runs of around 400 copies at most. By and large they had a very open editorial policy, caused by co-editorships, by the harsh divergence of views among the founders and employees but also by the objective fluidity of artistic ferment in the pre-war period. Among these contradictory trends, the most evident is that before the war the direction is anarchic and often subversive 9

S. Spender, ‘The Modern as Vision of the Whole’, in Literary Modernism, ed. I. Howe, New York 1967, 57.

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of the established order, whereas after the war (which hastened the demise of some by increasing the cost of printing) a classicist involution and the fear of historical and civic revolutions take over, with a marked anxiety for the return to order. One of the most solid, The New Age, lasted fifteen years from 1907 by updating its editorial line in real time, reflecting the pace of cultural change. The American Poetry, a Chicago monthly, was founded in 1912 by Harriet Monroe to become, as we shall see, the mouthpiece of Imagism, with Pound as a somewhat despotic co-editor for a short period, whose essays in aesthetics it published, together with the poetry of Aiken, Marianne Moore, Eliot himself, Lindsay, Frost, Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. The English in this group had been co-opted by Pound, who had landed in England in 1908 and subsequently became also a talent scout and an irreplaceable literary entrepreneur, with a hand practically in all the new magazines. Edited by the couple Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, Rhythm lasted just over two years, illustrated by elegant drawings, with sophisticated coverage and articles on literature and art. Edith Sitwell’s Wheels appeared in 1916 to counter the more conservative Georgian Poetry by Marsh. Ford Madox Ford founded The English Review. Clearly it was the very militant protagonists of the literary scene who launched the titles; some of the writers, like Virginia Woolf, turned publishers too. Founded by the commendable Harriet Shaw Weaver in 1914, The Egoist has a greater lineage than all the others, if only because it was home to some of the landmarks of Modernism, by Joyce and Eliot particularly, at first publication. It was first directed by Aldington, the Imagist poet and novelist, who was then replaced by Eliot, but always under Pound’s covert supervision. Oddly, for a few years serial publication was resurrected, just as in the heyday of Victorianism. 5. A census of the English avant-garde yields however quite modest results compared to the Continent.10 Is there anything else in England apart from Imagism and Vorticism, the only original projects? Cubism finds an 10 In the excellent guide by P. Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide, Basingstoke 1995 and 2009, only one out of the twelve chapters on the historical avant-gardes is focused entirely on English Modernism, and even there it deals primarily with Pound.

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outlet in the paintings of Wyndham Lewis and perhaps also in his novels, through a sophisticated and distinctive literary osmosis. The only English Futurism that is not derivative is that of the Futuristic-Feminist manifesto launched by the poet Mina Loy (1882–1966), printed with the usual erratic bold and underlined capitals to denounce the misogyny and jingoism of the English Futurists and Vorticists, and preaching the absolute autonomy of Woman, who should not aspire to equal rights but establish herself as a rigorously separate entity. For the rest, we find no Dada or appropriation of other European avant-gardes, in the usual pattern of British isolation. Surrealism takes root in two or three minor poets but a good two decades later. Ironically, Bloomsbury is an English avant-garde, but one of a kind. I shall deal with the two authentic British avant-gardes, Imagism and Vorticism, the former immediately below, the other introduced by its founder Wyndham Lewis, and I will survey too the brief and minor activities of English surrealism. § 76. Imagism Compared to the theoretical poverty of Georgian poetry, or the absolute silence on its poetic principles, Imagism, its synchronic counterpart, launched an excess of manifestos, all due to its three or four founders. In the March 1913 issue of Poetry, the laconic F. S. Flint lists three rules of the newly born movement, imagisme, whose first outputs had been published in the same magazine: 1. direct treatment of the ‘thing’, or subject, of the lyric; 2. avoidance of unnecessary words; 3. non-metronomic rhythm, that is, dictated by the sequence of the sentence. In the same number, Ezra Pound defined the image as ‘that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex1 in an instant of time’; in ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’ he dilated and embellished Flint’s short page with a broader overview of caveats. Anonymous, but surely by Aldington and Lowell, the preface to Some Imagist Poets of 1915 widened the founding precepts into the following: 1. use the language of common speech, but always the exact word, never the merely decorative; 2. create new rhythms, preferably in free verse; 3. total

1

‘Complex’ was a term derived from Hartley’s psychology.

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freedom in the choice of subjects; 4. present an image: poetry, without becoming painting, must not deal in ‘vague generalities’; 5. produce poetry that is ‘hard and clear, never blurred or indefinite’; 6. ‘concentration is the essence of poetry’. The 1916 Some Imagist Poets was published with a further preface that was not just an amplification or repetition, but clarified the implicit rhetorical mechanism at the basis of Imagist aesthetics: ‘Imagists deal but little with similes, although much of their poetry is metaphorical’. Conscious of the revolutionary character of the movement, the authors claimed a parallelism with other arts and a historical correlation between Imagism and the advent of Matisse and Gauguin’s painting on the one hand, and the music of Stravinsky and Debussy on the other. But they were careful not to place Imagism beyond literary tradition and therefore a sense of continuity (the task of dismantling tradition would have been proper to the avant-gardes). In fact the best periods in the literary tradition of all times and places2 were all to be saved and revaluated, with the exception only of the Romantic and Victorian interregnum.3 These formulations were reached after passionate and even fiery debates that had taken place in London five years earlier. In the prelude to the movement, Hulme had joined Pound and Flint. 2. Imagism was the product of an Anglo-American synergy that evolved into a literary event altogether more American than English, or at the very least one that can be followed on both sides of the Atlantic, with parallel perspectives that are at first integrated, then intersect and finally diverge. This makes it a more cosmopolitan and international movement than Georgian poetry, less indigenous, local and provincial than its English counterpart. The tally of Imagism returns four Americans – Pound, H. D., Fletcher and Amy Lowell – and three Englishmen – Flint, Aldington and Lawrence. Thomas Ernest Hulme (1883–1917) was just a facilitator for Imagism, for the simple reason that he was killed in action. He was however the link between Eliot and Pound, whom he had met in 1908 and 2 3

Therefore also Oriental, Chinese, Japanese and Bengali poetry, as well as that of Classical Greece. But see the perceptive discussion of the subtle implications of Romantic poetics in Imagism by M. Pagnini, ‘Imagism’, in PLE, 47–59.

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with whom he experienced a spontaneous convergence of ideas on the renewal of English poetry, on which he wrote. Eliot revered him, claimed he was a great poet whose works vied with Blake’s. It was ironic or a joke. Published in appendix to Pound’s Ripostes in 1912, with a title selected by Pound to recall Beerbohm’s joke, Hulme’s Complete Poetical Works were no more than five and would have been six or eight in total. Hulme was a meteoric figure, of the not uncommon species of conservative radicals. He read mathematics at Cambridge, but was already curious about philosophy. Expelled for an unknown offence, alienated from his father, he travelled to Canada and then settled in London with the financial help of an aunt. In 1907 he left again for Brussels, and met and amazed Bergson shortly afterwards. On his return, he worked as a journalist writing on avant-garde art and the paintings of Wyndham Lewis and Epstein. In 1908 he became the founder and secretary of a club of poets,4 where he met the young Pound, just landed in London. A more revolutionary splinter group was formed in 1909, thanks to the constructive criticism of a future member, Flint. Hulme’s Speculations, a posthumous collection of his theoretical essays edited by Herbert Read, came out in 1924. It included an important essay on Romanticism and classicism, which was critical of Victorianism and in line with Eliot’s theoretical positions.5 3. For his part, Pound formed his own coterie in 1912, with Aldington and the American H. D., his fiancée at the time. Aldington’s and H. D.’s free-verse compositions were christened ‘imagistes’ in French, and shipped to Poetry in Chicago. Pound too was the creator and editor of the first 4 5

Among these was Edward Storer (1880–1944), whose lyric ‘Image’ is the first Imagist composition. Pound called the club ‘the school of images in 1909’. Between 1910 and his death, Hulme became the spokesperson of Bergsonism in England, having started the translation of the French philosopher’s Introduction to Metaphysics, published in 1913. He participated in the London avant-gardes, becoming close to Vorticism. He also established at first dazzling then increasingly perplexed contacts with the aesthetician Worringer in Berlin. After translating Sorel’s Reflections on Violence, he volunteered in 1914. On Hulme, see the excellent profile by R. Bianchi, in CAB, vol. I, 375–85, dedicated particularly to his philosophical ideas, where Bianchi argues that Hulme had seen in Sorel’s anti-democratic stance an example of classicism.

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Imagist anthology in 1914,6 Des Imagistes (naturally), largely comprising works by Aldington and H. D., but with some contributions from Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Williams and Lowell. Flint and Pound came to a serious divergence, while the arrival on the scene of the rich American poet Amy Lowell, who aimed at rendering the term ‘Imagist’ more flexible and generic where Pound fought for the opposite, triggered the latter’s secession towards Vorticism. Lowell would take over the reins of the movement, in what is called second Imagism, or, by Pound, ‘amygism’, shifting the cardinal axis of the movement’s aesthetics from the image to free verse. The final aesthetic evolution before Imagism disappeared altogether from the scene would give rise to ‘polyphonic prose’. The closing balance of Imagism is rather thin: few great poems came out of it, and especially fatal was the discrepancy between theory and practice, as with the Georgians. Imagism was to have a lasting influence upon American poets – Stevens, Cummings, Williams, Moore. The primary link in England is with T. S. Eliot. His objective correlative is derived directly from the first phase of Imagism, from its correlation among images, juxtaposed, with few explicit similes, where the phenomenon is language and language is the phenomenon. In Hulme’s apocalyptic Weltanschauung we can catch the literal precursors of Eliot’s and the symbolic framework of The Waste Land, in its awareness of the end of liberal humanism, its indication of the need to restore a neo-Thomism, and especially in the incidence of original sin within history, calling for a new order in a world reduced to ‘deserts of dirt’ and ‘ash-pits’.7 4. I shall limit myself here to a brief discussion of some of the salient features of the poets who wrote in the Imagist anthologies,8 excluding the Americans and not taking into account the subsequent career of those, like Aldington or Lawrence or Joyce, for whom Imagism was an ephemeral moment, a departure point, or a transitory phase. In practice Imagist poets 6 7 8

The publisher was Monro’s Poetry Bookshop (§ 60.2), also close to the Georgians – another indication of the blurred boundaries between the two movements in the first two decades of the century. Quoted in DES, 172. A useful resource is Imagist Poets, ed. P. Jones, Harmondsworth 1972.

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adhered with clear, perhaps too slavish fidelity mainly to two of the rules repeatedly laid down in the Imagist manifestos: they strove to avoid ‘verbiage’, that is superfluous and decorative words; they composed their works as a small system of figurative juxtapositions that abolished the link or the semantic and logical bridge of the ‘as if ’, thus also suppressing comparison or in any case prolonged comparison. On the page the dryness of the lines becomes perceptible to the naked eye, in a poetic phenomenology that seems that of the fragment, running out in a few lines, sometimes just two or three. This is the dry, compressed, strictly short lyric invoked by Hulme, the model for which is recognizable in the two single lines of Pound’s famous ‘In the Station of the Metro’. This compression comes close to and indeed often realizes the ellipsis of the finite verb. The third rule applied by Imagists is that of ‘presenting an image without becoming painting’. Imagist lyrics are on the contrary in nine cases out of ten impressionistic perceptions, undeniable flashes of scenery and atmosphere quivering on the retina and from there transcribed, the moon fixed in the night sky often releasing associations. Several could be ‘nocturnes’, symptomatically a specialty of the Decadents, first of all of Symons, but also of other poets of that generation preceding the Imagists. In addition to the moon, another recurrent topos is the wind-strewn petals, fallen, dispersed, of a barely touched flower, or rose. Lawrence’s ‘Green’ lines up both images in its opening tercet. Unlike the Georgian lyric, Imagist compositions thus have a real kinship of vocabulary, syntax, rhythm, which makes them acts of a unitary, programmatic creative gesture. They do not suffer from the variety and sometimes the dissonance of the less homogeneous grouping of the Georgians. Except that it is still the ‘I’ who stands in front of a nature caught in its flames of colour, in its bright, vivid tinges, at times explosive, or in its softer hues – synaesthesia is rarely enacted. The syntactic chain resists too (apart from the ellipsis of the verb), together with the natural phenomenologies;9 the poet is moved, suffers, rejoices or grieves,

9

Only in Lawrence’s ‘At the Window’ do the poplars vibrate with ‘hysterical laughter’.

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or regrets the departure of his beloved. By themselves, Hulme’s poems are anything but transcendental. ‘Above the Dock’ is not immediately identifiable if you did not know it to be his, even if the moon that seems a ball in the sky to a child, and is soon forgotten, could be the symbol, or a wink towards a rejection of the past, over a rhythm that is actually oscillating. The others are all phenomenologies of a flâneur sensitive to atmospheres, and if anything, have a sense of pointillist painting with their well demarcated areas in contrasting colours. The exception is a poem on a dance-hall performer who uncovers her scarlet lingerie, in a visual flash that looks straight out of Edith Sitwell’s Façade. Aldington is represented with quite dull, anaemic and even conventional variations on the associations between languishing love and a nature that throbs, dies out, rises again. Equally unoriginal is Frank Stewart Flint (1885–1960), with his predictable compositions of the usual lunar landscapes, misty and autumnal. Among the Americans, H. D. goes her own way, mentally and affectedly in Greece; John Gould Fletcher in reality transgresses the Imagist rules: he is syntactical and even verbose.10 § 77. Yeats after 1919* I: The book and the image ‘Never had I more / Excited, passionate, fantastical / Imagination, nor an ear and eye / That more expected the impossible’, wrote Yeats in his 1926 poem ‘The Tower’, like an Icarus who does not care about burning his wings. He saw himself in the words of the aging Blake, that the ‘real man’ 10

Singularly, and perhaps not entirely accidentally, one of his ‘Irradiations’ starts with the line ‘The wind that drives the fine dry sand / Across the strand’, in an almost exact pre-figuring of Dylan Thomas. All this poetry expresses by and large a unison between human beings and nature.

*

To the bibliography given in Volume 6, § 254, which includes abbreviations for Yeats’s own works, I add W. B. Yeats, L’opera poetica, Milano 2005, trans. A. Marianni, with an introductory essay by P. Boitani and a superb commentary by A. L. Johnson, from which I repeatedly draw, citing it as Johnson 2005.

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resides in the ‘imagination which lives forever […] the more this senseless body decays’.1 Yeats after 1919 is in fact anything but a poet in retreat. He is on the rise on all fronts, driven by an intense, undimmed curiosity, intellectually vital, with an insatiable spirit of adventure and a physical condition to match. He is decidedly not the long-lived poet who has his highest achievements behind him, living on credit and his acquired reputation while experimenting with rare, inconclusive or regressive pieces, like the slightly older Bridges. The second part of his career is by contrast dotted with high achievements; he receives a definitive assessment and wider public recognition. Invested in the myth of eternal youth, not just mental and physical, Yeats symptomatically underwent a surgical operation to recover the sexual function once he started to develop more symptoms of senile infirmity.2 His was a very tough, robust constitution, since the many illnesses he suffered, especially the serious and threatening bouts of lung disease, never managed when cured to affect his strong, wholesome condition.3 The two decades from 1919 brought him an unbroken chain of honours. With Joyce in exile, he continued to be the reference point of Anglo-Irish culture, which was mainly Protestant, not fanatically nationalist, and covertly pro-British. He directed the Irish national theatre, promoted (at least initially) young new talents like O’Casey; deaf to the daily press campaigns, he fought Catholic myopia and philistinism and supported former unionists. He founded an Academy of Letters, sat in new Irish legislature from 1922 to 1928 as a spokesman for enlightened political causes and champion of progressive 1 2

3

Quoted in Johnson 2005, 1538. Apparently with his wife’s agreement, Yeats tested out the results of the operation with a number of attractive women poets and writers (Margot Ruddock, the novelist Ethel Mannin, Dorothy Wellesley, an older poet, the journalist Heald); he even leased a flat in London to facilitate these amorous trysts. Illness too becomes for Yeats a rich reservoir of experiences to be recycled in poetry. Diagnosed with vascular disease, having lost sight in one eye, getting increasingly deaf, he was advised by his doctors to spend some time in milder climates. He visited Sicily and its mosaics in 1924, stayed in the south of Spain (1927), and from April 1928 he leased a flat in Rapallo for many years to come, meeting Pound and other expats there. In 1929, another serious and nearly fatal illness brought him back to Italy at Portofino.

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battles, such as the granting of divorce. The mercantile bourgeoisie and the degeneration of Irish culture had become a polemical target already since Responsibilities. In 1933 he joined for a short time the Blueshirts, the Dublin fascists. He supported de Valera, whom he saw as a strong man like Hitler and Mussolini, trying to suppress the IRA, of which the president himself had been part: a march on Dublin was halted and the movement outlawed. The principal axiom of Yeats’s politics is the support for public order, which can only be indefinitely preserved under the guidance of capable intellectuals. This aristocratic vision befitted Yeats’s inclination to believe that government should be entrusted to the educated classes and that the state was by nature hierarchical. 2. From the first post-war period, the consensus both in Europe and in America converged to see in Yeats the greatest living poet in the English language. Examined more closely, this was neither a very flattering nor an entirely accurate judgement, since Yeats easily dominated the literary scene of the early 1930s, where major figures were in short supply, all of them either inactive or exhausted, if not dead. Yeats too was more precisely an Irish poet, although undoubtedly in the English language. Eliot and Pound looked up to him as the old master whose eminence overshadowed their own poetry, even while wishing them well.4 The world recognized him with the Nobel Prize for Literature, an honour that was not repeated by his election to Poet Laureate after Bridges’s death, but only because of Yeats’s status as citizen of a British Dominion, formally another nationality. Oxford, though, did award him an honorary degree. In fact English purists had long been resisting Yeats’s prominence,5 recognizing that the poet was a rara avis in the literary landscape. Indeed, after 1919 Yeats is in a class of his own, neither in the classical mould of the late nineteenth-century man of letters nor in that of the twentieth; he has no equals in Ireland either – if anything, he is connected to Blake, the other great maverick in English literature. He leaves a marked and distinctive trace with his aesthetics and poetics, with his stylistic legacy as well as with his pseudo-philosophy. After 4 5

But not so Auden, in his sharp obituary from 1939 in the Partisan Review, VI (3), 1939, 46–51. Volume 6, § 257.1.

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1919 he continues to be to an even greater extent a poet who abandoned and abolished – in poetry at least – any aesthetic of popularity. His individual compositions are in many cases the end products of an abstruse thought process, which arose from a reading cue, from a memory or even a momentary feeling – all sources that can be identified in their wild and chaotic state in the avant-textes.6 Ideally he sets his poetry in places connected to historical reminiscences, steeped in a past that is well-known to Yeats and the Irish but not necessarily to the general reader, elaborating on figures and facts sprung from Irish myths. Proof of this preference is his excessive use of the rhetorical figures of antonomasia or circumlocution. Nothing is clearly explained, everything is alluded to, partly because the symbol to which he gives birth remains unknown to him. When he explains his poetry in prose afterwards, it is not uncommon to hear him doubt the meaning of a term or an image used, as if to confirm Valéry’s warning that this task belonged to the reader. An image has a fixed value, perhaps consecrated by an iconology rooted in the collective unconscious, or derived from known sources or at other times from hopelessly arcane ones. And, as in a game of Chinese boxes, one explanation is fatally imbricated within another, or several others. With Yeats, the reader must keep the dictionary of symbols at hand, but even then it may not be enough.7 3. The very obvious difference in the second Yeats is a diminishing recourse to mythology, at least that Irish myth whose character of initiation distances or cuts off the reader before 1919 and which moves onto the theatre after that. Quite a few poems celebrate the poet himself, the spawn of Irish tradition and of an enduring heroic strain. He wishes his readers would not forget, would in fact unearth the genealogy of bygone Irish mythology, preserved in a breed of artists, writers and patriots who must be immortalized and eternalized. These ensure the historical continuity 6

7

According to Yeats’s own statements, it was only in his last poems after 1935 that he became driven by the desire to reach a wider public and to write a ‘national’ literature, more easily shared. This effort of connecting to the audience found of course a realization in his theatrical works, though with differing results. To give an example of a sketchy symbolic dictionary: horse=brave and proud nobility; mouse=cowardice, but also frenzy of an old man; beggar=wisdom and sympathy; bones and marrow=instinctive and deep truths; mountain=site of the spirit and of spiritual experiences.

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of the country, of which Yeats himself is part, fearing therefore its breach. These poems are also collections of ‘vivid’ portraits of real or spiritual ancestors. Ideally, they are born, by association, from the places where Yeats chooses to live, though not only from there, as he knows that the ghosts of previous dwellers still haunt them. The compensation of myth, the lunar esotericism, is relative, but even more unyielding. The centrality of Yeats’s lunar theory, historically cyclical, is mimetically reflected in poems that are often in twenty-eight or fifty-six lines. It is also behind certain conceptual ternary and quaternary rhythms, in the form of poems in triplets, quadruplets or other prosodic constructions that are precisely mimetic. Conscious or random, or perhaps unconscious, words and themes camouflaged or scattered phonetically, iconic figures that border on the technopaegnion, numerological references all flash through the seam of the poems. The socalled civilization poems are often fragmented but powerful meditations, blinding visionary flashes, terrified and prophetic, thus apocalyptic, marking the ends of cycles and announcing the coming of the new. As visions, their poetic diction lacks syntactic links, is highly evocative, proceeding by sudden and uneven flashes. Other lyrics are nonchalant, anti-rhetorical and therefore of a singular kind of lyricism, always muted by the poet as soon as emphasis threatens to take over. Yeats is congenitally averse to rhetoric, but slips into it in many stentorian tirades or outbursts, only to stop himself and remove them, making them abruptly merge into a lighthearted, colloquial, indiscreet register. He speaks to himself, is confessional, pulls himself up and sticks out his chest and then pities himself, humiliates himself, justifies himself – in sum, he embodies a stylistic intermittence and a range of signs that cancel each other out. The more acceptable aesthetic equation is found in poems where the external data, be they cultural or initiatory, can be ignored, so that the poems stand alone on their own feet. This happens when Yeats strips down theory to a minimum, gives up on the large canvas and on the great historical panorama, to become in a few lines purely Imagist, a symbolist, or even a naïf.8 Those who complain of 8

These imbalances are reminiscent of Hopkins, whom the first, untrained readers – like Herbert Read – analysed in the same defensive key, dividing his works between doctrinal lyrics and others, much preferred, having purely human appeal, or woven with elemental and universal images.

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and suffer the weight of the concept and of the abstruse, far-fetched theories welcome the last Yeats with relief, celebrating anew a poet shaken and disturbed by human dramas universally shared, as in the beautiful poetic metaphors of 1936 where the eternalizing and civilizing function of art acts as a dam against the historical spiral of violence. 4. There is some truth in Yeats’s confession that he is seeking not a book but an image, or rather a series of images or analogies. These are flashes of concrete memories, photo-frames surfacing from the past (such as those described in the first stanza of  ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’), or more often they are symbolic images, capable of stimulating and inflaming the imagination. ‘Those Images’ develops an argument on the poetic imagination while also being an imagistic survey of images. The poet – Yeats’s ‘I’ – invites himself to choose withdrawal into the cave of the mind, abandoning that thankless conceptual work, in order to give free rein to the suggestiveness of the images, even of personal and objective symbols. These images suspended in the air ‘make the Muses sing’. In many ways one of Yeats’s disciples, Dylan Thomas will remark that the Irishman’s poetry flourishes on the constitutive principle of the free image, ‘as inexplicable as a wild creature’. From this follows the need – and at the same time the necessary failure – of any exegesis when engaged in the hard task of paraphrasing. Many of Yeats’s lyrics are ruminations and reformulations of the theory, which verge on the baselessly bizarre when paraphrased. One of the questions that emerge for literary history is then to assess if and to what extent Yeats might be a modernist. He is certainly not a retrogressive poet, but shares little with the modernist dictates. He came close to Vorticism, which he even preceded, but he understands the vortex not in terms of a vague conception of phenomenal reality, but in a much more precise and founded sense, albeit a very idiosyncratic one. The great modernist pastiches he either regarded with respectful detachment ( Joyce) or harshly criticized (Pound). He considered Eliot a poet of great influence for his generation, but also accused him of moulding his verse to his subject, which being ‘grey’ and lacking in ‘heart’ ended up at the opposite pole from the ‘unfurled songs’ of Morris and the last post-Romantics.9 This negative reaction makes itself

9

This accusation is implicit in the poem ‘The Nineteenth Century and After’.

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heard again in another of Yeats’s assessments10 of the masterpieces of Joyce, Woolf and Pound. These ‘suggest a flood of experience breaking above and within us’, reminding Yeats – in a suggestion that is typically nebulous – of ‘a swimmer, or rather the waves themselves’. Theirs is a literature in which human beings are nothing. While it certainly deploys myth as a method, correlating reality to backgrounds and legends it tries to make universal, nevertheless modernists tended to exploit ideologies as materials, not as ends. For a modernist, Yeats is too systematic, too indebted to his system. Ultimately he is then a post-Romantic poet, of that mystical and spiritualist branch headed by Blake and Shelley, with the addition of other Romanticesoteric sources. The core of Yeats’s thinking on love does not differ from the definition of Medieval-Renaissance ‘aesthetic poetry’ Pater found in Morris,11 a religion so mystical and ecstatic that it naturally overflows into the senses. Though turned inwards, Yeats’s poetry presents itself as the post-Romantic continuation of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, since it still pivots on the irresistible charm of the eternal feminine, not in the unadorned lyrical register, but in the domain and the order of mythopoiesis.12 A litmus test for Yeats’s place in literary history can be found in the introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, where the poet defines himself as a traditionalist who has tried to be modern and differs from the many – Day Lewis, Madge, MacNeice – who are modern because of the ‘character of their intellectual passion’. This introduction opens with a distortion of one

10 11 12

In his notes to the play The Only Jealousy of Emer. See Volume 6, §185.3. Yeats had established a consensual ‘spiritual union’ (that is, a platonic relationship) with Maud Gonne. Johnson claims it became a physical relationship only ‘very briefly’ in December 1908 ( Johnson 2005, 1095). When Maud’s son took part in the murder of a minister in 1927, Yeats’s controversial passion was re-kindled. Shortly before his death, Yeats had invited Maud for tea in a symbolic leaving gesture. It is paradoxical that Yeats, in whose arms fell many young, captivated beauties, pined throughout his life for this woman who resisted him. His four-sided set of long-lasting relationships with women is enriched after 1917. Maud and the other women are immortalized in their hieratic or fluid poses, fixed in memory – Iseult dancing on the sea – like icons frozen in the mind. More often than not, the mythopoeic story superimposed on these relationships casts Yeats as Cuchulain and at the same time Narcissus, lovingly tended to by the jealous mistresses who crowd his bedside.

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of the first authors in the anthology, Hopkins, whom Yeats claims barely to remember as he met him at just seventeen, describing him at that time, with a questionable impression, as a ‘querulous, sensitive scholar’.13 5. Yeats’s alterity is measured by his new or rather better-defined ideological, or to put it better, pseudo-ideological baggage. He continued tirelessly to rummage among the mythologies and cosmologies of every latitude and longitude to extract a repertoire of images. No belief system that was alternative to or derivative from Christianity, no ambiguous mysticism steeped in sensuality, no esoteric conception of the world remained indifferent to him. I must reiterate that Yeats was in his own way religious. He was not nor was he ever going to become Catholic.14 Officially Protestant, he would have preferred to have gone back to the early Christianity he saw better embodied in Protestantism. His religious belief was altogether superstitious and therefore inconsistent. He wrote, for instance, fervent prayers for his children and for himself; he revered shrines and held a sincere belief in popular religious traditions; he was interested in, fascinated even by hybrid forms at the intersection of paganism and Christianity. One of his late incarnations, Ribh, is a mystical Irishman who has little of the orthodox about him, attacks the all-male trinity and formulates a natural theology. A chord that gains in intensity through his late writings resonates with the perceived approach of a sort of apocalypse. Yeats found confirmation in the signs of the times for a prophetic rebirth of

13

14

Yeats must have re-read Hopkins to select the few poems he included, arguably not Hopkins’s greatest. The anthologized poems might be hiding from view those that had a deeper influence on Yeats, the ones coming after ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’. Page xxxix of the introduction includes Yeats’s famous judgement that Hopkins constituted ‘a last development of poetic diction’, in which meaning develops in a rotating, spread out way, and is not neatly defined. Yeats gives moderate praise, though, to the posthumous benefit of Hopkins’s sprung rhythm. In private, Yeats was much less diplomatic on Hopkins, as N. H. Mackenzie has shown in ‘Yeats and Hopkins’, in HAP, 7–11, an article full of documents not cited in the critical bibliographies of either poet. EX, 266–7.

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a different civilization, an ‘antithetical’ one,15 after the extinction of the ‘primary’, 2,000-year-old era inaugurated by Christ. Each end and every rebirth would have been violent and bloody; interwar Europe was indeed full of premonitory violence. All transitions from civilization to civilization, that is, from primary to antithetical eras and vice versa, would be for Yeats accompanied by turmoil and world-wide cataclysms, a time of rage and murder that would shake the world. Yeats is terrified by this epidemic of violence, but does not seek to ward it off, considering it ‘necessary and inevitable, as he looks on with anxiety full of passion’.16 His sudden marriage provided stability to his affective life. He had two sons, but more crucial still was the symbiosis he created with Georgie (afterwards always George) Hyde-Lees, since Yeats derived productive, speculative and poetic material from his wife’s psychic powers, a new lynchpin for his art.17 His great ideological fortress rests on the secret key of a wait for the coming of an antithetical era capable of overwhelming the primary. His hypothesis of a lunar rotation represents an a priori typological reset (in Lotman’s distinctive sense) of history, in which Lotman’s alternating types are two only, though mixed and never completely pure. Yeats is partisan, that is, he promotes and advocates a return of the antithetical. The primary is identified with the sun, the subjective, the individual; the antithetical is lunar, and stands out from the crowd to assert its uniqueness. Broadly, the typical arc of development spans the poet’s fight to assert his subjectivity and even his egotism, although he is eventually forced into a compromise with the primary. The Yeats who writes the civic odes, who is politically engaged, who wants to have an impact on society will in the end retreat into his 15 16 17

Explained below (§ 78.3), the meaning of Yeats’s terms ‘antithetical’ and ‘primary’ will thereafter be taken as read. Melchiori 1960, 35. Yeats nearly married Iseult Gonne, Maud’s daughter. At twenty-one years old, Iseult was a diaphanous, slender beauty, but with a lazy and neurotic temperament; she spoke English with a French accent, was an aspiring writer who sent her works to Yeats and admired the new French Catholic writers like Claudel. When Iseult turned him down, Yeats proposed to George Hyde Lees in 1917. They married in a registry office in London, with Pound as witness. George too was considerably younger than Yeats, by twenty-seven years.

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tower, or at most found an ideal community with chosen spirits and relatives. Reclaiming subjectivity becomes a euphemism for establishing and nurturing the poet’s own elite, his separateness from the masses. He did not hesitate to state he hated the crowd, despite his support for the cause of his own people. This solipsism – of Manfred, Athanase, of other chosen princely souls isolated in their tower – is also a contradictory Romantic trait. Not for nothing did Yeats often use the Latin phrase hysterica passio, mass fanaticism, with ‘fanaticism’ a word to which in one case only Yeats gave a positive spin. § 78. Yeats after 1919 II: The lunar pseudo-philosophy Signs of Yeats’s lunar philosophy are scattered throughout his poetry up to 1919. The treatise A Vision18 systematizes them and thus forms the foundations for the poetry after that date. It is an easy short cut to say that A Vision should not be taken seriously and that not even Yeats did; many scholars simply ignore it, or get away with cautious generalizations, or depreciate and ditch that which they do not have the patience to read and decipher. Or to bypass it they cite a partial truth, that Yeats was aware of indulging in a ‘game’, simply wanting to create a factory of metaphors.19 Yeats himself quoted from Goethe (without really subscribing to it) the aphorism that ‘a poet cannot have too much philosophy but he ought to keep it out of his poetry’. His recommendation was to observe it in order ‘to write the poetry that it seems to have made possible’, aiming for a simplicity ‘sought in vain’.20 Though he had intended the system to be used literally, in a very famous and much quoted observation he argued that those ‘things’ were ‘stylistic arrangements of experience’, comparable to Wyndham Lewis’s cubes or Brancusi’s ovoid sculptures and therefore a figurative transcoding,

18

Published in a limited print run in 1925, it was revised or rather re-written from scratch in 1937. Here I shall refer throughout to the later version. 19 See Bloom 1970, 197, who calls A Vision ‘a literary curiosity’, but then dedicates two hefty chapters to it. KRI, 37–9, considers it akin to Coleridge’s magical, visionary pleasure palace, expressing the isolation of the dreaming artist. 20 Quoted in DES, 119–20. Yeats also used to say that ‘philosophy is a dangerous theme’ (quoted in Johnson 2005, 1402).

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a purely visual analogy. The patchy treatise, in five books, actually engenders intolerance in the reader for its convoluted language and unpredictable procedure. Frequent ellipses and esoteric expressions, as if addressed to the writer himself, often make it incomprehensible. Its core lies in the cataloguing of the twenty-eight lunar types, which illuminate by their historical and human examples (always subjective and debatable) rather than by their taxonomies of the requirements and components of the individual types, which are too abstract and theoretical. Nevertheless, it starts with short, agile and sketchy sections of memoirs, almost out of dreams and a bit remote; and goes on with short stories of a surreal, absurd or fable-like flavour. A Vision finishes with a clearer, more orderly overview of cyclical philosophies of history, where references to spherical and conical shapes, to zodiac signs and to the diagram of phases, become freer and clearer.21 2. A Vision, as a book, is a rather mixed bag. After a reminiscence of Pound in Rapallo,22 a critique of the Cantos, a tale of Pound’s strange passion for cats, there is a chapter recalling the discovery of George’s automatic writing and of the revelation of the unknown ‘communicators’. Then in overlapping stories there is a Robartes relating his doctrine of cycles, the renewal of faith through war and violence and the story of Haroun-al-Rashid’s egg; striking is the one where two lovers have a child without the knowledge of the noble husband. These stories are used to describe the company of students following Robartes, who announces that two truths have been proven: that the soul survives the body, and that each cycle ends, and is extinguished, as is the case with the present civilization. Robartes presents himself, in prose, as the alter ego in the poems. He has loved a cruel dancer without intellect, just a body; his own body worshipped that which his will

21

22

I shall discuss below, in relation to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, the twentieth-century mania for cyclic philosophies as well as the analogies between Yeats’s and Joyce’s. It was a Europe-wide phenomenon, as the German poet George, who also elaborated one of his own, demonstrates (cf. MIT, 953). Rapallo and its ‘mother-of-pearl’ skyline, broken along the shore, Rapallo not coincidentally compared to the ‘citadel’ described in Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ possesses that diaphanous, dreamy quality Yeats attributed to the ideal of art. It is an eternal city, like Byzantium.

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rejected, thus creating an inner conflict. The dream-like idea of the treatise flows from the fictionalized story of Robartes’s discovery of the Speculum of Giraldus, with the icon of the two overlapping cones, the wheel with the moon phases, the idea of life as a ‘gyre’ or vortex.23 Robartes teaches that civilization is made of cycles that die out like fires or are transformed, a theory he exemplifies by showing the blue swan’s egg from Byzantium, claiming it is Leda’s lost egg, symbol of a violent renewal through war. This reconstruction of the genesis of the theory of vortices and lunar phases is a fantastical, mythological alternative, therefore parallel to the one that would derive from the ‘communicators’ accessed through Yeats’s wife’s trances. It also provides a romantic origin for the theory of the 1925 edition, as figures and traces left by the feet of the Bedouins in the sand, even when the theory and the ‘geometrical symbolism’ of the cones had yet to be formulated. The treatise is divided into parts and sections numbered with Roman numerals; in its early sections the names of a certain Porteous recur vaguely and suggestively, to recall that he had shown to Poussin a painting in which everything has come out rounded, without sharp edges as if from a jet, a spray, a splash of colour. This is the same conception of art as in Pound’s Cantos, an art similar to that of Cézanne and Joyce, without the possibility of glosses, ‘self-contained’, without dross or anything external and alien, particularly anything conceptual: an art in the form of dream, like the combinations of a kaleidoscope. Yeats remembers Descartes with a beautifully irreverent analogy, in which he compares Descartes’s philosophical enlightenment, which led him to a pilgrimage to a shrine of the Madonna, and Yeats’s own ‘discovery’, in a ramble from Rapallo to Zoagli. A subsequent chapter opens with the text of ‘The Phases of the Moon’; the core of the book is entitled ‘The Great Wheel’. Between the first experience of automatic writing and of the ‘voice in his sleep’ – between the 1925 draft and that of 1937 – Yeats

23

The image of the vortex was ‘in the air’, but effectively popularized for the avantgarde and imagist aesthetics by Pound through Fenollosa. Before being adopted by Yeats, the vortex had been defined by Wyndham Lewis as ‘an image [that] is a node or knot, we can only call it a vortex, from which and to which ideas constantly flow’ (SSI, vol. II, 453). Yeats’s relationship to Vorticism is also discussed in Melchiori 1960, 261.

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undertook an accelerated programme of education, acquiring a smattering of philosophy from a somewhat haphazard list of thinkers read by his wife, jumping from Berkeley to Hegel, and from Plotinus to Pico della Mirandola. He operates a dizzying compression of those who preceded him in his ‘contrastive thought’, starting from the premise that a man24 will either fight against himself or fight against his circumstances, an original and primordial sense of conflict between first principles that he tracks back to pre-Socratic philosophy. From that premise, he arrives in a nutshell to the formulation of the theory of the years of crisis in historical cycles, which he admits had been already outlined in 1918 by Spengler. 3. As the author of a philosophical or pseudo-philosophical treatise, Yeats could not but start with pre-Socratics like Empedocles and Heraclitus, who saw in the dialectic of harmony and discord the motor of history and principle of being. They postulated a visual analogy for this dialectic, in which discord would recede down to the bottom of the vortex (i.e. to the edge of the circle), while concord, also with a gradual motion, rises to the centre where it founds and operates the unity of being, in a synchronized waxing and waning. This alternation of discord and concord, of love and war, is for Heraclitus the engine of history. Empedocles similarly spoke of a sphere of harmony that disintegrated by discord creates the actual world. By giving these aphorisms of the pre-Socratics a visual form, Yeats argues that the two cones that intersect and overlap, with the tip of one touching the centre of the base of the other, are equivalent to the ‘fundamental symbol of my instructors’. The starting point is the distinction between time and space, visually between the line and the perpendicular plane intersecting it. Time is here synonymous with subjectivity – time of consciousness, Bergson’s durée – while space stands for objectivity, for commensurable dimension. Neither the one nor the other, though, exists in an untainted state. They ‘are abstractions or figments of the mind’ which exist only in mixed, impure phases, above all unstable ones, in which subjectivity fights with objectivity. Human life ‘is constituted by the struggle between these two poles [between primary man and antithetical self ], each of which lives

24 See below, § 78.7, for Yeats’s approach to gender in the treatise [translator’s note].

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in every detail the loss of the other’ –25 a highly aggressive and dynamic concept or principle, even a competitive one, of the psyche and human personality. From these initial foundations, a wealth of terminologies and subcategories follows. The cone of subjectivity is also called antithetical, the one of objectivity primary; subjectivity distinguishes and separates man from man, objectivity reintegrates them into the mass from which they descend; the first is the seat of emotions and the aesthetic sense, the second of reason and morality. Yeats adds that within the same two cones ‘move’ four faculties: the will with the mask26 as its object; the creative mind which is the object of thought, the body of fate. In pairs, these faculties are antithetical and natural. For the first time Yeats also adds that the first two are also lunar, while the last couple, primary and ‘rational’, are solar. With these premises in place, he can proceed to classify human types as combinations of subjectivity and objectivity, with the addition of the degrees and levels at which the four faculties are present. Better still, even the four faculties have an added conical motion and can be represented as two pairs of imbricated cones, one made up of the will and of the mask, the other of the creative mind and the body of fate, always with the systolic-diastolic movement, with the waning of one element corresponding to the waxing of the other – or, as Yeats puts it, ‘every Faculty is alternately shield and sword’. 4. Yeats is a binary thinker, reducing nearly everything to the fundamental opposition between will and intellect. Yet he again recalls the pre-Socratics when in another analogy he associates the four faculties with first principles: earth, water, air and fire. The areas where either the will or the mind is dominant are called ‘contaminations’: one has the upper hand on the other until it decreases to reach an equilibrium or position of parity. But the position of the two cones, expanding and contracting, of will and mind, finds a correspondence in the opposites of mask and body of fate. It is a field of pairs of opposites, of vectors directed outward, with the mask being the antithesis of the will, as the body of fate is of the mind. They have specular and antithetical collocations in the diagrams found in the treatise. With these sets of oppositions Yeats obtains twenty-eight 25 Yeats’s statement in a manuscript, quoted in Johnson 2005, 1170. 26 Hough 1984, 106, suggests a ‘ballet’, a ‘dance’ of the four faculties, which reflect a schema without a real-life counterpart.

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combinations corresponding to the phases of the lunar cycle. In the correspondence from new moon to full moon, the antithetical rises; later, more distinctly from eight to twenty-two onwards, the primary takes over. The zones have the following succession: the antithetical phase ranges from eight to twenty-two, always ascending; the primary from twentythree to seven.27 At phase fifteen the antithetical curve is at its apex, and phase one follows from twenty-eight, that is, at the culmination of the primary. These phases follow one another in the wheel counter-clockwise, so that the hand of phase one is to the left. Yeats undoubtedly benefits from the remarkable intrinsic symmetry to the number twenty-eight, with the possibility of dividing the wheel into four quadrants of six phases, each sub-divided into two mini-cycles of three phases. From here he can almost proceed to a horoscope or fortune telling: any given individual will be ‘in a phase’ with the exact determination of the faculties and hence of his/ her ‘character or destiny’. Every human type is a field of battle of opposing elements: sheer subjectivity or objectivity – phases one and fifteen – do not exist, and therefore have no human representative, just abstractions. They are impossible phases, virtual only, since every human being embodies a tension between objective and subjective, which in those phases would no longer exist. In every human type there is in fact a preponderance of one or the other element or component. The eighth and twenty-second phases represent a draw or equilibrium. There are then first twelve and then another twelve phases with specular mixtures of subjective and objective. The pivot of the system is phase fifteen, a moment of ecstasy, or supreme illumination, to which all the other phases move and from which they descend. The explanation for the fact that there is no human type corresponding to phases one and twenty-eight is given thus: ‘human life is impossible without strife between the tinctures’.28 In addition, at phase fifteen the mask, the opposite of the will, is subsumed and consumed by this opposite, just as in phase 27 Except that Yeats adds an embarrassing note: the even phases are primary, the odd antithetical, on the basis of the axiom that ‘each phase is in itself a wheel’, or even ‘each series [of three phases each of which is a quarter of the wheel] is in itself a wheel’. 28 The ‘tinctures’ are two, antithetical and primary: the first is the couple of will-mask, the second that of creative mind-body of fate. Both couples are antithetical because the will moves towards the mask just as the mind toward the body of fate.

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one the body of fate is consumed by the mind: the distances are reduced, or indeed vanish. Each phase is a stage in the life of a human being or even a single incarnation. 5. According to the Great Wheel of the lunar phases, it is the destiny of each human being to go through all these possibilities in successive incarnations, but also to pass through the same steps in a single embodiment. A phase has a personal and a cosmic level, so that a lunar man might find himself living in a solar phase of history. Someone like Yeats, a phase seventeen, was in effect living in a scientific and economic phase, twenty-three. In this sense, the Great Wheel fuses the circular motion with a conical one, synchronizing them. In summary, the cycle of twenty-eight phases indicates three things and has three interconnected, concentric applications: it is the cycle of every human life in all its stages, that is, every human being goes through the twenty-eight phases in his/her life; it represents the range of human types, that is, every being belongs to one and only one phase; finally it is the cycle of successive phases within each self-contained 2,000-year time span. The four faculties are the four memories of the daimon, the ‘ultimate self ’29 of each being, moulded according to the deposits of memories from previous lives. The body of fate is the memory accumulated from past lives; creative mind and body of fate are antithetical, with the will attempting to self-determine itself, while fate is the environment that hinders the creative intellect. Antithetical and primary also indicate resistance to the outside world (the former) and seeking union with the outside (the latter). Combinations of the four faculties are compared with performances of the commedia dell’arte: the manager, or daimon, gives the actor a scenario, the body of fate, and a mask as a role, as far as possible from his natural self, or will, on which the actor improvises with his creative mind. It is the

29

In this sense, the daimon is not very different from Hopkins’s ‘inscape’, and we have a confirmation by some more precise definitions of the term: it ‘contains within it, co-existing in its eternal moment, all the events of our life, all that we have known of other lives, or that it can discover within itself of other Daimons’. The echo of Duns Scotus’s haecceitas as it flowed into Hopkins’ inscape – ultima realitas entis – is even clearer when Yeats calls the daimon ‘ultimate reality’. Elsewhere he will define it as similar to Leibniz’s monad.

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antithetical human being, in conflict with himself. The primary human being is weak-willed, and has an imitative mask, while the antithetic is strong-willed; the primary is weak, shaped by external forces. The phases follow one another and present various mixtures and different relationships between individual intellect and moral life. If the first is dominant, the result is division, arrogance and sensual objectivity; when the antithetic becomes primary unity ensues. For each phase there are however a range of types: one can live in phase or out of phase,30 or according to or against the mask, which gives origin to antithetical impulses. Above all, the type is by virtue of its combinations fourfold, or has four combinations, since the ‘mask’ may be true or false,31 while the ‘creative mind’ also forms a pair of opposites between which one can switch; in fact the combinations might be up to six, since the primary or antithetical ‘tincture’ might also prevail and dominate. This creates networks, correspondences, homologies or oppositions between each phase and at least another two, connected in the wheel of the twenty-eight lunar phases. 6. Yeats thus sketches analogous human types coordinating them to a quadripartite grid; a secret symmetry determines vague resemblances between corresponding phases of the wheel. A human type can be inverted, the antithesis of itself, depending on whether it is in phase or out of phase, or if the antithetical or the primary tincture predominates. Within a phase there can therefore be very different sub-types of character branching off. Yeats always gives the example of a human being who is out of phase in primary eras, and is therefore pushing himself into an antithetical climate. It is rare for any type to be a field of forces in harmony, since what prevails is Empedocles’ discord. In the early phases of history one trend among many is the slow drift away from innocence: Landor’s shepherds and Morris’s naives give way to a Byronic Don Juan at phase five; rising too is the affirmation of individuality, as in Whitman and Carlyle. From mid-cycle onwards we move from objectivity to subjectivity and from unity to gradual disintegration, where emotionality prevails. Until phase four there is in a general sense a transition from forms of mindlessness and unconsciousness to forms of 30 That is to say, ‘not following one’s own inner destiny’ ( Johnson 2005, 1181). 31 This is the result of interferences, ‘effects’ of different faculties of similar phases.

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consciousness but with the acquisition of abstract ideas that do not arise from experience. At phase four, a movement for the conscious separation of being from that which is other to it takes place. The climax of the conflict between the faculties is reached at phase eight, point of powerlessness and disorientation for a human being. Later, from nine on starts a sub-cycle of ‘incipient personality’, but only in phase twelve is there the full development of the heroic and solitary personality, close to achieving unity of being, yet still manifesting itself in external poses and dogmatisms. The point of balance, where the faculties are identified and overlap, occurs at phase fifteen, still through an asymptotic ascent. After fifteen, the unity of being is increasingly shattered: Yeats must always presuppose that the harmony or balance of faculties is an asymptote. Whether in or out of phase, the typical human being is feared as violent, bloody, leader of sects and instigator of collapse. This sense of a drift toward violence is too generalized for it to be ascribed only to certain phases and not to others. Violence easily radiates from every phase.32 7. The descriptions and reconstructions of the types echo those of horoscopes, sharing their vagueness, inaccuracy, approximation and contradiction. They are virtual identikits, issuing from the alembic of a new Frankenstein, monsters who would crumble if they ever came in contact with reality.33 Yeats often uses poetic images, fine-grained figurations, elevated and imaginative language, that is, imprecise terms, to define these typologies. He even adds short poetic quotations to convey an impression, without however giving the source. He almost never has any doubts, rather rock-solid certainties in assigning poets and artists to this or that phase. What is interesting to the literary critic and reader of poetry is the classification into, or rather the tracing back to these grids, of poets and cultural, historical and literary figures. The best pages are the most arbitrary, the ones where Yeats, almost forgetting his schema, 32 33

The type in phase twenty-three is ‘violent, anarchic, like all who are of the first phase of a quarter’ (italics mine). Cf. Praz’s lighthearted, but a the same time biting comments on Yeats as a ‘self-taught bungler’ whose mind was ‘an amphitheatre of dead sciences’, or a reservoir of ‘the refuse of all mythologies’ (CLA, vol. IV, 73).

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takes to writing of his cultural idols or especially of his phobias, giving us various critical sketches of writers and other literary figures, packed with colourful and shocking judgements, frank to the point of brutality (like the vitriolic ones on Carlyle or Whitman). What takes shape is thus a small, highly idiosyncratic literary canon, with gaps. Sometimes one gets the impression, if not the certainty, that Yeats starts not from the given combinatorial table for which the chosen historical personality functions as example, but vice versa. While prior character descriptions for each phase are or may sound like twisted puns, it is better to reconstruct the type in question from the concrete example, from the author or from the chosen real and historical personalities. It is unarguably dangerous to group literary figures who are specific and unique, often artists gifted with their distinctive ‘inscape’, in such general categories.34 Improper too is to fix the immutability of a boxed-in and frozen type within a phase, without admitting transfigurations and reversals of personality in life.35 The fact sheets are always naturally deformed by their author.36 At its best, the personality in phase two is, for example, a temperament that is all joy, the personification of nature. Another objection that could be raised against Yeats by women and feminists is why does he always refer to men in his phases, to a ‘man of the phase’; why does he never exemplify a phase with a woman writer, or just a woman? Only in the twentysixth phase does A Vision lack concrete figures to exemplify its type: the hunchback of twenty-six holds in his hump the prowess and power of a Caesar, jealous and malicious.

34 There is a margin of liberty with the action of the ‘thirteenth cone’, defined towards the end of the treatise as that which ‘each man calls his freedom’. 35 In part this becomes possible in the passage from being in phase to being out of phase. An example of not just aesthetic but personal transformation is given in Synge, assigned to phase twenty-three. 36 These groupings appeared ‘malicious’ and misguided to those like George Russell who had been assigned to the same family as Calvin, Luther, and Cardinal Newman (CRHE, 271). As Ellmann 1979, 223, remarks, Yeats acts like a modern-day Dante, ‘distributing friends and enemies in their appropriate phases’, as Dante did in the Divine Comedy.

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8. In the second book of the treatise, Yeats multiplies the categories37 but without a real and intrinsic necessity, claiming that a new, parallel system of the four ‘principles’ – ‘husk’, ‘passionate body’, ‘spirit’, ‘celestial body’ – was suggested to him by the ‘communicators’. While the dominant image of the first system was the wheel, for the second it is the sphere or the cone. Yeats in fact returns to the two cones imbricated backwards, stuck one inside the other, and to a forward movement in the form of a spiral. In this way ‘a kind of projection of the cyclical movement onto the spatial plan’ is performed.38 The first principles are the ‘innate ground’ of the faculties, a kind of doubling of or parallel model to the faculties, if not their exact or not quite exact synonyms and counterparts. The correspondence of the principles is with the months of the year, yielding twelve stages; but the wheel is out of step, in its phases, by a quadrant with respect to that of the faculties. For this system a vague correspondence with Plotinus’ ‘authentic existants’ is invoked only to be discarded, the contradictions of life demanding not a pyramid-like ‘descent’ from principle to principle, but ‘a perpetual return to the starting-point’. From the lunar cycle of twenty-eight phases we switch then to an annual cycle of twelve months, a symbolic year. For the first time Yeats clarifies the diachronic dimension by postulating a 26,000-year cycle, or Great Wheel, divided into twentyeight incarnations as well as cycles of 2,000 years, alternating primary, solar, and therefore objective ones, with lunar, subjective and antithetical ones – cycles of civilization and religious ones. Echoing ‘The Magi’ and ‘The Second Coming’, Yeats recognized that historically his time was close to a ‘revolution’ and an antithetical ‘revelation’, as well as to the birth of a ‘turbulent child of the Altar’. As an alternative to Darwin, a kind of historical evolution, both human and biological, is outlined: ‘the Great Wheel revolved several times before the beast changed into man and many times before the man learned to till the ground’, in fact a Genesis. There is however no linear development, but a recurrence in which ‘every phase returns, therefore in some sense every civilization’.

37 38

This is actually recognized by Yeats himself in the last but one section of this part. Melchiori 1965, 93.

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9. The third book, which begins with a critique of Valéry, studies the relationship between life and death, and their continuity: that ‘the living can assist the imaginations of the dead’, that ‘our actions affect the dead’, ultimately that the dead continue to live. It offers an updating of the old popular belief in the apparitions of ghosts of the dead and therefore of Spiritualism. ‘Spirit’ is a word used in the traditional and broader sense of the ghost of a dead person, as it appears in the adaptations of the Faustian legends and even in Clough. But at the same time it is a pseudo-philosophical, Orphic-Kabbalistic concept, a spirit going through well-defined ‘states’ and becoming reincarnated, with similarities to the zodiacal systems and drawing inspiration from Indian and oriental philosophies and from Plotinus’ emanationism. Yeats’s theory here comes close to a foundation or pseudo-foundation of dream life that sometimes rivals with Freud’s, to which it provides an alternative, since Yeats argues that the dream material of the dreams of the living is taken from the disembodied spirits’ ‘dream of the past’, along with other observations on the functioning of dreams themselves. When the spirit has reached purification it is ready for rebirth. The fourth book rhapsodically discusses ancient philosophical ideas about the opposition between eternity and change, between worlds and cycles that fade out and others that are renewed, as well as the separating agents, water and fire. Even within Christianity there lurked the heresy that the Resurrection had not been singular, and that there could have been many others. Yeats is particularly attuned to any mentions in early Greek civilization, and even before, of a belief in the Great Year, a historical period of great extension variously measured, including the Platonic Year of 36,000 years, after which the signs of the zodiac would turn to their initial position. In a very clear page he outlines and classifies the attributes issuing from the four cardinal points and associated with the figure of Christ: majesty from the east, the human attribute from the south, geometric ornament from the north. Yeats’s ‘antithetical revolution’ would be an ‘intellectual influx’ not issuing from something ‘beyond mankind’ or ‘born of a virgin’, but ‘begotten from our spirit and history’. In the last page of the book the birth of Christ is the watershed: before him religion was antithetical, after him it becomes primary. It is an unequivocal clarification, then, that the beast of ‘The Second Coming’ is

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not Jesus, but something that brings war, violence, blood – the omens of an antithetical civilization. 10. In the fifth book Yeats presents himself as yet another systematizer of history according to a priori principles. Among the British, he is a latecomer rivalling and comparing himself with Arnold, Ruskin, Pater,39 Hopkins, Orwell (without however mentioning them), especially for his new attempt at summarizing the evolution of the artistic and poetic civilization of the Greeks and the Romans. But he does so precisely as a writer, curious and eccentric, arbitrary and whimsical, not as a historian and scholar. Condensing 4,000 years of history of western and eastern civilizations in twenty pages, Yeats’s is a visual overview of painting and sculpture with distinct echoes of Ruskin’s Modern Painters and of Pater’s The Renaissance and Greek Studies, though far more decorative, syncretic and extravagant than those. The changes from Greek civilization at its peak to its decline, and from it to Christianity, then to its collapse, are mapped and explained against the background of some acute – or more often fantastic – reflections on the plastic arts. For instance, the eyes of statues, painted in Greek sculptures but drilled in Roman ones, are read as a sign of the transition from Athens to Rome. The system of lunar phases is applied vertically and diachronically; history is re-examined along three successive cycles of 2,000 years each related to the lunar phases, of which the third is underway, identifying the present with the phases twenty-five and twenty-six of the third cycle. In the first of these, from 2000 BC to AD 1, Greek civilization, born from Leda’s egg, extinguishes the Babylonian one of ‘mathematical starlight’ and moves on to its later stylistic achievements. As in Pater, Yeats, in an admirable passage, identifies correspondences with the next two subsequent cycles at the stroke of phase fifteen, or the full Moon (the falls of Persia, Rome and Byzantium). Every historical cycle presents relationships inversely proportional between antithetical and primary in the religious and secular spheres. During the Roman cycle, Byzantium emerges, reaching its apogee in historical phase fifteen under 39

The emergence of medieval romance is described by Yeats in terms that recall Pater’s definition of ‘aesthetic poetry’, which he ascribed to Morris: beauty ‘retreating into the mystery of faith’.

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Justinian, the age of perfection in art. After 1005 would come for Yeats primary forms of authority in religion, and of primary joy in art. § 79. Yeats after 1919 III: The tail end of ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ Viewed panoramically from above, the poetic production of the second Yeats is still unified, not a chaotic accumulation. Only the last collection (subsequently published as ‘new’ or ‘last’ poems) missed his imprimatur. All the previous four, published from 1919 to 1933, were issued and approved by the ‘teleological’ poet, who as I discussed earlier would gather lyrics composed and published here and there in a collection once they had all reached and exhausted a thematic coordination or homogeneity of mood. The four collections of this period are as many stages in a linear and vertical progress, collected in the true sense of the word, defined and identified by a dominant preoccupation. As with any great poet, they attempt to combine the private with the public, history with the ahistorical, the absolute of poetry and art with the contingent, which is also that of the biography of a poet burdened by his age and facing the imminence of death. Each collection brings to light its own typical vein, its own emphasis, its own thematic frame. This is the positive sense of their unity, but there is a less positive one. Yeats arrives at the same truths starting from points remote from each other: the unity of body and spirit, the desire for sublimation, the descent of the divine into excrement, with emphases at times on one, at others on the other pole, but also surprising conceptual reversals. To go back a little, the dominant mood of the inaugural and eponymous poem of The Wild Swans at Coole is until the second stanza the coming to terms with the impermanence of a happy and perfect age. One day the swans will turn away from the poet’s gaze, ceasing to delight the witness with their iconic meanings of passion, of conquest, of beauty and of a majesty that is not transient, just as the friends of long ago recalled in ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ cannot cheer up the Tower like so many fleeing swans, which have not migrated to other shores, but are really dead. There is a piercing sense of the poet’s physical and spiritual isolation, his literal ‘decadence’, physical and spiritual, accentuated by the symbolically autumnal season. Yeats had already suffered this dissolution of a community at the time of the Rhymers, but now another community is sung and mourned,

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that of the speculative Irish spirits, always convivial and whose animated discussions often unravelled into friendly quarrels.40 ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ ultimately praises a historical landscape now disappeared, the physical and intellectual unity of the late Renaissance. Gregory is the perfect man who reincarnates Sidney, capable of absorbing and capturing in his retina the totality of beautiful sights in the world, hence a semi-human and semi-divine icon of eternity and immutability. Yeats claims disbelief at the idea he might have been struck by the ‘discourtesy of death’, but the next question is ambivalent: ‘What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?’. Playing on the two meanings of ‘dreaming’, Yeats writes that beyond the literal hope that he might live long, Gregory had to die young because he was eternal and unchanging. The death of the airman Gregory is the last of those experiences which, as envisaged by Pater, are all delights for the complete man. 2. Deepening in the last eight compositions of The Wild Swans at Coole, Yeats’s esotericism consists in taking terms that in poetry are often harmless, merely ornamental, bare necessities or of an everyday character, and charging them with a heavy burden of hidden meaning, as they relate to his lunar and Orphic system. Among these are various antitheses: day and night, or sun and moon, which must never be taken as inert atmospheric data, but rather overflow with conceptual references that are symbolic and systematic. With his analogical mind, Yeats could often catch sight of examples of his theories in the tiniest occurrence, or the most mundane and grotesque of events.41 A lyric in a lunar key, under the misleadingly strident guise of a folk ballad, ‘Under the Round Tower’ tells of a beggar who dreams the frantic dance of Sun and Moon climbing up to the top of a tower, becoming a dance or a struggle between the two animating principles of becoming. The beggar derives from this dream an impulse towards action, an incentive to get busy stealing and gain the comforts enjoyed by the wealthy. The last eight poems of The Wild Swans at Coole form a kind 40 The term ‘companion’ of the evocative ode echoes ‘companionable’ in the first. 41 As an example, Yeats had the intuition of the duality of souls and people which he would later elaborate in A Vision when seeing a man carrying two salmons under his arm.

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of internal anthology presented as an imaginative and visionary version, even a fantastical-anecdotal one, of some excerpts and passages of the lunar treatise, with which they must be tightly coupled to understand their difficult turns. One of them explains in a dizzying and nebulous list the phases of A Vision. Yeats, though, focuses particularly on the exposition of the theory of man’s and the artist’s inexhaustible search for his anti-self, done in a dialectical way by letting the system emerge from a dialogue that is not Platonic but lunar between the opposing figures of Aherne and Robartes (which will subsequently recur), themselves two incarnations of distinct phases of the moon and of psychological and historical types. This short embedded plot casts them as a pair of hikers who arrive at Yeats’s tower, from which they see – again in the moonlight – a spiritualist artist who is naturally a sleepless Yeats consulting a magic book by candlelight. A confused but powerful vision of emblematic icons of the lunar middle phase, the fifteenth, is attributed to Robartes. The shorter final poems introduce in visionary but also simplified form the three figures or icons of the last three lunar phases. These ‘fool’s songs’, which at first might be mistaken for a parody of the nonsense of Shakespeare’s fools, as they seem casual songs, even naïve ones, are in fact pregnant with lunar significance. The stylistic feature gaining ground here is that of the antiphonal composition, of a debate between two parties that are initially hidden and camouflaged as a ‘this’ and a ‘that’, but then evolving into a Aherne and a Robartes, a hunchback and a saint.42 Other forms are those of the attributed monologue and of the visionary poet who speaks in the first person. Only one of the eight is a fable, or a nursery rhyme rich with arcane meaning, with a surprise always lurking. 3. With a Dantesque proleptic title, ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’43 is an ars poetica if not a complete aesthetic derived from the premises of the lunar 42 Yeats has often to admit that he attributed to his alter ego Robartes ‘discoveries’ he had made, but which he did not dare to present as his. 43 In Dante’s Vita Nuova, ‘dominus’ is Love who carries in his arms the woman ‘of health’ [‘de la salute’] and in his hands the poet’s heart, which the woman later eats. This reference best explains the origin of the poem for Yeats. Eating the heart is a central image in ‘Parnell’s Funeral’ (§ 83.1)

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philosophy, set up as a debate between two voices simply identified as Hic and Ille. Here Yeats recalls the search for his own latent and always neglected anti-self or opposite, a goal to be reached with the help of magical rites, with strange hieroglyphs carved on the sand of the river bed under the tower, in the moonlight, all conditions in which and with which it can be approached asymptotically – ‘unconquerable delusion’ – and recalled via a medium, in a spiritualist context.44 The lamp burns ‘still’, as ever, to signify that this fruitless quest has been ongoing throughout his life. The first interlocutor, Hic, is a ‘solar’ type, obtuse and impatient, who thinks he has good reasons to misapprehend his daily search for a superstition: he has in mind a supposed unity of being, not just an ‘image’. In replying to this objection, Ille incidentally hopes for the end of a ‘modern’ historical cycle, solely or mainly intellectual in character, in which the artist is a critic (an allusion to Wilde?), or a ‘half creator’; the age that will gain the upper hand will restore the ‘old nonchalance of the hand’. At the heart of the argument, the search for the anti-self is exemplified by Dante, Keats and Yeats himself, who discovers a kinship with them. The artist who has ‘found himself ’ has actually found the opposite, his ‘double’, his mask; or rather, he has often fruitlessly aimed for it. The centrepiece of the dialogue is that both Dante and Keats were lunar artists animated by a longing for the unattainable, the latter being identified with a self different from what they were: the metaphors are those of the apple on the farthest branch (with the shadow of the Tree of Knowledge and therefore of original sin) and of the sweets behind the pane, even in those who like Keats celebrated the joy of life without having experienced it.45 The true Dante is not the gaunt, presumed ascetic poet, but Dante divided, arrived at an abstemious

44 There was indeed a real spiritualist experience behind the assertion ‘I call’. During a séance, Yeats had caught sight of his anti-self in Leo Africanus, that is the Arab historian Al-Fazi; the two opposites could have merged together. As we have seen the anti-self is also called ‘Daimon’, that is, a man who resists his destiny ( Johnson 2005, 1200–1201). 45 Keats goes to his grave ‘unsatisfied’, the same adjective used for the Magi in the eponymous poem (Volume 6, § 261.4); they are looking for precisely the opposite of the Calvary, a new and violent annunciation.

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mysticism after a secret life of uncontrollable sexual urges, of bitter torments, of repressed hatreds. This aesthetics of an art always divided in principle between a surface facade and an invisible inner torture that has been tamed and is yet rising again, is actually a recapitulated echo of Romantic aesthetics, particularly of Shelley’s.46 Yeats presents the aesthetics of the ‘tragic’ inner ‘war’ as a law: ‘art / Is but a vision of reality’;47 and those who sing about happiness without caring deceive themselves, are rhetoricians, and sentimental. Without giving up, the other interlocutor asks Ille in a few lines from the end if poetic style is not imitation. Ille hastily replies that it is rather a pure response to the dictates of the heart, only to return to his waiting for a special messiah, who is his anti-self. Art consists in listening and absorbing everything that has been sought, but it remains a private experience to be guarded jealously, for fear that the birds might eavesdrop and disclose its secret. 4. ‘The Phases of the Moon’ is set as a dialogue between the two figures of Aherne and Robartes on a bridge overlooking Yeats’s Tower, where Yeats is bent over the magic spell book, knowing that he will never find what he is looking for, since like Ille in ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ he has fallen into the error of searching for his complementary anti-self in external sources rather than with the forging powers of his own imagination. The poem reprises the dialogue form in a closer echo of The Divine Comedy, featuring a guide who teaches a pupil who claims ignorance. In the prologue on the bridge Robartes sharply mocks Yeats, who struggles towards the knowledge Robartes easily possesses. Withholding from Yeats news of his arrival, Robartes takes his revenge upon the poet, who he claims wrote him up in that ‘extravagant style’ he had learned from Pater and even killed him off. Yeats here reviews his work from a distance and makes fun of himself. The composition turns entirely didactic from the moment when Robartes imaginatively explains A Vision in a nutshell. Of the three possible meanings 46 Bloom 1970, 197. 47 ‘vision’ should be italicized as the first term of an antithesis whose second, and implicit one, is ‘objective and photographic transcription’. Yeats, an enemy of realism, classified it using an expression taken from Stendhal, a ‘mirror dawdling down a lane’ (Introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, xxvii).

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and applications of the lunar cycle he summarizes the first, which maps the phases in a man’s life, though relating them back and forth to their historical and typological value. In this descriptive and explanatory phase the visual analogue would be that of the two interpenetrating cones, since until phase fifteen the will grows while the mind decreases, the soul gradually ‘becomes a body’ and the ‘thought’ becomes an ‘image’. Once over the ridge of the antithetical, which is also a spiral movement towards the fusion of corporal and spiritual beauty, Robartes describes the remaining phases as a descent into the primary, characterized by service to the world and a fissure between body and soul. The last three lunar stations are hunchback, saint and fool. Saint and hunchback converse in ‘The Saint and the Hunchback’; the fool speaks in ‘Two Songs of a Fool’. These are phases in which personality is erased. In the hunchback physical deformities stifle any possibility of expressing individuality despite the desire to be a Caesar. The saint even lacks this desire, since he does not aspire to become his opposite, the powerful or sensual individual, an Augustus or Alcibiades, and is rather entirely possessed by his longing to subsume himself into the divine.48 The last poem of the collection, eighth in this mini-anthology, ‘The Double Vision of Michael Robartes’ once again opens with a psychic act: the evocation in the ‘mind’s eye’ of a primal birth instigated by the Moon, in which she shreds, pulps and kneads a new being, like a God with a pestle. The ‘cold spirits’ that will later be brought to life by the pseudoPentecostal breath will then acquire a moral conscience. For now, though, stunned or between death and life, they do not have it and live a ‘triumph’ of abstraction and an absence of sensitivity in the eyes of an almost envious Robartes. After this latest prologue, Yeats focuses on the fifteenth lunar stage as if in an apocalyptic vein. This phase presents itself to the visionary alter ego with the ‘dual’ symbolic form of a sphinx, part woman and part lion, and of a Buddha; between them lies a dancing girl. It is a trinity of perfection, but only in the interrelation of the three images. The sphinx embraces all that is known and unknown within intellectual knowledge; the Buddha is infinite love for all that exists (an almost repentant Yeats

48 Melchiori 1965, 91.

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confessed that Buddha could have been replaced by Christ). After tasting an intoxicating juice, and bubbling forth with a sudden song which is the poem itself,49 Robartes discovers in the dancer a feminine archetype he has eternally sought, corresponding to the cessation of all mental operations in the vortex of the fully bodily dance. With her figure, the synthesis of head and heart is realized, and with it the unity of being.50 § 80. Yeats after 1919 IV: ‘Michael Robartes and the Dancer’. The marriage of body and spirit Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)51 is a short and sober collection focused on the Yeatsian persona of Michael Robartes, the possessor of lunar knowledge, and on the symbol of the dancer. Dialogic, rather difficult and lumpy, the opening lyrics undertake investigations into bodily unions seen as cosmic or mythical, or embodiments and examples of mystical conjunctions and of opposing vital principles, or extreme passions fusing separate worlds. Yeats takes up again various personal mythologies and different reference points that are dear to him: Robartes and the dancer, then Solomon and

49 The duality of the vision of the title, which has puzzled the critics, may perhaps be explained in the sense that Robartes has found in the three unified images his ‘double’, in the meaning given to the term in ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’. In the last section of the poem, the fifty-three-year-old Yeats flashes up in Robartes, in the twenty-second phase of the ‘temptation through strength’ both in the personal arena and in that of history, when the need for a strengthening revelation against the mental weakness typical of this phase makes itself felt ( Johnson 2005, 1222). 50 I note here, though it applies elsewhere, that Yeats is a sceptical Platonist, in some stages of his journey no longer sure of his Platonism, which he feels does not give enough room to the corporeal and to the body claiming what is rightfully its own. In Pythagoras he found the first formulation of a form of mysticism opposed to materialism and scientism, as well as a philosopher who values the indivisible unity of God and condemns the visible world as an illusion; the transmigration of souls was also a Pythagorean principle together with the cyclical one of becoming. In Plotinus we can find Yeats in retreat from his tower and from the view of the turmoil of the world, and taking refuge in his own interiority. Like Pythagoras, Plotinus argues that the world of ideas is real, while that of reality an illusion; he postulates the cognitive ecstasy of the human subject who becomes similar to God. 51 Many of the poems were in fact composed in 1916, or shortly after.

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Sheba as biblical alter egos of himself and his wife, parties to a total marriage of body-spirit and wisdom. Such a marriage was meant to be fateful and epochal, and to usher in a new dispensation hailed by a mythical crowing of the cock, thus sealing the birth of a new world. A situation that is repeated is the dialogue of two newlyweds, or two lovers, he wise already, she on the way towards attaining wisdom, who meditate on physical-spiritual unity and attribute to their union the merit of the birth of a new universal cycle that opens to a revitalized world. The conceptual line is that of the revaluation of the body, of marriage as a painful but invigorating fusion of body and spirit posited by God, but also of Chance and of Choice, hence of fate and will. The three or four initial lyrics are in fact reflections of Yeats’s own marriage, almost reverberations of the wedding night and inquiries about the meaning of the union of bodies. In an abrupt and violent transition to the concrete, the collection is invaded and dominated by Dublin’s Easter 1916 uprising, ambiguously celebrating the patriots who took part in it, whom it eternalizes in stone statues. The dominant events are then two, which Yeats seeks to congeal together: the one of a more symbolic order is the regeneration of the world through Yeats’s mystical marriage; the other is Ireland’s regeneration through the sacrifice of the patriots in the insurrection. Poems of childhood memories and a touching and poignant prayer for his daughter in wartime round off the collection. Still, the last word belongs to the visionary, hallucinatory, prophetic Yeats, who has a terrifying glimpse of a landscape of struggle between opposing principles embodied in symbols: the ‘gyre’, or cone, which expands from its peak into another cone. The final epigraph sets the collection as ideally sprung from the restored tower of Thoor Ballylee, giving way to the next one and tracing the dynamics of the Advent, the symbol of the destruction or degradation of the old, the restoration of the old, and therefore the birth of the new. 2. This dualism, or pairing, is visible and developed in the titular opening poem, Socratic and didactic, and therefore still hinging on a teacher and a pupil designated once again only with pronouns. But the core of the lesson is a revolt against any unfounded, sublimating arbitrary interpretation of Renaissance art and art in general, along with a proclamation of the indivisibility of body and spirit. Composing a brief ekphrasis, Robartes explains it to his dancer, taking as pretext a painting by Tura in

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Ferrara, or perhaps more accurately one of St George and the Dragon by Paris Bordone. The first point of this argumentative dialogue is that St George could and would appreciate the pure physical side of his beloved – what she saw in the mirror – and that every lover is satisfied with the mere physical appearance of the beloved. This is then an anti-Platonic lyric, which re-appraises the corporeal, the tangible, even in the sphere of art, as Veronese and Michelangelo show. But the shy, demure female voice, like that of a schoolgirl, counters that ‘there is great danger in the body’ (echoing perhaps Hopkins), while the male voice replies that the body has been given by God together with the spirit, that it is a vehicle chosen by God to get to beauty and to the ‘uncomposite’ – meaning ‘undivided’ – state of grace. Alongside Hopkins, this hymn to the art – and to the knowledge – of the body, which the poem exemplifies in the great paintings and sculpture of the late Renaissance, evokes Browning and the aesthetics of Lippo Lippi.52 That is why the dialogue in the end turns out to be still Platonic, since the unification of body and spirit actualized in female beauty leads to the idea of ‘undivided’ beauty. Thus the poem sings the impetus towards achieving unity of being typical of Yeats. To look at oneself in the mirror, and not countenance anything else, is a sign of rejection of any transcendence, as demonstrated in the great pictorial tradition: it is nothing other than anatomical representation, even if natural and supernatural at the same time. In Yeats’s critique of abstract reason, thought itself is unhealthy until translated into an image. ‘Solomon and the Witch’, also dialogical, though without separately identified interventions, foreshadows Yeats’s marriage. The woman recalls her wedding night and the spontaneous flow of a strange speech she had heard, not hers or her husband’s. The event is mythically explained as the song of a rooster ‘three hundred years before the Fall’, exactly similar to and different from the one that sang during Jesus’ 52

Volume 4, § 121.1. As in Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’, the opening here features a couple commenting on the details of a painting by way of deictics. Two images become superimposed in the mind’s eye of the woman: that of the knight, who holding his spear high wishes to chase the dragon, and that of the dragon which sinks his talons. These two images, one real, the other dream-like and recurring, are translated into thought, as Yeats wishes to show.

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trial, because it greets the alignment of the stars of Chance and Choice, giving a sort of signal of renewal of the world, which will start again with the union of bodies and spirits, under a fresher, newer dispensation. The rooster symbolically cancels and dethrones the serpent of Eden, given that both the world and what was brought ‘from the Apple’ are ‘dead’. The apple is called a ‘brigand’ because it deprived the first human beings both of their freedom and of this sexual ecstasy. In this sense it is Yeats’s version of an Advent poem: at the stroke of this hour a cycle ends and another starts, an eternity ceases and another begins; as in Metaphysical poetry and poetics, lovers in their union have abolished the world. But Yeats does have Solomon admit the incontrovertible reality of love lived as pain, or the superimposition of the ‘real’ image onto that of fantasy, or insist that ‘the world ends’ when two bodies join. This disappearance, the abolition of the world after coitus, is the consequence of the physical-corporeal unison. If the world persists, or seems to persist, this means that the mental image brought into the marriage was either too strong or not strong enough. The sober, tight dramatic dialogue ‘An Image from a Past Life’ rests on Yeats’s theory (with some borrowings from Rossetti) that in moments of strong emotion and excitement lovers can share a mental image. This disturbing mental image, which arises for the newlyweds from the watery vortex of a river, is that of Maud undoing her plaits in ‘arrogant loveliness’. Yet, with an abrupt cut, these surfacing images become more soberly the far more ‘vivid’ and less opalescent ones of the ancestors in ‘Under Saturn’, effective patriots serving the people. This poem is in other words an early, ‘Arnoldian’ call to social responsibility addressed to the ‘strayed’ reveller.53 3. Immediately after comes ‘Easter 1916’, in which the beauty at stake is not the private, spiritual and sublimated one of the archetypal woman, but the unique one of the 1916 Easter uprising, a beauty therefore (can a revolt be terribly beautiful?) that is transposed into a different key, which is the memorializing of those fallen in battle no less than the intent to recant. Yeats admits to a certain indifference to these patriots, having looked upon them at first from on high, ridiculing them, and now instead respecting and

53

Volume 4, § 152.3.

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revering them, if only out of lack of confidence in their ability to overthrow a world far too corrupt (‘where motley is worn’). In Yeats’s list the patriots are idealized and glorified, ritual actions are ascribed to them, and they are described with a courtly stentorian, ‘poetic’ language: ‘she rode to harriers’, ‘our wingèd horse’, ‘He had done most bitter wrong’, this last line being of a Shakespearean stamp and resonance. The end elaborates the concept of change in nature, a living stream, and of stone, an image of firmness and immutability, both of which symbolize the patriots. That too long a sacrifice can make the heart turn to stone, that is create heartless men, signifies the resurgence, the excess of violence, or ‘love’. At the end of the ode, however, Yeats is touched by a doubt, that the sacrifice might have been futile. He reveals his political ambivalence when noting that Britain could have kept to the agreements, then is quickly overcome again by his celebratory intent. 4. The ode starts in one of Yeats’s favourite, fateful moments: the ‘close of day’, a time that is symbolic of end and beginning, in this case heralding a violent dawn. The colour contrast lies between the ‘vivid’ faces, standing out against the backdrop of ‘grey’ neoclassical buildings in Dublin, and a little further on the ‘multi-coloured’ coat, a symbol of the vanity of the efforts to change the world and of political opportunism. The seemingly superfluous particular of ‘the eighteenth century buildings’ indicates the hoped-for coming of the new taking place within an old and dilapidated architecture. The two places that are evoked, bank and desk, are emblems of stability and symbols of British power; the club is that of immovable and disheartened aristocrats. Yeats, who hitherto used to greet the patriots with a nod, confirms the sensation of a cold and stiffly formal figure he aroused as a young man among his acquaintances.54 Modulating it to the real historical event, the refrain alludes to the Yeatsian motif of the imminence of a violent Annunciation, to the horror that accompanies the renewal of a cycle, a cycle of new and turbulent beauty (the word ‘turbulence’ appears in ‘The Magi’). History seemed to be providing proof for Yeats’s lunar system, which predicted the transition to a new cycle towards the end of 54

Volume 6, § 258.3. Yeats was also allergic to crowds and gatherings, and an aristocratic individualist in perennial disagreement with Maud Gonne, as he admits, with a fierce accusation, in ‘The Leaders of the Crowd’.

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the century; except that, caught off guard, Yeats admits he had not believed that universal renewal could come from that group of exalted heroes. In fact he remains convinced just of that. In its third and fourth stanzas, the poem calls into question its dominant concept, even if it recaptures it at the last minute. The celebration of the heroes of the uprising is compromised by the fact that they are all described as unaware, promising yet unexpressed. They have transformed themselves, but into an entity that is not susceptible of further change: the inanimate ‘stone’ that stops, obstructs, ‘disturbs’ the living ‘stream’. Metaphors aside, political passion can lead to atrophy of the heart; Heraclitus’ nature in its mutability is confronted with the stone, that is, the patriots. The fourth stanza insinuates the doubt that there must be a limit to sacrifice, even a limit dictated by sheer common sense, and a limit to patriotic love, which can degenerate into fanaticism. The poet does not answer the doubts, silences his conscience, suspects that the initial close of the day might be a prelude not to the night but to death; he returns to his celebratory task, almost pretending he had never raised those doubts. Placed in fifth position in the collection, this ode is catapulted to the polar opposite of the more visionary and occult poems. The hiatus to explain and to suture is that between the philosophy of the body and the call of the historically concrete in Dublin. The answer may be that of physicalspiritual unity and of wisdom, always to be put first: the patriots are beings cut in half, made of stone, who sacrificed and atrophied the corporeal.55 5. The third internal hiatus occurs in this collection with the tenth poem, with which Yeats returns, having exhausted the theme of insurrection, to the motif of the physical, spiritual and even mystical unison between the two spouses, to the motif then of the indivisibility of thought and image, body and spirit, and of the physical, spiritual and mystical unity – to the motif, too, of the objective man, old and gentle, and of the subjective one, daring, sensual, stormy, lustful, demonic. ‘Towards Break of Day’ is the freshest of lyrics, evoking Yeats’s childhood in Sligo and the waterfalls of 55

The theme of the insurgents, and their remembrance mixed with some perplexity, was not abandoned by Yeats. Con Markiewicz too (in ‘On a Political Prisoner’) lived a unified life in her youth, only to become a victim of ‘abstract’ thinking, fracturing that unity.

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Ben Bulben, but this dream which the poet believes to be shared by his wife is not, since she is dreaming of King Arthur’s deer. The same dreamer rebels against God’s will, which makes the waterfall ‘insensitive to touch’ and would have him in his old age touch only ‘cold stone and water’, thus breaking the spell. In the end, as in ‘Solomon and the Witch’, he must admit that this unison is a fleeting illusion, and therefore unattainable.56 The old poet is dissociated from his childhood self, and division snakes its way into the couple. ‘Demon and Beast’ hails the temporary liberation from demon and beast – that is pure senses, or physical strength of the body – which assail the poet day and night. It dwells on the realized aspiration towards freedom from hate and desire. This subjection is expressed in the form of a tension between conical and spiral motions one inside the other, according to the resistance against and attraction to desire. Having escaped from a nightmare, the poet now looks upon the wall lined with portraits of august historical figures or ascetic saints who embody perfect self-control and are therefore ‘objective’ and ‘primary’, under the aegis of that sun which in the first stanza disperses the lunar vapours. But a pair of different images, by themselves well brought out, awakens the inner war: on the shore of a lake a white seagull, alter ego to the poet in that it flies in concentric circles and is pure in its whiteness, is overwhelmed by another bird that awakens the demonic. The poet admits the supremacy of the demonic, but adds that his subjugation is temporary and belongs to the brief era of senile wisdom. Yeats, in this subjection, recognizes his division.57 This longed-for mystical-ascetic liberation is reinforced in the end, where a fasting St Anthony, not coincidentally a saint belonging to the twenty-sixth lunar phase, is contrasted with the materialistic greed of the Caesars. This rather contorted parable signifies that it is a vain attempt to expel the demon and the beast of the senses even in old age, that in

56 There is here an application of Yeats’s concept of the ‘complementary dream’. According to the commentators the waterfall is feminine and a source of life, while the deer is masculine; the first motion is downward, the second upwards. It remains difficult to see, though, how waterfall and deer may be complementary. 57 Recognizing the freshness of the poem, Bloom 1970, 315, rightly remarks that this is one of the few instances in which Yeats ‘speaks against the antithetical’.

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senility too there can be sexual arousal if for brief moments, or that old age is sweetness, but an incomplete life. 6. ‘The Second Coming’ is a concise poem, epic and visionary in tone, dripping with pure evocativeness. Its allusions make Yeats sound like Dante, because the tone of prophecy is not specific (who are the best that have no ‘conviction’, and the worst who are full of ‘passionate intensity’?). Segmented into frames and snapshots of flashing clarity, the opening, in a series of asyndeta, can work ambiguously at the symbolic and historical level. It can evoke the human intellect escaped from the control of the soul of the world, the splitting of the unity of being, as well as catching echoes of the revolutionary events in Russia, or even be the voice of an apocalyptic Yeats, fearful of the possible spread of Marxism in Ireland. In the second stanza Yeats seems, but only seems, to identify this prelude with the passage in the Scripture that describes the end of times: he cites the ‘second coming’, the one feared or more often longed for by the Victorians (‘revelation’ being the very word used to designate the book of John). A terrifying image, however, stands up in front of consciousness, an image emanating from ‘spiritus mundi’, not a Christian spirit proper: that of a centaur or sphinx with a lion’s limbs, the head of a man and a merciless gaze, surrounded by birds of the desert. Yeats merges here all his mythological and visionary deformations of the Christian incarnation. In particular, he revives from ‘The Magi’ the ‘beast’ that ‘limps’ towards Bethlehem to be born, and echoes ‘the uncontrollable mystery of the bestial floor’, the line that closes that poem. This expected, imminent coming is very different from that of Christ: it is the coming of a brutal deity, violent and bloody, coinciding with the end of the second millennium – not of Christ but of an Antichrist. The unborn child, or rather the one already born that is moving towards Bethlehem, is literally a ‘rough beast’ –58 such, in part, in the sense of ‘Demon and Beast’. Imminent is in fact an era of senses, instincts, of fierce and destructive hatred, on the personal and historical level. It is another panicked reaction to the wave and to the horde of violence. The verbal connection with ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ is the word ‘cradle’, which 58

Johnson 2005, 1251, sees it as a self-generating figure, suggesting an identity between centaur and ‘rough beast’.

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connects the two poems as if with a musical legatura: cradle of the beastly figure, similar-dissimilar to Christ, literal cradle of his daughter. Although called ‘a prayer’, the poem is ideally addressed to his daughter and is all too openly and heavily catechetical; it is in fact only nominally a prayer, since its real purpose is not to invoke protection, but to deter from an imitation. In wishing and admonishing that beauty be not proud, not lonely, courteous in fact, like a tree or a gentle bird dispensing their charms and their favours, Yeats’s disguised target is once again Maud Gonne. He wishes to disapprove of the excessive beauty that takes women away from ‘natural kindness’, to the point of denouncing the bodily perfection that admires itself in the mirror (celebrated in ‘Michael Robartes and the Dancer’) and recognizing himself in the ‘fool’ Helen took as a lover. Symbolically the barrier against the second, gory advent is the restoration of a noble spiritual aristocracy and of that innocence which was trampled in the previous poem: the symbolic values of the ‘ceremony’ and of ‘costume’, an innocence that is not ‘murderous’, but ceremonious, frugal, and feudal.59 § 81. Yeats after 1919 V: ‘The Tower’. The second coming Published in 1928, The Tower,60 consisting of twenty poems some of which date back to the years 1919 to 1920, others to 1912, was greeted on its appearance as an absolute poetic masterpiece, if not the culmination of Yeats’s oeuvre. This aesthetic excellence is mainly due to a group of four impressive rhapsodies at the opening, followed at a distance by a fifth composition of plastic and concentrated visuality, metrically a sonnet. The publication date is misleading because the thematic centre of gravity, 59

The feeling of historical menace is also evident in the testament-like lines that close the collection. 60 The Norman tower of Thoor Ballylee (in Galway, western Ireland) was bought by Yeats in June 1917 for 35 pounds. It had a square layout, and it was short and heavy; access to the top floor was through a stone spiral staircase which Yeats, with his proneness to associations, was quick to appropriate. The Yeatses did not live there long, abandoning it in 1928 when The Tower was published, ensuring its immortality, as it were. Yeats and George stayed in a number of English and Irish locations while the very expensive and laborious restorations took place. The tower was restored three decades later; today it is a museum devoted to Yeats.

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emotionally and historically, private and public, is the year 1919 or 1920 or 1921. This is Yeats’s version of a demarcation between the end of the old world and the beginning of the new, which many English writers placed towards the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Those years marked a private and historical apocalypse for Yeats, who as an Irishman did not recognize in 1914 or in 1918 an epochal watershed, which to him rather coincided with the civil war that followed the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. The violence with which the old world cycle ended was in part the closure of the history of the subjection of Ireland to England, and a world war on a smaller scale. The eponymous tower from which Yeats ideally composed61 was the one he had bought in County Galway, from which he cast his gaze on the signs of the incoming storm, as several poets in other literatures were doing at that time. These storms, that is their collections of poetry, were slightly earlier than his, since they emerged from the European and global storm of the actual world war. The Tower came out relatively close in time, but its poems on the storm in fact refer to a different tempest, one that, equally hyperbolically – a ‘foul storm’ – had fallen on his island with ten years’ delay. In this collection Yeats’s tower is a vantage point on the horrors of war, as much as the ivory tower of ancient memory in which the artist withdraws from the war. ‘I turn away and shut the door’, so Yeats closes ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, adding that he had chosen not to prove ‘[his] worth / In something that all others understand or share’, but in the ‘abstract joy’, ‘the half-read wisdom of daemonic images’.62 The poet then turns his back on history. Except that the title poem ‘The Tower’ proclaims a testament that does not hail the lunar, antithetical man, but one who is equivocally and contemptuously ‘upstanding’, all in one piece, going against the flow,

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A number of poems were in fact incubated in Rapallo, where Yeats had come to stay due to his lung condition. From the Ligurian town Yeats bitterly witnessed the situation in his country, even though he could set it aside to write ‘more serene lines’, ‘bird songs of an old man’. 62 The tower is also the tower of Troy, from which Helen’s destructive beauty can be seen (Melchiori 1960, 128, 130).

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too boldly claiming his freedom – the man who is also partly a fascist.63 This old and ‘decrepit’ poet in his tower, close to sixty, immersed in the contemplation of the occult, growls, rebels, does not know if he should tame or rejuvenate himself, or even how to rejuvenate himself. He takes pity upon himself, humbles himself, exposes himself, aiming for a stripping down, for a voluntary ban upon decaying senses to establish the primacy of the soul, almost reaching to the sacred from the profane, but a sacred that is aesthetic, and unorthodox. With a fantastic leap that might remind us of the end of Hopkins’s sonnet on the Heraclitean fire, Yeats attempts to turn the ‘tattered coat upon a stick’, to which he confesses himself reduced, into an ‘artifice of eternity’. Byzantium, mental goal of the life of the spirit and of the descent of the supernatural upon man, the Byzantium of the time shortly before Justinian, is the perfect example of a renewed unity of being. Hence the surge into memory of the eternal simulacra of beloved women. The fateful circumstances of 1917, when his proposal to Iseult was refused and his abrupt declaration to George followed, are evoked and transfigured in ‘Owen Aherne and His Dancers’, a very immediate poem for Yeats, without filters, and a dialogue, once again, between the poet and his heart that ‘went mad’. ‘A Man Young and Old’ is a phantasmagoria of the women who eluded the poet, ending with an invitation to desist from the chase, with the poet almost reconciled, and composed along the lines of a free translation from Sophocles. After the grand opening, the collection is dominated by an apparent dispersion, with little tender poems, prayers followed by other lyrics hinging on subtle, sophisticated analogies or pictorial or artistic disquisitions. This diversity is reflected in the variety of tones, at times high and prophetic, vibrating with invocations, at others plaintive and melancholic. The confessions in verse adopt a kind of Yeatsian stream of consciousness, or rely on an informal diaristic and seemingly improvised voice. The Tower confirms Yeats as a peerless master of changes in register and of discursive modulation. He knows how to go from the seductive middle tone of remembrance to the sudden reference to erudite and occult matters, or to the obscure popular anecdote. He is 63 In a 1921 letter Yeats declared that the future ‘derid[ed] any hope of socialism’ ( Johnson 2005, 1284).

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a master too of the private allusion, of antonomasia, and other related figures of speech. As a habit, he perversely designates real people with unidentifiable circumlocutions, which makes his an insidious poetry; or at the opposite pole, he will indulge at times in an excess of denomination. 2. In ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ the deictic at the beginning – ‘that’ – refers not only to Ireland, but to the entire western civilization of the twentieth century which is now alien, foreign, for the old man without any more physical and intellectual stimuli, as it were ‘out of phase’. The apparently positive vitality of the young lovers, of the aquatic fauna, of the leaping salmon celebrates a life-and-death cycle in a song that does not know the incomparably higher value of the intellectual monument, not destined to die. Old age can be redeemed only by the soul uttering its song and erecting a monument to itself while the body decays. At the end of the second of the four stanzas, the logical-visionary link of the poem appears: ‘And therefore I have sailed the seas and come / To the holy city of Byzantium’. The poem here reveals its nature as a late and camouflaged escapism of the imagination, evident too in the optative poetic syntax that echoes Shelley. In Byzantium the poem invokes the wisdom coming from a ‘fire’ that being holy is purified from the sensual, and seemingly as if cooled in its counterpart, the ‘gold mosaic’;64 in Byzantium the soul is sung and sings of itself. The heart is frustrated in its desire, yoked to a ‘dying animal’; the whole being is rapt ‘in the artifice of eternity’. ‘Artifice’ is just the latest indicator of a desire that does not hide and does not repress the nostalgia for youthful instincts not sublimated, if perishable. It is above all, in the sophisticated mechanism that links the last line of each stanza with the first of the next, in opposition to ‘nature’. The process of rising up to the artificial sphere of eternalizing art might translate into an even more natural, hence supernatural,

64 Yeats had never visited Byzantium, but was inspired by the mosaics he saw in Ravenna in 1907 and, in 1924, by those in Monreale. In the poem Yeats admits the vanishing of the mad and unconscious sexual desire, which is also what Eliot postulates and admonishes in Four Quartets. The opening of Eliot’s poem is also anticipated in the ending of that of Yeats, where the imitation of nature in the precious, golden artefact keeps the emperor awake as an illusory synthesis of ‘Of what is past, or passing, or to come’.

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union of body and nature itself, that is, into shapes made of gold leaves and precious objects for decoration that illustrate nature, thus that cycle of life and death from which they are a living form of detachment.65 In the supposed imminence of death,66 Yeats is even more intent on drawing up a stentorian and proud spiritual testament; and ‘The Tower’ revolves immediately afterwards, in its three sections, around the compensation that a still fervid imagination, therefore demiurgic and creative, can offer a physically dilapidated and sexually impotent old age. The poem, though, contradicts his proposition because the imagination, which is not dead, does not decline into abstract reasoning and senescence. The feared failure of the poetic Muse is belied by the making of the poem itself, which expands into fragmentary reminiscences of stories and legends related to Yeats’s tower. This makes the tower a place of associations for Irish legends that also repeat those of a more distant past, such as the story of the beautiful peasant girl bewitching her suitors, a double for Helen. What is more, the vitality of the imagination and its evocative mediumistic power are proved by the poet’s remembering his imaginary creatures in a brief roll-call, relishing his ancient quasi-divine power. In the vividness of their evocation, he would like to address each one of them – fantastic ghosts, creatures of the imagination who are without rationality67 and can therefore guess, fantasize, dream, also growl at old age, if only because they are poetically immortal. From the end of its second part Yeats stretches the poem through rather risky associations. The womanizer Hanrahan,68 the poet’s mask, has carelessly thrown himself into one-sided love-affairs; Maud reappears as a 65

The extinction of real sexual desire evoked in the ‘dying animal’ is as if compensated by an intellectual erection, the one that provides the precious artefact to the ‘drowsy’ emperor, thus waking him up. 66 Confessing himself to his heart, Yeats rails against old age, calling it, in the very direct and human, almost desperate beginning, the pebble tied to the dog’s tail. 67 The linking cyphers of this phantasmagoria are: the ‘divin[ing]’ of the servant (stanza II of part II), madness, misunderstanding and the ‘wits driven astray’ in Mary Hynes’s suitors (stanza IV of part II), the blindness of the poet Raftery (stanza V of part II), the triumph of Yeats the poet whose ‘rhymes […] make men mad’ (stanza V of part II), and finally the magical wizardry of Hanrahan (stanza VII of part II). 68 Volume 6, § 260.3.

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‘great labyrinth’ which Yeats did not penetrate on account of a cowardice and a weakness that seem transformed into the pride of the upright man in the third section, though upright not so much in a romantic sense as in terms of his strict social conscience and of his awareness of the body’s resurrection after death. The ending, however, reverts to the same imagined paradise of art, synonymous with the ultimate unity of being and with the Promethean cult of the disembodied soul that Yeats celebrates in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. 3. The seven ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ are a fantastical rhapsody that alternates – more exactly swings – on the twin axes of the conceptual and the anecdotal, of the abstract and of the concrete, and that revolves around the paradigm of destruction and reconstruction and around the personal and historical theme of inheritance. The first of these contrasts is that between the ancient, painless naturalness with which life, and even great art, renews itself as an ever bubbling fountain in the rich mansions of Ireland, and the symbol that hangs over them now, not the fountain but the empty seashell. Within this sinuous argument, however, emerges a historical law of degeneration, which sees the most soothing, civilizing, gentlest art as born through the will of patrons who came to power through violence and abuse. Conscious of this, Yeats glimpses the overturning of the status quo, lamenting the increase in violence, the overcoming of greatness by force and hatred, ultimately the ineffectiveness of art itself, already foreseen by the eternal soul, or Yeats’s ‘daimon’. From the third section on, the transmission and continuation of life is shifted onto the plane of the personal and of the historically concrete, though still related to the philosophy of the ‘second coming’.69 The symbols of continuity are the tower itself and art, exemplified in Sato’s sword on the poet’s table, the Japanese sword with its richly decorated scabbard, symbolic both of the conjunction between action and contemplation and of the immutability of the soul. Yeats is divided between his dread of seeing his lineage weaken, devoted to worldly idols, and resignation that the tower may be the only monument of his survival. But mournful owls circle around it, and the very shape of 69 Sections V and VII in particular contain shocking and appalling anecdotes from the civil war.

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their movement is a harbinger of cosmic renewal, of a flowering after the decline; and with an elemental, suddenly optimistic image, bees make a hive ‘in the empty house of the stare’. The vagueness and the openness of the rhapsody are all in the final juxtaposition of its airy symbols: in the sky the poet sees a procession of female figures with closed eyelids, filled with joy and sweetness,70 a sweetness that opposes violence, but they are dispelled by hawks (Yeats’s symbol for logic) who have ‘put out the moon’. Yeats eventually returns to the tower and focuses on the purely spiritual quest. ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, written between 1919 and 1921, moves from the gnomic aphorism at the opening to an elegy for a golden age that was intensely wished-for but did not come true; and from there to the phenomenological observation of the war ruins, concluding with the scathing sarcasm and shocked disdain of the last stanzas, which deny any metamorphic power not only to historical reality, but more darkly to the poet himself. Subverting the wording and the hope of the previous lyrics, this power of transformation is taken away from his own soul and imagination, granted only to a haughty but sterile, and in any event very disconsolate loneliness. Not even the promise of art can resist time’s waste. Never previously declarative or non-symbolic, Yeats confronts the most inhuman manifestations of internecine disorders, which are also remote signs of an incipient change of civilizations, expected but always ambiguously feared. Only in the second brief section does Yeats read in the ‘signs’ of the times the caesura that separates two dispensations, though the one coming next is that of an old instead of a new moral law. The comparison of the soul with the swan that flies away does not lead to the intoxication of resurrection, but in this case unleashes a real destructive fury, even destructive of the ‘monuments of unageing intellect’; and even more fleeting are the common ‘works’ the great reformers of the world believed they could leave behind them.71 The final frame captures a reality of disorder and senseless blindness. 4. With these rhapsodic and composite poems now examined the collection has already passed the mid-point in quantitative terms. After this, 70 An image inspired by Moreau’s Les Liocornes. 71 These lines will echo at the end of the second movement of Eliot’s Burnt Norton.

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shorter poems follow, some aphoristic, others light and airy like Elizabethan and seventeenth-century songs. They are captivating, but also anti-climactic and therefore redolent of the style and anonymous diction of Bridges or Housman (such as ‘The Fool by the Roadside’). Pathos overcomes the poet, as in the hyperbolic elegy for a dying or imagined dead Lady Gregory whose partnership with Yeats will be strengthened in the realm of shadows. The sonnet ‘Leda and the Swan’ strikes the reader as the most compact, unified and ultimately perfect of all Yeats’s poems, which are often so polymorphous, discursive and wide-ranging in their possible registers. It is an ekphrasis of a nonexistent painting,72 but an inexorably dynamic one, since the wings at first envelop and caress the human prey, slowly overwhelming her resistance, as the participle ‘caught’, completed in ‘caught up’,73 indicates from a distance, only to release it then, almost as if the swan had consumed its desire and its phallic beak had become ‘indifferent’. It is an excitement that the sonnet mimics in its elliptical parataxis of the verb, in the thick tissue of alliteration, in the chain of its synecdoches. In the historical and cyclical sense, Yeats dramatizes the coming of the classic 2,000 years cycle, and the embrace from which the Trojan War was generated according to the myth of Leda’s egg, Leda taking in and therefore taking on the power and knowledge of the swan.74 ‘Among School Children’ obliterates its 72 It is also, undoubtedly, a concoction of many suggestions from Spenser and Blake, though the echoes that reverberated ‘in some obscure recess of [Yeats’s] mind’ (Melchiori 1960, 146) are really too many to enumerate. But Melchiori (133–67) strangely does not consider the swan poem closest in time to Yeats’s, Tennyson’s ‘The Dying Swan’, excluding it from the influences that have been or might be proved. Wilson 1960, 269–70, discusses a possible oppositional relationship between Yeats and another of Tennyson’s poems. 73 This climax could be roughly described as ‘capture’ and ‘clutching’. The potential link with Hopkins (the sonnet ‘The Windhover’) and the echoes in the swan’s dive, its clutching of the victim, the ‘mastery’ of ‘brute blood’ and the recurrence of ‘caught’ are discussed in Volume 6, § 261.5 and n. 77. This kind of terminological recurrence cannot in my opinion be a coincidence. 74 Christ’s comings are always in Yeats veiled in analogies that prevent one from regarding them as literal ones. They are nebulous, evocative, vague, disguised and hidden. The Madonna in ‘Wisdom’ sews Christ’s trousers, or so it seems, leading us to read there a reference to Rossetti’s early paintings. Her son, though, will later move among

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public occasion already from the end of the first stanza, gliding abruptly away from the concrete – a visit to a school – towards a phantasmagoria of memories and an atmosphere of yearning for the unattainable and the lost unity of being.75 In the transition from reality to dream the lyric becomes from the second stanza a play of mirrors and projections, therefore tracing an arduous logical circuit. Evoked by the schoolgirls, Maud had a body resembling that of Leda, though Yeats did not have ‘the pretty plumage’ of the swan. He finds himself an ‘old scarecrow’, the familiar ‘tattered coat upon a stick’. The gap between past and present, between on the one hand a love that seemed to be mutual and satisfied, and on the other one that was unfulfilled is as piercing as in ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’, another poem about the swans and the poet who looks at them. Merging memory and controversy, Yeats picks up again the opening theme of the girls being educated according to the best ‘modern’ pedagogy to eventually reject religious sublimation and manipulation of the body, which is sterile, in favour of the physical and spiritual unity of being, symbolized by the chestnut tree that grows harmonious and strong from its roots to its trunk. Yeats is now openly anti-Platonic and anti-Pythagorean, or rather Aristotelian. In ‘All Souls’ Night’, which is also the epilogue to A Vision, the poet speaks under his breath to his fellow occultists about his drive to forget the world and get wrapped up, like a mummy in its shroud, in the contemplation of lunar philosophy, particularly of the part that is the continuation of life in death. The three deceased who answer the spiritualist invocation are enticed by the witty and improvised magic of the fumes of Muscatel in a college room in Oxford, at the fateful stroke of midnight. Hungry for mystical experiences to the point of self-destruction, they are described, as often in Yeats, with quick and vivid strokes, coupled stanzas by coupled stanzas, hailed for their inexhaustible investigation into the hereafter where they have transmigrated.

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‘the starry towers of Babylon’. A different trinity generated him; the closing lines are a riddle. Yeats wanders around the school ‘questioning’, ready, that is, to ask the dead or the absent rather than the girls and the nuns the same questions he had wanted to ask the poetic ghosts in ‘The Tower’.

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§ 82. Yeats after 1919 VI: ‘The Winding Stair and Other Poems’. The Platonic idea and the revenge of the human The emotional background of The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933) is old age and the approach of death. The collection is Yeats’s version of a Death’s Duel in its obsessive insistence on endings: the end of feminine beauty drained by political utopia; the end and conflagration of time towards a revival and entrance into another life through the spiritual experience of fire, an ascent then towards mystical annihilation. The old poet recalls better moments, vivid experiences, incisive and formative figures from the past. The tone is that of remembrance, more frequently an inner meditation that diverts, drifts, is not preordained but twists and turns. The dominant mood is oscillating, as in the lyric ‘Vacillation’ where the extremes it speaks of are those of the sublimation of the instincts and the revaluation of the corporeal, of an animalistic bestiality, of pure and instinctual eroticism: of the dross, the filth, the ‘pig of the world’ against all advocates of sublimation. The ‘bishop’ of this collection is the saint of one of the last poems of The Wild Swans at Coole, who struggles to represses in himself all beastly temptations. The revenge of the human against the superhuman is celebrated for an instant in ‘Byzantium’. The Platonic idea that may decay in its realized form but still survives as a mental archetype returns on the scene with Maud. But now the theme of an ending is projected, from the personal onto a national and cosmic scale. The winding stair is the symbol that identifies not the linear or progressive movement as in nineteenth-century philosophies, but the spiralling one. Both universal and individual history move in a spiral. Historically the civilization in which Yeats writes lies in the lunar phases twenty-three to twenty-five, corresponding to a moment of excessive abstraction and of thought no longer rooted in the senses but stripped down to the bone. Plato and Plotinus had become less congenial to Yeats because too bent towards the abstract.76 He was concerned that there were no heirs of the spiritual legacy embodied in Lady Gregory’s park and estate. The words ‘everything has changed’ echo from ‘Easter 1916’, but without the implied meaning of wonder and

76 See above, n. 50.

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the ecstatic cry. Lady Gregory had given birth to an Eden, or at least to an artistic coterie out of time that was threatened, and the poet foresaw its impending doom. Looking for salvation, he turned not to the future but to the anchor of the past. As a guest on Lady Gregory’s estate, he felt himself to be participating in a tradition of Protestant Irish liberalism, the last link in the chain of Grattan, Burke, Swift, Berkeley, Goldsmith. This chain was about to break and with it the tradition of aristocratic pride, which was never to be paraded, but humble and restrained. In this context, Yeats repeated the refrain that Ireland was dead and buried. The prevailing form is the memorial rhapsody on the evanescence of river and lake landscape at Coole. After some long lyrics in dialogue and rhapsody, a few verse fragments take over, mostly quatrains and imagistic contrasts of sheer charm, stripped of occult references and appreciable for this vein of simplicity. Formally extended odes, either memorializing or visionary, alternate with snappy and elliptical aphorisms, reduced both in length and in imaginative commitment. The visionary mode informs the most memorable composition of the collection, ‘Byzantium’. At the end, there is the objectification of the two self-sufficient mini-cycles, the section with twenty-five lyrics, ‘Words for Music Perhaps’, and a second with eleven poems, entitled ‘A Woman Young and Old’. 2. The opening lyric obliquely announces the theme of death looming over life and the unrealized chance of overcoming death through the consideration of the body. Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz, participants in the Easter uprising, were two beautiful women who have withered, having consumed and extinguished their attractiveness in political passion. They are an ‘image of such politics’ in their now shrivelled and gaunt body, oblivious to that life of the imagination that was the promise of youth. It is at the same time a new recollection of the 1916 uprising, an attempt to establish something ‘beautiful’ and ‘innocent’, as already in ‘Easter 1916’, perhaps now more innocent than terrible; and a utopian attempt because time is ontologically an enemy, so that any enterprise aiming to eternalize human initiative is ephemeral and doomed to failure. As if in an angry suspension of the sense of reality, the poet is led to light a match and set fire to time, the great enemy, thus fixing a constant opposition in the collection between dreamed-of eternity and the impermanence of the real.

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‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ is a kind of funeral knell, as in Marlowe’s Faustus, or a revisiting of the Everyman. The self is called by the soul to the winding stair leading to the top of the tower and to the encounter with death and to the body’s dissolution in the dark night. But it is a dialogue of the deaf: the self is not thinking of his impending annihilation, but rather lingers obliviously on an emblem of eternity or of a life that does not rust away: the artistic object, Sato’s sword,77 from which the soul wants to divert him. The old sword reawakens the old man to thoughts of love and war, while the soul wants to lead him towards the contemplation of death, wants to get him to regard the earthly with contempt and thus suppress the imagination, the latter always for Yeats a promise of a life that survives even when the body decays. This new Faustus challenges conscience with an a-moralist rebellion, the blows of which silence the conscience, leaving the poet’s self free and alone on the stage, free, above all, to get bogged down, to go down into the pit of impurity rather than to ascend. The poet denies nothing of his past life, proudly presenting its imperfections to his settling of the accounts. In Yeats’s discourse there is no point in trying to escape from one’s own history and the assigned teleology of one’s ‘daimon’. He is prepared to relive lost battles like loving again a haughty woman who turns him down; once consciousness has been tamed and regret overcome, the blessing is no longer granted by Heaven but bestowed by the self. ‘Blood and the Moon’, which echoes and perfects ‘The Tower’, evokes the same tower as a sarcastic pledge of immortality against a time ‘Half dead at the top’. Yeats himself shows off with solemn assertiveness the mechanism of the poem, calling the tower a ‘powerful emblem’, and soon after, in no uncertain terms, his ‘symbol’, the symbol of an Irish cultural tradition of very different spirits – Swift, Goldsmith, Burke, Berkeley – in his dedication to the subjective, even to the pathologically self-centred, and to an organic and spiritual life against primary scientism and intellectual solidity. The secondary theme is the celebration of lunar man and of the tower bathed in the moon’s 77 In ‘Symbols’, which deals with the contemplative life of the hermit in the tower, who foresees the advent of violent barbarity, the sword is no longer Sato’s, but that of any wandering fool.

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innocence, with the planet’s white blood the instigator not of violence, but of a ‘drunken frenzy’.78 ‘Coole Park 1919’ surveys other figures who used to visit Lady Gregory’s estate, the august predecessors who left her like swallows, with Yeats himself the only one to stay. Lady Gregory was the binding agent between different spiritual energies and the still point of the compass around which moved the poets in formation (an image of course reminiscent of Donne). But Yeats feels their dispersion impending. Still in the eight-line stanza that Yeats prefers for reminiscence, ‘Coole Park and Ballylee’ follows ‘Coole Park 1919’ as in a diptych.79 Here the winding river that flows into Coole Lake is the symbol of the generation of the soul, as is the swan taking off from its surface. In a letter about this poem, Yeats suggested hesitantly that the swan might be ‘a symbol of inspiration’. His first associations are no longer now the beauty and the ‘conquest’ of ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’, but a dematerialized purity, ‘concentration of the sky’. The impromptu poetics announced by Yeats is the one celebrating ‘traditional sanctity’, ‘grace’, an uplifting art ideally part of a ‘book of the people’ – a poetics he almost never implemented.80 This desire for purification is taken up again in ‘Byzantium’. While the first poetic Byzantium was that of the sixth century and of phase fifteen, it is now the imaginary city of the end of the first millennium. Yeats evokes the

78 In the historical sense, the tower represents a wish for fusion ( Johnson 2005, 1333) between the conquering Normans and the conquered Celts seven centuries earlier, between the Ascendancy Protestants and the Catholics now. This reintegration is attributed to Protestant but not sectarian thinkers, supporters of a different native Irish heritage in which Protestants and Catholics come to an agreement and become jointly juxtaposed to the abstract cultural type of the British. The ‘time half-dead at the top’ is also a critique of Britain through the means of the four great Irishmen evoked in the poem. The investigation into the contribution made by those four figures is continued in ‘The Seven Sages’, where another point of convergence lies in the opposition to the Whigs, symbolizing a rational attitude contrasted with that of the saint or the drunkard. 79 Becoming a triptych with ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’, which returns to the celebration of a sense of discordia concors among spirits. 80 Bloom 1970, 382, notes that this poetics does not fit in with Yeats’s claim that he and Lady Gregory were ‘the last Romantics’.

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word ‘image’ several times and the poem is a dream or liturgical delirium in which the sensuality of art is overcome in return for a total abstraction of the spirit, accessible only by death. The narcotic approach of night at the poem’s opening rejects, or rather abolishes, the complexities of thought, eliminates the sensual, the unclean and any excess of carnal appetite. The exorcism of dirt and impurity takes place in this ideal nocturnal blackout after the ardours of daytime.81 This turning inward is so deep that it can be understood in terms of a dream that has been rejected by reality. Yeats invokes in fact the exact opposite of his lunar hierarchies: the disdain of ‘all that man is’ and the celebration of the ‘superhuman’.82 In ‘Vacillation’ he gradually proposes antinomies with one hand and with the other tries to reconcile them. These are the antinomies – ‘extremes’, ‘contradictions’ – of day and night, life and death, joy and remorse, Moon and Sun, self and the soul, swordsman and saint, action and contemplation. The oscillation is formal, too, between fragments of philosophical and meditative poetry, pensive, symbolic, and other fragments that offer lightning impressions and vivid memories of daily life.83 The same purgatorial and penitential flame consumes the pleasures of the flesh, but even supposing their acceptance, the question remains of what joy is left in life. The red-green tree, which is ‘all the scene’, is on fire at the top while sinking its roots into the earth; he who hung the representation of Attis’ emasculation there ‘knows not grief ’. Point and counterpoint, concessions to vanity and human weakness, imperious calls to rectitude as a way to meet death succeed each other in the poem, until the heart and soul confront each other in a loud and bitter exchange that takes place in short, incisive single-line responses. The

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The fourth stanza describes the purification from mud and from fury as a dance, a trance and even ‘an agony of fire’ in yet another anticipation of Eliot, particularly the final lines of Four Quartets. When looking at the cyclical plane of history and at the phase in which Byzantium finds itself in this poem, the more necessary and more coherent symbolic development should have been that of a society and of the soul moving towards the bliss of wisdom. But in this period Yeats repeatedly wanted to ‘return to religion’ (quoted in Johnson 2005, 1366). Such as the sudden access of bliss in the London shop (section IV).

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last word is for a Yeats inclined to saintliness, even if he dismisses with a blessing a Catholic theologian with a rather different take on it. 3. Words for Music Perhaps84 was drafted in Rapallo between 1929 and 1931, while Yeats was recovering from an illness that had also led to sexual abstinence and therefore instilled in Yeats a desire as acute as ever. It then forms a ‘contrast’, too, or rather the resolution in objectified form of a contrast after an oscillation. The bulk of it is made up of poems attributed to Crazy Jane;85 a trio is spoken by Tom the Lunatic; others do not belong to the voice of any specific character. Jane’s craziness signifies alienation from social and religious norms; her distant correlative was an old Irish peasant who had suffered the same religious troubles as those of the poetic character. In the text a bishop rebukes a pair of peasants, Jane and Jack, who have had a sexual relationship outside of marriage. Jane bitterly attacks the bishop for the rebukes which caused her Jack’s death. These short and unpretentious poems, which Yeats was surprised to have written without the ‘grief ’ that usually accompanied creation, but with ease, pleasure and a sense of wellbeing, rake up again the old theme of the unity of being and the rejection of sexual abstention before marriage. Connected to this (as it always is in non-religious poets) is the ultimate salvation of pure love from a god that is not that of the various revealed faiths, but one who turns a blind eye. The twenty-five little poems are Yeats’s supreme contribution to the purely lyrical genre. Some of them (‘The Three Things’ and ‘Lullaby’, for instance, the latter featuring a maternal breast nursing the child that merges with the breast upon which the lover lavishes his sexual desire and which feeds it) can be enjoyed without any previous or subsequent knowledge of lunar philosophy, and recall the lightness of the Elizabethan and seventeenthcentury poets. The opening lyrics of this cycle play on the strings of sexual

84 The ‘music’ in the title must be understood as divorced from the actual ( Johnson 2005, 1372), as pure lyricism, expression of desires and emotions – an inner music, therefore. Yeats confessed ( Johnson 2005, 1077) that ‘music without accompanying words’ bored him. 85 The body’s prowess is lack of wisdom, whereas the chastity of old age is itself wisdom, achieved at a high price. In the light of all this, ‘crazy’ is here also a metaphor for sexual excitation.

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abstinence, which deforms, makes one hunched,86 dries the skin; the peasant used to be straight as a ramrod, but is now lying under the ground.87 In the following poems,88 Jane replies to the admonitions of the bishop to live a virtuous rather than an animal life, arguing that from the filthy and imperfect one can rise to the perfect, that imperfection and sin are therefore part of the dialectic of existence. From the eighth poem onwards the continuity of the voice is broken. The thirteenth echoes Rossetti, with its cut-off hair placed by the woman on Love’s grave. Yeats takes over from the fifteenth poem to speak of his declining desire and increasing wisdom, and of the regret for youth – the madness of wind and mist – now that wisdom has come. The three songs of Tom the Lunatic concern the law of change and the stillness that is found only in God. The final sub-cycle, ‘A Woman Young and Old’, is made up of often cold technical exercises on female coquetry and the flirtation and the seductions of the body which stimulate the male lover toward achieving a physical-corporeal unity of being. It is occasioned by an indistinct biographical detail, of the father anxious about his daughter using make-up, with Yeats himself being the father, though the main voice is that of the woman, whose vanity corresponds to the search for the Platonic archetypal image – while the lure of the world, of the purely physical, continues to utter its tormenting reminder. The references are erudite, to Browning’s poem about a woman making a first and then a final ‘confession’ (‘A Woman’s Last Word’), to the adapted myths of Perseus and Adonis, and to a parody of Romeo and Juliet.

86 With a literal reference to the hunchback’s repression, as noted in ‘The Saint and the Hunchback’. 87 Johnson (2005, 1375) argues convincingly that in the second refrain of the first poem there is an exchange of referential images for the two male figures, ‘coxcomb’ and ‘solid man’. 88 The refrain in the second lyric of the cycle, ‘Fol de rol, fol de rol’, is the same as that found in the only poem by Herbert Trench (1865–1923) – a song – included in Yeats’s anthology The Oxford Book of Modern Verse.

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§ 83. Yeats after 1919 VII: ‘From A Full Moon in March’ In the few poems of this 1935 collection,89 written in recovery from a period of creative drought, we witness a sudden surge of political passion. Yeats rails against Irish hypocrisy that had condemned Parnell, whom he defends and rehabilitates; he hails the heroism of the Blueshirts; he assays more then once the tones and metres of the pounding choral ballad with refrain. The example of the great statesman is evoked for a country that has no leadership, itself an image of the cosmos adrift. Yet lyricism returns in an appendix, with Yeats’s witty prayer for himself, the usual call to the unison of mind-body-action.90 The target is therefore abstract thinking to which a madness that is true rather than stale wisdom is preferred. ‘Parnell’s Funeral’ is interwoven with elliptical and risky analogies and is at the same time a long cry of protest, a bitter Horatian invective against the ‘unholy rubble’. One of the first analogies it develops is between Parnell’s heart pierced by his own countrymen and the Kabbalistic and mythological theme depicted in a Sicilian coin that is nearly identical: that of a young man whose heart is ripped out by a ‘Great Mother’. The asyndetic ekphrasis of the coin takes up the whole of the second stanza. Nature had participated in mourning with a fallen star in broad daylight, a supernatural phenomenon recorded with amazement by the newspapers of that distant day of 1891. Parnell’s heart has been brutally devoured by the Irish, who gather around the grave of the ‘great comedian’, O’Connell. Yeats always reviled the figure of the patriot O’Connell, whom he considered the emblem of Catholic corruption. But he revered Parnell instead, as a spokesman for the Protestant tradition and above all as a ‘symbol of proud, personal, solitary intellect’ – an emblem, that is, of subjectivity. History and the myth of the god devoured, so that he could rise again, overlap: the analogy links Parnell to the rank and stature of a sacrificed and sacrificial god. With another conceptual transition, eating the heart becomes a positive act for Parnell’s supporters, who thus safeguard his spiritual life and perpetuate 89 The title does not indicate a selection from a larger collection of poems but rather from one also including one-act plays as for an earlier collection (see Volume 6, § 261.3). 90 ‘A Prayer for Old Age’.

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his political lesson. In fact in the second part of the poem, which sums up the forty years that have intervened since the death of the statesman, Yeats does not recognize any worthy successor and denounces the rule of populist rhetoric and rancour.91 The three songs that follow, ‘to the same tune’ and in the form of a sprightly ballad by a man condemned to the gallows, deal with Ireland’s decline at the hands of fanatical populist leaders. Yeats had composed them in the first moment of his infatuation with O’Duffy’s fascist brigades and subsequently revised them to make them more generic when that infatuation evaporated. They have the imprint of other military ballads, of the rapid recall of other idols of the libertarian tradition (rarely mentioned before) and of bold warriors defying danger and condemned by cowards. With a sharp reversal of tone, ‘Supernatural Songs’ are twelve Orphic and esoteric hymns of the old hermit Ribh, whom Yeats called an imaginary critic of St Patrick and is thus the emblem of a primitive Christianity that had absorbed features of the oldest Indian and Egyptian faiths which could still be traced in the Irish Protestant Church. Ribh is one of Yeats’s masks since he preaches the spiritualization of sensual love and the incandescent totality reached in physical union. He is Yeats trying to explain and to bow to a spiritual marriage, together with its supreme realization even post mortem, as was his with Maud. In the second and extremely complex poem, Ribh preaches a new concept of the Trinity made up of father, mother and child. In so doing, it posits the principle of sexual procreation as an agent in both the natural and the supernatural world. Yeats explained that ‘the central idea of the poem is that we generate and give birth because of the incompleteness of our love’, and that the human couple participates in the Trinity of God the more it moves towards the perfect forms of human love – that is, from multiplicity to unity. In the equally paradoxical and heretical fifth poem, Ribh espouses a negative theology that casts hatred as a purgative agent of ideological waste in the 91

In the first part, Parnell is never explicitly named, only alluded to; in the second, Yeats lists even too many names, failing the Presidents de Valera and Cosgrave and suspending judgement on O’Duffy, the leader of the Blueshirts. ‘Church and State’ hopes for a domination of the people rather than a Church and State who dominate the people, and with which the people identify.

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soul and the spirit, and thanks to this regeneration is a proponent of a new encounter with the true God, always a mystical union that goes beyond purely intellectual understanding. The erotic embrace in the eighth poem transforms the couple into cosmic, ‘echolalic’ actors who praise eternity, an intoxication from which they wake up unaware and drowsy. The ending compresses in four lines the primary cycle inaugurated with ‘frigid Rome’, which started to crack with the birth of Charlemagne. Ribh is then ousted by Yeats, who in the remaining very short poems offers flashing and imagistic aphorisms of his lunar and cyclical philosophy. In this short cycle, the weave of esoteric references thickens, such as in the issue of an influence external to the facts of history, and of the four ages of the individual. The closing sonnet, ‘Meru’,92 reluctantly admits that the world ‘is hooped’ by illusions, but points to a spiritual enlightenment based on ancient Hindu religion, founded on the culture of the soul and the search for truth. § 84. Yeats after 1919 VIII: Testaments Yeats’s fertile post-1936 production could not be arranged, published and organized into a collection before he died in 1939. The first complete edition of his late copious blossoming appeared under the overall title of ‘last poems’. In later editions this substantial corpus was broken up into at least three sub-sections: ‘new’ poems, ‘last’ ones and finally a group of three formerly included in the prose composition ‘On the Boiler’. These demarcations are based on rigorous principles of philological accuracy but not on perceptible variations of theme or style. Yeats, until the end, remains faithful to his poetics of unity in heterogeneity. The only issue of textual editing that still remains open is the placing of the rhapsody ‘Under Ben Bulben’, whether at the beginning or the end.93 The absence of revisions gives now the impression of a magma without an ordering principle, since sixty compositions can make up a varied, rich collection that could be divided up into the well-established chapters of Yeats’s inspiration: 92 According to the ancient Hindu myths, Meru is the great golden mountain at the centre of the world, where the gods live. 93 In this discussion, I shall follow the order of poems in the 1958 edition, where ‘Under Ben Bulben’ is placed last, the position that seems to me most appropriate.

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the vein of actuality, including Irish politics; mythology and the mythological projection or stance; the restatements of and ruminations on lunar philosophy interwoven with other hermetic and esoteric motifs. On the other hand, almost half of the lyrics are ballads, songs, ‘broadsides’; some consciously inclining towards song. The opening mode is a visionary eruption that is both engaged and complex, or maybe even a rhapsodic poem along the lines of Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. Yeats discusses the position of the poet in the period now approaching the Second World War: a participant absence, the sense of sharing a tragic joy, avoiding art’s direct involvement in politics. Art is then a membrane sublimating the real. The opening lyrics are among the best ever in Yeats, at least for those who prefer the simplicity and universality of the references, the poetic in its pure form, but also an argument that is not convoluted, forcefully truncated, perhaps, but straightforward: a poetry of direct and evocative images, such as the spiral, the lapis lazuli, the animals in the circus. An occasional vein then intervenes, made up of re-readings and reassessments of his life, of remembrance of figures from the past, in patriotic ballads deliberately loose and messy, interspersed with popular refrains. But whichever order is followed, the progress is once again in fits and starts: a powerful coda with new and contorted poems ‘about civilization’ soon comes to life. Among these final combinations are some of the most risky and convoluted mixes of mythological and lunar reflexes, inextricable mazes that produce in those who attempt them laborious, scrambling paraphrases, or expositions and premises on lunar philosophy that are inadequate to the complications found on the page, especially since the images functioning as ‘vehicle’ – as in ‘The Black Tower’ – are themselves conflicting and sophisticated.94 Two in particular belong to a sub-species of the poems ‘about civilization’, since both are about the historical parable and the trajectory of art, at first demiurgic and antithetical, until, after the Italian Renaissance, the spiral turned to an art become fatally objective. According to the lunar philosophy the era in which Yeats wrote was the twenty-second phase of the ‘breaking of 94 Everything is relative. Yeats considered himself different from ‘those poets’ of the Left he found difficult, and thought his own poetic expression closer to the simplicity of the common people.

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the force’ and the further decline of civilization toward objective phases. In this case Yeats’s anguish and satire give way to a Nietzschean tragic or cathartic joy when faced with the Apocalypse. Yeats often hails this constructive, interior serenity. 2. ‘The Gyres’, at the outset, is with ‘The Second Coming’ one of the most dazzling invocations of a prophetic, bard-like Yeats, who foresaw a rapid succession of bloody epochal collapses of order, beauty, art and the advent of civilizations founded on ugliness, on blood, on the senses uncoupled from the mind and therefore on dissociation. Summoned to interrogate the oracles, the old stone face is the poet-prophet himself, who notes with disappointment that the civilization of beauty (it sounds like Ruskin) dies by saturation and, therefore, by a historical law. Having reached its peak, value too must decline. Perhaps more concretely, Yeats foretells the advent of the irrational, the Europe of violent, exterminating dictatorships knocking at the door. Faced with the impending catastrophe the poet could take up an attitude of aesthetic and decadent detachment, passive, blind and even nostalgic; or he could sublimate the tragedy into joy, as Yeats advocated. The third stanza is more hopeful that noble human specimens, active and constructive (in reality art, life, and soul) might live again from the marble tombs. This is recommended and guaranteed if history is a winding spiral and therefore cyclical. ‘Lapis Lazuli’, which immediately follows, is a propositional, illustrative rhapsody strictly divided into two sections, the second of which describes a scene engraved on a Chinese lapis lazuli. The basic question is what must art do when faced with the sights described in ‘The Gyres’: become an active voice, dissuade and intervene, as many wanted it to, or cultivate indirection, appearing abstract, secluded, contemplative, indeed ‘gay’? Yeats will defend the latter. If nothing is done someone will raze the world to the ground with bombs; but those who know they are playing a part – à la Pirandello – also know that when the curtain falls95 they will not cry but sublimate the pain into gaiety, into joy, as in ‘The Gyres’. The secret is to transform the nightmare, 95 The second section is all taken up by a theatrical metaphor. The ‘black out’ that intervenes at the change of scenery will recur and be developed in a different way by Eliot in the second of the Four Quartets. Eliot will use the image of a Chinese jar

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be consciously actors and estranged as if in a play by Brecht. The tragedy of life is already taking place and cannot decrease or increase by ‘an ounce’. The object, even the artefact, perishes in its physical materiality, but what is destroyed will be rebuilt, with gaiety. This premise is demonstrated by the three ‘Chinamen’ engraved in the lapis lazuli and by the bird that stands out against the background, ‘symbol of longevity’ if not eternity. This engraved scene is a symbol of continuity for its contents, but also manifests the gaiety of a contemplative art, in retreat within a shelter or ‘half-way house’, that is not insensitivity but a waiting for the renewal. 3. The general pattern of this last collection alternates strong poems, dense and encompassing, with others in the realm of the fugitive, often in the form of pungent Irish ballads, rich and coarse. After the prophetic debut, witty, meditative short poems take over. There is the cameo of a dancer, subject of two flashes of memory; a Gothic or more exactly Boccaccesque ballad – ‘The Three Bushes’ – on devotion in love, the heartfelt but secret passion of a woman who loves only ‘with her soul’ and is thinking of letting her beloved lie with the chambermaid. She sublimates physical love and dies without having enjoyed carnal love. In this ballad additional chants of lady and maid hinge on the negation and affirmation of carnal love, and finally agree on the oneness of body-spirit. Yet another analogical repetition of the principal theme of Yeats’s oeuvre, this short cycle gives way to a virile lyrical vein, openly challenging, inebriated by the wait for an ultimate renewal, the vein of ‘An Acre of Grass’, announcing a second youth, active, energetic, untamed, truth-seeking. This witty lyricism, disconsolate but not defeated, and very sincere, continues in ‘What Then?’. In this poem’s self-assessment, Yeats can look in the mirror because he is both himself and another observer who weighs him up more objectively. To the feeling of having accomplished something the poem opposes the more meandering sense that the road is still unfinished. Vivid little portraits are devoted to Margot Ruddock and to Dorothy Wellesley, poets who symbolize an art longing to possess a visionary reality which perpetually escapes them. Once this series is finished too, there follows one made up of ballads on public as the symbol of an art which may not always be gay, but still turns upon itself while appearing to be fixed.

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figures such as Cromwell, Casement and Parnell. These poems ultimately do not add anything new to Yeats’s indignation at the state of things in Ireland, since they simply juxtapose to it a new version of the mansion of the cultural patron such as Lady Gregory had been, under whose roof noble and beautiful minds congregate. With Casement, Yeats always boldly supports those who, like Parnell, have been the target of a prurient and bigoted public opinion. The metres are dominated by the loud, sonorous boldness of folk ballads destined to be sung. Yeats recognized that the outcome was inferior, but he strongly felt his civic duty. In effect these lyrics mark a lapse in taste and in poetic achievement; they are cheap, hasty, slovenly like the chorus of a hero’s retinue in a tavern. ‘The Wild Old Wicked Man’, a dialogue, returns to the contrast between the wild satisfaction of bodily needs and, as far as the woman is concerned, renunciation and chastity. Immediately after, Yeats returns to the first person with aphorisms redolent of cyclical schemes and announcements of a renewal, X-rays of inspiration and even of senile lust, the latter also objectified in the ballad of an old pilgrim who cannot sublimate the urge of desire in repentance. ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’ passes in review, with intermittent emphasis, some of the heroes from the true lineage, those who set a standard of national excellence and who are now in the past, having been followed by pale copies. The unfolding of the vision of the paintings in the gallery is marked by the same spirit as the previous odes, consisting of miniature portraits of illustrious men now dead accompanied by short assessments of the work of each. Yeats’s praise of the generosity and hospitality of Lady Gregory’s salon was by now commonplace and proverbial. The rhapsody therefore does not sound a new note, even if the excitement felt in front of the pictures is genuine and the epiphany truly dazzling.96 From the perspective of just a few years, Yeats recognized an already mythical Ireland, one ‘the poets have imagined’ rather than the ‘dead’ Ireland of his youth.97 96 Yeats invites his family to ‘this sacred place’, a sanctuary of revelations that is different from Eliot’s ones, which represent the end and ends of the world, such as Little Gidding. 97 The disappointment of not being worthy of that tradition which filters through this ode becomes explicit in ‘Are You Content?’.

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But there is a swift passage to ballad-like songs on heroic figures past and present, bold ones, challenging, rebellious. Yeats goes constantly fishing for new specimens and archetypes for his ideals: a rogue tinker here, there a meditative type and then again the heroes of the Easter Rising. The feeling of old age and impending death is objectified and made automatic in the folk legend of the King of Tara, told in two beautifully concise stanzas.98 4. The artificial and mannered ‘The Statues’ is a return to a poetry that is oracular, enigmatic, condensed, and a rhapsody of dizzying conceptual compression. With allusively elliptical imaginative and dark formulas, it sums up in four stanzas the evolutionary design of art and civilization in the three milestones of Greece (prefigured by Egypt), Byzantium and the Italian Renaissance. In actual fact the poem aims acrobatically to combine the abstract arabesque on the evolution of the arts with Irish current affairs. It is also verbally circular, since it ends with the wishful speculation that the Ireland of the heroes of the 1916 insurrection descended from the ‘ancient lineage’ of the Greeks and that those heroes, who had been thrown across centuries, or exactly two millennia, to land in the modern era, had been as if mentally and ideally engaged in rowing back up the river of time, and in finding in themselves, still active, ‘the features of a plummet-measured face’. This is the Pythagorean plan mentioned in the opening stanza, the first principle of the number without ‘character’, that is, abstract, which was embodied in the marble forms of Phidias’ sculpture, the law of supple and dynamic harmony that was transmitted to the west. In a reduction that Yeats himself called ‘prejudicial’ and is indebted to Pater’s Greek Studies, Greek art is seen as a ‘modelling of calculations’; the young Greeks kissed statues and in kissing them infused life into the cold marble and the ‘casual flesh’. It was Greek art and not military power which determined the victory of the Greeks over the Persians, the art born from the Pythagorean philosophy of numbers, precise, mathematical, unitary, which overcame Asian art, a ‘many-headed foam’ in a passage from the manifold to oneness.99 ‘News 98 ‘In Tara’s Halls’. 99 The most obscure and cryptic stanza (harshly criticized by Bloom, 1970, 443–4, who devotes to this poem one of his best commentaries) is the third one, in which Yeats takes a step back, or makes a conceptual diversion, to describe the importation of

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for the Delphic Oracle’, a scenography or phantasmagoria of the island of the blessed, is also a catalogue of Yeatsian mixed deities, from different eras and mythical and historical traditions, Greek and Irish. ‘Long-legged Fly’ fears the end of civilization without government or with an inadequate guide. In three anaphoric, disconnected and allusive stanzas that remain sharp and vivid, it depicts Caesar and Michelangelo as emblems of the mind’s control over reality, while in the third the leader and the artist are joined by the hypostasis of the dancer, whose ‘mind moves upon silence’, like that of her male counterparts. 5. These very last poems are still short and impromptu yet secretly connected, ever changing in form, now scathing, now heartfelt. Their mental theatre flips from the remembrance of Maud Gonne to the restoration of an active, heroic, antithetical age – a motif on which now weighs the eugenic concern (‘the best blood’) also expressed in the prose of ‘On the Boiler’ – to the traditionalist aversion to ‘modern’ poetry, often of the Left, which was gaining ground at the same time as Yeats’s own, and to the artist’s disengagement. The theme is better developed and more thoughtfully discussed in ‘The Man and the Echo’. Yeats there questions the active and pragmatic effectiveness of his poetry, feels serious responsibility for having sent someone to his death maybe, or made him crazy, and is racked by remorse. But he still asserts the private, public and prophetic value of art above any practical effects or repercussions; the making of poetry is again a seeking for gaiety and joy. Three longer and more impressive compositions seal the Yeatsian corpus in a valedictory mode, two of them in the poet’s own voice, the third in objectified form. ‘Cuchulain Comforted’100 is evocative and surreal, in abrupt tercets reminiscent of Dante. It has a wounded king urged to desist from the fight and to sew a shroud for his journey in the afterlife; the most individualistic of warriors has now to learn

Greek art into India, with the example of a statue of a fat and round Buddha, which he views as similar to Hamlet, but the Hamlet with rapier and dagger which Yeats considered to be a self-possessed man of action, not the vacillating melancholic of modern staging. The Hellenic Buddhas had an empty gaze to express their indifference to reality. 100 Written as a sequel to the play The Death of Cuchulain.

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a new law, laying down his arms for the needle and preparing himself to live with cowardly spirits. It is the last of Yeats’s self-mythologizing poems, on a character familiar since his debut and the protagonist of many of his plays. ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ lists and surveys in chronological order the materials of Yeats’s previous poetry, worn-out themes by now, to the point where the heart remains the last resort. After the opening, metapoetic octave, the question ‘What can I but enumerate old themes?’ sounds like a Byronic anticlimax.101 In fact the poet, now almost at death’s door, spreads a veil of irony that casts doubts on his past identification with heroes such as Oisin, ‘led by the nose’, driven to an ever ‘vain search’ (the adjective is repeated three times in a single line), without ever getting his elusive ‘faery bride’, as Yeats with Maud. He sees his themes and their icons become mentally objectified, treating them like a tamer with his animals, perched on stilts and pedestals – as if, again under the figure of vanity, they wished to parade themselves. Cathleen is the one imbued with fanaticism who recklessly ‘had given her soul away’ as she was dazzled by the dream that she had mistaken for reality. In this poem Yeats brings down the curtain on his mythopoeic poetry, without announcing other veins than a poetry rooted in the heart and in its impurities. He is no longer climbing the stairs to the tower, but stops at the first step, which rests on waste and corruption, whence, according to his philosophy, every ascent to the pure and the perfect must begin. ‘Under Ben Bulben’ was revised two days before Yeats’s death; it touches the emotional and conceptual core and the leitmotifs of the late Yeats. In some editions this was the closing poem, as I mentioned, though other critics are inclined to give it the sense of an introduction and of a prologue. It is a testament filtered by voices and by teachings of human beings, gods and demi-gods, invoked close to the sacred mountain. The message is that death, which separates from the eternity of the race, is a return to the eternity of the soul. From the third stanza onwards, Yeats leans inexorably toward a diagnosis of the present and of the regenerative duties of subjective man. Rebirth always had to be preceded by a violent phase to which even the wisest had to stoop, even before they ‘accomplish fate’ by choosing a bride with whom racial 101 It echoes almost to the letter the beginning of Don Juan, in which Byron, like Yeats, confesses his own inability to find themes and heroes for the poem.

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purity could be perpetuated. The second half of the rhapsody unfolds in a concise, abbreviated outline of the paths of universal art, with the artist helping the soul’s return to God. Repeating and glossing ‘The Statues’, the poem argues that art is born from Pythagorean harmony and is actualized in the Greek sculpture of Phidias; it then moves into the Renaissance and into the forms of Michelangelo, forms of a ‘profane’ creation and evidence of a superhuman purpose in art and in the artist. The art of the fifteenth century represented for Yeats a backdrop where the daydreams of someone who has just woken up are materialized, and where the sky looks like it is opening up. After this historic climax there came a decline, or rather this decline began after Blake and the end of Romanticism. The symptom of this decline, affecting even Irish history, is a commodified, polluted, degraded art, a situation which triggers the peroration calling for more genuine and popular art forms. Raising his voice a bit too much, the dying Yeats passes the baton to the new Irish artists, suggests for them realistic themes, stories of the poor and of aristocrats. This final poem offers then a series of precepts for posterity. § 85. Yeats after 1919 IX: The dramas* All of Yeats’s plays from 1917 onwards102 are more properly short and intense stage actions, without divisions into acts; and in one case only do they have distinct scenes. In some a time is stated, but it is a ‘heroic’ time, therefore mythological, in effect a temporal void. The place is always *

From the general bibliography on Yeats in Volume 6, two pioneering studies, although disorganized and in several parts debatable, may be recalled: F. A. C. Wilson, W. B. Yeats and Tradition, London 1958 and 1961, and Yeats’s Iconography, London 1960, along with Vendler 1963. To these I add L. E. Nathan, The Tragic Drama of William Butler Yeats, New York and London 1965; R. Taylor, The Drama of W. B. Yeats: Irish Myth and the Japanese Noh, New Haven, CT and London, 1976 (the best on Noh theatre and its influence on Yeats), and A Reader’s Guide to the Plays of W. B. Yeats, London 1984; D. Calimani, ‘W. B. Yeats. Il ciclo interrotto’, in Fuori dall’Eden. Teatro inglese moderno, Venezia 1993, 103–36; E. G. Carlotti, Le danze dei simboli. Scrittura e pratica scenica nel teatro di W. B. Yeats, Pisa 1993 (with a useful emphasis on anthropological schemes); F. Gasparini, W. B. Yeats e il teatro dell’ ‘antica memoria’, Pisa 2002.

102 The dates in brackets following the title of each play refer to the last revision and are those given in the collected editions.

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symbolic or dream-like, moorlands without geographical coordinates, or indefinable royal courts where vagabonds, old or blind or mad men, poets or storytellers congregate. It is light years away from a theatre of natural environments and meticulously realistic interiors. The actors have to pretend to act out, or rather mimic, the actions which the chorus or stage directions describe; the stage is bare and empty, so that everything is always evoked ‘in the mind’s eye’. Invariably there are ‘musicians’ who take up the functions of a Greek chorus,103 namely those of commenting upon and explaining the action, but who also sometimes act as intermediary vocal expression for characters who remain silent. The chorus has the first word and serves as a stage direction that is not so much informative as evocative of the spiritual and symbolic atmosphere; it also has the last word and summarizes the cryptic meaning of the play. Yeats’s infatuation with Noh theatre is responsible for these innovations. He reminded himself to focus on words above scenario and gesture, beautiful words, words that were absolute, accurate, well-articulated, essential; but also on the element of ritual. He aimed at theatre as a place for sowing ideas, rejecting his own, earlier minor concessions to commercial theatre, even though he knew that this made his plays ‘unpopular’. From Noh theatre he also took a strippeddown and reduced action, lived and acted out by very few characters on stage, often defined only by age, with everyone always donning a mask. The mask has the institutional task of obscuring and covering the actor’s facial features and of intensifying, in a grotesque and twisted fashion, the symbolic meaning of the type of the character being represented.104 The stage space in that model was completely empty; in Yeats, the backdrop of play after play is covered by a painted panel before which a drum, a gong and a zither perform a ritual function, played or plucked to accompany the movements on the stage. The opening gesture of the play sees one of the

103 Yeats thought of some of his plays as ‘Greek’ ( Jeffares and Knowland 1975, 109; see also EMW, 398–9). 104 According to Nathan 1965, 169, the function of the mask is ‘to suggest the supernatural’; according to Taylor, 1976, 105, it is rather that of evoking ‘ideality, the eternal or universal type rather than individual character’, thus ‘transfiguring and ennobling’ the real.

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musicians take a black cloth to the centre of the stage and unfold it, to be folded in again when the curtain falls. In the three plays of the Cuchulain cycle, a troop of male and female warriors kidnap the valiant like Wagner’s Valkyries in the Valhalla, but Yeats’s are more malignant diabolical and deceitful forces. After the Cuchulain cycle, there is the one ‘of the Cross’ with other isolated farces of mythological and non-mythological themes. A couple of plays are variations on Salome, featuring the severed head of the wandering poet, the queen’s lover, who sings after decapitation, with the grisly details of the queen’s final kiss on the lips of the dead man’s skull. By the end, the theme becomes that of the tyrannical woman, moody, ‘lunar’, unresponsive, who does not yield to the passion of the lowly character. This is the same conflict between mind and matter often described in Yeats’s poetry, and here in parables of queens who suppress their sensuality under the mask of virginal cruelty, but who need to submit themselves to the drive for communion with the bestial.105 2. Compared to the poetry, the theatre of Yeats’s second phase presents the advantage of being more immediately readable. It keeps to a fluid diction and an exemplary syntactical clarity, as well as having an ordered, or more ordered, development of the action, even if of high symbolic density. The critical paradox might be that Yeats is more satisfactory and accessible as a playwright – but only if we accept that none of these plays would survive staging. The minimum of diegesis which each play must satisfy infuses them with uncommon rapidity, even if the internal logic of the actions is dream-like, surreal, symbolic, mysterious and therefore unpredictable. But the gap between poetry and plays is actually less marked. Many of the poems are dialogic and even contain stage directions, while in the plays blank verse prevails over prose, the dramatis personae are extremely simplified and there are very few speakers on stage. The transfer and interchange are also evident in the fact that Yeats’s plays open and close with extremely 105 This struggle is however multifaceted and allusive. Vendler’s book (1963), for instance, hinges almost aprioristically on the motif of the conflicting relation of the poet with his muse. I should add that this kind of interpretation was much in favour at the time of publication of Vendler’s book, when the dominance of New Criticism often led to seeing in images of physical and bodily union metaphors of the poetic act.

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well-wrought songs, as nearly divorced from the text as those of an imagistic and symbolic mould, and included by Yeats himself within editions of his poetry. With good reason, Yeats’s objective was ‘not a theatre, but the theatre’s anti-self ’,106 a theatre that could do without the ‘crowd’ and, as Pound put it, of the stage itself. Conceived for a small audience of no more than fifty, it was a chamber theatre, addressed to a utopian, ideal civilization, ‘very different from ours’. Pound and Fenollosa sowed in Yeats an enthusiasm for the Noh which rested however on the realization that many of the dictates of that fourteenth-century Japanese canon had already been intuited and partly implemented by Yeats, if it is true that the Noh hinges on the three principles107 of emotion as the expression of an idea, of the unity of the image through repetition and variation, of art as a complete fusion of text, music, dance and mime. The unity of the image consists for Yeats in the symbolic continuity of the well, the hawk, the unicorn, the herne.108 Some of the plays had sets designed by Dulac and music by Antheil; the dancing roles were taken up by the Japanese actor Ito109 and by Ninette de Valois. 3. Among the internal cycles, the first by size and absolute achievement is the Cuchulain one. Within it, At the Hawk’s Well (1917) is the most densely inspired and enigmatically symbolic of this series of dramatic stations inspired by this myth.110 It is not only perhaps the most intense and tense play ever written by Yeats, but also recognizably the founding stone for Yeats’s second dramatic phase. By the end of the play, Cuchulain is bewitched, marked by the tragic destiny of a divine-human unfulfilled seeker and lover. The well is evoked ‘in the mind’s eye’; more properly it is marked by a blue cloth in front of which lies down, covered with a cloak

106 EX, 257. 107 Taylor 1976, 63. 108 Almost all of the plays written after 1919 were inspired by a Japanese Noh, as Taylor 1976 definitively clarified. 109 According to Taylor 1976, 111–13, though, Ito Michio was a westernized actor who ‘knew little or nothing about Noh’ and composed a ‘non-Japanese’ choreography for At the Hawk’s Well. 110 The plot is Yeats’s own reinvention, mostly extraneous to the material of Irish myth.

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the guardian of the well; the well is dry, full of the leaves of a withered hazelnut tree. The two dominant images, dry well and withered tree, may appear first of all as evocations of the life principle always newly expected, of a promise of immortality, of an ejaculatory source now exhausted. The play can be read at so many levels of interpretation: the stony and windy set is also Yeats’s waste land, or the drought of always frustrated love-affairs. The musicians announce the arrival of a traveller with a pale and ivory-like face, doomed to death. But first an old man steps up to the well moving like a ‘marionette’, piles up the leaves and lights a fire, actions he has been repeating for fifty years. Impatiently he turns to the guardian who is mute, staring and stunned. The chorus of musicians cries the tragic fate that awaits the unknowing, bold warrior, who it would have been better had never been born. His epithet of ‘lofty’ is justified by the magnificent gold-embroidered tunic he wears; one of his first speeches displays his pride, which has been heightened by rumours of a miraculous well, whose water bestows immortality. Only the dancers know when the water will flow from the well, but they are treacherous and malicious because they blind or induce sleep in those who are waiting. Old and young turn out to be each other’s shadow or counterpart. The old man condemns the deception of the dancing shadows, warning the young man that fifty years earlier he had undertaken the same bold journey from beyond the seas, only to remain bound to that place. With a few notes of black humour, the brusque dialogue between old and young is interrupted by the hawk’s cry, where the bird of prey is the aggressive, fiercer type or archetype of Leda’s rapist swan, no unicorn or herne, pure birds without the beak that hurts. The challenger Cuchulain will be cursed by the woman-hawk never to love a woman for long and to mix love and hate.111 Indeed the ‘young’ one ‘staggers to his feet’, with the same verb used in the sonnet ‘Leda and the Swan’ for Leda’s postcoital

111 The hawk, wild in a majestic swoop, threatens and attacks man with the same violence as Leda’s swan and a beak that wants to tear. The few lines that describe its swoop have once more the tight clarity of Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’, as if Yeats had repeatedly remembered that sonnet. In terms of symbolic continuity, the hawk in ‘The Second Coming’ is the representative of abstract thought. If this is the case, it impedes in Cuchulain the unity of being.

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languor. In the Greek fashion, the play is a kind of Oedipal curse uttered by the Sidhe. Since the well is dry and its rainwater evanescent, Cuchulain cannot drink its miraculous power. At the end, we hear from the musicians the name of Aoife, the woman by whom Cuchulain will have a son whom he will unknowingly kill. 4. In The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919), the chorus sings the theme of evanescent beauty – Cuchulain’s mirage – in delicate images of a fragile white bird hit by the storm and of the shell.112 For Yeats this beauty was the fruit of centuries of the soul’s workings, from Pythagoras onwards, and of the Platonic incarnation of the idea. In the play Yeats moves as if from alpha to omega, from the heroic investiture of a young Cuchulain to the threatened but avoided decline of the mature hero. Cuchulain lies dying, as Queen Emer sings, weeps and watches over him, together with his mistress Eithne Inguba, both women stately in their mutual respect and subdued by the stature of the hero they both loved. One tells the other of the king’s agony when he realized he had killed his own son, begotten from a brief affair with the Scottish Queen Aoife. Cuchulain has defied the ‘immortal sea’ that has engulfed him. The action starts after the telling of this backstory. The task is to awaken and resurrect the dying king: Emer calls on her rival to do so with her sweet words. Both believe that the dying Cuchulain they witness is an impostor, or his mask; his real self might be wandering about the scene of his massacre as a disembodied soul. If invoked, he could come and banish the image that resembles him. Elemental up to this point, the play becomes unnecessarily complicated out of fidelity to the mythological canvas. Eithne’s psychic evocation fails when under the guise of the ‘figure’ of Cuchulain it is actually Bricriu of the Sidhe who appears, agent of discord and therefore precisely the deceitful and untrustworthy agent of the mocking higher powers of At the Hawk’s Well. The diabolical blackmail is that if Emer gives up the possibility of loving him again and being loved in return, Cuchulain will be restored to life. It is the old mythic theme of a woman’s sacrifice for the beloved, as well as being a distant memory of the youthful poem 112 The shell is pushed to the shore by the waves, in an anticipation of the ‘image’ of Cuchulain’s rejection after he had killed his son, in Emer’s tale.

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‘The Stolen Child’. The figure in disguise touches Emer’s eye causing the queen to see the ghost of the hero, who can ‘neither touch, nor hear, nor see’. A second arrival on the scene is of a woman of the Sidhe,113 who it is revealed is the same goddess who charmed the young Cuchulain under the guise of the guardian of the well. She starts an enticing dance. The last stages of the play become agitated with two reversals of fortune. The king is about to be seduced by the promise of a life without remorse and entirely dedicated to the beauty of the moment, and prepares to kiss the woman, when in an outburst he invokes Emer and the hearth of a monogamous union. At the last moment, Cuchulain chooses the human (as the impurities of being human had been accepted in ‘Byzantium’) rather than the supernatural and its completeness and perfection. He renounces the kiss of the faithless Sidhe woman. Yet temptation wins out, so that it is up to Emer’s renunciation to save him from being kidnapped and then to dispel the struggle and with it the nightmare. The cycle was completed in 1939 with The Death of Cuchulain.114 With a clever alienating technique, Yeats here is camouflaged in the voice of an old storyteller, who forewarns about the artificial nature of the spectacle with multiple barbs directed at Degas’s dancers. In the plot, the king is urged by Emer to face the enemies who are burning his house. He must either act right away or wait for reinforcements while deciphering the discordant rumours that warn him he is about to die. After a moment in the dark, Cuchulain comes back onto the stage wounded; he is killed by Aoife, his former lover and abandoned queen. He is tied to a stone with a veil, but before the goddess of war arrives to comment on his death, an old blind man severs the king’s head for a fistful of coins. Emer performs her dance in front of the severed head of the beloved, a visionary scene that haunts Yeats in the last plays. Equally alienating is the leave-taking of three musicians in modern clothes, one of whom sings of the persistence of the myth of King Cuchulain, a statue of whom ‘stood in the Post Office / With Pearse and Connolly’.

113 Though not named, it is Fand. 114 Yeats finished it, without revisions, just before dying.

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5. The Player Queen (1922) seems a return to the realistic drama of Yeats’s beginnings, though it is still a grotesque and absurd kind of realism. The action is expanded, and less symbolic, and there are more characters on stage endowed with a generous dialogic verve, often full of concessions to the comic and the punch-line. Indefinable in space and time,115 it is set in a fictional court, at times almost Ruritanian,116 and is therefore one of the most regular and we could say most easily staged among those written by Yeats. This transition, or involution, is supported by the linguistic medium, witty prose rather than a scanned verse that is vaguely suggestive. Still, a new type of character and plot is born here in glimpses: that of a queen in the grip of the flesh and of renunciation, to whom a wanderer, often as here a poet, comes from afar in order to love her without having seen her, and to conquer her. The motif of revolution resurfaces from Yeats’s youthful drama. At an initially superficial level it is a confused grievance of the inhabitants of this unreal realm who clamour and protest, even if not against an unfair, miserable life, but against the devout queen’s stubborn determination never to appear in public. The farce tips overboard when the drunken poet Septimus arrives in the country. Nobody offers to take him in; he complains of his ‘bad wife’, a woman who thinks of herself as a femme fatale, but is in fact a small-time actor with social aspirations, and a capricious shrew. The pretext for the plot is a play-within-the-play, a drama that this Decima must perform at court, but which must be postponed because of her sudden and unexplained absence. Even the plot of this play within the play, the story of the ark of Noah, is symbolic of a time of transition and historical change.117 It does however create an additional link, since Septimus is the Noah both of reality and at the same time of fiction, playing the role of Noah leading to the ark all of his animals bar

115 There is a bizarre reference to Kubla Khan, in whose presence the company of entertainers is said to have recently performed. Yeats did admit it was his only play not to be set in Ireland ( Jeffares and Knowland 1975, 141). 116 Volume 6, § 138. 117 This element is derived from Blake, on which see Wilson 1961, 183.

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one, his own wife. Septimus is actually an ironic Christ-like figure,118 as he knocks on the doors and is sent away (he not coincidentally complains of being in a country that is ‘not Christian’) but would happily settle for a stable, ‘like the Saviour’. He is then a beggar, particularly as this innocent similarity with the Saviour becomes more charged and Septimus slowly reveals a secret obsession: he too is deliriously waiting for a bloody and violent upheaval that will be brought about by the chastest of Yeats’s animals, the ubiquitous unicorn. The invisible queen is a lower version of the various women of the Sidhe that bewitch the warrior Cuchulain, or at least this is what her subjects claim: like those women, in the country she is considered deceitful. In this imaginary district witches are ‘strangled’ at first sight. Like a good imitator of Synge, Yeats follows everyman, the village’s gossip, the rumours, the presumed spell by the unicorn, which disappears with a gun shot, leaving bloodied tracks, and is surprised by a rather visionary local busybody having sex with the queen. But the queen is now a fleshless Leda who mates with the wholly and solely spiritual unicorn in a white, asexual union, quite different from that of the sonnet of the same name. Even so, the reclusive queen is Yeats’s late version of the Lady of Shalott, who rejects the world and is detached in contemplation and sublimation. The novelty of the farce is that these elaborations of a high theme find a counterpoint, at the very least raucous, in the peasants who listen impatiently to the story of the alleged copulations – there is even a braying donkey to announce the next cosmic upheaval. According to Yeats’s syncretism and love for variations, the Christ-like Septimus does announce a new dispensation, but one that marks the end of the Christian era and the beginning of that of the Unicorn, the new Adam. Septimus’ only surprise is that the unicorn should be chaste and the new age not need violence to establish itself. Indeed, he nearly incites the unicorn to maim and kill, and excites him, complaining that it is not able to ‘fill with desire’. The theme of the play seems to be then that of a ‘second coming’ but without the violence Yeats had always advocated. The queen is insensitive to the call of bestiality and awaits her death like

118 Taylor 1976, 147, associates Christ with the poet of The King of the Great Clock Tower, who is undoubtedly close to Septimus.

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the nonexistent St Octema of Antioch, trampled by the crowd despite the help of her white unicorn. At the realistic level, the populace is nearly at the castle and at the end of the play there is a general stampede in fear. The sudden happy ending features the wedding of the Prime Minister with the queen, or rather the false queen, since Decima had managed to swap places with the real queen.119 Septimus is driven away from the court like a madman.120 6. The first play in a religious diptych, Calvary (1920)121 has a very short, bare and stylized plot. The choral prologue announces122 the ascent to Calvary under the rays of the full moon, signifying the beginning of a primary cycle. The symbol for Jesus is the great heron whose indifferent Father is abandoning him to death, white as the unicorn, and dazed by the moonlight. The bones, of the bird and of Christ, will soon be picked clean of flesh by fish and birds. The heart of the work lies in two meetings, one of Christ with Lazarus and the other with Judas. Lazarus regrets having been resurrected and taken away from the tranquillity of death, nostalgically reproaching Christ: ‘You took my death, give me your death instead’. In this blasphemous outburst we hear again Swinburne (‘I never could escape your love’) and, looking forward, a strong influence on Dylan Thomas’s ‘Vision and Prayer’. In fact Lazarus and Judas are in Yeats’s terms Christ’s

119 This role-swap has been seen as a somewhat humorous version of the motif of the completion of the personality of the self with the anti-self, or mask. 120 The less remarkable The Dreaming of the Bones (1919, but only staged in 1931) combines actuality with myth, though with the former infused with perceptible ghostly presences. After the 1916 Easter Rising, the police pursue a fisherman from Aran who is looking for refuge in an Irish landscape devastated by the English. He meets two travellers with whom he evokes some myths and historical facts about the island. In a realization of the theory of ‘dreaming back’, whereby life is re-lived by the dead who haunt the location of their death, the young fisherman does not realize he is facing the ghosts of Diarmuid and Dervorgilla, who are seeking forgiveness in order to stop wandering like two troubled souls out of Dante. 121 The play is indebted to Wilde’s short prose poem, ‘The Doer of Good’ (on which see Volume 6, § 225.3), as Yeats acknowledged. 122 As Nathan notices (1965, 202), the already-crucified Christ ‘relives the ascent to Calvary in the depths of this mind’.

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masks, or alternatively Christ is their respective anti-self. Later in the way of the cross, after the picture of the Marys that Yeats derives closely from the Gospels, Christ meets Judas, who reveals he betrayed out of envy for Christ’s excessive power and for his capacity to subjugate free will. It is in effect Judas who helps Jesus carry the cross. The meaning of the introductory chorus of The Resurrection (1931) lies in the alternation of still separate historical cycles, introduced by the violent death of a god and his resurrection. A first resurrection is that of Dionysus, whose heart was torn by a virgin in an act that initiated the Great Year of the Platonists. The second was that of Christ. The two events are overlapped and made synchronic in the play, with the delirious crowds of followers of the Greek god gathering under the windows of the place where the disciples are holed up awaiting the fulfilment of the prophecy. The fire however is not theirs, but of a group of guards standing outside the room of the eleven disciples. When the curtain rises, there is a dialectical confrontation between a Greek, a Syrian and a Jew on the meaning of the passage of Christ through the pagan world and of his resurrection. The three witnesses recount the last events of Jesus’ life according to different preliminary assumptions and clearly distinct views on the divine and the human. It was not a man who was crucified, says the Greek, but a ghost, for a god cannot be buried or crucified, or even be born. The Jew corrects him that Christ was just a man who thought he was the Messiah, but he was not. The Greek replies that a god has no compassion for humans. The Syrian untangles the situation when he enters the stage to announce that the tomb is empty and that Christ has been seen alive again on the mountain and has therefore risen from the dead. The Greek believes that the women at the tomb must have been dreaming; the Jew is caught off guard. The Syrian is the only one to believe in the resurrection of the man-God, spokesman for Yeats’s notion of the advent of the Christian order, an irrational one to follow after the rational order of Greece. With this, the ‘circle’ starts again: subjective and antithetical man succumbs and God is resurrected, the opposite of what happened in the Greek era. At the end, Christ pierces the fourth wall and appears with his stylized mask and with his beating heart. The discussants hold firmly to their positions; only the Greek must admit that the cycle of ‘Athens, Alexandria, Rome’ is becoming extinct.

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7. Little more than an interlude, The Cat and the Moon (1926) is immediately tinged with a spirit of bawdy jokes and grotesque farce, starting with the bickering of a lame beggar riding on the back of a blind man, seeking perhaps misleading directions on how to get to the well of a saint.123 Together the two form a whole man, complete in all physical and sensory faculties and constituting the unity of being in Yeats’s terms.124 Their long familiarity has not dispelled their mutual suspicion. The blind man at least can hear and has listened to ‘the world’s knowledge’; supported by this worldly wisdom, he asks the saint to have his sight restored rather than to be blessed. The lame man makes the opposite choice. The blind man regains his sight, and after the initial shock, as in Synge, has his suspicions confirmed when he realizes the lame man stole a sheep from him. Not lacking in muscle power, the blind man strikes the other. The saint is in fact revealed to be a musician who pretended to be the voice of the saint, exposing the entire scaffolding and the hoax of the miraculous spring. He jumps on the back of the lame man and invites him to dance, effecting a grotesque miracle with the lame one throwing away his crutches to dance. This spirit of mockery is also at work in The Words Upon the Window-Pane (1934), a unique piece as it is a Yeats play with a semblance of realism and naturalism, vaguely inspired by Ibsen (though the situation also evokes Shaw and the element of the surreal there is in Heartbreak House). It does not take place within a bare and empty stage, but is set in a bourgeois living room with fireplace, where guests making small talk are waiting for the tea ceremony to begin. One of them is down from Cambridge, but the location is in Dublin. The occasion is a séance led by a medium, with the usual curious sceptic in attendance. With considerable delay, the play revolves then around an experience that had been very dear to Yeats in his youth, becoming even more so after the discovery of his wife’s psychic powers. The séance takes place in a house that exudes historical memories: the house of a Grattan, relative of Swift’s, where Stella had perhaps even 123 The theme of the miraculous well which restores sight and even the use of legs recalls a play by Synge (Volume 6, § 263.6). 124 Wilson’s reading (1960, 152–7) extravagantly sees in the two protagonists a proletarian and an aristocrat, and in the play a political allegory.

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lost some money gambling. Yeats celebrates here a house that gave birth to or hosted famous characters and great descendants of a race. In reality it was Lady Gregory’s house at Coole – where the play was written, as is revealed in the epigraph – that Yeats had in mind. The play therefore matches many of the odes celebrating the Irish Protestant tradition to which Yeats proudly belonged. The title refers to a tale that claimed that Swift’s Stella had engraved on the wooden window frame a rhyming quatrain expressing her gratitude to the Dean. With this, the play reveals its dual nature and purpose. Spiritualism and the séance are a device to evoke and re-enact Swift and his times, that distant early eighteenth century when Ireland reached her apogee with Swift and other exceptional personalities. Swift believed in reincarnation, in resurrecting the Roman senate and in the order established after the murder of Caesar. But he foresaw that that order was at an end and that ruin was approaching, under the guise of democracy, Rousseau and the French Revolution. The concrete problem of the participants is how to eliminate the ‘bad influence’ that once more threatens to spoil the séance. In an excessively discursive digression, the competent president of the spiritualist society exposes his theory of spirits, who as human beings relive their lives at the moment of their deaths, or some other tragic juncture, in a kind of purgatorial afterlife.125 The séance begins by evoking a situation from the past that had happened in the house: Swift scolding Vanessa for not living up to his cultural ideals. The speech flowing out of the medium’s mouth summarizes in the form 125 This idea is developed in the much-praised (for instance, by T. S. Eliot) Purgatory (1939), which in my opinion does not quite deserve this fame. In the play, a son and his elderly father arrive at a dilapidated house where the souls from Purgatory ‘re- live / Their transgressions’. The old man’s tales of adventure serve to celebrate the symbol of the noble mansion where great patriotic figures from the past used to live. The play thus revolves around an ancestral sense of guilt that is morbid and nihilistic. The old man relives his own parricide and then kills his own son while uttering the words, ‘I killed that lad because had he grown up / He would have struck a woman’s fancy, / Begot, and passed pollution on’. On the thematic link with Yeats’s ideas about eugenics, and for a critical assessment of the play with which I concur, see Bloom 1970, 426–9. Eliot’s praise is in On Poetry and Poets, 78, in the edition listed below in Eliot’s bibliography at § 92.1.

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of a dialogue the drama of Swift’s biography and of the two women he loved. Swift reiterates his opposition to having children bound to inherit his congenital vein of madness.126 After the séance, the exhausted medium claims not to know that she had evoked Swift and despises him as a dirty and repulsive old man. The sceptic from Cambridge, on the other hand, has gained useful stimuli for his thesis on the illustrious writer. The end of the play is however enigmatic: alone on stage, the medium demonstrates she has cleverly forged Swift’s voice and those of his two women, like an actress. Her greed and materialism are proved by the excessive indifference she feigns for the tips the guests leave for her. One of the participants is a joker with a hobby-horse, only wanting to know if there are horse races in the afterlife. Though a convinced spiritualist, Yeats casts a humorous discredit on Spiritualism, surprisingly takes the side of the sceptic and in this way writes his own ‘Mr Sludge, “The Medium”’.127 8. A Full Moon in March (1935)128 marks a return to a stylized drama with masks and a few characters on the stage and to prose instead of verse. It is the first of three successive plots in as many plays focused on a queen as protagonist. Here a queen has decided to marry whoever will be better at singing his passion, a plan announced after a chorus at the beginning has brutally sung of the vanity and fickleness of love. An ugly, brutish, stinking swineherd presents himself to the queen proposing to sing to her, trying to pass the test decreed by this sort of bored, though desirous Turandot.129 The moment is propitious: the full moon is arousing desire and if the swineherd wins he will become king; if not, the executioner stands by. In fact, the swineherd has already been condemned even before he sings, for his insult to the frigid, proclaimed virginity of the queen who gives the order 126 Swift’s fear for the advent of democracy can obviously be interpreted as Yeats’s own, reflecting on the European scene of the 1930s. 127 At the beginning of the séance, one of the participants does refer to David Home, the prototype of the medium in Browning’s dramatic monologue (Volume 4, § 124.4–5). 128 As Wilson 1961, 53, recalls, the drama was written after The King of the Great Clock Tower, although it preceded it in the Collected Plays. One can be seen as the reworking of the other. 129 According to Taylor 1976, 177, Yeats might have had Puccini in mind.

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to behead him. Yeats frames the polar difference between an excess of spirituality and bestial filth, between a vow of chastity and wallowing in the mire. This fear of sex was already inherent to the sanctity of the protagonist in The Player Queen. In this later play, the queen becomes a vicious Salome scared of sex, who abhors the blood spilled in the loss of her virginity. Facing her, the swineherd is filthy and bearded like Jokanaan in Wilde’s play. In the background, Yeats’s version evokes the precedent of a mythical Irish queen who used to cut off her suitors’ heads to stick them on a pole. The bloodied queen, stained with red, dances as a woman in the grip of necrophilia around the severed head, whose lips she kisses; the attendants recognize that she is the emblem of the moon, descended from her niche to stain her whiteness with red. The play represents the asexual spirit which gets dirty with blood and earthly mud and becomes pregnant, or even the meeting of the soul with matter, leading to the perfecting of being, the theme of the lyrics on Byzantium. The King of the Great Clock Tower (1935) does not change these dramatic features, with a courtyard, the attendants, a king, a queen and a drifter who arrives on the scene, all with their faces covered by masks (and thrones are in the shape of cubes). The king asks the queen about her mysterious origin and her stubborn silence, but is interrupted by the arrival of the wandering poet, who has heard of the queen’s beauty and is here to sing of it. The play reproduces the antithetical design of the previous one, with a queen entrenched in her cruel and maddening purity, and a poet reeking of the animal. The encounter between the soul and materiality becomes here more visibly the meeting of the poet with his recalcitrant muse, in which we can see Maud Gonne. The wandering poet longs to see the queen who used to wear a veil, to check if his mental image of her corresponds to reality. Even if there is no match, he will continue to sing his mythical vision. He demands that the queen dance for him and rejects the punishment which should follow the insult, that is, beheading, claiming that the injunction to sing for her comes from the god Aengus. Once again a song emanates from a severed head and there is a repeat of the kiss of a dancing queen on a bleeding head. A longer play in several scenes, The Herne’s Egg (1938)130 is

130 The play has given rise to differing and at times opposing critical assessments.

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enchanting, diaphanous and suffused: ‘all should be suggested, not painted realistically’, warns a caption. On stage the two kings of Tara and Connacht are resting after yet another battle. Hungry, they would like to eat the eggs of the herne, personal possession of the priestess Attracta. Attracta enters evoked by the flute to declare the eggs are sacred and reserved for her only. This priestess too embodies the idea of a cruel and sterile virginity, dreaming of her imminent sexless marriage with the herne. Yeats reintroduces the clash between the masculine principle, sexually and libidinally active, and the feminine one, purely receptive. Hyperbolically it takes the strength and desire of seven hot-bloodied men to liquefy the symbolic snow, though an ancestral curse hangs over whoever steals the sacred eggs. The marriage between the priestess and the herne is a variant of the one between the mythical bird and the woman already seen with Leda, with the swan’s place taken up by the herne. This is a substantive difference, since the herne is also a symbol of Christ and of spirituality more broadly, in itself a paradox and oxymoron of pure animality. In the play the eggs are actually stolen from the priestess, though war resumes because one of the two Irish kings served the other simple chicken eggs, a replacement demanded by Attracta, who is about to be raped by seven men for her deception. The next day Attracta reports she lay with the herne, while the warriors tell her it was seven men who raped her. It is a drunken lie, for which the herne will punish them with a degrading metamorphosis, turning them into mice, dogs and cats. Only the King of Connacht admits to having raped her and is prepared to face his punishment, performed on the sacred mountain at the hands of a madman whom the king had unsuccessfully tried to buy off with a drink. The spit with which he is pierced is the instrument of the herne’s vengeance; the king completes the punishment by throwing himself onto the spit erected between two stones. In this case too, the ending offers a twist that reverses the conceptual perspective: Attracta sees the dying king and rejects her chastity at the last moment. The herne, pure spirit, has only generated an image of himself in the mirror of her mind. She now wants a true bodily conjunction with the startled servant, who is the image not of God’s selfsufficiency, but of man’s imperfection.

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§ 86. Edith Sitwell* The three siblings Edith (1887–1964), Osbert (1892–1969) and Sacheverell (1897–1988) Sitwell form yet another English literary dynasty of the nineteenth to twentieth century, perhaps the last one, with decreasing value from senior to junior. The observers who came just after told a partial truth when they repeated one of F. R. Leavis’s quips, that the trio belonged to the history of publicity and of fashion, not properly to that of literature; and that they belong less to literary history than to the domain of a small, amateurish, snobbish mythology. Children of an erudite antiquarian of august ancestry,1 the Sitwells were raised in a family-owned estate in Derbyshire overflowing with tapestries and objets d’art. By Osbert’s own

*

Collected Poems, London and Basingstoke 1957 and 1982 with the author’s introduction, xv-xlvi, not a complete edition, since it leaves out Early Unpublished Poems, ed. G. H. Morton and K. P. Helgeson, New York 1994, as well as the thirteen compositions of Music and Ceremonies (1963). Taken Care Of: The Autobiography of Edith Sitwell, London 1965; Selected Letters of Edith Sitwell, ed. R. Greene, London 1997. R. L. Mégroz, The Three Sitwells: A Biographical and Critical Study, London 1927; C. W. Bowra, Edith Sitwell, Monaco 1947; A Celebration for Edith Sitwell, ed. J. Garcia Villa, Norfolk, CT 1948; J. Lehmann, Edith Sitwell, London 1952; G. Singleton, Edith Sitwell: The Hymn to Life, London 1960; R. J. Mills, Jr, Edith Sitwell: A Critical Essay, Grand Rapids, MI 1966; E. Salter, The Last Years of a Rebel: A Memoir of Edith Sitwell, Boston, MA 1967, and Edith Sitwell, London 1979; J. D. Brophy, Edith Sitwell: The Symbolist Order, Carbondale, IL and Edwardsville, IL 1968; G. Elborn, Edith Sitwell: A Biography, London 1981; V. Glendinning, Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions, Oxford 1981, 1983; G. A. Cevasco, The Sitwells: Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell, Boston, MA 1987; The Sitwells and the Arts of the 1920s and 1930s, ed. H. Clerk, London 1994; S. Samberger, Artistic Outlaws: The Modernist Poetics of Edith Sitwell, Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein and H. D., Berlin-Hamburg-Münster 2005; R. Greene, Edith Sitwell: Avant-Garde Poet, English Genius, London 2011.

1

Praz (beginning with PSL, 607) had called Sitwell the father ‘an amateur armoured in his egoism’ who reminded him of the ‘egoist’ by definition, Meredith’s. Praz also reminds us that Osbert Sitwell was among those advocating a ‘return to Meredith’ in 1949 (CLA, vol. I, 105–8).

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admission, they grew up as ‘Italianate English’, the breed Forster was satirizing in his novels almost at the same time; and they became soon known for their frivolity and eccentricity, for their aesthetic poses, and extravagant, cosmopolitan tastes and intellectual curiosity. As a picturesque phenomenon of late aestheticism, of the end of an English belle époque, they could not escape in Italy the attention of Mario Praz. The Italian critic barely conceals his mockery in assessing them.2 Showy in attitudes, hairstyles and dress, courted by painters (Roger Fry and Wyndham Lewis) and photographers (Cecil Beaton), Edith had sharp features, a high profile, an aquiline nose, an irrepressible cult of personality and therefore a poisonous tongue. Rebellious since childhood, she was privately educated and as a teenager came under the beneficial influence of a young governess, a pianist and translator of Rimbaud. Having bravely achieved independence from the family, she joined the London literary circles before the war, started publishing poetry in 1915, then in the 1930s she oversaw and compiled poetic anthologies and controversial overviews of contemporary poetry. In prose, she wrote a negligible version of Swift’s life transposed into the present3 and a critical biography of Pope, whom she provokingly saw as a Romantic.4 She was five years younger than Virginia Woolf; her ‘court’ of admirers and supporters, who gathered at the Sesame Club in London, was more elastic than Bloomsbury and therefore more populous and promiscuous.5

2 3

4

5

PSL, 606–7. Her main critical essay is Aspects of Modern Poetry (1934), where not only does she show herself to be once more an extraordinary pioneer of formalist textual criticism (see Brophy 1968, 18–40), with fine analyses of samples from Eliot and Hopkins, but also elaborates an aesthetics of ‘organic form’ indebted to Coleridge. Both in this work and in her earlier forays in Wheels, there are examples of her uncontainable and ferocious polemical force. Orwell (OCE, vol. I, 44–7) was unconvinced by this 1930 work which acrobatically described Pope as a precursor to Francis Thompson and Hopkins, that is, as a poet of enchantment, of texture, of the poetic music of verse and of poetry as a weaving of syllables. Orwell thought that Sitwell suffered from a prosodic fanaticism which induced her to semanticize Pope’s alliterations, in an anticipation of formalist readings. The two writers respected each other, partly because one was a novelist and the other a poet, and therefore not direct rivals. But see Glendinning 1983, 235, for the more critical, variable, and even malicious opinions each had of the other.

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In 1955 she converted to Catholicism, like many aesthetes; also, like many aesthetes, she left an autobiography when she died. 2. A partial truth, as I mentioned: Edith Sitwell shows how the roots of Modernism, or of one of its versions, reached down into French symbolism and by the same token into English aestheticism. The magazine she founded and edited, Wheels (1916–1921), was the exact counterpart of Marsh’s Georgian anthologies. It provided an unquestionable landmark of the resistance against pseudo-Romantic pastoral poetry, the descriptive and melancholic lyricism of feeling, or any aesthetics of realist representation (it included six lyrics by Owen). The small poetic revolution she sparked can be summed up as the overhauling of the established hierarchy between signified and signifier. The ‘notes’ prefacing her collective edition of poetry anticipate Russian formalism, and constitute an impressively precocious document that has a scientific precision unheard-of at the time, compared to the rather mediocre and anodyne critical language then current. By my recollection, such a thorough discussion of the ‘physical-technical’ facts of the poetic text had not been attempted since the letters between Hopkins,6 Bridges and Patmore. Classified with false humility as ‘some notes’, these form in fact an articulate, pedantic and presumptuous preface in which the poet takes on the oracle’s stance as if explaining to the neophyte the Eleusinian mysteries and arcane procedures of her art. It does not seem to matter if a distance and a discrepancy can be felt between the programme and the empirical evidence in the texts, or whether the ‘impression’ allegedly given by a certain play with vowels or consonants is or can be debated. The programme laid out in the notes is the dethronement of denotative and connotative semantics in favour of turning morpheme, phoneme and rhythm into alternative sources of meaning. Poetry is for Sitwell programmatically a ‘sound pattern’, a musical score – unsurprisingly she invokes similarities with the music of Liszt and Satie. But this poetic revolution was in truth ephemeral, disowned by a bloated post-Romantic pantheism nearly antithetical to it.7 For one reason or another – at first for being too experimental, later too conventional – Sitwell’s corpus is still considered

6 7

Mentioned by Sitwell (xxxiv) for his shocking verbal pairings. The end of the experimental era is confirmed in the ‘Notes’, xli.

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in textbooks either too aggressive and iconoclastic or a kind of unexplored continent. 3. Some partisan choices are indeed implied in Sitwell’s poetic corpus. The first line in the sand separates poetry from any reflection on external reality, be it social, historical, political, even personal.8 The second is that contents are encased in fixed and predetermined prosodic measures. Familiarity with a certain classical tradition explains the prevalence, even dominance, of the rhyming couplet, where lines are economical and aim at accuracy, at definition, at a sharp outline. The flagrant friction between signifier and signified lies in the fact that the prosodic pattern of Augustan ancestry, and typical of Pope, and as such symmetrically lucid, is the vehicle of a content that remains mostly unintelligible or irrational. The opening lyrics are macabre and ghostly dances of Italian popular masks according to a visionary stance that is not, say, the leaden, involved one of a Thomson B. V., but that of a dispassionate spectator. They are watercolours, not oils, of a minor, un-demonic Sabbath.9 They are followed by delicate imitations, refined, very simple or seemingly naïve, just like the rural ballads by Christina Rossetti, or occasionally like Hopkins’s short lyrics on his innocent saints like Dorothea. They are more precisely nursery rhymes about life in the fields and the daily lives of maids, or household servants or peasants, caught up in their tasks and made mythical, fantastical with a sense of estrangement due to de-familiarization, ellipsis and synaesthesia. ‘Aubade’ describes the awakening of a servant girl who descends into the kitchen to light the fire, pierced by the morning light as if by strident sounds. This poetry goes against the grain of much production of the day; it is disengaged, light, highly stylized work. Taken in isolation, its lines are immaculate, perfect, natural, sculptural like those of Keats or

8

9

Still in 1941 Orwell (OCE, vol. II, 150) picked on Sitwell because she irresponsibly emptied the literary work of meaning. But his aestheticist side had prompted him to say in 1937 (OCE, vol. I, 319) that he ‘very much’ liked the 1930 monograph on Pope, thus overhauling his own perplexed and strict assessment of 1930. The first five or six poems listed as early compositions in Collected Poems could be retitled ‘Pulcinella in Hell’, and bear in fact a striking resemblance with Pierrot lunaire by Schönberg-Girard-Hartleben, tellingly from 1912.

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the Augustans. It is in the same exquisite vein as de la Mare, only Sitwell’s is even more formalized, or alienating with its refrains, absurd tongue twisters and incongruities influenced by Carroll and Gilbert. One poem features an erudite, embroidered metamorphosis of the three witches of Macbeth; another sees a pig purified by wearing the feathers of an angel. Behind these screens and simulacra stands the poet herself, transfigured and refracted in these disillusioned maidens and enchanted virgins who have however reached the edge of puberty.10 On this motif hinges too the verse novella ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ (1924), composite and discontinuous in its murky atmosphere of Gothic tale, with its decadent affectations and backward look at Rococo. It in fact describes the fateful advent of puberty and of adult knowledge under the guise of a remaking of the fairy-tale of the Sleeping Beauty. The threat is as much of a sexual nature, with its phallic spindle whose sting will release blood and place the girl under a spell, as of a cognitive one, the acquisition of the knowledge that the paradise of childhood ‘is only the clear mirage / Of an eternal beauty that is not’.11 The thirty-seven pieces making up Façade12 are the most representative and significant of Sitwell’s poems, and an example of a poetry without moralizing, comments or tails, purely representational, phenomenological and therefore exactly abstract. They are disconnected paintings, decontextualized scenic flashes, constructed and assembled with a surreal technique that borders on the nonsense of old: sometimes as dry as imagist poems, with

10

11

12

On the pubertal delay of the poet, who arrived in London in 1914, see Glendinning 1983, 39, and 154–9 on her virginity. Even in her advanced age Sitwell regretted never having had sexual relationships with men, particularly as she felt ‘made to have them’ (157). She was pursued by at least three men: the painter Tchelitchew, Wyndham Lewis and an unnamed Chilean poet. She confessed she had effectively been deprived of maternal affection. But feminism has been by and large silent on all these matters. The curtain falls however on the sleeping enchantment and not on the awakening of the queen’s daughter. The sleeping enchantment is the work of the malicious fairy Laidronette, a clear precedent of the Thief in Dylan Thomas’s ‘In Country Sleep’. Launched by Sitwell, Thomas was her main discovery as a talent scout; she dedicated to him the tired and emphatic epicedium that closes her Collected Poems. In the first performance of its version, set to music by Walton (1923), Sitwell recited eighteen of the pieces from behind the scenes with a megaphone, thus causing a stir.

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surprising rhyming couplets of Byronic inspiration resulting in strings of words with a purely exotic or phonetic charm, and therefore meaningless stanzas.13 They are also epiphanies of the eternal or supernatural nestled in the banality of the everyday, epiphanies, then, of an ephemeral spark of life that is quickly extinguished, as in the recurrent use of the image of the snuffed candles or of dust and shadow.14 4. The minor booklets that follow this experimental phase surrender too soon to an ideological or philosophical or meditative necessity. They also damage Sitwell’s imagistic brevity by tainting it with an incipient prolixity, so that her poetry seems to become opulent overnight. Once expanded, Sitwell’s anecdotes become blander or overflow with Victorian pathos. The thought that nags these compositions is how to imprison the passing of time in order to access eternity, and thus an awareness of death and of the metaphysical ‘bone / Deserted by the flesh’. The barely disguised, humorous ‘Colonel Fantock’ evokes the carefree existence of the three Sitwell siblings as children with an appealing but bragging soldier who one day thought he was dying. Less euphemistically macabre and inspired by remote historical events, the three ‘rustic’ elegies from 1927 are dramatic monologues, in fact tragic, heart-breaking, even solemn and pompous, with no longer any sign of irony or humour.15 The reversal of subject matter and form is by now complete or well underway, judging from ‘Metamorphosis’ (1929), which marks Sitwell’s transition to a type of litany or choral diction of biblical and psalmodic lamentation, with hypnotic choruses and sacred formulas revolving around the ultimate reality of ‘dust you are’. This long, again prolix poem announces, however, the central paradigm of future meditations: the Gospel parable of Lazarus and the rich man, and the prospect of a ‘Sun’

13 See particularly nos 13, 17 and 31 in Collected Poems. 14 No. 22, ‘Fox Trot’, offers an imitation of the dance’s irregular rhythm, while other pieces have titles of dances such as the polka, the mazurka and the waltz. Sitwell’s normally satirical, dry and cutting tone mellows in the two idylls, nos 14 and 28. 15 A very long, overabundant, artificial return to Sitwell’s old manner is ‘Elegy on Dead Fashion’ (1926), nothing more than a pageant of old and dead mythological deities, a recurrent theme of Romantic poetry (particularly in Keats), but also in Decadentism.

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homophone of ‘Son’,16 invoked to ‘melt the eternal ice / Of Death’. But the 1920s in fact close with the phantasmagoria Gold Coast Customs (1929), the last experiment by Sitwell. Its main theme is a passage from Hegel, on the eighteenth-century custom of the Ashantee from Africa who washed the skeletons of the rich with the blood of slaves and the poor killed in the course of a long ceremony. This erudite inspiration lays bare how an exhausted imagination was in need of external support. The composition alternates with sometimes chaotic and suggestive force over three levels linked by visual and psychological associations. From the flashing, surreal reconstruction of African ceremonies it moves, in the mould of The Waste Land,17 to glimpses into the degradation of the port of London alternating with the drawing room of a wealthy woman. Three landscapes of death weigh on the conscience with thumping obsessiveness, and on them falls the shadow of bones and the worm of death, a desolation like Eliot’s which can only be redeemed as in Eliot by the advent of Christ and of the divine fire that purifies. 5. Sitwell herself indicated that the year 1940 should be taken as the real and visible internal demarcation in her poetry (and ultimately the only one). Her poetry after that date is unrecognizable to anyone who has followed her from the beginning. It spreads out in broad odes and lavish hymns of a Romantic-Baroque type and style, with a prophetic vocation and visionary outlook, all similar and imitating each other, even down to their blank verse. From the lucidity of her early classical beginnings, from the acute sense of geometric design that abhorred the superfluous, Sitwell sinks into a Romantic lack of measure and the verbal farrago. From a supreme, wary objectivity she descends into advocacy and a prophetic and incantatory persuasion, from the elliptical to the explicit, even and especially from the abstract to the descriptive. Indeed she gives in to that naturalistic framework, albeit still a bit shaken and overwhelming, which had been the polemical target of her aesthetics and its practice in the 1920s. This restoration was recklessly hailed by some as the most important development in 16 17

In the revised version of 1946, this evident euphemism is replaced by the explicit naming of Christ. Especially obvious and off-putting are the mice nibbling the bones.

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English or even European poetry after the Second World War.18 As evocations of the spiritual death gripping the fallen world,19 these poems are also calling for a spiritual regeneration to be brought about by Christ’s second coming in the world. Both preoccupations superficially echo Hopkins and Francis Thompson,20 especially the latter, so that the common denominator is Shelley. The war provoked from Sitwell a noble meditation on the redemptive power of the blood of Christ for humanity, but with the selfcritique that human history had been a persistent crucifixion of humanity by humanity (‘Still Falls the Rain’). The inequality of the economic system brings about repeated references to the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, in the precise sense of Disraeli’s ‘two nations’, the poor and the rich, which become united again in the utopia of a regenerated world. Three poems ‘of the atomic age’, mostly in an analogic and visionary vein, seem to quench the fire of regenerative hope and realize the regrettable advent of an ice age. The second of these, the apocalyptic ‘The Shadow of Cain’, at times rings like an unwitting parody of science fiction. Serious doubts can reasonably be raised on the much praised, suffering religiosity of Sitwell’s late phase, which is emphatic but superficial, and even filled with an eclectic paganism. § 87. Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell* The conspicuous and very varied production of Edith Sitwell’s two brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell, is still to be given an exhaustive catalogue. Its most essential historical significance has been reduced, however, to the formula that their frivolity, their haughty snobbery, their androgynous, 18 19

See DES, 231. ‘Fallen’ is here intended in a biblical sense, as this is a poetry with a sustained postlapsarian scaffolding. 20 The final objective is invariably Hopkins’s ‘harvest’, which Thompson’s sun or Sun, once resurrected, must ripen. Besides the odes dedicated to Thompson’s sun, the models most often literally paraphrased are two of Hopkins’s sonnets, the one on the Heraclitean Fire and ‘Spelt From Sibyl’s Leaves’. The tropic abundance is however ultimately indebted to Swinburne, even if the visionary stance echoes Blake. *

R. Fulford, Osbert Sitwell, London 1951; J. Lehmann, A Nest of Tigers: The Sitwells in Their Times, Boston, MA 1968; S. Bradford, Sacheverell Sitwell: Splendours and Miseries, London 1993; P. Ziegler, Osbert Sitwell, London 1998.

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indefinable gender and their erudite and eclectic eccentricity1 conceal an insistent sense of the tragedy of the modern world, for which their work is an exorcism. They did take refuge from the present into the past, ‘into the stronghold of a past dream’,2 resurrecting and reviving (in the same terms I used for Beerbohm) the Baroque and Rococo, neoclassical painting, the exquisite virtuosity of commedia dell’arte, the epic melodrama and opera and operetta of the eighteenth century. At that point they pulled down the shutters, because après was le deluge, the world had become irredeemably vulgar for a century, lately reviving in the glow of the 1890s. Persiflage, caustic speech, pose, exhibitionism are all a mask. As I mentioned earlier, Praz is among those who have accepted this formula and have splendidly illustrated it, speaking on behalf of many other late incognito aesthetes (a whole sensibility, then), whose critical reason could not but embrace a modernity by then undelayable and the unavoidable end of aestheticism, but who nostalgically pined for it with another part of themselves. The Sitwells’ satire looked to Praz exactly like that of Beerbohm, Vernon Lee, Lytton Strachey, and dozens of other minor memoirs writers. Having been born too late, they had to pretend to satirize an age that had slipped from their fingers and which they missed; their critique and gentle irony were meant to caress and bring back to life their target. As Praz rightly saw, Osbert Sitwell was Beerbohm’s counterpart.3 After school, he joined the army in 1911 as a cavalry officer, but, having nothing to do, he ended up going to the theatre and art galleries in London. In 1914 he was actually sent to the front, where he wrote his first poems. After the war he became a journalist, critic and polemicist in magazines, introduced Matisse, Utrillo, Picasso and Modigliani to the British, wrote the libretto of Belshazzar’s 1

2 3

This eclecticism was even chameleon-like if we are to judge from the echoes and borrowings attributed to them: from Aubrey to Thomas Browne, from Donne to the Metaphysical poets, from the polite aphorisms of the eighteenth century to Lamb and the Romantic essayists, to Meredith, besides Beerbohm and the Decadents, as I argue. And yet all these influences are gathered under the much wider heading of stylistic mannerism and Alexandrianism. CLA, vol. II, 74, where the repetitive motto ‘the swan-song of a doomed society’ is first launched, offering a summary of the five autobiographical volumes. The first edition of the autobiography was illustrated by Beerbohm’s sketches of the two brothers.

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Feast for Walton, and published two collections of poetry in 1921. As with Beerbohm, though, his natural inclination was for inventive, evocative prose and memoirs. His third novel, The Man Who Lost Himself4 (1929) is summarized and interpreted so well by Praz5 that one could almost dispense with reading it. But the ostensible analogy with novels of the ‘double’ and of ‘the woman who lived twice’ by Wilkie Collins, or with Falkner’s fantastic Gothic tale of a ‘lost Stradivarius’6 is here misleading. After a failed love-affair, the protagonist of this novel twice finds himself facing his own ghost in Granada: at first as a young man he sees his old self, then many years later, as an old man he sees his younger self and dies of a stroke. His ostentatious name is Tristram Orlander, fusing Arthurian and Wagnerian romance with references to the newly published novel by Woolf, Orlando, though both references are finally overtaken by the obvious link with Dorian Gray. Osbert’s masterpiece remains his autobiography in five volumes: Left Hand, Right Hand! (1945), The Scarlet Tree (1946), Great Morning (1948), Laughter in the Next Room (1949), and Noble Essences (1950). Praz surpasses himself in his account of this overview of English life during Edward’s reign, to the point of forgetting himself and seeming to follow Osbert’s hand as he wrote, thus empathically reliving as witness the sketches unravelling on the page: Lytton Strachey, Ronald Firbank, D’Annunzio, Ada Leverson, etc. Only reluctantly does Praz interrupt the list, which he wishes would never end.7 2. A student at Oxford, Sacheverell too fought in the First World War, returned to the university once decommissioned but without graduating. When he made his debut as a poet, he met with such a harsh reception

4 5 6 7

A novel that is really a memoir, told in the first person by an acquaintance of the protagonist and without any division in parts and chapters, and almost without dialogue. CLA, vol. I, 172–4. IDM, 139–44. Halfway through the fourth of five volumes, Osbert is still intent on recreating the milieu of pre-First World War England. Praz’s apparently rash judgement that Osbert’s autobiography dominated the ‘English literary horizon’ in 1949–1959 (CLA, vol. II, 116) is in fact confirmed in Orwell’s review of the third volume, from 1948, a review which ends by claiming that Sitwell’s work is ‘among the best autobiographies of our time’ (OCE, vol. IV, 505).

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that he refused to be published for many years: his collected poems only saw the light in 1967. Yet he was certainly more gifted than his brother as a poet; Edith vouched for him, claiming he was a poet of language, of sound and of prosody, an outstanding Symboliste.8 He should therefore be revived and revaluated in our times, when the charge of being merely skilled in verse-making and a verbal stylist – of a poetry that is a mere dress for slight sense, in other words the accusation that he may have had nothing or little to say – has no longer any justification to be. Those who valued content praised Sacheverell when he relied on a model he could follow and change, as in certain variations on a theme by Pope; but to others, like Eliot, he appeared like a Shelley flapping his wings in the void without that support. Dr Donne and Gargantua was panned as a pretentious rumination on the nature of good and evil. Sacheverell wrote essays that are even more intangible and immaterial than his brother’s, formally disguised as falsely heuristic investigations into German, Italian and Hispanic Baroque, or even into Northern European Gothic. Some of his collections of essays, such as The Hunters and the Hunted (1947), woven through singular and stilted connections and leitmotifs, therefore digressions without rhyme or reason, have an aura of almost astral sophistication and are unique in the literary panorama of the time. § 88. Firbank* To explain and place the lightness, the evanescence, the extravagant affectation, the playful irresponsibility of Ronald Firbank’s (1886–1926) 9

8

GSM, 511, an accurate judgement, since some of Sacheverell’s poems are sophisticated and refined syllabic and alliterative games relishing in fine sensations and natural impressions. Two well-known and often anthologized poems by Osbert and Sacheverell are both called ‘Fountains’, clearly originating from their estate at Scarborough. Sacheverell’s version shows his superior gift for exquisite and musical lyricism, capable of forging similes that are far from stale.

*

The Complete Firbank, ed A. Powell, London, 1961, 1973, to which should be added the juvenilia of New Rythum [sic] and Other Pieces, London 1962, inclusive of an unfinished novel about New York. Letters to His Mother 1920–1924, with La Princesse aux soleils, ed. A. Hobson, London 2001. Among the many near-complete editions should be remembered Five Novels, London 1949, with the invaluable introduction by the eyewitness Osbert Sitwell. E. M. Forster, ‘Ronald Firbank’, an essay from 1929

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fantasy tales, critics have invoked a veritable plethora of predecessors, contemporaries and successors. Having tried to stick a number of labels on his work, critical opinion has finally converged towards a unanimous recognition that he was not an imitator or a mere pasticheur, but a late Decadent who becomes an original albeit minor convert to Modernism before the official baptism of the movement (of which he was perhaps not even aware), and who even exceeds Modernism as a precursor of the postmodern. But all of these stages and transitions took place in Firbank’s candid ignorance of the stir surrounding him, through the spontaneous development of his art, without proclamations and manifestos. Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, Congreve’s mischievous drawing-room dramas from the Restoration, Sterne and Beckford are all cited as Firbank’s early predecessors. Later ones are Barrie and Lewis Carroll, closer still Wilde and Beardsley, not only Beardsley the cartoonist but also the author of rich and refined prose works like Under the Hill.1 The great priests of international aestheticism held Firbank within the orbit of the femme-fatale

repr. in Abinger Harvest, Harmondsworth 1967, 129–35; I. K. Fletcher, Ronald Firbank: A Memoir, London 1930; J. Brooke, Ronald Firbank, London 1951, and ‘Ronald Firbank’, in Ronald Firbank and John Betjeman, London 1962, 5–24; J. A. Kiechler, The Butterfly’s Wings Freckled: A Study of Style in the Novels of Ronald Firbank, Bern 1969; J. D. Merritt, Ronald Firbank, New York 1969; E. M. Potoker, Ronald Firbank, New York 1970; M. J. Benkovitz, Ronald Firbank: A Biography, London and New York 1970; B. Brophy, Prancing Novelist: A Defence of Fiction in the Form of a Critical Biography in Praise of Ronald Firbank, London and New York 1973; Ronald Firbank: Memoirs and Critiques, ed. M. Horder, London 1977; L. Sampietro, La narrativa di Ronald Firbank, Imola 1979; R. F. Kiernan, Frivolity Unbound: Six Masters of the Camp Novel, Thomas Love Peacock, Max Beerbohm, Ronald Firbank, E. F. Benson, P. G. Wodehouse, Ivy Compton-Burnett, New York 1990; Critical Essays on Ronald Firbank, English Novelist, 1886–1926, ed. G. Davies, D. Malcolm and J. Simons, Lewiston, NY 2004; J. Fryer, Ronald Firbank: A Life, London 2005; A. Hollinghurst, ‘Saved by art: The shy, steely, original Ronald Firbank’, TLS, 17 November 2006, 12–15; F. Cleto, Opale violetto verdeoro: uno studio su Ronald Firbank, Genova 2012. Praz’s 1980 feature ‘Analisi strutturale di una farfalla’ [‘Structural analysis of a butterfly’], in SSI, vol. II, 300–4, is partly dedicated to Firbank and ruthlessly crushes the structuralist approach. 1

Firbank had a marked interest in design and painting and considered his books to be objets d’art. His first editions were published with frontispiece illustrations by some of the best designers of the age.

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cultists, describing him as a writer still unable to escape the abasing charm of the myth of Salome, a favourite with the Decadents for its ambiguity, hiding on the one hand their curiosity about mysticism and the taming of sensuality, while on the other making explicit the need for transgression and perversion. Firbank’s ‘artificial princess’ exposes this complex construction when she says that ‘the uglier he was, the more terrible the fascination’. As the leader of these intoxicated connoisseurs, Praz repeatedly spoke of Firbank as a maudit, without however devoting to him more than a few pages or a proper overview, happy to repeat Firbank’s self-portrait as ‘a dingy lilac blossom of rarity untold’. In 1929 Forster had found for Firbank the beautiful metaphor of a butterfly or dragonfly writer, whose wings break off as soon as the critic tries to examine it with his blunt instruments, so much so that Forster strongly advised the critics to put away their tools and be silent. With Firbank, he said, we just have to put intelligence aside, forget about scalpel and microscope and enjoy books that must be closed whenever boredom takes over, only to then find the need to reopen them sharpened. With a grandfather ironically grown into a self-made railroad contractor, Firbank had been a late Nineties aesthete in the early twentieth century, collecting fine editions of Wilde and Beerbohm; as a student he had had his room in Cambridge decorated with silks, flowers, figurines and trinkets, entranced by the work of Maeterlinck and Huysmans. From there, without graduating or ever sitting an exam, he began to travel to Spain, Italy, the Middle East and North Africa. He had been of course declared unfit for military service, and his work constitutes a veritable exorcism of war. He circled around the periphery of literary coteries, and just had a few friends who were minor figures; a secretive temperament, he kept everything locked up inside him. A repressed unexpressed homosexual, fearful and introverted, dominated by his mother who pampered him, he wore powder on his protruding cheeks, crimson nail-polish, and spoke in a falsetto that sounded like a woman’s voice. Naturally, he dressed like a dandy. But he was not the figure of fun to be mocked, the idler, the eccentric silhouette issuing glacial quips without any facial expression that his contemporaries described. He could be unpredictably practical: after his father’s death he made virtue of necessity and supported both himself and his family financially. Like generations of homosexual aesthetes, Firbank had converted to Catholicism in 1907. Within the range of infinite versions of English

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Catholicism in the early twentieth century, he took on the religion as a kind of magic box and forcing-house of his imagination.2 His Catholicism was at first that of the Pre-Raphaelites, with Rossetti’s aesthetic focus on the blessed damozels of the Italian Stilnovo and of the virgin saints who mistake mystical ecstasy and the urge towards holiness for the first stirrings of love. It then gradually became a Mediterranean Catholicism with its similar ambiguities, and sincere devotion mixed with worldly pleasure. Firbank’s imaginary topography is populated with Catholic churches dedicated to fantasy saints who never existed, or convents with the most preposterous dedications, out of which come nuns with ambiguous morals who often burn with the desire to mortify themselves by flagellation. Firbank’s aristocracy is always Catholic by definition, with its drawing rooms and salons full of hovering priests, monsignors and prelates. Each page in Firbank oozes the orgiastic and figural taste for Catholic liturgy. Yet, as Praz remarked, Firbank’s Salomes owe more to Laforgue than to Wilde;3 and yet Praz pretended not to know that Firbank’s belated and already parodic Decadentism practically ceases with the short story of 1905 with which Firbank made his debut, or at most with his second, dating from 1915, and with the third. The remaining works, around seventy per cent of his whole production, have a very different imprint and can no longer be framed by Decadentism. In the most authentic Firbank, the plot becomes thin and absurd, disproportionate

2

3

Because of a scarcity of information, for a long time there was a very reductive account of Firbank’s Catholicism (cf. Benkovitz 1970, 102–6, for a correction). Up to 1920 Firbank was a practising and fervent Catholic aiming to be enrolled not in the diplomatic service at the Vatican (as some have wrongly claimed) but in the Swiss Guards, or even in the Pope’s Noble Guard. In 1910, at the end of a long stay in Rome, it became clear to Firbank that this would not be possible. Benkovitz argues that this disappointment was the cause of Firbank’s cooling towards the Church, and of a certain aggressive attitude as recorded in this quip: ‘The Roman Church did not want me, and I mock her’. In 1921, he told his mother he had lost his faith but continued to pray in an effort to regain it. Firbank did not then treat his faith lightly. Years after his lonely death in Rome, his body was dug up from the Protestant cemetery and buried again in the Catholic one, the Verano. The only text approaching Wilde’s aphoristic manner is the weak A Study in Temperament, published in 1905 together with Odette, but never reissued.

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and fantastic, while stage directions progressively give way to dialogue. The narrative form becomes an even more dramatic play, since each turn in the dialogue, already often of a single line, becomes, through a premeditated operation of subtraction, increasingly digressive and impertinent; they are not even clearly attributed, with the reader always uncertain as to who is their speaker.4 Of Firbank it is often said that he writes works in which the microphone is given to abstract and fatuous characters, floating away from the concrete; his fluffy and insubstantial novels, effectively novellas, burst like soap bubbles from vacuous chatter. The success of this very experimental and idiosyncratic method is greater when the flow of dialogue climbs from the non-specific to a climax, be it a sally, a cutting witticism or a skit without rhyme or reason but fantastically effective. To be precise, it is not accurate to say that Firbank wrote the same novel or short story ten times over, with the later works as evidence of a relative normalization, at least in the sense of a narrative not entirely resolved in one-liners. I shall try and highlight the subtle differences of structure and emphasis between the different works, and with it a certain escalation – or a decline as the case may be – in form. I do not deny that once one has read a number of pages at random in his oeuvre one will have figured out how the text works. He is undoubtedly a writer to be enjoyed in moderate doses, or he will nauseate, as Forster remarked. 2. But the surprising fact about Firbank is that he was then a shaper of other writers, particularly those who debuted in the 1920s, or at least some of the best of that generation, from Huxley to Waugh to Powell and even Graham Greene. Some critics will also include Hemingway among the imitators of Firbank’s short story written exclusively as dialogue. Peacock and the conversation-novel or the novel of ideas are just external resonances, since Firbank is not interested in ideas after all, and just makes his puppets chat amiably and fantasize; so while his influence on Henry Green or Compton-Burnett may be credible, less convincing are the claims for Aldous Huxley, and even less for Beckett, whose beggars do speak in 4

Before Firbank, Saki had already attempted writing dry sketches without depth in the collection of short stories ‘by Reginald’ (Volume 6, § 247.5), all driven by lines of dialogue only, entirely within the realm of the whimsical, extravagant and digressive.

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telegraphic lines but with a very different metaphysical and philosophical import, something obviously absent in Firbank. Over time, small groups of loyal followers among the elites of post-aesthetes appreciating his kind of refined and immaterial writing took it upon themselves to keep Firbank’s memory alive. They were writers like Forster, Osbert Sitwell, Auden and, as I mentioned earlier, Waugh. Obviously Firbank remained outside the scope of political, engagée literature and was ignored by Orwell. This explains why he is just cited by name in textbooks and anthologies, but not always seen in favourable light.5 Firbank thus faded into oblivion in the decades after his death, until he was rediscovered as a precursor of ‘camp’ sensibility. In her influential Against Interpretation,6 Susan Sontag identified in Firbank an emblem of this key concept for pop and mass culture in the 1960s. In her argument, ‘camp’ is a sensibility made up of artifice, exaggeration, stylization, but neutral towards content, effectively a sub-species or sub-category of Mannerism and the Rococo. With Art Nouveau as its primary term of reference, camp borders on and merges with a variant of the postmodern. Sontag adds a number of conflicting categories, which is unsurprising since all sensitivities to a certain extent blend their identities in the range of voices flowing into ‘camp’. Some of these other categories are ‘kitsch’ – the ‘good taste of bad taste’ – and ‘gender’, that is, the aristocracy of truly refined taste that has remained the preserve of homosexuality. Be it as it may, Firbank’s work is no longer readable as belonging to fin-de-siècle aestheticism or Impressionism, and not even to Modernism tout court.7 5 6 7

Without mincing words, he is defined a ‘mediocre’ novelist in WEL, vol. VI, 176. S. Sontag, ‘Notes on “Camp”’, in Against Interpretation, New York 1966, 275–92. As the bibliography shows, Firbank is often associated with the name of Edward Frederic Benson (1867–1940) under the aegis of camp. The father of this prolific novelist and versatile writer, author of detective stories and critical essays, was to become Archbishop of Canterbury. His mother was renowned for her brilliant intellect and once widowed entered into a lesbian relationship with the widow of the previous archbishop, a plot vaguely reminiscent of those of Trollope’s Barset chronicles. The Benson brothers (one of whom was A. C. Benson, an important critic often cited in this work) were exceptionally eclectic, talented and eccentric, oddly similar to the brothers of Hay Fever by Noël Coward, but also effeminate. In life E. F. Benson was often partnered with homosexuals, and lived with one in Capri at the same time as

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3. Behind ‘Odette: A Fairy Tale for Weary People’, written by Firbank at nineteen, critics have detected Jammes and Maeterlinck, but the simplified, naïve prose is also evocative of Wilde’s children’s tales. The trace and the Norman Douglas, another homosexual. Capri was then the homosexual paradise that Berlin would be ten or twenty years later for Auden and Isherwood. Proof of Benson’s camp universe is however best found in his novels, starting from David Blaize (1916), whose protagonist is a public-school homosexual. A sizeable reputation and a surprisingly broad reception, including both mass readership and illustrious writers like Auden, attached itself to the six novels of the ‘Lucia and Mapp cycle’, first published in the 1920s but for which there was renewed interest in the 1980s through a BBC serialization. The characters were aliases and the novels masked the small fights for local power waged by the two queens and minor matriarchs Emmeline Lucas (Lucia) and Elizabeth Mapp. Their squabbles take place in the fictional town of Tilling (as imaginary as Carlingford, Middlemarch, Cranford, or Jane Austen’s locations), which disguises Rye in Sussex, where Benson lived for several years and was mayor from 1934. There, Lucia establishes a small court where her subjects bow to her despite her grandstanding, her vagaries, her pretentiousness, her marked ostentation. The camp sensibility is exhibited especially through the conscious and controlled enactment of these rites. This provincial court falls apart and exhausts its power when it is exported from its narrow confines, unable to penetrate the world of the metropolis and of high finance. In addition to camp, Benson therefore also belongs to the serial novel, which was popular especially with Galsworthy: he is therefore a minor author of a minor saga. On Benson see the profile, full of valuable information, by F. Cleto in MAR, vol. III, 556. The novels of Barbara Pym (1913–1980) were rescued from oblivion by Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin in 1977 after several of her novels from the 1950s had been symptomatically rejected as not sufficiently modern; they give an updated version of the same chronotope as Benson’s thirty years later: the small, closed world of the suburbs and the Trollopian comedy of skirmishes in the living room with the daily rituals in the shade and the perimeter of the parish. They are chiselled with a clean and lively style, and punctuated by a delightfully sassy dialogue, which irresistibly made almost everyone recall Jane Austen. They form a cycle not just because of their unity of place, but also because they revolve on the tepid and bloodless passions of demure spinsters for professionals, often anthropologists or librarians or antique dealers, who are absent-minded, selfish and careless. But deep down these spinsters really do share some residue of the protagonist of Firbank’s Vainglory: an extravagant whim, an eccentric tic, a naïve habit, like the one for ‘cat Faustina’ or for collecting tinned foods. Beyond this scheme lies Pym’s masterpiece, Quartet in Autumn (1977), a study in the inability to communicate of four eccentric clerks working in a London office.

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most unmistakable echoes are however for me with Morris’s prose. Firbank sets the tale in the feudal France of the Loire castles dear to Morris, where the orphan Odette lives with her aunt; Morris’s influence is also evident in the décor of furnishings and objects and of the language itself, which lingers on the shades and on the woodland as well as on the layers of antiquity and enchantment in the landscape. Like Morris too is the focus on tapestry as an inevitable decorative object from here on, providing even the potential for a story within a story. But the interest in ancient fairy-tales of heroism and sanctity from the Middle Ages, seen through the lens of the Renaissance (and therefore already eroticized), were also dear to Pater, who as we know had traced them in Morris, coining a key concept of Decadent sensibility.8 In the slight plot the daring Odette, her head filled with the lives of saints and books of prayer, longs to become a saint, a recurring element in the early Firbank. Moved by the story of Joan of Arc, the orphan left to her own devices finds her way towards mysticism and the heroic fanaticism of holiness. But the saint’s legend that most strikes her is that of Bernadette of Lourdes, whom Odette attempts to emulate one night by going into the woods. Here it becomes clear how much the story owes to late Pre-Raphaelitism. Firbank’s child is the prose descendant of Christina Rossetti’s Laura of ‘Goblin Market’, who meets the goblins in the wood; the enchanted and magical atmosphere of fairy-tale and ballad also belongs to that of the last three poems by her brother Gabriel. What links Firbank to the Rossettis is essentially the ambiguous fascination, mystical and sensual and even mystical and sexual, of the immature female figure who lives this ambivalence unaware. In the actual story, as the girl approaches holiness and the encounter with Our Lady (here, you might say, Swinburne comes to the rescue), she unexpectedly meets a prostitute in the night, with the experience transforming, or better darkening, into a rite of passage, especially towards knowledge and self-knowledge, including that of sexuality, since that awaited meeting with Our Lady is described as an anticipation of an imminent sexual experience. Such a ritual, which necessarily also meant the transition to puberty (at the end red roses shine ‘in the morning light

8

Volume 6, § 185.3.

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like drops of crimson blood’) had been endless times veiled and figured in Victorian fiction and poetry, from Dickens to Gaskell, and precisely to the Pre-Raphaelites – a late and neo-Gothic ritual too and thus Romantic, with its first appearance and development in Coleridge’s Christabel. ‘Odette’ was not understood and appreciated even by Firbank’s admirers, who have panned the equally miraculous, narratively very balanced, and therefore a-typical story ‘Santal’, written in 1921 from Tunisia.9 Without any apparent tinge of that dominant and amused irony with which at that time he was treating religion, but with a prodigious and admirable immersion in local colour, ‘Santal’ reveals how deeply rooted in Firbank was the search for holiness. The little Odette is here the Arab orphan Cherif, devoted reader of the Koran in a rather secularized environment, who indomitable decides to leave for Mecca.10 The Artificial Princess (1915, published posthumously in 1934) completely reshuffles the deck. It is suddenly a very free, amused even absurd parody of Wilde’s Salome set in a fictional, Ruritanian Germany, reminiscent of Büchner’s Leonce und Lena, though threatened by revolution.11 Firbank’s narrator here launches his dress-designer vein. What he likes to do and does is to offer in words, in an ekphrastic process, the attires of the ladies he portrays, put together with an eccentric taste in colours and fabrics, and with extravagant imagination in the clothing: that is, he sketches models, outlines trends, and the text becomes a fashion show. Each character is described along the lines of a pictorial model to which it adapts itself and which it embodies. Firbank does not know how to describe a character, clothing and parts of the body without giving a striking pictorial equivalent. The internal parable is a version of the biblical story of St John and Salome, which burns through all of Decadence: one St John Pellegrin is invited to the birthday party of the capricious princess,

9 10

11

Forster 1929, 133, considered this tale a failure. Firbank renders here like no other the scent of Arabia that is also found in ‘Karshish’, Browning’s dramatic monologue. For Cherif too an ambiguous initiation beckons: before leaving he avoids the prostitutes’ quarter, but in the night sky the star of Venus shines. One of the surprising outbursts is the queen’s exclamation: ‘To-morrow […] we will begin our economies. The Court shall have Rabbits for dinner’.

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with the Baroness in charge of bringing him the invitation, even if, in a parodic bathos, she must take the tram to do so. On the way, the Baroness meets an old flame, but this is an opportunity to let her fantasize about an invented French saint. At the meeting between the new Salome and the saint12 a parodic banquet of lampreys (called a kind of ‘locusts’) and honey, John’s food in the desert, is consumed. But the curtain falls abruptly on the enigmatic song of a rooster. 4. The setting of Vainglory (1915), the first of Firbank’s mature tales, is that of an imaginary English cathedral city, Ashringford, where a very large number of wives with aestheticist tastes are gathered together with some mere extras. It is the longest and therefore most dilatory of Firbank’s works. It stages ballets of encounters and rambling, airy and evanescent conversations. The only men are a pianist, a playwright, a fistful of husbands, but it is really the women’s quarter that dominate. The proliferation of little skits hinders the focus, particularly since Firbank expunges any informative captions. This is a separate jurisdiction, truly off limits, where the rules and the codes of social life are suspended and characters can say and do what is most strange and bizarre. The speeches and acts of the characters give the impression of being expanded limericks, so many are the cameos that make the reader smile. The fantastic plot (yet constantly ignored) concerns a naïve, mystical woman, Mrs Shamefoot, a caricature of an earnest, gentle, sentimental wife to an MP who can work herself into a trance. She has a flower shop in Sloane Square and is stubbornly looking for a cathedral where she could dedicate a stained glass window to herself. It is a parody and burlesque of Odette’s longing for holiness, but no less heartfelt for that. More broadly, the parody attacks the Victorian microcosm of Gaskell’s Cranford and of all those imaginary towns with their humorous sagas of an eccentric and bizarre bourgeoisie: ‘In Ashringford what egotists we are’. When the coterie of chatterboxes moves to Ashringford, the ecclesiastical affairs of the bishop take centre stage. The parodied model is then Trollope’s

12

Yet, as Sampietro 1979, 41, notices, the saint is most probably just a stranger, since the invitation was never delivered, as is revealed at the end. This pseudo-Jokanaan utters just one, extremely banal line.

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Barchester cycle, with the sacristy gossip and subtle quibbles over liturgical practices and clerical casuistry. Lightning destroys part of the cathedral; during the restoration the stained-glass window can finally be installed with great fanfare. From this novel it becomes clear that Firbank’s narrative thread improves when caught in tangles; each of his following stories will be a discontinuous fabric of sketches of weirdness and the bizarre. Inclinations (1916) takes place mostly in Greece, where the fifteen-yearold Mabel Collins is travelling with her companion Miss O’Brookomore. Having fallen in love with a Roman count, Mabel elopes with him. After two years she visits her family, now as mother to a young child and reeling off improprieties in Roman dialect. The plot is still trivial, banal, deliberately treated in a generic way, superficial and even macaronic (especially in the cliché of Count Pastorelli’s Roman origins): any psychological depth has been eliminated. The interest lies if at all in the complete triumph of the dialogue, which reduces almost to zero the need for explanatory prose. Not only the intentions of the characters, but also information about the stages of the journey and meetings are all filtered by the dialogue in a tour de force. The flickering whimsy of the pure humourist survives. The novel is also in some ways a travesty of the grand tour, reminiscent not just of limericks but also of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera, of nonsense verse and, farther, of Clough’s Amours de Voyage. For a good half of Caprice (1917), Firbank seems to have toned down his novelty, obliterated his trademark and even betrayed his dialogic gift, returning to the manner of fiction-writing at the time. The opening is anonymous, a fairly orthodox prelude to a rather fragmentary stream of consciousness that introduces Sarah, the romantic and imaginative daughter of a clergyman impatient with her family’s oppression and sense of worthlessness, who flees to London to realize her dream of becoming an actress. As well as being rather smooth, stylistically settled and surprisingly fast, the story takes up a theme typical of Wells and pro-feminist narrative: the woman who seeks independence and throws herself into acting. In the second half Firbank assumes the unlikely role of the naturalist writer, succeeding well in giving his readers a tissue of facts and suspenseful events. The scared young woman arrives at night-time in a dangerous London, looking for a place to sleep; she knocks on the door of an intermediary she had naïvely turned to in order

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to get a foothold into theatre, only to be told that she had just died. These are not occasions for burlesque, but rather events narrated by a serious novelist. These varied, measured, naturalist sketches, which give a slightly satirical and yet at the same time realistic picture of the theatrical milieu in the capital (the remote precedent here is Reade), continue with only a few indulgences until fantasy and impressionism – and therefore loose threads – take over at almost exactly the halfway point. In itself, the hiring of a theatre to perform Romeo and Juliet is the same extravagance as the self-dedicated window of Mrs Shamefoot. Sarah lives in a small dressing room inside the theatre; the premiere is a great success, but she dies soon after while performing gymnastics on the empty stage and falling through a trap door. The elliptical way in which that accidental death is introduced is paradigmatic of Firbank: a cry is heard across London, yet its origin is not immediately identified and the chapter abruptly ends.13 5. In Valmouth (1918) Firbank found a device he would increasingly adopt from then on: occasions and pretexts for keeping in close contact a small community of unreal and funny characters, in order to let them talk ad lib.14 He also began using an incongruous geography and therefore an imaginary space-time,15 here that of a nonexistent spa where three no-longer-young ladies generate storms in teacups, weave romantic and marriage plots against a background of vapid, saucy one-liners, at times also subtly cruel. In other words, this could be the Arcadian world of Jane Austen, and there is a definite semblance; but Valmouth is rather set in a late eighteenth century with some clues pointing to the contemporary. The atmosphere is then that of fairy-tale, while the healthy air lets nearly century-old mummies move on the scene. Valmouth is definitely not on 13 14

15

This way of under-narrating, of playing with ellipses and of breaking with the hierarchy of narrated events is inherited from Meredith. Firbank the supreme dialogist would seem to have been born with the chrism of the playwright. In fact his play The Princess Zoubaroff (1920) is a limp catalogue of literal one-liners, some absurdist puns, but most rather routine, attributed to eccentric and world-weary British aristocrats, dimly Chekhovian and on holiday in Florence. It is a play in which the lack of stage directions is paradoxically quite acutely felt. Firbank would typically set his stories in a location that he would then visit after rather than before writing the story, confirming a complete reversal of the procedure of realistic fiction (Brooke 1951, 44).

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the map, both because the country is populated by Catholic churches dedicated to nonexistent saints and because its Catholic priests are like those of the eighteenth century, witty and worldly, steeped in high society. Though the location appears to be English, its geographical landmarks are polyglot, as if it were a Catholic colonial country with Spanish as its other language, or a pleasant subtropical colony where the British took over from the Spaniards, and whose vestigial religion and language remain in agreeable disharmony. The text derives from it a cacophony of languages and a mingling of heterogeneous materials in a disintegrated universe. Mrs Yajñavalkya, the masseuse, weaves together the erotic plots, but is a caricature, since Firbank captures her comic potential and her humour at the phonetic level. She is also the first arrival on the scene of the black diversity already remembered in the paintings and the world of opera at the times. There is a constant stream of prurient and dazed sketches, of bizarre and sharp cameos of figurines with tics that could once again have descended from the Victorian eccentricity of light verse or nonsense poetry. Firbank delights in creating parodic changes of register, as in the pathetic, empathic and lyrical one adopted for a girl madly in love, who when wading the river often feels the throbbing of nature and dreams of a more unreachable aristocratic beloved and is called Tethys; or that of the anguished conscience of the elderly woman in love with a reluctant young shepherd. The skirmishes from operetta, about a love that is not reciprocated, or crossed and unfaithful, would be risqué and forbidden ingredients, but are here neutralized in the general overall lightness, as if they were arias from Guarini’s Il pastor fido. The height of the bizarre sketch features the Catholic sister Ecclesia who has taken a vow of silence which she can transgress only on special occasions, only one of the endless possibilities and variations that Catholic superstition offered to Firbank’s imagination. In The Flower Beneath the Foot (1923) Firbank set out to follow the model of the opera libretto, or light opera buffa, or even of outright operetta. The text belongs to a repertoire that ranges from the subplot in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro to the Strauss operas with Hofmannsthal’s libretti,16 16

Whom not coincidentally Sontag associates with Firbank under the heading of camp. Brooke 1951, 12, is unconvincing when he evokes similarities with Debussy, Schönberg and Webern.

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without forgetting the English precedent of Gilbert and Sullivan. Not for nothing this repertoire is all set in fairy-tale courts where all that is most improbable can happen. In its kind, it is Firbank’s masterpiece, where he pulls out of his magic hat real novelties of scene and dialogue, a never-ending supply of comic sketches of exquisite quality. Firbank plays with words, names, locations, and likes to put together what cannot be together in an exuberant hubbub. The external occasion, in a plot that is like a meze, often without reciprocal links among its numbers, is the arrival of the royal family of the kingdom ‘of dates’ to the Pisuerga court, an indeterminate state that could be exotic, situated somewhere in Asia minor, or in Africa, but with many European characteristics and a mixed population. The internal pretext is the marriage of the heir with a mademoiselle who once she discovers that her betrothed is a small-time Don Juan decides to become a nun, but with the twist that she replaces heterosexual love with a just-hinted homosexual passion for the abbess of the convent. Among the many enjoyable variations there is space for a satirical vein: a journalist offers her daily reports of royal events; in the lending library they discuss and criticize the novels of a Firbank; a young British diplomat is about to be flogged by a friend.17 In Sorrow in Sunlight18 (1925) – his most popular and famous tale, though in my opinion weak and superficial, perhaps because the more regular and traditional of his works, except the first one – Firbank exploits the comic possibilities and humour of the patois of Caribbean blacks (already central in Valmouth), setting it in a South American island. Not only do the dialogue parts want to be an imitative exploit of Dickensian classics, but the theme is also an update of the Victorian satire of pretension, with the family of the fearful Mr Mouth, proverbially hen-pecked husband who

17

18

This Eddie Monteith, who in the past was half-inclined to become a Jesuit, is perhaps one of the writer’s counterparts (Brooke 1951, 28). Even Laura de Nazianzi wants to purify herself by flogging once she becomes a nun. The Firbankian motif of the dream of exile from the world and of the aspiration to holiness is thus depicted in Laura; in its secular version it is also the aspiration of Madame Wetme, the owner of a coffee-shop who longs to be received at court. The title originally given to the novel in America in 1924 was Prancing Nigger, Mrs Mouth’s frequent interjection to her husband in the book.

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wants to move the family to the capital to enter high-society. The attempt predictably fails: one of the daughters turns with nostalgia to the life she left behind, while the other becomes the kept woman of a wealthy bourgeois. It looks like some kind of translation or transliteration of Dickens or Thackeray,19 particularly since it is one of the few cases in which Firbank gestures towards a moral parable, the dreams and aspirations that used to be spiritual in other stories having here turned secular. In Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926) Firbank’s phantasmagoria indulges in risqué jokes on Catholic superstition and the unsustainable celibacy of priests in the land where carnal passion traditionally is more torrid. Firbank sets the story in Spain, albeit in a fictional diocese of Andalusia where characters bear by now familiar Firbankian, extravagant names. The success of the story is due to the surreal and grotesque ingenuity of its separate scenes, which light up with visual surprises from the baptism of a puppy in the cathedral onwards. This shows that the goal is not to satirize Catholicism, but rather the pure combinatory play of the imagination. The reader is reminded of Baron Corvo and Browning, one of whom converted to Catholicism while the other flirted with its forms, its history and its legend. The subject of much gossip, the scandal-prone cardinal is investigated by the Holy See and the scene also moves on to an imaginary Pope Tertius II in the footsteps of the pontifical fantasy of Adrian the Seventh.20 Reminiscent of Browning is the splintered and fragmented exposition of the narrative voice, which gives way to the inner monologue of the cardinal, 19

The critique of social climbing and the approval of the primitive are the subject of an unusual aside worthy of Carlyle: Mrs Mouth ‘after a lifetime of contented nudity appeared to be now insatiable for dress’. The portraits of Madame Ruiz and his son aim to criticize, without much success, bourgeois pretensions. 20 This Pope is from Naples, like Browning’s Innocent XII (Volume 4, § 132.1), whom he also resembles in that he must judge the ‘scandals of Clemenza’ – the fictional town of the tale – and feels called upon to take action about the ‘dangers’ to the Church, which he laments. The story is set in a number of scenes and is multifocal like The Ring and the Book, though on a smaller scale. The cardinal is not always on stage; in addition to the chapter on the papal audience in Rome, others describe a local high-society party, the monologue of the female ‘supervisor’ of the archbishopric, and the chatter of the young choristers.

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or the mock-heroic and playful irony on the erotic anguish of the prelate, who composes or mulls over an ‘apologia’ shortly before his sudden death among the naves, while he pursues a mischievous altar boy.21 Firbank’s pleasure and enjoyment in mixing up and coining words are Joycean, as in an abridged Finnegans Wake.22 § 89. Wyndham Lewis* I: The roar of Vorticism Though Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) was active for half a century, his influential force is limited to a very short period of time, when just before 21

The ‘apologia’ does not just refer to Browning’s ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ and ‘The Bishop Orders’, with a meditation on ‘omnia vanitas’, but it is also a sneer at Newman. 22 The Cardinal is becoming ‘almost huntedish’, the sacristan dabbles in ‘siestose fancies’; the retreat room is ‘gloominous’ – only a few examples. The analogy is cautiously pointed out by Brooke 1962, 8, 22; Powell 1973, 15, is far less hesitant. In 1922 Firbank was in Paris, but deemed 15 pounds too high a price to pay for a copy of Ulysses (Hollinghurst 2006, 14). *

Some of Lewis’s works have been republished by the Californian Black Sparrow Press, Santa Rosa, CA; Collected Poems and Plays, ed. A. Munton with introduction by C. H. Sisson, Manchester 1979; paintings and drawings are collected in W. Michel, Wyndham Lewis: Paintings and Drawings, London 1971. No fewer than three anthologies, confirming my initial statements, have appeared: A Soldier of Humour and Selected Writings, ed. R. Rosenthal, New York 1966; Wyndham Lewis: An Anthology of His Prose, ed. E. W. F. Tomlin, London 1969, and The Essential Wyndham Lewis, ed. J. Symons, London 1989. Letters, ed. W. K. Rose, London 1964. H. G. Porteus, Wyndham Lewis: A Discursive Exposition, London 1932; G. Grigson, A Master of Our Time: A Study of Wyndham Lewis, London 1951; C. Handley-Reed, The Art of Wyndham Lewis, London 1951; H. Kenner, Wyndham Lewis, London 1954; E. W. F. Tomlin, Wyndham Lewis, London 1955; G. Wagner, Wyndham Lewis: A Portrait of the Artist as the Enemy, London 1957; W. H. Pritchard, Wyndham Lewis, New York 1968; R. T. Chapman, Wyndham Lewis: Fiction and Satires, London 1973; T. Materer, Wyndham Lewis the Novelist, Detroit, MI 1976; F. Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist, Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, CA and London 1979; J. Meyers, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis, London 1980, and, as editor, Wyndham Lewis: A Revaluation, London 1980; Wyndham Lewis. Letteratura / Pittura, with essays by various critics, very detailed and enlightening, ed. G. Cianci, Palermo 1982; Cianci is also the author, in CMM, of two essays on

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the war (1914) he founded almost alone the magazine BLAST, which not only launched the manifesto of the semi-original English movement of Vorticism, but also hosted some innovative poetry by Pound and T. S. Eliot and the first chapter of Ford Madox Ford’s foremost novel. No one can therefore deprive Lewis of the historical merit of having founded, a good eight years before 1922, an avant-garde offshoot of English Modernism, distinct from that of Joyce, Woolf and even more from that of Dorothy Richardson. Lewis also published in the two issues of the magazine a futuristic and unusual dramatic fragment which remains one of his most fresh and creative experiments, perhaps the only authentic example of Vorticism, despite – or rather in virtue of – the fact that it is just a few pages long. Before the war he had written (but not published then) a minor novel and a series of modernist stories, though less so than the play included in BLAST. The novel Tarr, published in 1918, already signalled a slight decline. Although it was presented as the mathematical product of an aesthetics and a technique distinctly and fiercely different from what was then current, its novelty was in fact circumscribed to slight typographical idiosyncrasies,1 which were subsequently suppressed in the interests of full normalization in the revised edition of 1928. Lewis’s production until 1928 has a strong formal character, and tends towards a tyrannical leanness and an elliptical imagism. The distinction from early to late Lewis runs along a furrow that divides formal experiment from the primacy of content, or at



Lewis ‘vorticofuturist’, 156–74 and 175–93 (these contributions are milestones in the international study of Vorticism); A. Pajalich, Wyndham Lewis: l’apprendistato e il vortice, Brescia 1982; D. Ayers, Wyndham Lewis and Western Man, Houndmills 1992; T. Normand, Wyndham Lewis the Artist: Holding the Mirror up to Politics, Cambridge 1992; D. Schenker, Wyndham Lewis: Religion and Modernism, Tuscaloosa, AL 1992; P. Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer, New Haven, CT and London 2000; P. O’Keeffe, Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis, London 2000; A. Gąsiorek, Wyndham Lewis and Modernism, Tavistock 2004; Wyndham Lewis: A Critical Guide, ed. A. Gąsiorek and N. Waddell, Edinburgh 2015; The Cambridge Companion to Wyndham Lewis, ed. T. Miller, Cambridge 2016.

1

One of these is the = sign, which, if I understand correctly, Cianci 1982, 45, too (disagreeing with Kenner 1954), considers to be ultimately ‘without any function’.

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least mannerism, and lightning brevity from the overblowing.2 The result is that the general estimate of Lewis’s work is low, irretrievable, even though (or perhaps precisely because) he had wanted to present himself as the rival of the true, great and imperishable writers of his time, Pound, Joyce, Eliot, Yeats, or even of those of other times.3 This hubris was expressed without being satiated in the versatility of the novelist, essayist, poet, ideological activist, polemicist, journalist,4 philosopher of history and culture, and in the sheer, overwhelming mass of his written works, many of which belong, after 1928, to the monumental, but without approaching even remotely the masterpiece. They are in fact not even defended by his admirers.5 2. Lewis did then mould the history of English culture in 1914. Vorticism can easily be hailed as an indigenous, not an imported movement, the first after Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelitism. But it was born from the hype for Futurism in London, dating from the first English appearance of Marinetti and his followers in 1910,6 in a swirl of displays and most various events, conferences, exhibitions, public readings echoed by the press, all set up by an amazing organizational machine. BLAST (I will explain just below why the title should be cited according to the original in capital letters) came out in just two numbers, one in July 1914 (which included Enemy of the Stars) and one in 1915 (with Eliot’s poems), just before and just after the

2 3

4 5 6

As Kenner 1954, 93, also highlights. It is impossible to agree with Tomlin 1955, 34, who had predicted that Joyce would have been relegated to the curios in half a century, and Lewis would rise again (or with Porteus 1932, 9, expressing the same prophecy). Lewis proudly noted that Enemy of the Stars had been imitated by Joyce in ‘Circe’ (Collected Plays, 221–2); but he himself became an imitator or parodist of Joyce in works written after Ulysses. ‘Informally’, as he defined himself. Recklessly, Eliot considered him ‘the greatest prose writer of the century’, but others thought him ‘the worst’ (Symons 1989, 3). In recent years, there has been a tepid revival of interest, with commemorative exhibitions of books, magazines, paintings, as in Rugby in November 2007. At the Lyceum, Marinetti reproached the British for their ‘hypocritical formalism, for their snobbery, for the medieval separation between master and servant, for their “more than respectable” chastity and homosexuality yet soon repudiated for marriage’, yet absolving them because of a ‘deep-seated hatred for German clumsiness’ (M. Verdone, Il Futurismo, Rome 2003, 14).

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outbreak of war. The original manifesto of the movement was signed by various writers, including Pound and Aldington, and various visual artists, including Gaudier-Brzeska. Some of them, according to Lewis, belonged to Roger Fry’s group, defecting because he practised an art too close to Bloomsbury. Futurism was incorporated by Vorticism, even if not in full, in some respects in fact kept at a distance and overturned. At the purely literary level Vorticism proclaimed a less novel rejection of realistic description and an abstract simplification of cubist-futurist derivation. Futurism evolves into Vorticism by adapting it to local needs, culture and national tradition; such adjustment is accomplished when Marinetti and his English righthand man, Nevinson, appeared to Lewis and his companions as a duo intent upon appropriating the English ferment by deposing the Vorticists. It is the dawning of Lewis’s motif of the genius who will not be subdued. The gap between Futurism and Vorticism further lies in the implications they ascribe to the centrality of the machine. The supremacy of the mechanical is unarguable also for the Vorticists, but they do not celebrate it. Part of their devotion to geometric abstraction came from Hulme’s Imagism, where it is seen to exorcize the chaotic reality and disorder of life, and from Worringer’s theory of abstraction and empathy.7 Lewis appreciated the Cubist structural principle but did not consider it enough; in particular it did not have the vitality of Futurist art, which in turn lacked structure for him. Vorticism is then full of internal contradictions, is driven by pressures and counter-pressures, one of which is towards modernity and subversion, while the other is a call to discipline and tradition. From here stem the paradoxical and oxymoronic axioms included in its programme. For Pound, to whom we owe the name of the movement, the vortex was moving image but one tending to the still rhythm of its speed; ideas had to vortex into an image in a ‘radiant node’, and Vorticism meant stopping the flow and a classical stability. The vortex, the summary picture of these oxymora, is just a way of combining Futurist dynamism with Cubist immobility. We can read in the Vorticists an infatuation with Futurism restrained

7

Abstraktion und Einfühlung (1908).

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by a reference to the principles of Hulme’s classicism.8 The chaos of war weighed like a nightmare and threatened to unhinge the world. It needed to be exorcized with abstract and geometric art, ‘absolutely distinct from the mess, confusion, and incidental details of existing things’, Hulme said, echoed by Lewis when he claimed that the war ‘promised a more intense discipline’. The abstract architect of the world and the future hierarch of history can already be glimpsed in this definition. Lewis’s Vorticist drama, Enemy of the Stars, in the 1914 issue of BLAST, is proto-absurdist, Imagist and expressionist all at the same time, and in its first part even a precursor of Beckett. It abolishes the age-old laws of dramaturgy and narrative, and adopts the concision of the Futurist manifesto’s ‘wireless imagination’ in its telegraphic style. It is also indebted to the new Futurist fashion of the iconic word, the word that relies on the possibility of varying the typography in order to provide an additional channel of expression – a thoroughly aggressive word, also because of its typographical diversity or dissimilarity. The value of Enemy of the Stars lies not in allegory, that is, in the confused simulacrum of internal alienation, in fissured personality, or in the parable of a visionary ‘I’, or in the eternal struggle of the artist looking for his identity against a hostile society,9 in the guise of a plot that has the middle-class Hanp as the ‘double’ of the artist Arghol, whom Hanp will murder only to then kill himself in turn. This is more a minor prose poem than a one-act play. The bewildering, hallucinating, litany-like stage directions prevail over the dialogue, describing disconnected, static scenes and actions, links between heterogeneous planes, sudden and violent combinations and flashings of previously unheard words. This imagist texture inevitably now suggests echoes with other either previous or subsequent Expressionisms and Imagisms: the meditation on the ultimate muddiness

8

9

According to KRI, 148, the pictures in nodes or clusters are of Romantic filiation – an important detail; the picture is an end in itself although it is pierced by the ideas. Kermode also notes how BLAST shows Pater’s influence in the contention that art is closest to music. ‘But the violence of all things had left him so far intact’. In another Promethean echo life is said to be ‘a grotesque degradation’, a ‘souillure’ of the primitive ‘solitude of the soul’.

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of things, ‘terrible’ as in Hopkins’s sonnets, or the string, or ‘host’ of unrelated images à la Dylan Thomas. Aside from its programmatic avant-garde significance, the play is a pioneering milestone in the desiccation of narrative language, up to the limit of the removal of the connective particles of speech, a milestone that seeps into early twentieth-century literature, from Lewis into the early Auden (whose The Orators is easily evoked) and Henry Green.10 In Lewis’s entelechy, Enemy of the Stars has a foundational role.11 It establishes a division in the artistic self by creating two related hypostases: one the absolute and apocalyptic artist, the other a conformist, corrupt, conniving, gentrified, even parasitic artist, who often prevails. It further fixes these two selves into rogues both surreal and real, metaphysical and physical, on a pilgrimage in otherworldly, dream-like or actual territories; they are wrong-headed, mismatched, resembling in some cases a parody of Dante and Virgil, in others Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Vorticism had its own exhibition in 1915, with a second one held in New York in 1917, but the movement then broke up, overwhelmed by the war. At the end of the war, Lewis launched a second magazine, The Tyro, which had only two issues; in 1927–1929 The Enemy appeared in three issues, sanctioning Lewis’s separation from the avant-gardes and previous affiliates and followers, who for Lewis lacked sufficient awareness of ideologies that were opposing the renewal of the west.12

10

11 12

The 1932 edition restores the padding missing in the 1914 version and transforms it into a more conventional play, where dialogue dominates over the stage directions. On the possible influence of a Russian drama of telepathy, brought to London by Marinetti in 1914, see Cianci in CMM, 186. Cf. Meyers 1980 (The Enemy), 66, and Ayers 1992, 58. As a painter, the early Lewis was fascinated by the primitivism of African and Oceanic masks that had reached him through Picasso’s paintings and which implied the rejection of classicist canons of beauty and harmony. In drawings and cartoons inspired by Shakespeare’s plays, especially Timon of Athens, the Futurist influence lies in the complete rejection of an aesthetics of representation and camouflage for the abstraction of imbricated planes, of corners, of cylindrical bodies. Later Lewis became a much-sought figurative portrait painter, still of Cubist matrix, for famous writers such as Edith Sitwell, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound; but Walter Sickert’s contention that he was ‘the greatest of his time and of all time’ is of course exaggerated.

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3. The early Mrs Dukes’ Million (1908–1909, published only in 1977) is an isolated text, on a different track from the one the author will subsequently follow, and preceding any of his experimental phases; it is rather more indebted to the style of the Victorian sensation novel, to Collins even, for the mixture of detective elements piling up, for the humorous aspects (two rival gangs are trying to put their hands on the heritage of a weak, ignorant London shopkeeper) and the atmosphere of urban alienation. Some of the ten stories collected and revised in 1927 in The Wild Body13 were first published in Ford’s magazine, The English Review, and others, inspired by Lewis’s recent, dazzling and empathetic immersion in the classics of Russian existentialism and the grotesque, Dostoevsky and Gogol. The stories form a gallery of solitary and marginalized types with fractured identities, antisocial and subversive even, against the background of a hallucinatory Breton landscape. Lewis does not however celebrate primitivist and regressive ideals as much as he describes the anarchic energy of the destitute, vagrants, misfits, precociously similar again to Beckett’s. Tarr (1918), which first appeared in instalments in The Egoist in 1916–1917 and was revised in 1928,14 is not very different in theme and in atmosphere from the novels to come soon after in the English new wave of the 1920s led by Huxley, whose younger proselytes will be Waugh, Powell and Green. It was meant to be the product of an ‘external’ characterization, but it is a novel that already, and especially in the version of 1928, normalizes its revolutionary features, according to the same trajectory that regulates the two versions of Enemy of the Stars, and then softens and contaminates the novelty, and makes it inconspicuous for those who do not know the preceding formal research. Even Lewis’s abstention, programmatic and polemical, from the introspective characterization typical of the twilight of Decadence, in which he supposedly aims for a metallic, hard type of character, is not palpable on the page. Lewis closely followed Marinetti’s invitation to ‘ego 13 14

In a short contemporary essay Lewis symptomatically reclaimed the primacy of the body and of its animality. Cf. Pritchard 1968, 28–9, for the typographical eccentricities Lewis fancifully deployed in the first edition (then largely suppressed) to give the novel an outward veneer of avant-gardism.

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destruction’, but his adherence should be measured more in terms of purpose and programmatic guidelines than by results that are less than assured. It is doubtful, that is, that the poetics of Vorticism could be converted into the forms and principles of the novel, except by undertaking a revolution that Lewis was not prepared to envisage; and that Tarr should have been meant as an anti-psychological novel verges on a contradiction in terms.15 The novel pivots on the vicissitudes of a community of beings a little less ‘brilliant’ than those in Mayfair, but who still have artistic ambitions to be innovators and even a ravenous lust for that. It therefore looks like a less successful precursor to Huxley’s Antic Hay, also because though it is named after one character, it actually describes a group of artists as stragglers in the grip of their disappointments and emotional ups and downs, away from their craft. In 1918 narrative conventions could be beaten and broken with a few, precious references to esoteric cults, with a ‘jagged’ (as Lewis called it) or rather chiselled dialogue, that does not offer the reader much to grasp and does not explain, and with a characterization by isolated ‘facets’ to be gradually recomposed, but which being heterogeneous cannot be put together again, in a technique that could be broadly defined as Cubist. Far more unrealistic is the systematic dropping of capitalization from attributes of nationality. In the transition from the first to the second version, and through the experience of war, Lewis became aware of the impossibility of an ‘abstract’ prose parallel to abstract art; he claimed he had got out of the ‘abstractionist cul-de-sac’. The opening chapters of Tarr, two dialogues between Tarr and other more anonymous artists, often dotted with cold aphorisms à la Wilde,16 focalize on the vexed question of the relationship between the absolute of art and everyday life. 4. Tarr the artist must decide whether to marry his German girlfriend, but decides not to domesticate his art. The dilemma dates back to the PreRaphaelites. Bertha (an overused first name, as I have often remarked) is a kind of Earth-Mother, not the ideal of the aesthete. Tarr is timidly 15 16

Lewis was lucidly aware of his impotence, as he writes in a letter cited by Symons 1989, 274. On the necessity of masks, a principle Lewis derived from Wilde, cf. Materer 1976, 98–9.

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multifocal because the paths of two artists converge before colliding, and Tarr himself is even eclipsed for many chapters by the arrival on stage of Kreisler, a German sculptor whose antecedent life, and Parisian anecdotes, are narrated in a remarkably natural, attractive, and fluid style.17 With Anastasya, a Russian grown up in America, the couple expands to a quartet of two artists competing for two women in Paris. As in Huxley, a long scene seamlessly describes a Parisian party in which colourful figures of painters, models and bluestockings roam about. Just as long is the scene of the absurd duel that leads to the death of a Russian collector by Kreisler’s hand, the latter exasperated by Anastasya’s resistance, although his substitute is Bertha. With this, Lewis turns what was to be a comedy of artists in Paris into the tragedy of a poor and sick sculptor who eventually commits suicide, incapable of managing himself partly because of childhood traumas never worked through. This script of the artist exiled in Paris was typical of the late nineteenth-century novel. Lewis does capture the cosmopolitanism, the proliferation of minor characters of various nationalities in the crucible of the metropolis, but they are mostly figures struggling to take shape and prominence on the page, always a bit vague and schematic, more precisely mechanized puppets; even the exciting scenes, like the duel, or the flight of a hunted Kreisler, do not stand out. Lewis’s goal in writing Tarr is to self-inoculate against an unhealthy and immature aestheticism, and the novel is a portrait of the artist, or the portrait of an artist like Lewis himself, who in ironic, absurd and burlesque forms comes to terms, through a dialectical process, with the ‘feminine’. While Kreisler is a tragic victim of his self-destructive determinism, Tarr manages to find a form of balance between art and life. An exceptional acceleration takes place towards the end, when Tarr consents to marry Bertha, pregnant with Kreisler’s child, only to be divorced soon afterwards, so that she can marry an ophthalmologist. Here truly an impatient Lewis vandalizes the nineteenth-century tradition of the happy ending.

17

Lewis’s stated purpose with this character was the creation of a puppet or a machine. But he was later to claim that Kreisler was the prototype of Goebbels.

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§ 90. Wyndham Lewis II: That lonely old volcano of the Right18 Lewis had by curious chance been born on a yacht moored near Amherst in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, the son of an eccentric American, owner of the yacht, and a Scottish-Irish Catholic (though no longer practicing) mother. He always maintained Canadian citizenship, but lived primarily in England, where his mother had moved in 1893 in order to send him to school at Rugby and at the Slade School of Art in London. Lewis was eleven years old when his father eloped with a servant and the couple separated, although Lewis senior continued to send his son periodic cheques to fund his studies. After an eight-year stay in Paris learning to paint, other trips and the foundation of Vorticism, Lewis fought in the Great War as a lieutenant gunner. But he spent the Second World War in the United States and in Canada. Some secret complex lurked in Lewis, and theories of psychobiography have been invoked to explain his obvious and intrusive egotism. He was naturally affected by the absence of a father’s affections, and was consequently much too attached to his mother. He had five illegitimate children, and had the reputation of being a ladies’ man; once married, though, he never acknowledged his children, and would not show his wife Froanna in public. Witnesses speak of a fundamentally mild personality, though easily spurred into enthusiasm or anger, rather proud and touchy; more precisely close friends and acquaintances thought him paranoid. As a spasmodic believer in his own genius – a misunderstood genius – he naturally suffered the backlash of an inferiority complex, and suspected a conspiracy behind every form and manifestation of modern culture. After the six years of Vorticism, the significance of Lewis’s work lies in the recovery and amplification of an eminently Romantic conception of life and history, even if he had founded Vorticism as an anti-personality culture dedicated to the destruction of the ego. But in this neo-Romanticism it was Nietzsche who had at the same time the role of a mentor. Lewis considered himself a genius and espoused and elaborated a philosophy of genius. He studied the phenomenology of the modern Prometheus, armwrestling with history, that is, with that which is other than the self and

18

Auden in ‘Letter to Lord Byron’.

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not-I. He must therefore overthrow history and temporality, subordinate and subdue them. Yet history continued to win and inexorably moved forward, crushing the genius. The great writers of subjectivity who surrounded him and whom the world hailed were, under his scrutiny, petty, mediocre beings, subject to history and time. Reading the famous belittling of Joyce in Time and Western Man from this perspective, one realizes that the motive is not only Joyce’s adherence to the philosophy of time, but rather the absence of any heroic stature in Ulysses, with its faithful reproduction of a narrow, minor slice of daily life in Dublin. Lewis’s sympathy for right-wing or authoritarian movements is explained as a form of transference onto just such Promethean or Nietzschean figures of lords and rulers, leaders of the world who have won their challenge. From 1930 Lewis strips off the robes of the formal avant-garde artist and suddenly takes up the role of ideologue sui generis, writing books and essays on politics and ideology mixed in with corrupt and fantastic examples. In his evolution, if not involution, some phenomena of the history of Modernism become palpable and transparent: that culture is not an exact science, so that Cubism plus Futurism equals Vorticism; that particularly the avant-garde is not or cannot always be left-wing, indeed it may be of the right, or it may turn to and fro unexpectedly (Marinetti too was a fascist). And again that the age of the machines and speed informs the avant-gardes, which nevertheless have as their theme and aim the rejection of mechanization and of mass culture. Lewis actually believed that there was a left-wing orthodoxy in the 1930s. Right-wing, conservative, reactionary threads run covertly through the Vorticist programme, in which Lewis included Ezra Pound as his heir-apparent, but they later emerged and became enlarged beyond measure, to form a constellation of reactionary attitudes, opinions and distortions. 2. The book Hitler (1931), which presented the dictator as a ‘man of peace’ whose henchmen were threatened by Communist street violence, made him unpopular among liberals and anti-fascists after 1933. Admittedly he then wrote The Hitler Cult (1939), a partial retraction but insufficient to regain sympathies; misleading too was his self-definition of ‘Tory Bolshevik’. As the novels show, he was also anti-Semitic and hostile

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to gays, lesbians and other minorities.19 The ‘volcano of the Right’ was lonely because Lewis had fashioned for himself the mythical aura of the ‘enemy’ (the title of a magazine he had founded, as we have just seen) and therefore of a kind of contrarian. As a purely literary critic, Lewis was soon to hurl a ferocious hatred, as advocate of a precise, intellectual art, against the vagaries of Lawrence; he disliked too the modernist practitioners of the stream of consciousness, Woolf and Joyce. He had already theorized a different aesthetics, of description from the outside and not from within, which was the opposite of a now dominant trend: a hard, metallic, objective, impassive, and intellectual art, of ample architectural structures. There is a notable parallelism, not only biographical but also thematic and ideological, between Lewis and Matthew Arnold, whom Lewis often quotes. There are multiple links, such as the degradation of taste, that is, the disappearance of Arnold’s ‘sweetness’ and ‘light’, the slide towards anarchy, the abandonment of a classicism that is mistakenly confused with reaction and antiquarianism. There is a shared, though obviously updated battle against their respective Zeitgeist. Lewis’s two substantial books, The Art of Being Ruled (1926) and Time and Western Man (1927) overlap and complement each other. They develop the thesis of the mass-man, shaped by the power and authority called philosophy, literature, entertainment, media. The premise was that of an investigation into and a reconstruction of actuality as a fragmented ‘waste land’ in the absence of any kind of post-war organization, as an après nous le deluge against which the miracle cure was that of a centralized authority, dispenser of order, even despotic if necessary. The germ of Time and Western Man is found in a revealing formulation: how contemporary philosophies have conspired to produce ‘a kind of mystical cult of time’. The book is then directed against the mentality of temporality and the philosophers and theorists of ‘the school of time’, Bergson, Whitehead, Alexander, Russell, challenged and demolished from Lewis’s perspective, and against their followers – Gertrude Stein, Joyce – whose

19

There is an anti-Semitic satire in The Apes of God (1930) with Julius Ratner, a disguised parody of Joyce.

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ego-novels and stream of consciousness technique are slated in verdicts that have remained memorable. These crusades would turn out to be largely anachronistic since their target is still aestheticism, that is a form of extreme Romanticism preaching that the world should be tamed and leave the field open to the artist, giving him free rein to attend to his otherness and the absolute in art. That the modern world was in the grip of a destructive fire was also Hopkins’s and Pater’s complaint: had the latter not spoken of the modern as something relative, without fixed points? And was Hopkins not the main buttress against the anarchy encircling the world? 3. Lewis’s early fictional works were written to experiment with new languages, forms and aesthetic ideas; those after 1928 are instruments to convey controversial arguments, where the purely narrative motif disappears and loses force. It is the same defect one can find in the later Aldous Huxley. It is not clear what compelled Lewis to draft these hotchpotch productions that even his supporters do not defend, but merely summarize in a few lines thus accentuating the ‘waste’ they represent; the only explanation that comes to mind is that Lewis would thus quench his manic and uncontainable desire for revenge as a misunderstood genius. The Apes of God (1930) was the culmination of five productive, hectic and heated years, in which Lewis published no less than eight books dealing with political theory, had the editorship of a new magazine, and launched the first act of The Human Age trilogy. The goal of The Apes of God is to satirize the idle and amateurish art principally of the Bloomsbury group and of the Sitwells, an objective pursued with the most astounding tour de force of which Lewis was to be capable in all of his oeuvre. That the novel competes with Ulysses is clear, be it for the spirit of the stylistic pastiche that animates it from the first to the last word, or for the sketchy mythological parallelism, and for an interminable final sequence which mimics a specific chapter of Joyce’s novel. In its thirteen parts, the young poet Dan Boleyn, who is flanked by the mysterious patron Zagreus – the recognizable eternal hypostases of Lewis’s narrative world – is introduced to various literary circles and salons. Dan is Irish, and his surname, Boleyn, can be a parody or an anagram of Boylan in Ulysses,20 though Dan is in almost all other aspects the opposite

20 Materer 1976, 86, dubiously links him to Anne Boleyn.

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of the Joycean character, rather a Voltairean ingénu who suffers, mostly stunned and disoriented, the events into which he is thrown. Zagreus,21 the critical conscience of Bloomsbury aestheticism, acts on behalf of a mysterious external character, a Pierpoint Morgan who has ideas similar to Lewis’s because derived largely from Nietzsche. This character’s ‘encyclical’, in the language of the sociological and literary-critical essay, openly rails against the imitative, and therefore ‘ape-like’ art of Paris and Bloomsbury. There is nothing to add to the verdict that was formed hot on the heels of its publication. Such a lavish and exhausting abundance gives birth to a little mouse in the indictment of Bloomsbury and its snobbery; this being so, the goal visibly fades in the continuous fireworks of gratuitous scenes and stylistic leaps. The fundamental genre is therefore neither the satirical nor even pure comedy: Lewis is not a comic storyteller, and his satire is too woodenly contrived. Its genre is rather the vaporous, fin-de-siècle fantastic, as we see in the prelude in italics which describes in detail the toilet of an old lady cared for by the maid who is combing her hair, a long parodic pastiche which could be called the undressing of the old lady, or the scene of Pope’s Belinda aged at the mirror, but rewritten in a coy tone, to say the least, and in a continuous display of coinages, of unusual expressions, of rare words, from which emanates a sense of nausea, of artefact, of the overwrought. The stations of Dan’s career and the apprenticeship of the ‘genius’ cultivated by his patron do not manage to give rise to a single memorable character or scene. The exception is the penultimate sequence, if only for its immeasurable length. It is a banquet, also a banquet of languages, occurring in a fantastic atmosphere resembling that of the aesthetic writings of Beardsley and Huysmans, while the fluttering dialogue, absurd and inconsistent, echoes Firbank’s fantasies. Yet the analogy that can be conjured up is especially that of the night episode ‘Circe’ in Ulysses; but Joyce outclasses Lewis. It is all done in unity of time like the great reception which opens Huxley’s near-contemporary novel Point Counter Point, also much superior to Lewis’s novel. In the chaotic bedlam of entries and exits of a crowd of picturesque characters or extras, in the parade of dud jokes 21

As in Pater, Zagreus is looking for students, disciples, geniuses. For Materer 1976, 86, the name is instead related to the god of the emotions, those emotions which were deplored by Lewis.

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and damp squibs, there recurs in fact the realist ‘counterpoint’ of a Dan whose feet hurt, and who wants to relieve his pain with vaseline. Dan the passive outcast, Dan the anti-superman is ditched by Zagreus while the streets of London rage with the demonstrations of the general strike of 1926. 4. Intertwined stories in a small multifocal ensemble, on the model of Tarr, make up The Revenge for Love (1937). They can also be better seen as modelled on the choral scaffolding that Huxley had inaugurated in Antic Hay, updated to ten or fifteen years later, and with the opening and finale set in Spain. The Spanish anti-Franco War, in which many English intellectuals had participated, is directly revisited from Lewis’s particular perspective; this is not however a novel of war or guerrilla warfare, but a far more traditionally fluent, even anonymous, work for Lewis, who seems to have laid down his experimental weapons; its plot of action, confrontation, political content, and its vicissitudes and espionage remind one in some cases of Graham Greene. It is the first if not the only one of Lewis’s works with its feet planted firmly on the ground. The critical study of unrealistic communist activism and interventionism is carried out initially through the character of a trade-unionist fugitive from Franco’s jails who is quickly re-captured, interned in a hospital, has a leg amputated, and ends up returning home with the reputation of an anti-fascist martyr. In virtue of this co-protagonist, it is natural to compare, or rather to contrast Lewis’s novel with Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.22 Lewis undertakes an objective, phenomenological investigation – non-moralistic, according to his programme – of the contradictions and weaknesses of communism. In this first section in the hospital, the English communist is accused by a Basque trade unionist of not being a true communist but a crypto-fascist, on the grounds that as a decent Englishman he does not sufficiently hate the bourgeoisie: in fact the Englishman confesses that a classless society is unthinkable. The Spanish communist accuses the English one of snobbery, the same charge we hear in Orwell. When the novel moves to England, the target becomes the crisis of pictorial art, exemplified by Victor Stamp, a near-failure of a painter who contemplates suicide and is kept alive by 22

But the comparison is in Orwell’s favour, even if the internal opening scenes of Lewis’s novel, set in the prison, are not without some local colour of truth.

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Margot, his wife, who amongst the chorus of many ‘hollow men’ angelically rises above their corruption. Stamp represents the symbolic crisis of folk art. At cultural meetings and gatherings, we witness the fake, fashionable marriage of politics and art, with the class of the tycoons ready to enslave and corrupt art, almost to bankruptcy. The dealmaker Jack, exclusively interested in female conquest, decides to woo the militant, communist wife of another painter of Marxist tendencies, thus landing the novel in the territory of farce or slapstick about left-wing militancy, which is simply unable to align its moral code with its political credo. The Falstaffian Jack buys for 30 pounds a picture of the painter’s beautiful wife, with whom he is infatuated. At a party of the intelligentsia, in which a leader of the socialist International attempts to organize an assault brigade for Spain, the question of Marxist art and of the revolutionary content of avant-gardists such as Picasso, whom some call a ‘sensual classicist’, comes under renewed fire. The fields are clearly demarcated, with the two painters’ wives aligned on each side, one sceptical of artistic and political Marxism, the other an ardent proponent.23 After the noble speeches each guest thinks of his or her self-interest, or of the satisfaction of the sexual desire; the erotic motive always seems to have the upper hand over revolutionary intentions. Later, Victor Stamp will become an ‘ape-like’ painter, that is, an imitator who for a while makes good money for a firm that churns out fake Van Goghs; disgusted, he is blackmailed into being a stooge in a revolutionary mission in Spain and ends up being killed along with his wife.24 Margot Stamp is the only pure soul hovering above the human melee, nurtured by nature; as the name implies, she is a Ruskinian queen of gardens, a character therefore out of her times, and displaced.

23

To this latter, the political debates appear like a ‘false bottom’, an image that recalls the basket of food received by the communist Percy while a prisoner in Spain, in which escape plans were hidden. Even the prostitution of authentic art to imitation evokes the image of the false bottom. Not for nothing False Bottoms was the working title of the novel (Kenner 1954, 127). 24 Some believe Lewis had meant Victor to be a reference to the Vorticist GaudierBrzeska (Materer 1976, 116).

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§ 91. Wyndham Lewis III: The trilogy of the hereafter The Childermass (1928),25 continued and completed as The Human Age 26 in 1955–1956, is the first novel of a trilogy which is the second or perhaps the ultimate, Titanic tour de force by Lewis. It can be considered as a profusely varied gloss on the two historical poems ‘to which both Heaven and earth set hand’, that is, the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost, but in the context of other numerous and chaotic influences.27 The Childermass shares with them the status of the nightmare and the medieval vision of the hereafter. A farcical phantasmagoria of the Last Judgement, bawdy in some places, it has no internal divisions whatsoever and is a discursive and uninterrupted flow of dialogue (with one change, towards the middle, from prose to dramatic form). But it is once more lamentable that pastiche should so heavily outweigh the work’s more promising elements. Two poor and ridiculous figures representing post-mortem humanity are introduced at the beginning in the dream-like situation of a Beckettian wasteland, where they mark time in a fairly vague and opaque landscape, weaving endless incidental conversations, insipid and querulous, quarrelsome and also pathetic, like those of Vladimir and Estragon. They are outside paradise, waiting to be admitted, even loitering on the banks of infernal rivers they need to cross. The running thread of the story is all in dead time, a swirling around in the same area, with a narrative that borders on repetition and rigmarole, therefore a mere exercise in style.28 The bailiff is as mysterious as Godot, even though he does arrive, with much delay and in the guise of a judge. With this, the Beckett of the future marries a Kafka from the past.29 The long, slow advance through this lunar and astral landscape further sounds like a parody of Browning’s ‘Childe Roland’; but the examples heap 25 26 27 28

Childermass-day designates the Feast of the Innocents (28 December). This remains a trilogy, as a fourth novel exists only in the form of a fragment. Tomlin 1955, 28, and Porteus 1932, 57–76, detect Blake’s and Yeats’s influence. In Lewis’s design there was to be a studied opposition to movement and a devotion to stasis. 29 During the endless interrogation, the question of what happens in the Eucharist if an animal escapes with the consecrated host and eats it, is similar to those that arise with Beckett’s Moran (Volume 8, § 108.6). The bailiff ’s monologue at times anticipates Lucky’s tirade in Godot, with a polysemy that also recalls Finnegans Wake.

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up, and the journey back in time, as it appears to the two travellers, also recalls Alice’s adventures, with objects and people fantastically shrinking and enlarging; for this same reason it is also like Gulliver’s Travels. These are however mostly gratuitous episodes that Lewis cannot quite turn into significance, or to which he gives too much meaning without providing the key to a readable synthesis; so much so that one could speak of a kind of dream-like and otherworldly picaresque with a thousand unpredictable evolutions. About halfway through, the bailiff receives and admits to judgement the assembled crowd in a series of exemplary interrogations. Here the experimental shift from prose to the theatrical line is, as I pointed out, Joycean, as is the setting up of the Judgement according to a pageant that has surreal, overblown, sumptuous Baroque-like effects. Pullman, the embodiment of all that is corrupt in twentieth-century intellectual culture, yields to the bailiff thus suppressing his ability to self-determine; he depicts the crisis of the intellectual who surrenders and betrays his identity. The Childermass is then at the end a jumbled parable on the theme always dear to Lewis, who feared subjection to time as a pessimistic and irrational drifting, and on his effort to arrest time, or abstract himself from it. It is the old idea of art as a fixed point of contemplation, within but in reality outside of the vortex. 2. With its three, even four books, The Human Age was to be according to Lewis himself his summa, the work for which he wished to be remembered; but it is impossible to agree even in the slightest with this judgement, which must in fact be turned upside down, since it is the most unreadable and threadbare mess that Lewis ever wrote. It starts as a didactic work like Dante’s, designed to educate and scare, both entertainment and deterrent; but its reversal, or rather its overturning from heaven to hell is also a parody of The Pilgrim’s Progress.30 Monstre Gai (1955) is a relative surprise for its initial resemblance to a nineteenth-century utopian novel of the ‘nowhere’, when it domesticates the afterlife as a counterpart, both worse and better, of the terrestrial world. Butler and especially Wells come to mind when a storm of superhuman-sized flies – a ‘blitz’ – is unleashed on

30 The third novel, set in Metapolis, features a Bunyanesque ‘Slough of Despond’.

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an ‘outpost of paradise’. The trio of characters, Pullmann, Satter and the bailiff, returns with a dialogue that has lost some of the random, impertinent and logorrhoeic character it had before; but there really is no gulf in style or content between the first and the later two constituents works in the trilogy. In Monstre Gai two metaphysical wayfarers have entered the Magnetic or Third City, which is a kind of purgatory. The Dantesque imitation is undisguised, but the imagination corrupts it in a series of randomly sketched carnivalesque variations which rather point to Bosch.31 Presiding over this kingdom is an inefficient angel who enables a kind of dreamy indolence. The underlying allegory is never particularly clear and definite, but among much inconclusive and specious blather, Lewis has his characters declare that the distances between heaven and earth are not as pronounced as it was thought at one time, and that even heaven and hell are more homogeneous. The story turns this way or that at random, without a logical or ideological necessity, apparently dictated by whim. The heart of the book is a torrent of debate between the bailiff, his former rival Hyperides, a fascist, a communist and a Catholic priest. Following a worsening of the circumstances and a threatened attack from the devil, Pullmann, Satter and the bailiff flee and ascend to Metapolis, that is, hell. In Malign Fiesta (1955) Sammael, namely Satan, rages against sexual sin and feminine temptation, and unleashes his own police to hunt sinful women; he is often said to be a puritanical Satan punishing the sin of lust.32 This enlightened Satan advocates a programme of ‘sacrificing individuality in favour of man’s mass-mind’, capable of the ‘freshness and creativity of momentary existence’. Pullmann’s inspection, however, ends with the arrival of two real, not fallen angels who in mock-Faustian style abduct him to heaven. He arrives there aware that the meaning of life lies not in power but in bravery, and therefore rejects his earlier attachment to power and those who hold it. Lewis’s The Human Age cycle, as I mentioned, is 31 32

This in the satanic show of human monsters; but in the mountains outside Metapolis live beings very similar to Swift’s Yahoos. In the visit to the modern Dantesque circles of hell, Paolo and Francesca are no longer a ‘romantic couple’, but exchange fierce, compulsively obscene insults in a brothel’s Italian worthy of Joyce.

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complete even so, and perhaps the fourth book, describing the apotheosis of Pullmann kidnapped in Heaven, would have been a pointless exercise. 3. Self Condemned (1954), of a naturalistic greyness barely ruffled here and there, told in a natural, not artificial voice, is ultimately a thesisnovel, not about characters and love affairs, but ideas and conversations, with some Canadian impressions in its second half. It is also one of the few novels, perhaps the only one by Lewis, which abandon the binary scheme. René Harding, a university professor, happily married, resigns his position in 1939 for idealistic reasons – the impossibility of teaching the truth -- and agrees to move to Canada. The wider political context revisited here after the event is that of a trial of the Tories, instigators of a destructive war according to the pacifist point of view. The first quarter of the book is a prologue: Lewis resorts to a reading in full of a long essay on René Harding himself, to preserve a minimum of narrative illusion. This essay tells the reader about the historical and utopian ideas of this quixotic dreamer, who sees an apocalypse loom and dreams of a return to a golden age in the midst of warmongering and murderous politicians. For a good half the novel unravels in rather dilatory scenes, a series of visits explaining the professor’s gesture, prior to his departure. One of these takes him to his brother-in-law, an Anglican priest tellingly in Rugby, the crucible of the formation of the nineteenth-century ‘Christian gentleman’ promoted by Dr Arnold. Nor is it a coincidence that René should be French on his mother’s side, and thus perceived by some as a fascist, by others as a Jansenist.33 These scenes have the function of debating and fighting against contemporary ideas; in one of them, more salt is poured on the wound of the bad faith of Marxist intellectuals fighting in Spain. But the defects always present in Lewis have not been eradicated, since the real motives behind the professor’s exile remain fundamentally unclear.34 In its Canadian section, which to some has incomprehensibly seemed a masterpiece of scorching realism, the novel degenerates in my view into a kind of anonymous and unnecessarily descriptive travel dairy, including 33 As has been noted, he shares his first name with Descartes, the philosopher of dualism. 34 Materer 1976, 141, dispatches them in a brisk paragraph, but without being able to clarify them.

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the dirty hotel interiors where the exiled couple find themselves living. In the third part Lewis resumes his strenuous attacks against the excesses of politics, literature, art. The ménage of the Canadian pair in exile remains for too long an autobiographical diary with just a change of names. Like his protagonist, Lewis was appointed to a university chair in Canada and had indeed found again a hope in history at the end of the war. In fact he kept in store a sensationalist shock ending for the novel: Hester, René’s wife, commits suicide in an act of rebellion against her husband’s progressive abstraction from history. He collapses and recovers in a Catholic convent where he ends up teaching the seminarians, on the brink of a conversion; but he is quick to submit to the return of reason over mystic spirituality.35 § 92. T. S. Eliot* I: The roots that clutch The first collection of poems by Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965) was published in London in 1917, and in 1922 The Waste Land came out; 1920 36

35

Lewis had come close to conversion more than once, but without going through with it.

The complete poetic and dramatic collection is The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot, London 1969; to this edition must be added the ‘facsimile’ of the manuscripts of The Waste Land (cf. § 96.1 n. 83), and Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917 by T. S. Eliot, ed. C. Ricks, London 1996. I shall quote with the following acronyms some books of essays: SE = Selected Essays, London 1932; UOP = The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, London 1933; OPP = On Poetry and Poets, London 1957. The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, general editor R. Schuchard, Baltimore, MD 2014–, will be in 8 vols, of which four have been published to date. Letters, various eds, London 1988-, in several vols of which the seventh (1934–1935) appeared in 2017.    Life. L. Gordon, Eliot’s Early Years, Oxford 1977, Eliot’s New Life, Oxford 1988, and T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, London 1998; P. Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot, London 1984; C. Raine, T. S. Eliot, Oxford 2006; R. Crawford, Young Eliot: From St Louis to the ‘Waste Land’, London 2015. On Vivienne, Eliot’s first wife, see C. Seymour-Jones, Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot, London 2001.    Criticism. F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot, Oxford 1935, 1947, 1958 (in this reprint the ninth and final chapter is by C. L. Barber); H. Gardner, The Art of T. S. Eliot, London 1949, 1968; E. Drew, T. S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry, London 1950; G. Williamson, A Reader’s Guide to T. S. Eliot: A Poem-By-Poem *

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is the year of publication of his first book of literary theory and criticism, and 1931 marks the beginnings of his career as a playwright. These dates, milestones in effect, marked the launch of one of the most paradigmatic trajectories in the definition of the culture and arts of early twentieth-century

Analysis, Syracuse, NY 1953 and 1998; G. Smith, T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning, Chicago 1956 and 1971; H. Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot, London 1959, and, as editor, T. S. Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1962; K. Smidt, Poetry and Belief in the Work of T. S. Eliot, London 1961; M. Praz, ‘T. S. Eliot e Dante’, in Machiavelli in Inghilterra e altri saggi sui rapporti letterari anglo-italiani, Firenze 1962, 337–64 (1st edn 1937), and ‘Thomas Stearns Eliot’, in James Joyce Thomas Stearns Eliot. Due maestri dei moderni, Torino 1967, 83–204; N. Frye, T. S. Eliot: An Introduction, London 1963 and Chicago 1981 (non-chronological, thematic investigation of Eliot’s poetry and criticism, in a Blake-Dante key); J. H. Miller, ‘T. S. Eliot’, in MPR, 131–89 (on Eliot’s imprisonment in Bradleyan subjectivism: an essay ‘only partially valid’, a ‘collage of often pretentious quotations’ with ‘simplistic conclusions’, according to Serpieri 1973, 93, quoted below); B. C. Southam, A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot, London 1968 (useful reference work with valuable insights); E. M. Browne, The Making of T. S. Eliot’s Plays, Cambridge 1969 (documentary on the genesis of the plays, from The Rock onward); A. Serpieri, ‘Eliot’, in Hopkins-Eliot-Auden. Saggi sul parallelismo poetico, Bologna 1969, 95–161, reprinted in T. S. Eliot. Le strutture profonde, Bologna 1973 (compelling and illuminating study of the ‘deep system of antinomies’ in transformation towards the ‘comforting protection of the allegorical perspective’ [259]); Eliot in Perspective: A Symposium, ed. G. Martin, London 1970; R. Kojecký, T. S. Eliot’s Social Criticism, London 1971; S. Sabbadini, Una salvezza ambigua. Studio sulla prima poesia di T. S. Eliot, Bari 1971; B. Bergonzi, T. S. Eliot, London 1972, 1978; J. D. Margolis, T. S. Eliot’s Intellectual Development, 1922–1939, Chicago 1973; D. Ward, T. S. Eliot: Between Two Worlds: A Reading of  T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, London and Boston, MA 1973; M. Pagnini, A. Serpieri and A. Johnson, Rhapsody. Tre studi su una lirica di T. S. Eliot, Milano 1974; Interpretazioni di Eliot, ed. F. Moretti, Roma 1975; E. Schneider, T. S. Eliot: The Pattern in the Carpet, Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, CA and London 1975; S. Spender, T. S. Eliot, London 1975; F. Gozzi, La poesia di T. S. Eliot da ‘Prufrock’ a ‘The Waste Land’, Pisa 1976; A. L. Johnson, Sign and Structure in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot, Pisa 1976 (on which see below, § 93.4); B. Rajan, The Overwhelming Question: A Study of the Poetry of T. S. Eliot, Toronto and Buffalo, NY 1976; D. Traversi, T. S. Eliot: The Longer Poems, London 1976; T. S. Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’, ‘Gerontion’, ‘Ash Wednesday’ and Other Shorter Poems: A

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Europe.1 This trajectory reached its peak in the following decade with a series of individual compositions of impressive intertextual density, and by virtue of an apodictic, authoritative and highly learned sequence of essays which championed a literature and a sensibility at that time the preserve

Casebook, ed. B. C. Southam, Houndmills 1978; A. D. Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot: Poet, Cambridge 1979, 1994, and, as editor, The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot, Cambridge 1994; CRHE, 2 vols, ed. M. Grant, London 1982; P. Gray, T. S. Eliot’s Intellectual and Poetic Development, 1909–1922, Brighton 1982; G. S. Jay, T. S. Eliot and the Poetics of Literary History, Baton Rouge, LA and London 1983; R. Bush, T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style, New York and Oxford 1984, and, as editor, T. S. Eliot: The Modernist in History, Cambridge 1991; A. Righetti, Dittico eliotiano, Verona 1984; H. F. Brooks, T. S. Eliot as Literary Critic, London 1987; A. Calder, T. S. Eliot, Brighton 1987; R. Crawford, The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot, Oxford 1987 (a study of genetic character that focuses on sources, bringing to light important links between Eliot’s poetry and childhood readings, and those at university in anthropology); M. Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Cambridge, MA 1987; L. Menand, Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context, New York and Oxford 1987; D. Calimani, T. S. Eliot. Lo spazio retorico, Roma 1988 (detailed commentary on the functions of irony, especially applied to ‘Prufrock’) and Le geometrie del disordine, Naples 1998 (the same book as that of 1988, only slightly changed in form, and preceded by a new introduction); C. Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice, London 1988; M. Jain, A Critical Reading of the ‘Selected Poems’ of T. S. Eliot, Oxford 1991 (introductions to the poems and useful interlinear comments referenced to the most authoritative bibliography on Eliot); J. P. Riquelme, Harmony of Dissonances: T. S. Eliot, Romanticism, and Imagination, Baltimore, MD 1991; A. Julius, T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, Cambridge 1995, rev. edn London 2003; G. C. Smith, T. S. Eliot and the Use of Memory, Lewisburg, PA 1996; T. S. Eliot, ed. H. Bloom, New York 1999; R. Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art, Oxford 1999; T. S. Eliot and Our Turning World, ed. J. S. Brooker, Houndmills 2001; C. MacCabe, T. S. Eliot, Plymouth 2006; T. S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition, ed. G. Cianci and J. Harding, Cambridge 2007; A Companion to T. S. Eliot, ed. D. E. Chinitz, Oxford 2009; R. S. Crivelli, T. S. Eliot, Roma 2015. On the bearings of Italian criticism in the last half-century see my own ‘T. S. Eliot Studies in Italy 1950–2007: An Overview’, in The European English Messenger, 16: 2, Autumn 2007, 68–76. See below for individual bibliographies concerning The Waste Land and Four Quartets. 1

Synchronies with the avant-garde movements will be discussed as they emerge.

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of a few: pre-Shakespearian drama and the Metaphysical poetry of the seventeenth century. Eliot’s teachings retained their wide influence even when the irreverent poet, the poet who parodied tradition, became the most reverent champion of tradition, and poetry, criticism and drama found themselves aligned and allied in the utopian proposal of a world newly returned Christianized. In a history of literature, it is legitimate to disregard the rule implicitly transmitted to the critics by Eliot himself at the beginning of his essay on Dante: that the less is known of a poet’s biographical history and of the circumstances of composition of his poetry, the more he can be appreciated. This maxim is to be ignored in this case, if only to understand the route through which an American became in many respects the most English and European of poets. The principal fact here needed is that Eliot, a native of St Louis in Missouri, was an expatriate, or rather a returnee, or according to a pattern from Four Quartets, a prodigal son.2 His forbears had in fact emigrated from England to the North American territories from East Coker, in Somerset, in the mid-seventeenth century, and an ancestor, Sir Thomas Elyot, was the author of a 1531 treatise on education. The second is that the emigration of his family had been triggered by the persecution of the Puritans. From this biographical perspective, his life and his writings can be seen as a return to origins or roots; indeed to understand the beginnings, playing with his own words, we must start from the end, and in the end is the beginning.3 Owing to a curious and strange conversion, Eliot’s ancestors went from Puritanism to the opposite extreme, Unitarianism. This faith is also the opposite of Methodism: with a high level of social activism, Unitarianism is the preferred church of philanthropists, activists, reformers,4 one of whom was Eliot’s grandfather. But Eliot felt he was not part of the Christian communion, and asked later to be baptized again. This distant genealogical thread is not lost or dispersed altogether. Eliot, who became a British subject and a member of the Church of England in 1927, described himself as having ‘a Catholic 2 3 4

Eliot did not identify himself as American, but cultivated the myth of being stateless (Ackroyd 1984, 25 and 88). I will clarify these terms as I go along, particularly in relation to Four Quartets. See Volume 4, § 106, on Gaskell for a definition of each category.

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cast of mind, a Calvinist heritage, and a Puritanical temperament’.5 He belonged therefore to the family of so many nineteenth-century fellow Americans, like Hawthorne and Melville.6 He is an American Puritan because he feels the burden of ancestral guilt weighing on him. The past is, as he often says, ‘unredeemable’ – or, as The Family Reunion adds with a felicitous pun, ‘irremediable’ – and life is the atonement of a guilt that may well not have been incurred, or wilfully incurred. Eliot’s mother was a poet who wrote odes on historical martyrs, and this obsession or vocation was indelibly transmitted to her son, whose education was to be in the field of philosophy and history of religions. A student at Harvard, he wrote his doctoral thesis (submitted but not defended because of the outbreak of war) on the neo-idealist philosopher F. H. Bradley. The influence of this philosopher was always acknowledged by Eliot, and lies in a conceptual scepticism towards experiential knowledge. Eliot reverses the Cartesian cogito and therefore the basis of consciousness: ‘I think and feel, therefore I am only an appearance’,7 replacing it with the immediate experience that precedes any distinction between subject and object, and therefore any personal emotion; emotion is objectified and the recipient is equipped with a unified sensibility. The guarantee of the real is an Absolute, which is known to us from appearances that it is our job to tidy up into a coherent system. The Absolute is an unknowable God who is already a Christian hypostasis capable of reconciling and harmonizing the contradictions of reality in itself. At the same time, the Harvard philosopher Irving Babbitt had lectured to him about the rejection of the sentimental anarchy sown by Rousseau with a humanism that to Eliot would always seem inadequate. Moreover, while living in Paris as a student in 1911, Eliot had attended Bergson’s lectures, though he had found the ‘classic, Catholic, monarchist’ Charles Maurras more congenial. Back in Europe in 1914, first in Germany to study philosophy in Marburg, then in Oxford, Eliot suddenly got married in London in 1915 to Vivienne, or more commonly Vivien, Haigh-Wood, a gifted but neurotic writer. Like 5 6 7

OPP, 209. An affinity well noted by Matthiessen 1958, 9–10, and 24 n. 6. Quoted in MPR, 132.

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Rossetti, like Patmore, and like his alter ego Tiresias, Eliot would ‘divine’ the emotional life he was living. His poetry prefigured the juxtaposition of the two women of his life, and his life successively realized, and embodied, these ghosts. These female stereotypes are essentially the neurotic woman of ‘A Game of Chess’ and the ‘hyacinth girl’ of the opening of The Waste Land – in reality, Vivien and Valerie,8 two romantic French names, the first evocative of the Arthurian and Tennysonian enchantress. Like Prufrock, Eliot was hesitant with Vivien and had been estranged from her for several years, and for a few decades unable to ‘bring the moment’ – the moment of separation and divorce, or clarification – ‘to its crisis’; or unable to put the or an ‘overwhelming question’. Valerie, the secretary, was the coveted flower girl, the essence of light, the silence. Perhaps the first marriage was never consummated: a sexual complex, a sex phobia, emerges in the unpublished, covertly pornographic poems of Eliot’s youth and in the sexual innuendo present everywhere in the published poems. From 1917 Eliot became a kind of Jekyll and Hyde: an irreproachable bank clerk9 living out a second life as a poet, critic and magazine editor,10 not entirely at ease in the beau monde of artists and post-aesthetes of dubious morality (his wife betrayed him with Bertrand Russell). The decision to separate was unilateral, made on the eve of a journey to Virginia in 1933–1934 to give a series of rather weak lectures on the history of criticism. After the separation, Vivien would hunt him down in comic scenes of hide-and-seek acted out at the publishing house Faber and Faber, where Eliot was editorial director. In fact, Eliot was still suffering from an emotional trauma that has not yet been thoroughly examined in its prehistory, a platonic love for the American Emily Hale,

8

9 10

Valerie Fletcher, his secretary and second wife. Vivien, from whom he had separated, died in 1947 having lived in a mental institution for a long period. Eliot dedicated a ‘Patmorian’ poem to Valerie, indiscreetly and rather directly celebrating their union, the similar ‘smells’ of their bodies, their meaningless childishness. They lived in an Eden that Eliot represents with a founding image of his poetry, the rose garden. In the fifth of his ‘Five-Finger Exercises’, Eliot jokes about his own clerical appearance, on his irreproachability, terminological precision and discursive accuracy. Contributor to The Egoist and The Athenaeum, Eliot founded and edited the Criterion (from 1922 to 1939).

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the third woman in his life, whom Eliot would see from time to time, and who rushed to England after his separation. 2. To take the plunge, and go from academic philosopher to poet, the combined teachings of Bradley, Bergson and Maurras would not have been enough. At the very least, those of the Harvard Dante scholars and Pound’s The Spirit of Romance must have been blended in. The poet was the result of a chemical reaction whose reactants are two distant but unthinkably homogeneous poetic traditions: the French Symbolism of the CorbièreLaforgue duo and the English dramatic and Metaphysical tradition of the seventeenth century. For his part, Corbière stemmed from Villon, and even their ‘colloquial ironic’ idiom came into the mix. A third source for Eliot’s poetry lies in the impersonality and objectivity of art derived from Flaubert, but also fundamentally from the Decadents and some Romantics, too ready to believe in the superiority of past ages compared to the sordid present.11 At the same time, Eliot had been a child prodigy in imitating and parodying any poetic voice. His adolescent introduction to poetry produced an uncritical infatuation with poets he would later love, others he would reassess, and others still he would later erase and reject: among these are the obscure Victorian Edwin Arnold,12 FitzGerald and his Omar Khayyám, Shelley, Byron. He was already incubating and at times revealing a poetry conceived and later produced as a web of citations, sometimes juxtaposed without suturing. Eliot’s early poetry had to confront a literary background consisting of the gentle musicality and fluidity of the Georgians, with their widely popular anthologies, and of some lingering Victorians, without forgetting isolated dissident voices such as Kipling’s and Hopkins’s. Kipling had ‘accompanied him ever since boyhood’; Hopkins, published for the first time in 1918, thereby becoming an honorary contemporary.

11 12

WAX, 85. In Edwin Arnold’s poem ‘The Light of Asia’ Eliot discovered the anecdote of the foundation of Buddhism by Siddhartha, and the mention of the Buddhist theme of ‘surrender’. Several poets of the turn of the century including Laforgue had been fascinated by Buddhism thanks to Schopenhauer. In Arnold Bennett’s Clayhanger, the hero is asked to provide a copy of ‘The Light of Asia’ by Janet, his future fiancée (§ 21).

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The theory of the impersonality of art and of seventeenth-century poetry as a unified sensibility was born or hatched by the discovery of the French poets Corbière13 and Laforgue. The two French poets left their mark on Eliot because they both disassembled Romantic musicality and innovated prosodic and poetic forms, though they were still undecided between a residual Romanticism and the ironic objectification of the lyrical impulse. On the deep conceptual level, they are both strictly ‘sexual’ poets, obsessed even linguistically by the male-female polarity, and who due to a childhood trauma similar to Eliot’s own (the idealization of the mother, especially in the case of Laforgue) transform the Romantic cliché of the angelic woman and mother into that of the prostitute. At first glance Eliot could seize from Corbière not so much a repertoire of situations – the poet lost and alienated in urban desolation, but certainly not the nagging metaphysical inquiry, to which the Frenchman is totally deaf – as a poetry in early rebellion from the Romantic atmosphere when after all Romanticism was still at its height. This prolific French poet, born in the same year as Hopkins, and who had died at just thirty in 1875, is decidedly one of those who successfully tried to ‘tordre le cou à la rhétorique’ (and to poetic lyricism), as Verlaine had enjoined: he did so with a poetry that is at first glance loudly and unprecedentedly against the grain. The principal feature of this poetry is its dialogic form, or an imitation of dialogue, with an extremely allusive and elliptical dryness: a chain of repartees and minimal interventions, chopped up, cut down and even suspended, particularly with the ubiquitous three dots for ellipses – a very particular poetic version, it could be said, of the stream of consciousness. Corbière’s Les amours jaunes is listed in Des Esseintes’ library; Huysmans happily defines its style ‘un langage de télégramme’. The wink and the allusion are its substance, as is the lightning and often unintelligible wit typical of the French. So is the violent image, incongruous, irreverent, shocking even, or bizarre, obscene, nonsensical; and that is why, sometimes, Corbière’s poems sound like nursery rhymes with some elements of nonsense verse and doggerel. Through their use of sexual slang they also belong to the ribald vein of licentious poetry, that 13

On whom Eliot never wrote an essay because nobody paid for it, as he revealed in To Criticize the Critic.

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of Berni and Angiolieri. Corbière’s urban landscape is that of the poor, to which the poet – bohemian or maudit – is associated: the hard life, the cheap tricks, the primordial needs such as hunger, home, warmth, sex. And Corbière calls them all by their slang names, another hallmark of his poetry. Les amours jaunes contains lighthearted anecdotes of the urban odyssey of the poet, but the apocalyptic note is missing, and a Byronic, easy-going, ironic self-pity prevails: the beautiful Épitaphe recalls Pound’s Mauberley more than Eliot.14 For his part Laforgue,15 who died at twenty-seven, even younger then than Corbière, presents himself more than Corbière as a ‘desdichado’, an outcast and marginalized poet, frustrated in his need for love. From this derives an incipient, Eliot-like misogyny, even the disgust of sex, so that his poetry oscillates, like Eliot’s, between women’s angelic role and their primarily demonic one, that of the prostitute on the prowl, often seen in a situation that is also typical of Eliot’s poetry, the night walk through the streets flooded with moon- or gaslight. Laforgue’s nihilism shines in dry, bare compositions of thrilling wit: ‘Je fume au nez des dieux de fines cigarettes’. Like Corbière, Laforgue taught Eliot the abrupt juxtaposition of dissociated, unrelated, shocking and irreverent images, often tied with cacophonous rhymes (‘astre’ / ‘épigastre’), as well as surreal visions like the ones expressed in the lines ‘Une enfant bestial et brûlée / Qui suce, en blaguant les échos, / De juteux abricots’. Formally Laforgue is the inventor or re-inventor of the ‘complainte’ genre, an archaic form that relates his poetry to Ronsard and Villon. Within his poetry another series takes shape, of poems dedicated to and about the moon, humanized, chaste and faithful to the poet, rather than injected with sinister tinges as in Eliot. Laforgue weaves graceful, stylized short dialogues with the moon. Other internal series are those of Pierrot, the poet’s mask, melancholic, de-poeticized and

14 Besides Pound’s indirect testimony on Corbière in his critical essays, see, on his relationship with Eliot, F. F. Burch, Tristan Corbière: l’originalité des ‘Amours jaunes’ et leur influence sur T. S. Eliot, Paris 1970. 15 Eliot first encountered Laforgue through a youthful reading of Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature. Bergonzi 1978, 9, notes that Eliot used to dress like Laforgue in his youth.

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misogynist;16 and those on urban Sundays, grey and boring. In this ironic disenchantment, in this self-objectification through hesitant and temporizing masks, in these imploded sentimental dramas lies the infectious charm that Eliot would derive from Laforgue. Self-pity is perhaps best captured in ‘Simple Agonie’; but according to Eliot Laforgue belonged to the line of the Elizabethan and Jacobean macabre, that of Webster. Laforgue too imagines the undertaker knocking on the door to remind the living of the dead, and Eliot would be impressed by the trivialization of metaphysical questions such as in ‘Avant-dernier mot’ and ‘Ballade’. Laforgue also knows how to ring changes upon closed forms, for example those of rhymed quatrains and regular prosody, with the widest range of variants, in a verse which, as in Corbière, is fragmented in improvisational manner, fading to elliptical dots. 3. The English nineteenth-century tradition which Eliot would bypass almost entirely as a critic re-emerges subtly in his early poems. Even later, Eliot the poet would imitate the forms and ways of poets whom he, as a critic, had vetoed. The two most significant compositions before The Waste Land – ‘Prufrock’ and ‘Gerontion’ – are two broken, disjointed dramatic monologues, indebted to Browning’s version of this influential nineteenthcentury form, the forerunner of the stream of consciousness. Neither was it a novelty for the speaking persona of the poet to be embodied in the figure of a metaphysical wanderer, since the poetry of the late nineteenth century is full of them;17 nor to play on the theme of the psychological alienation of the writer, flung onto a superficial society. Eliot’s monologue transcends those of Browning or Clough because the radius of his psychic reach expands, making the surges and reversals more mimetic and abrupt.

16

17

Since Ernest Dowson (Volume 6, § 242.2), Pierrot had been a favourite mask for many Decadent and modernist poets. Hartleben-Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire was completed in 1912 within an atmosphere of ‘desecration’ of the Romantic moon in the European avant-garde, as Pagnini 1974, 20, reminds us. And so is American fiction, with its ‘frustrated traveller’ (Pagnini 1974, 30), to which we can add Dickens’s traveller or flȃneur going about in a naturalistic context which is also and especially surreal, and precisely nocturnal; also James Thomson B. V. and Dostoevsky.

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In Browning too the speakers of the monologues ask themselves tortuous metaphysical questions in drawing-room settings and contexts – let us recall ‘Sludge’ – and know how to move from the mundane to the metaphysical, as Eliot does. But Eliot lacks the playful seriousness and the entertainment found in Browning. Eliot is not therefore strictly speaking the inventor of the absence of situation and context, and of the total mimesis of the monologist, although psychological associationism was a discovery that came after Browning. But the decline of regular and closed prosodic forms was terminal. In the early Eliot, the poem is designed as a chain of detached sections interspersed with refrains, in verse of variable syllabic length; the rhyme is absent or very spaced out, becoming imperceptible, or turning into assonance and consonance. The twentieth century is, for Eliot too, the era of the difficult, acrobatic, dissonant, sometimes polyglot rhyme. The vocabulary and the metaphorical fields widen, and in Eliot, mindful of his university training, it includes terms extracted from the repertoire of philosophy, law, logic, therefore polysyllabic and Latinate, which combine with Anglo-Saxon monosyllables to produce singular effects of cacophony. Chameleon-like, he switches from the philosophical to the visionary register, oracular and prophetic, to the counterpoint of nonsense. Up to The Waste Land, however, he is also the author of ‘objective’ sketches in stylish quatrains, like the miniature narratives of Burbank and Sweeney. It is poetry as embryonic fiction, anecdotal but with a laddered narrative thread, hinted at through disconnected snapshots, which in themselves represent grotesque actions, absurd or arcane, an aura which is intensified by strident prosodies, in neat orderly metres but with an ostentatious friction between signifiers and meanings. With The Waste Land we face a polyptych or a diorama of scenes recounted by a composite voice and therefore, more precisely, by a choir of voices and in a gamut of registers. It is often said that this poem destroys and erases the principle of narrative; but within each of the five sections short, strange anecdotes unwind, with characters that seem to stand with one foot in a hallucinatory contemporary world and with the other in the timelessness of myth (or some story far into the past). The episode of the typist is a novelist’s naturalistic slice of life, but is viewed by Tiresias, and small hints turn it into a ritual. But the impersonal narrative voice of the witness suddenly ceases in the periodic interventions

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of another voice, admonishing, prophetic and off-screen. A well-read poet, Eliot invented poetry as a stratification of reading memories, expanding from an epigraph, which in fact already contains the poem in a nutshell. Behind it lies the idea that the whole of history is an eternal return, that the great facts of life are repeatable; and then the poem, every single poem, is composed as a collage of quotations and memories, and cannot but spring from a source-text, or more than one. The Waste Land opens or identifies a question I already raised with Yeats: how far can poetry be enjoyed and appreciated without knowing the scaffolding of thought behind it. It is selfevident that the communicative nature of the work of art changes with Eliot and Joyce, and that a work so interwoven, so overflowing with quotations, references and hints, addresses itself to poets and writers, and is a work for elites. And it effectively digs an even deeper rift between author and critic. 4. The total volume of Eliot’s poetry does not exceed 250 pages, and was gathered from 1917 in an arc of almost fifty years. The conclusion must be that Eliot was, deliberately, a rather unproductive, frugal and cautious poet. Nothing in his oeuvre is given over to the occasional. The individual collections are slender, a sign of a change of pace, scale and unit of measure in the poet’s system of publications. Whereas before 1922 Eliot’s output consisted of collected volumes spaced a few years apart, after that date Eliot published only individual poems; in the 1930s and beyond the output in some years is small compositions of thirty lines at most; to this must be added that a small part of the total corpus is made up of nonsense rhymes and poems for children, and that a good portion is of ‘unfinished’ poems and another of poems classified as minor. With his infallible intuition, Pound noted not only that many of Eliot’s poems implement an aesthetics of juxtaposed, unrelated scenes, linked by an undeclared logic, and not diegetic but symbolic, but also that they are ‘series of poems’. This coherence across poems written separately was only discovered by Eliot himself afterwards.18 Eliot had in fact reached, by his own admission, the stage of poetic desiccation in the early 1930s, or already by 1925 when he joined Faber as a publishing executive. Even as a playwright he had prolonged 18

Ackroyd 1984, 176.

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delays between plays. Having converted in 1923, he eventually became an ideologue and a maître à penser, and with some of his pamphlets an adversary to Orwell in politics and on sociological grounds. In quantitative terms, the essay-writing activities were to occupy him much more than poetry and drama. His cultural politics as a poet and essayist hinge on an appeal for order to be rescued from chaos, and that is why his place, extremely prominent as a poet until 1922, lies half-way between reformers and restorers, and why that antithesis – chaos and cosmos – is the same as that of a reformer, Carlyle, with whom Eliot would not have wished to be confused. An ordered cosmos could be imposed from above, and with a strong hand; from here derive the anti-Semitic hints, or rather distinct accents, that have been found in his work.19 Rather, Eliot is a philosopher of history who sees eras of chaos upon which order can be imposed by means of literary works and of certain cultural policies. He traces a similar antithesis, a kind of cosmic systole-diastole, in many eras: in the Elizabethan (in which stoicism gives the illusion of stability),20 and certainly in his own, the twentieth century, in the first application of the mythical method. Conversely the order of Dante’s medieval cosmos is an object of envy.21 Even the purely literary scene he saw repeatedly, and lucidly, as anarchic, lacking a benchmark: a chaos of language, and even an indifference to etymology and historical semantics. Eliot therefore values at first sight qualities that are extraneous to the dictates and the practice of Modernism, as can be seen explicitly not only from his theoretical writings – from his aesthetics, from his poetics – but also from the judgements that he left on other modernists. Pound was at first kept at a safe distance, then in old age recognized as an innovative influence: of course it was good to cut out the deadwood 19

Ackroyd 1984, 171, believes that Eliot was closer to communism than to fascism. Yet he kept an ambiguous equal distance from both at the time of the war in Spain (ibid., 243). Orwell thought more frankly that there was an unmistakably ‘reactionary or austro-Fascist tendency’ in his prose writings (OCE, vol. II, 277), a charge that has been heavily reprised and detailed in recent decades, forming a new critical pole of questionable interest (as can be seen in the TLS article from 14 November 2003, 6–7). 20 SE, 132. 21 SE, 136.

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but only to return to a healthy conservatism. Remarkably, Lawrence is praised in the essay ‘Religion and Literature’, though he had been attacked more than once before, and would be later, because of the absence of a minimum, residual moral sense.22 Eliot’s judgement on Joyce is generally benevolent, and the reason is easy to guess, because Joyce had behind him a framework similar to his own, and Joyce’s Catholic Thomism was of the same fabric as those ideologies, philosophies and beliefs that must be respected, although not always shared. On Finnegans Wake, though, Eliot’s disapproval is uncompromising, for the eccentricity that he always fought against, for its severing of constructive communication between author and reader, for its detachment of polysemic language from a common tongue. Hopkins, to anticipate, shared with Eliot many ideas on poetic prosody, rhythm, and even, very markedly, in terms of Weltanschauung. But he was a too religiously partisan writer for Eliot to be able to adopt him. In any case, as with others, Eliot on Hopkins says one thing, then contradicts himself, then denies it, driven like no other to a continuous revision of his thought.23 The heart of the matter is that Eliot is a classicist, naturally averse to any kind of formal experimentation. His axiomatic support of ‘tradition’ means ipso facto a denial of individuality or a strong limitation of it, and there is for him no stronger demon to be exorcized than eccentricity. Everything in Eliot tends towards aesthetic uniformity. His aversion to a poetry which is pure sound is unambiguous, as well as that to imprecise or vague emotion resulting in vagueness of expression. His is an aesthetics of restoration, particularly in its truly anti-modern, reactionary ideas. There is no other modernist writer who like Eliot recognized the importance of religion and of religious faith, and celebrated familial and cultural roots, the Christian roots of Europe between the wars. Religion was for him a bulwark of civilization, anchor and foothold in a world heading towards moral and civic decline. But this, in itself, is the argument of Hopkins’s sonnet ‘God’s Grandeur’. 22 23

One of the main disagreements between the two writers concerned primitivism. For Lawrence ‘the savage world was authentic and admirable’, whereas for Eliot it was ‘horribly ineluctable’ and ‘torment’, even if to be investigated (Crawford 1987, 178). Cf. § 103.7 for a summary discussion of this relationship.

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§ 93. T. S. Eliot II: The overwhelming question Looked at as a whole Eliot’s poetry is epoch-making because it is a selected and interlinked oeuvre to the highest degree. Formalist, structural and semiotic criticism all found the ideal poet in Eliot as it reached its peak phase not long after the apex of Eliot’s poetry. What those critics found was an impressive network of internal references, both verbal and figurative, forming in turn obvious or less noticeable chains of connections, contrasts and antinomies, of an amazing level of elaboration. And hunters of sources also wallowed in plenty, since there is not a single line by Eliot that does not set off a chain of literary echoes for its well-educated reader, or, more precisely, the specialist. So for both kinds of reader, Eliot’s poetry is a weave of dialogues, each poem a dialogue with all the others by Eliot, and the whole oeuvre with the universal literary canon – which is after all the keystone in Eliot’s idea of literary tradition. The general paradigm is overall that of a disorder that comes together in order. This disorder is subjective, private, but it appeared to be choral and epochal, the voice of a chaotic and disjointed era in search of ordering principles. Equally evident in this poetry is a watershed, 1922 or 1925 or 1930, dates after which Eliot declares the end of the search for order, because the order has been found, discovered, though not exactly or always reached. Eliot imposes order on his disorder a posteriori, in his poetry; his poetry is the ordering of chaos, of the chaos that is expressed in the figure of the fracturing, of the dividing, of the absence of relations, the famous ‘heap of broken images’. But in doing so Eliot translates into his poetry a cognitive investigation that is there from his earliest poems, as he tries to understand reality and the meaning of life at the level of private as well as historical existentialism. The ultimate question on the becoming of the cosmos is shunned, avoided in that it is ‘overwhelming’, or because of the horror and fear that the answer may elicit: nothingness, perhaps. The motif or scene of the Holy Grail holds the secret of regeneration in The Waste Land with the arrival of the Knight or of Parsifal at the Chapel Perilous to ask his question. It is anticipated – in a grotesque disguise – when Prufrock advances towards a comic equivalent of the chapel, the drawing room, where he does not dare to ask the overwhelming question. Eliot’s debut takes place, then, under the sign of the alienated, metaphysical, lost, dazed wanderer, who must

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wear a mask24 to appear socialized in the meeting places of middle-class society. The drifter loves but does not make any vital contact. The shift from the particular to the universal is the same apocalyptic context that we find at the end of the century, the sense of decadence in history, the chaos of modern life, the theme of a God in hiding and of man’s corruption, that is the Protestant, Calvinist heritage, confirmed by the actual history of the twentieth century. As in many of his contemporaries, a ‘myth of decadence’ was active in Eliot, reinforced by Spengler’s The Decline of the West. Unlike the liberals and the evolutionists, these writers believed that after the Middle Ages there had been only a downward slope. It was also a myth of the corruption of the race, which supported a counter-myth of the need to preserve ethnic purity. Yet this rigid schema, in which the modern is seen as systematically worse than the old, is questioned in Eliot by the principle of cyclical recovery. Likewise, his ancestral Calvinism instilled in him the fear and the terror, together with the attraction, of the senses and of eroticism, more precisely of Eros without agape. But from his university studies Eliot had also derived a sense of the syncretism of religions, which all insist on the message of love, of peace, of harmony, of grace, all of them relying on the sublimating Word that recreates, anoints and baptizes anew. In the early Eliot, for instance in ‘Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’, the Christian religion is a dead word and an object of parody. A similar allegorical parable is set against the backdrop of London as the quintessentially European city. Eliot paints a muddy, misty, sooty city, most of all a city of the evening, often lunar, often windy. His walker wanders in slums or seedy, unlit neighbourhoods, hovering at the gates of equivocal homes from which women invite him with a wink. These neighbourhoods must be crossed to enable the questioning character to access the inauthentic bourgeois drawing room where small talk takes place. The gallery of alter egos continues with Apollinax, the counterfeit of an Apollonian character turned into beast; or with the little verse cycle on the simian and phallic Sweeney.

24 The ‘theme of the mask’ in the Prufrock collection is touched upon in chapter II of Serpieri 1973 (cf. 99, 107, 111).

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2. The stance that Eliot often wants but fails to hide is that of the biblical prophet. In the Bible, the chosen people turn away from God, and are rebuked for lapsing into idolatry. The modern idolatry denounced by Eliot is the loss of divine love, the absence of the sacred. The movements of peoples and ethnic groups were destroying the roots and contaminating those same ethnicities, and this is the reason for which Eliot in his prose celebrates unspoiled local communities, or Welsh and Scottish regionalism. The metropolis is unwelcome and alien to him because he cannot see in it the welfare of the community. The migrant people par excellence, and thus the source of contamination, were the Jews. Eliot proverbially and harshly criticizes the Jews as rootless, stateless in name and fact; conversely, he welcomes racial purity. The Jews were so de-Christianized that they embodied pure profit, according to an established prejudice. They were the first to have sown the seed. Cultural revival must for Eliot go through the return of the sacred and of the jurisdiction of divine love, which is economic disinterestedness and agape. At this point we have implicitly completed an argument that leads us back not only to Dante and medieval societies or communities, but also to Victorian utopias. This is more explicitly confirmed by Eliot’s essays, with which the poetry agrees somewhat remotely. Though much more sophisticated than Dickens, Eliot still announces the same romantic utopia: he sees the world damned by economic and sentimental avarice, and preaches the advent of chaste sexual love, of generosity and community. Not for nothing Eliot, who even considered the novel the literary form of a minority culture, never missed an opportunity to rate Bleak House (one of the gospels of Dickens’s altruist agape) as the masterpiece of this English writer who deep down was one of his inspirers. From its very outset, his poetry is even in the cleverest disguise that of a spirit scanning the horizon, we might say. His attitude is that of the soothsayer, the prophet, the augur, the seer, or, trivializing it, of the fortune-teller. His poetry is the anxiety of waiting for a time that is ‘other’, and the expectation of the final deposing of time. 3. In Eliot’s early poetry, there is in fact a negation of the mythical method; Eliot had not yet discovered, implemented and applied it. Those first writings are about situations captured from the present, with nonexistent or scarcely discernible roots in the past. Spatio-temporal indications are

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vague and imprecise, without counterpoint. One evening Prufrock moves towards his visit, which is also a metaphysical quest that drives him on – ‘there will be time’, though, and he pauses – to ‘disturb the universe’. In ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ the passing of time is even measured by the stroke of the hours, creating that effect of a race to the scaffold that is also typical of Stephen Dedalus’ ‘nightmare’ in Joyce’s Ulysses.25 That history, the enigma of history, the direction of history, whether it be purposive or rather absurd and incomprehensible, is the theme of ‘Gerontion’, as the text quite explicitly says. The satirical poems and those in quatrains from 1920, however, start to place the present in suddenly extended temporal counterpoints. These dry sketches for the first time speak of cycles of the past and present, of repetition and of an increasingly degraded repetition; history does seem repetitive and cyclical, but made of cycles in which the downward curve of the loop always looks not only lower, and deeper, but also longer, indeed eternal and ‘unredeemable’. The historical pessimism is objectified, but it remains very deep. In this group of poems preceding The Waste Land Eliot devises dizzying intersections of historical phases or even of emblematic, symbolic glimpses of entire civilizations, from Greek and Oriental myth up to documented facts of the recent past, and to the present, all caught in a spiral of degradation. So Eliot, who pretended never to have opened the sacred texts of Victorianism, was as apocalyptic as many of the terrified writers of that era. As Freudian critics have told us, isn’t Eliot’s woman invariably, apart from the significant exceptions that prove the rule, the evil woman, the fallen angel, the depraved and depraving prostitute, castrator of men? And isn’t this the exact vision of another sex maniac or neurotic, Ruskin, who could have taught Eliot that the degeneration of feminine purity, corruptio optimi pessima, could become a metaphor for the city and civilization degenerated from their past splendour? Eliot applies in fact the same, threatening, Old Testament prophecy as Ruskin when he envisions Venice as the image par excellence of the chaste virgin that debases and prostitutes herself. And Ruskin, anticipating Eliot, had

25

MPR, 178, rightly observes that for Eliot ‘history is a labyrinth in which each individual is lost’.

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already described the decline of the west, and, as Eliot would later do, the Thames nymph turning into a prostitute. The poems in quatrains from 1920 are difficult and abstruse anecdotes, as well as apparently straying into the surreal and the absurd, because synthetic and elliptical; and also because they compress time frames and connect ‘fragments’ without joints, with violent, allusive juxtapositions. Of The Waste Land I must anticipate that its key point is more than ever to scan the horizon and see where and how the world will end. Crucial in the poem is therefore the internal web of seers, visionaries and soothsayers. The problem that is discussed is the abstraction from time, as in Four Quartets, but for a purpose that is not redemptive, but rather resigned, when not destructive and self-destructive. Eliot, in Four Quartets, embeds en abyme history and the future, from the start, by means of the cycle of the seasons. The first sentence of The Waste Land makes clear that the collective ego of this poem is one that has embraced self-renunciation, or a life of minimum subsistence, so faint as to seem dead. Eliot overturns Chaucer and all the singers of the fresh romantic breath of April through parody, because he wants to give up the promise of rebirth, does in fact not want to be born again; to that effect all traditional symbols of regeneration are, until well into the poem, not really redemptive, but rather soiled; fire and water are contaminated because history has no prospects, if not that of nihilistic nothingness. References to time and the uses of the lexeme ‘time’ must be counted and explained (up to the apocalyptic knell of ‘Hurry up please its time’) to see their Marvell-like urgency, to see how this beat of time – elsewhere a ‘fatalistic drum’ – is both metaphysical – that of absolute time – and actual, historical time – the war, or Yeats’s ‘revolutions’. Eliot comes out of The Waste Land into the forced resettlement and the slight, dim dawn of waiting (‘The Hollow Men’), a waiting marked, or rather prevented, by a shadow or Shadow. Then follows the rapid escalation towards the victory over time, but always precarious and until the last doubtful. ‘Ash-Wednesday’ and Four Quartets announce the abstraction from time, its annulment, its neutralization, but by virtue of a paradigm unknown to the previous poems, which it precisely overturns, that is, the incarnation of Christ. 4. The story of Eliot’s reception is the story, as always, of how certain ideologies alternatively in vogue generate specific bias in critical approaches,

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lasting until they have achieved a series of results from that perspective, only to be undermined by other approaches in the wake of other ideologies, epistemologies or simply fashionable trends that have arisen in the meantime. No contemporary reader doubted that ‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land were landmarks of twentieth-century world literature, but, in intrinsic terms, the latter was often considered flawed and imperfect. The general sense was clear: fertility would not return so long as the Holy Grail was not found, but the actual development of the passages was unclear, and there was felt to be an excess of private associations and of allusions not sufficiently explained by the notes. The search for sources, still not exhausted today, was set in motion as a purely mechanical task. The allegedly more communicative poetry of  ‘Ash-Wednesday’ was greeted with relief, only to be followed by complaints of a relapse into obscurity with Four Quartets. In the late 1940s critics sought to clarify the meaning of the mythical method under Eliot’s own guidance, variously integrating it with Jung’s psychoanalysis of the unconscious;26 or moving the centre of gravity towards Eliot’s prosody, and the music and the rhythm of his verse.27 As usual, Orwell’s perspective was different and personal, more ideological than technical. Predictably he had plenty of barbs to direct against the darling of right-wing Anglicanism, despite Eliot’s overt and proclaimed poetic Modernism, and against Eliot’s advocacy of a hierarchical society that hides a sinister class privilege and a trenchant opposition to progress and social change. At other times, Orwell’s judgement is more varied and controversial, with Eliot making a surprise appearance among his twelve favourite writers. In other words, he had inspired a youthful, let’s even say an infatuated Orwell, before becoming a broken idol. Orwell’s overall analysis focuses on Eliot’s defeatism, on his resignation to the decline in human affairs, whereas the early poems, for him the most promising, had displayed a ‘glowing despair’28 and a love of life, not a longing for death. Centring mostly on The Waste Land, critical consensus until the late 1950s focused on – when it was not blinded by – the 26 Drew 1950. 27 Gardner 1949. 28 OCE, vol. II, 277. Bergonzi confirms that at the time of the publication of his book (Bergonzi 1972), Eliot was in decline, criticized as snobbish and reactionary.

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archetypal or symbolic method, and read Eliot’s poetry as a rite of rebirth after decadence; or following Dante’s influence, as a parable from hell to purgatory with very close views of paradise. From the 1960s this worn-out scheme started to crumble, and we see applied the suggestions of linguistics, structuralism and semiotics. Scholars reconsidered Eliot’s poetry, especially in Italy, as a field of signs or images, above all contrastive and as clusters of representational binary oppositions in evolution or transformation from the depths to the surface, and from the surface to the depths; and the internal development of Eliot’s poetry was traced back to the theory of Roman Jakobson’s functions of language. Thus neo-Freudianism blended with Jakobson, the Russian formalists, and Chomsky.29 The 1976 study by A. L. Johnson brought a certain type of approach to Eliot’s poetry to a point and to an analytical level beyond which it seems difficult to go. He analysed Eliot’s poetry down to the last unit of signification – to morphemes and discrete individual phonemes – postulating and then finding the cohesion of sound chains – anagrams, word games, etc. – with those of meaning. However, when he tried to reconstruct from this pulverization a modelling of the poetry, the results were not much different from those already-known, of an Eliot puritanically obsessed-attracted by sex as a ‘bad death’, and therefore of procreative sex rejected in – and soiled by – hallucinated and disgusting symbols.30 Johnson started from a preconceived idea, as much about aesthetics as it is about content: that poetry is by nature conflictual and that where there is no conflict there can be no poetry, so that after 1922, or 1925, and definitely after 1930, Eliot has no semic or representational conflicts to work on, and the critic finds himself deprived of material, with the implied inference that Eliot’s poetry ceases to exist after The Waste Land. Johnson’s other assumption is that of a psychoanalytic approach of strict Freudian orthodoxy, whereby Eliot’s poem would objectify his horror at the life forces of fertility and procreation, except when their beauty becomes an occasion for spiritual life; what burns in Eliot is the desire to advance and to accelerate the personal death of the flesh and of the senses through ascetic denial. In short, there is no 29 This is the path followed by Serpieri’s pioneering 1973 book. 30 In essence this is Edmund Wilson’s position in WAX.

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escape from the ancestral curse, from the sense of guilt, from the Calvinist persistence of original sin. So the thesis or the premise is that Eliot’s best poetry ‘takes the form of a rearguard battle fought against the encroaching FEMALE principle’;31 while the poetry that follows The Waste Land, staging the revenge of the male principle, suffers from that. The inner cosmos is in Johnson more stuck on representational oppositions pointing to other, symbolic ones, and is less transformative than in Serpieri’s book. What Johnson does is to set up a kind of vocabulary associating with each lexeme, adjective, nominal and verbal form, colour or vectorial field, an abstract symbolic value (dirt, sensuality, fertility, phallus, female and male, money and gold, etc.): a meticulous and maniacal biblical commentary of the most unthinkable aspects of Eliot’s lexical network. This leads to a structuring that leaves no room for dead and expressionless zones in the text: everything is structured or amenable to be structured. Johnson outlines a poet who seems suffocated and imprisoned by the accuracy of the grids to which he has given birth, a position unknowingly Lacanian, of an absence of escape from the ‘dominion of the word’.32 The 1980s brought to a close the period of oppositional readings and the interest in strings of conflicting images, and broadened the critical gaze to include the reconstruction of the biographical background and of Eliot’s American childhood, with its passions, its readings, its places rich with suggestion. Since then Eliot has been relocated in the grooves of more recent critical currents and of their ‘issues’. Was he a homosexual? Was he an anti-Semite? Anthony Julius, who has tried to prove Eliot’s anti-Semitism with an impressive display of documents, has caused panic,33 but he has done nothing more than weave a tapestry whose isolated threads were already known. Has feminism been silent? Eliot may concern it by contrast. His woman or rather ‘female’

31 32 33

Johnson 1976, 168. It is not known, it has not been said, whether Eliot consciously imposed these patterns, or if they came out of his pen through conditioned reflex, or whether he would have been surprised or disappointed to find them identified. See for instance the rather rarefied discussion on the extent of Eliot’s philo- or antiSemitism (TLS, 14 November 2003, 6–7), which has little to do with the substance of his texts.

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conforms to worn stereotypes, for she is a femme fatale, diabolical and tempting, that subdues the male, pins him to the wall, ‘formulating’ him. There would seem to be no patriarchal prejudice in Eliot, whose male is a poor man who has no coercive power over the woman, always a Cleopatra on the throne. The critical debate of the early twenty-first century is downsizing the poet’s authority in every field, and operates under the sign of revisionism, inevitably oriented to issues peripheral to the text in the end: biographical, gender-related or purely ideological. The new questions are: was Eliot sexually inhibited, frigid, and to what extent? Was he puritanically obsessed by his maternal education, and disgusted by the flesh? Did he use his first wife to promote and launch himself ? Was not his behaviour towards her disgraceful and ‘callous’? On the other side, the debate rages between defenders and accusers on whether his fascism and anti-Semitism were explicit, underlying or latent. § 94. T. S. Eliot III: ‘Prufrock and Other Observations’. The moment to its crisis Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) came out in the middle of the war, and there is a whiff of the historical context in the not unusual dedication to a fallen soldier. The frontispiece, though, bears the rather discreet traces of what is almost a unique practice by Eliot over time, that of the epigraph; and if that wasn’t enough, almost all the poems of the collection have one of their own. Very few of Eliot’s poems will subsequently be free from inscriptions, since from the beginning the poet immediately moves within a poetic tradition from which fragments emerge to sculpt or suggest the eternal and already eternized themes of poetry and art of all times. This happens because poetry is conceived – or Eliot conceives of it – as a variation, a modern and later expansion of sayings, aphorisms or proverbial extracts, as a tribute to the poetic tradition and a homage having only deceptively narrow margins of originality. The overarching epigraph of the collection34 attests to a gesture of love and friendship for Eliot’s fallen French friend Jean Verdenal, but also anticipates the Eliotian theme and

34 Taken from Dante, Purg., XXI, 133–6.

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semantic opposition of emptiness and fullness, the ‘vanitate’ against the ‘cosa salda’ [‘substantial thing’] and therefore also ‘full’; this epigraph can therefore reverberate through the entire collection and beyond, and allude too to the misty, rather dreamy ‘observations’ of deceptive shadows, and mirages in a ghostly, visionary urban landscape crossed by a traveller. Under various names, or even anonymously, the traveller wanders in a city that is seedy, real, ‘unreal’ and symbolic at one and the same time; he makes unsuccessful contact with a frivolous drawing-room milieu primarily of women; and feeling the pressure of questions he does not have the courage to explore to their ultimate consequences, he escapes to a ‘sea’ of irresponsibility. Such metaphysical questions concern the meaning of the world, but they are muted by a small-talk gossip to which it is a torture to adapt; sexual desire is temptation or oblivion. From Boston or from London or from the exterior city we enter an interior and the scenario of a ‘conversation galante’ (the title of a poem) which covers up the inquiry into the truth, and in which banality is a ‘diversion’ from the real question that counts. This liminal collection consists of a dozen poems, some long and dense, others brief, with the drastic exclusion of any unripe fruit, since a poet of classical ambitions like Eliot had to suppress or conceal his apprenticeship. As a whole, these poems consist of patchworks and collages of images, more like Imagist poems though scathing in their satire of the conformity to which the thoughtful poetic ‘I’ does not bend.35 The complete decline of the occasional poetry which in the late nineteenth century had facilitated diffusive verse-making is therefore a Modernist trait; diction shuns the mellifluous. One poem, on the signs of hysteria hidden in a woman’s convulsive laughter while taking tea, strays directly into prose. 2. What makes ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’36 one of the historic landmarks of twentieth-century Modernism is ultimately not its being part of the decline of the traditional concept of poetic beauty, already in irreversible crisis for at least two decades in England; nor is its success related to the far from linear or logically ordered speculations, between 35 36

Or they are vignettes of life that show that he who dies lies down and who lives finds peace (aunt Helen, the vitalistic cousin Nancy who on her horse ‘broke’ the hills). First published in 1915 in Chicago in Poetry, but already written in 1910.

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the self-pitying and the cocksure, of a middle-aged poetic alter ego, who tells of a painful interpersonal experience of discomfort, alienation and lack of communication through images, similes, metaphors and visual flashes that are deliberately disoriented and distasteful. It lies rather in the exceptional ability of this novice to compose immediately in his most mature and most defined poetic method, and, right from the first beat, launch the main theme of his poetry, the metaphysical inquiry into time and history. From the first passage of the poem, twelve out of a total of 130 lines, a rhythmically irregular verse begins to flow, of varying syllabic length and in rhyming couplets that have the effect of a limping parody and a grotesque mock-heroic tone, also due to a semi-pompous anaphoric basis. At the syntactic level, the verse is fractured, bristly, looking back to Donne, stripped of euphonious graces and without the search for harmony; it even seems to have taken on the stylistic lesson of the later Yeats in the deliberate, ostentatious, occasional sloppiness and carelessness.37 Later, the linear development of the account of the evening is frustrated and fragmented in flashes and splinters that are not organized chronologically, in the free shift from the level of lived experience to that of its repercussions in consciousness: they are separate, disconnected moments, as is apparent from the use of ellipsis, because the unity and fixity of consciousness have vanished, and the twentieth century has discovered they never actually existed. In the poem’s internal linkages, allusion triumphs as it will again in The Waste Land. The title itself is thick with antiphrastic, onomastic puns. The ‘song’ will be about love, but only of the frustrated kind; Alf, the first syllable of Prufrock’s name, is also that of Coleridge’s river in ‘Kubla Khan’, and ‘red’, the second, is the red of the ‘rock’ in The Waste Land; but the high-sounding name can also be broken down into ‘pru[de]’

37

Such as for instance in the heavily prosaic and careless ‘To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet’. In this regard ‘Prufrock’ is the first of many poems by Eliot to have become historically untouchable, and around which an inviolable protective cordon has been drawn. But sometimes it gives the sure impression of awkwardness, which is not really an imitation of awkwardness. Even Yeats would let himself slide into this studiously dishevelled form.

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and ‘frock’, the priest’s dress.38 These are religious and metaphysical references to be saved for later, but which in the meantime align themselves with the epigraph from Dante, just above, which is taken from that passage of the twenty-seventh Canto from the Inferno where Guido da Montefeltro is going to answer Dante’s question, with the awareness that his interlocutor will not return alive to the world. Beyond the recurrence of the contrast between shadow and living body, we can see then the theme which will be fully developed later, of the question and answer to an existential issue of a metaphysical order, and therefore an allusion to Lazarus’ otherworldly journey. Just as Tiresias is in a sense the hero of The Waste Land, Lazarus’ miracle and his otherworldly experience lend uniformity to and run like a secret index through Eliot’s preceding poetry. The allusion spreads from the epigraph to the body of the poem, in which every other line contains a literal or manipulated quotation, and therefore an echo, from the great book of sacred and secular world literature, weaving a thread in the background against which the experience of Eliot’s hero, or rather sub- and anti-hero, is measured, again with an inevitable lowering effect of parody and mock-heroism. The poem starts in imitation of a dramatic monologue, recognizably derived from Browning in the presence of an ‘I’ that appeals to a factitious ‘you’, a companion who remains silent;39 but Eliot’s voice is even more like a stream of consciousness and more polyphonic in its transitions, with the refrain that belongs to the narrator or ‘external’ poet, and a kind of voice-over. At the outset the speaking ‘I’ addresses himself to his hypostasis, both because the psychophysical unity of the subject has been broken,40 and to steady himself, conscious of his lack of courage and in a controlled game of simulation, and to announce the metaphysical resonance of the opposition between a desired stasis and a movement away

38

Calimani 1988, 21–2, makes these and other ingenious observations on the main character’s name, disassembled into its possible components. But suffice it to say that Prufrock was actually the name of a furniture retailer in Eliot’s American hometown. 39 See among many Drew, 1950, 56, and Williamson 1998, 63, about the fact that the two alleged walkers are split faces of the same person. Read too the vague, reticent confirmation by Eliot to K. Smidt, quoted in Johnson 1976, 385–6 n. 18. 40 Serpieri 1973, 102.

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from it, accepted reluctantly and with a visible effort. The evening ‘spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised’ is an all too obvious objective correlative of the same monologist; but it is a desired anaesthesia, a mental absence from which he is being torn.41 ‘Then’, the incidental fourth word of the monologue’s opening line, has a weight and an impact far greater than a simple conjunction can normally hold, and looks ahead. Tied to ‘let us go’,42 it belongs to the same collective voice that will make its debut in The Waste Land, because it expresses the possibility, the ambition, the illusion of being able to cultivate the same withdrawal from life and the same stasis, or death-in-life. In the ritual stroll through crepuscular, hazy evenings (a topos of the early Eliot43) the bourgeois drawing room is reached through dark, equivocal, ugly slums; the two are contact zones, separated by a subtle channel. They are also two adjacent areas in a fixed mental topography, one the place of sensuous appeal that is inhibited, and the other of an eroticism that is suffocated, sick or sublimated. Extremely 41

Beyond its metaphysical hypostasis, this protective living room is a ‘one-night cheap hotel’, and this means that Prufrock is a homeless wanderer, and consumes his meals in filthy taverns. The reference to ‘oyster shells’ is not to the quality of the food, but to the emptiness and at the same time the protectiveness of the ‘shell’. 42 ‘Then’ returns a few lines from the end of the poem. 43 The approach to the drawing room occurs under the action of the recollection of two delirious and obsessed poets on whom Eliot wrote as a critic, and who are his harbingers, both not coincidentally inspired by Dante. One is James Thomson B. V., the other is John Davidson, poets like Eliot of the ‘dreadful night’ and of the infernal city, who anticipate him in the creation of similar, dark, equivocal, suppurating atmospheres. Crawford 1987, 35–60, has highlighted the later resurfacing of these poets whom Eliot read in his youth. But the fog, fog in this case of his native St Louis or Boston, is also a narrative topos, and the halo and the mark of the Gothic, sensationalist and detective fiction of the late nineteenth century. Crawford 1987, 11, while carefully investigating the persistence of Eliot’s childhood and youthful readings, mentions Conan Doyle and points to Baudelaire’s ‘brouillard’, but does not cite the most notorious Gothic and demonic tale of Stevenson, which takes place in the most realistic and at the same time symbolic night-time fog. The story of Enfield in the first chapter of Dr Jekyll literally anticipates the return home of the protagonist of ‘Rhapsody’, at ‘about three o’clock of a black winter morning’, with the same spectral procession of anthropomorphic street ‘lamps’. And in the second chapter Hyde too, always at night, finds the key and puts it in the lock.

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modular in its anaphoric syntax, the second part of the monologue is prodigious in its metaphor of an anthropomorphic fog,44 grotesque, surreal, animalistic, and scabby, rubbing its back against the windowpanes, scratching and wiping itself, as of a cat rubbing its muzzle and obscenely licking with its tongue the corners, cracks, crevices of the ‘female’ evening.45 The streets through which the stroll towards the drawing room winds its way are whispering, half-deserted, anonymous; for those who tread them they are serpentine, zigzagging, mimetically evoking the sense of tortuous questions, with the content of one in particular, ‘overwhelming’ but unspecified, hinted at, if not clarified in what follows.46 To talk of Michelangelo – ‘In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo’ – is to speak of the painter of superhuman man, of muscular power, of the Creation, all subjects very close to Prufrock’s personal dilemma. In the third part we begin to see the fracturing of the individual between a formal, official though timid adherence to the rites of society and, on the other hand, the metaphysical questions that agitate within him but do not dare come to light. The result is a self-protective

44 The first two ‘Preludes’ are typologically close to, if not descended from this passage, in being atmospheric sketches in which not only nature is anthropomorphized under the insisting sign of the disunited, the unmade, the muddy, the smelly, but objectivity and materiality are transferred to the human kingdom (‘the morning comes to consciousness’ against ‘the muddy feet that press / To early coffee-stands’, or ‘hands’ that draw shadows in houses, dismembered human body parts). 45 All commentators agree on the sexual allusion of the passage, although the majority, making the ‘cat’ female as is usual in English, see in the licking tongue, rather bizarrely, the icon of a vagina, even a ‘spring-vagina’ (cf. Johnson 1974, 73). To balance the textual occurrences with the motif of tyrannical castration and with the female aggression of the ‘voracious vagina dentata’ active in Eliot’s early, misogynist poetry, the crab in ‘Rhapsody’ too is given a ‘feminine function’ (ibid., 75). In fact it seems to me that (as Johnson mentions, ibid., 82–4 and 106) Eliot operates a subtle exchange, attributing phallic characteristics to the woman-prostitute – as seen from the association with pointy, blunt and penetrating objects, in ‘Rhapsody’ – and vaginal ones to the man. 46 Looking ahead, the question that terrifies is, in an anticipatory parody, that of the Grail Knight at the ‘perilous chapel’, of which the drawing room would thus be a reflection.

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mask. With that mask, it is possible to conceal that there is in Prufrock none of the superhuman vigour of Michelangelo, that his hair is thinning, and his body lean, although dressed up in pretentious clothes, like the ‘assertive’ pin on the tie. What agitates inside Prufrock? The hesitation, as the title tells, is as much erotic as metaphysical, if not more so. It is the dilemma of creation and nothingness (or of creation from nothingness), of creation and destruction, a question that cannot be delayed but is insoluble, like the destination, the finality of the cosmos and of history, of which Prufrock is therefore the first helpless, troubled, bewildered, discouraged investigator (‘Do I dare / Disturb the universe?’). Prufrock’s nature and lineage are by his own admission those of Hamlet because he wants to postpone the confrontation with the universe and the investigation into history. Identifications, both declared and allusive, multiply. He is a new Faust for modern times, diminished and shrunken, grotesque and deflated, who has now experienced it all, and known all (see the biblical anaphora ‘I have known…’). At the same time, Prufrock who has known and emptied the secrets of life, and also knows the passing lure of Eros, is a foreshadowing of Tiresias. These two references are allusive; others are more explicit, like the one to another prophet, St John the Baptist. The sense of a metaphysical bitterness, of an existentialism without outlets, of an incipient perception or observation of a land already laid ‘waste’, without faith, religion and prophecy – or in other words Hopkins’s and St John’s ‘dark night of the soul’ – becomes gradually stronger.47 This thread or climax culminates in the figure of Lazarus, who is above all, as in the pilgrim Dante and often in Victorian religious monologues and especially in Browning,48 the lucky mortal back from beyond, clutching in his fist the reply to the terrifying question, so that those who remain might be shaken by the doubt that the answer is ‘nothing’, and therefore avoid or delay

47 See especially the heartfelt confession, echoing Ecclesiastes, of the vanity of prayer in the words ‘I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed’. 48 For Browning and Tennyson, see the item ‘Lazarus, miracle of ’, in the Thematic index to Volume 4.

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asking the question.49 In the pattern of the refrains, the recurrence of ‘There will be time’ looks ahead to another, realistic and at the same time apocalyptic chorus, that of the pub scene in The Waste Land, ‘Hurry up please its time’. But Eliot also inaugurates a double temporal speed when Prufrock recalls that ‘in a minute there is time / For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse’, and that the whole of life is measured by ‘coffee spoons’. Prophets, mental explorers, inquisitors, boastful and imaginative projections of the voice – which oscillates towards the admission, in the light of day, of its far from heroic mediocrity (here too the dawn of the mythical method may be seen) – are all mythical alter egos evoked by the monologue but rejected, and therefore admitted only as unachievable. In the drawing room the parallel erotic ordeal which diverts the nagging metaphysical debate is underway; Prufrock is pinned with his back to the wall, and struggles; yet he is not insensitive to the charms of bejewelled arms and the ambiguous down that covers them, and to the scent that distracts him from the nightmare. Eros could emerge as an antidote to the metaphysical question, but Prufrock inhibits its pull, so that from him, a fish out of water, is born as a displacement the vision of his metamorphosis into a fish, even into a crab which darts across the sea bed insensitive and without consciousness, an image of regression. The peach, of which he had wondered if he should take a bite, is a hairy fruit, and evokes the nymphs of the sea from whose company he is also excluded.50 The sketch of desired but lost mermaids is drawn as a romantic parody, and is therefore pure escapism.51 3. Eliot’s texts and thus this single poem too are often violently discontinuous and diatonic, and can switch from one register or plane to 49 Specifically at this point the Dante epigraph ‘persona che mai tornasse al mondo’ [‘person who never returned to the world’] must be remembered, with the line ‘giammai di questo fondo / non tornò vivo alcun’ [‘from this pit / Nobody returned alive’]. 50 Calimani 1988, 66, adds that it can be a disguised reference to the apple of Eden that Adam dared to eat. 51 This visionary close on the sirens and the sudden shutdown of the vision seem to quote literally Hopkins’s poetic debut, ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’. Eliot however could hardly have known it in 1917 and before. Or maybe he did.

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another, with pronounced hiatuses and always with shifting boundaries and a fluid form. Eliot’s usual working practice was to draft for every lyric and poem a version later to be pruned and reduced. Pound participated in (or rather directed) the prunings, and wanted to expunge a passage from ‘Prufrock’ itself, which suggests that he may have excluded others. The outcome of the deletions is the aesthetic connotation of a fragmented, segmented, unsteady text. Another feature, this time semantic, is the text’s reticence. What exactly is the overwhelming question is not known; the anguish is such that the question cannot even be formulated, and the exact wording that nails it is the one that is feared; the question is the unspeakable, the ineffable, almost like the unpronounceable name of Yahweh. But this is not the point: Eliot wanted here for the first time to translate the abstract into the concrete and the sensory, or rather into the image. Pound spoke of phanopoeia, Hulme of Imagism. It is not ‘rumination’, and yet the content is exactly that of nineteenth-century existentialist poetry, by Browning or Tennyson: the metaphysical quest, the anguished review of ultimate things, expressed by way of iconic pictures, which foreshadow an ironic ‘progress’. Eliot here writes a series of ‘scenes’, already announcing the compositional process of The Waste Land. The essential, revolutionary innovations, both technical and formal, and the unmatched rate of allusions have overshadowed the fact that the poem tells a story of an education or mis-education, and a nineteenth-century crisis. Prufrock is the familiar unheroic protagonist, the hapless student often embroiled in the harem as a reed in the wind. The poem then places at its centre the classical protagonist of the Victorian novel and even of some Victorian poems dealing with pressing contemporary themes rather than with the Arthurian or archaeological ones: the graduate leaving university with an uncommon wealth of culture, tormented by existential inquiries, especially since he is on the brink of losing his faith, which puts him in crisis since he has grown respecting the faith. He feels the erotic and sexual frustrations because he is unprepared; educational mistakes and puritanical burdens weigh on him. Eliot never named Clough in his criticism, but the latter’s Dipsychus could be a lookalike for Prufrock. Both are unbelievers but fear the curse of eternal damnation. The sub-canon of the hesitant young man tortured by sex and by the investigation of the afterlife, by the sense

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of guilt and punishment and therefore by the loss of faith, goes back all the way to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The allusion is more precise in Prufrock, although the text is eclectic in its references, or rather kaleidoscopic. This echo emerges clearly, though the paragraph is in the form of denial: I’m not Hamlet, and therefore Prufrock is Hamlet, or could be, and appears thus to himself; by denying this, Prufrock effectively takes on the mask of Polonius. A thorough comparison with Hamlet is based on the fact that both speak in soliloquies set apart from public discourse, with ‘there will be time to murder and create’, a paraphrase of ‘to be or not to be’. The title of the poem should be seen as the exact denial of the love-song code, of any remnants of Petrarch’s madrigals and songs offered to the noble lady; further, it displays two relevant units of meaning, also a foreshadowing: the irony of a character who is ‘proofed’ – that is, protected, armoured – and the hardness of the rock. The words to be extracted from the epigraph are the asking, the answering, the return from the other world. The insignia of the poem, like the sign at the inn, is that of wasting away, of metaphysical investigation pursued to the point of becoming ill. Prufrock is just a modern Hamlet, while denying it: the speculator of ultimate meanings, about God and what happens after death, about being and non-being. Equally relevant is the frankness with which, in his poem, Dante, who is both Prufrock and not Prufrock, responds; that is, does not respond. 4. The first stanzaic unit rhymes aaxbb, without the reader realizing it; but the lines have variable syllabic consistency and an extremely precise sound texture, though camouflaged. Perhaps the unusual occurrences and iterations of /st/ sounds have to do with the obsessive rhythms of the same sinuous ‘question’, which returns on itself and which they mimic. The images are taken from unusual semantic fields and all of them are of an ambiguous nature. The first simile launches an anthropomorphosis of nature and also a displacement of the subject onto the object. The anesthetized patient on the operating table is Prufrock, but this also announces at a distance, and in embryo, the later image of another patient – in reality Prufrock himself – who is imagined lying on another ‘table’, no longer horizontal but vertical – a wall, where he is pierced by another scalpel, a ‘pin’, that is, a scalpel in miniature, and a wall where he squirms and wriggles. The isotopy of the ‘pin’ runs as follows: scalpel (in absentia) – ‘assertive’ pin of

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the necktie, a symbol of strength or a facade of force and safety – ‘pin’ with which Prufrock is ‘pinned and wriggling on the wall’. The second simile in the poem introduces the desolation, aridity and erotic loneliness of the protagonist. He wanders through seedy streets lined by squalid hotels, ‘restless’ perhaps because prey to an eroticism without outlets and partners, and also because gripped by the ‘overwhelming question’. The landscape works as objective correlative of the insinuating question, which is, however, a noli me tangere. ‘Tedious’ – boredom, spleen – and ‘insidious’ rhyme and are placed on the same plane. On the iconic side we have to explain ‘restaurants’, ‘oyster’ and ‘sawdust’. The restaurant is a gathering place, it represents a social occasion to meet people and a source of sustenance; here the ‘sawdust restaurant’ is the counterpart of the drawing room, as at the restaurant no gallant conversation takes place, as Eliot confirmed in the poem ‘Dans le Restaurant’, the dialogue or monologue of a waiter. The sawdust? Perhaps quibbling, sawdust is what you get from crumbling wood; it is a by-product, or it evokes Eliot’s symbol of dust. But let us also notice the grammatical ingenuousness, that is, the compressing speed of ‘sawdust restaurants’. ‘Oyster-shells’ is another, less indecipherable compound, because oysters are in and under the sea; and ‘shells’ are empty, that is, valves, a remotely iconic image of female genitalia and at the same time reference, agreement, foreboding and vibration of the final marine images. 5. In the second segment of the poem, the continuation of the image of rubbing, and the shuttling up and down, as if expanding the inference of the previous lines, suggests that the anthropomorphic fog masturbates against the window panes. This is matched by the figure who, as we have seen, passes by ‘muttering retreats’; particularly, he is insomniac while the fog ‘falls asleep’: an inanimate yet anthropomorphic nature – an old poetic device – does not feel the pangs of the investigation, and is unconscious. Fog scratches its itch, careless and brash; contrite, Prufrock must wear a mask. Immediately after, l. 28 is a clear and alarming denegation, since the question is ‘overwhelming’ and therefore the answer to it even urgent, though Prufrock piously tells himself that ‘there will be time’. In any case, the question manifests itself at the sensorial level, from above, ironically as a sort of biblical manna, as if sent by an invisible demiurge: it is served on a plate, it becomes now ‘a toast and tea’, as if transformed by a magician.

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The thoughts of death foreshadow the question of the meaning of the universe and therefore the modernist question of time. And we are surprised by the image of the ‘coffee spoons’ as a measurement of life because the instrument normally used is a watch. Is it a reference to the Bergsonian theory of time? Or is man now so superficial that his time and his life are all consumed in drawing rooms? Or does it mean that life is fragmented into small units? It remains a mysterious image that cannot be completely resolved. Prufrock is afterwards a hesitant, almost self-deconstructed and self-destitute Tiresias gifted with prior knowledge; his cognitive fatigue is associated with the peak of his ignorance, the one that relates to the ‘question’ that is not even known and formulated, and, when made, elicits a paralysing response. The poem prefigures a kind of third degree, or rather a painful torture to extract a secret. It is significant that he who fears the overwhelming question should then feel a looming judgement hanging over him. On the other hand, this is the first time, or one of the first, when the antithesis animal/man is introduced. Here man seems a crawling insect: spider, scorpion, gecko, beetle, wriggling on the wall (as only geckos do). The questioner must spit out the butts of a lived time; it is not a harmonious life but a congeries (objective correlative). Maybe this is even more simply the mentioned punishment of the mask, that of having to face the ladies, of not knowing how to be apodictic, of suffering on the rack, of the inability to speak firmly, but only stammer. At least those who fix their eyes upon others possess ‘a formulated phrase’, unlike the aphasia and mental confusion of Prufrock, who delivers therefore his own judgement: the confession he must or will have to make concerns the ‘butt-ends’ of his life and his actions, and it is not a beautiful record to put before the Creator. If there is this judge on the horizon, Prufrock feels he must confess only unclean things, and the Puritan legacy of guilt weighs on him even more. 6. The ladies of the ‘room’ are themselves a bit hairy like insects and small animals, and also experience sex like little animals. The bracelet is a sign of feminine vanity and of human kindness and grace, but the hair that crops up on the arm is indebted to Darwin. And just as Darwin subjected the beautiful butterflies to the microscope and found a far less airy spectacle, the microscopic examination of the arm makes one suspect a

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Swiftian Eliot: to the naked eye women are stripped of flesh and marblelike, but under the microscope they look very different. The couplet of the ‘perfume from a dress’ looks like an exemplary paraphrase of the concept of association of sensibility, but the smell is not of the rose, but of a woman, a perfume lived and experienced as a digression, from concrete to abstract. From the beginning, then, the landscape of ‘narrow’, semi-dark streets, and of fog resurfaces. The anxiety that overflows is that of deteriorating into a dumb animal that hides in an underwater lair and of man losing his human characteristics – an anxiety of regressing rather than evolving in the Darwinian scale. Here the fabric of abrupt unexplained images calls for an interpretation. What Prufrock thinks or may find the courage to say is an account of superficial and banal events, but the reader must decide what value have the ‘men’ leaning out of windows. They are not in my view a mirror of Prufrock, but represent an intermediate stage of animal degradation. Prufrock’s city is made up of working-class neighbourhoods and of other, grander ones. In the first you can stand freely at the window in your shirt-sleeves. These ‘men’ are workers who once home can relax and rest without problems. This is the usual envy of the neurotic and educated bourgeois for the healthy worker, described and celebrated for instance by Hopkins in the sonnets ‘Tom’s Garland’ and ‘Harry the Ploughman’. There at least I do not see any phallic implication: the pipe was in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a smoking instrument of the elderly or old, or of ancient sages, a little like the peace pipe. Smoking a pipe at the window is a gesture of comfort, satisfaction, relaxation, accompanied by a fair-minded look at the swarming life below. He who is looking at this picture envies its subject. These are single men, without family, who have no need of company perhaps because they have already experienced the emptiness of sex, and even of familial love. Immediately after intervenes a descending climax: from the old workers who smoke at the window to the crustaceans with their claws at the bottom of the sea, a floor foreshadowed in the one, strewn with sawdust, at the very beginning. And for the first time the symbol of the sea appears, opposed to that of the earth, a sea inhabited by beings who unlike men do not feel, but just have a blissful cycle of insensitive life and death.

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7. The poem then repeats that the personified day and anthropomorphic nature live in their own time, which is other than that of humanity: you wake up, you work and you live, you get tired, you slumber, you go back to sleep. In the first part of the poem smoke and fog operate by friction, develop movement and motions, then calm down once satisfied. The evening by now sleeps peacefully, like the solitary men smoking their peace pipe. Here Prufrock has the strained accents of a defrocked priest, a lapsed believer: he projects himself into Christ fasting, or even into John the Baptist, who had long hair in Beardsley and even in Wilde, but which here is thinning. The next lines contain the flashing, surreal appearance of an eternally grinning ‘footman’, that is an almost Faustian fantasy of the devil. It may be that the ultimate, overwhelming question could resonate between one tea-cake and another; the hope is that the answer to the question could be dismissive, reductive, defusing, with a smile on one’s lips. That bitter pill, that hot potato is swallowed with a smile, and the universe is rendered harmless in the form of a ‘ball’; and a substitute for the divine, even reminiscent of one of Dante, arrives to say that everything is clear. But this is an insoluble existential crisis, and even this possible answer is not enough. Prufrock has reached the limits of neurosis and ineffability: ‘It is impossible to say just what I mean’. Rolling up his trousers is not perhaps a sign of vanity and adjustment to fashion, as has been frequently said, but it indicates that the trousers are too long, Prufrock having shrunk with the passing years; it also lays the ground for the final sea image. The sirens’ dream is gratifying, but Prufrock is excluded. His urge to get out of the real is not satisfied. That admission to the sirens’ circle is a little spell, lasting only until concrete daily life takes over. 8. The ‘overwhelming’ question of the afterlife becomes temporarily dormant, and is put aside after ‘Prufrock’, because it does not lead beyond nothingness. Eliot assays metaphoric salvations, which are ironic, earthly, but also forms of forgetfulness, surrogates of the real one, like the salvation to be found in love, friendship, eroticism and art. But there is no escaping the determinism of time. The female figures become fixed into two split-off icons, which will stay so from now on in Eliot, emanating from the two mental areas of ‘Prufrock’, because they are the nocturnal

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prostitute of the slums and the neurotic, mawkish lady of the ‘afternoon’ and of the drawing room, suffering from a vague spiritualizing yearning; a third, rare, elusive figment, is the pure, pictorial or sculpted ‘figlia che piange’.52 Slums and drawing room are still the poles of the excursion, real and metaphysical at the same time, for the wanderer in ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, most daring and even tyrannical in its rhythmical drumming of an urban nightmare and with its description of human submission to ‘time’ – both the time of the clock, never before so clearly striking, but also mental time, mnemonic and psychic, though the two do not in fact differ in their results, since together they form a double, obsessive and inevitable determinism. This is the terminus of nowhere reached by the wounded, disheartened traveller of Eliot’s early poetry. Unable to explore the paths of cognitive investigation and to plumb the metaphysical mysteries of the universe, he is at the mercy of the id and shaken by the animalistic temptation of sex: the epigraph of ‘Portrait of a Lady’ surprises and shocks us with its contextualization – and then reframing – of a scandalous quip by Marlowe: ‘thou hast committed – fornication’. Such psychological subjugation brings out from the depth of the vortex images and visions of a reality decomposed and fragmented, and of a personal and cosmic disorder. The individual poems of this collection are connected to each other until the very end by the thread of a cultured, suggestive literary embroidery, which through the literal or slightly varied epigraphs and quotations calls into play a team of authors ranging from Marlowe to Henry James to CharlesLouis Philippe to Matthew Arnold. ‘Portrait of a Lady’53 is the reversal or inversion of ‘Prufrock’, in which the metaphysical disorder is transferred to one of those anonymous ladies of the drawing room that ‘come and go’ in ‘Prufrock’, while the male interlocutor is left in the shade, a witness and

52 53

‘La Figlia che Piange’, the title of the final poem of the collection, a lyrical vision of a woman, virginal and slightly Rossettian in her pose and situation, with the sun in her hair and scattering flowers from on high. The lady of the title is modelled on a précieuse ridicule of Boston, in whose drawing room, even without the allusion contained in the title, Henry James’s dialogue echoes in parody. Sabbadini 1971, 121–2 n. 17, develops a parallel with Joyce’s story ‘A Painful Case’.

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restrained listener to her staid, tired and distressed monologue. A variant of the pattern is the poem’s subdivision into three symbolic times that are winter, spring and autumn; but the hoped-for regenerative spark does not occur. There is a similar allegorical language in fragments and occasional passages, but it remains mostly analogic, purely metaphorical and amounts to simple turns of phrase. Vicarious salvation is to be found in an intellectual friendship that nevertheless fails to materialize; and all that is left of it are the side effects, and that anaesthesia, that psychological absence cited at the opening of ‘Prufrock’, which is here a ‘tobacco trance’. Instead of an escape from time, the equivalent, at least for the insensitive male, is an escape into space, to that south which is a temporary buffer also in The Waste Land. More precisely, the ‘scene’ of the monologue is formed out of nowhere: a ritual with candles in the dimness, a sort of temple for lovers of musical art; the motif of communion and sharing is trivialized in the ambiguity of ‘I have saved this afternoon for you’.54 A kind of secular, or artistic miracle has just happened: a transubstantiation at a concert in which Chopin, the soul of Chopin, was ‘transmitted’ (the text says, literally, was ‘resurrected’), then exhaled and emanated through the pianist’s hair and fingertips. It is a miracle, though, that can only occur between intimate connoisseurs, in a circle of the elect, of true beings possessed of a soul in turn.55 The lady could not have been clearer in expressing the ‘cauchemar’ of life without real friendship, just as she is clear about Eliot’s drive to find a way out of the nightmare and towards a meaning. It is strange, disturbing even, that the neurotic individual who is Prufrock has become in a short time a young and savvy cynic with the healthy sensuality of the average man, who with each visit tires easily of the lady’s lengthy ruminations, offers a jolly jaunt in the fresh air, and invites her to drown out her dilemmas in everyday

54 ‘Saved’ in its ambiguity has the additional meaning of salvation, not just of having reserved the afternoon. 55 The third and fourth of the Preludes play on the ambivalence of the soul, which for the prostitute is dangerously mistaken for the semantic and phonological area of dirt (she clasps the ‘soles of feet’ with ‘soiled hands’), while in the following prelude the soul tries to lift itself above a world which is resuming its dreary way as the city awakens.

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pleasures, like a smoke or a good beer. The character being studied is decidedly the lady, who, in the season favourable to rebirth, with the lilacs in bloom, can now warn the young man to become aware of the existential questions that he lightly and carelessly neglects, impassively indifferent56 even, while she laments being a poor dying woman – a foreshadowing of a female Gerontion – who parenthetically mentions, or rather misunderstands, the motto of Four Quartets, that ‘our beginnings never know our ends’. Just a small thrill, a little shake cracks the self-control of her young acquaintance. 9. ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’57 is, in the last analysis, the confirmation of the primacy of the id and of its subjugation of the individual, at this stage, against any attempt at sublimation; the confirmation of a return to chaos and disorder beyond the reach of a rational order. The term ‘floors of memory’ seems even to draw and define the Freudian compartments of the psyche and the plane of separation between reason and instinct, or, which is equivalent to it, between ‘incantation’ (lunar) and ‘precision’ (of memory). Under the sign of enchantment or of an inherently confusing spell, the moon and the row of lamp-posts express verbally, anthropomorphically, a joint lewd invitation, or a compelling injunction to that fornication found in Marlowe’s epigraph shifted to ‘Portrait of a Lady’. They do so with the anaphoras of a disturbed, distorted communication, or rather one almost animal-like in character, with phrases and words sputtered, muttered or hummed. The nightmare of history has turned into the Puritan nightmare of the attraction of sin.58 The moon is the classical goddess of tradition, fickle and indeed ambiguously, incomprehensibly sadistic, as witnessed by 56 Just like Eliot was in his second self, as he recognized in his moments of perverse excitement and in the short lyric ‘Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’. 57 The wind of the title does not however appear explicitly in the text. Behind it lie much reworked specimens of Laforgue’s, like ‘Solo de lune’ and the untitled poem that begins, after a symptomatic epigraph from Hamlet, with the line ‘Noire bise, averse glapissante…’. 58 An analysis of the images of penetration, castration and masturbation – the shaking of a dead geranium, the prostitute who peeps through the half-closed door opening obscenely on her ‘like a grin’; the cat who slips out its tongue and devours a morsel of rancid butter, the child who pockets a toy, the crab clutching a stick – can be found

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her ‘dissolving’ the planes of memory, even though through her ‘synthesis’, with which she envelops the space as in a vice; and not even just that, because its ‘synthesis’ produces in fact the disorder, that is the regurgitation from memory of disconnected and unrelated, though powerfully evocative objects. In the long, too long and heavy delirium and therefore visionary catalogue, the wayfarer reaches and experiences a cognitive epiphany, even though a deeply negative one: the flashing vision of the secret of the world, whose objective correlative is the distorted, the twisted, the impoverished, the stripped, the putrefied. At the first light of dawn the abetting lamp not only maliciously superimposes the ugly and tempting prostitute, whom it had previously evoked and pointed out, onto the moon-goddess, but also dissolves the same lunar enchantment, urging memory to become truly diurnal, that is, ordering, and to lock up the casket of its visions; sarcastically and conventionally, with a striking image it invites the wayfarer to lower himself anew in the furrow of an irreproachable everyday life.59 § 95. T. S. Eliot IV: ‘Gerontion’ and the poems of 1920 The mighty opening item of the Poems from 1920, ‘Gerontion’, takes up from where ‘Prufrock’ left off, develops it and carries on its plan of investigations. The first alter ego had a parodic, playful name that could possibly be a real one; the later one is reduced or promoted to a type; hence the stylization or abolition of the external frame (the visit, the drawing room),

59

in Serpieri 1973, 135. But for a masterful, polyphonic and thorough scrutiny of the poem see the collaborative study by Pagnini, Serpieri and Johnson 1974. ‘Mr Apollinax’, in two irregularly rhymed stanzas, dissolves by another reversal into a short bizarre and burlesque farce the situation of the drawing room and the insoluble erotic awkwardness of Eliot’s wanderer (behind the main faun-like character there was a real person, whom Schneider, 1975, 21, identifies with Bertrand Russell). The visit, described by a witnessing ‘I’ in disconnected flashes, takes place overseas, in aristocratic circles and gatherings of American academics who have the airs and the fanciful names of eccentric protagonists of a limerick. Priapic desire erupts in a loud, atavistic, primal laughter, especially the ‘irresponsible’ laughter ‘of a foetus’, or of a human-animal hybrid like the centaur. The marine metamorphosis of Apollinax, with seaweed braided in his hair, is reminiscent of the irresponsibility longed for but not achieved by Prufrock.

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intermittent but perceptible in ‘Prufrock’; hence the space-time contraction, or the deictic ‘here’ at the opening, which implies and the same time does not imply an actual dimension.60 The protagonist is hurled out of time but remains rooted in time; history is both abstract and concrete, speculation and occurrence. The voice is more uniform, without the incursion of voice-overs, and therefore Gerontion is, rather than a nineteenth-century dramatic monologue, a real soliloquy, more like those of the Elizabethan and Jacobean repertoire, because composed in blank verse. The result is a more stentorian elocution, rhetorical, eloquent, vibrating with an epic and heroic tone without a shadow of irony though with a hint of sarcasm, which removes the continuous fluctuations of the Prufrockian register.61 Switching from the contingent to the archetypal means moving closer to the personal and collective resonance of The Waste Land.62 Of course the heroic style is a signifier that is at odds with the signified, for Gerontion remains a mock-heroic hero, or an anti-hero, though always more heroic than Prufrock. The poem pivots as much as and perhaps even more than Prufrock on the mechanism of allusion and literary suggestion, which builds up a peculiar and very high density starting from its title and epigraph. The outcome of this accumulation, which propagates as usual to the text, is a collage that is perhaps the most intricately woven in Eliot’s poetry before The Waste Land. The final balance of this dialectical operation of absorption may be formulated as follows: that the Elizabethan dramatic repertoire retains its imperishable primacy; that Eliot has temporarily 60 This opening seems to have been caught, almost literally, from a line of Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’ (quoted in Southam 1968, 72); its resonance extends in fact to another opening, that of The Waste Land. I shall discuss this reference more fully later. 61 Gerontion can be read as a ‘Senecan’ hero, a set of poses, particularly of the character at death’s door, as is argued in Eliot’s essays in SE, on Seneca and the Elizabethan theatre. 62 It was meant to be a prologue to The Waste Land, of which it anticipates the dynamics of dry and wet, and the need for the return of the life-giving sacred in the arid and dirty world; but Eliot was dissuaded by Pound. I explain below the reasons of this important intention, and the resonance exercised by some passages from the autobiography of Henry Adams.

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deposed Laforgue, Corbière, Baudelaire, and even Dante, and has been recently struck by the revelation of Cardinal Newman and Henry Adams. At this point we can find the space for a brief digression on the meaning of an oeuvre like Eliot’s, often, if not systematically, written on the basis of a confrontation with a number of sources. The considerations are essentially two. The first is that Eliot already implements a kind of mythical method in his choice of literary material from which to work. If he manages to align and make simultaneous and consistent – to harmonize in other words – Shakespeare and Newman and Henry Adams, it means that the whole of literature shares visible and unknown harmonies, and is both vertical and horizontal in some of its specific and privileged paths. It should be added that not only life, but literature itself is the repetition of unchanged patterns: not infrequently Eliot discovered them through fortuitous readings, made for reviews, like the one dedicated to Henry Adams shortly before writing Gerontion. 2. The second inference to make is that Eliot the poet is at the same time implicitly Eliot the literary critic. The honour of an epigraph or of a crucial resonance is equivalent to an investiture; obscure titles and authors are thus promoted to a rank of privilege. The list of authors cited or alluded to in ‘Gerontion’ forms a small, personal, alternative pantheon, just as alternative, and reintegrated in the tradition, are certain discoveries made by Eliot the critic in his essays. Eliot dusted off Newman, an author revered but unread in his time, and a forgotten poem, The Dream of Gerontius, perhaps with the same fortuitousness – the same Ruskinian fors – that had brought Adams back into circulation: the fact that Elgar had set him to music, or even that his oratorio had just been performed.63 Getting back to the text, the reference to Newman is superficially noted by many critics, but almost nobody discusses it, for the single, obvious reason that the explicit intertextuality stops at the title, and there seem to be no literal or near-literal echoes and citations from Newman in the body of the poem. Newman’s poem represents an archetype, man at the end of his life, old 63

Eliot was also a music critic, and in 1921 he reviewed a performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (Southam 1968, 70). There is no need to anticipate that Eliot’s skills and musical analogies are fully transfused in Four Quartets.

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and dying, preparing for the afterlife and for purgatory. But the reference is mainly dialectical. The reader catches a glimpse of its mode in the distortion of the name – no more Gerontius, an old man, but Gerontion, a little old man, a warning that Eliot has deformed and is questioning his source, and with it the prospect of life after death. Newman’s theme in the third part of his own poem is the redemption of and from time, and the encounter with eternity.64 Harking back to the Victorians, his perspective is to strip off the veil and see what lies behind,65 to reveal God’s plan for creation, or the terror of the Last Judgement derived from the Calvinist tradition, or the purgatorial fire which will be the distant goal of Four Quartets. The theological question arising in Eliot’s alter ego, Gerontion, concerns the historicity and divinity of Christ, and the essence of faith as the eternal word. But his voice is rather critical of the teleological course of history, which appears to follow an incomprehensible pattern.66 In the end, Gerontion is not redeemed, regenerated, transformed by Christ. When he says that Christ is a devouring tiger, Eliot gives him the voice of the essentially anonymous but equally collective speaker who opens The Waste Land. Christ promised rebirth, but he is not the gentle lamb that had been announced; rather, with a Blake-like antithesis, he is a fierce man-eater who wants to stay in his den. To the invitation or self-invitation to movement which opens ‘Prufrock’, there follows a comfortable stasis: Gerontion ‘is’, ‘here’, that is, he is stationary; his physical passivity is underlined by his ‘being read to by a boy’.67 Christ is a tiger, and May is ‘depraved’ – just as 64 See Volume 4, § 29.6–7, particularly for anticipations of Eliot’s themes of ‘life-indeath’ and the dazzling fire of Judgement. 65 Still a veiled vision, though, as the quotation in the epigraph, from Measure for Measure, warns. 66 The actual history to which I was referring also included the after-effects of the recent Treaty of Versailles, which by creating the Danzig Corridor had ignited the accelerating European crisis that would result in the Second World War. Gerontion alludes to it, in the form of ‘passages’ and ‘contrived corridors’. 67 This echoes old Edward FitzGerald (read by Eliot in his youth) describing himself in a letter in its turn quoted in a monograph dedicated to him. The theme of passivity, and of the death of the senses, is taken up again at the end in the recognized lack of ‘passion’, explicitly erotic passion for a woman: love has been stifled by the ‘inquisition’ and its terror, and it is therefore itself a question, the same ‘overwhelming’ one disturbing Prufrock.

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April is ‘the cruellest month’ in ‘The Waste Land’ for those who refuse the awakening of spring – because it challenges man to be reborn; and because Christ violates man with his proposal, though rejected.68 The ‘new’ year or ‘order’ and cycle (as Yeats would have put it) has not been inaugurated, or it has not borne the promised fruits. Christ’s mystery is expressionless, speechless, ‘word within a word, unable to speak a word’,69 and ‘swaddled with darkness’. At this exact point, it becomes more plausible to suggest that Eliot had been inspired and was quoting from the Autobiography of Henry Adams, freshly published in 1918, in which the author stressed with satisfaction the raw pagan residues – what Hopkins called the ‘brute beauty’ – of American civilization and of the country’s interior landscape. On the contrary, the history that Gerontion is induced to contemplate looks like one that is Godless: faith has become secular, or continues to be practiced in secret and fearful groups; the world is not going through a phase of rejuvenation, but of senescence. Rather than making progress, it regresses, and the distorted planetary order sinks, in Gerontion’s hallucination, into the realm of the sordid, the corrupt, even the Swiftian excremental. In an apocalyptic and Calvinistic perspective, after the ‘adulteration’ there can be no ‘forgiveness’.70 Christ is dismembered, torn apart in the modern age in various forms of corruption of his message:71 his Word is only whispered, 68 The tiger, as Frye 1963, 56, reminds us, is a symbol of the Antichrist and of wrath; Serpieri 1973, 62, notes the ‘Eucharistic inversion’ whereby Christ is not eaten but eater and devourer. Crawford 1987, 122, argues in turn that Christ comes in the ‘year’ not as an infant, but as a frightening beast associated, like totemic animals, with fertility. The tiger, this devourer of men, is also the tiger of that much-loved author, Kipling (Crawford 1987, 31), in the first Jungle Book (‘he must eat Man’, whereas the other animals abstain from it). In Kipling the man-eater will be eaten, as the prophecy tells; and yet, Webster’s wolf, the enemy of man, will become the friendly dog in The Waste Land. 69 This sentence is taken verbatim from sermons by the admired Lancelot Andrewes. 70 The drift of the world, the twirling of sinners pushed by the wind into distant orbits as a punishment for their sins with an image derived from Chapman, is perhaps the sense of the ending, where the wording is similar to that of the close of The Waste Land, and is made up of juxtaposed, short phrases of great suggestion, but difficult to connect comprehensibly. 71 In chapter L of the abridged edition of The Golden Bough, Frazer examines the ancient forms of the Eucharistic sacrament, under the label of ‘Eating the God’: the

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not proclaimed; aestheticized, doubted, betrayed, it can become a message of damnation, not of salvation. A Mr Silvero72 from Limoges has ‘caressing hands’; the Eucharist is taken, sullied, devalued by three other figures, a Hakagawa lover of painting (his name has some of Swift’s coprolalia, and the inner chain, within the paradigm of adulteration, corruption and excrement, ranges from ‘merds’ to ‘kaga’), a Madame de Tornquist, evidently tortured by sin, and a Miss von Kulp, whose blame is engraved in the name, just as in Armadale Wilkie Collins called his demonic culprit Gwilt. All these individuals, who live in the space of a mental flash, wander into a room, in the shade or in the dark, intolerant, harassed or falsely assured. But the generation of the world has for the first time in Eliot a reading that is as much biblical as it is economic and racial: the devotion to Mammon and pure profit, and the formation and concentration of modern capitalism in the international Jewry after the diaspora. The protagonists of Eliot’s early poetry, representatives of spiritual culture, are all individuals without family and especially homeless, living in rented rooms or in hotels. Prufrock sleeps in ‘one-night cheap hotels’ and eats at the restaurant; Gerontion is a lodger in a house owned by a wealthy Jew who squats on the windowsill, a disgusting symbol of the intrusiveness of a ‘spawned’ race and of the purely material culture that holds the cash; he owns vast real estate, and is beginning to show his sexual hunger as well. 3. In this poem, Eliot seeks but cannot find, asks questions but does not ‘reach conclusions’, perpetuates a state of waiting in a historical and absolute time of degeneration, or depravity. This is then a first, prophetic inquiry into the meaning and the phenomenologies of time, to which Four Quartets will give an answer many years later. For the moment history is a vortex, not a linear and progressive movement, circular or ascending, and

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spirit of wheat was represented as anthropomorphic or zoomorphic, and killed in the person of its representative and transformed into a sacramental meal. Johnson 1976, 44, sees him as a ‘descendant of Judas’ via the thirty pieces. Gerontion recalls the promise of Christ’s advent to renew the world, using the coinage ‘juvescence’ (for ‘juvenescence’), and it does so pour cause, because it also contains the word ‘jew’. The ‘Judas tree’ of Adams, incorporated in the text, and strictly a botanical term, also contains an allusion to Judas and to Judaism.

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those who investigate it experience feminine seductions that frustrate. The world is spoiled, rotten, unredeemed in the precisely literal and therefore religious meaning of the term. This means that the Good News, which once could appear to cleave the darkness, bring light, and renew things, is now a dead letter, or uncomprehended, misunderstood, denied. Christ comes or can come, but indolently passive man rejects it, and as in The Waste Land he just wants to stay in the safety of his refuge, and understands Christ’s message as aggressive, and too much of an awakening. Furthermore, the Good News calls for an agape that man cannot accept. The poem is as much religious, with a background of negative existentialism, as a discussion of the oxymoronic curse of carnal eros. The curse that hangs over the world, and that denies the Good News, is the appropriative and dehumanizing instinct reducing humanity to an almost Swiftian beast or Yahoo; as such, man is liable to succumb to uncontrollable lust, and his unproductive, senile ardour is accompanied by a repentance that comes too late. The poem is one of Eliot’s most difficult, complicated and obscure. Its difficulty springs from a private network of associations building a poetic version of the prose stream of consciousness that was in the air around the time of the poem. The epigraph and the conclusion, which echo each other, tell us that this poem is a fabric woven from the disconnected thoughts of an old man, a flowing rhapsody. This flow is apparently more chaotic, and the mobility of registers more pronounced, than elsewhere: there are in fact visible discursive leaps between the eight sections of the poem (which has few rhymes, more phenomenologies than Prufrock, but includes a philosophical and gnomic middle section). This network of associations is not only private, unexplained, suggestive, but also vague, to be guessed at; the poem’s difficulties are also due to the application of a method that is treacherous and ‘dishonest’ with respect to the reader. The meaning that I have extrapolated and laid out arises as much from the written signs as from those in absentia, that is from the dialogue with the sources. These sources explain the text, amplify and clarify the meaning, so that those who do not know them grope in the dark and are destined to a partial reading. And Eliot did not provide any notes to this poem. 4. The first section situates the little old man in his sleep, in deep sleep, and in the absence of stimuli. Eliot imagines himself old, and the

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incipient signs of old age were already visible in ‘Prufrock’. He uses the Victorian ‘mask of age’ typical of Tennyson. Gerontion stands aloof, does not fight, vegetates, thinks, and waits. The opposition between the present drought and a wet, rainy future, synonymous with hope for regrowth and renewal, is first formed here and foreshadows the ‘waste land’. In the first lines history and reflection on it arise from a confrontation: Eliot’s alter ego is always a coward, he wants to stand apart from the fray, and the little old man measures himself against the heroes of Thermopylae. Heroism is finished (a bitter fruit of the recent war), and this is the first sign of retrogression in history. ‘Bitten by flies’ is a small important detail: there are various insects and animals in the poem and this reference is the first. In his passivity, the old man wants to preserve his physical safety and does not want to be conquered, damaged, eaten or bitten: Christ will soon appear as a rejected devourer, and from here the food paradigm or isotopy takes shape. Except that, as I mentioned earlier, this is a covert reference to the motif of the soldier poet who fought and fell in the Great War. Through Gerontion, Eliot (who had not fought and had stayed at home) places himself among the many who regretted having missed the chance to act out of duty and the enthusiastic and romantic departure for the front to answer the call of their country. More precisely, with a subtle allusion, Eliot here recalls the most splendid and admirable symbol of the war poet as brave fallen soldier, that of Rupert Brooke ‘dead at the Dardanelles’ from a mosquito-bite,73 who had impressed himself on the collective imagination. Eliot ennobles Brooke’s death even more, making a mosquito into a fly (the detail would not otherwise make sense). That is why I spoke earlier of Eliot being haunted by Brooke’s shadow. The first sign of a world dominated by money and by the race towards enrichment, and therefore by the denial of charity, is personified in the Jew who sits as a petty monarch on the decayed throne of the window sill. But humanity is brutalized or animal-like or ambiguous, and ‘spawned’ indicates more of a sub-human generative process than a human one. ‘Antwerp’ contains ‘ant’; the Jew is repellent in his external characteristics of disease and peeling skin. He is

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§ 64.2 n. 6.

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also the emblem of a nomadic life without roots. In and with his visionary fantasy the old man sees around him not only a goat coughing, because ill, but also the intrusion of excrement (‘merds’). The woman too has a selfish attitude and is inclined towards appropriation. ‘Keeping’, as we shall see, is not good, or useful. The goat will yield infected milk, and the woman, sneezing, is therefore equated with the goat, both providers of secular food, milk and tea, which could be an allusion to or prolepsis of the Eucharist. 5. The diction becomes highly uneven and moves violently from one register to another. Abrupt reference is made to Christ the child wearing light where darkness was. But a challenge is thrown at Christ: if you are really there, you have to give us a sign and strike a blow. Assertiveness – ‘Signs are taken for wonders’ – masks a doubt, or a question, or a request. Line 20 is a sentence left in abeyance; the setting turns, from the time of Christ’s passage on earth to the ‘depraved’ May of the present. The scene that comes to life in an elliptical way is antithetical. The quartet of characters performing this scene in Limoges operates within the realm of lust and excrement, or of an aesthetic religion. The word of the infant Jesus has historically been overturned, and man has become a Judas above all, Judas the first capitalist and the first profiteer in history, and a Jew. As I mentioned, the name Silvero contains an allusion to the ‘thirty pieces of silver’ the traitor received. However, a figurative chain linking silver, excrement and lust is formed in this scene. Limoges, famous for porcelain, remotely refers to ‘porcella’ [Italian for ‘sow’], and Hakagawa contains echoes of ‘caga’ [Italian for ‘shits’]. Lust seeps through the consumption of sex ‘among whispers’, the hands that caress almost to titillate and excite, the pulsating wait for intercourse, the bowing among the Titians (instead of the talk about the more virile Michelangelo in ‘Prufrock’), Titian being the painter of profane and sensual love. Fräulein Von Kulp will be seized by guilt coming into that room where she will yield, and then repent; for now she is hesitating, between here and there. After the emblem of the corruption of both sacred and profane love comes the anguished admission that there can be no forgiveness, that the world is hopelessly doomed. The historical outline is indebted to an American Puritan (the logical and deductive link with the scene with Silvero and his companions is ‘whispering ambitions’). But now history is illusion and seduction, and unintelligible.

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Towards the end, apocalyptic Puritan pessimism becomes lacerating and consciousness is bombarded by the anaphora of ‘think’. Believing is impossible, and not believing ‘propagates a fear’. This anguish is clearly derived from Kierkegaard, and a chord picked up from ‘Prufrock’. In practice man is predestined as in Calvinism, and predestined to damnation: doing or not doing, passivity or activity do not ‘save us’. And this is a purely theological discourse. Indeed heroism creates ‘unnatural vices’, and ‘impudent crimes’ force us to become virtuous: this is the decree of a punitive God, as Hopkins might have put it. 6. After the parenthesis, the discourse left dangling is taken up again: Christ devours us.74 He is not a gentle lamb but rather oppresses us. As for many others who had met this challenge, Christ is eventually rejected because he asks too much; and then the old man is back disconsolately to reflect on his condition of drought and rigidity. Sexual arousal is gone, useless, and even sincere affection is foreclosed. The drift towards contagion and rot is unstoppable, and what is ‘kept’ is adulterous (and is the answer to the woman who ‘keeps the kitchen’). Sensual life is dangerous, as the interspersed sexual innuendos confirm. The senses are cooled, but the membrane gets excited in a cold frenzy (unequivocal words, plus ‘membrane’ that contains ‘member’). In practice there is only an imaginary arousal, erection is nonexistent, even despite the intervention of the aphrodisiac ‘pungent sauces’ (another reference to food). Lines 65 to the end are the most difficult and enigmatic of the poem. The new trio of emblematic characters have semantically opaque names, and apart from one the reader knows or can guess nothing about them. Are the spider and the weevil disgusting instruments of inexorable divine punishment? Maybe (‘weevil’ not coincidentally contains ‘evil’). The question is rhetorical: the spider-web will disintegrate, the weevil will rot. Those three characters will be ‘whirled / Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear’. That a settling of the accounts is taking place is confirmed by the cancelled lines on Fresca omitted from The Waste Land. There Fresca is an antiphrastic name, for she is depraved 74 In one of his ‘terrible’ sonnets, which paradoxically yet temporarily reject God, Hopkins describes the striking paw that hurts like that of a wild beast (‘why wouldst thou rude […] lay a lionlimb against me?’).

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and infected. She gets up in the morning after carousing and dreaming of ‘pleasant rapes’, and takes a novel to the toilet. The context is Swiftian, a kind of ‘Celia s**ts’. But those who do not know those lines are cut adrift. I have come then to the end of the discussion on how this poem signifies. Of the many sources cited, half are Elizabethan and Jacobean plays focusing on ‘lecherous’, horny, lustful, adulterous, sexually incontinent heroes, who repent or review their life on their deathbed. This is already there in the epigraph from Measure for Measure. Such is Eliot’s acrobatic mode of signification. 7. The formal structure of the remaining 1920 poems is the quatrain, rhymed abab, or with an occasional irregularity of rhyme, which Eliot took from Gautier. Gautier in turn had inspired Laforgue and Corbière, who had founded a new way of composing, different from the uninterrupted (though already fractured) flow and fluidity of the monologue. This is the French scherzo of juxtaposed scenes and skits, incredibly vivid in themselves, witty, daring and outlandish but dry, quick, and unexplained; and therefore based on hiatuses that are not only logical but also contextual, historical even, and also hiatuses between the mythological and the contemporary. No longer is allusion the core generator, but rather it is the ellipsis. Many of these seemingly simple and short poems are tours de force. They may also appear as artificial riddles or word-puzzles, and they force the reader unwilling to take them as such to make a similar acrobatic effort, looking for a thread (which it is doubtful will be found) in order to fill the hiatuses, unite passage to passage and poem to poem according to a certain logic or sense, or preordained intention. Eliot’s talent for introducing, and thus varying with the ease of a great musician, individual episodes, individual songs, individual words of a text, often quoted from little-known earlier authors, has risen to stellar levels. But this is enough to exclude the general reader from full participation, and to make these poems into philological exercises for specialists. The apparent chaos can be reordered, however, into a sufficiently unitary discourse. Dispassionately, Eliot notes the eclipse of the sacred in the modern world.75 In a way this corpus, in 75

The enigmatic ‘A Cooking Egg’ is the only case in which Eliot, who hides and objectifies himself, tries to anticipate and therefore to believe in a post mortem ascent to

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its discontinuities, and precisely because of them, gives shape and pattern to a ‘waste’ or ‘desolate’ land. The word ‘desolation’ can be tracked down in the epigraph to ‘Sweeney Erect’, where it functions as a premonition of the poem itself (as it does elsewhere); in this epigraph it is used in a sense and in a context that is not exactly the same, or only metaphorical, one that anyway Eliot captures and adapts with great skill. Or this connecting thread is camouflaged in the French title of one of the four poems in that language, ‘Mélange Adultère de Tout’.76 The single scenes of this ‘desolation’ lead back to the secular, the material, the beastly, the level to which the man without memory and in defiance of sin has descended, giving way to promiscuous desire. But for ‘man’ we mean the male, towards whom Eliot is much more indulgent than to the female, always merely rapacious. For each virtuous and modest woman there are so many others, or they are the only ones, who are provocative temptresses making the first move to assail male virginity. 8. It has rightly been said that at this stage Eliot considered and described humanity as Swiftian Yahoos, although his polemic is restrained, playful but no less scathing towards those who idealize human beings. While the capitalist Jew combines the cult of profit with lust, avarice worms itself into the institutions and even the Church. The epigraph to ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’ is a remarkable assemblage of six seemingly irreconcilable fragments from different texts, separated from each other by a dash; once decoded, they are all evidently connected with

another world; but this adventure is described in burlesque, and simply imagines the gratification of some vanities, like meeting there historical worthies and famous heroes, or rich and dissolute personages. With a U-turn, the speaker welcomes the life of humble and rewarding routine with the inconspicuous, modest housewife Pipit, who is the only woman in this 1920 collection to be totally devoid of rapacious feminine allure. 76 In ‘Dans le Restaurant’ we hear the erotic confessions of a ‘vieux lubrique’, a waiter who ‘explored’ a child; the composition is notable because it contains an early version of the fourth section of The Waste Land, and introduces Phlébas, the beautiful Phoenician merchant, whose ‘death by water’ is a nemesis for having too much thought of ‘les profits et les pertes’.

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Venice, with one exception.77 In this dazzling composition, which aims to sketch a phenomenology of the venereal, Eliot can only weave a pastiche of Venetian quotations, proving once again how virtually endless is the macrotext of Venice in literature and the arts, and how excessive, overwhelming even, is the scope of its suggestions. Venice is the place of the fall, which for Eliot is the Fall from Eden, seen as a yielding to sexual sin. Burbank78 arrives in Venice, accepts the advances of a Jonsonian Princess Volupine, and ‘fell’. But then the next two quatrains suddenly expand dramatically this scenario localized in time and space into a more vaguely mythical and therefore archetypal field, identifying the Roman tourist with Mark Antony, exhausted, abandoned by ‘Hercules’, and therefore fallen too by Cleopatra’s hand. This postulates the Fall as timeless and fatal, if not fatalistic. This context of the exotic queen with her ‘burnished throne’ in the sea would always remain impressed in Eliot’s mind. Most of the rest of the composition is given to Bleistein, simian Jew of mixed and impure race whose abrupt entry arouses so many suggestions and associations: not just the most obvious of Shylock and Othello, but others which can no longer be contained and developed within the space of the quatrain, but must be expressed, bouncing off each other, in a condensed and bare form, almost like summary captions. Eliot ends up agreeing with Ruskin that the physical erosion of Venice is the reflection, if not the result, of its

77 This epigraph, which is a kind of quatrain added by way of a prologue, hinges, in the whole range of its weird citations, on the opposition between the mad and unbridled joy of the senses of carnivalesque Venice, and the severe warning that ‘dust you are and to dust you will return’. Niobe reinforces the warning, because she is the woman as mother, proud of her offspring and of the noble reproductive function of sexuality. The sophisticated and acrobatic ‘Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’ metaphorically applies the motif of reproductive sexuality to the clergy and to sterile theological diatribes (the example given is that of Origen, physically castrated but intellectually fertile). The diagnosis – that Christ’s Word is mute or unheard – echoes ‘Gerontion’. The Aesopian theological allegory ‘The Hippopotamus’ ironically equates the fragility of the Church, and its simoniacal dedication to ‘material ends’, to the only apparently and outwardly firm and strong hippopotamus. 78 The name was that of a controversial American pseudo-scientist (cf. Crawford 1987, 65–6).

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moral decline; like Ruskin, he turns Venice into a woman, a prostitute, in fact, or an impoverished and promiscuous noblewoman, the Princess Volupine, laying her ‘phthisic’ claws on rich tourists. 9. The brief cycle about Sweeney, protagonist of two lyrics and fleetingly remembered in a third, opens in ‘Sweeney Erect’,79 the parable of the ugly and petty diminution of the noble and ancient myths, and of evolution and evolutionary development (though retrograde and non-progressive) in historical eras which nevertheless are linked and interconnected. The beginning is a parodic evocation of the legendary episode of Theseus and Ariadne in high classical style; but the Greek world had already combined the sublimating purity of Nausicaa and the bestial instincts of the Cyclops, just as the two characters are linked in Eliot’s line. The descent of mankind seems to be from Polyphemus – in an abrupt transition, Sweeney has the features of an erect orang-utan, just risen from a lying position in bed. The erection suggested by the title signifies not only his simian lust, but also the exact dividing line between man and beast.80 The ape-man shaves to eliminate his simian traces and thereby reduce and control his instincts, but his partner reacts with an irrepressible hysterical laughter. This climax fades into a farcical scene in front of the scandalized inmates of the boarding-house. The Sweeney who reappears in ‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales’ is man who has fallen, or is in the process of falling, still with the features of an animal, the striped zebra or the ‘maculate’ (therefore not immaculate) giraffe. This time Eliot sets the poem in reverse, starting from the contemporary scene only to find the mythical correspondence at the tail end (though this also announced by the epigraph), in the cry of the murdered Agamemnon from Aeschylus. Eliot sets it up also as a short thriller in the hot South American and Argentinian atmosphere, in keeping with the belief he once stated that the context must stem from the actions; in itself this parallelism between ancient and modern may remind 79 Sweeney was the name of an Anglo-Irish boxer known and frequented by Eliot in his youth. It is not often remembered that the pronunciation of this name, itself evocative of ‘swine’ in English, sounds exactly like the Italian ‘suini’ [‘pigs’]. 80 It is here that in a parenthetical quatrain Eliot argues with Emerson, who defined civilization as ‘the lengthened shadow of a man’.

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the reader of Eliot’s drama. The threatening intersection of stars and constellations indicates that an ambush is being plotted against Sweeney; the epigraph has already hinted that he will be literally or figuratively killed like Agamemnon. In the modern variation of the myth, the attack is targeted at his virginity and perpetrated with overwhelming fury and bestial enthusiasm by a woman to whom Eliot gives a Jewish surname. The final six lines are a rapid compression of a very subtle associative argument. Nightingales sang in Agamemnon’s days, dirtying his shroud with their droppings and thus dishonouring him; now the nightingales are the tempting prostitutes, who sing and lure and leave their excrements near the convent of the Sacred Heart. They are the desecration of the sacred, inverting the image of the nun. § 96. T. S. Eliot V: ‘The Waste Land’* I. The orchestration Published almost simultaneously in the British magazine Criterion and in the US in The Dial, The Waste Land (1922)81 was partly written in

*

T. S. Eliot: ‘The Waste Land’: A Casebook, ed. C. B. Cox and A. P. Hinchliffe, London and Basingstoke 1968; H. Williams, T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, London 1968; A. J. Wilks, A Critical Commentary of T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, London 1971; T. S. Eliot: The Making of ‘The Waste Land’, ed I. Scott-Kilvert, Harlow 1972; F. Gozzi, La cosmogonia della ‘Waste Land’, Pisa 1979; G. Smith, ‘The Waste Land’, London 1983; S. Coote, T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, Harmondsworth 1985; H. Davidson, T. S. Eliot and Hermeneutics: Absence and Interpretation in ‘The Waste Land’, Baton Rouge, LA 1985; C. Bedient, He Do the Police in Different Voices: ‘The Waste Land’ and Its Protagonists, Chicago 1986; T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, ed. H. Bloom, New York 1986; Critical Essays on ‘The Waste Land’, ed. L. Cookson and B. Loughrey, Harlow 1988; R. L. Schwarz, Broken Images: A Study of ‘The Waste Land’, London 1988; J. S. Brooker and J. Bentley, Reading ‘The Waste Land’: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation, Amherst, MA 1990; G. Reeves, T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, New York and London 1994; B. Blistein, The Design of ‘The Waste Land’, Lanham, MD 2008. Outstanding Italian editions of the poem, with valuable introductions and annotation, include those edited by M. Praz, Torino 1966, by M. Melchionda, Milano 1976, and A. Serpieri, Milano 1982 and, with a new essay on the poem’s genesis, 2006.

81

Were we to follow R. Poggioli’s incisive suggestion of an allusion to Dante (cf. Praz 1962, 348 n. 2), the title would be better paraphrased as ‘il paese guasto’ (Inf., XIV, 94), which H. F. Cary prophetically translated in 1814 as ‘a desolate country’.

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a Swiss sanatorium, where Eliot was suffering a nervous breakdown largely due to the crisis in his marriage.82 The Notes to the text were added in the book edition of the same year. The canonical version we all know today was the result of extensive excisions83 – the famous ‘Caesarean Operation’ – performed by Pound on the manuscript Eliot left with him while travelling through Paris. While blindly trusting in Pound, on his return to England Eliot nevertheless reserved his right to have the last word on what to accept and what to reject of Pound’s suggestions. The examination of the two versions, the final and the first and most extensive, concerns scholars of textual genesis and falls outside my purposes. The Waste Land is here the text of 1922, the one known and read for almost a century and which has had an indisputable global resonance. This poem, doggedly investigated by generations of exegetes, can nowadays only be discussed in terms of the history of its different interpretations, relating mainly to its genesis, its intrinsic and symbolic meanings, and its orchestration. And the author was for once its first interpreter. As sparing and hermetically reticent as Eliot was about his other compositions, on this one he was more loquacious, releasing various statements relating to it, which having been issued later are not all consistent with each other, and yet are also not without some truth. In one of those Eliot hinted at a biographical and personal, rather than ideological genesis. The poem had gushed from him as ‘the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life’;84 in another intervention he warned and discouraged those who had believed and continued to believe the poem was the declaration of an epochal and generational disillusionment; for years or decades after it was published, while not repudiating it, he did not rate it highly, and would have saved only the last forty lines. But the most complete authorial self-reading is undoubtedly the one provided by the Notes to the text. The latter are, and should undoubtedly be considered as the first rationalization of its formal 82 83

More specifically in Lausanne, treated by the Swiss psychologist Vittoz. The complete MS was published by Eliot’s second wife, Valerie, in 1971 in New York: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound. 84 Quoted in Johnson 1976, 248.

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design and the unequivocal confirmation of its ideological value, in spite of the fact that Eliot, at a distance, humorously conceded that they had been padding made necessary by the shortage of pages for the poem to be published as a book in its own right.85 They are certainly not bogus, even if, as has been repeatedly pointed out, they are reticent and simplifying (the initial one is a rare gem of false modesty), cryptic and candid, and some of them impertinent, misleading or, on various issues, sketchy. Their most salient points are the general acknowledgement of the model of the vegetative rites, the relevance of the associative principle, the weaving of relationships among the five sections and among the individual actants or extras, against a background formed by a series of patterns that are transformed through repetition, an occult unity by which everything holds together. The metaphors and expressions used in the Notes are significant: those of ‘metamorphosis’, with the recurrence of the verb ‘melt’; those of the ‘correspondences’ and of the ‘non-accidental’ nature of placements, which presupposes a plan studied in detail.86 The Notes also draw the map of the borrowings, which are far from inert, as always, and can be organized in a hierarchy following the incidence of citations. Scholarly source-hunting has not yet lapsed as an approach to Eliot’s poem, not only because once again we face a thematic composition and variations on the great canon of literature, but because sources and quotations can be reorganized as a secondary trace that strengthens the primary poetic discourse, or even often stands, as we shall see, in a dialectical relationship or as an ironic counterpoint to it. Here it is hardly necessary to mention the varied and contrasting reception of the poem, which has hinged precisely on this acrobatic and sophisticated semiosis, sometimes implying the accusation (often used in the nineteenth century as a critical standard) against Eliot of being a ‘poets’ poet’. At the same time, Eliot’s Notes confirm the surprising causality of associative links discovered in impromptu phrases, or even through simple events in everyday life: connections of an unexpected, 85 OPP, 109–10. 86 The one-eyed merchant ‘melts’ into the Phoenician sailor, who ‘is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples’; and all the women are one woman, and the two sexes ‘meet in Tiresias’, and what Tiresias sees is the substance of the poem.

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miraculous, dazzling adherence to the pre-established plan. In the Notes Eliot admits twice he ‘does not remember’ where, from what source and how a functional element has been captured and integrated.87 They finally leave no doubt as to the figurative and allegorical meaning of The Waste Land. In one, Eliot admits the figurative value of ‘decay’, but only for ‘eastern Europe’, and in another he repeats the same concept relying on a quotation from Hermann Hesse, who apocalyptically announces that ‘half of Europe already, or at least half of eastern Europe’ is ‘on the road to chaos’ and ‘is reeling into the abyss’. With Hesse, then, Eliot was thinking of the harmful global effects of the Russian revolution in particular, authorizing us to believe in a kind of phantasmagorical Nineteen Eighty-Four twentyfive years in advance. The same militant stance, and with it a clarification of method, are emphasized in the famous declaration of 1923 about the work of Joyce, Yeats, and even his own. In it Eliot extends to his poem the obvious application of the mythical method; indirectly he describes the poem as a ‘panorama’, composed, as we shall see, of several frames and calls the panorama of modern history (and thus the poem), one of ‘futility and anarchy’, leaving its scope unclear, again emphasizing the civic, political, historical theme, and implicitly calling for a restoration of order. 2. Biography and poetic design do not necessarily have to be split apart:88 Eliot merges his own present and contingent ‘desolation’, his emotional, marital and existential crisis, with the historical and cyclical desolation of Spengler, Yeats, Vico, and one becomes a function of the other. On the general, conceptual plan he can but declare himself in dialogue with all the artistic representations, with all past metaphors, of the ‘waste land’. Of course, it is by now clear that there is no longing in Eliot for a splendid 87 On the ‘interpenetration’ and ‘metamorphosis’, and on the human mind as a ‘continuum’ see an illuminating review of Stravinsky’s Rite by Eliot, quoted in Southam 1968, 70–1. 88 Bush 1984 gave for instance credit once more to Eliot’s account of the genesis of the poem and developing this connection saw a dramatization of ‘the prison of the individual ego’ (Bush 1984, 99), a phantasmagoria of surfacings from dreams, especially of disconnected images from memory, much like those in Browning’s ‘Childe Roland’. Only later, according to Bush, did Eliot, in reshaping the poem, superimpose the mythical frame (Bush 1984, 71–2).

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and redeemed past by comparison with a degraded present, and that all past ages have accommodated a sense of desolation from which they have emerged into a regeneration: the paradigm of the story is not then inexorably decaying, but cyclical. And yet the conceptual point of The Waste Land is that, as in all the apocalyptic texts and authors, this cyclical and therefore optimistic mechanism89 seems to have broken down, and from cyclic to have become ‘unredeemable’, an adjective not surprisingly crucial in Eliot. It is an equally firm corollary90 that the deep-seated oppositions of the images are not one-way, but in their variations give rise to an unstable system, so that the positive may become negative, the dry and arid have the advantage over the wet or over a certain kind of dampness, that of the dirty, defiled, stale water within the semantic and the figurative space of the rat or of lust,91 the only one that is unchanging. To anticipate, Eliot realizes immediately, or almost immediately after The Waste Land, that the only exit from the impasse is to find one special pattern of and in time. The Waste Land, therefore, is also, in its internal dynamism between timeless myth and its later re-enactment, a meditation on time: a chaotic time, close to its consummation and consumption, here; a redeemed time, in the manner indicated mostly in Four Quartets, which was then already germinating inside The Waste Land. On the basis of Weston and further back of Frazer, what Eliot does in The Waste Land is a syncretic weaving of variations on a single mythical theme. The quest for and the discovery of a common stock unifying the geographical and diachronic dispersion of myths was already, after all, the classic theme of anthropology in the nineteenth century. Frazer’s and Weston’s thesis is that the medieval Christian ritualism of the Grail and the Fisher King was already a rewritten version 89 Serpieri 1973, 182–3, argues that Eliot uses the mythical method discovered in Joyce ‘without finally accepting his world view’, and providing a paradigmatic vision which is ‘absolutely not teleological’, amounting to a celebration of the infinity of human beings which is ‘an infinite possibility of naming the world’. Eliot was, on the contrary, a teleologist. Serpieri 2006, 7, however, emphasizes that in The Waste Land there is a constant negotiation with ‘literary, mythical, anthropological paradigms’. 90 As Serpieri 1973 was the first to clarify. 91 Johnson 1976 makes the subtle distinction that rainwater is akin to the rejected kingdom of the dirty flesh, while seawater has a positive value.

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and a transformation of ancient rites and myths of fertility, all of them either synchronous or near-synchronous, and largely self-sufficient, like those of Attis, Adonis and Osiris. A detailed and comprehensive comparison between Eliot and Frazer – what in other words Eliot drew from the latter – does not seem to have been traced by the critics. In The Golden Bough92 Frazer records and studies the ancient pagan rites assuming an abstract synchronicity or a vertical and horizontal ‘analogy’ (his term) among the practiced rituals, without therefore any distinction of historical time and geographical latitude. His formidable system of classification shows that the hidden and invariable motive of ritual, of every pagan ritual and of folklore, is the propitiation of fertility, natural (the invocation or conjuring of the rain) as much as sexual and human. All rites, in every latitude, are originally rites of awakening of the vegetation and crops. From the point of view of Eliot’s poetry, the heart of Frazer’s work are the chapters on the gods and goddesses of the ‘grain’, on vegetative rites based on the fact that plant life was personified ‘in a god who annually died and was resurrected’; they were different rites from country to country, but in essence the same. Adonis, or Tammuz, was not buried, but descended in the late summer of each year to the underground world. He was, therefore, truthfully, ‘the spirit of the grain’. Attis is the Phrygian counterpart to Adonis, whose death according to two legends was due to the impalement by a wild boar or to emasculation. This particular version, which included the fanatical self-mutilation that the priests of the god underwent upon initiation to his service, must have impressed Eliot deeply. The burial of the effigy of Attis and its unearthing meant the promise of the resurrection and the exorcism of death. His feast was celebrated on the date of the vernal equinox, and thus meant the resurrection of the god of vegetation. Osiris is for Frazer the god who embodies the harvest, the planting, the wheat. The cults of these gods follow therefore the lines of the grain cycle. On the killing of the god Frazer only indicates as a motivation the desire to ward off aging and the drying up of the vital forces: the old, withered god dies to be replaced every year by a young and vigorous one, by the inflexible 92

In twelve volumes originally (1890–1915), reduced in two in 1922, the most approachable version.

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action of ‘sympathetic’ or imitative magic. Human sacrifices were also made for the sake of the crop. Weston’s booklet,93 anything but a masterpiece for its farrago of doubtfully relevant digressions, follows Frazer closely and was conceived in its footsteps, though it integrates him with, and discusses a wide range of other authorities; so that, where Frazer was intelligibly and engagingly popular, Weston is more drily academic. Eliot relies more on Frazer, although Weston suggests to him some addenda; for example Frazer is silent about any more precise detail of vegetative rituals as rites of phallic awakening, and he glosses over the Grail. Weston sees the merging of the former into the latter, with the recovery or rather the persistence of the phallic implication in the sword and cup of the Grail. Eliot was also certainly affected by the discovery that the Tarot pack of cards, of Oriental origin, was not just an instrument of divination, but served to predict the rise and fall of the waters. But the discovery of a common stock of the old anthropological traditions and pagan rites of vegetation is not for Eliot antithetical or antagonistic towards the Christian tradition, but rather a graft onto it. The idea that the ‘word’ should be living, that it might bring wetness and fertility to a desiccated world, underlies all anthropologies and religions, from Christianity to Buddhism to Brahmanism. At a late stage of the poem, there emerges from the chaos of citations and discordant voices the primacy of the New Testament, from which the model of a God punishing an idolatrous people is taken. But references to Dante are also apparent, as early as the crowd of Londoners significantly ‘flows over London Bridge’ like so many damned souls in hell. Dante too is a partner in Eliot’s dialogue with past metaphorists of the waste land. Even Dante, particularly Dante, implements a mythical method aimed at emergence from the waste land and from the corruption of history. Perhaps Dante inspired Eliot, so that Dante and his poem became another founding insight. The Divine Comedy is in fact an otherworldly, metaphysical journey, which takes place in time and, most importantly, out of time; it is placed in April 1300, but its time is an eschatological time. Dante’s visit is a vertical immersion in historical time, but each circle of hell, purgatorial frame

93

From Ritual to Romance, Cambridge 1920.

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or paradisal circle rejects and then dethrones historical time, and in each individual section he sees grouped together, horizontally, the damned or those atoning their sins or the blessed, all of them having lived in historical eras very far apart. Dante thus collapses time and makes it simultaneous, like Eliot. Like Eliot, he gathers together gradually on the same stage, and depending on the sin committed, mythology, recorded history and the petty crimes of the day before yesterday, with his famous, dizzying changes not only of register but also of epochal setting, formae mentis and locations. The optical illusion is astounding in Dante: the reader has barely finished meeting the mythical-historical Capaneus in the fourteenth canto of the Inferno than soon after, across a leap of centuries, Brunetto Latini appears; or one gets to know the brutality of Vanni Fucci to see him chased away by the mythological Caco. 3. The internal disconnection of the five parts and of each part with all the others – enhanced and exacerbated, as has always been recognized, by Pound’s ‘cutting’ – is only an impression. The reader’s task is to find the end in the skein, to understand where are the sutures of these parts which have different and alternate linguistic registers – argumentative, philosophical, dignified and parodically conversational – and are placed on separate temporal planes: ancient and modern, ahistorical and current, symbolic and allegorical, metaphysical, visionary and prophetic. The orchestration of the poem has been described with various metaphors, and the first by Eliot himself occurs in the preface to his translation of Saint-John Perse’s Anabase. The obscurity was due to the suppression of ‘links in the chain’, an ‘abbreviation’ to which the reader must get accustomed, leaving images to be stored in his/her memory, and eventually discovering that an effect is produced, and that in fact there is not chaos but an order dictated by the ‘logic of the imagination’, antithetical to that ‘of concepts’. It is first of all natural and proper to situate The Waste Land as part of an early twentiethcentury avant-garde, not only literary but spanning painting, music, film even.94 The similarities of the poem with abstract art, Fauvist and Cubist

94 On the historical synchronicity of Modernism, in a series of works that accompany The Waste Land, see PLE, 188–94.

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painting,95 or even with the ‘photomontages’ of surrealist painters, such as Ernst or Dalí, based on ‘violent juxtapositions of contrasting fragments of tone and colour’,96 were immediately perceived. The artistic composition in juxtaposed pictures integrated according to an associative logic had been after all inaugurated in the early twentieth century by cinema97 and music. In a literal sense, orchestration is a term associated with a score, with musical performance, and with it the concept and practice of the tone poem.98 The musicality of the poem does not just involve the most obvious – but no less functional – citations (Wagner’s libretti, from Tristan und Isolde for the theme of the romantic and exhausted erotic love, to Parsifal for that of the crippled and wounded Fisher King regenerated to a new life); and it does not only hinge on the leitmotiv of melodrama. In its inexhaustible network of references, The Waste Land absorbs in its pores the whole of post-Wagnerism, from atonal music to the twelve-tone technique,99 from light classical music to jazz, ragtime and popular song. More precisely, it is a musical diorama, and can be defined as a bundle of scenes with no apparent contact, or modulations and variations on a theme, governed by one of the dominant modalities of twentieth-century music, that of dissonance. There are five internal tempos each with its own title, as with the five sections or movements of another musical poem, Four Quartets. The sections are homogeneous in length, around 100 lines each, with the fourth, of about fifteen lines, interrupting the regularity. In each of them, the voices of individuals and groups of speakers ring out in a variety of alternating historical times (present, past and no time, that is, absolute and ahistorical time) and registers: evocative, gnomic, narrative, dialogical, reminiscent and therefore memorial. Sections interlinked by verbal associations and echoes

95 Bergonzi 1978, 91. 96 PSL, 674–5 and n. 1, and Praz 1967, 101. Praz 1966, 5 n. 1, however, insists on the analogy with the photomontages of Hans Erni, and in particular with the one that depicts one of the Magi against the background of a Swiss clinic. 97 One example for all, and American to boot, is Griffith’s Intolerance, from 1911. Praz 1967, 93, evokes a slightly daring comparison with Ingmar Bergman’s dream-like films. 98 Music ‘of ideas’ was the guiding principle of one of Eliot’s first critics, I. A. Richards. 99 A connection also noted by Serpieri 1973, 73, but in ‘Portrait of a Lady’.

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reverberate on the scaffold provided by the meaning. In this mosaic, what is at work is either the direct poetic quotation from a previous classic, or a parody that lets a text be seen or alluded to. As in Four Quartets, we must resist the hypothesis or the temptation to disassemble and reassemble the poem according to the homologous and symmetrical micro-sections. The most compelling analogy is that with the symphonic poem or the kind of music called ‘pictures’.100 The term brings to mind Mussorgsky; but the musical work in ‘pictures’ which is amazingly parallel to The Waste Land in technique and theme is The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky.101 Stravinsky, like Prokofiev, does in music what Eliot does in poetry, irreverent or even dissonant parody. The Bible is perhaps, statistically, the reservoir of allusions most resorted to, but in the form of inverted, distorted extracts, relevant by contrast, or bent into trivialized meanings. The quotation, any quotation is emptied, or reversed; it sounds jarring in the face of a reality that cannot contemplate it except in its denial; or the allusion is purposely forced and its sign is changed.102 § 97. T. S. Eliot VI: ‘The Waste Land’ II. Witnesses of the pastiche In the epigraph in Latin and Greek that comes from Petronius’ Satyricon, where the Cumean Sibyl has fallen from her ancient mythical

100 ‘In a highly entropic vision’, as Serpieri 1973, 242, adds. 101 See Serpieri 1973, 242 n. 84, and Serpieri 2006, 32–3 with nn. 24 and 25. The link between The Rite and Fauvist technique was noted by Cocteau (‘le Sacre est encore une œuvre fauve, une œuvre fauve organisée’, quoted in R. Vlad, Strawinsky, Torino 1983, 57 n. 3). Dating from 1913, The Rite has a conceptual development strikingly parallel to The Waste Land, expressly made up of pictures of pagan Russia, more precisely of the rites with which the coming of spring was celebrated. Vlad finds the technical mark of the piece is ‘polyharmonics, polymodality and polytonality’, and the ‘unleashing of primal rhythmic forces’ (52). 102 In the Notes there is a certain degree of freedom and arbitrariness in establishing correspondences and parallelisms between figures and motifs that will appear in the poem. For example, in the vegetative rites the buried god was also called the hanged god, and Eliot tracks this figure in the Tarot pack of cards, which he adapts to his own purposes because it itself plays with, transforms and changes archetypical figures. Another invented analogue is that of the ‘hooded’ figure, an adumbration of the Gospel episode of the disciples of Emmaus.

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glories in Virgil and now hangs ‘in a bottle’ desiring death only, Eliot launches the first of his guiding threads, the one linked to prophecy. He laments, more precisely, the degradation of the prophetic function, or the turn to a pessimistic prophecy of death and desolation, which therefore becomes more properly a bitter, resigned, or sarcastic or frighteningly unconscious realization. The internal echoes of this epigraph extend, in the first place, to the imperiously cautionary prophetic voices regularly disseminated in the text, and overshadowing other voices; and further to the still degraded voices of a Tiresias, and of the decidedly amateurish, charlatan, myopic Madame Sosostris. The connection lies also, under the sign of death and ritual, with the title of the first part, ‘The Burial of the Dead’, the same as the liturgical service for the dead in the Anglican Church. But this is the first ironic reversal, because the dead are later the living, the living dead destined to die, therefore moribund in a variety of meanings. The drift towards death, or rather towards the prison of death, or the condition of life in death, is the leitmotif of the entire ‘Burial’ section, even through minimal hints and verbal appeals, synonyms or verbal derivations. The diorama is one of interments, burials, drownings, descents to the grave, or symbolic and comfortable residences there; if burying means lowering into the earth, every fall or descent, literal or metaphorical, is a death. Were it not for the variations on the theme of death, the first part of the poem could be deemed hopelessly fractured. It contains three spacings that set out four sub-sections taking place in different times and places and introduce anonymous or even named figures, or others designated by epithets, who apparently have nothing to do with each other. The internal instability cooperates with a confusing game of voices and pronouns, always changing and difficult to attribute. The first seven lines are recited by a ‘we’. Earlier Eliot had chosen Prufrock and Gerontion as his alter egos; now he has a collective, anonymous one. Within each of the five parts there will be from now on the repetition of an ancient form of an antiphonal matrix: a chorus of deniers, spiritually resigned, who have taken refuge in a ‘little life’, that is, in a life lived to the minimum; they are shaken, awoken, stimulated, encouraged to go symbolically towards life and to second the natural and symbolic cycle of rebirth, which may be approaching. Spring sprouts and favours seasonal rebirth, but takes away the pleasure of wintry intimacy, the warm lethargy in aridity, and April is therefore ‘the cruellest month’. One

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should not overlook the concentration of iconoclastic energy released by this first line, ‘April is the cruellest month’: not only does it signify according to a surprising reversal of the commonly accepted values of seasonal changes (the euphoric pleasure that everyone feels with the arrival of April); at the same time Eliot in fact ironically overturns Chaucer, namely the spring, birth or rebirth of English literature symbolized by the first line of Chaucer’s poem, of recognized inaugural and creative value in the English tradition. This quotation, just barely but crucially changed, also allows us to consider the new condition of the poet as it is realized in this poem. Later we will meet an equally recognizable manipulation of Dante and, foremost, one of the most famous lines of Shakespeare, then four quoted verbatim from Wagner in German, plus a fifth, and the closing line taken from Baudelaire and given in French, to limit ourselves to the most obvious. What I mean is that that the role of the poet has become that of the director or editor, as sometimes now in the technique of cinema or television, of fragments and excerpts taken from a mass of documents, and blended in succession by virtue of obvious or sometimes hidden and even acrobatic mutual allusions. The break and the abrupt hiatus, and the scene-change, are laws of composition to which Eliot gets his readers accustomed from line 8. The speaking ‘we’ are now a couple of death’s prisoners, ‘fallen’ in love in the sense of Burbank’s fall, and dying in sin or believing they have escaped the punishment of sexual sin, as the reader is warned by another voice rising behind the scenes, repeatedly reminding him or her of the dust, ‘a handful of dust’, which man will become in death. The dry or shaken roots are then the sexual organs, too. This launches a diagnosis that will be resumed, where the dryness is related to an Eros that is not agape. While it is good that the senses should be awakened, they must be put to good use. 2. The use of a private and obscure reading memory – a sleigh ride down the mountains – is one of those random epiphanies of his theme that Eliot discovered and treasured. Independently of the text from which these memories are taken,103 the link with the previous lines emerges clearly. A woman, Marie, evokes an encounter with a man in Bavaria: summer, sun, 103 This is an excerpt from the memoirs of Marie Larisch, granddaughter of Elizabeth of Austria.

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downpour, stop in the colonnade, tobogganing, fright. Again these frames or detached slides can be reminiscent of an episode in Rupert Brooke’s life, one which could illuminate the density of this passage: exhausted, neurotic, possessed, Brooke had in fact moved from Munich to Starnberg in February 1911, followed by a reluctant Ka Cox who didn’t like the idea.104 In Eliot the episode has perhaps become a remote allegory of an unbridled eroticism leaving an indelible sense of unease and guilt. This may be the section in ‘Burial of the Dead’ which, reading the poem transversally, shows up in each of the parts, and is the image of seedy sex, of pure carnal intercourse, even of rape. The latter is alluded to by the stop in the shady ‘colonnade’, after which a refreshing coffee is taken, and there is some small talk. The sleigh ride can be in turn the metaphor of a premature erotic relationship, whose trauma there may be an attempt to forget and to dispel in the mountains. The woman however remains scarred and unbalanced. If Marie is one of the doomed, the ‘hyacinth girl’ who comes immediately after as her counterpart, along with the ‘Irisch Kind’ of the Wagnerian sailor, are the foundation of the longed for but elusive archetype of sublimated and therefore regenerating love. The next section, introduced by a jarring caption, sweeps the reader from the maritime romance of Tristan and Isolde to a modern interior of grotesque squalor, therefore also visionary in character. If the winter means the absence of the sun, Madame Sosostris, a ‘famous clairvoyante’, should bring light; but instead of predicting fortune she only sees misfortune, death and little metamorphosis. Her monologue, marked by a ramshackle and careless conversational tone, is a mise en abyme of the whole poem. The Waste Land is in other words a Tarot pack of cards, from which the same cards are drawn each time under different guises. Eliot assumes the linked roles of the film director and of the magician, the fortune-teller, the prophet, for which Sosostris now, then later Tiresias, are his stand-ins; Tiresias is in fact the one who, like the poet, ‘sees’ and, according to the Notes, knows ‘the substance of the poem’. Madame Sosostris lays out as if in a messy prologue the paradigm of death and, partly unconsciously, even rebirth in the poem: she first mentions the drowned Phoenician

104 See Rogers 1971, 31, in the bibliography on Brooke (§ 64.1), and the letter cited, 50–1.

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sailor, namely the buried one who will become Phlebas; then the card of the temptress, and with her all the fatal or homicidal women corrupting sex; then the card of the ‘man with the three staves’ (the Fisher King), then the Wheel of Fortune, then the ‘one-eyed merchant’, he too destined to put in an appearance. She cannot see the ‘hanged man’ because he is a foreshadowing of the god to be regenerated, and of Christ himself who will be resurrected. The lines of this subsection have the same deliberately demotic and ramshackle timbre of the subsequent Lil sections in the pub and of that of the typist, and they sound bathetic after the romantic lyricism of the hyacinth girl. We also hear the first, or second prophetic voice, after the anonymous one of biblical wisdom, which intervenes and points the way to metamorphosis, that is, the transition from half-life or semi-death to true life reborn. In the direction Madame Sosostris lays out, Eros can distract the knight Parsifal or Galahad or others, just as in the chivalric poems. The fourth sub-section, which uses the analogy of Dante’s infernal ‘crowd’, depicts London as the phantasmagoria of a necropolis. The fortune-teller ‘saw’ a crowd, and by association a crowd of living dead swarms across the bridge. The speaking voice seems to be here once again that of the beginning, the one wishing the continuation of winter, and warding off the advent of spring. The friendly dog should be kept away because it would unearth the buried corpse: this strange injunction is therefore uttered by someone who wants to stay in the symbolic realm of winter burial,105 and is addressed to a certain Stetson.106 The famous line from Baudelaire, the apostrophe to the reader and hypocritical ‘mon frère’, associates the French poet with Dante, as the poet of a ‘fourmillante’ and ghostly city,

105 Also possible in this passage is an echo from chapter XLVIII in Frazer, where in analysing the zoomorphic incarnations of the spirit of the grain, the scholar cites the wolf and the dog. More superficially, the reference to the dog as man’s friend varies and reverses a passage in Webster. 106 On whose name see TLS, 5 November 1973, cited in Schneider 1975, 217 n. 8, and Serpieri 2006, 104. The ‘stetson’ is undoubtedly a sombrero-shaped hat often worn by Pound, so this section, by virtue of a humorous synecdoche, can be taken for a spectral dialogue between Eliot and Pound.

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and above all it confirms that the speaker belongs among the living dead.107 The salient fact is here that for the first time in the poem Eliot alludes to the myths of vegetation and fertility, and especially to that rite of spring and harvest which was performed in ancient times by burying the effigy of the god. In a paradoxical reversal, the question is whether the buried corpse has been reborn, or has sprouted again: if the buried man himself has, literally, reappeared. The looming opposition is that between the protective snow of the beginning and the chill that here ‘disturbs’ the peace of the dead. The end of the section makes this ‘I’ who had withdrawn to see the crowd of the half-dead from afar, rejoin the category of the deniers, of the dead and buried men who deny the possibility of rebirth: woe to the dog rummaging in the ground, who is an agent of revival. 3. The theme of ‘A Game of Chess’ is the reduction of modern love to a ‘game’, articulated in two distinct variations, of social class, caste, and different resonance in actuality, especially and audibly of register, but always starkly backlit by their mythological and literary precedents.108 If the game being played is chess, the implication is that it is cold and calculated, not spontaneous and genuine; and if it is cold, it is also sterile and therefore doomed to death because it does not procreate; the oxymoron that emerges as a leitmotif is the one already announced by ‘Gerontion’, of cold lust. The first nine lines, all laid out in one breath without a full-stop, form a proverbially Baroque, puffy, florid description of the boudoir of the fatal woman, a descendant of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, of Belinda, Belladonna, Venus above all,109 with their scents, mirrors, candles. In this static picture bright colours shine through, flaming reds, gold, green and orange, and the lushness issuing from the furnishings is doubled and multiplied. It is an optical multiplication effect of forms of life that belies the sterility and

107 The ninth hour is that of Calvary and the Cross, and resumes the motif of the absence of the hanged man, or the man with three staves of the Tarot pack of cards. Mylae alludes to another quintessential experience of heroic war, like Thermopylae for Gerontion, under the banner, in both cases, of cowardice. 108 Starting from Middleton, author of a drama with almost the same title. 109 In this overload, a possible echo of the ‘venereal’ story by Beardsley (Volume 6, § 142.5) has gone undetected.

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the final lack of result of this toilette that prepares for an erotic encounter; the figures of excess and surplus predominate. The mirror is supported by columns wrought with ‘fruited vines’; mirrors deceptively double this already illusory life and growth; and the candelabra are ‘sevenbranched’. It is all a ‘rich profusion’. If the cosmetics of the lady are ‘synthetic’, the dominant image is that of falsity and unnaturalness; and immediately, pour cause, the eye of the scene-setter moves to the wall and the carving of the rape of Philomel. The descriptive voice, until now impassive, emerges from obscurity into a veiled and indirect warning (the ‘barbarous king’, ‘rudely forced’), or memento, that of the nightingale addressed to the dissolute of all times. The elaborate caption transitions to a flash of dialogue enacting the terrifying emptiness experienced by two lovers unable to communicate. The jagged and broken dialogue is reminiscent of ‘Portrait of a Lady’, but here the male, who has at least the perception of impending death and a sense of the abyss opening up in front of him, is already one of the ‘hollow men’, and therefore more susceptible to metamorphosis, and above all to waiting, while immersed in ennui. The ‘knock upon the door’, symbolic of a wished-for regeneration and concluding the first sub-section, becomes the anxiety of closure in the second, in the form of the warning to the pub customers, ‘Hurry up please its time’, echoing like an ominously ironic apocalyptic chorus, this episode being ‘the only point of the poem that provides an explicit reference to the post-war period’.110 All threads come together. In the story, the commoner Lil, who is also a rather withered lily, is invited by her friend to make herself ‘a bit smart’ using her cosmetics, like the lady of the opening. This naturalness of the mask, and therefore of the fake, is now signified by the false teeth for which Lil’s husband left her some money before leaving for the war. The game of chess is played all over again because the friend who is telling the story has entangled Lil in a subtle blackmail: if she is not going to be a seductress for her husband who is only looking for amusement, he will pay attention to other women. Love is reduced to sensual Eros, and must promiscuously be satisfied, once

110 Serpieri 2006, 113 n. 19.

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aroused;111 but husband and wife are finally brought together in a relationship of complicity, being for one another the Baudelairian ‘mon semblable’, since Lil, mother of five already, has aborted the sixth pregnancy. The sudden illumination at the close – Ophelia’s words as she leaves the scene in Hamlet – is that of a symbolic funeral agreement between death and madness that resonates throughout the section. 4. The unity of place and the multifocal centre of ‘The Fire Sermon’ are announced by its first word: ‘the river’, that is, the Thames, on whose banks and in whose vicinity alternate, as if in a phantasmagoria, homologous and simultaneous scenes, which however belong to the most remote anthropological myth, to literary mythology and to modernity itself, which becomes therefore itself mythological. Taking up the thread from ‘A Game of Chess’, their common, obsessive, denominator is dirty or unnatural love, just sensual or promiscuous passion, or rape, enacted in erotic consummations of various non-procreative kinds. Predominantly, the symbol of this third part of the poem is the contaminated and muddy water of the river, but at its close this symbol is overshadowed by that of the fire that the title announces, and the fire of passion becomes that of purification.112 The final note is not a sermon but a series of broken and jagged cries. More than any other section, this one plays on the change of voice and on that of the personal pronoun ‘I’: early on the speaker perhaps coincides almost perfectly with Eliot the poet, who from the shores of Lake Geneva mentally contemplates the bleak filth of the present Thames, remembers its Edenic cleanliness in Spenser’s time, and, in a parodic counterpoint blended with a sense of biblical elegy, plays on the double meaning of ‘nymphs’, now prostitutes without customers, the latter

111 The pleasure of the flesh is joined by that of the stomach, in the ‘hot gammon’ to be eaten in the ‘beauty of it hot’, also an allusion to the profane animal, the pig. 112 The Fire Sermon of the Buddha ‘confronts the problem of the sensory perception of the world in relation to suffering’, where suffering is a general term for affection and attachment to the world, and fire indicates the activities of the senses and of the mind, which like a fire devour human beings until they become able to detach themselves from them. In a strictly Buddhist sense, the ascetic knows how to go from the adoration of the sacred Vedic fire, agni, to tapas, the inner fire of meditation (P. Filippani-Ronconi, Il buddhismo, Roma 2004, 28–9).

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being now in their turn the heirs of the rich ‘City directors’.113 In the first change of voice, the poetic ‘I’ becomes a more indistinguishable brother of the Fisher King, himself fishing in the ‘dull canal’. After the corruption of the nymphs’ love into mercenary sex, the wounded Fisher King enters the scene, and with him the vegetative death and desolation visualized in the images of the slimy rats and the bones of the skeleton of a body not reconstituted and revitalized. This ‘I’ has one foot in contemporaneity and one in myth, and prepares his metamorphosis into Tiresias. A line by Verlaine is a fleeting allusion to the healing of Amfortas, but it is in sharp contrast with a rhyme adapted from a popular barracks song, telling of a promiscuous, de-sacralized love in which the porcine Sweeney reappears.114 This first section fades in a sequence of gradually more disconnected verbal fragments (Philomela’s warning is shortened to its common verbal multiple), and the next scene is the proposal of an equally ‘unnatural’, homosexual encounter, made by another close relative of Sweeney’s, the ‘unshaven’ and therefore hairy merchant Mr Eugenides.115 If reconnected back to the heirs of the ‘City directors’, what is threatening love is also profit, that is, venal love.

113 But ‘By the waters of Leman’ hints at a psalm and even at the third canto of Byron’s Childe Harold. 114  Another corruption of the lustral and cleansing water is the detail from the Australian ballad, where Mrs Porter and her daughter wash their feet in soda water. In a more indecent version the washing was more intimate. 115 I would suggest to specialist Eliot critics, and therefore seekers of sources, that Mr Eugenides’ proposal of a ‘weekend at the Metropole’, which is usually identified as the Metropole in Brighton, might have been recalled from T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Lawrence’s memoir (see Volume 8, § 31) was of course published in 1926 and in 1935, but conceived and written since the autumn of 1919; and it was already in draft form in 1921, first published for ‘private circulation’ in only eight copies, designated as the ‘Oxford Text’ (reprinted in 2004 and reviewed in TLS, 2 April 2004, 3–4). Eliot could then have read it in that form. The literal echo is found in the Introductory Chapter (Harmondsworth 1964, 40) in which Lawrence discusses Semitic extremism, oscillating between ‘luxury’ and ‘self restraint’. The relevant passage is as follows: ‘The Jew in the Metropole at Brighton, the miser, the worshipper of Adonis, the lecher in the stews of Damascus were alike signs of the Semitic capacity for enjoyment, and expressions of the same nerve which gave us at the other pole the self-denial of the Essenes’.

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It is Tiresias who witnesses the seduction of the typist and narrates it, in the most detailed and sustained narrative passage of the entire poem, though in parodic and mock-heroic terms.116 It is a scene that repeats itself from the beginning of history, but with striking contrasts. The typist’s return home at the end of the day is as different as it could be from that of the sailor after the long journey (in Dante’s Purgatory); and in its disorder the home is itself a waste land, unheated even if the fire is lit. Love is a counterfeit, a fake, experienced without mutual involvement;117 it is also – ‘the time is now propitious’ – a new game of chess. The rest of the passage proceeds, from this episode, on the edge of an ingenious chain of verbal associations. The moral and religious indifference to sin on the typist’s part is exacerbated by the contrast with a modified quotation from a Goldsmith ballad; the music of the gramophone passes into a mélange of deformed and cacophonous overlaps that all return to the theme of sensual and promiscuous love: disconnected, fleeting snapshots, including the belated repentance of Dante’s Pia, the love idyll in a boat of Elizabeth and Leicester, the Wagnerian daughters of the Rhine who re-emphasize the motif of greed and of the exchange of true love with gold. With all this, and in parallel to the overlapping pronouns, the Thames and the Rhine, and in the fifth part the Ganges too, join to form a single symbolic river. In this ‘music […] upon the waters’, the oscillation remains that between the purity and filth of loves consummated on the river. The ‘I’ that closes the poem is that of St Augustine arrived in Carthage, and noticing in his Confessions the fire cauldron of passions, which is made into a burning fire ‘plucking out’ the sinner. 5. ‘Death by Water’ is an enigmatic eight-line exercise in Imagist miniaturism, with a final admonition. It replays more fully the motif of the drowning in water, foreseen by Madame Sosostris and recalled in many previous allusions. Phlebas the Phoenician has the archaic name of an ancestor, progenitor of the many merchants who put profit before love and who like the Wagnerian Alberich barter it with gold. For the moment, he is 116 Tiresias, who is reincarnated in each era and witnesses them, may have suggested another bisexual of the 1920s, Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando. 117 It is here relevant that in myth Tiresias was called upon to settle the dispute between Jupiter and Juno, on whether women or men enjoy the greater pleasure in sex.

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a corpse decomposed and gnawed by the sea, but a metamorphosis awaits him,118 for he travels backward in evolution, passing through the stages of old age and youth, and under the action of the marine vortex he will meet the supposedly favourable fate of the father of Shakespeare’s Ferdinand, also on the strength of the baptismal symbolism and of the effigy of the drowned god in vegetation rites. But while lucky, his fate is also a warning, addressed to the Christian and especially to Eliot’s Jew, the accumulating and sensual capitalist. In a trajectory possibly signifying the advent of a regenerated world, ‘What the Thunder Said’ stops at the point of annunciation, promise and expectation. It is not so much that rainwater cannot provide salvation, but that it does not come, and the spiritual time and place are the stony desert where a community – hence the pronoun ‘we’ – and a people are on a parched journey. Reconstruction of the heavenly city implies destruction, and while the poetic voice celebrates the bonfire of the world and its metropolis, embodied in its ‘towers’, what rises and stands out in the imagination is the stable in Bethlehem, which broadcasts the cry of an infant hailed by the atmospheric elements. Recalling the general incipit, the beginning suggests that the announcement and the wait imply a bold reversal of dying life into living death, and the birth of the divine infant coincides with his death and vice versa.119 A little earlier, the pilgrim community had had the vision of the disciples at Emmaus, that Christ has risen; but the opening itself is an evocation of the Passion. Eliot at this point extinguishes, and therefore does not continue, this vision. The stable is an empty chapel, as empty and desolate as the Chapel perilous still waiting for the knight who will bring rebirth and healing; a rooster of the kind that exposed Peter’s betrayal perches on the roof. In its last fifty lines the poem rejects the regenerative Word of Christ to rely on the more secure and anodyne precepts of Vedic wisdom. The fisherman still has behind him the ‘arid plain’. In fact the last ten lines of The Waste Land are an aphasic delirium which is difficult to penetrate and reaches the apex of the elliptical 118 Serpieri 2006, 133 n. 1, seems to favour the thesis of a ‘natural catastrophe of death without salvation’, true to his assumption that the vehicle of salvation in the poem is not water but the desert. 119 They will also coincide in Murder in the Cathedral.

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procedure of the entire poem. They may be considered a formula of selfencouragement for the poetic ‘I’, identified perhaps for the first time as Eliot himself, in so far as they are examples of the destruction of everything that is old, and invitations to commitment, purification, patient waiting. § 98. T. S. Eliot VII: ‘The Hollow Men’ and ‘Ash-Wednesday’ ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925) is a shorter transitional and intermediate composition in both technique and symbolic intent. It is preceded by two epigraphs and makes them signify by challenging the reader to understand and construct the underlying path; but it greatly reduces if not abolishes altogether the collage texture and the assembling of parts, fragments and citations. Its form is that of choral and hymn poetry, lean and elementary in metre as in Medieval exemplars; its background is religious, without however much advance, in substance, on the conclusions of The Waste Land. The world is still symbolically desolate and symbolically lying within the dry and the stony, and can regenerate itself not with water but with purifying fire; death will thus become authentic life. And yet, from motorial paralysis, a feeling of envy arises for those few who have already made this spiritual leap, from which both the community of lukewarm believers and the isolated poetic voice exclude themselves, while wanting to be part of it. The last section is a litany in the form of dialogue, or better an antiphonal one in which the collage method indeed reappears, since some stanzas which confess the inability and weakness to accept Christ’s salvation are interspersed with the phrase from the Lord’s Prayer, ‘For thine is the kingdom’. The final stanza marks a return to the functional use of song and child poetry, singing that the world ends ‘not with a bang but a whimper’, and reaffirms that life is death and that the death of Christ in particular is his birth, birth at the same time of the believer and rebirth of the world. 2. Death is once again, therefore, the onset signal in the epigraph taken from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The second epigraph, placed between the title and the beginning of the first of five sections, ingeniously exploits, in its involuntary secondary meanings, the proverbial request, ‘a penny for the Old Guy’, made by children on 5 November of each year in England, when effigies of Guy Fawkes, who in 1605 headed the Gunpowder Plot,

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are burnt everywhere. Politically Guy Fawkes was perhaps a ‘full’ rather than a hollow man, that is he had ideas and opposed the corruption and desolation of his time, which he showed with a desperate and extreme but palingenetic action. But ‘the old guy’ is also St Paul’s ‘old man’ who must burn if he wants to be reborn.120 Finally, the cellar where the gunpowder was stored becomes the symbolic underground shelter where the unbelievers, or the not-sufficiently-believers waste away like so many ‘whispering’ conspirators,121 that is, true devotees of death. The paradox or the oxymoron is that the hollow men are actually full, and full of combustible straw, in a perfect condition, therefore, for burning. But, as close relatives of those who pined for winter at the opening of The Waste Land, in even more poignant tones they attempt to ward off the ‘final meeting / In the twilight kingdom’. Eliot, however, has in the meantime superimposed on the historical motif of the conspiracy that of Dante’s purgatorial fire,122 and isolated from the pack one of the deserters. The too intense eyes of an intermediary cannot be contemplated even in dream; and the refusal to worship the true God is compensated by the worship of broken idols. The throng of Dante’s damned rests by the side of the Acheron fearful of the too dazzling look of the divine intermediary, who unmistakably echoes Beatrice. The indefinable, capitalized Shadow that unyielding stands between shy desire and firm, decisive will perhaps denotes a metaphysical obstacle, and, if one looks forward to ‘Ash-Wednesday’, a diabolical one. The final stanza, which I have already explained, takes the hint found at the beginning, that of the

120 Moody 1994, 127, recalls the regenerative rites of the month of November, November being the liturgical season of Advent. 121 In Eliot those who whisper are always conspirators, that is, also disbelievers or renegades. 122 See Southam 1968, 97–108, for an extensive examination of the simultaneous multifunctionality of nearly every figural element of the composition, reduced to four key areas: Conrad, the Gunpowder Plot, the other conspiracy from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and Dante. See especially 99–100 for the identification of the various ‘kingdoms’ with stages and grades of Dante’s universe.

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Gunpowder Plot; but, in a different symbolic order, the destructive fire is that of the Incarnation.123 3. ‘Ash-Wednesday’ (1930) is traditionally seen to mark Eliot’s religious conversion and thus also a poetic and stylistic turning point. But judging by the results on the page, the poet diagnoses himself still in a destruens more than construens phase, one of static dispossession of disparate worldly inclinations – one of intentions and promises – rather than of achievements, and of a purgatorial immersion in Lethe. It is therefore a poem of light and shade, admitting rebellions and resurgent temptations, acknowledging the weaknesses of the penitent, even confessing bitter, violent, unexpected changes of heart that hint at a fluid belief and a still unresolved tension. As a critic Eliot would have certainly included it in what he called ‘religious’ and therefore minor poetry,124 because devout, written in the form of antiphon, of litany, of the prophetic vision, of prayer, and specifically of Marian invocation. It is true that Eliot still engages with the poetic tradition, but whereas he previously parodied, and grotesquely debunked the sacred, here he sacralizes the profane (the Cavalcanti ballad ‘Perch’i no spero’, the passing reference to Shakespeare’s twenty-ninth sonnet), and incorporates the erotic yearning of the stilnovisti and of Shakespeare to recycle it as religious anguish. Except that gradually the quotation becomes literal, and therefore in a sense a paraphrase; and it is from the repertoire of biblical wisdom, from the Psalmist and the prophet Ezekiel above all, that the dominant metaphor for the existential condition becomes that of exile. But on it are then superimposed the allegorical paraphernalia of stilnovismo which Dante turned from secular to Christian. So that the intertwined religious metaphors are those of the exile of God’s people, the penitential permanence of Christ in the desert, and the equally penitential ascent of Dante from Purgatory to the earthly Paradise under the guidance of Beatrice, herself forerunner and icon of the Virgin. The poem’s dialogue is then not only 123 See again Southam 1968, 108, who recalls the ‘whimpering’ in Kipling’s ‘Danny Deever’, a poem on a soldier’s execution, or even ‘the cry of a baby’ before a stern mother, mentioned by Dante (Purg., XXX, 43ff. and XXXI, 64ff.) as he leaves the sinful world in the presence of Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise. 124 § 103.7.

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with the poetic and scriptural tradition, but it is ipso facto a dialogue with Eliot’s previous poetry, from which ‘Ash-Wednesday’ recalls symbols and images that, to a certain extent, undergo a radical change of sign. 4. In the first of the six sections, which were drafted separately and not conceived at first as part of one work, the verb ‘turn’, occurring in a triple and marked anaphora, attests to the desire not to look back and therefore to walk straight ahead. The poet has closed the chapter of nostalgic complicity with those who refused spring and rebirth. As in ‘Gerontion’, Eliot dons the ‘mask of age’, an old age that is essentially inner, spiritual, symbolic, as of a sapped and inert eagle. He has been spiritually disinherited, and is therefore ready to turn ahead; but if he has dried up and abolished the world, he has not yet drunk from the spring that quenches thirst. Though appearing to deny it, Eliot is actually still within the ranks of those who warned against April as ‘the cruellest month’: ‘I renounce the blessèd face / And renounce the voice’; joy is only a foretaste of joy. With the lines that follow, until the close of the first part, Eliot imperceptibly quotes two other sources that intimately shape the poem or at least influence its exterior imagery. The tone suggests Hopkins’s ‘terrible sonnets’, as the poet begs for an end to the harsh and feverish inner investigation and for the extinguishing of the Luciferian audacity of a diatribe with the Father himself. The following warning, ‘teach us to sit still’,125 closely echoes similar appeals in his sonnets ‘Peace’ and ‘Patience’. Hopkins, as we shall see, periodically recurs in the poem; in turn, the Rossetti of ‘The Blessed Damozel’ leads, from the rejection of the ‘blessed face’, to the apparition of the Lady in the opening of the second part, at whose feet a vision or phantasmagoria takes place, whose sparks seem to come from Revelation and Blake’s poems. This Lady, the counterpart to that in ‘The Hollow Men’, is an intermediary like Beatrice, or a Rossettian, white-robed acolyte of the Virgin; but the symbol, or simply the term of the Lady, has undergone an extremely long symbolic and especially allegorical journey, unthinkable after the femmes fatales and the neurotic women of ‘Portrait of a Lady’ and ‘A Game of 125 DES, 203, briefly mentions Eliot’s religion as being ‘no sudden glory as it was for Hopkins but a hard and difficult path of patience and renunciation’, even though he says this about the Ariel Poems.

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Chess’. Purification is figured in the three heraldic leopards that ‘feast’ (as in Hopkins’ ‘Carrion Comfort’, or like the devouring tiger in ‘Gerontion’) on the human body, gnawing bones and skull before celebrating man rebuilt and regenerated126 and announcing the symbol par excellence of the later Eliot, the rose garden which is also the end of the world. The song of the bare bones is a string of oxymora and contradictions that are verified and realized, that is based on the figure of speech with which Hopkins also connoted religious mystery. To reach purification and meet the Father, an inner fight with the Tempter must be fought, a fight visualized as ascending the stairs to Purgatory, but without losing sight of one’s alter ego lingering at the bottom, who struggling with the temptations of the world would be lost without the intervention of divine grace. Such intervention is invoked but is still waited in the two final sections of the poem, which then closes on tones of a desperate plea once again reminiscent of Hopkins. The fifth section plays with a series of puns on sound similarities between ‘word’, ‘world’ and ‘whirled’, which sketch a rather dramatic sophism, the deafening silence of God in the world, and the darkness enshrouding those who reject or even blasphemy Him. More than ever the close of the poem insists on the resurgent temptations of the world, and admits the irresistible force of those ‘desires’ that the beginning had claimed to have extirpated; but in this ‘time of tension’, a prayer and invocation to Mary rise up to calm down the turmoil. The litanic cadence into which this prayer fades unmistakably echoes the end of another poem by Hopkins, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, also for the marine imagery, the wreck ‘among these rocks’ of a ‘rebel’ who still calls for a port of ‘peace’ that is the will to acquiesce to the plan of the Father, even if it is mysterious.

126 The preceding phase was the dismembered skeleton of The Waste Land. Serpieri 1973, 58, notes that regeneration is also prefigured by the denial of the flesh, and that the last temptations have to do with the wet and with the sea, which would confirm his hypothesis of the validity of the symbolic chain water-flesh-sex-repulsion-spiritual death. In the fourth section purification, especially from the senses and from lust (the sign for which is in the invocation ‘Sovegna vos’, recited by Arnaut Daniel in Dante), leads to a vision and, with the comfort of the Marian ‘veiled sister’, to the key point and asymptote of Four Quartets, the redemption of time.

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5. From ‘Ash-Wednesday’ and up to Four Quartets Eliot went through a long interim period, more inconclusive and less dense with poems. Four short religious and devotional lyrics are the main and most notable fruits of this meagre harvest, and were gathered together under the heading of Ariel Poems. They are in fact, except one or two, earlier than ‘Ash-Wednesday’. ‘The Journey of the Magi’ (1927) is not a hagiographic and stereotyped account of the Gospel episode, but problematizes, reduces and secularizes it, straining in a functional manner a cue taken from the seventeenthcentury preacher, Lancelot Andrewes. While formally it is first of all the dramatic monologue of one of the Magi, on the other hand Eliot had never attempted such a neat, clean, varied, pedestrian, vividly realistic, picturesque tale, and never indulged so generously in the pure circumstantial colour of raw instincts and primary needs, such as food and warmth and the satisfaction of the senses. The poem can be enjoyed by itself in all its fluidity. But the canvas of the Gospel works in a symbolic sense too. Mindful of ‘AshWednesday’, Eliot fits the journey of paganism and its curiosity for the Good News to his own, uncertain path of purgation and rebirth. His Magi are not the traditional and proverbial ones because they lack the euphoric lift and are weakened by a sense of exhaustion, doubt, regret. The opening lines emphasize almost to excess and even unnecessarily the fatigue and difficulty of their journey, a sign that Eliot’s longing for the warmth of winter had not yet been eradicated, and that the Magi still sail in the symbolic realm of death rather than rebirth.127 The regret for the world of the fleshly pleasures and of those of the palate and the climate which they have left behind would even lead these pilgrims to turn back. The symbolic and anagogical signs – of Life, Death and Resurrection – disseminated in the foreboding landscape are widely misunderstood or trivialized by them, and Golgotha is just ‘three trees on the low sky’. Arrived breathless at their destination, the caption ‘it was (you may say) satisfactory’ is a deadly understatement. ‘A Song for Simeon’ (1928) can also be deconstructed in this way. Shaped as a monologue, it portrays in fact the fulfilment of the pious and wise old 127 For the sake of fidelity to the Gospel narrative and to the historical and geographical context, the summer and not the winter is the languid and protective season of torpor and rejection.

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man of the Gospel who saw the infant Jesus, his slightly self-righteous awareness that he had always done God’s will, his soft-spoken desire for peace, and peace in death. All this masks the fear of verifying the ‘birth season of decease’, that is, the secret urge of an escape from the crucified Christ and from ‘martyrdom’, from ‘the ecstasy of thought and prayer’ and from the ‘ultimate vision’. ‘Animula’ (1929) merely but imaginatively paraphrases in its first part Dante’s theory of the soul that comes from God’s hands, similar to a naïve girl who tastes everything that is pleasant in life, lively, curious, importunate, yet becoming darker and more confused as she grows and learns the moral law. Eliot does alter Dante, though, as he assumes or fears that the corrupting world may prevail over divine grace, whose imprint is like a spring that runs out of strength over time. The entrance into time and its grip, and hence the need to get out of it, herald the investigation of Four Quartets. The grip of time also means a subjection to the blood, to the senses and the flesh,128 which leave around – like ‘disordered papers in a dusty room’ – the symptoms and symbols of ancient ‘desolation’. Therefore, as a product of Eliot’s theological wit, the prayer to the Virgin should be changed into ‘Pray for us now and at the hour of our birth’. In ‘Marina’ (1930) Eliot exploits a complex variation of Shakespearean themes and situations, especially but not only the agnition of Pericles’ daughter in the eponymous drama, to wish for himself the sublimation of the ‘ecstasy of the animals’, and almost taste the purification of the senses and the ecstasy of the atemporal, in the paraphrase of the emotion and surprise of the old man who recognizes his daughter.129 The quartet becomes a quintet with the much later (1954) ‘The Cultivation of Christmas Trees’, which in the limping prose tone of a children’s exhortation conceals the eschatological and perennial significance of any birth and therefore of the Nativity of Christ. This feast is not an excuse to keep alive ritual and routine, but must be intended as an ‘event’, and such especially for children, so that the soul as described in ‘Animula’ would not lose, forget or confuse even this value as it goes about in the world. In practice, the Christmas memento 128 The shadow, associated with the ‘importunity of the blood’, clarifies the meaning of the term in ‘The Hollow Men’. 129 For Eliot the most beautiful scene of recognition of all time (cf. Southam 1968, 125).

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is the same that comes from the already drafted Four Quartets; it is joy mixed with fear at the discovery that ‘in the end is the beginning’ and ‘in the beginning is the end’. § 99. T. S. Eliot VIII: Nonsense, minor and incidental poetry The Five-Finger Exercises are small verbal pictures of animals inspired by Edward Lear’s nonsense vein, and serve as an anti-chamber to Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939). This little book, usually overlooked by all monographs on the poet, can be read all in one breath without any cultural props. A little old-fashioned, belonging to the Victorian genre of children’s poetry, it shares with it the spare yet incisive illustrations, mostly black-ink silhouettes by the draughtsman Bentley, some of which are reminiscent of, and rival with, the ones in Kipling’s story ‘The Cat that Walked by Himself ’. Photographs taken of Eliot unguarded at home frequently show him in the company of a number of cats; and the cat family appears in several poems as objective correlative of lust and cunning. The reverse side shown by Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats is that of the man at home, the engrossed and meditative poet and critic surprised in his dressing gown, who without his vestments feels a child, and readmits, in a sort of parenthetical way, the little things of life, as well as infantile fantasies and innocent games.130 The child-like humour and nonsense, the wit, the playfulness and grace of these poems come close to the excellence of professionals in the genre. Of course they also represent the indirect if tacit approval on the part of the critic for a certain literary tradition. In this book prosodic experimentation is set aside, that is, prohibited in this case by the homage to the tradition of this genre which requires rhyming couplets or alternate rhymes, often even cacophonous, or funny or strident, and a regular prosody, be it of fourteeners or of shorter measures, and a moderate labour of wordinvention, with the adoption of the rhythm and syntax rules of the nursery rhyme. The fifteen poems tell the humorous exploits of various types of cats, well-identified in their features, habits, spheres of action, situations. An imaginative epic and ‘catty’ phenomenology takes shape: the house cat, the 130 The cats in this collection are those that Eliot’s father, as a painter, wanted to but could not paint (Ackroyd 1984, 19).

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pirate cat, the kleptomaniac cat, etc. Their idiosyncrasies repeat and mirror those of humans: there are the rogue but sentimental and courting cat, the finicky and squeamish cat, the criminal cat, the actor cat, the dandy cat. Can we trace down anything serious, or interconnecting with the major, canonical poetry? The old cat Deuteronomy has seven lives, then reincarnated like Wilde’s sphinx, with which it shares the immobile hieratic pose. According to a sharp hierarchical reversal the cats act and live like humans, and humans are cats, or depend on them, and the ‘the night Mail just can’t go’ if that certain cat is missing. In fact, on the train he ‘will supervise them all’. The penultimate poem is looking for a definition of the cat, that is by no means a dog; and in fact one is dedicated to a mysterious cat, because cats are indeed mysterious. This most anthropomorphic of animals, with the horse and the dog, deserves respect; but there is an etiquette to follow, proprieties to observe, because the cat is demanding and has his codes, and is formal, responsible, meticulous. 2. The Rock (1934), a pageant for which Eliot was asked to write the recitatives, is a unique, uneven collaboration, since the dialogues were written by a parish priest and amateur playwright with the aim of making popular and cockney the idle talks of some masons while building a church. The ten choruses written by Eliot were not included in editions of his plays, having been split off from the masons’ dialogues, which soon fell forgotten. They were, however, included in the collected poetry with considerable foresight, because they unmistakably function as a prelude to Four Quartets. They invoke in fact some kind of metamorphosis to regenerate a dull, unjust, unwise world; and they also display a new and insistent camouflage of the poetic voice among the Christian community or that of the elect, who are committed to building the earthly Church in the image of the divine and heavenly one, but are besieged and constitute a marginalized and even persecuted community.131 In any case, it was time for Christians to come out, not to hide, and to choose with clarity and conviction, and to proclaim loud and clear their choice. Overall the series of these choruses alternates powerful visionary and symbolic flashes where nothing is superfluous with 131 The sixth chorus deliberately evokes the persecution of the early Christians; the ninth exalts the spirit of the Crusades.

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considerable redundancy and repetition, and a surprising fall into explicit religious rhetoric filled with relentless and anaphoric interrogations. The choruses invite and exhort to silence, therefore to the utterance of the authentic word, while they also praise ignorance as a means of unlearning unnecessary things that are not worth knowing, and immobility rather than motion, all preparatory arpeggios for Four Quartets. One of these echoes in the first chorus, which warns that twentieth-century civilization lies too tightly in the grip of time and that London and the City, the kingdom of the world and the symbol of worldliness and of profit, are ‘timekept’, a compound suggestive of this grip. Indeed Eliot precisely notes both in a heartfelt and at the same time a sarcastic way that the sacred, represented even just by the emblem of the churches, is unloved: it can no longer be found in the City, in the countryside, in the industrial districts; as a sociologist, he adds that new needs and habits have arisen that relegate it to the margins.132 The same secularizing spirit is tracked and condemned in ‘The Cultivation of Christmas Trees’. The task of almost all the choruses is to start the construction or reconstruction of the Church.133 The Rock is a new Peter, a vigilant foreign prophet, and no longer a symbol of dryness but of power; he is the rock or the cornerstone. Through him comes the complaint against profit, against Enlightenment secularization, and the announcement, ‘Make perfect your will’. In the first chorus Eliot filters the problems of the real world, as he gives voice to the employed and the unemployed, who seem to echo the hired labourer in the vineyard and the disgruntled and unemployed ones in the Gospel parable. In the second chorus, there is a step back, from the rock to the cornerstone who is Christ and the building of the Church and of the Mystical Body. Like a rigorous Medieval theologian Eliot sees the heavenly Church as universal,

132 The car is twice mentioned as an ominous symbol of secularization which destroys the unity of the community and the family: each son now wants a motorcycle and even girls sit astride one, ready to go on trips. 133 The remote barb contained in this assertion is explained in one of the Notes to The Waste Land, l. 264, where, in relation to the church of St Magnus Martyr, ‘one of the finest among Wren’s interiors’, a proposal in favour of the demolition of  ‘nineteen city churches’ is cited.

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the one on the ground a copy of the model, ‘the model and type for your citizenship upon earth’. And like Hopkins he puts a strong emphasis on the meanness of man who believes himself great whereas only God is.134 The enlightened, civilizing imperial mission of England is seen in a perspective similar to Kipling’s; except that much remains ‘insecure’ in his homeland. Eliot’s concept of history is that of the Old Testament, that is, for each man and race the misdeeds of the fathers are visited upon the children, who suffer the consequences. Tireless then is the warning to rebuild this lost Church day after day and to rebuild the community of saints or of the builders on earth. The third chorus continues the survey of the forms and phenomena of de-Christianization, such as human vanity, futile occupations, the crisis of the press. The populous city is contrasted with the desert, the place of the refusal of civilization, and of meditation. The fourth and fifth choruses become paraphrases and prophetic casts from the Bible; the seventh rewrites the opening of John’s Gospel, even if it continues investigating the birth of the moral law until the advent of Christ. The central point of this chorus is in a protracted pun, also distinctly preparatory for Four Quartets, prefiguring the collision or the intersection of the old amorphous time, a purely random sequence, with a time loaded with meaning and which transforms and revives meaning through the incarnation of the Word. This seems a literal paraphrase of the theological concept informing Hopkins’s ‘Deutschland’, where man remains rebellious but is subjected to, if not subdued by, divine grace, almost defeated and refocused, and a concept expressed with equal intensity and in Hopkins’s typical style of oratio perpetua. Yet man in the present has rejected God not for other gods but for ‘no god’, and this is the death, the ‘disappearance of God’ in the twentieth century. Or the new gods are ‘Usury, Lust and Power’. The tenth chorus preaches harmony between body and spirit, not a denial of the first, and the rebirth of the creative faculty, starting from the divine gifts. The closing note is on a utopia or a vision of a world of ‘little lights’, all of them rays of the one Light. 134 ‘O weariness of men who turn from God / To the grandeur of your mind and the glory of your action’, which echoes the opening and the argument of Hopkins’s ‘God’s Grandeur’.

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§ 100. T. S. Eliot IX: ‘Four Quartets’* I. The music of time The quadriptych, or ‘quartet of quartets’, Four Quartets,135 begun in 1935 with the first and closed in 1942, is only comparable in size, commitment and universal resonance to The Waste Land; for some, it in fact surpasses it and is the authentic and supreme masterpiece by Eliot. In England and especially overseas, it was received as the ne plus ultra of the poetic, the exemplary and indispensable experience in the literary education of the critic, the poet and also of the cultivated reader of the middle of the twentieth century. Four Quartets kept hold of this primacy and even increased it at least until the sun set on the taste and fashion for Eliot after his death. In fact, this exceptional recognition cannot hide that its theme is that often treated by the poets, even just by Victorians such as Browning, Tennyson, Hopkins and FitzGerald: an investigation into the government of the world, if due to impassive and cruel Chance or a providential God, a dilemma resolved in extremis with God’s victory, and the formulation of a decalogue of precepts of wisdom. Neither can the high esteem hide that Eliot’s meditative and philosophical poetry flows now less fluid and less easy than

*

R. Preston, ‘Four Quartets’ Rehearsed: A Commentary on T. S. Eliot’s Cycle of Poems, London 1946; R. Campbell, On the ‘Four Quartets’ of T. S. Eliot, London 1953; S. Bergsten, Time and Eternity: A Study in the Structure and Symbolism of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’, Stockholm 1960; T. S. Eliot’s: ‘Four Quartets’, ed. B. Bergonzi, London 1969; H. Blamires, Word Unheard: A Guide Through Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’, London 1969 (a very remarkable close commentary, the most comprehensive radiography of the poem’s echoes, although fatally incomplete; takes the poem as ‘post-Joycean’ in the richness of ‘verbal overtones’); M. Pagnini, ‘La musicalità dei Four Quartets di T. S. Eliot’, in Critica della funzionalità, Torino 1970, 9–38; H. Gardner, The Composition of ‘Four Quartets’, London 1978; S. Ellis, The English Eliot: Design, Language and Landscape in ‘Four Quartets’, London and New York 1991; P. Murray, T. S. Eliot and Mysticism: The Secret History of ‘Four Quartets’, Basingstoke 1991; Words in Time: New Essays on Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’, ed. E. Lobb, London 1993; X. J. Cooper, T. S. Eliot and the Ideology of ‘Four Quartets’, Cambridge 1995; A. Thompson, Transfiguration and Reconciliation in Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’, Genova 1995; P. K. Kenneth, Redeeming Time: T. S. Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’, Lanham, MD 2007.

135 ‘Burnt Norton’ began as a collage of pieces discarded from Murder in the Cathedral; the complete set of the four quartets took shape after ‘East Coker’.

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the collage of juxtaposed pictures, and that the anecdotes and exempla are less fresh, less memorable, less immediate than in The Waste Land. The ligatures between the two poems are none the less obvious. Four Quartets is like The Waste Land an absolute and contingent assessment of the age, which diagnoses the present and the future, as well as a historical time that can also be ahistorical – a metaphysical, inner condition humaine – and points to a solution and a recovery. It therefore ideally starts from a new ‘waste land’, which it describes and to which it tries to point the path to salvation; finally, it formulates an equally totalizing proposal twenty years away. In Four Quartets, however, Eliot overcomes or amends, as I was saying, the construction of the poem by pictures and scenes interrelated by means of the mythical method; he shifts from the mythical to the mystical method,136 evading the nightmare of history through a metaphysical revelation, which is however accessible in full only to the saints and, in solitary epiphanies, to ordinary men. The demonstrative path is enclosed in its incipit and explicit, while everything in between is hesitation, oscillation, panic, bitterness or invective, alternating with bursts of confident optimism: namely, it is a path that begins with the fifth verse of the first quartet, ‘All time is unredeemable’, and closes with the last of the last, ‘sin is behovely but all is well’. Human history is threatened with damnation for its Luciferian arrogance, superficiality, hedonism, aberrant ideologies, crass secularism and so on, and therefore sin impends and hangs over and threatens it, but ultimately a forgiving God will save history.137 It is a poem that is less and at the same time more inflamed than previous ones by Eliot, from which the polemical hints directed against the two main defendants of Eliot’s conceptual system, the woman and the Jew, have been drained, and which is continuously absorbed in a diaphanous, inner debate,

136 MEF, 130. The first reference point is St John of the Cross and the ascent of the soul to God through meditation leading to the ‘dark night of the soul’, which is a passive surrender to God, an emptying out of the interests and a severing of the ties with the world. From this darkness the human being always rises closer to the divine light. But below I discuss other connections with the mystical and philosophical traditions. 137 Reiterating what I mentioned above, Eliot’s God is ultimately Janus-like, since as in Manzoni, he ‘doth chastise then heals’, punishes and is merciful, as for many Victorians.

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though still overflowing into public prophecies. It is inflamed in that it is Pentecostal and purgatorial, and Eliot’s poem on ‘fire’ par excellence, a fire which consumes and destroys human vanity, and ‘refines’ man as in Dante, and purifying him returns him to life. Less explicitly, Eliot still holds in the foreground the passion of the senses, and it is above all a passion that has to be disciplined, tamed, turned off, ‘dried out’: the ‘body’, that is, the flesh, is ‘weak’ and the sensual must be ‘deprived’ and ‘emptied’. 2. The change of method is crucial: in The Waste Land the mythical method implied the repeatability of the ritual and of myth, ineluctable as if in a downward slope; in Four Quartets it is instead dramatically necessary to reject the passive acquiescence in antiquated patterns, and move to a radically renewing metanoia; what is invoked is not the negative and nihilistic repeatability and reproducibility, but the possibility of perennial renewal. Thus the oscillation between past and present has faded, and the ego is no longer refracted, and subjected to acrobatic swerves, but has become more unified and often joins a collective ‘we’, immerses himself and dissolves into a community, which is the very community of builders on a spiritual journey that had come forward in The Rock. Consequently the varieties of linguistic functions are reduced, as are the contrasts and juxtapositions of scenes and anecdotes. The new poem enhances instead the rhetorical function and borders upon a series of precepts. It borrows the ancient forms of pre-Socratic philosophy or even that of the books of the biblical prophets, as the wording is frequently made up of commandments, proverbs, sayings, synonymous admonitions. The register varies from abstract to concrete, or roams within a field of images, but the sense remains fixed. If the poem aims at a persuasion based on the double negative or on the oxymoron, as we shall see, these admonishments, descending from the founding precept of the concentricity of the past, present and future, acquire something of the oracular, enigmatic, apodictic, but also self-contradictory. The process of concentric clarification, the fabric of synonymous or co-extensive enumerations, or even repetitions (as the poet admits: ‘You say I am repeating / Something I have said before’) may result extremely tiring and fatiguing; Eliot often gives the impression of merely playing, or worse quarrelling, with words, and to be more than usual specious, or casuistic. The oxymoron and the double negative may be described by logic, but in order to denounce

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their logical and ontological impossibility, in a word, their contradiction in terms. The precepts of the poem are thus of an ineffable and impracticable character. And the sophistic and circumlocutory nature of the argument stands out especially when the interpreter attempts a paraphrase (as, I fear, will be the case with my own commentary). Eliot, I dare say, would once again have needed Pound’s scissors, which in this case remained idle. The pronouncements follow one another lapidary, gripping, but once analysed often sound overly stentorian, and therefore also vacuous. There are key terms that must even be interpreted with different, specific or opposing meanings138 depending on the context, even if the overall construction is consistent. Eliot has not lost his fondness for the Sibyls, for oracles, and ambiguous fortune-tellers. 3. After the intermediate and final warnings of one of the voices of The Waste Land – after the fire sermon and the threefold warning of Indian philosophy – comes now the voice of the Christian commandments of mysticism and Christian homiletics, which issues its decalogues for a community of true believers. In Four Quartets Eliot is essentially a Platonist or neo-Platonist who sees the world as the copy of an unchangeable universal, or a collection of successive copies of that universal. The real world does not then have its own autonomy, it is merely a succession of copies of that universal. All philosophies and ideologies believing in ceaseless progress and in a metamorphosis of creation towards ever higher, positive and satisfactory goals are contested. At one point in the poem Eliot declares unambiguously his apriorism and his intellectual habit of giving ‘only a limited value’ to ‘the knowledge [that] derive[s] from experience’. It is unarguable that from this general premise it is impossible to believe in linear time, or in simple historical progress as an unforeseeable chain of multiform movements. There is in fact no movement in history for Eliot, either rectilinear or by ascension: history is but ‘a pattern / Of timeless 138 To cite just two examples: the ‘pattern’ is part of the semantic field of stillness, though in perpetual motion in the first movement of ‘Burnt Norton’; but a few lines later, ‘the detail of the pattern is movement’; in the same context love is opposed to ‘desire’ and said to be without ‘movement’, whereas in ‘East Coker’ it is ‘love of the wrong thing’, becoming insensitive to the here and now at the end of ‘East Coker’.

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moments’. His main target is first and foremost evolutionism, and only the modernity of the form disguises such an outmoded contention. In history there can be no saltus, no constant, uninterrupted overcoming of cultural and societal models that need to be rejected. It follows that Eliot makes common cause with all the philosophies and cultures of renunciation and withdrawal, withdrawal into interiority and into the contemplation of the immutable universals. Here his reach widens syncretically: to St Paul and St Augustine he adds the nirvana of the Buddha and of Krishna. The operations carried out four times, and repeated fourfold in the quadripartite poem, are those of an observation of the current aberrations of a belief in linear time (a belief in Leopardi’s ‘magnificent and progressive fates’, as Italians could say) in order to reveal underneath it all the real hidden pattern, circular time. But in the end things are not so simple, or are so only ‘on paper’. Linear time must be fought, but in the meantime it exists, and those who want to live in the jurisdiction of the timeless must still go through time (‘only through time time is conquered’), because in time humanity has been thrown out of timelessness, and must now live in time but longing for the timeless. All this may explain why Eliot insists so obsessively and with excessive chains of synonymous formulations on a middle stance that human beings must make their own: they in fact must necessarily keep their feet in both camps, compelled to remain in historical time, but with a foot ahistorically out of time. Now, according to Eliot, linear time, which broke timelessness, is due to original sin. The Edenic life of our progenitors, bliss without change, was thrown into time by sin, and humanity has suffered the consequences ever since. Later, eternity had to enter into time with Christ’s Incarnation, necessary to redeem humanity from sin and therefore to reopen the doors of timelessness and remedy the dissolution of the eternal Edenic bliss. And yet Eliot seems ultimately to believe, like the Puritan and Calvinist he is, that Christ’s redemption was imperfect and the demonic is still lurking, and has not yet exhausted its curse. The war between God and Satan is far from over. The withdrawal from time is then in Eliot also an exorcism of time, more exactly a deliberate blindness to the double possibility that the world could be either saved or damned at the end of time. There is also a militant resonance, however: the first of the Four Quartets was composed before, the other three after, the

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outbreak of war, and therefore some designate the latter as ‘quartets of the time of war’, and Eliot called them ‘patriotic’.139 Salvation is also relative to a secular public history, which has failed, disappointed and disillusioned. The historical desolation is therefore also ‘empty desolation’, is the waste of time ‘entre les deux guerres’, is the bankrupt policy of past wise-men and of a whole cultural tradition; it is the ‘distress of nations’. These are only glimpses or parenthetical hints, anything but insistent; on the other hand, in the fifth movement of the third quartet Eliot repeats how intrinsic to human beings it is to stand and watch, or rather to try and ‘foretell’ the future, but not in the satirized craze of Madame Sosostris’ doubles, not even in the much-mocked practices of Freudian psychoanalysis, but in order to make history signify in its most authentic though more secret pattern. The medicine of salvation is indeed a series of wise maxims of mixed aetiology, which are therefore in a state of fusion. A new spirituality is urgently needed to get out of the desolation; and this hinges on the Bergsonian concept of the mental continuum applied to history. 4. I have not found any studies that notice that the general opening of the poem is an astounding poetic paraphrase – a condensation and a sort of anthology – of Bergson’s aphorisms on time that open L’évolution créatrice. The number and the literal nature of the borrowings are indeed surprising. Bergson is the theorist par excellence of the flow of consciousness, of duration as metamorphic, ‘chromatic’ continuity of the states of consciousness. The ego consciousness is constantly, perennially changing, no successive state of consciousness remains unchanged. Consciousness never crosses twice the same state, and who revisits a place is not the same person he had been before. Even the perception of a fixed object is a duration, because of the inexorable passing of time, even of the seconds that change duration, and above all because memory consists in the ‘prolongation of the past into the present’. Hence the continuous invasion of the past on the present, in a process ‘increasing and rolling upon itself, as a snowball on the snow’. Duration is this unbroken continuity of consciousness, ‘the continuous progress of the past gnawing into the future 139 Moody 1994, 203.

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and swelling as it advances’. Eliot certainly read in Bergson that ‘the past is preserved by itself, automatically’: it ‘follows us at every instant’, maybe even persecutes us, from early childhood. But not without some disturbing intimation: that the past is a burden we drag along; and this burden is hereditary, and exerts a push and a pull: ‘our duration is irreversible’. Every moment is therefore a neo-creation, we are what we do but we do what we are, and we are constantly creating ourselves. These Bergsonian dicta echo, variously paraphrased, throughout the poem, and they are its counterpoint. Yet Eliot is investigating a way to defeat and overcome this ‘enchainment’ to a deterministic duration. And this so because Four Quartets is also a return to the precepts of the never-forgotten Buddhist mysticism. Buddha means ‘awakened’, and his preaching points to the sole purpose of ‘liberation’ from the wheel of reincarnations in lives only punctuated by suffering, a suffering that is inherited and therefore inescapable, a legacy of previous lives. In its way even Buddhism is Bergsonian, since it sees the present determined by the past (and the human psyche as ‘a succession […] of states of consciousness based on a set of psychic states, feelings and physical appearances’).140 The Buddha taught man the necessity of liberation from this deterministic chain. Enlightenment leads towards awakening, and Nirvana is the extinction of all ties with existence. But to get back to us, if past, present and future form a mental continuum, they do so also in history, so that present and future pull the past along and are its consequences. Imprisoned, entangled in historical determinism, human history ends up getting worse; determinism must therefore be escaped. Such liberation is an alternative way to achieve the same end point as that of the Gospel philosophy or doctrine, all centred on the oxymoron and the antithesis. The rejection of the world is reached via a series of oppositions which are derived from the first, that for the Christian life is death and death is life. Eliot claims that the Christian who wants to be saved is the one who systematically chooses the path of opposition to the way of the world. In this sense Four Quartets is equally a Dante-inspired poem, since Eliot, as historical pilgrim, pursues the lost vision of the Marian rose

140 P. Filippani-Ronconi, Il Buddhismo, 22.

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garden, which is also the dream of an Edenic regression never realized. It is an apocalyptic poem, finally, since in it the human and artistic word is old, and therefore inadequate, and useless to express this thirst: a worn-out word, instrument in the service of a philosophy of language to be repudiated, which speaks the world and the beauty of the world, and not its negation or its teleology. This old word favours the expressive capability whereas the word should aim to silence, unaware of the semantic gap between the word and the Word. This motif – of the inadequacy of language and of the poetic word, and therefore of art – takes up a self-enclosed section within each quartet. Thus Eliot dismisses, with this poem, poetry, and his poetry and art in general, or rather makes it from now on instrumental to the achievement of a higher aim. 5. Each of the four quartets ideally starts from a place indicated in the title, but without providing a clear and orderly identification, for they are locations to be guessed and reconstructed through historical and private associations. From here rhapsodies are born, and as with each rhapsody, or even as in The Waste Land, the common thread runs through meditative or reminiscent episodes that are seemingly detached, have a diversified register and discursive slant, and are interspersed with lively, sharp, visionary anecdotes, adduced as demonstrations of the abstract. The tone is for long stretches oracular, of high distillation, cryptic and allusive, but we are surprised when Eliot comes to the fore, speaks to the reader without his robes on about his labour with words, and takes the reader to one side, no longer in an apodictic manner but with a kind of fake improvisation. The technique is blatantly orchestral, the closest such ever conceived by Eliot.141 The specific and symptomatic reference, after the similarities with the modernist Stravinsky in The Waste Land, is the quartet literature of Viennese classicism, from Haydn to Beethoven. Each quartet is made up of five internal tempos in Roman numerals; the canonical number in which quartets were written and published at the time of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, or 141 The most authoritative essay on the subject until its date of publication is Pagnini 1970. Moody 1994, 198, claims that there are structural analogies between Eliot’s and Bartók’s quartets, especially with the fourth from 1928, which in his view Eliot might have heard at the time of ‘Burnt Norton’.

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even Bartók, was three or six; and Eliot’s quartets are of the rarer type of those in five movements. Two corollaries can be added. On the strength of its first representational unit, Four Quartets has often been said to be a ‘poem of echoes’: in its musical analogies it resorts, far more systematically than in an average poetic composition, to a network of anticipations and reprises, and to the thematic hint followed by the development,142 or to a theme and variations structure. Since each quartet repeats the others in its arguments, they could easily be read transversally by breaking them down into sequences of symmetrical sections (that is grouping together all the first movements, then all the second, third and so on).143 In quartet literature, citations of dance movements are extremely frequent. In Eliot the dance metaphor strengthens the musical analogy. Dance is for him a symbol of the concentricity of past, present and future, because it is an orderly and coordinated series of movements regulated according to a ‘pattern’, and obedient to the figures and the laws of its kind. Dance is in fact concentric in all its occurrences; it is ‘neither arrest nor movement’, a movement to which human beings should conform (‘we move above the moving tree’). Dance therefore combines movement with stillness, and embodies the privileged spiritual and metaphysical dimension of a motion without movement, or the middle position, a being ‘in-between’. It is also the metaphor of the condition of being with one foot here and one on the other side of the world, with a kind of uncommitted commitment and a middle state between ecstasy and horror. This dance is authentic in that it opposes that of the spinning world, illusory because it tempts one to say that the world is eternal.

142 The meaning takes shape through preludes, foreshadowings, nebulous and remote formulations of cells and therefore also ‘phrases’ that are developed and changed in a framework, so to speak, and shift from one instrumental department to the next. This is certainly a quartet technique, while it is also that of a cyclical symphony like Franck’s. The appropriate musical metaphor to describe Eliot’s quartets is then the orchestration, regardless of the format of the musical ensemble. 143 This option, suggested and actually implemented by some critics, is expressly discarded by Serpieri 1973, 242–3.

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6. Each quartet has then its own fixed organization, but since the sequential nature of time is an internal ideological target, the content must necessarily transfuse into form, except that the very form of the literary work is, like the Chinese jar, unavoidably linear, even if it moves perpetually in its fixity. If Four Quartets as a whole is a pattern, each quartet is a variation on it, and it is the same pattern that ultimately is repeated. Each quartet starts from or converges almost immediately on an occasion that is an evocative epiphany: a real or imagined or remembered visit to a place, an English manor, the village of the ancestors, the native coast of Massachusetts, the seventeenth-century monastery of the followers of the mystic Nicholas Ferrar. Between the first recollection and the other three there is a difference: the visit to the rose garden is virtual rather than actual; the other three occur in reality, even if they are partially mental. Eliot, once again, is not a linear composer, and to the two main rhetorical figures supporting the poem I already mentioned must be added transition and anacoluthon. The first tonal gap or hiatus is that between reminiscence or narrative scene, metaphysical gloss or catechetical, prescriptive discourse and pure, enclosed, often rhymed lyrical flash; it is also one between prose poetry and ‘poetic’ poetry with recognizable traits. In essence, however, the rupture of all sequential poetry is due to hiatuses between movement and movement, and often even within the single movement. The anacoluthon obtains because Eliot jumps from one order of discourse to another within the same syntactical turn, and the two planes, which do not appear to match, may agree only by virtue of an arcane, definitely elliptical, purely transcendental logic. 7. Four Quartets, which as I mentioned used to be and is still sometimes placed before The Waste Land in an absolute hierarchy of values, raises once again the question of the plausibility and raison d’être of dianoetic poetry. In the four quartets, Eliot formulates and reformulates his own idea of unworldly spirituality, and he does so by laboriously mimicking the ineffable he wants to convey.144 The prose-like harshness of a 144 In the third quartet, ‘ineffable’, ‘probably totally ineffable’ is the experience of turning to look back at the ‘primitive terror’ of ungoverned history, thus challenging the certainties of recorded history.

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philosophical poetry without rhyme and with irregular prosody is mitigated and compensated by shorter, self-enclosed sections which are undeniable, if slightly artificial rhythmic and prosodic tours de force. But the reservations of a certain section of critical opinion do not stop here, adding a certain sense of disappointment for the abandonment of the symbolic mode in favour of Christian and neo-Platonic immanence, and of the force and the structuring supremacy of dogma. An invitation to abstention, almost to Paterian ‘diaphaneité’, Four Quartets was bound not to please the ‘committed’ writers of the ante- and post-war. Orwell,145 for instance, only retained of it a memory of scattered fragments, without any of the immediate familiarity that the early Eliot poems had produced in him. Compared to the early poetry, Four Quartets sounded like voices of neardeath resignation, similar to Tennyson’s, whereas the youthful poems expressed a pagan joy, Orwell claimed, even if they were focused on the bourgeois intellectual unable to work, fight and reproduce. The poem was often subsequently read in a vacuum, detached from any historicizing, as a body of close internal relations, and equally dense links with the universal literary canon, both sacred and profane. Practically every single term has been regarded as a short cut to articulated thought through a dialectic re-discussion of the source, more or less as in The Waste Land. This is an asymptotic reading, always partial because the series of suggestions and echoes that can be aroused in each reader is potentially infinite; so that even the archive that claims to be the most complete is inevitably incomplete, and even arbitrary, though necessary because some interpretive light ends up filtering through.146 There has also been so much insistence on, and so much attention to finding the echoes and the dialogic game with earlier texts, that the question of how far the Four Quartets were themselves a source, a sounding board or a landmark for poets who came later, or 145 OCE, vol. II, 272–9. 146 Blamires 1969 confesses to having just come out of an immersion in Joyce, and proceeds accordingly by wielding a radar of rare precision to track imperceptible, sometimes far-fetched verbal echoes. Having surfaced from other kinds of immersions, I for one marvelled at Blamires’s absolute deafness to echoes from Hopkins, whose overwhelming centrality I shall try to emphasize.

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operated almost simultaneously, has been neglected. Developing what I said above, the influence of this poem quickly ran short, and the mould of Eliot’s priestly albeit eclectic voice has proved to be quite transient. Paradoxically, and surprisingly, Auden was one of the unrecognized sources of the poem. Almost a generation younger, Auden was indeed baptized a poet by Eliot himself, who in turn drew from Auden’s early works, which he approved for publication, some resonances which he transposed in a spiritualist, transcendental and eschatological perspective. These resonances are firstly the necessity of love, with already clear shades of agape in the playful The Orators: the triple distinction drawn in the third movement of ‘Little Gidding’ between love for oneself, for others, and love perverted, paraphrases in effect Auden’s song in the first section of that 1932 pastiche. The closest follower is Geoffrey Hill for more than obvious reasons, among which is the Pentecostal vision of life directly taken from the central passages of ‘Little Gidding’, adding a reflection on English history, made of rebellions and lacerations subsequently atoned over the long term. Eliot also echoes concepts, chords and motifs from Yeats, as I have mentioned while discussing the Irish poet: the body that withers, the ardour of desire that wanes, the weakening of the passions in Byzantium, the ‘monuments of unageing intellect’, the purifying fire. But Eliot is more puritanical, far more puritanical. § 101. T. S. Eliot X: ‘Four Quartets’ II. The alpha and the omega, from the rose garden to the thorn bush The two epigraphs taken from Heraclitus are the only ones in the poem, and rare in their placement, because they don’t appear before the general title, or that of a quartet, but between the title of the first quartet and the body of its text. They are however extendable to the whole of the poem. The first observation is that Eliot joins a precise division of philosophers, of which he is a member: the philosophers and the wise authors of maxims, and especially those who overturn common knowledge and arrive at a counter-knowledge, so called because it overturns accepted truths or transforms them into compromises. Hence the main figures of speech are, as I have already mentioned, the double negative (neither / nor) and the oxymoron. After the debut of the general leitmotif, the coexistence of

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past, present and future,147 ‘Burnt Norton’148 (1935) imagines not the actual but what is possible in the imagination: an entry into a rose garden with a pool on whose mirrored surface some guests are reflected149 under the rising of a thrush’s song, while from the roses colours gleam, and children laugh through the leaves of the trees. This purely imaginary vision, but well fixed in memory, will become the recurring and final symbol of a saving and redemptive epiphany. It is useless, or maybe it is not, remembering the vision of a primitive and primeval Edenic world, from which the present one has deviated, becoming ‘Ridiculous the waste sad time’, since the drift of a cloud, that is, original sin, has erased the pond and dissolved the scene.150 This has shown ‘our first world’, the degree zero of the past that is contained within the present and the future. If everything hinges on the axis of time, time in the present and in the future is marked by the past, and carries the burden

147 There is an astonishing similarity between the opening of the first quartet and an entry in Stephen’s diary in Joyce’s Portrait: ‘The past is consumed in the present and the present is living only because it brings forth the future’. In the second episode of Ulysses Stephen meditates on the ‘endless possibilities’ that real events have prevented, and continues: ‘But can they ever have been possible since they have not come true? Or is it the only possible what happened?’. This meditation on time actually derives for both from Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Book IX); relevant too is the distinction of the ninth book of Poetics, between the task of the poet, describing the possible, and that of the historian, who tells what really happened. 148 It is the name of a Gloucestershire manor, which (as Blamires 1969, 83, notes) is also that of the American coastal city that is the setting for ‘The Dry Salvages’. See the whole of Blamires’s page for interesting observations on the relevance of this place as the scene of a possible Eden, of a personal, cosmic and political kind. 149 By Eliot’s own admission, this element was taken or remembered from the opening of Lewis Carroll’s Alice. In the pool a kind of Gospel miracle is suddenly produced, because being dry it brims with water, and the sunlight sparkles there. It is not just to my mind a ‘fiat lux’ – as Blamires 1969, 13, would want – but an allusion to the Gospel passage of the dry lake filled and flooded. 150 See the ‘dying nurse’ who in the second quartet ‘remind[s] of our, and Adam’s curse’. As Blamires 1969, 8, notes, in the last quartet the children are hidden ‘in the apple tree’. But (ibid., 83, 100), the Burnt Norton Eden is also England before the emigration caused by the seventeenth-century wars of religion, and where Eliot’s family could have happily remained.

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of the spiritual history of humanity: it is a time that is stained, soiled by guilt, and a time that is, in this precise sense, ‘unredeemable’. Behind the adjective lies an unmistakably Calvinist premise, more exactly an obscure sense of predestination: the time is post-lapsarian, following the stain of the original sin. The domain of the possible does not count, and in any case the possible also converges towards the present, although it delights one to imagine a different order of events, a sort of ‘back to the future’ in the modern sense. The core of the first movement is then an imagined or rather simulated ‘first world’ or even another auroral world, which could have evolved into a creation unburdened by the original sin. It is indeed a rose garden where there can be no ‘pressure’, where the ‘lotus grows’ and therefore favours oblivion, and smiling cherubs nestle among the leaves of the trees. The second movement abruptly outlines the cycle of human life, both vegetable and spiritual, as a reconciliation of opposites, right from the ‘garlic’ and the ‘sapphires’ that surround an axle. It is a phantasmagoria of unity, of the close compactness of the reconciled cosmos, crossed by a single vital flow, or by a kind of upward momentum, and an optimistic vision of becoming as in Heraclitus or Empedocles. Everything moves within a more general movement with which it melts and in which it dissolves; and yet every movement exists in relation to fixity, and this fixed point is imagined in a series of zones where opposites balance out. It is also an exit from verifiable time into timeless time. Achieving fixity is equivalent to liberation from the deterministic chain, the ‘outer compulsion’; yet it is being and not being within time, then a condition of partial liberation, partial de-concentration, partial ecstasy and estrangement. This is ultimately the midpoint between unconsciousness and consciousness; it is to be in stillness, to dance and therefore to move in fixity, challenging the apparent movement that – echoing Hamlet – is also a departure from the ‘damnation / Which flesh cannot endure’. In this second movement the rhyming lines perhaps warn that this is just a yielding to a fantasy, a fantasy about creation as a reconciliation of opposites, and a collection of syntheses and meeting of opposites. That this is the case is proved by the introduction of a central figurative, symbolic and conceptual antithesis, the one between dance, or circular motion, and the straight line. In this way and for the first time the argumentative and procedural rhythm of

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the poem is introduced and made explicit: not only an abstract axiom or theorem alternating with imaginative or memorial evocation, but rather a kind of to and fro movement between dreamy visions of a redeemed and therefore peaceful creation, copy of an Edenic eternity, or returned to it after having healed its splits, and the realization of the threatening storm, the post-lapsarian stain, the universal confusion and chaos reigning everywhere. The second movement is, in its first part, a euphoric hymn in which Eliot unleashes a sudden sensation of well-being, an oblivious transfiguration, or daydream. In the second part of the second movement the voice is conative and exhortative but disguised, and suggests a number of difficult, risky positions and intermediate and symbolic locations: to be in and out of time and even space, to dance in fixity rather than in movement. The ideal would be to stay out of time, it is just the subjection to post-lapsarian history that forces these uncomfortable balancing acts. Humanity Platonically remembers an ahistorical ‘where’, but does not know how to locate it, invoking instead a number of unreachable locations, sibylline even in the Greek sense of the word, which can only be defined with words, in fact only with words, as oxymora. Abstraction inevitably touches desire. The Calvinist bent of the opening lines resurfaces because now Eliot says the past and the future form an ‘enchainment’ that is ‘woven in the weakness of the changing body’, that is, subject to sin. If the escape from this chain is achieved, if there is freedom, one is protected from ‘damnation’, which is terrifying, though also from salvation, as Eliot adds in Luciferian tones. After positing the enchainment of past, present and future, he is then sceptical about the good finality of this time, and about its movement toward historical or eschatological redemption. The difficulty of this argument is first of all to see if Eliot proposes these median, balancing stances as advice or as condemnation. Perhaps it is as condemnation, to which we must react by seeking those intermediate positions. The last four lines of the second block of this movement are a snag because they ruinously appear to contradict the truths built until then. They allude to the fact that being in time is unawareness or partial awareness of that lottery which is the ultimate time and the settling of accounts: a perspective that can be salvation, ‘heaven’, or ‘damnation’, but that, as we have seen, ‘the flesh cannot endure’.151 The 151 The enslavement to time, from which Eliot always argues we must free ourselves, has the positive effect of ‘protecting’ humanity from ‘paradise’ and therefore from

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movement ends with a stalemate: better to keep out of time, to be estranged from it, but only by being within time you can ‘conquer’ time, and hope to redeem it. This hints at a caution that ends up by being paralysing, as in Hamlet, significantly called in question here. 2. The third movement of ‘Burnt Norton’ glosses a ‘here’ which is a series of intermediate scenarios: the rhythm is that of a repetitive list, or a litany, without additions of meaning. The second section of this movement is persuasive and describes a descent into spiritual solitude, inner darkness, Nirvana, or trance.152 It continues the imaginative description of an intermediate zone which is equivalent to a kind of oxymoronic attentive indifference, of a suspension over the edge, of disaffection, of half-light or dimness. The rotating motion is accompanied by one of descent. On the one hand there is withdrawal, on the other the resurgent appeal of the world: ‘only a flicker’, or ‘tumid apathy’. The assertive subtleness of this recommended stance is sought and found in a series of figurative oxymora. In reality the poet exhorts himself and others to fall into this area of dimness and obscurity and also to abstain from movement; desire itself, mobile by nature, must be suppressed in favour of love, which is ‘abstention from movement’. After the short fourth section, describing and dreaming of the unison between man and nature, and therefore of a reconciliation of the cosmos, the fifth broadens the investigation of the oxymoron, that motion is stillness, in the corresponding spheres of the word, of musical and ceramic art (the Chinese jar, victorious against the ruins of time and a sign of the coexistence of before and after, rather than the note of the violin, which though long has an end).153 The Chinese jar is a synonym and counterpart of the dance, the opposite kind of time. The straight line ends in the silence of death, circularity is a form of eternal life. So then by degrees the poem salvation, as well as from ‘damnation’. The ‘which’ of  l. 82 can however, strictly speaking, refer only to ‘damnation’, which would certainly be far more intolerable than salvation for the weak and changeable ‘human flesh’. 152 The imprecise and metaphysical ‘here’ at the beginning alludes to the Gloucester Road underground station, from which Eliot commuted daily. This piece of information is possible only on the word of Eliot’s first wife. 153 This may recall the Thomistic consonantia as explained by Joyce’s Stephen in Portrait: the aesthetic object that exists in time and space, and the audible that is presented in space; but first beauty had been defined as stasis rather than kinesis, unlike the oxymoron of Eliot’s jar, which is synthesis of movement and stasis.

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returns to the repetition or re-assertion of the starting assumption of the enchainment of time. The warning is that the word itself should be purified, that language should become circular and a dance, that is, stilled as it turns. But obsessive is the insistence on a Word tempted in the desert, that is, a desire that is mobile, the opposite of the love-agape which is fixed. This is precisely one of Eliot’s most typical examples of transition: how the Word of eternal life is tempted by the transient, how it has been and is threatened, and how the devil imposes his mark even on the dance, which becomes a dance of death. But, or rather therefore, the re-emerging memorial flash is still that of the primordial garden that has not materialized, and whose future existence has been truncated. In the realm of aesthetics, art is movement, or fixity in eternal motion, and ideal love too is fixity that must yield to movement because of the limitations of earthly things. Being a love to be spent in the world means sharing the diminution of the world and suffering the corruption of time; being against non-being inevitably implies being in time, and therefore loving also, and in part, in movement.154 3. The first section of ‘East Coker’ (1940), named after the place from where Eliot’s English ancestors had emigrated in the seventeenth century,155 is philosophical, and argued in Hegelian fashion, even if its final note is Augustinian or more exactly sceptical, and only finalistic in extremis. It in fact presents a thesis, then the antithesis and finally the synthesis. The thesis is that beginning and end are inextricably linked, and even interchangeable: each end is a beginning, and every beginning is an end, and thus the biological life cycle is secured and given continuity. However, on the plane of images, the dance, horizontal and vertical, is eventually overwhelmed by the nightmare of the vortex, icon of disorder, of turmoil, and of by no means peaceful finalism. From here it is even feared, in the third movement, that everything may end but will not start again, and that the cyclical movement may collapse. It is here that an ideological clash between 154 This is an admirable application of the signifier to the signified, since the assertion of a circular pattern in verbal art is reflected in a circular quartet, which opens and closes with the same lines, while the next one opens with an almost ad hoc comment on the very form of the previous one: ‘In my beginning is my end’. 155 And which therefore lends to the poem the symbolic paradigm of the return of the prodigal son.

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Heraclitus or Empedocles, or other teleological philosophies, looms large. If the precept to be adopted is unenforceable it is because it is an oxymoron, which works on the rhetorical level, but almost not at all empirically. This quartet ends in a draw: the apodictic formula that seals it is peremptory and assertive but laborious, and hides a doubt or an incomplete conviction. The beginning of the first movement asserts that all the existing, be it physical, human, inhuman, and natural, dies, but by returning back to the natural womb it is re-fertilized and returns to live. Every end is a beginning, and this also applies to each self. This seems to restate in different words Hopkins’s concept of the Heraclitean or Lucretian fire, of a ‘world’s wildfire’ in which what ends feeds what is recreated, and the rubble becomes the new building material, with an uninterrupted succession of destructions and creations in time that also echoes Yeats’s historical dynamism. But the difference lies precisely in overcoming, just as in Hopkins’s sonnet,156 Heraclitus’ senseless chaos. The exemplum given is a visit, the first actual one of the poem, to an emblematic place where Eliot evokes a ritual marriage-dance of ancient villagers, now dead and buried, but – while dead they ‘feed’ the ‘wheat’ – also living. It is the life cycle of generation, death and rebirth; and to emphasize its uninterrupted repetition and continuity since the dawn of time, it is narrated in an archaic English which mimics that of the book by Eliot’s ancestor, The Governor, and which is permeated by a sense of English late Medieval cosmic harmony, precisely expressed in the form of a dance whose steps faithfully obey the prescribed rules.157 The ritual dance is a symbol of conjunction, of the conjunction of life, of the end that is transfused in a beginning without saltus; a dance that embodies and applies love, without the linear movement which is synonymous with desire. Once arrived in the village of his ancestors, the modern pilgrim is surrounded by silence and emptiness, until an ‘unheard’ music forms, one that is therefore all the more audible; and the vision takes shape.158 The second internal movement is Lucretian and therefore abruptly contrasting, 156 Volume 6, § 206.1–2. 157 Blamires 1969, 44–6. 158 The passage may contain a veiled criticism of technological progress: light is now electric, there are factories and ring roads where before there was countryside, and light was made with fire.

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arguing that the unstoppable dynamism of the cosmos is a broken ‘vortex’ burning before the final glaciation, and no longer an orderly dance. This is the Hegelian antithesis, or even Heraclitus’ chaos, which seemed to have been subsumed, absorbed, defused in the first movement; it causes a cry of anguish to break out. But this movement surprises more than anything else for the deviation of register and voice with which the poet, dressed in a different garb, takes the reader aside and confides in him/her, and in tones of tragic declamation recommends humility and discourages Titanism. It is a formally postmodern, because metapoetic, episode; it also contains a militant hint at the empty promises of the so-called wise men. The apparent contradiction, a few lines from the end, is that on the one hand knowledge derived from experience imposes a pattern, which may be positive, but, on the other, this pattern is also falsifying, imposed from outside, while every single moment bears the burden of the past, and therefore updates the true historical perspective. The fifth movement repeats that the pattern changes continually, and each time is more complicated and every moment loaded with the entire history of the individual and of humanity, which is also true of inanimate nature. Eliot repeats that the flesh cannot endure the existential reality and emphasizes that the wisdom of old age is reassuring, as the watchful man is always existentially on the edge of the abyss, threatened and at risk. The passage voices doubts about the continuity and even the validity of the transmission of the fathers’ knowledge and of a secular culture that sought to free man from God to make him apparently the maker of his own destiny; so that this apparent demigod must, once returned human, learn the lesson of humility.159 Still at play, under discussion, caught up in a dramatic and frightening oscillation and in a desperate struggle, is the finality of the cosmos. 4. Immediately afterwards, the Heraclitean fire burns again and dramatically plunges160 everything into the greatest darkness of death and the 159 Reading between the lines this seems to be targeted at Nietzsche. 160 Here one may sense the reverberation of the first part of Hopkins’s ‘Echoes’ (in turn the most musical poem he wrote [Volume 6, § 203.1]), especially in the repeated ‘notes’, in the long enumeration, and in the repetition and triplication of single terms.

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apparent nothingness. Apparent because in this universal funeral ‘there is no one to bury’, because the darkness is the darkness of God, or even the night of the mystics. What is needed is a patient, passive, inactive, even tedious wait. But as soon as the poet says this, he abruptly corrects himself: everything seems to move towards nothingness, and yet there is no burial and no funeral, only the entrance into the dance of time that allows man to live again. The lesson that begins to take shape points to Oriental passivity, inaction, ataraxia, the willingness to let events take their turn, a condition that is even favourable to the phantasmagorical recollection of Genesis and of Eden. Throughout the fourth movement Eliot varies the primary metaphorical field by introducing another series of oxymora or contradictions linked to or derived from the figure of Christ bleeding, who has come to heal a sick world and humanity, who do not know – with Carlyle, and with Hopkins – that ‘our only health is the disease’.161 The movement is full of paradoxes and antitheses, because in order to heal one must get worse, because disease is the healthy state, and the healer, on the basis of this therapy, is now explicitly Christ, that is, the true Christian faith. Here we measure the radiating influence of Hopkins’s ‘The Habit of Perfection’. The diagnosis is that the world is sick while believing itself to be healthy, and those who are sick in the eyes of the world are in fact healthy. The fifth movement is a monologue that seems to be voiced by a Gerontion aware of a history that is incomprehensible and unredeemable, and at the same time of the inability of language to express new or really just useful concepts. The two decades between the wars have only been an ending without a new beginning. The condition humaine should be that of someone who is eternally leaving, one who does not have a home or whose home, whose fixity, lies in movement: a movement of relentless pursuit towards a difficult deciphering of the signs of the times. The metaphor of life, death and resurrection, or that the end is a new beginning, is extended to verbal art. The artist finishes each new abortive attempt from which he then restarts; art is a quasi-divine, creative act, which brings out parole 161 For the propagation of this metaphor in Eliot’s theatre, see below, § 102.4 and n. 181; see also Volume 6, § 196.2, on the modelling function of the oxymora in Hopkins’s ‘The Habit of Perfection’. The Carlyle essay echoed here is ‘Characteristics’.

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from the chaos or magma of langue. There is also here a hint to the theory of poetic impersonality and precision, in that language is itself affected by the consequences of the construction of the Tower of Babel and by the slide of post-lapsarian history. The closing returns in frustration and pessimism to the semantic imperfection of language. Humanity is either Tantalus-like, only searches, or asymptotic, it approaches goals, but never reaches them – a negative view, then, pessimistic, existential, and a world within a time, unintelligible. And love suffers from excessive attachment. 5. ‘The Dry Salvages’162 (1941) is the quartet where Eliot proves to be most aware of the dominance of sorrow and of the ruin of the things of the world, to which the only answer can be a patient exploration under divine guidance, without worrying about the future, conscious of the difficulty of understanding the true pattern of time. The theme is now death and redemption, that is, ultimate salvation. It is the most orthodox and religiously aligned of the four quartets: history becomes redeemable, although not always intelligible, according to the redemptive scheme of Christian faith. It opens with the only or one of the few moments when Eliot reverts to anthropological memory with a prolonged evocation. The ancient inhabitants of America worshipped the river and the sea as destructive gods to be propitiated; once tamed, their divinity was forgotten ‘by the dwellers in cities’. It is a pagan foreshadowing of the Christian God, or especially of the Old Testament God of Puritans, like Hopkins’s God, who, though believed to be merciful also claims and requires the sacrifice of human lives. River and sea are a border, a limit, a historical demarcation, or even a new paradigm of birth, life and destruction,163 since they regurgitate signs and relics of previous creations that contribute to a new creation. The sense of this prelude is the relativity of time and the different ways of measuring it: its slowness and its speed, for example, for the women who are waiting anxiously for the return of their sailor husbands. It is also a pessimistic or 162 The name of three rocky islets off the Massachusetts coast, as Eliot indicates in a brief introductory note to this section. 163 See Blamires 1969, 80–1, for the correlations between the flow of life and bursting of the river and the urinary and genital functions of man, always seen in unbreakable bond with nature.

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fatalistic sense of historical drift, of a destructive bent, again an inevitable movement towards nothingness: a rudderless sea voyage towards a metaphysical shipwreck.164 The introduction of the river soon reveals its symbolic coherence. A river would seem an instance of the straight line, whereas it is in fact bent into a circular form: it has a rhythm and a pace that are the same as that of the past, present and future, and therefore it does have a pattern, that of the circularity of the seasons in particular. The sea is analogous to the river in all senses, and it repeats its features: it may be even more menacing and destructive, and regurgitate corpses in particular, but its circularity is evident since it is a reservoir of ‘earlier and other creation’. The confluence of this new scenario into the general investigation takes place when the marine bell strikes two kinds of time, or three in fact. There is the usual linear time, the non-chronometric one of the poor women who are waiting for their husbands, and the eschatological one of the coexistence of past, present and future. This latter, the third, is slightly different from that of the women whose waiting for their husbands to return from the sea stops time or makes it feel like it never passes – already a more personal, subjective, non-chronometric perception. They understand in fact that the past is ‘deception’, full of broken promises. The disconsolate question – ‘Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing’? – echoes again unmistakably the same pleading request of the maiden choristers in Hopkins’s ‘Echoes’; but as in Hopkins, it is a ‘despair’ that is overturned into a ‘Spare!’.165 The three stanzas whose six lines rhyme with the corresponding ones in each, mimic a ‘De Profundis’; it is touching movement where the infinite sorrow of loss becomes, with a jolt, the joy of conquest. From a secular ‘calamitous annunciation’ of bad news to the veritable Annunciation, precisely that of

164 The protection of the Virgin is invoked in the very traditional prayer in three stanzas in the fourth movement. Blamires 1969, 112 and 194–5, sees an allusion to the sinking of the Titanic, without sensing the much more macroscopic one to Hopkins’s ‘Deutschland’. The men are, not by chance, compared to the fishermen, that is, the apostles, in the midst of a storm that Jesus could quell. In HAP, 34, Bush at least doubts the not implausible claim made by the Hopkins scholar Peter Milward, that Eliot had read ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ before setting to work at ‘Little Gidding’. 165 See the analysis of Hopkins’s poem in Volume 6, § 203.1.

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salvation, the only one that transforms suffering and makes it acceptable by inserting it into a general movement towards the end of times and unearthly glory. The only explanation of undeserved sorrow is in divine inscrutability. The Annunciation is therefore the Trumpet of Judgement Day, too, the end of times, and even the coming of Christ after the fall. Eliot eventually proclaims this to the evolutionists, with explicit words rather than through veiled metaphors. There is no elimination of experiences, both of happiness and of anguish, and it all adds up, without discontinuities. But at the end the burden of suffering and of Calvinistic evil appears to be reconfirmed, as it holds sway on the course of events, and nature is ultimately seen as two-faced, destructive and re-creating. 6. History seems hypothetically and once more damned, and, as Dante says, ‘man is not aware of it’. From the river and the sea we move to the train and even to the ship, with that peaceful and beneficial sleep that lulls us. But life is not a journey to a bright future; we do not know what awaits us, or we are afraid. We are marked and destined. That straight line gives the illusion of being able to get away, to escape, but in fact it too is a trap, although unperceived. We all start on the road towards the final goal, which is death, of which we need to think. But the reverse solution is precisely the salvation of faith, imploring the Virgin Mary. The fifth movement admits it is human to try to know the future in its variety, but also necessary to see the connection between the timeless and the temporal. But all this is understood only in flashes, unless one is a saint. It follows that the intelligibility of history is, though painstakingly and in a Hegelian way, reaffirmed and posited once again. To attempt an exit from time, from the ‘enchainment’ described above, is a very difficult thing. Disregarding the transient and always pinning the mind on the eternal is only for saints; it is better to tune in the sense of hearing to this aim, as the manifestations of the eternal are almost invisible and imperceptible. Christ’s Incarnation flashes with the same sudden revelation as ‘heaven of desire’ for the shipwrecked in Hopkins’s ‘Deutschland’. It is the reconciliation and redemption of time, the point where action would only be self-generated movement by the chthonic powers. This liberation from time is an unreachable goal for us mortals, happy if our life close to death feeds the soil and fertilizes it.

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7. The strangeness of a bloom out of season, of a ‘midwinter spring’, is in ‘Little Gidding’ (1942) the correlative of the unpredictability, of the precocity of a rare and sudden epiphany, which reveals the pattern of time and the disruption or destruction of the mechanism of progression. The ‘brief sun’ flaming the ice is an oxymoronic and Pentecostal symbolism, which developed at various figurative and literal levels will ingeniously inform and keep firmly bound the five movements of this quartet. The first stirrings of spring in winter form of course an irresistible reference to the opening of The Waste Land, since there as here spring ‘stirs the dumb spirit’. The occasion for the epiphany is a visit to the eponymous sanctuary, a legendary seventeenth-century centre of meditation and prayer revisited almost by inertia or secret providential drive as the extreme temporal boundary of the world, ‘now and in England’.166 It can be reached without knowing why, or with a purpose other than that which is revealed by the experience while it is happening. And it may be left after having learned the lesson of prayer, communicated by the dead who rest there. That was a rare moment in human history, and in England, when the eternal had intersected with the temporal. But it is clearly a repetition of what happens in the first movement of ‘East Coker’. From it stem similar reflections on time and times, and an identical resuscitation of a community, from which we somehow learn timelessness, and also the containment of the past and the future in the present. Future history was already all ‘contained’ and written in that sanctuary. Now the word of prayer subsumes, overtakes and makes obsolete any other word; and the language of the dead is life-giving and Pentecostal. Fatally, Eliot is led to repeat himself, and the second movement, in the three rhymed lines at the start, retells the opening of ‘Burnt Norton’, that is, the Heraclitean burning, incineration, and nullification of any beautiful, worldly spectacle. The recollection of the semi-monastic community is interrupted in order to recount a meeting of the poet with a foreigner, a former, forgotten teacher at the violet and ‘uncertain hour before the morning’. This is where a famous visionary overlap takes place, between the German bomber – a ‘dark dove’ with ‘flames 166 On the ambiguity of ‘world’s end’ see Blamires 1969, 130.

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of terror’ – and the Dove of the Holy Spirit: overlap but also transition from the fire of destruction to that of purification. It is a blatant parody, signalled by the verse-form employed, of Dante’s encounter with Virgil in The Divine Comedy,167 while it also recalls the meeting with Stetson in The Waste Land. From this dialogue, described as ventriloquism, and from this figure, three teachings are derived: the abstention of ecstasy at the approach of death, a taste as of a tasteless fruit;168 the still sterile anger against human folly; the revision of one’s life, softened in the fire that redeems. In this fourth section it is a ‘compound ghost’ who speaks, and this figure, apart from the joking inclusion of Pound’s name, represents more than anything else all the Christian poets and spiritualists who since the dawn of history have succeeded each other and sung together as if in a chorus. The sibylline teachings of the ghost point to the acceptance of disillusionment and to the path towards humility and repentance. But above all this shadow is one of the dead from the Little Gidding community, who therefore speaks now as more dead than alive. Despite all this, he teaches the way of salvation through Purgatorial fire, the time of waiting for the divine plan to become explicit, which in the meantime is prefigured in the phantasmagorias and fireworks with which the quartet closes. 8. Returning again to kneel at the monastery, the poet draws the lesson of supreme detachment from the passions, including those political and religious, in a veiled invitation, of militant flavour, to realize the vanity of diverging opinions when faced with the levelling of death. The quartet and the whole poem move to their circular conclusion. With an ingenious associative passage, from the historical level to the symbolic one, the symbol of the Lancastrian Rose is preserved, a ‘symbol perfected in death’. The rose is the symbolic culmination of the purgatorial path passing through

167 The ghost is ‘compound’ and merges together a ‘community’ of teachers (Blamires 1969, 146–58, and 174, wherein Pound is included; see also Frye 1963, 88). That the ghost is not univocally identifiable is an acceptable conclusion, since he represents Eliot’s idea of literary tradition globally understood. 168 ‘Bitter tastelessness’ is another, macroscopically unmistakable quotation from Hopkins, the ‘bitter […] taste’ of God for man in the ‘terrible’ sonnet ‘Carrion Comfort’ (Volume 6, § 204.3).

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fire – the Pentecostal fire of the ‘dove descending’ from heaven, the Holy Spirit – and through the ‘pyre’, quite different from Heraclitus’ bonfire. Every fourth movement of the quartets focuses on the intervention of spiritual figures, Christ, the Virgin Mary, the Holy Spirit. And as in Hopkins, fire is of two types, one destructive and one purifying and regenerative, depending on whether it is that of the bomber or of the Pentecostal spirit. The fifth and last movement of the quartet and of all the four opens with a literal paraphrase of the corresponding movement in ‘Burnt Norton’, that is with the struggle with words, which from chaos form a dance that obeys rules. ‘Every poem [is] an epitaph’, that is, if it is great art, it must speak of the end which is a beginning, and of the only and unique time, that of an apocalypse; it accompanies the movement toward death, but towards a death that that is regenerative. Symbols of birth and death, the rose and the yew-tree overlap, and have the same duration, and coincide in it. The last section echoes and amplifies in turn the end of the third movement of ‘The Dry Salvages’, restating that life is a journey of exploration, discovery and purification. But it will still be a circular motion, an arrival where one started from, but with the surprise of finding a new place. From the last visited world that ‘first’ imagined ‘world’ of the poem’s opening will be reached. The final purification of the world is a return to the Edenic genesis where eternity reigned. The vision is radiant and mystically vibrant. The resurrection of the new man lies in the symbolic death by fire, and when the purifying fire has purified, and its tongues have retreated into the heart of the flame, ‘the fire and the rose are one’. § 102. T. S. Eliot XI: Liturgical action and propedeutics for atonement in Eliot’s drama Eliot firmly believed that prose drama acted in the realm of the transient while verse drama operated in that of permanence. With Hopkins, he argued that verse was needed when aiming for intensification, since verse is ‘heightened’ prose.169 In a vaguely Arnoldian terminology, he added that to a dramatic era of ‘diffusion’ in prose (Shaw), one of ‘concentration’

169 Volume 6, § 191.4.

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in verse should follow. Moreover, it was necessary to stay well away from Shakespeare’s example and suppress any ambition of emulation. Eliot did not consider himself a pioneer, because when he started on Murder in the Cathedral the vogue for verse drama was already well under way. The revival of stagings of the Everyman and of miracle plays dated back to the beginning of the century, while the ambition towards a more ritualized, liturgical, hieratic theatre in Noh style had been there since 1923.170 Eliot’s development after Murder in the Cathedral took the form of the long-established plots of English comedy in a hybrid (therefore poor) fusion with the stylistic features of verse, though made imperceptible and therefore artificial. The counterpoint with myth, or to be precise the synchronicity between myth and actuality now transposed to theatre, had to be disguised too in order to make it seem innocuous. Moulding the drama of contemporary events closely on the model of Attic theatre meant for Eliot recognizing the pattern of the eternal return in history, but was also a further response in the field of theatre to Joyce’s novel and its use of the Homeric framework. In 1935, when he was about to start on Murder in The Cathedral, Eliot had behind him a bold and daring experiment of a completely different kind, successful in its way yet abandoned: Sweeney Agonistes (1927 and 1932), an Aristophanic drama full of the rhythms and jargons of the music hall; or its polar opposite, the sublime choruses of The Rock, with their liturgical and biblical rhythms. In the fragment of the prologue to Sweeney Agonistes, we enter the apartment of two prostitutes entertaining American sailors and businessmen; like Madame Sosostris,171 Doris, one of the two women, deals the cards from which come out in turn the planned dramatis personae, together with the inevitable coffin. The second scene to have survived reinforces the theme of the seamy side of sex and of a wild life away from

170 On Phillips’ verse drama see Volume 6, § 285.2 n. 7; on Abercrombie and Bottomley, see above §§ 60.3 and 65.2; on Yeats and Noh theatre, § 85.1 and MEF 187, where it is argued that Eliot adapted music-hall shows to bridge the gap between theatre and public. I will discuss Fry immediately after Eliot. 171 She too has ‘a terrible chill’. The footbath in ‘mustard and water’ and Mrs Porter also return from the Sweeney cycle and The Waste Land. Among the guests, there is one Horsfall with a predictive name, and a Mr Klipstein.

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civilization that is reduced to ‘birth, and copulation, and death’. There the cynical Sweeney invites the fortune teller Doris to a trip to a cannibal isle, knowing how easy it is for a woman to give in. In the fragments of Coriolan (1931), the Roman hero is catapulted into modern times as a veteran of the wars of the twentieth century on a ‘triumphal march’. In the second fragment the ‘statesman’ is engaged in feverish organizational activities, forming committees and subcommittees, although he would like to withdraw from this frantic activity. Coriolan can therefore be read like a very distant announcement of The Elder Statesman. 2. On the basis of the time in which they are set, the internal and reciprocal relationship between Eliot’s finished plays is of four to one, one being a historical play and all the others contemporary. This latter theatre of contemporary setting is programmatically designed and engineered in ways that coldly reproduce and update classical myth, a model that is evident in the near absence of stage directions (if there is an anti-Shavian twentieth-century theatre, this is it) and in its exclusively indoor setting of living rooms, offices or clinics, without any particular stage effects, as well as in the choice of verse over prose. Faithful to the mythical method, these plays implement a form of dramatic alienation that is not Brechtian but Greek. Unified in time and action, their underlying plots come from Greek drama following precise correspondences and revivals of mythical figures in contemporary guises. Eliot’s characters enter and exit from this plot, stand with one foot in the present and the other in the distant mythical past from which they come, confirming the general, driving theme or motif of how the past looms over the present.172 The protagonists end up reaching for holiness, martyrdom, suffering, rebirth,173 in plays that are all about sudden flashes, the re-discovery of a vocation and a mission of salvation and self-salvation, hence redemptive. The single great theme of Eliot’s dramaturgy is the conversion, the self-discovery, the atonement, 172 On the persistence of the past, on looming ‘consequences’, Eliot’s essay on Middleton in SE is illuminating, since it illustrates this paradigm in the latter’s best play. 173 Virgil’s Aeneas is read as a hero who embraces a ‘new beginning’ in Eliot’s essay on Virgil (OPP, 128). After all, Eliot’s mother had read to him about the edifying lives of saints and martyrs. She too had written a predictive play entitled Savonarola.

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and therefore the beginning of a life of conversion. He writes in a classical mould and in verse, but when acted out his dialogues seem natural and are not perceived as poetry, because of the enjambements and the adaptation to the language of the everyday and of the drawing-room; this too is a symptom and a sign of the persistence of the past in the present. 3. Murder in the Cathedral (1935) is a very assured historical drama, evoking the 1170 standoff between King Henry and Archbishop Becket with the aim of making the Church submit and limit its autonomy. It is complex and layered in its register, given the choral inserts and the dialogues in verse modelled on the metres of the medieval Everyman;174 it also has two parts in prose, a central one and the last, where the killers drop their on-stage disguises and implement a peculiar form of theatrical alienation. The play is dominated by a classical, austere, sombre and solemn sobriety, which imbues three finely structured and balanced parts: there are three priests and four tempters; two antagonists, though Henry is off stage and does not appear. The chorus is Greek: it knows the impending fate and through omens and hints warns of the threat, whispering to the characters without being able to interact with them.175 The historical events thus lend themselves to reinforcing some key points in Eliot’s reflection and meditation on life and death. The women’s chorus in the cathedral reads in the first scene the omens of an impending tragic event and announces a renewal in death, or the New Year which fulfils a destiny (‘destiny waits in the hands of the Lord’); on the other hand, it instils mistrust in the political class and ‘temporal government’, corrupt when compared to the spiritual one. The action proper begins with the arrival in England of Becket, the bishop venerated by the people and now reconciled with the king. But after seven years of exile in France, Becket has in the meantime become an

174 Eliot made it clear (OPP, 81) that he had deliberately avoided the worn-out form of blank verse, that he had enlarged the choral sections, that he had written the prose parts as a compromise, and that he had occasionally imitated the alliterative verse of the Everyman. 175 The choruses celebrating the martyrdom and the revelation of God in the living world, and particularly the last one, are all indebted – once again – to Hopkins’s ‘Echoes’ in metre and prosodic variety, as well as to the fragments of the play on St Winefred (as Matthiessen 1958, 162–3, also remarked). Naturally, Hopkins is the unrivalled, major English poet of martyrdom.

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uncompromising and staunch advocate of the autonomy of the Church. He is Eliot’s symbolic ‘rock’, the founder of a church, or of the Church, after a time of waiting for regeneration (typical of Eliot, and as the chorus says), a time consumed in a half-life, ‘living and partly living’, that is, where acting is suffering, as the poor also know. In his first words, Becket uses the initiatory language of the Quartets to speak of suffering and of acting, of the eternal, non-temporal fixity of acting while suffering, to formulate the incomprehensible oxymoronic pattern of a spinning wheel that is nevertheless fixed. Becket reiterates the need for self-renewal to the first tempter who reminds him of his past weaknesses and his old-fashioned habits. The temptation that Becket considers is that of a lax, lascivious life, like the bishop’s own in the past. The devil’s temptations are increased to four compared to the Gospel; but this is also an embodiment of inner voices, in keeping with the form and genre of the medieval Everyman. The second temptation is that of the resumption of political power, to be achieved through a reconciliation with the king. He is presented with the prospect of that marble tomb for which Browning has the bishop at Saint Praxed fight so ardently: ‘Power is present. Holiness hereafter’. But Becket renounces temporal power too. The third temptation is also in the form of exploitation: to serve Rome while at the same time giving support to the cause of the barons who fight against royal power, be it French or English. The fourth temptation is subtler, because it encourages Becket to pursue a purely spiritual power on men, but in a posthumous form. There is something Luciferian in letting him imagine the veneration of his grave, the miracles and the relics, and that he could have a greater power from beyond the grave than alive. It is still a dream of power, a vain projection of himself strutting in the afterlife almost in rivalry with the Father. Becket’s and all men’s problem is then clearly framed: is it possible to act and suffer ‘Without perdition’, that is, without becoming proud of it and without aiming at power? Becket reflects that the ultimate temptation ‘is the greatest treason: / To do the right thing for the wrong reason’. Becket’s Christmas sermon focuses on the very mystery that is being represented,176 that is, the Mass celebrating the birth and death of Christ, and therefore illustrates

176 Murder is therefore a liturgical action, or more precisely it is modelled on the Mass. Drama for Eliot was historically born as ritual.

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the contradiction in liturgical logic, that the beginning is the end, and that in the end is a beginning and that joy and sorrow are intertwined and coincide. In this way, Christ’s peace lies in suffering and martyrdom, not in worldly peace. And the day after Christmas we remember St Stephen Martyr. But martyrdom is not for the glory of the martyr, but to that of God and for men’s salvation.177 And martyrdom is chosen and bestowed by God, so that the martyr desires ‘not even the glory of being a martyr’. In the preparation of the massacre, Eliot’s lapidary sentences ring out, including one that Beckett must ‘perfect’ his will according to the commandment, as one of the choruses of The Rock puts it. Martyrdom is cast as a ‘timeless’ act; and it is a martyrdom not wished by him, but dictated by God. I have already discussed the alienating, prose apologia of the murder by the four perpetrators. They speak outside the dignified and austere register, in a somewhat sullen everyday slang which throws them off the dramatic pedestal, as if they were any four commoners. It is a final flourish by Eliot the cat ventriloquist, or Eliot the poet of the pub scene in The Waste Land and of the off-stage intrusions in Four Quartets.178 4. With The Family Reunion (1939) Eliot permanently moved from historical drama to the contemporary scene, though in reality there is still here an underlying mythical model made up of interferences between past, present and future, and of interconnections between historical levels. An imitation of Aeschylus’ Libation-Bearers, it keeps to a strict unity of time, place and action; as in Ibsen (also Greek in his own way) secrets from the past come to the surface, but their full import needs to be clarified.179 A crime demands atonement from its perpetrator and the play ends with the start of this redemptive process. This is then Eliot’s own ‘crime and punishment’ after Dostoevsky. Once again, Eliot ingeniously works with a Greek rather than Brechtian form of alienation effect. The characters occasionally withdraw to one side, disclosing intimate and foreboding thoughts that 177 Another echo from Hopkins. 178 Praz 1967, 157 sees in it echoes of Shaw. 179 Harry discovers that his parents did not get along and ended up separating; when his father died, there were celebrations at home. Before writing the play, Eliot read all Ibsen’s plays consecutively (Ackroyd 1984, 244).

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clash with the ones expressed a moment earlier; a small chorus of other characters occasionally speaks in a different, detached register like actors reluctant to play a part. Bystanders are divided between those who are acting and others who are acted upon, or those who sleep and those who are awake, with the latter investigating the emergence and recurrence of past events. Philosophically the play reflects on the ambiguity of the term ‘event’, because some events leave a deep trace, while others do not resonate at all and leave the individual unchanged. The curtain rises on an upperclass family in its country house in Wishwood, where there seems to be harmony but trouble is brewing under the surface. Lord Monchensey had intended to kill his wife, Amy, while his eldest son Harry may have pushed his alcoholic wife180 overboard during a cruise. These antecedents inexorably rise to the surface in the course of the play. In the prelude, before Harry’s arrival on stage, the inconclusive chatter in fact predicts what is to come: the characters are waiting for a spring that never comes, by now an established symbol in Eliot, that of a longed-for or even rejected regeneration. Someone even proposes to ‘go south’ in pursuit of the sun, like the Russian woman in The Waste Land. This intimate and symbolic motif is misunderstood by the others, who are merely talking about travelling for recreation. The play moves forward from a similar friction between the plane of everyday life and of banality, in which some characters are immersed, and an atmosphere of allegorical and liturgical action. Agatha, Amy’s sister, is the first to act out this second level, or perhaps the internal actor par excellence: she knows that the past returns and is in two connected senses unredeemable and irremediable, and that the consequences always come home to roost. Even Amy, the mother, wants to mummify a past that she nostalgically nurtures and which corresponds to a dream of harmony she wants to restore, not knowing how much everything has changed and that reality can neither be reproduced nor preserved from consequences. At Wishwood Harry will meet his double, his younger self from before the event or his crime. Many of the relatives give an interpretation guided by 180 This is Eliot’s archetype of the drowned man and of death by water, which makes Harry’s wife, whom many accuse of ‘vanity’ and selfishness, the descendant of Phlebas the Phoenician in The Waste Land.

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common sense of this mysterious mishap on the cruise ship: Harry should remarry and everything will work out. But what is about to unravel is an allegorical paradigm, a scheme from Greek tragedy. Harry always astonishes his relatives with an allusive, strident, defiant speech. He starts by recalling seemingly external events that have in fact an intimate resonance; he then adds that certain events cause nightmares. His bitterness, his images and his delusions speak of a psychological devastation, marked by the past and by the event that took place then; obsessed, he wanders in concentric circles as if in a fog. He is sure he pushed his wife overboard, but everybody else assumes it is not true, but a sheer delusion. He is considered mad, and treatable with natural remedies; the family doctor is summoned.181 In a scenically brilliant intermission, a servant is questioned to uncover what has happened; with chilling levity, he alludes to predestination. Harry knew that something was about to happen, and his wife was herself pushed to that gesture by a force unknown to her: it was an accident, either by chance or fate. Interpretations collide, but no final verdict on the misfortune emerges, with the exception of Agatha’s comment: ‘The decisions will be made by powers beyond us / Which now and then emerge’. In this associative space, Harry is increasingly revisited by memories and his past unavoidably resurfaces. There is no escaping the ghosts. In Act II the dialogue between Harry and his old flame Mary demonstrates the interaction of two planes: of the child-like freedom of play and of oppression, of the factual and the allegorical. Harry believes it is impossible to return to the beginning and start again ‘as if nothing had happened’. Mary does not know that she is speaking the truth when she tells him he has the power to wish the change, his regeneration. As in the beginning of The Waste Land, Harry does not want to regenerate, and rejects the symbolic spring because it forces him

181 The medical metaphor is also central to the fourth movement of ‘East Coker’; in both cases there is a most evident overturning of the paradigm health/sickness: he who summons the doctor is the truly ill, while the patient is in fact the only one who is healthy. With the sole exception of The Confidential Clerk, the two other plays by Eliot hinge on this medical metaphor, one putting on stage a psychologist who treats patients who are mostly spiritually sick, the other set in a clinic where the protagonist is convalescing.

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to come out of his wintery, pessimistic torpor.182 Both Harry and Mary comment then on the pain of regenerative ‘birth’. After lunch, the family doctor and Harry talk at evident cross purposes, the doctor announcing that something is about to happen (easy prediction of the mother’s death) and speaking of the rhythm of fate, that something happens because it has already happened. Harsh and sarcastic, almost talking to himself of his allegorical plan, Harry admits to being immersed in the chaos that is life, with all its traumas. Agatha emerges as the one who will take him across towards atonement, which ipso facto implies a greater suffering. In what follows Harry and his brother allow the healing metaphor to return: they have both had an accident from which they will superficially recover. In fact Harry is working on another internal disease, meaning that the guilt is located deeper. In the second and decisive dialogue, Aunt Agatha tells Harry of her own love affair with his father, of his father’s desire to kill Amy, and of his equally secret desire to posses life, that is, Harry. The goal is not to be freed from the ‘human wheel’ but rather to start on a path of purgation. At this point, Harry feels Eliot’s ending coinciding with a new beginning. The burden of sin and the spiritual heritage of the whole family converge on his shoulders, but he is ready to start on the new path, chased by the Eumenides he glimpses through the curtains. It is an epiphany that leads him to decisions that go against common sense, which he calls the ‘election’, in a theological and Calvinist sense. Agatha too suffers, since she is attempting her own new beginning, whereas the foolish Amy is unable to read allegorically the events, and dies from it. Harry’s departure is naturally and comically misunderstood by all the other characters. 5. Released exactly ten years later,183 The Cocktail Party (1949) is also concerned with regeneration. Its setting is still the bourgeois drawing room, and to the audience the halting start might sound like a parody of the classic drawing room comedy of the late nineteenth century, without any sense of discontinuity coming from its being in verse. The aristocratic and 182 Revisiting the play from a distance, Eliot (OPP, 84) recalled he had hesitated between aligning himself with the mother or the son, whom he dubbed an ‘insufferably conceited man’. 183 Written after Four Quartets, it marked Eliot’s definitive abandonment of poetry.

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professional class gossiping and conversing in the most superficial, careless and extravagant fashion may even recall Wilde’s theatre. Gradually, however, we realize that these characters speak of subtly allegorical issues in the form of allusions unknown to themselves: travelling, finding oneself, running away. Absurdity reigns because a group of enlightened aristocrats gets together to act as incognito guardians to the lost, the blind, the sick, and thus to restore their health and their moral equilibrium and sanity (here too surfaces a residue of Wilde’s moralism). The outsider to the party is a stranger who turns out to be a philanthropic doctor, who persuades an apathetic young female aristocrat to become a missionary in the east; most of all he will dedicate himself to reconciling a married couple, Edward and Lavinia, on the verge of a crisis. In some moments, the atmosphere is also that of Shaw’s dramatic paradoxes, or of Barrie’s special effects. On the other hand, for the second time Eliot explores a marriage in crisis, and its misunderstandings, tragic in the first case, remedied now, in a clearly autobiographical reflection. The skeletal action of Greek origin needs to be fleshed out and varied with intervals; this is how the play accumulates episodes of grotesque farce, in which Eliot is not quite at home.184 Effectively he cannot conceive of modern life except as a repetition of eternally established patterns. The outsider is like Euripides’ Heracles who must even take on some ‘common’ and vulgar features to avoid arousing suspicion of his ‘divinity’, and watches over the fates of a bored company of guests in a drawing room, and will then be the deus ex machina of the happy ending. Allegorically, he will render back to Admetus (Edward, a renowned lawyer) his Alcestis (Lavinia), who is not dead but about to leave him. In Act I the play is deliberately stalled because every piece of gossip that is about to be introduced is interrupted by the interference of another rumour, until

184 One of the guests, Alex, prepares an inedible soup he claims to be a delicacy for Edward, his friend temporarily without his wife, but the meal is absent-mindedly left to burn. The Greek framework can be ignored, because it is undefined, not cumbersome, and the play’s success might have been due to its internal vicissitudes, the revelation of the secrets, the classical stunts of bourgeois comedy, particularly in Act II, where both spouses admit to have flirted with others and confess to be jealous of each other.

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the reason for Edward’s distraction is revealed, that is, that he must find an excuse to mask the fact that his wife has dumped him. This chatter185 is subtly implicated in and interwoven with the plot: stories of failed attempts, of operations that were started but left incomplete, of stratagems that are not the solution. Once the others leave, Admetus-Edward confides in the guest, more for mythical reasons that out of dramatic plausibility. He wants to get back his wife Lavinia, does not want to aggravate the conflict so as not to break up the marriage. The unknown guest sets in motion in Edward a process of self-knowledge that moves him not to take himself ‘for granted’ anymore and to begin life again, or for the first time. This confession undergoes a grotesque reversal when one of the party’s previous guests, Peter, who aims to become a film director, returns to the scene to confess his own unrequited passion for Celia to Edward, who has his own troubles to attend to – the patient must therefore become a doctor. Edward does meet with Celia, but with a dual purpose: he has to investigate her feelings for Peter, while Celia inquires of those of Edward for Lavinia. From the end of Act I the antitheses and the allegorical paradoxes run riot: Edward has learnt from the unknown guest that it is better if Lavinia leaves him, and yet the guest will restore her to him; he has also learnt he has an almost incurable disease, that in short he can gain freedom and self-knowledge only by rebuilding his marriage on new foundations and not just to avoid the gossip. Edward struggles to understand the guest’s allegorical language, which has a hybrid status, is ambivalent, and always double. Husband and wife will have to meet again as strangers, that is, they will have to begin to rebuild their relationship anew. At this point Lavinia enters the scene and with her almost all of the guests who were in Edward’s drawing room at the beginning, inexplicably summoned by enigmatic telegrams in order to show the results of the secret orchestration of the ‘guardian’. Celia is about to leave for an unknown destination; alone, husband and wife do not ask or give explanations, but then dig up the past in order to start again; they have done this moved by an inexplicable inner strength. They conclude 185 The situation is that of Eliot’s early poetry, of the party Prufrock and his partner attend, and where it is difficult to silence the metaphysical questions drowned out by the chatter.

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that they both have changed, but bicker as if unaware of it. In Act II we see that everyone, even Lavinia, is part of an amiable and benevolent conspiracy, a Pirandellian conspiracy, to ‘heal’ Edward the patient. Thus begins the therapy, with the stranger who is an accomplished doctor of the spirit. Edward is in a state of despair and unhappiness with or without his wife. The couple are treated live, on stage by the therapist. The intrigues come to light: that he loved Celia and she Peter, who loved Celia unrequited. The two plot lines dovetail and a clearer reconciliation starts on this tightrope, because they all agree it is a last resort. The act ends with the rather artificial coda of Celia’s healing; she then leaves on the difficult path of martyrdom – the ‘transhumanation’ of the human – and atonement.186 In a second party, while Edward and Lavinia focus on their probation, we learn en passant from the flowing, sparkling drawing-room dialogue, that Celia has been martyred by the savages. 6. With Eliot’s third play, The Confidential Clerk (1954), the crisis and exhaustion of his formula for mythical theatre become apparent. The play has been traced back to Euripides’ Ion, but an objective examination reveals the link to be very remote. The plot seems rather that of a Victorian novel or short story, given the daring discoveries of found or swapped children, on the quintessentially Victorian model of the ‘foundling’ or ‘changeling’, like a rehashed No Thoroughfare by Collins and Dickens.187 There are at least three of these disorienting discoveries, of which two are left dangling until the last scene. Eliot seems to have succumbed to the pleasure of mishaps, to the thrill of the game, without bothering to hide in this whirlwind any significant allegorical or theological motifs. Some of the deeper meanings ascribed to these plots seem therefore excessive. The play has been seen, for instance, to illustrate the problem of the final acceptance of one’s vocation, or to function through the rhythm of repetitions and duplications; the recognition-scenes in the play are said to depend upon a providential but unknown design that is progressively revealed, or alternatively upon an 186 Celia is loosely modelled on Charles de Foucauld, whom Eliot held in high esteem (see Moody 1994, 371 n. 7). 187 In one of Shaw’s plays too (§ 6.2) an important politician has his speeches written by his versatile secretary.

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allegorical parable on self-knowledge and on life’s calling, fixed from eternity; or that they depend on the need for an enduring conversion between spouses and for not taking anything for granted to avoid a relationship crisis, and therefore on the need to start afresh each day. In the office of the wealthy financier and womanizer, Mulhammer, the old and trusted clerk Eggerson is about to be replaced by the boss’s illegitimate son, Colby Simpkins. This illegitimacy has not been revealed to Mulhammer’s wife, an eccentric woman who in any case is known to have had a child after she was widowed, whom she ‘lost’ in mysterious circumstances. Mulhammer hides from his wife also another secret, his daughter from another relationship, Lucasta. Colby is in fact the son of a neighbouring bourgeois couple who have made Mulhammer believe he was his son in order to secure his future. The actual son of his wife, who is not Colby, as her sixth sense had told her (hence the scene of the dispute over the son allegedly found again), but a promising aspiring financier, ties the knot with Lucasta, the other one of Mulhammer’s illegitimate children. This is then a far from novel situation, one of youthful sins, mischief and past escapades that reverberate upon the present, but without any sense that the perceived sins might lead the characters to leave for regenerating missionary adventures. The various recognitions and discoveries are coordinated by the old and trusted Eggerson, a sort of alter ego of Mulhammer and omniscient deus ex machina. The plotting works because only two people know or think they know everything, while all the others know only partial truths about the multiple claims to paternity. Lucasta is introduced as a foundling who is dear to Mulhammer as the daughter of a friend, not his own. Both Mulhammer and Colby are looking for a father, or live in a relationship and condition of ‘atonement’; they are both frustrated, convinced they have a different vocation which they abandoned because they were sure of being just amateurs.188 Freed from his respect for a fake father, Colby eventually realizes the destiny of his real father, who had also wanted to be an organist. 7. The Elder Statesman (staged in 1958, published in 1959) is not a typically insipid senile production: it inverts the trend to become a kind

188 Mulhammer wanted to be a potter, and Colby an organist.

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of swan song. It functions both as a tragic, moral farce on the persistence of the past and its resurfacing (the unacknowledged faults that persecute us and must be brought up again in order to be at peace with ourselves), and as a variation on and ingenious reprise of historical and classical motifs and at the same time of assured comic episodes. It is the easiest to stage of Eliot’s plays, and the freest, most fluid and dramatically skilful. It should be remembered that it is a late play, in fact very late, contemporaneous with the first of the Angry Young Men and of the early Beckett, against which it held its own. But Eliot did not deviate, consistent with his dramaturgical line and the revival of myths.189 Lord Claverton is his most successful creation, his only rounded dramatic character after Archbishop Becket.190 In a play by a poet who made his debut in the second decade of the twentieth century, it is striking to see, or rather hear said, that there is television for entertainment, and that some letters can be photocopied. At his appearance on stage, Lord Claverton comes across as an ailing character, focused on rethinking his past, obsessed by a confession he cannot yet make of reprehensible and scandalous events. Ibsen remains until the last the model for Eliot’s theatre. Claverton is indeed a bitter man, aware of his undeserved renown, and of having climbed the career ladder through favours. He is gradually confronted with the skeletons in his cupboard from his past in three chance encounters which a malignant fate, or rather providence, bring about. The first is a meeting with an old classmate, who had come under the spell of the future statesman in his time and had been induced to live above his means. He is the proof that Calverton conceived of life as an exploitation of others in order to achieve his own ends, while carving an unimpeachable image for himself and a successful career. As a student, then, Claverton sowed his wild oats and became embroiled in some very murky dealings. Not only did he consort with some ‘easy’ girls, he then failed to attend to a passer-by he had run over in his car. 189 The play can be read in particular as a remake of Oedipus at Colonus, with Monica, Claverton’s daughter, in the role of Antigone. 190 In the eponymous essay in The Sacred Wood, Massinger is criticized because incapable of creating ‘living’ characters, conceived from ‘emotional unity’ rather than ‘composed of scattered observations on human nature’.

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The one-time friend, who now lives in South America under an assumed name, reminds him of these events, but not for blackmail as the statesman expects. ‘Gomez’, this friend, is a first providential agent of salvation, but the statesman does not trust him. He has since redeemed himself and turned the page before Claverton does. Dramatically, this revelation is improbable; far more effective, and scenically lively, is the second one, which takes place shortly after at the nursing home where the statesman has been moved. An old flame is sitting next to him; with naïve candour she gets him to recognize her: she used to be a cabaret actress. This affair too had been kept secret; the scene is entertaining precisely for the statesman’s embarrassment191 in having to bring up a past he did not want to come to the surface, as the woman candidly tells his daughter everything. Unknowingly, while reminiscing she draws up a very fitting diagnosis for Claverton, who already at that time seemed to be one of Eliot’s ‘hollow’ men. The one-time lover participates in the internal isotopy of the change of names, with different results and for different functions: Claverton’s second name was used to gain a facade of importance; Gomez’s to rebuild a new life; the woman’s to become an actress. She too is an agent of salvation, since she does not ask for compensation for his breaking of the engagement but only denounces the falseness and hypocrisy of her former lover. In the fateful third encounter with salvation, his son Charles, who has inherited Claverton’s dissolution, turns the page and disavows his father’s exploitation (‘a kind of prolongation of your existence’). Only at this point does Claverton realize he must not run away from his past, but meet it head on, and acknowledge it, and that he will heal only through confession. The law he exemplifies is that of living in order to be and not to seem, of living while loving selflessly. The metaphor is the Elizabethan and Pirandellian one of the actor who takes off his mask, that of the ‘brokendown actor’. In the garden of the clinic, where he finds calm and coolness, Claverton rushes towards a beech tree where he dies a redemptive death.

191 In itself similar to the scene in Forster’s Howards End where Bast’s partner Jackie recognizes Wilcox as her lover in front of everyone.

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§ 103. T. S. Eliot XII: The literary system Even a superficial comparison of Eliot’s essay writing from the 1920s with that of Woolf and Lawrence, two of the other three major British modernists, easily reveals how distinctive it was. Woolf ’s and Lawrence’s essayism is markedly personal, idiosyncratic, with clearly visible individual passions and partisanship; their style mimics that of improvised essay writing, deceptively so in Woolf ’s case. As the theorist of impersonality, though, Eliot could not be guilty of an excess of personality. If Woolf ’s and Lawrence’s essay writing is anti-academic, Eliot’s is just the opposite; he criticizes Pater but finds in him the essayist who stylistically, procedurally and also conceptually comes closest to his own approach. In Eliot’s essays, we breathe the air of the lecture theatre, with his predilection for the Latinate word, for the classical constructs, for those overly formal and chillingly elegant ways of arguing. He lacks Woolf ’s lightness, but his could not be an idiosyncratic essay writing, coming as it does from a critic who rejected on principle idiosyncratic individuality. It can be defined as having a philological bent – the interest in prosody is everywhere – and an evaluative aim. This fine and perceptive critic, nevertheless, lets out at times trite and obvious, blurry and apodictic generalizations, which often are or have become critical commonplaces. So many times this or that writer is dubbed outright ‘the great master’ of one or another poetic genre or form. For this reason, Eliot often passes off tried and tested methods as if they were new. On the one hand there is the effectiveness of his description of the poetic operation as a chemical reaction, in which by melting acids and other substances we get a combinatorial result that shows no trace of the two original reagents. This scientific metaphor applied to aesthetics and poetics can be taken without doubt as one of the originating germs of formalism and even of critical structuralism of the middle and late twentieth century; the very idea of poetry as a network of subtle and shrewd linguistic relations lies behind the rise of New Criticism. Eliot is interested in the work, with the result that the poet’s life is dispatched in a few words; and this too is forward-looking, prophetic, very modern. On the other hand, he resorts to a category of Poe’s (which is also Hopkins’s, as a theorist of poetic inspiration) when he speaks of a shock and a surprise on first approaching a great poem, even without actually understanding it, as with Dante. Eliot often

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drops his icy and very controlled composure to reveal he feels and has felt a ‘shudder’, like when he was faced with Tennyson;192 or he remembers the childish, primitive and sudden infatuation with a poet. His voice should be and effectively at first presents itself in every essay as that of emotionless objectivity.193 But when in the more mature essays he explains how he arrived at certain judgements, he reveals with the utmost candour that as a practising critic, the first step was a sympathy or instinctive dislike for a poet – and the targets of his dislike had been at first Milton, Addison and Shelley. He also warned his readers not to expect full coverage from his criticism, reminding them he had discussed poets only and not authors and writers tout court, and particularly those poets who had affected and influenced him, with the implicit warning that many of those who had not had been excluded from the scope of his investigation. His drastic selection of the literary canon is a natural corollary of this position. Poetry is for Eliot distillation and selection from a magma; the or one of the most frequent reproaches he made to poets, especially Romantic and Victorian, like Byron and Swinburne, was that they had been too prolific and lacking in ‘the destructive element’.194 Suffice it to add that Eliot places poetry and drama at the centre of his field of vision, but excludes hybrid forms like the novel or the prose drama, relying on a very selective concept of literary production; his silences and gaps are then implicit negative verdicts. What surprises us is indeed that Eliot should have had almost nothing to say about his fellow poets, apart from Pound, and that there are no radical, close analyses of contemporary poetry and poets in his criticism.195 The

192 SE, 333. 193 As I shall show below, two styles alternate in Eliot’s critical writings: the elaborate, cold, marble-like and dry one of the academic essay, and the affable, easy-going style of the lecture. Eliot’s intricate, even Byzantine style is well parodied in WAX, 104. 194 OPP, 193. 195 In OPP, 169, Eliot distances himself in general terms from a poetry of pure sound and of imprecise and opaque meaning, which he also calls ‘melodious raving’. Sabbadini 1971, 72–3, interprets this position as a residue of ‘the need to start from a concrete given’ typical of the American tradition, as well as a form of resistance against Mallarmé’s practice.

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heart of English literature lies for Eliot indisputably in dramatic poetry or verse drama, and, within this genre, it corresponds to the dramatic canon of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, on which Eliot wrote contributions that have become a fixed and integral part of the history of its interpretations. When he moves on to the preachers and divines of the seventeenth century he rounds off (with inevitable gaps) the whole history of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean canon up to the Cromwellian revolution. His is a theoretical literary criticism, and for the most part ad personam. Almost always dedicated to writers, the individual essays are not, as I mentioned earlier, interested in their biographical personality and often also not in the social and epistemological background. Starting from these remote and certainly not popular authors worthy of an academic essay, Eliot focuses on purely technical, sophisticated issues, issues for insiders such as the evolution of prosody in Elizabethan theatre, or the influence of a writer on another, or of Greek and Senecan theatre on English drama. The emphasis placed by Eliot on the question of literary influence is certainly comforting for the interpreter and researcher of the sources of his own poetry, since it confirms the soundness of the approach. Eliot, however, did not substantially formulate or leave an aesthetics of poetry or drama. His theoretical insights are scattered, not laid out at the outset and explained in detail. But these flashes and glimpses reveal quite a few fundamental principles of the creator’s activity, so that the deeply organic nature of Eliot’s textuality comes out enhanced. Each essay claims to reduce a poet and a playwright to the essential in a few pages, and often does so by focusing on a single line or a short extract and presuming easily to establish from it the ‘self-evident’ fact that that poet he studies is manifestly better or worse than another (a procedure that smacks of Arnold and nineteenth-century criticism). These critical activities occupied Eliot for a good four decades, ranging across a field of interest that increasingly broadened out from the sphere of the purely literary. He wrote new prefaces for each subsequent reprint of collections of his essays, thus putting himself in perspective and recognizing the need for a revision of his critical thinking. Eliot’s is the very rare case of a writer who was both precocious and so long-lived that he could respond directly and in real time to an impressive critical and exegetical corpus already published during his life, in a sort of immediate repartee.

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2. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism196 came out in 1920, and was reprinted in 1928; many of its essays, those considered to have stood the test of time, were later included in Selected Essays. It is a first survey of Eliot’s interests, of his aesthetics of poetry and drama, and of his leading writers – a first identification of his critical world, of his horizons, and at the same time the inauguration of a form and a formula for his essay writing. It is also the first appearance of Eliot’s style of classical imprint: dry, objectified, paratactic. Two essays, the second actually more pragmatic and focused on individual critics, attempt to define the task and function of criticism and to plot a few coordinates, so as to place his own activity and notions of criticism within the tradition. They clearly prefigure one of his most famous essays, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, a landmark and the subject of many later discussions, where he identifies the network of close relationships that operates between each new author and work and the whole canon that preceded them. The rest of this slim book is made up of ‘applied’ essays, which nevertheless outline or refer en passant to short theoretical quotations or aphorisms. Eliot in this book does not lay out a strictly abstract aesthetics, but wants and intends to start from a few axioms, adding others, or glossing them, as the individual case requires. Apart from an essay on Swinburne’s poetry and one on Blake, all the authors examined, around fewer than ten, are classical or remote, and all British, save for Dante. A further look clarifies that this literary tradition Eliot isolates, and tries to define for himself, is centred on poetry, or more precisely, on poetic drama. A second consideration is that his crop of favourite authors belongs to the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic canon, from the early and still immature onset of the dramatic form until the beginning of the Restoration. He shows himself at the outset to be a profound expert and critic of Elizabethan drama, a Shakespearean philologist, and also a scholar of influences, often of the subtlest echoes between individual lines. As a student of the great issues in that tradition, he is a supporter of the thesis

196 The title may be alluding to the ‘sacred wood’ dedicated to Diana on the shores of Lake Nemi, from which Frazer’s Golden Bough starts (as also Sabbadini 1971, 25 n. 29, notices).

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of the dialectic presence of Seneca, Seneca the playwright, Seneca the orator and stage designer ‘of Horrors’, but only of horrors that are spoken of and not represented. Most of all, this is Seneca the stoic, who presents the dying man who seeks and gets admiration and enjoys his pose (even though this was not to be found in the primary sources, but derived from Seneca’s followers). In the other essays, Eliot focuses on the tradition of the verse drama, by no means dead but in fact capable of being revived. The need to give dramatic literature models and milestones resurfaces in the essay on the controversial Greek translations by Murray, where Eliot reaffirms the structuring role of Greek drama in ordering and ‘revitalizing’ English poetry.197 Verse drama is an instance of order in a context of external chaos, which it literally attempts to exorcise.198 More specific issues take over elsewhere, in the essays on the adequacy and the nuances of Elizabethan rhetoric, on the evolution of blank verse, on Hamlet, with an analysis of its semantic layers and with the famous indictment of its ‘failure’ due to the unrealized development of the protagonist.199 3. Looking back, Eliot sees Arnold as the only authoritative and recent critic of poetry; he explicitly avoids dealing with Pater200 and Wilde or Ruskin or the Decadents. No doubt he considers himself Arnold’s epigone, 197 Eliot quibbles with what he considers to be the shocking deficiencies of Murray as a translator. After all, Arnold too lamented in 1854 the parlous state of Homeric translations, taking issue with Newman’s brother, a popularizer. 198 These critical stances were confirmed again in the 1951 essay, ‘Poetry and Drama’ (OPP, 72–88): that verse is necessary in drama for the supplementary – and totally anti-Brechtian – reason that its rhythm makes the spectators unconscious (ibid., 75). 199 In a later essay, collected in SE (43–58), and written in the form of a dialogue that targets Archer and hinges upon the vaguely Paterian aphorism that ‘all poetry tends towards drama’, Eliot argues that prose drama emphasizes the transitory, while that in verse gives voice to the permanent and to the universal and that the human soul ‘strives to express itself in verse’ when the emotion is intense. 200 Pater was often harshly criticized by Eliot, as apropos his assessment of Dryden, which Eliot dismissed as ‘cheap journalism’ (SE, 309). The eulogy to high journalism, with a new dig at Pater, can be found in the second essay on Whibley from 1930 (SE, 492–506). But the Goethe-like definition that ‘art resides in limitation’ (in ‘The Unity of European Culture’, § 104) seems in turn to have been inherited and echoed from Pater.

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yet he cannot declare complete agreement with him. The fact that makes Arnold current for Eliot is that the situation of poetry in the early twentieth century cyclically resembled that of the early nineteenth century due to its immaturity,201 its lack of poetic materials and of speculative knowledge. Yet Arnold wanted to exert a real constructive effort in times that were too far removed from his ideals of culture; therefore, he could only destroy or correct, according to Eliot. In reality, in starting The Sacred Wood Eliot bows in devotion precisely to the Romantic tradition of Coleridge and the Victorian one of Arnold, in order to reject an intellectual aesthetics of poetry and to look towards the impressionism of the genealogical line that starts from Pater, Swinburne and Symons. Already here, in the assessment of Symons’ beautiful critical prose, emerges the dilemma of a criticism in the service of literature as opposed to a creative criticism in its own right, a criticism that does not just transmit but translates the work of art, and imposes itself for its autonomy (so that to that genealogy we must also add Wilde). Eliot does not regard Symons as a reliable guide or as capable of a general assessment of the work; he rather sees him as providing a series of private impressions, entirely his own, as Pater (who can be detected through the grain of Eliot’s essay) also found. This does not happen, though, in Swinburne’s critical (and not ‘creative’) prose.202 The goal for Eliot is to balance the creative and the objective; those who are only critics and not poets tend to transfer their poetic impulse into their criticism. Long periphrases lead to a profession of Aristotelianism, of the need to ‘look at the object as it really is in itself ’ (as Arnold himself had 201 The maturity – of civilization, language and literature – is the criterion that establishes what is classical (OPP, 53–71), and on the basis of which Eliot does not recognize any classical writer among the English. 202 Eliot notes and registers Swinburne as a critic and as a poet, discerning a radical divergence between the two functions. As critic of the Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, Swinburne could be more faithful to his subjects and less ‘creative’ – despite his style, only apparently extravagant – because he could divert that creativity in his activity as a poet. Slightly more reserved is Eliot’s judgement on Swinburne’s criticism in 1920, compared to the 1928 preface, where the disagreement between poet and critic has disappeared. I shall not dwell on the characteristics of Swinburne’s poetry according to Eliot, which are discussed in Volume 6, § 152.1.

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said!), without impurities and ulterior motives, in an excessive and authoritarian objectivism. With that, Eliot rejects and ditches all the imperfect and intellectually muddled critics. Yet Eliot’s judgements ring out hasty, are given without argumentation and are therefore by and large facile ones. That this is a sort of ghostly recall of Arnold is shown by the method of the ‘touchstone’, of the comparison of extracts that should speak for themselves.203 Arnold is mildly contested because he is not a creative critic but a merely instrumental one, whose aim is to correct taste and elucidate the work.204 Eliot’s relationship with Arnold is therefore closer, dialectical, dialogical. Among the many common points of debate, Eliot rejects the idea that poetry is now the substitute for religion and argues instead that for humanity in the midst of chaos religion is a necessity; conversely, he is against any attempt at aestheticizing religion. A similar distance from Arnold was to become exacerbated in the later ‘Arnold and Pater’ (1930), included in Selected Essays, where Arnold is accused of having paved the way for aestheticism, or for the aesthetic perception of a religion without faith. Eliot therefore argues from a basis which is not that of a non-secular or a-religious concept of culture. In the second part of the essay Eliot works like Arnold and in Arnold’s areas, investigating the correlation between literature and faith, discussing humanism, dealing with the Church and religious issues from an Anglican perspective, repeatedly disputing matters with sharp politeness, and even engaging with school education. He is selective, as strictly selective as Arnold, and his idea that the critic must ask himself how much of a poet it is worth reading is the same as Arnold’s, who was always seeking only the best that was thought and written. In the introduction to The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism Eliot repeats a saying dear to him and well-rooted in him, that Arnold leads to art for art’s sake, having argued that poetry replaces religion.

203 Arnold’s notion of ‘touchstone’ is cited in OPP, 32 n. 1, as a ‘test of the greatness of a poet’, ‘the way he writes his less intense, but structurally vital, matter’. 204 In ‘The Function of Criticism’ (1923; SE, 23–34), a blatantly Arnoldian title, Eliot concurs with the Victorian critic that the creative writer is also a critic of his own work (30).

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4. Eliot’s dynamic view of literature is articulated in the essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919). ‘Tradition’ here does not have the usual negative or archaeological meaning. And another prejudice or interpretative category the essay debunks is that an author is all the greater the more he differs from his predecessors. The category of innovation as positive and crucial to literary works is blown to bits. Eliot therefore postulates an osmotic transmission, besides that of tradition: that which is immortal and not transient in literature survives in the works of others. Imitation loses its negative connotation, which is instead transferred to the cult of difference in principle, so that Eliot implicitly overturns one of the most prevalent linchpins of literary practice in his time, the aesthetics of exasperated difference, as for example in Hopkins. The essay begins to shed some light on various features of Eliot’s own poetry: its nature of collage and patchwork of other presences, and quotations from other poets; the phenomenon of literary influence itself, far from any sense of anxiety about it. But is it a willed, conscious stance, to be part of the tradition and feel it continue through one’s own work? In part, yes. The poet must appropriate this historical sense, must perceive the past character of the past and its presence or ‘impendingness’. With this Eliot foreshadowed, in the cold domain of criticism and of literary history and as a pure mechanism of the literary becoming, the cornerstone and the central motif of his own poetry and dramaturgy, that is the irremediable quality of the past, its persistence and the impossibility of erasing it. The poet then always writes in an ideal, virtual simultaneity, aware of his relationship with the dead poets who preceded him. Reading him means discovering his cohesion with tradition. But the brilliant idea of the essay is that of seeing tradition as a reservoir being continuously if slightly redefined by the addition of new literary experiences and events, which in their turn also change the past and the very interpretation of past works. The past orients the present but the present changes the past, therefore, in a two-way movement. How should one act, then, in this prison? Is tradition a prison? And how can the poet say and do something new? The material of art is ever-changing, but Eliot is very explicit on the writer’s level of awareness. Writing poetry is like thinking and refining the idea of the past. In the 1923 sequel – ‘The Function of Criticism’ – the timeless community of writers is presented

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as operating unconsciously. The immature poet imitates, the mature one steals, the mediocre or bad deforms what he takes without giving it cohesion. With this definition too Eliot is establishing a disposition of poetics for himself. This systole-diastole structure is applied to cases of individual literary careers, where the poet or playwright writes in constant development individual works that are all related, so that each work sheds light on the previous one; but also each work in preparation is influenced by those written in the past (a dynamic applied to Shakespeare, at the start of the 1932 essay on John Ford).205 ‘The Function of Criticism’ closes on the celebration of the idea of a ‘whole’ personality such as Shakespeare’s, rather than of a collection of beautiful verse fragments. Dante’s poem is also an organism in which the parts illuminate each other. Eliot typically strives to connect a single work to a coherent plan and to a weaving of ties; at times he seems to fail to find this coherence, but eventually he comes out with it. 5. As an aesthetician, Eliot foregrounds the concept of change, of transformation, of ‘transmutation’ in the poetic process – from feeling, emotion, and vision to their expression on the page. He does not deny that poetry has to do with factors external to the poet, with history, society, politics; but he insists that the poetry will be all the greater the more ‘sanity’ the poet brings to his scrutiny of the mystery of life. From here on, Eliot occasionally drops dry aphorisms that can be amalgamated into a whole aesthetics. For instance, he intermittently criticizes the indiscipline of emotion and the need to control it: enjoying poetry amounts to a form of contemplation that distances any contingent emotion, in a critique of pure emotivism. Eliot is then a believer in the fusion of intellect and the senses, supporting a definition of poetry as ‘sensuous thought’, or as the thinking of the sense, already anticipated in the critical essay on Swinburne. The progress of the poet lies in self-sacrifice, in an extinction of personality, therefore in objectivity and the objectification of the poet himself. There is a chemical separation206 between the poet who suffers or simply feels 205 SE, 193–204. 206 Blake illustrates for Eliot the alchemic process of poetry. His poetry springs from an idea, a feeling, an image which is then developed ‘by accretion or expansion’, and therefore subject to a ‘prolonged manipulation’.

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and the poet who creates, and this is the transmutation of the original raw material. Poetry originates from a combination of various impulses, emotional and intellectual; it is independent of or sublimates the original concrete experience, which it objectifies. Impressions and experiences combine in a ‘medium’ that is no longer a personality. Poetry is an escape from emotion and personality. Every great poet has the intellect on the tip of his senses, and is capable of making sensation become a word and a word a sensation. From the analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet emerges the precept that emotion has to externalize itself into the objective correlative,207 which is what does not happens in that play, where there is an excess of emotion that has no correlation. The function of philosophy in poetry is to stay in the background, and where it comes to the foreground it is damaging, as happens in Blake though not in Dante. For Eliot, Dante and Lucretius are expositors of a pre-existent philosophy, for which they have found an equivalent in the vision (‘The aim of the poet is to have a vision’, and Dante has treated philosophy as ‘something perceived’: in him philosophy is an ingredient made organic to the poetry). Poetry can be philosophical, provided that poetry is at the service of philosophy, which it translates sensuously. The great poets have behind them a philosophy (more or less organic) which they have found, not one they make anew. 6. The majority of the essays published from The Sacred Wood onwards were collected in Selected Essays in 1932. When the volume was reprinted in 1951, it became an anthology of Eliot’s criticism, making ‘superfluous’ any other intervening volumes, according to Eliot himself. The volume has indeed become historically established as the authoritative summary of Eliot’s critical thought. This collection at first rounds off an ideal history of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, which it then extends to treat the nondramatic poetry of the time. The well-known essay on the Metaphysical poets recognizes the heterogeneity of their jumbled-up images, but argues it is a device that is found to a certain extent in all poetry, and that in some exponents of that school the language is simple and direct, finding then its 207 A famous term, which Eliot, however, took from a Dante scholar from Harvard (Praz 1967, 86–7). On the distant influence on Eliot of the Dante scholars at Harvard, see also PSL, 672.

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specificity in elements other than the tropes. The common denominator of that Metaphysical temperament, which was unfortunately subsequently lost, was the association of sensibility, the direct and sensuous apprehension of emotion.208 Yet this is an integral feature of this literature, derived from the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama that preceded it. The following dissociation of sensibility is imputed to Milton and Dryden.209 A 1962 essay on Herbert was to belatedly fill in a gap, even if it is an admiring though contradictory one, since it starts atypically for Eliot with a reconstruction of the poet’s own times, his life and his vicissitudes as a country priest, tormented by his stifled ambitions. By then Eliot had acquired a marked interest for religious writers, preachers and apologists. The essay on Pascal (1931), also one with a protracted biographical slant, is very different in its turn from that by Pater. As Eliot himself admits in the essay on Arnold and Pater, he sees in the French mystic and mathematician a practical spirit, focused on the world and unwilling to withdraw from it. For Eliot, Pascal’s antidote had been Montaigne, whom he had set out to dethrone and demolish, but by whom he ended up being infected. In other words, Eliot stresses the doubt that always assails the believer. By the end of the essay, the reader understands the reason for Eliot’s interest in this figure, since Pascal offers a therapy for an age of disorder, futility and insignificance. Baudelaire too had been read in 1930 as a ‘striving’ religious poet, a poet of blasphemy and Satanism which reveal the existence of the tormented believer behind them. About halfway through the volume emerges a pleasantly discursive and therefore less technical essay on Dante, overflowing with very relevant issues for Eliot’s theory of poetry. The starting point is that Dante can be read and enjoyed even with an imperfect understanding of what his Italian says, which means that he is a poet easy to read. On the whole it is not obscurity, abstruseness, or difficulty for their own sake that make poetry great. From this derives Dante’s stature as universal and immediate poet, also given how close his Italian is to medieval Latin. His language did not 208 Praz 1967, 189, fishes out the source of this other famous critical concept, coined by the editor of Crashaw’s poetry, 1873 edition. 209 As Brooks 1987, 37–8, points out, ‘dissociation of sensibility’ is also a term taken from Remy de Gourmont, and it goes back to Schelling and Stopford Brooke.

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have the opacity and particularity of a passage in other idioms; Dante the European, international and supranational poet (a weak argument, given his intense partisanship) wins over Shakespeare, who is seen as parochial even. Dante sums up for Eliot elements of tradition, community and integration in the unified cultural context of European culture before its fragmentation; in Dante, the reader breathes this sense of cohesion and belonging. He is packed with meaning, dense and yet transparent, and has a poetic lucidity all his own; as Victorian medievalists knew, he reflects a cultural homogeneity that was fractured with the Reformation. This nostalgia was possibly the one felt at least by Carlyle and Hopkins. If Dante was perspicuous he owed it to the method of writing poetry that was prevalent in his time, allegory, of which Eliot was not critical but which he approved as a poetic method expressing itself with neat and distinct images. Eliot then agrees with all those before him, both Romantics and Victorians, who had argued that Dante had been gifted with a ‘visual imagination’, especially active in the phantasmagoria of the Inferno. This essay in fact imitates, retraces and slightly updates the previous discussions of Dante by Coleridge, Carlyle, Macaulay, since it flows into a well-worn comparison between Dante and Shakespeare, the classic outcome of which is that while Shakespeare is broader Dante is deeper in understanding and capable of describing the abysses of degradation, exaltation and ecstasy.210 According to Eliot, Dante is best understood retroactively than proactively, best read by knowing the whole and modifying the interpretation in the light of the individual parts: a poet who can be enjoyed purely through a ‘poetic assent’, rather than a philosophical one.211 7. At this point I must briefly correct once and for all the assessment or impression that Eliot had a radically critical and negative opinion of

210 See my own ‘Alcune considerazioni sul ritrattismo letterario’, in Comparatistica, VIII (1997), 17–26. 211 Praz 1962 (but written in 1937) corrects Eliot and cleverly shows that many of Eliot’s assertions had been inherited from Pound; furthermore, Praz argues that imitating Dante (one of the most imitable poets for Eliot) has not always produced results as good as Eliot would have us believe. On the difference in treatment of the motif of Rossetti’s ‘blessed damozel’, see Praz’s equally clever observations (354–6).

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Hopkins. Eliot had read and assimilated Hopkins, as hinted in Selected Essays,212 where in writing about religious poetry Eliot defines it as a poetry of limited scope and focused only on that theme. There the definition of ‘minor’ (not necessarily a denigrating one) is only tentatively and not clearly assigned to Hopkins. Another echo of Eliot’s contact with Hopkins may be seen in On Poetry and Poets, when Eliot identifies the existence of a group of avant-garde poets who are ‘ahead of their times’ – in other words, an elite of writers a generation ahead of the passive public. It is also quite telling that when Eliot writes about the music of poetry, which he finds in its closeness to spoken language, he should cite Hopkins,213 even if he finds that in Hopkins this rapprochement of poetry to speech is never fully realized. Further, one of the three voices of poetry, the first one, is that of the ‘poet talking with himself ’,214 even though here Eliot is drawing fully on the ideas of Gottfried Benn. Hopkins’s name appears almost every time Eliot writes on John Donne, under the sign of a minor poetry understood in the positive sense of a religious poetry that is fully contained in that sphere. The essay on Herbert mentioned above has only one explicit mention of Hopkins, as the next ‘poetic genius to devote himself entirely to God’, though the argument in favour of Herbert may be implicitly extended to Hopkins.215 212 213 214 215

SE, 390–1. OPP, 33. OPP, 101 Bush (HAP, 32–5) acrobatically argues that Eliot kept his appreciation for Hopkins below the radar to mask the latter’s profound influence on him. However, drawing from Eliot’s unpublished letters, lectures and essays held in Cambridge, he highlights an ambiguous attitude and a changing opinion along the lines of the development of Eliot’s poetics and religious belief. Bush in fact starts by revealing that Eliot authorized other poets in his circle (Auden was among them) to publish essays in praise of Hopkins in his magazines. After The Waste Land, Bush adds, there came a moment when Eliot became more attentive to the possible combinations between personal style and ‘an exuberant orchestration’, even if in the essays from the 1930s Eliot had a tendency to equate Milton and Hopkins as guilty of the vice of poetic rhetoric. On the difference between ‘devout’ and religious poetry on the one hand, and Christian poetry on the other, Bush underscores that Eliot’s own ‘Ash-Wednesday’ and Four Quartets could be criticized as being ‘devout’, ‘doctrinaire’ or ‘theological’. Eliot’s surprising, almost total palinode, where Hopkins is called ‘if not the most gifted,

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§ 104. T. S. Eliot XIII: Other works of criticism The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933) collected for the most part lectures which trace a rather pedestrian and dry history of English criticism from the beginnings to the most recent developments. Already announced in the essay on Dante, one of the cornerstones or premises of this history is that in order to appreciate religious or philosophical poetry it is not necessary to share that philosophy or that creed. Except that Eliot then equivocates when he admits to feeling repelled by Shelley for his ‘petty’ ideas. Another collection of speeches and lectures, On Poetry and Poets (1957) adopts a more discursive, approachable and genial style. In reality it is the style of a later Eliot, who is now looking upon an earlier way of making poetry, drama and criticism from afar, from a point of detachment and a separate visual location. He also takes stock of himself, explains and judges himself too, as if he were a different poet and a different critic, different from that distant self, and one who disdainfully reviews his work as a whole. As a critic he does not just sum up his oeuvre, he refashions it and becomes a personal critic, rather than the impersonal one he used to be, indulging in remembrance and laying down rules and heuristic critical axioms based upon his own reading experience. Where he used to be a critic with an immaterial voice, guarded, not situated, outside of time and space, without inflections, he now has a recognizable voice, dabbling in witticisms and humour. The outcome is a less sound and absolute volume, but a more enjoyable one. Eliot has the courage to go beyond his confines, and deals with poets mildly or definitely out of his usual scope: Virgil but not only, Byron, Goethe too. A couple of these essays have become the subject of bitter controversy among critics of the critic, because in the first of them Eliot aims to give an apparently heuristic motivation to his purely visceral dislike of Milton, whom he considers to have had a pernicious influence on the eighteenth century, because of the distortion of poetic language and because of Milton’s tendency to wish it modelled on classical languages, especially Latin. Incapable of writing a poetry of ‘visual imagination’ because he was blind (a biographical explanation of poetry!), Milton directed all perhaps the greatest poet of his generation’, is uncovered by Bush in a lecture of 1939, which Eliot never delivered.

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his attention to sound effects. Eliot’s piece is set up like a typical Victorian evaluative essay and is based on a comparison; also far from new is the theory of a sound-oriented, musical Milton, not visual like Dante, and of a Milton who unable to focus accurately tended to draw Michelangelesque forms.216 This bold attack from 1936 was attenuated and qualified in 1947, but not substantially changed. There Eliot reiterated that Milton is not a classic, but an eccentric who departed from ‘common speech’ and the direct communication of meaning. The more humane gift of the late essayist is also that of retractions of rash youthful judgements. Eliot realized that he had been writing for too long to be able to aspire to or boast of absolute coherence. He does not stubbornly stick to his past judgements but revises them. A case in point of this magic trick is his amendment of the rather forceful critique he had previously directed at Goethe, delivered in an occasional lecture given in Goethe’s homeland, Germany. This too is in its setting an old Victorian essay that hinges on comparing Goethe with Shakespeare and Dante under the common denominator of wisdom. This lecture has an affinity with another one, ‘The Unity of European Culture’, also delivered on German soil, in which Eliot argues that the ductility of English poetry derives from the mixture of European languages – and music and rhythms – that are blended in it. The essay proceeds with clever but predictable comments about the fruitful reciprocity of links between European national literatures; but in a vortex-like or concentric progression in scale Eliot includes any system (which thus becomes a subsystem) into larger systems. He celebrates the fraternity of intellect and intellectuals at a time of deep political divisions in Europe between the wars. ‘To Criticize the Critic’ is a 1961 piece which provides a legacy overview. It distinguishes the professional critic, the critic with taste, the academic and theoretician, the moralist critic, and the poet-critic, the category to which Eliot himself belongs. As a critic, Eliot divided his own career into three periods: that of The Egoist, of Babbitt and of Pound; that of the Times Literary Supplement and the Athenaeum, after 1918; the third one, of lectures.

216 A comparison that becomes daring when extended to Milton and Joyce, both musical writers and blind or semi-blind musicians (OPP, 143; see § 129.5 n. 22 too).

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§ 105. T. S. Eliot XIV: The English patient Reprinted without variations or additions in 1951, Selected Essays is nevertheless a strange volume, since its most recent essay is from 1936, fifteen years earlier than the date of publication, years during which Eliot had certainly not been inactive as an essayist. In any case, it reproduces essays from as early as the mid-1920s (rather wrought ones, far from nimble) which are placed in a central position in the volume, as well as essays testifying to his interest in religious questions and religious literature, in a well-circumscribed and defined sense. These essays, on preachers belonging to the most devout and pious branch of the Anglican Church in the seventeenth century, not coincidentally pave the way for a firm stance against secularism, which Eliot sees growing and taking over the modern world. From an essayist operating in the field of pure literature and philology, Eliot becomes another essayist, who studies with commitment how literature relates to society, a sociological essayist, then. In ‘Lancelot Andrewes’, from 1926, he celebrates the great churchman and at the same time the excellent preacher, ipso facto the writer, the stylist of ordinary language, clear and precise, far from Donne’s sensationalism. Yet this re-evocation is the starting point of a reflection on the historical role, and therefore also the present one, of the Church of England and of any Christian church. Andrewes’s volume of private devotions is full of expressions and aphorisms which Eliot keeps well in mind, such as the one that often recurs of ‘a word within a word, unable to utter a word’. Andrewes was the prose-writer capable of de-personalization, of finding an object adequate to his feelings. Reading then the essay on the obscure Archbishop Bramhall (1927), who tried to stem the chaos threatening the Church under Cromwell, the reader starts to suspect if not to perceive with certainty that Eliot is tracing an embryonic analogy between the times of James I and Charles I and his own, where 1649 figures more or less as an equivalent of the 1920s. Ideological chaos, dispersion and secularism threatened the integrity of the social and political order. Appropriately enough, Andrewes was a medieval man living in the wrong era, while Eliot argued that the Renaissance had imposed upon history ‘chaotic movements’.217 Around that time, it was Hobbes who

217 SE, 352, 355.

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struck the major blow in favour of materialism and against free will. Eliot in fact heard echoes of Hobbes in the philosophy and psychology of his own day, in which morality becomes ‘expediency’ (Russell, for instance). Bramhall is a screen: then as now, it was necessary to find a middle way. Eliot no longer speaks behind a veil, calling his times a period of ‘debility’ and of apathy, which favour fascism or communism. The absolute primacy of materialist ends and the absence of ethical criteria – the indifference to ethics – make Hobbes into a precursor of present-day communisms. There is then almost no trace of literary preoccupations in ‘Thoughts after Lambeth’, a commentary on a kind of ecumenical council of the Anglican Church held in 1931. It is a very bitter examination, optimistic only in its foundations, of the role of the Church in the modern world. Eliot analyses the report of this congress of Anglican bishops without really agreeing with it, but he starts with a panoramic overview of contemporary English thought and culture, atheistic, agnostic, and secular. He then takes off into a more specific tirade against Russell, Huxley and the new relativist, hedonistic, anarchist philosophies. A very polemical target is also the new orthodoxy of secular humanism, as in Murry, Foerster and Babbitt.218 At the end, Eliot sees on the horizon in 1930 an unbridgeable division between Christians and non-Christians, a moment in which the Church had to close ranks against the world (as it had done in pagan times). The times are always corrupt and the world is forging a sophisticated civilization, but not a Christian one. Dark ages are coming, and the world must be saved from suicide. These reflections will reverberate in Four Quartets. The essay ‘Religion and Literature’ (1935) has then a militant as well as an aesthetic theme, or to put it in other words, it turns the whole of Eliot’s previous criticism on its head and with it the axiom of an absolute primacy of the literary tout court. It immediately states that in eras such as the contemporary one, where relativism and moral fluidity are dominant, pure literary 218 In the essay ‘The Humanism of Irving Babbitt’ (1928), this humanism is opposed to the Christian heritage. Any religion is for Eliot distinct and not simply a humanism in that it ‘recognises the dependence of the human on the divine’ and accepts the supernatural and not just the natural. These arguments against Babbitt and Foerster are reiterated in all the religious essays in the volume.

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criticism must refer to ethical and theological standards. Eliot speaks, in semiotic terms, of a ‘common code’, which can more or less be consonant with the background of religion. He identifies three categories of religious literature, of which the second is devout poetry, considered to be minor poetry and not especially praised. Here Hopkins, on whom Eliot is always silent, comes to the foreground for once. The meaning of ‘devout’ in this context is that of a poetry that addresses only a part of the range of the important questions that are specific to it. The third category is that of propagandist, apologetic poetry. Eliot’s argument is to indicate the disappearance of the religious novelist in a broad and unconscious sense, and the violent separation between world and religion. The target he aims at towards the end is the glut of inferior publications, and of contemporary writers absorbed by the masses without any critical sense, and of a literature that has overshadowed the supernatural. 2. Eliot’s late social thought took shape in three further volumes, or rather brief pamphlets which represent the most conservative if not reactionary writing that could be imagined. They embody one of the last English utopias to date. It is disappointing to note that the utopian idea of stopping history or reversing it, of bending it to ancient ideals, in practice to push it back towards Christian unity, has become a failure and a real mirage already as soon as it was announced. This specific utopia confirms the destiny of all utopias, from Plato to Campanella, from More to Butler, none of which has come true, and all of which have come unstuck the very day or hour after their announcement. In the 2010s Eliot’s proposal is sadly disproved, like all proposals of a re-Christianized society, and, as Eliot thought possible, of a Church and religion that are not passive but active, or at the very least interventionist, if not at the price of an irreparable collapse of western civilization (Eliot was writing shortly before the Second World War). Society today is in effect even more deChristianized, secular, pagan than Eliot foresaw in 1938; and popes must smile, or pretend to smile, and console the remaining Christians that the world is Christian still. 3. After Strange Gods (1934), the first of those three pamphlets, marks the start of Eliot’s apocalyptic thinking with a series of lectures on the corruption of the world which can nevertheless be stopped. Eliot’s social

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thought is gifted with a clear-eyed pessimism that does not give in to panic. His writing is brief and cryptic, far from crystal-clear in its development, offering a reliable X-ray of those who were considered at the time to be writers in currency: Mansfield, Lawrence, Joyce, Hopkins; the only one missing is Woolf. Those writers demonstrated directly or indirectly Eliot’s thesis: that in a world without God, in which God is not even attacked any longer, but is considered dead – in an age ‘worm-eaten with Liberalism’ – blasphemy is welcome. Hence the subtitle, ‘a primer of modern heresy’. In another sense, After Strange Gods is an apologia of intolerance, and a form of retribution on behalf of orthodoxy. They are also defensive lectures which attempt to clarify and even perhaps modify Eliot’s previous, excessively loud profession of rock-like and unmovable orthodoxy – polemical, passionate, militant lectures, therefore the most free-wheeling of Eliot’s writing, but also the least well organized in terms of arguments. It in fact starts with a paean for the lost purity of local traditions in America owing to the mixing up of races and ethnicities, and the loss of ancient traditions, ideals and customs. But tradition is here an oxymoron, as it means the cult for the past, even though it is not mummified, and therefore also coursing with life, susceptible of transformation and update. Such a sense of traditions can only blossom in homogeneous communities which are not racially mixed, in fact homogeneous even in religion, making the presence of free-thinking Jews ‘undesirable’. ‘And a spirit of excessive tolerance is to be deprecated’. From here, Eliot’s crusade against theological liberalism takes off, comparing it to the waves of biblical new criticism in the nineteenth century. The argument is interrupted by a tirade against the forced originality of contemporary literature and in favour of heresy as a partial truth; but the sequel clarifies that Eliot wants to defend the opposite, that is, orthodoxy. In the second lecture, Eliot specifies that it is good to be orthodox but not to excess, that a little heresy is needed, and that tradition is not ossification, even though it should not stray into anarchy and a cult of the self and of individualism. To build a society, or rebuild it, this moral sense must be found again, together with a dependence on sanctions and intolerance and rigidity, especially the negation of artistic elitism. Yeats too had coined an individual and artificial religion of poetry, though more recently he had ditched its ‘paraphernalia’. In Eliot’s clearest and least allusive of his many

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reticent statements,219 not even Hopkins is recognized as an orthodox and traditional poet. The provocations and paradoxes on blasphemy in the third lecture distinctly echo Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus in casting blasphemy as ‘a symptom that the soul is still alive’. But now the target is contemporary fiction, looking for ‘aggrandisement’ (a Hopkins term, in itself ) of the writers’ personality – a Luciferian tendency. 4. The foundational axiom of The Idea of a Christian Society (1940) had already been announced in ‘The Unity of European Culture’: the belief (also shared by Benedetto Croce) that European culture developed in the midst of Christianity, though always in a respectful accommodation of diversity. This new 1940 volume consists of a rather fluid organization of different materials, with four related discourses, notes and glosses, as well as a closing piece, originally a radio broadcast. This hybrid nature makes it at times similar to a miniature twentieth-century Fors Clavigera. In other words, it no longer looks like the writing of a former poet, but it has all the labouring, embellishments, formulas and jargon of a sociological essay. It does follow a logical order, but the procedure is not enlivened by any image, any insight or any spark. The theme is that of the cyclical threat, even of the nightmare, of secularization in universal history, subject to Eliot’s personal and contingent variations. All utopians believe that their own secularization, the one relative to their age, is the ne plus ultra. But history teaches us that this process cannot be stopped and is unpredictable in its leaps over limits previously thought as unassailable. All utopians have had the inner, unshakeable conviction that their dream would be realized in a very near future. Eliot is sharp when he concedes that his own might be ‘one more amateur sketch of an abstract and impractical future’ – that is, he reveals his fears that it might be. Europe and England must become Christian again, or they face extinction. Without going too far back, this was an idea shared by Arnold, Ruskin, Hopkins, Novalis, that of a homogeneous Europe, a solid ideological organism hinging on Christianity. The novelty of Eliot’s thought is that it is ideologically even more backward than Morris’s or Arnold’s enlightened positions, and even 219 See above, § 103.7.

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more dogmatic and rigid than Ruskin’s. Eliot is closer to Dante when he emphasizes and invokes not an individual Christianity, not even a directly political one, but a communal faith. His argument develops from a survey of contemporary society, which on the basis of generic and anodyne sociological concepts he dubs a society dedicated to the unbridled pursuit of profit. But for Eliot contemporary society has reached the last ‘negative’, stage in this descent, even though it can still be rescued. The concepts of democracy and liberalism are ambiguous and to be rejected, in that they are not naturally applicable to Christian society. Democracy can be labelled as ‘financial oligarchy’ (as Orwell also feared),220 while liberalism throws away religious concepts and principles which it wrongly considers obsolete, until it nearly makes a tabula rasa and leaves nothing more to uphold. However, Eliot refrains from straying into a political argument, he simply writes about ideas, mentality, attitudes, and his traditional culture. Soon the choice presents itself between ‘a pagan, and necessarily stunted culture’ and a ‘religious, and necessarily imperfect’ one. The dilemma was either to perish or regenerate. The whole building must be thought anew, it cannot be ‘mediaeval in form’, as Hopkins, Morris and Ruskin had wished. It is the link between Church and State that needs to be strengthened again, rather than dividing their competences; the two entities must therefore merge, as in Dante’s times. Not wishing to appear too churchy and sanctimonious, Eliot tries at all costs to find the Christianity of the State not in the holiness of statesmen, but, tortuously, in answering and caring for ‘the general ethos of the people they have to govern’. In a very weak argument, he sets out the ideal of a politician who conforms to a general faith shared by all the layers of the population, even if it is a matter of traditions and unconscious customs. The minimal religious unit of the parish as centre, cradle and place where the ancient traditions were preserved had fallen apart; no longer Coleridge’s ‘clerisy’, but the community of Christians, teachers and pedagogues must baptize the new generations. A Christian society will be built again on the basis of religious unity, making it necessary for England to become

220 Volume 8, § 28.3 and 29.1.

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solidly Anglican again, rallying around the ‘established’ Church.221 The verb ‘must’ recurs with obsessive and stifling frequency, as is typical of utopias. Eliot outlines and prefigures an imagined society structured like a feudal pyramid, where the relationship between State and Church has returned to perfect harmony and wholesomeness, while also retaining a certain flexibility in order to guard against the always looming danger of ossification and petrification. By the end, the credibility of the utopia is undermined by the awareness that the society of saints does not exist in this world, only that of fallible beings committed to reach an aim which is always ‘a sordid travesty of what human society should be’. 5. Even Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948, reprinted 1962) does not excel in lightness or natural lucidity, but plods rather laboriously. The volume bears the marks of the aftermath of the Second World War, and therefore shares a family resemblance with the fictional and non-fictional dystopias published in Britain at the time, with Orwell the first name on one’s lips.222 Eliot’s first premise is that any given culture has always manifested itself in relation to a given religion, a reversible relation of mutual implication. The corollaries are that any given culture is transmitted through organic structures, and this makes necessary the existence of social classes; that any culture can be disassembled into local subcultures, and each religion

221 This is said disagreeing with Arnold, than whom Eliot is a much more immovable conservative thinker. 222 The volume was in fact reviewed by Orwell (OCE, vol. IV, 514–17), who discusses its thesis while proclaiming his doubts on whether a society should or could rest on a hierarchy of classes. Nevertheless, Orwell shares Eliot’s critique of the elites, and even goes beyond Eliot in arguing that elites reproduce themselves through the leaders’ choices of their own successors. For Orwell, all institutions governed by hereditary succession are fragile, like the Catholic Church or the Communist Party; their leaders should therefore be elected by all the layers of society and according to their merits. Orwell sees and reads contradictions between an immutable and rigid class system on the one hand and the recognition of a vertical mobility on the other. Unlike Eliot, he cares about the problem of the subsistence of a future society based on class divisions; and he believes in the incontrovertible existence of progress in human affairs, and that men can hope to counter the ‘defeatism’ he always imputes to Eliot.

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is diversified in each culture. It is also a damper on the thirst of the new for its own sake: Eliot’s dystopian humour leads him to say that those who invoke it do not know that the new is often worse than the old (and this is one of the first Orwell-like hints). Only a ‘permanent standard’ can decide upon improvements and what effectively counts as such, since in any case deterioration is evident to all. Neither can ‘improvement’ come from above, as if from a deus ex machina. Eliot tends to rely on the culture of a society rather than of a group or an individual, where culture is the sum of various talents. Among the components of society there must be connections and a close implication. Eliot cannot deny the existence of a cultural evolution, or more exactly of dissociation within a culture. Religion cements each successive culture, and culture and religion are synonymous, but Eliot carefully abstains from any talk about identification and relation, preferring instead the term ‘framework’. The kind of thinker Eliot is can be gauged from the statement that ‘the schisms of the seventeenth century, and the subsequent multiplication of sects’ must be understood as ‘the disintegration of European culture’, a nostalgic notion that owes as much to Hopkins as it does to Novalis. The transformation from the primitive stage onwards has imposed a division in classes, and each class has taken upon itself a cultural task of different level, according to natural talents and predispositions; and this division has beneficial impacts on the whole spectrum of society. Eliot is a restorationist in this emphasis too, with his argument developing broadly along the lines of Hopkins’s Liverpool sermons.223 Within each class there will be groups with particular predispositions, but the idea of a classless society is dismissed.224 When Eliot points to Russia as a country ‘ruled by an élite’, the setting becomes the same as that of Orwell’s discussions of the post-war world order. The idea of society promulgated by Eliot is that of a hierarchical pyramidal construction, at the top of which sits the aristocracy. Culture filters through this pyramid, with the difference that the highest point marks a form of culture that is more specialized and more self-aware. 223 Volume 6, § 202.6. 224 It is here that Eliot disagrees with Karl Mannheim on the creation of elites, which Eliot rejects because they fracture culture and are formed by individuals who rise to the top within a free competitive system.

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As Hopkins had also argued, the difference lies in the higher or lower grade of each individual’s responsibility towards the ‘commonwealth’. In the third speech, Eliot salvages regional cultures but without engaging with the attendant political-economic problems; they must be individual, but without breaking up from the so-called ‘mother’ culture (and it is also a gesture in support of the cohesion of the United Kingdom). There is reciprocal support between satellite and ‘mother’ cultures;225 the image is that of a heart or lungs which absorb and redistribute lymph and blood. It is also the image of a network of connections in both directions, at increasing levels and scope until it reaches the whole of Europe. When Eliot speaks of ‘world culture’ as an unreachable aim, he is prefiguring globalization. With an unswerving attention to the advantages of attrition between cultures or sub-cultures, or satellite and ‘mother’ cultures, and always alert to the danger of ossifying uniformity, Eliot follows in Arnold’s footsteps in the chapter on religious diversity as nourishment for culture, deploying one of his predecessor’s own categories, ‘petrification’.226 Only a Christian faith without any Protestant impurities can escape sclerosis. With reference to the unifying historical value of Catholicism, and to the Protestant sub-culture, Eliot asserts once more that the main organism suffers from the loss, just as the sub-culture does. A sub-culture becomes a culture in its own right in its separate territory, from which other sub-cultures spring.227 As for colonialism, the alternatives are those either of mere vigilance, leaving everything unchanged, or of a complete cultural assimilation. It is yet another incursion into the actuality of 1948, but Eliot is not a supporter of the dismantling of the Empire, seeing the danger of a forced but gradual assimilation of the underdeveloped populations to the west, leaving them to suffer the consequences set up for them by the anti-imperialists themselves. On Russian imperialism, Eliot agrees with Orwell, for instance about Russia’s clever pretence of giving independence to satellite states; politically, he is aware of Orwell’s theory of the three blocs. 225 On the necessary survival of Welsh literature in Welsh, Eliot espouses ideas that are quite literally lifted from Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature. 226 See Volume 4, § 149.7 n. 50, where I explain the genesis of the term in Emerson. 227 In a fine and perceptive passage Eliot sees Protestantism as feeding itself on the culture of Catholicism, a Catholicism that is then healthy and lively.

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Finally, as an educator, he is opposed to mass culture, to the ‘headlong rush to educate everybody’, which lowers standards and destroys ‘ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanised caravans’. § 106. Bunting Eliot did not have actual heirs or followers; his very loose, effectively transient ‘school’ comprises just two figures, one in the field of poetry, the other in that of verse drama. Basil Bunting (1900–1985) became known in English poetry only in 1966. His career is contradictory in that he had a real impact on the macrotext of national poetry at the ripe old age of sixty-six. At that date he carried out a retroactive modification of the poetic tradition of the twentieth century – to adopt and follow Eliot’s evolutionary and historiographical mechanism illustrated in ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’ – by redeploying forms, poetics and stylistic features that had been progressive and avant-garde in their time, but had become obsolete in Bunting’s own.1 Bunting was seventeen years old when ‘Prufrock’ was published, twenty-two when The Waste Land came out – that is to say, he was not much younger than Eliot and Pound. But his first poems, influenced by his early reading of those poets, did not find an audience; and for a number of reasons he did not get a hearing until that much later date. In 1966 he was then twenty to thirty years older than the poets debuting at the time. The cradle of his spiritual formation was the climate of the early twentieth century, with Decadentism in dissolution and a dissonant, uncoordinated jumble of movements and their derivatives looking for an identity. Bunting fumbled because he did not want or could not associate himself with any of those movements: Georgian poetry, Imagism, Futurism, Vorticism, surrealism, New Apocalyptics, and others still. They all filed past him in the first twenty to thirty years of the century, and Bunting took inspiration from them all (with the exception of Georgian poetry), but he did not subscribe to any. He is first of all the protagonist of a minor myth. His restlessness, his marginalization, his movements always on the edge of bohemia or

1

Because of this delay and these revivals, Bunting is often discussed in parallel with David Jones.

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even right inside it, his condition of traveller and spiritual pilgrim without fixed abode: all this makes him into a kind of Lawrence’s Aaron, a type in eternal collision with conventional society. Born into a Quaker family, in a village close to Newcastle (roots which he never forgot), he could have been chronologically a young war poet, risking or pursuing the fate of the poet ‘killed in action’; in fact he was arrested in 1918 as a conscientious objector and imprisoned. Traumatized by the experience, in 1920 he moved to bohemian London, where Nina Hamnett introduced him to Pound’s work with a copy of Homage to Sextus Propertius she lent him. A listless traveller in Northern Europe, an indifferent student of economics, he became Pound’s friend in 1923, earning him the dedication to Guide to Kulchur (1938) with Louis Zukofsky, both ‘strugglers in the desert’ for Pound. He moved to Rapallo from 1931 to 1933 and published in Poetry thanks to Pound, as well as in other magazines and while working as music critic for the newspapers. During the Second World War Bunting was a diplomatic civil servant in Persia and ended up staying on in the Teheran Embassy after the war until he was expelled.2 His figure jars with that of the poet sitting at his desk, of the poet librarian, of the poet as university professor, and most of all with that of the integrated poet. His is an ancient icon, that of the wandering poet, Homeric even as ‘he set[s] down words as a musician pricks his score, not to be read in silence, but to trace in the air a pattern of sound that may sometimes […] be pleasing’. His obscure and difficult anachronism had to wait for the post-war years, when the trends that had furiously overtaken each other earlier on finally petered out, and for the return of time and ease that made possible a recovery and catching up. Bunting’s main work, Briggflatts, was defined by Cyril Connolly (and not just by him) as the greatest single long poem after Eliot’s Four Quartets, demonstrating Connolly’s usually astute assessment of limitations. Some critics celebrate Bunting for the blunt and fearless concreteness of his nononsense style, which is secondary and complementary; others overlook him, but while he is not usually included in general surveys, his absence from histories and overviews of English Modernism is bewildering.3 2 3

While in Persia he wrote The Spoils, a free digression partly inspired by the famous quatrains of Khayyám-FitzGerald. As in BRM.

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2. Bunting’s poetic oeuvre was collected, organized and left for posterity by Bunting himself in 1968. It is a late example of distilled, measured, rarefied poetry, as if it had been poured through an exacting filter, and marked by the effort and rigour of composition. In a career lasting sixty years, then, Bunting delivered or maybe secreted a little book of barely 150 pages, which would be further reduced if translations were to be excluded.4 A half-page preface gives an inkling of the compression of his prose writing in its four extremely short paragraphs, and announces the leanness characterizing the poetry. With a dry aphorism, Bunting indirectly speaks of a poetry – his own – always in the making and in a fluid state, similar to molten metal, a poetry that is buried in a tomb when bound in a complete edition. The following, well-defined readings of the collection are idiosyncratic; the reader notices primarily the musical sub-titles, almost attempting to create and explore an analogy between poetry and music, after and with Eliot, or the frequent allusions to and citations of musicians. The aim seems to be to test the specificity of poetic language and at the same time to offer a modern version of the old theme of the interdependence of the arts, of the symbiotic relationship between words, images and sounds. The poet’s own disposition and structuring of the corpus is nearly unique; it suggests an alternative criterion of organization to the principle of unified evolution and of an organic chronological and thematic progress in a poetic career. Since Bunting is the most musical and musically competent of twentieth-century English poets, we can apply to this collection the metaphor of a stereophonic composition. As we shall see, it organizes in succession a number of synchronic or parallel routes within one single and unique experience. Written after coming out of prison, Villon (1925) is a phantasmagoria which at first sight imitates the first Cantos by Pound but also precedes (or influenced?) the Pisan section that was the product of Pound’s own imprisonment twenty years later. They are laments, embroideries, memories or associations of the poet in prison, who only sees death and its mastery of the universe, and the whole of history ending up in its abyss (but the prisoner also believes himself at the same time to be feasting on ‘the carrion’, as in Hopkins’s banquet, whose ‘terrible sonnets’ are also are evoked). The abrupt, sudden shift from the 4

Collected Poems was reissued in 1970 and 1978. Complete Poems, ed. R. Caddel, Oxford 1994, extends Bunting’s canon to nearly 200 pages.

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vein of remembrance and document to that of invective or private allusion also recalls Pound. The diction of the later poems increasingly belongs to the poetic of fragments, citations and mnemonic scraps, with quotations in Italian that recall Eliot and artificial or bogus epigraphs (though playful, and as an end in themselves), and titles in other languages. ‘Aus dem Zweiten Reich’ is the story of the Prufrock-like awkwardness of an Englishman in German territory, with the distant reverberation of Auden in Berlin in the late 1920s, in that it is a hallucinatory kaleidoscope of the attractions of the city’s seedy side. It is also an alternative version of Isherwood’s Berlin sketches, closer in fact, for the powerful imaginative flashes, to Spender’s contemporaneous poem ‘Vienna’, with the nightmare of the looming war filtered and distanced through the mass of citations and the Dantesque metaphors of slime, of mud, of the Styx, or more precisely of a hellish pit where the creatures steeped in it rummage and kick about. When Bunting identifies mere sex, and not agape, as the mark of the decade, this sounds as an extension of the interwar ‘desolation’, just as at other times he sets his poems in brothels where girls sell their virginity and men copulate among lascivious moves, dances and enticements. Briggflatts5 (dated 1965) was furnished with notes like The Waste Land, though Bunting restricted himself to giving the meaning of botanical or zoological terms, or of other dialect words from Northumberland, his native area to which the poem is really dedicated. It is the most extreme experiment in his work, in that it is the most rhapsodic, alternating as it does splintered records of natural scenery with the actions and vicissitudes of opaque human presences, like shadows in the background, and with poignant yet vivid childhood memories compiled in sparing, sober and refined words, and finally hints of a local legend linked to an ancient king, perhaps inspiring Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns. It is a work in chiaroscuro, with patches of colour and sudden transitions, which can be thought of as having been drawn as a visual palette, but mapped onto the rhythm of a poetic stream of consciousness. Musically, it is a feast of monosyllables and of tongue-twisting monosyllabic patterns, a true danse buccale; there are plenty of ‘word-paintings’ but of a type that is entirely distinct from the impressionist, nineteenth-century kind, by and large made up of distinct and precise verbal comments. Sea and sky pictures 5

The name of the Quaker meetinghouse which Bunting had attended as a child.

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and scenery are drawn to show (though without much persuasive force) the divergence between the eternal, starred sky and the feebleness of the human condition, as well as the inevitable theme of transience. The musical analogy6 lies in a leitmotif structure – the search for roots, the inscription of the subject into language, the fixation on child sexuality – which, when traced back and reduced to a logical discourse, dwindles into simplistic or contorted formulas.7 3. The poems of the second half of the oeuvre are not, it must be said, of the same calibre and texture as Briggflatts. Bunting goes back to the beginning and reads and writes an alternative or parallel poetic journey which takes shape in the two books of ‘odes’ (another parody of genres) and from a terminus a quo in 1924, odes that are lean and short poems of an Imagist8 or avant-garde mould, not too far at times from Edith Sitwell’s manner, or even frank, rough, brutal, foul-mouthed, and indecent, or surreal and rude anecdotes, of a bawdy, absurd or extravagant humour (as in number thirteen, about the tiger that has just arrived and is admired as a rarity). In his earlier poetry the reader walked along an arduous mountainous path; with the later, one walks the flatlands in the company of a witty, vigorous poetry of direct communication, though in a series of highly varied episodes still without a context. Undoubtedly the occasional, refined and cruel satires of the bourgeoisie, and the jottings of the homeless poet in this later or parallel Bunting, could find a much wider public than the exploits of the elite poet. The second series of odes extends into the 1960s, stressing the retro flavour of Imagism and the revival of an outmoded fashion. Bunting’s is an eclectic poetic oeuvre, close to the spirit of Sterne, with an appendix of translations from various authors, from Lucretius and Catullus to Firdausi, and even an extract from Machiavelli, but in rhythmic poetry.9

6 7 8 9

It is still to be shown if and in what way the poem is modelled on Domenico Scarlatti’s sonata L 33 (or K 87), as Bunting claimed. See for instance the paraphrases made by N. Corcoran, English Poetry since 1940, London 1993, 34–5. As in the following couplet, no. 27 of the first series: ‘On highest summits dawn comes soonest./ (But that is not the time to give over loving.)’, where Bunting’s passion for the Latin poetry of Horace and Catullus is clearly perceptible. Another writer who falls within the post-Pound and neo-Modernist wave and tradition is Christopher Middleton (1926–2015), eclectic author of intellectual, difficult

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§ 107. Christopher Fry1 First performed in 1948, Christopher Fry’s (1907–2005) most famous play, The Lady’s Not For Burning, marked the beginning of what was hailed for a decade as a neo-Elizabethan age, as well as the birth of a new glorious epoch for English verse drama, which had by then become a backwater of academic and elitist exercises since Swinburne, Bridges and Phillips. Audiences of all intellectual levels and social classes acclaimed the success of this unexpected revival as a new form of cultured drama that was also at the same time popular and therefore universal, achieving the most basic aesthetic objectives of instruction and entertainment. It was a flash in the pan. The leading critics of twentieth-century English drama agreed in finding utopian and impossible the idea of reviving verse drama, a path that could not be followed, especially when the verse was not integrated and enmeshed within the content, but simply worked as a decoration. Rather than being in Shakespeare’s wake, Fry follows Marlowe, Chapman and the euphuists. In the early 1950s he found himself ousted and dismissed, purely on the grounds of taste, popularity and longevity in the repertoire, from two sides, that of Beckett and the theatre of the absurd, and that of the angry young men on the other. He nevertheless did not lose heart but continued to work for over forty years, with more sporadic plays and as a film scriptwriter (even in Hollywood, where – it is hard to believe – he actually scripted Ben Hur) as well as producing refined and skilful adaptations of French plays. His meteoric rise already concealed at the outset a misunderstanding, and rested on shaky foundations.2 Fry seems another figure out of place and time, who chooses his

1

2

and artificial poetry scarcely less demanding than that of Hill or Empson, and made more complex by constant and esoteric references to structuralist, poststructuralist and semiotic theory. From Bristol, the son of an architect who later became an Anglican lay preacher, Fry took his grandmother’s name because he was erroneously thought he descended from the nineteenth-century Quaker reformer Elizabeth Fry. He later embraced the Quaker faith, becoming a pacifist and a conscientious objector. He was a schoolmaster until 1932, when he founded his own theatrical company; he claimed to have discovered his dramatic vocation just like Browning, by seeing a great actor perform, in Fry’s case Gielgud in Richard II. WAR, 136. AAA, 20, argues on the other hand that the box office success enjoyed by Fry was helped by the presence of actors of the calibre and prestige of Gielgud,

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subjects with an erratic arbitrariness and an anomalous erudition that recall Browning’s long, unstageworthy dramatic scenes,3 or the Wilde of A Florentine Tragedy.4 However, his esoteric plots, seemingly the material for a dusty librarian, offer illustrations of vaguely religious or macabre themes, or of cases of fanaticism. As in Browning, human love is deemed a mirror of its divine counterpart, with a rejection of mysticism and of the sublimation of the body. Closing his eyes to the spectacles of his day, Fry created artificial webs that are enjoyable for their own sake, despite the intrinsic poverty of the plots. Through this parodic crafting and his labour of pastiche and revision, Fry may carve out a niche all of his own in the history of dramatic Modernism. 2. The 1930s and 1940s were an age marked by political engagement, a tendency with which Fry’s drama was soon destined to clash, being entirely resolved in the display of refined and recherché images. His work was unanimously considered to be an elegant exhibitionism, high-end entertainment, or ‘verbal pyrotechnics’. He perfectly fitted in that private canon of Mannerism and neo-Baroque (but without its ‘algolagnic’ associations) that Mario Praz prized. Praz gave one of his ineffable and elusive diagnoses5 when he defined Fry’s work a typical example of English arts leaning towards the linear, to ‘boneless’ architectures rather than to plasticity, to the point that in Fry concrete and human events rest on emptiness and immateriality. For Praz, Fry belonged to neo-mannerist art; his images were derived, he claimed, from ‘an arsenal of possible mannerist combinations’. It came natural to Praz to affiliate Fry’s practice to that of a Dylan Thomas, another neo-mannerist, seven years younger than Fry, who not only looked back to John Donne but also availed himself not of an ‘arsenal’ but of a ‘host’ of images which he kept reusing with a similar

3 4 5

Laurence Olivier and Edith Evans in the cast, and traces an overall picture of the verse drama of the times, whose playwrights (like MacNeice) ended up in radio once their popularity waned. The play A Phoenix Too Frequent (1946) was for instance developed from a suggestion in Petronius, centred on a widow who wants to be buried in her husband’s tomb. The dialogic cleverness recalls Wilde for MEF, 214. PSL, 723.

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satisfaction (that sound prevails over meaning is also true for Thomas6). Praz concluded his half page by confessing the impression that Fry’s theatre reminded him of Italo Calvino and of the lightness of a dragonfly or a butterfly; if this is so I would mention Firbank too, another tightrope walker who created delightful, immaterial puppets, without body or weight. In a slightly richer discussion of Fry,7 Praz deployed the adjective ‘metaphysical’ and remarked upon the discursive gap between pedestrian speech and rare images, finding echoes of Laforgue. For this and other reasons, Fry is often (though preposterously) spoken of in tandem with T. S. Eliot, who reproached Fry for being ‘too poetic’.8 Fry’s inclusion in Modernism was then officially sanctioned by Melchiori, who classified and studied Fry as a twentieth-century ‘tightrope walker’, while testifying to the resonance and credit enjoyed by the playwright at the time through the amount of space he dedicated to him.9 3. The aim shared by all the modern playwrights who choose verse, Eliot first, is to universalize the feelings and emotions, and therefore the solemnizing and the ‘heightening’ of everyday language. Fry proudly used verse drama because he was avowedly against the realism and naturalism prevailing at the time, and against the superficial values and apparent certainties which that type of theatre propped up. His critique of the loss of the sacred in contemporary civilization echoes Eliot’s; Fry’s first protagonist is the fanatic fighting to re-sacralize history, and his theme the divine or

6

7 8 9

The virtuosic A Sleep of Prisoners (1951) is in parts an astonishing phantasmagoria about four soldiers imprisoned in a church having dreams of episodes from the Bible that intersect, interfere and overlap with each other. It is a play for evocative and dreamy voices, in some ways similar to the dreamers’ voices in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, which is just slightly later. The asphyxiating reclusion and forced inaction produce on the other hand hallucinations and mirages reminiscent of Eliot: ‘Can we be living, or only / Seem to be?’. CLA, vol. I, 34. Eliot lived to appreciate Curtmantle (1962), one of Fry’s last works, a historical play dedicated to the well-known conflict between King Henry and Archbishop Becket. See ‘Christopher Fry: teatro-pop’, and ‘Il teatro barocco’ in MEF, 201–28, and 303–39, especially 319–25, both accurately distinguishing between Fry’s euphuist, mannerist moment reminiscent of Donne, and the sedate Baroque closer to Crashaw.

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prophetic vocation, not without a touch of ironic, submerged scepticism about the folly of the enterprise and the Wagnerian nature of a similar ‘reine Tor’. The Boy With A Cart (1938) dramatizes the legendary life of St Cuthman of Steyning in Sussex, called by God to found a church, after having carried his mother around on his cart, without a home or goods, looking for the site to build the church on the basis of a divine sign. This very short work alternates rhyming choruses with unrhymed verse in various metres10 and prose dialogue within an admirably limpid, flowing and readable sequence of stylizations and symmetries, as in a liturgical and symbolic action, until the first stone of the church is laid. The brilliance, freshness and balance of this first work will remain unparalleled. Fry’s language is undoubtedly a formalized dramatic language, and we can hear in it the ‘poetic’, evocative and even rhetorical polish; yet the dialogues are witty, sparkling with unusual yet apt lexical choices, and even in the prose parts the writing is rhythmic, alliterative, musical. Fry usually excels in the choral parts, which take on the traditional function of recapping, connecting and filling in the gaps. Here the beautiful choruses recall Eliot, but especially Hopkins’s ‘Echoes’, though they do not imitate these antecedents in a passive way. The only precedent for the construction of a play ‘on the road’, set among rustics, shepherds and farmers, is Synge, with his already poetically inflected prose. And verse suits perfectly a plot that goes against the prevailing trends, a mad and remote utopia. The willed parodic humour of the play rests at every turn on the astonishment Cuthman provokes in his fellow countrymen when he, like Jesus, leaves behind the congregation to answer God’s call, uttering delirious Pentecostal speeches; like Mary at Canaan, his mother is also initially incredulous. In The Firstborn (1948)11 the divine call is that of Moses who becomes aware of his mission, rejects the Pharaoh’s temptation and prepares the exodus. Owing to an excess

10 11

A sustained analysis of Fry’s prosody has never been attempted and is even missing from the lengthy monograph by D. Stanford, Christopher Fry: An Appreciation, London and New York 1951. The title points to a counterpart to Moses in the figure of young Rameses, naïve and lethargic dreamer who embodies one of the horns of Moses’ dilemma, since his mission entails the death of Rameses, the heir to the throne, whom he loves.

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of action the play is less intense, less lyrical and poetic than the previous one; conversely, the reader gets a first taste of Fry’s proper and proverbial dramatic style, which gives to each character long speeches characterized by a richly figurative and adorned language.12 4. The Lady’s Not for Burning (1948) breaks new boundaries. Set in a version of the Middle Ages that is virtual, recreated, often macaronic, it presents events that are at the outer limit of the probable and where the speeches are extravagant and fantastic, nearly contests of conceptual eloquence, duels of paradoxes, hyperboles or impertinence. As the curtain rises, Thomas Mendip is on the scene asking to be hanged because of the world’s corruption and looking for the mayor, who in a typical quip asks him if he has filled the required forms. From here on, especially in Act I, the play crackles with spectacular verbal duels that are the source of pure humour though even coming close to actual, roaring laughter. The plotting is pleasing and captivates through the exaggerated or unexpected quip, the constant bragging, the witticisms and misunderstandings; it quickly becomes a verbal barrage, rattled off for the sheer pleasure of its comical and fantastic potential. Act II is a lengthy and dense contest swollen with images between the resolute Thomas and the witch Jennet who will be burned alive. Here the play develops into a proper burlesque of incidental scenes wrapped up in a mantle of sumptuous, euphuist rhetoric; figurative language rises to delirious heights with no relation whatsoever to the meaning, and there for the sake of pure decoration. On the plane of the argument, love is presented as an accident that only allows a suspension of judgement upon an ontologically corrupt world; love is therefore reluctantly and almost regretfully embraced by the woman condemned to the gallows. Venus Observed (1950) is also a watershed, as it abandons historical drama and enters into the contemporary era; it also overturns the illusionism of the earlier plays into a parodic alienation, and abandons the figure of the

12

As an example, see the line ‘Our lives are being lived into our lives’. This often rich and sophisticated linguistic indiscipline is accentuated by neologisms and words that are either hapax or of rare occurrence, such as ‘feculent’ and ‘coitous’ (not in the OED).

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fanatical reformer of the world.13 The anecdotes are equally extravagant and improbable, grotesque and fantastic, surreal even. An eccentric, widowed duke has constructed an observatory in his manor and watches Venus, the star of erotic love; when the play opens, he asks his son to choose himself a mother from among three of the duke’s old flames, but the Venus of the old man, still palpitating with sensuality, is revealed in the young body of the agent’s daughter. The alienation effect comes from the fact that the plot is modern, contemporary in many details such as the telephone or the car, yet the characters speak with the eloquence and the blank-verse cadences, barely updated, of Elizabethans. The play is alive not because of the action, which is thin and slow, but, once again, because of the verbal flashes, of the changes in register, of the gap between the master’s tongue and the servants’ dialect and inflection, of the abundance of puns, of the showing off of Latin and English erudition reminiscent of Sterne – in short, of the empty chatter and undisciplined waffle, even of nonsense. Parody has thickened and gained ground, overtaking the modest interest of the action and overshadowing even the titillating theme of senile, priapic voyeurism, displaced onto the astronomer’s passion.14 § 108. Whiting After having fought in the war John Whiting (1917–1963) debuted in 1951, dividing critics and theatre-goers, with a dramatic fantasy in the wake of Fry’s verse drama, Saint’s Day, the story of a writer who feels himself persecuted by imaginary murderers and in a fit kills himself after causing carnage. It has the figurative exuberance and the lusciousness of Fry’s work, but pushed to levels of extreme incandescence and melodramatic delirium.

This figure will reappear, though, in One Thing More (1986), centred on the legendary Caedmon, a monk who, inspired by a divine revelation, suddenly takes up singing. 14 Of the remaining numerous, yet mediocre plays by Fry, The Dark Is Light Enough (1954) goes back a century and is set in Austria; it is the story of a deserter from the Hungarians whom a countess, a passionate defender of freedom, refuses to surrender to the soldiers who have come to arrest him. Fry appears out of his element here: the play focuses on stiflingly verbose dialogue rather than on pure diction, or witticisms and verbal exploits. 13

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The much soberer Marching Song (1954) offers the self-examination of a general who has refused to desecrate some children’s bodies with his tanks, bringing about with this noble gesture the defeat of his army; rather than committing suicide, he stoically faces up to his death sentence. Both plays, like Fry’s, are too exquisitely literary and not easily or immediately likable; their lack of theatrical flair condemned them to being soon forgotten. Whiting also adapted Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun (1961) for theatre, but with a damaging shift of the protagonist’s role from the possessed nun to the libertine priest. § 109. Lawrence* I: The messiah of phallic reawakening The innovative and in some respect revolutionary import of the work of David Herbert Lawrence (1885–1930), who contests with Joyce and 15

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence, ed. J. T. Boulton and W. Roberts, Cambridge, in progress since 1979 in over 40 vols, includes the author’s two volumes of criticism and reviews, Phoenix, ed. E. D. McDonald, London 1936, 1961 (vol. I), ed. W. Roberts and H. T. Moore, London 1968 (vol. II), and the 8 vols of letters, ed. J. T. Boulton, which replace earlier partial collections, among which Albatross, 2 vols, Leipzig, Paris and Bologna 1938, has a valuable introduction by A. Huxley.    Life. E. Nehls, D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, 3 vols, Madison, WI 1957–1959; E. Delavenay, D. H. Lawrence: The Man and his Work: The Formative Years, 1885–1919, Eng. trans., London 1972; H. T. Moore, The Priest of Love: A Life of D. H. Lawrence, London 1974; K. Sagar, The Life of D. H. Lawrence, London 1980; J. Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, London 2005. The Cambridge Biography consists of the following volumes: J. Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years, 1885–1912, Cambridge 1991, M. Kinkhead-Weekes, D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile, 1912–1922, Cambridge 1996, and D. Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game, 1922–1930, Cambridge 1998.    Criticism. J. M. Murry, D. H. Lawrence: Son of Woman, London 1931; H. Gregory, Pilgrim of the Apocalypse: A Critical Study of D. H. Lawrence, London 1934 (perceptive because impressionistic, but formulates hierarchies of value that are out of kilter); A. West, D. H. Lawrence, London 1950; F. R. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, London 1955 (cited here from the Harmondsworth 1978 edition; a hagiographic volume written in disagreement with T. S. Eliot, with questionable evaluations), and Thought, Words and Creativity: Art and Thought in D. H. Lawrence, London 1976; M. Spilka, The Love Ethic of D. H. Lawrence, Bloomington, IN and London 1955 and 1966; *

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more victoriously with Woolf the role of most representative British fiction writer of the 1910–1930 period, is not at the level of form. On this basis, he is not a Modernist, even if we can recognize in his work some traits and some authentic, though timid Modernist stirrings, which I shall try to highlight. His poetics was in fact spasmodically content-oriented: writing meant for him ‘facing new points of view’, liberating the reader from the automatism of the old ‘emotional furrow’, so that the novelist could be socially more beneficial than a saint or a scientist. His revolution rests G. Hough, The Dark Sun: A Study of D. H. Lawrence, London 1956, 1968, 1970; A. Beal, D. H. Lawrence, Edinburgh and London 1961, 1964, 1966; A D. H. Lawrence Miscellany, ed. H. T. Moore, London 1961; E. Vivas, D. H. Lawrence: The Failure and the Triumph of Art, London 1961; H. M. Daleski, The Forked Flame: A Study of D. H. Lawrence, London 1965; K. Sagar, The Art of D. H. Lawrence, Cambridge 1966, and D. H. Lawrence: Life into Art, Harmondsworth 1985; D. Cavitch, D. H. Lawrence and the New World, Oxford 1969; C. Clarke, River of Dissolution: D. H. Lawrence and English Romanticism, London 1969, and, as editor, D. H. Lawrence: ‘The Rainbow’ and ‘Women in Love’, London 1969 and Houndmills 1976; CRHE, ed. R. P. Draper, London 1970; F. Kermode, Lawrence, London 1973 and 1981 (a sober and honest assessment, centred on the notion of a successful compromise between doctrine and metaphysics on the one hand and ‘quickness’, pure narrative intensity on the other); A. Gomme, D. H. Lawrence: A Critical Study of the Major Novels and Other Writings, Brighton 1978; A. Niven, D. H. Lawrence: The Novels, Cambridge 1978, and D. H. Lawrence: The Writer and His Work, New York 1980; F. Gozzi, La narrativa del primo Lawrence, Pisa 1979; A. Burns, Nature and Culture in D. H. Lawrence, Totowa, NJ 1980; M. C. Dix, D. H. Lawrence and Women, Houndmills 1980; P. Hobsbaum, A Reader’s Guide to D. H. Lawrence, London 1981; G. Holderness, D. H. Lawrence: History, Ideology and Fiction, Dublin 1982; S. Melani, David H. Lawrence, Firenze 1982; A. Burgess, Flame Into Being: The Life and Work of D. H. Lawrence, London 1985 (‘neither a complete biography nor a scholarly study’, just the delightful record of the ‘impact’ of the writer on a similar temperament [18]); S. Cenni, La visione interrotta, Pisa 1985; M. Black, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Fiction: A Commentary, Houndmills 1986 and 1990, and Lawrence’s England: The Major Fiction, 1913–1920, Houndmills 2001; D. H. Lawrence, ed. H. Bloom, New York 1986; C. Nixon, Lawrence’s Leadership Politics and the Turn Against Women, Berkeley, CA 1986; D. J. Schneider, The Consciousness of D. H. Lawrence: An Intellectual Biography, Lawrence 1986; O. De Zordo, The Parable of Transition: A Study on D. H. Lawrence and Modernism, Pisa 1987; M. J. Lockwood, A Study of the Poems of D. H. Lawrence, Basingstoke 1987; C. Milton, Lawrence and Nietzsche: A Study in Influence, Aberdeen

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on a new concept of man and of human personality, which, had it been understood and implemented, could have released effects of universal import and changed contemporary civilization. His fiction is therefore not a vertiginous and rarefied escalation in form and technique, not the frugal cultivation of amused objectivity, not the pursuit of Flaubert’s inevitability; rather it is a monumental succession of novels rising out of the urgent, immediate and uncontainable passion for expression, all of them written in just forty-four years of life and barely twenty of actual production, limited by wartime paralysis and forced to almost five years of silence. If there is a mot juste, Lawrence certainly does not aspire by deliberate choice to writing the ‘juste’ novel. He does not sculpt a life’s work. Joyce wrote just one masterpiece that universally identifies him; Lawrence’s masterpiece is his overall production, in which no single work is exempt from some dross. His aesthetics is programmatically that of the rough and unfinished. There was no need for Huxley’s1 testimony to know that Lawrence did not correct or revise what he poured out; almost all of his novels were written



1987; S. Albertazzi, Introduzione a Lawrence, Bari 1988; J. Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: A Literary Life, Houndmills 1989; J. Humma, Metaphor and Meaning in D. H. Lawrence’s Later Novels, Columbia, MO and London 1990 (skilfully focused on the weaving of images and symbols); T. Pinkney, D. H. Lawrence, Hemel Hempstead 1990; D. H. Lawrence cent’anni dopo. Nuove prospettive della critica lawrenciana, ed. C. Comellini and V. Fortunati, Bologna 1991; B. Mensch, D. H. Lawrence and the Authoritarian Personality, Houndmills 1991; C. L. Ross, ‘Women in Love’: A Novel of Mythic Realism, Boston, MA 1991; M. Bell, D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being, Cambridge 1992; D. H. Lawrence, ed. P. Widdowson, London and New York 1992; A. Fernihough, D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology, Oxford 1993, and, as editor, The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence, Cambridge 2001; R. E. Montgomery, The Visionary D. H. Lawrence: Beyond Philosophy and Art, Cambridge 1994; D. H. Lawrence: ‘The Rainbow’ and ‘Women in Love’, ed. R. Beynon, Cambridge 1997; L. R. Williams, Lawrence, Plymouth 1997; T. R. Wright, D. H. Lawrence and the Bible, Cambridge 2000; Il corpo, la fiamma, il desiderio. D. H. Lawrence e la sfida di ‘Lady Chatterley’, ed. S. Cenni and N. Ceramella, Firenze 2010; J. Beer, D. H. Lawrence: Nature, Narrative, Art, Identity, Basingstoke 2014; D. H. Lawrence: New Cultural Perspectives and Cultural Translation, ed. S. de Filippis, Newcastle 2016.

1

Huxley 1938, 22–3.

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twice or more, but those are not successive revisions: when Lawrence was unsatisfied with one version, he started re-writing it from scratch. Each word had to spring as if anew from the dark source that erupted from him, and give the scorching effect of immediacy. 2. Lawrence’s apprenticeship in narrative took place within the context of an updated imitation of the models that just preceded him, those of late English Romanticism, of aestheticism and Decadentism. In his first novel, reminiscent of Hardy, Lawrence observes a group of ‘modern’ youths, recently educated country-dwellers whose loves go unrequited, like Hardy’s characters, and who have picked up the restlessness of London and European culture, almost pretending to live in an Arcadian oasis right next to the coalmine. A miner’s son, the provincial Lawrence had single-handedly mastered a cultural baggage which came de rigueur to the ‘University wits’. His alter egos are infatuated with Burne-Jones and Beardsley; Lawrence himself may have entertained the idea of becoming an Impressionist painter at some point. The novelty in his work is the precocious interweaving of literature and music, of Wagner’s music specifically, which is a route to annihilation. The first and particularly the second of Lawrence’s novels therefore focus on the frustration of the secretly aspirant amateur artist; they depict the impossibility of aesthetic dreams in an antagonistic milieu. Lawrence’s old master is Pater, but with a glimpse of Nietzsche too, since aesthetic life is ‘Beyond Good and Evil’. His mature phase takes off with Sons and Lovers, but it is an involution. Focused on the overpowering awakening of eroticism in a still aesthetic soul, the novel was and still is extremely popular, fundamentally because it is very traditionally a nineteenth-century design, structured into three parts like the threedeckers and narrating the happy and tragic vicissitudes of an industrious provincial family. The gestation of The Rainbow and Women in Love, on the other hand, was presented by Lawrence himself as a determined attempt at formal innovation, in line with the most current proposals of the European avant-gardes. In a letter,2 Lawrence claimed to have radically overthrown conventional patterns with those novels, and to have revolutionized

2

5 June 1914.

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narrative technique. He argued he had rejected rounded characterization, an ordered plot, the omniscient narrator, in favour of a mimetic rendering of the turmoil of feelings and impulses. He also claimed to have destroyed ‘the old stable ego of character’ in order to recover the original, metamorphic one, as well as to have discovered the ‘allotropic’ states in which it becomes substance: ‘Diamond, what! This is carbon’. In another letter of the same time, Lawrence confesses to an attraction for and curiosity about the Futurists. In practice this was a passing technical interest, translated into minimal variations, for instance only into the enactment of the principle of simultaneity, or the transfer of terms from an appropriate to an inappropriate context. In any case, Lawrence was diametrically opposed to the Futurist enthusiasm for machines and technology. With The Rainbow and Women in Love, the latter published in 1920, Lawrence in fact continued to write novels that were far less experimental and pioneering than could have been expected. He seems to me closest to Modernism in other ways, for instance with the essayistic novel and the novel of reportage such as Kangaroo and partly The Plumed Serpent, as well as in the minor, though undeniably less successful attempts in the realm of parody. The Lost Girl and some of the short stories are written in a chatty, loquacious falsetto, in the voice of the exuberant narrator from fifty and even 100 years earlier, with the content that seems suddenly to lose its immediacy, the inspiration to communicate and persuade subdued to make room for monkeying around, ironies, humour and whimsy. The fictional poetics of Kangaroo, third-but-last of Lawrence’s novels, is that of the ‘conversation piece’: ‘I hope, dear reader, you like plenty of conversation in a novel: it makes it so much lighter and brisker’. Such is the decline or perhaps the deviation of a narrator whose first steps take place within the context of the objectivity of the Victorian serial. 3. There are many ways to describe and define the real revolution of the novel performed by Lawrence, though some are superficial, and some decisively, grossly mistaken, even if largely accepted by conventional wisdom. Any attempt in this direction must emerge from a sequential reading capable of keeping track of authentic changes of course in Lawrence’s thought, and even of simple momentary moods. Principal among these oscillations is that for Lawrence – the high priest of the Pan-like and reviving fusion of

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mind and body in the couple – the preservation of existential autonomy, the inviolability of the person, the ontological individuality matter perhaps more. Another divergence is concerned with the role of women, partners who are in principle sought and pursued by men, but who are also perceived as destructive and a threat to that inviolability, to the point of even cursing sex. Yet another lies in the surprising concept that heterosexual love is incomplete and needs to be integrated with or substituted by its homosexual version. The most popular mistake is to consider Lawrence the prophet of promiscuous and unfettered sex, while he was in fact sworn enemy of libertine Don Juans. In the defence of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, his ‘overturned Puritanism’3 finds support in his call for the re-sacralizing of eros, and with the rejection of sex as pastime, a position reached in history from the opposite extreme – Platonic-Christian, but also Oriental, Buddhist – of the negation of eros itself. Fundamentally, the mature Lawrence speaks consistently of the ways in which eros can be channelled into a kind of fulfilment, but also of how this objective cannot be attained easily at the present time. What matters to him is the end, not the means. Rereading him across his whole oeuvre, I conclude that Lawrence is in some ways anti-Lawrence, that the thesis of the saving value of sex is at the very least demonstrated indirectly, by showing the difficulty of achieving it, or its ephemeral and evanescent duration,4 even its extinction in the institution of marriage with children; and that some of his key novels put forth in fact the opposite thesis of the need for sexual abstinence. Lawrence’s heroes are pushed then to an inexhaustible migration which is real as well as ideal, spiritual, and metaphysical, from umbilical connection with the native, 3 4

PSL, 702. Lawrence formulated and reformulated his theory of the irrepressible drive towards fusion and of the equally inexorable pull towards solitude an impressive number of times. A synthetic and very effective account can be found in the first pages of the essay on Poe (§ 122.1): the two blood-systems come together in sensual love, and ‘almost fuse’ but ‘never quite’. There is always ‘the finest imaginable wall between the two blood-waves’. The essay goes on to say that every organism is open to union but metaphysically returns to a state of isolation. In fact, this state of isolation is that of the Holy Ghost, the rupture of which makes us want to love and seek union ‘without resistance’.

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rural mining district in search of something above and beyond the self. Only in extremis, with Lady Chatterley’s Lover, does Lawrence celebrate without hesitations the achievement of the reviving potential of eros, and he also dreams of it as a regeneration ad extra. In Sons and Lovers the sexual drive erupts for the first time at the pubertal phase in the development of the protagonist. The veiled, uterine, Oedipal love for the mother must be imperiously overcome by heterosexual love. But no spiritual-bodily unison is celebrated; neither is there a hymn to the liberating power of sex, nor is the rapture of satisfied sensuality after repression celebrated. There is instead a sense of nausea, of emptiness, of blundering, of displacement after the union of the bodies is consummated. A recurring obligatory scene in Lawrence’s novels is the gushing forth of sexual desire, the irrepressible discharge of lust, the electricity that vibrates between man and woman as they undertake the path towards the unknown, as Lawrence puts it. But this scene is inexorably followed by ‘revulsion’, a word that denotes an undertow, the violent passage from excitement to disgust and the total absence of desire. Man and woman pine for physical-spiritual fusion, but this is metaphysically impossible. In and after Women in Love Lawrence voices a bitter and sharp scepticism about the possibility of coordinating impulse and intellect in sexual intercourse. The quartet of principal characters in Women in Love faces at the end a complete absence of prospects, and hopes for, proclaims and enacts the destruction of sex. Furthermore, Lawrence shows the drift of eros in family life, the cell of society, and therefore the dimming of sex, isolating and monadic, into a power that curtails and constrains. The institution of couple relationship is for Lawrence stuck in a blind alley: virility has disappeared and woman is nostalgic for a strong man, flaming from below, who will subjugate her; she then ‘bullies’5 man, from the male perspective. In Aaron’s Rod Lawrence returns to the lucid fight to negate creation and procreation, and life is only lived in order for the world to end. Its portrayal of asphyxiating maternal love lets the reader intuit, even without the novel’s confirming it, the emotional damage suffered by Lawrence. Middleton Murry was the first to suspect, formulate or 5

This diagnostic term often recurring in Lawrence is defined in Fantasia of the Unconscious as ‘a desire to superimpose [one’s] own will upon another person’.

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even verify Lawrence’s sexual dysfunction, which contemporary witnesses classified as a ‘sexual failure’ with Frieda. From this inner wound derive at least partially those unmissable scenes in the novels, starting with Sons and Lovers, in which two men look at each other, are attracted to each other, become friends for life, and strike a ‘blood pact’. 4. The label of ‘apocalyptic’ suits Lawrence more than most. He felt he was living in a civilization that had passively accepted the slow dominance of mind and spirit over the body, and he thought it necessary to overturn St Paul and a religion, or more simply a secular ethics, founded on this mistaken hierarchy. He therefore advocated and hoped for an equal but opposite regeneration to that of orthodox Christianity, first of all by appropriating traditionally religious terms, though re-deployed in an analogical sense after having scraped off their incrustations.6 Lawrence’s new rhetoric is often built up from the hypnotic repetition of the same concept through a series of short sentences that expand on it and its variations. His style is prolix, redundant, slack at times; his expression blurred, metaphorical but imprecise; the conceptual message exposed in imaginative formulations full of suggestions, which, however, once deciphered, make little sense. The search for the ultimate truth about the self, even the arrival of the spiritual journey at its goal, usually take place in thick obscurity: this darkness opposed to the light belongs to the magmatic crucible of the obscure creation of something out of nothing; ‘dark’ is also the typical epithet for the phallus. Lawrence chooses obscurity, therefore darkness, as his first principle, instead of the light of intellectual enlightenment. Literature as sermon and invective has many predecessors. Just a little earlier, Lawrence’s kin is to be found among the aesthetes championing workers’ rights – Carlyle, Ruskin,7 Morris – and raging against machines and industrialization. From Blake he derives the notion that expression is founded on imagination and vision, but especially the attack on intellect and abstraction. They both speak of the need for awakening the blood and criticize cerebralism. Yeats too was inspired by Blake and wanted to call back to life a posse of 6 7

In this sense, see the play on the double meanings of ‘dying’ and ‘rising again’ in the short story ‘The Man Who Died’ (§ 122.6) On this relationship see the perceptive observations by West 1950, 144–5.

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autochthonous deities that, once rejuvenated, would have replaced the aged ones. Yeats’s old Irish mythological deities correspond roughly to the Etruscan ones for Central Italy or those of the Aztecs for Mexico. Lawrence is less geometric and less systematic, though he too believed in the advent of a new cycle, one expressly of the flesh. His apocalypticism, however, is decisively of the active kind. He was repeatedly involved in the attempt to found a regenerative sect at the margins of the world, to be called Rananim, to which he tried to recruit first of all his friends. He presumed to be a psychologist, physiologist, historian, anthropologist, philosopher of history, all such roles revolving around the phallic pivot, since a phallic revolution would have triggered, through a chain reaction, a global sociopolitical regeneration.8 The difference between Lawrence’s conception of the Apocalypse and that of his predecessors is that his is not political but moral or mostly sexual. Political apocalypse becomes in fact the target most stubbornly and bitterly struck by Lawrence in his last novels. Hence his apolitical stance, or his strange, unusual equidistance (negative and negating) from fascism and Bolshevism.9 In any event, a revolution should have had as its objective not the acquisition of more money but its loss – a communistic revolution, though not in a Stalinist or Leninist sense. Faced with the choice between bourgeoisie and Bolshevism, Lawrence chose 8

9

A cursory survey establishes that Lawrence’s global ideology is a mixture of ‘scandalous’ progressivism and equally astonishing reactionary conservatism. He was antiscience, with a tendency to admit that some phenomena exist and are perceived, but (as with Ruskin) remain inexplicable. He shunned a priori formulations where everything fits. He was a stubborn defender of the inalienable individuality and distinctiveness of human beings, with even an early formulation of genetic DNA; human life and human beings are formed with this code in the ante-natal cycle. Today Lawrence would be classified as one of the most inflexible anti-abortionists. He was not ashamed of admitting the existence of the soul, even if he attributed to it extravagant metempsychotic wanderings. He was in favour of allowing real freedom to the child’s early development, condemning the imposition of intellectual knowledge from the outside. In his two essays on childhood (§ 122.2) an indecisive and apprehensive Lawrence describes the moment when the umbilical cord securing the connection mother-infant is and must be fatefully cut. Still contentious today is the sterile question (as for Carlyle) first raised by Bertrand Russell, about Lawrence’s underlying or explicit fascism.

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bourgeoisie, even if his most satirical and fiery poems are attacks against the bourgeois way of life. His revolution aimed at an ethical communism, at a frugal life for everyone, despite the fact that he was very distant from and indeed inimical to evangelical and Franciscan notions of poverty.10 5. Lawrence’s sexual-mystical rhetoric was almost immediately rejected and even mocked by the English public. It was soon, though, indulgently championed by the intelligentsia and academia, with Lawrence being chosen as the narrator of modern times, English to the core, untainted by foreign fashions even though he had travelled the world. The trajectory of his reception starts from 1932 with Aldous Huxley’s clarifying intervention (followed by Murry), which saw in Lawrence a self-crucifying Christ-figure, permanently blocked from truly loving a woman by the castrating love of his mother. Huxley therefore argued that Lawrence had transferred his virility onto fictional male alter egos with whom he imagined homosexual relationships, while casting them as initiates in sacrificial rites where women figured as the victims. The cosmopolitan wing was headed by Eliot, whose critique of Lawrence is found in After Strange Gods. There he theorized in the English novelist the ‘heretic’, creator of an unrefined art that is too humourlessly self-involved, and which centres exclusively on sex and makes humanity regress to the ‘coitus of the protoplasm’.11 In 1955, Leavis passionately absolved Lawrence of Eliot’s criticism, while distorting him into a sane, unsentimental, reverent novelist, religious in a non-denominational way in a book that squares and smoothes Lawrence out by pruning all his most daring, scandalous, sacrilegious traits. It is indisputable that Leavis’s is the most influential interpretation and the one that continues to be the reference point even for those who disagree with it. By the late 1950s a contrast of positions and interpretations had become established between those who defended the pure form of Joyce and Woolf, and those focused on content, or even the defenders of an 10 In the poem ‘Poverty’, Lawrence criticizes St Francis as a ‘rich and spoiled young man’ who mythologized Lady Poverty, who is in fact a ‘hard old hag’. 11 But MEF, 133–50, demonstrates the influence that some of Lawrence’s prose passages had on Eliot, and that the two writers deployed the same recurring symbols, though not with the same meaning.

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untainted art of an eminently English tradition. The last among the latter was Raymond Williams, who hailed Lawrence as the classic self-taught writer springing from the organic community of the Midlands, the fulcrum of a trinity of pure English writers with Emily Brontë and Hardy. Orwell never criticized Lawrence very deeply, though with his temperament of renegade aesthete he preferred Joyce, while predictably and repeatedly blaming Lawrence for not having lifted a finger to change the existing political order. The year 1960 marks an epochal shift in English letters and in Lawrence’s reputation, as the beginning of the revival which led to his apogee: it was the year of the lifting of the ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover, occurring at the time of the paperback revolution and of the heyday of Penguin Books (200,000 copies were sold in a short time). The peak of Lawrence’s reputation coincided with the explosion of the hippies’ and the beatniks’ ideology, of 1968 Paris, of permissiveness and sexual liberation for which Lawrence had been (as we saw) far from a precursor. ‘Free cinema’ also discovered in him a highly cinematic novelist. This glorification, this triumphant return to the Pantheon of the Great Tradition was abruptly halted by feminism; it could not have been otherwise, given the ‘stable’ archaic and patriarchal notion of women’s roles in Lawrence’s paradigmatic couples when seen from a feminist perspective. Despite all this, Lawrence has belatedly become and still remains today the novelist of the British intelligentsia, secular, tolerant and liberal, with an updated ethics that integrates sexuality and sacralizes an eros clearly and necessarily rooted in the married couple and the nuclear family. § 110. Lawrence II: The early novels In the form of an unadorned narrative in the first person, impressionistic, allusive and sparing with the backstory and other information, The White Peacock12 (1911) studies a community of youths belonging to two 12

The novel is explicitly autobiographical or only slightly camouflaged. The narrator, Cyril Beardsall, shares his surname with Lawrence’s mother, a schoolteacher of Puritan faith who passed on to her five children an intense and unhealthy aspiration to social and cultural advancement. Lawrence’s sister Ada is featured in Lettie, Cyril’s sister. Lawrence turns Cyril’s mother into a dissatisfied woman and her marriage to

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families, who love, dream, suffer, repress, frustrate and tame themselves in Lawrence’s native rural district of rivers, springs, lakes and ponds, damp in autumn but glowing in summer. Symbolic or mysterious scenes follow each other in purple cameos, like the rabbit-hunt, the domestic animals caught in traps, the coronations with berries. There are also more realistic scenes that attempt mild humour or grotesque or caricature effects (the deaf old lady who keeps her pension where the internal narrator’s father dies; the short scene of the disinfection of a wound in a Dickensian hut where confusion reigns and the mother looks after lots of unruly imps). Fulfilled love affairs and frustrations, secret dramas, suffused passions bubbling under the surface in a milieu dripping with archaic archetypes – all this is reminiscent of Hardy’s intense and atemporal passions in Wessex. In Lawrence, however, the proximity of the coal mine sharpens the immutable markers of a peripheral England that has been swallowed by encroaching industrialization. Yet the passions brooding within these rural youths are the same as those of George Eliot’s or Gaskell’s protagonists, not just Hardy’s. Many of the chores are reported with the same loving, technical detail, as are their hobbies, dancing or the peeling of apples. The first objective correlative are the grey fish splashing about in the pond; the second scene introduces the farmhouse typical of Gaskell’s novels, with the patriarchal father, the big kitchen, the fireplace, the rest after working in the fields. But not all the sons work in the fields; as a sign of the times, the daughters are all affected teachers who show off with a few French words. The dialogue among these young people is even excessively literary, with some of them quoting Latin expressions and making forced mythological comparisons; in order to be ‘modern’ they comment on Russian and French authors like Chekhov and Maupassant and on the Pre-Raphaelite vogue. George feels his strong, physical passion for Lettie revive when he sees a reproduction of Beardsley’s illustrations for Wilde’s Salome. In the long run, the novel drags because of the limited scope and uneventful plot. The monotony a good-for-nothing a failure. The father’s corpse is identified by the son and mother who pretend to be distant relatives out of shame. The novel was printed at lightning speed so that Lawrence’s dying mother could read it; it is however already in part an exorcism of maternal love.

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is occasionally lifted by the subplot of Annable the gamekeeper, a role which will later become crucial for Lawrence.13 Annable turns up to tell his story and to rail against the rot of modern society, the diabolic attraction of women, the convention of marriage, the fear of the body. But this character, who looks like the god Pan and belongs to a different era, is for the moment just a two-dimensional addition. The title originates from Annable’s forced simile between a vain and Luciferian woman and a white peacock, white in the sense of innocent or not entirely guilty. 2. In the Saxtons’ farmhouse, a rough and natural George is racked by an impossible passion for Cyril’s sister, Lettie, who like Eliot’s Rosamond can play the piano and sing, a provincial femme fatale who beside George is leading on Leslie too, the better educated and wealthy coalmine owner. Lettie is also a less intense version of Catherine Earnshaw, with George a passionate, physically strong and active Heathcliff, the instinctive, unthinking, powerful man, while Leslie is like Linton, standing for reason, balance, and a lack of strength. Lettie hovers from one lover to the other: one part of her yearns for George, while the other tells her to go for Leslie, to whom she gets engaged, even if George (strangely put up to it by Lettie’s brother) encourages her not to give him up. Lettie is melancholic, unhappy, indecisive, much more neurotic and morbid than Brontë’s Catherine; she is therefore much closer to Hardy’s Eustacia. As in Hardy, love dissolves as soon as the flower is picked, that is maybe after Lettie has had sex with Leslie: it is the decline of their affair, as Lettie eventually tells Leslie they have better split up. But when love gives way to marriage and becomes lasting, it is no longer a duet but a duel. The third part is the dispersal of the group, with its members becoming adults, leaving their rural epicentre, 13

With some grounds, it has been suggested that this role might have been derived from Kingsley’s Tregarva in Yeast (Volume 5, § 152.1), just as in Lady Chatterley Mellors’s wife, Bertha, will have some of the satanic and destructive attraction of Latimer’s wife, also named Bertha, in George Eliot’s ‘The Lifted Veil’ (Volume 5, §§ 196–197, especially 197.2). Lawrence even ambiguously and obscurely tests the male homosexual friendship which will bind together Birkin and Gerald in Women in Love, in the scene of the swim in the lake, when George and Cyril undertake that strange symbolic ritual in Lawrence which is the massage and the rubbing of the bodies, as we shall see later.

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starting families and degenerating or becoming prosaic. None of the couples is happy. The group follows the mirage of an aesthetic life until they realize that the magic circle has dissolved and the dream is an impossible one. The narrative voice remarks that George’s wife has ‘grimy and rough’ nails; the girls lose the attraction they had when unmarried once they become mothers, get fat and let themselves go. The exit from an aesthetic life is a recurring paradigm in the literature of the early twentieth century: Orwell too will take it on, offering a committed and militant life as its salutary outcome. In London George witnesses first-hand the Orwellian vision of the homeless sleeping under the bridges, gets inflamed by politics and follows socialist rallies with a fake infatuation. For George socialism is fanciful and civic engagement does not redeem him; for Orwell the prospect will be more optimistic, with the sole exception of Flory,14 who could be George’s older brother. 3. The Trespasser (1912) was written by Lawrence while convalescing from a tuberculosis attack that forced him to give up his position as primary school teacher in Croydon, where he had got to know his colleague Helen Corke. The novel is inspired by the true story of Helen’s relationship with a musician who committed suicide. Siegmund, who plays the violin in an orchestra and is therefore a musical artist, will become Aaron the flute player in the eponymous novel. The novel also anticipates the adultery of Lady Chatterley, even though there both lovers will be married, and Siegmund is a man while Connie a woman. The fundamental difference is that while in the first case the union or fusion fails, in the second the physical-spiritual contact is exceptionally and miraculously complete, and crowned with success. If, as with Gerald Crich, the man harbours a passion that is both destructive and self-destructive, the woman remains untouched, and subsequently finds in homosexual and bisexual relationships the ‘complement’ to heterosexual relationships; these are described in the opening scenes of the novel, which is narrated backwards. The opening already outlines the homosexual ‘variant’ of Ursula’s spiritual journey in Women in Love. The Trespasser aims to achieve a kind of

14

Volume 8, § 24.1

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poetic writing that is sophisticated, artificial and ever more ‘purple’. The couple’s adulterous escape to the Isle of Wight is narrated in a series of scenes entirely made up of sensations and impalpable, volatile and worn out associations; the background predominates over action in seascapes and descriptions of precipitous cliffs, waves and their crests, clouds, winds, mists. This descriptivism, these ‘word-paintings’ seem to come down and be almost directly copied from the most recent English great poet of the sea, Swinburne,15 titular deity of the island where he was born and where he often set his compositions. This brief novel, the intensity of which resembles that of a love poem, and which by a mimetic principle shares the ephemeral duration of an ecstatic intoxication,16 has however further aims. Lawrence revised his arrangement by renouncing the choral novel in order to weave the plot around two towering protagonists. The aesthetic sublime which makes one forget reality stems from the greyness of the real. The core of the story – the lovers’ escape to the island – is a flashback narrated in a downtrodden house in a London suburb, where two women, a pianist and a violinist, cannot reproduce the magic of the music because one of them is mourning the tragic loss of the musician she was madly in love with. Lawrence, that is, writes for the second time a novel on the aesthetic or aestheticizing life, impeccably showing it through two artists, musicians who have been able to abstract themselves from daily misery. The Trespasser is then a Künstlerroman, a novel of musicians and artists like the ones Mann or D’Annunzio were or would be writing. It is in fact very like one of D’Annunzio’s novels, on two beautiful, chosen, superior souls, drunk on the art they play, isolated in the magic circle of art and aesthetic love. It is only natural then that Lawrence should name not just D’Annunzio, but also the mentors of the Italian writer: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Wagner. Mann had already written Tristan, and Lawrence’s novel is the clearest and most openly avowed parody or revision of Wagner’s Tristan. The role of a Tristan exiled and thrown out of his myth is in Lawrence taken up by a 15 16

Identified by Lawrence as a sea-poet at the outset of the essay on Melville in Studies in Classic American Literature. ‘There won’t be a next week’, Helena says in one of the first lines of dialogue in the novel: ‘There is only the present’.

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violinist with the improbable, but duly programmatic name of Siegmund. The lover with whom he has an aesthetic relationship ‘beyond good and evil’ is not Sieglinde but Helena, who embodies the same destructive female allure. Fundamentally the equivalence with Wagner’s plot is not literal, but applies at the level of meaning. 4. The Wagnerian parody emerges in the form of a bourgeois repetition of Tristan and Isolde’s romantic journey, no longer from Ireland to Tintagel but from London to the Isle of Wight. The immersion in an a-temporal Eden is underlined and symbolized by the strange, unnatural, protective fog, a psychological and actual fog at the same time, which shrouds the two lovers as in a cloak. On the island they consciously live out their roles as melodramatic reincarnations of Wagner’s heroes. There is in fact a continuous, never interrupted counterpoint of comparisons and patterns. The novel is a fabric woven of minimal, imperceptible sensations, of impressions of well-being drawn from the contact with nature (the Isle of Wight is synonymous with the uncorrupted for the English), all experienced by two new parents of humanity. The two, reincarnated Tristan and Isolde, yearn for the undifferentiated fusion of beings: a kiss on the island becomes a ‘supreme’ kiss in which they grow passionately engrossed until ‘at the mouth they seemed to melt and fuse together’; it is a kiss in which ‘man and woman have one being. Two-in-one, the only Hermaphrodite’. Lawrence, however, affirms the isolating dimension of art: eventually, the union starts fatally to crumble, with the consequent realization that beings are monadic, or in psychological terms man and woman cannot fuse, remain autonomous and cannot communicate with each other. Most of all, it is the erotic relationship, even the maddest and most intoxicating one, that reaches a stage of unavoidable alienation. Exactly halfway through, the novel reaches the climax of the unifying impulse, but after this peak the second half declines, tragically so. Lawrence has misled his readers, making them believe they were participating in the celebration of the possibility of aesthetic life, but from now on he destroys or pities his likely spokesman, stripping him of eroticism, making him yield to the barrage of bourgeois common sense and of an anti-aesthetic daily life. Already before this point, the two Wagnerian doubles had first of all loved themselves during those five days, separately finding their Pan-like union in and with nature. There

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are many scenes where the sea is evoked as a feminine presence, but it is a presence that cannot wound or destroy as a woman can; though a mediocre swimmer, Siegmund cannot understand how the currents push him against the rocks and at times make his arms bleed: ‘it is impossible [the sea] could have hurt me’. The love potion exhausts its magic action, and ‘living too intensely kills’. The first crack appears in Siegmund in the surreal scene of the nihilist, who catches him with his nose pressed against the window watching the sea on the penultimate day of his stay. He is almost a figment of his conscience, as he himself recognizes, a ‘queer-sort of Doppelgänger’; in any case, this fantastic character emerging out of the blue tells him of the vanity of momentary passion and of the isolation from the world in ambiguous and mysterious words, adding that the flame will extinguish itself for lack of fuel. His words echo. Hampson, this is his name, is a type of character who will become a fixture in Lawrence, and one always appearing from the outside to open the eyes of the possessed, to confirm that the love between man and woman can never be unifying, and to give vent to his misogyny and inveigh against the destructive power of feminine love. The crack lies in the fear that this timeless time, this living outside of time might end; it lies in an anxiety of the future and of the re-entry of the character into time and space. From that point on, the two lovers find themselves already speaking a different language, no longer inspired and poetic, and purified, but suddenly stuffed full of the everyday and practicalities. The ‘filter’ has exhausted its function or the ‘out of time’ is re-channelled into time. Siegmund and Helena become bit by bit two simple, common adulterers in flight. The mark of this unstoppable metamorphosis is that they start to evoke the past and therefore recognize the jurisdiction of temporality. As the ‘spell’ dissolves, Helena is faced with the real man, unattractive and slightly stooping, unlike the man of her idealization. In the last stages where they come back to London, the register of the story is the varied, realistic one of an everyday husband returning from an escapade; at home Siegmund is met with an icy reception by his family. It is the anticlimax, the return of the reality principle the lovers had feared on the island. The two protagonists are only identified by their first name for a long time, just like the heroes of epic poetry. Only later do the readers get to know Helena’s surname, Verden, unusual in English perhaps because it sounds like ‘Werden’ in German, as in

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‘werden’, to become, with its derivation ‘Wurd’. Separated from his Isolde, Siegmund hangs himself, unable to bear his wife’s reproaches and pushed by his purely bourgeois obligations to provide for his children. The final idea seems to be a juxtaposition of selfless duty to destructive romanticism: Siegmund’s wife Beatrice too had had a youthful, timidly romantic loveaffair that drove her to marriage; she recovers from her husband’s suicide by dedicating her life to her children and opens a boarding-house. § 111. Lawrence III: ‘Sons and Lovers’. The mining scenario and the Oedipal dilemma Sons and Lovers (1913),17 his third novel, published when he was twenty-eight and in its third draft,18 shows Lawrence to have acquired the mastery of a narrative organism of broad scope and extended temporal arc. He decidedly turned the page on his first two, refusing to carry on the path of the ambitious novel describing an aesthetic life, made up of impalpable sensations and transgressions, and lived by ‘fatal’ supermen and superwomen. He changed, but to go back to a safe model, an updated version of the Victorian serial novel. Sons and Lovers is a miners’ story, of poor, down-to-earth, rough people who speak in the Midlands dialect and face the difficulties of their everyday life at the beginning of the century. From the panoramic prospect, we zoom down onto the conjugal difficulties

17

18

The title suggests Lawrence’s difficulties and his lack of imagination in choosing all the other titles of his novels (as Aldington remarked, and as I think Burgess 1985, 23, also notes). The ‘and’ here must be understood not as oppositional but as an addition: sons who love their mothers like sons and are also in love with other women at the same time (but see Pinkney 1990, 27ff., for other suggestions, in some cases forced ones). The plural would seem to include William and Paul, but William is a son-lover who disappears too early, and the other two sons never come into focus. Sons and Lovers officially inaugurated the publishing vicissitudes of Lawrence’s novels. The original, ‘non-expurgated’ text, published in 1992, was shorn of some prolix passages for publication, and included somewhat explicit anatomical terms that were substituted with other, vaguer ones. Only one scene deserves to be reinstated, the one where Paul is in Clara’s room while she sleeps and sees her tights, which he tries on as fetish (see the incisive discussion by P. Bailey in LRB, 1992, no. 17, 12–13).

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of the Morels,19 who are attempting to build a future for their children, with the admirable mother who keeps going despite the blows of destiny and the accidents great or trivial, a late version of the Angel in the House who strives to safeguard the unity of the family and keeps her husband on a tight leash by alternating stick and carrot. Gradually the second generation, of four children, but particularly William and Paul, push their parents onto the background. Just as The Trespasser was a D’Annunzio-cum-Wagner novel, the first half of Sons and Lovers is Lawrence’s version of Dombey and Son. Bit by bit a suggestive echo emerges between Paul Morel and Paul Dombey, each a rara avis, an inexplicable son, aesthete and artist – a painter, gentle and effeminate, Paul loves to cook, and to pick and smell flowers – in the midst of a necessarily pragmatic family. This explains the sudden return of a choral design and the many narrative threads that make this novel a toned-down multifocal. There are occasional generous caricatures reminiscent of Dickens, initially in the scenes of the miners collecting their wages (though without Dickens’s excess) and of the factory of surgical prosthetics, a microcosm teeming with a varied and eccentric humanity on which Lawrence wittily dwells, almost aping the master. Here the present of the colour tubs Paul receives for his twenty-third birthday, handed to him by a midget employee who cannot contain her joy, forms an exquisite and pathetic genre scene that seems to be a literal citation. These are episodes typical of serial novels, since they are largely incidental, and ones on which Lawrence dwells for the sheer pleasure of it. The two parts are articulated into chapters with their own titles, which is also the mark of a tradition going back to Smollett, Sterne and Dickens; and these chapters span a long temporal arc, in a novel of births, lives and deaths, that is an extreme, ironic and finally tragic Bildungsroman. In the first part the early life of the Morel family is the subject, while the second focuses on Paul’s birth and his ‘launch’ in life. But the promises are not kept and the novel ends on the note of an existential malaise with no relief.

19

The surname is French, since the grandfather of the head of the family, Walter Morel, is a French refugee. Hence, as Lawrence warns, the name’s pronunciation with the stress on the second syllable.

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2. As a miners’ novel, Sons and Lovers rewrites Sybil, Mary Barton, particularly Hard Times, though it represents the world of miners and workers a good fifty years later. A further link with Dickens comes in its depiction of the natural spirit of support among the poor and the dispossessed, which replicates the atmosphere of the famous Bleeding Heart Yard in Little Dorrit.20 And doesn’t the Morels’ relationship also cite that of the Bartons in Mrs Gaskell? Mrs Barton is as house-proud, has the same mixture of resignation and romanticism as Gertrude Morel; their husbands are both asocial and apathetic. Sons and Lovers is ambitious just like the most typical Victorian serials, being a story of actual people while at the same time giving the emblematic X-ray of an era: human nature is weak and strong both as arcane miracle and as effect of the environment; the condemnation of pretension and of frivolity is the other side of the celebration of the salt of the earth. At the turn of the century, the English stock was strong but under threat. External circumstances weigh in because, as in Hardy, the crisis of the marriage institution appears unavoidable, and this time even in the world of the proletariat which was so celebrated by Dickens, so that the characters must either implode, suffer without an outlet, or transform their frustration into something else. One dimension or side is that of the social-realist novel reflecting English life at the beginning of the twentieth century. A historic socio-economic datum is the transformation of privately owned mines into public companies. The novel opens with an excursus that reminds its readers of the change from a form of exploitation of the miners that was still rudimentary and of limited scope to more sophisticated, more intensive and better organized systems for profits. The prologue places the action in the mining district of Nottinghamshire, and for some time the story of the Morels appears to function as a sociological plot line, a sort of reportage preceding Orwell’s Wigan Pier, with the aim of not only demonstrating the miners’ poverty, the alcoholism to which they inevitably succumb, but also of documenting the details of their everyday life, the poor sanitary and hygienic conditions and the plague of over-population. But in which years is the action set exactly? At the start we are told that this

20 Volume 5, § 50.1.

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change had taken place sixty years earlier, but since the novel has a very long arc, of at least twenty-five years, it is difficult to determine exactly when the novel begins. It might perhaps span the last decade of the nineteenth century to the eve of the novel’s publication. A social novel should have some recognizable dates; Lawrence however does not let even one slip through, which means that the novel takes place in a kind of eternal present, in a poetic and especially telling synchrony. Some dates are given in an indirect way, such as the one that could be derived from the Nottingham tournée by Sarah Bernhardt. But few external facts are referred to, and the novel is not connected to them. A similar temporal vagueness is explained by the fact that the miners, or at least the Morels and Lawrence with them, are still cultivating the utopia of a pastoral society, of a verdant England whose slopes are scattered with the most diverse and scented flowers, and whose social cell or unit lies in the patriarchal family living in the farmhouse. This glimpse of England cannot and surely should not be later than 1914. It cannot be and is not because of the publication date, but mostly because this novel of miners and workers embodies a community that lives a hard but not a harsh life, not an impossible one like that of Orwell’s miners in the early 1930s. The Morels cannot splash out, but they can afford the essentials and at times even a little bit more; they fight daily, but live the kind of decent life which Orwell will find drastically gone because of the intervening war.21 What these workers do not have is in other words a unionized and political consciousness. Morel the miner has no friends, only drinking companions, and there is no sign of socialists in Bestwood. The only possibility for women is to be homemakers; the best educated and aware of them, Gertrude Morel, forms a modest feminist cell, but of a religious type, preaching sublimation rather than fighting the status quo. Any kind of political awareness is blocked in Lawrence by an ineradicable residue of romanticism. In 1930 Orwell’s miners and workers would no longer be able to afford even a sprinkle of it, or at least much less. What compensates for the submission, and is almost an emotional blackmail, is to offer oneself up as a martyr to that morbid, annihilating love for the children Lawrence 21

On this comparison see also Burgess 1985, 204, who argues it in a slightly different way.

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describes in Morel’s mother. But from within the miners’ novel a more intimate, darker novel slowly emerges, centred on the artistic and ‘sentimental education’ of the protagonist Paul Morel, with a clear nod to Flaubert. In this way only does the new novel connect with Lawrence’s first one, and its inquiry into the residual possibility of an aesthetic life. 3. In its near-autobiographical slant, Sons and Lovers goes back all the way to Lawrence’s infancy, with Gertrude Morel playing the part of the author’s own mother while Paul mirrors the mother’s favourite child Lawrence had been, born after his parents had lost another son. Gertrude is a handsome woman, even if small: a strong character, morally firm, unbending, dour as well as gentle and romantic, never short of an answer, never on the ropes. Some of her repartees, so blunt that they do not admit of reply, sharp even if loving, have remained memorable. Solid as a rock, she holds up the family without ever losing faith or whining: ‘She was one of those women who cannot cry’. Hers is the portrait of a passionate woman who apparently sacrifices any romantic notions to her role as pillar of the family, and make up for the father’s absence without too much suffering, or rather with stoic bearing. Though admired by the narrator, her stoicism often borders on the inhuman. It transpires for instance in her hatred of dancing and in the instinctive and rigid modesty which leads her to criticize a photograph of her possible daughter-in-law because the cut of her dress is too low. The accident at work that befalls her husband reveals that their mutual love, and partly also their sex life, have run dry. Gertrude practices her marital duty as a routine, even if, in a pretty basic calculation, she sacrifices her self-realization as a woman and wife for the sake of her children. This impassioned maternal love is a compensation for the frustrated or unfulfilled marital love, but it also drives her covertly or explicitly to block her children’s love affairs, as she selfishly and possessively wants to keep them all to herself. The eldest son, William, is about to marry a rather superficial girl, Lily, who is not mean but vain and vapid, but she dies.22 Parental selfishness ruins the children without realizing it. It snuffs 22 Here Lawrence’s novel seems to be citing the risqué, intimate, powerful passion of the mother for her children represented in Synge’s Riders to the Sea, published a few years earlier.

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out the eldest son’s love affair, even if it was ill-placed and for the wrong object. It also ends up subtly blackmailing the second born too, who leaves the sweet Miriam23 because the relationship never goes beyond the limits of a Platonic love, while he is undergoing a sensual awakening,24 and because it hides the inextinguishable maternal love under the prejudice of an alibi and of a principle (Miriam only absorbs, drains, does not give); finally because he has understood his emotional dilemma, that his exclusive love for Miriam would entail the renunciation of his mother’s. 4. Lawrence criticizes the lack of balance between husband and wife: Gertrude is too ascetic and inflexible in her sacrifice, while Walter is morally irresponsible and selfish. In this description of the difficult, stormy relationship, Lawrence seems to shape Walter Morel into another Henchard by Hardy, an impulsive drunkard capable of thoughtless gestures and actions which, after a while, he regrets. One night, after a quarrel, he locks his wife out of the house only to then come to his senses; this mad fit then finds its sequel in another gesture of fanciful pseudo-rebellion, when he decides to leave home after receiving an insult from his wife – who knows he will come back, as indeed he does. And yet Lawrence tells us in fairness that this failing, unbalanced man full of weaknesses also has a good side: he is a handyman in the house, is neither lazy nor shuns hard work in the mine. He is certainly a liar, who once in a while takes money from the household allowance he gives his wife to pay for his drink, without managing to deceive her. Angry, unable to be responsible, Morel implodes into silence, becomes surly and testy like Henchard. While Gertrude transposes and transfers her hardened love for her husband onto her children, Walter is destroyed by it. Another woman might have saved and redeemed him; Morel also has the justification of the pressures coming from his environment. And sex between them is just a discharge of their malaise, not a gesture of reciprocal devotion, but the venting of hatred. It is not an inconsistency, but 23

Miriam is inspired by Jessie Chambers, an educated friend of Lawrence’s with whom he had a Platonic relationship and who recognized his talent and sent his first poems to the local newspaper. 24 In the poem ‘Last Words to Miriam’, Lawrence admits that her body did not ‘respond’ to his ‘strokes’, but also a sadistic attempt at inflicting the ‘torture’ she deserved.

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rather wise psychology, that given this stormy relationship, husband and wife would conceive in hatred a third and then fourth child. Lawrence in this way shades in the primary psychological and philosophical question of the novel: a distorted experience of sex is alienating, not a regenerative act of fusion but the fulfilment of a purely solitary compulsion.25 As a young child, Paul is exceptionally weak physically, effeminate, moody, the shiest, most reserved, delicate and clumsy of the four young Morels. He is revealed as the artist and the miraculous aesthete, as he is the son of a miner. William is practical, ambitious, easy-going, loud-mouthed, cocky but naïve; he succeeds as a clerk in London, but falls into the trap of a petty, conceited femme fatale, brought up by a pretentious aunt, like Dickens’s Dora. Paul grows up a stickler for form, fastidious, prissy. His apprenticeship in the firm making surgical prostheses presents, as I mentioned, an environment that has all the eccentricity and oddity of the most memorable Dickensian interiors. Lawrence hits the bull’s eye with some well-placed choral gags. With the birth of Paul’s love for Miriam, a slower and slightly more prolix and less inspired phase starts, partly because Lawrence wants to repeat the improbable meeting of two covert aesthetes, as Siegmund and Helena had been in The Trespasser, but within the miners’ community. Their love is a fight between conflicting drives: a Platonic love that shies away from physical expression, in him but mostly in her; a love that lives with hate, confirming the precarious and hybrid nature of love, which is always a form of selfishness, and the inequality of the relationship between the sexes, where the woman is in a position of superiority. Miriam lives on a farm at the heart of the mining district, and is thus an embodiment of romanticism in its most dreamy and uprooted version. She lives through 25

Those who have seen in Walter Morel an unconscious preparatory study for Mellors in Lady Chatterley are undoubtedly right, given his positive, animal-like vitality and also his occasional down-to-earth expressions. Kermode 1981, 11, argues, agreeing with Van Ghent, that Mellors is a near-anagram of Morel. On the strength of this connection, Sons and Lovers may be deconstructed as the rehabilitation of the father with the necessary though hard-fought elimination of the mother. Significantly Lawrence, who used to be clean-shaven when young, would later grow moustache and beard – his proverbial beard – in imitation of the unkempt beard his father had sported.

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the ‘filter’ of an imaginary assumption to the role of a medieval Madonna with the ability to charm men and bind them to her, but only those who are like her – potential knights, as she thinks Paul is, since he is gentle like a knight. Sex is only ersatz, virtual, as in the beautiful vicarious scene of the swing, or in that in the forest, when she shows Paul a bush of wild roses. 5. Paul promises he will not marry for as long as his mother lives, but his psychological block is not incestuous but a normal Oedipal attachment visible in his kindness, his favours, his affectionate displays.26 Outside the house they are mistaken for a couple. The last third of the novel follows the struggle between Miriam and Clara:27 in allegorical terms, the former represents the soul, the latter the flesh. Clara’s attraction for Paul is that of the older woman who seems to push him away: separated from her husband but harbouring a heated sensuality, Clara does nothing to show off her physical attributes. Miriam is more traditionally also identified with a religious faith that prescribes chastity. Paul’s courtship of Clara inches forward very slowly, as Paul is throbbing with physical desire for the stout, Junoesque beauty who is a little sullen, cool, unfriendly and even chilly. This slow development leaves room for some successful incidental episodes, such as those featuring Clara’s mother, with her rough, blunt humour; the desolate interiors of the house filled with cotton, where mother and daughter weave and spin, are given an ominous or perhaps only grotesque shape. Lawrence builds a complicated theory on Paul, who exemplifies a sexual desire that is unattached to an actual person, a dissociated desire, that is. If Paul pursues something, he pursues Miriam in order to marry her; she knows that her affection for Paul is like Catherine’s for Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, eternal and not ‘shallow and temporal’. Paul manages to convince a reluctant Miriam to yield to him sexually, but only as a sacrificial act which she knows will not cement their union, but rather fracture it. That is indeed the case, to prove another theoretical assumption about 26 Sons and Lovers has been described as the first Oedipal English novel, written with conscious reference to Freud’s theories, which Lawrence got to know through Frieda. 27 Clara impersonates Alice Dax, a suffragette friend of Lawrence’s who, it is believed, initiated him into sex. The full-bodied Clara Dawes is also, though, a counterpart for Frieda.

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the unease, the malaise whichever the cause may be, and the impossibility of loving once dissociated sex has been experienced. This intolerance, this childishness in Paul, who is Lawrence looking at himself in a deforming mirror – is this a self-criticism? Paul had everything that was good and delightful in Miriam – why then sully this love, why give it up? Lawrence’s erotic philosophy is no different from Hardy’s belief in the precariousness of love, though it has an added sense of the torment of love and sex, rather than a joyful and fulfilling sensation. Love, any love, ends up being imprisoning, a truth which had emerged from The Trespasser, and causing frustration, dissatisfaction, unease. The only, ironic solution proposed is for those defeated by femininity, those disappointed by an ephemeral and incomplete experience of sex – Paul and Clara’s separated husband –28 to band together and become friends and allies after being rivals and enemies. The separated couple goes back to living together and the curtain falls on a sense of emptiness, in which Paul Morel thrashes about without an outlet. His loss of direction is attributed to the loss of a mother who had always supported him. This epilogue, which focuses on the mounting passion for Clara and its exhaustion, drags on, except for some incidental flashes; the last pages look like the bare entries of a diary, even of a bulletin. § 112. Lawrence IV: The short stories Having probably read and learnt from Kipling, who was still the master of English tales in the early twentieth century, Lawrence wrote twelve short stories collected in The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (1914), all of them drafted in what can be defined as an a-temporal, objective, naturalistic style. In this prose any authorial intrusion is held back, in fact any minimal intervention in the plot line is barred. The narrator pretends to be at the same level of knowledge as the reader; the ordered exposition of the antecedents at the outset is therefore eliminated, while the internal logic emerges inductively, and must be extracted and framed as we go along. Narrative time is also not linear: after an opening scene which is epiphanic, evocative, a real rupture of the continuum, the story traces back to the scenes 28

A scene in which they have a scuffle and then reach a reconciliation distinctly anticipates the ‘gladiatorial’ fight between Birkin and Gerald in Women in Love.

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that lead to it in order to get to the epilogue. Finally, the voice too is that of the naturalistic short story: dry, sober, laconic, stripped of anything that is superfluous in a paratactic flow of inflexibly short sentences. The short story of the title and the one that follows are set in the German military, derived and extracted from Lawrence’s escape to Germany with Frieda just before they were written; the remaining ten belong to a different category and show a cautious return to the settings of the mining district. None of them is especially gripping, and their plots are slight. Lawrence struggles to become a short story writer because he lacks the imagination to choose or make up a small episode that is self-contained and well-defined, and which could capture the interest of his readers in the course of twenty pages or so; instead he subdivides the stories into chapters as if they were miniature novels. He does however shift the centre of gravity from the sheer event to the psychological study. The first two, which could be read as documenting the legendary iron discipline of the Prussian military system, are in fact diagnoses of morbid and paranoid forms of psychological subjugation inflicted by superior officers on the timorous lower ranks. Lawrence applies and widens the case histories of ‘bullying’, of intimidation and threatening behaviour which is mainly grounded in the man-woman relationship. In both stories, the subjugated subject who is weak, sensitive, psychologically fragile, an ‘idiot’29 in Dostoevsky’s sense, stores up the bullying actions he is subject to until his continued implosions lead to an explosion. In the first story, officer and orderly are mutually implicated in a silent game of glances or a tug-of-war, in which a secret homosexual attraction may be present, masked behind the hate and the sadistic, persecutory respect for discipline. ‘The Prussian Officer’ is surely the expected story of two males looking for a blood-pact, which they mask or rather give vent to through fighting, violence and aggression. Here the two men are so frustrated by their inability to establish that bond, or the bond is so morbid and inadmissible that one ends up killing the other. In the second story, ‘The Thorn in the Flesh’, an act of insubordination leads to a failed attempt at desertion. ‘Daughters of the Vicar’ from the beginning runs along the tracks of the Victorian vicarage

29 ‘His [the captain’s orderly’s] mouth hung slightly open, like that of an idiot’.

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novel, such a close imitation of Anne Brontë and Trollope that it appears an intentional parody, particularly in the portrait of the faded, submissive vicar’s daughters (who are still trembling in the midst of the hardships suffered by a large and needy family) and of the religious disaffection of the miners.30 The three most incisive stories of this collection are ‘The White Stocking’, ‘A Sick Collier’ and ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’,31 all three spilling over from the emotional reservoir of episodes in Sons and Lovers. In the first, Lawrence studies women’s dream-life and their seductive power which struggles to manage (though in the end manages and represses) the irresistible desire for adventure and promiscuous affairs. The white stockings the pretty employee receives from her elderly former boss on St Valentine’s Day are the symbol and emblem of her dream projections, but also a fetish especially, morbidly dear to Lawrence.32 Equally evocative, irresistibly so, is the scene of the bare-chested miner as he washes himself, rubbing his strong and flexible muscles which become white again once cleansed of the underground dust. But Lawrence’s miner is always like Paul Morel’s father, a silent natural philosopher inclined to misanthropy, often a nomad living an alienated life.33 As in ‘A Sick Collier’, once he has a work accident, he ends up demented. The only perfect masterpiece of this collection is the closing one, ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’, a tight and vigorous plot, delicate and humane, easily seen in parallel with Sons and Lovers. Lawrence knows how to capture the contradiction of the miner’s wife, caught between the conscious rejection of a failed and exhausted relationship and the forces of conservatism and constriction, in the moments of panicked waiting for the husband who does not come back and who it will be later revealed has died in the mine. The life that dies and the prospects of the family left 30 31 32 33

One of the vicar’s two daughters marries an exuberant, sympathetic miner; the story’s success rests on the sharply satirical portrait of the clergyman who marries the other daughter and in the sketch of the bath for their little girl. This story is recycled in the play The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd, where Lawrence sides with the dead husband and forces the widow to acknowledge her responsibility for what has happened while she washes the corpse. See Gudrun’s stockings of different colours in Women in Love (§ 114.2 and n. 43) On Lawrence’s split perspective on the miner, oscillating between reality and myth, see Kermode 1981, 9.

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without a father are compensated with the life that grows in the widow’s womb; the chrysanthemum’s symbol which punctuates the story shifts from that of festive flower to the more traditionally funereal. Harsh and yet romantic, Elizabeth Bates is a second Gertrude Morel, particularly in her marked, utter, irredeemable separation from her miner husband who drinks without thinking of his family. Her separation is specific, ontological and historical; the scandal of the story is that this sense of alienation from her husband is realized and sharpened while the woman prepares his corpse with hieratic, epic, composed detachment. Except that ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ hides and at the end reveals the rehabilitation of the father who was a collier, and is in death cleaned up, handsome, blonde and especially sober. 2. In the anti-militarist title-story of the collection England, My England (1922–1924), a young, sensitive but apathetic Englishman dies in the war without having really understood why he enlisted. The critique of patriotism is merged with that of a matriarchal femininity, buried and drained by maternal duties. In the other short stories of this collection, Lawrence chooses improbable situations like those in Hardy or Wilkie Collins. A collier returns to his wife after more than a decade’s separation and the couple is formed again; a young man touched by his stepsister in his sleep wakes up and decides to marry her, but not (as suspected) in order to inherit her father’s wealth. A transport inspector flirts with all the ticketsellers but without marrying any of them. Here Lawrence precociously attacks sexual promiscuity by showing the inspector hit by a hail of blows from the community of women who have united against him. § 113. Lawrence V: ‘The Rainbow’. Analysis and management of passions The first novel of Lawrence’s most influential and canonical diptych, The Rainbow34 (1915), belongs to the genre of the family saga. It follows 34 Copies of the novel were withdrawn from circulation. The diptych of which I am speaking was to be titled The Sisters. The title is pretentiously explained in chapter 6, when a natural rainbow looks to Anna like an arch or portal inviting her on a journey towards the unknown, which she forbids herself to start on, as she is fulfilled by the joy of maternity. The symbol returns in the last scene, of a realistic-visionary

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three generations, and therefore covers roughly sixty-five years. It is the story of the Brangwens, wealthy farmers.35 The story stretches from 1840 until 1898, an unmistakable date given by the start of the Boer War, and ends shortly afterwards around 1904. The novel is a choral work, at first without dominant protagonists, only to become focused on one single character for each of the three generations. Tom Brangwen gives way to his son Will, and Will to his daughter Ursula. There is no straying from the ancestral homeland on the border between Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, an area like the one centred on Coventry used to be for George Eliot.36 There uncorrupted, later cultivated, nature, and the farm, border onto the collieries, though the mining background shades away and there are no mining families. However, the context of Lawrence’s first novel reappears with farm-work being transmitted across the generations. The theme is that of the alienation of the married couple, or even the fatal and inexorable brevity of the union of body and mind once the spark is lit and consumed, and the novelty of the regenerating discovery of the other is exhausted. The monadic conception of human personality is therefore once more reasserted, as is the always unfulfilled desire for a total and lasting fusion with a partner. There is the emergence of a dark

35

36

flavour, which I shall examine at the end of this section. Behind the novel stands the intuition of the Mediterranean or Italian landscape, of sex as a reviving power, and of the well-being that comes from a legitimized relationship; but there are also early foreshadowings of the 1914–1918 war. Focusing a little on the naming, the first question about this novel is the surname Brangwen, an uncommon Welsh name hardly found in England, and clearly derived from Wagner. Humma 1990, focused on names, has nothing to say about it, because he simply ignores the two novels. And why are the daughters called Ursula and Gudrun? It has been suggested that Ursula refers to Ruskin’s predilection for the saint, but if that is the case it would only be for argument’s sake (cf. n. 41 below). Gudrun is the name of the bloodthirsty heroine of Norse and Old German poems and of the Nibelungenlied, which makes the reference more apt. On the continuity of the regional tradition from George Eliot to Lawrence, especially in this novel, cf. Leavis 1978, 116–73, who in an anticipation of the idea of the anxiety of influence shows Lawrence as if observed and judged by a later George Eliot throughout this novel.

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drive towards hating the partner while the very flame of sensual appetite is lit and fulfilled; there is too the mounting of hate and of destructive feeling between the partners and the following battle for dominance between the sexes. The separate condition of human beings is raised to the status of metaphysical chord and universal underlying note, in a sort of solemn parody of Ecclesiastes. Lawrence is all-too-ready to extend the dominion, the mantle, the mark of the condition of being separate. It is an optical effect, a dominant tinge. All the characters of The Rainbow without exception are either explicit theoreticians of separation, or end up at some point experiencing or feeling a ‘disintegrated lifelessness of soul’, which they hide under ‘an utterly tolerant good-humour’. Even the landscape is portrayed in this palette of separation, in its separateness from human beings who do not feel a sense of communion with it but rather one of alienation. With such a broad perspective and a beginning so far removed in time, the question of separateness becomes an issue of a historical trajectory and a wide-ranging diagnosis. The tragedy of existence is manifested in that historical-temporal milieu down to the early twentieth century; for Lawrence its cause rests on the metaphysical and actual impossibility of perpetuating sensual well-being without its being exploited to other ends; it rests on an absolute cultivation of the soul which is extremely hard to pursue. A definition given a long way into the text is that ‘Passion is the only part of love. And it seems so much because it can’t last. That is why passion is never happy’. The bourgeois myth his characters rebel against is first of all that of marriage, the social institution which chills passion in love and kills the free and absolute expression of the soul. There are no ways out of the thirst for the soul’s affirmation: women madly yield to the vitality of the cult of the soul in sex, and then become fulfilled in their role as mothers; overambitious men too deflate, becoming even proud of being useful and esteemed members of the social whole. Blame is equitably divided between specific individual weaknesses and external conditioning. The torch for the search for individuality and uncorrupted passion remains in the end only in Ursula’s hands. Through her Lawrence demolishes the bourgeois myth of the person as a social being and of the dutiful and tamed belonging to the bourgeois world; he has broken the chains of imprisonment within allocated roles. And among these roles

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there is too the prominent one of patriot and servant of the homeland, with a bellicose militancy that is an additional target as it falsely diverts the urgency of starved senses. Sons and Lovers was still an objective or objectifying novel, one representational, ruled by a certain detachment from its subject-matter; in places it displayed a sense of satisfaction with isolated scenes. Here Lawrence has become convulsive, wounded, piercing; he invades his own characters, himself tormented by the disunion he is representing. The problem with The Rainbow is with its tone and style. Lawrence attributes the elaboration and intellectual meditation of these mental processes not to believable characters as in The Trespasser, that is, to ruminating artists who live in the world of ideas and of impalpable sensations, but to rough, primordial and instinctive farming people, although these do become more educated.37 In The Rainbow, Lawrence’s mature style asserts itself for the first time, the same style that emerged from the conspicuous and visible variations of the last few pages of Sons and Lovers. There the reader noticed an involved narrator quivering behind his characters; here, there is a narrator who is as dissatisfied, embittered, alienated as his characters, and writing in an objectifying, phenomenological, utterly lean naturalism. The Rainbow is today more experimental for its disruption of grammatical norms, for its metonymy by which Lawrence converts a preposition into a noun, as in ‘he was travelling through her to the beyond’, or emphasize with the same words or their variants a concept or diagnosis. This style, although in places tedious, is often suddenly ignited, and these exceptional flares often coincide with moments of vision and of visual and imaginative delirium, or more often with blissful if ephemeral sexual encounters. Lawrence forces the language to explode because he realizes it is no longer suited to its representational function, and cannot communicate the spasm and peak of pleasure. His prose rises in a musical crescendo, a gush of words often not even bound to the grammatical or syntactic construct: incandescent, delirious prose

37

The defect of transferring the burden of tragedy onto the shoulders of characters who are too weak to bear it is one of the criticisms Lawrence directed at Verga’s Mastro-don Gesualdo ([sic], Phoenix, vol. I, 223–31).

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which must mime and accompany copulation. And this language of copulation is enriched with grandiose periphrases, extended chains of arcane epic metaphors, to suggest the systole and diastole of physical pleasure. The purple prose of a few years earlier, generally left behind, comes back in the imprecise and vague metaphors, in the old-fashioned images, in the coinages and neologisms. Lawrence rejects religion, indeed makes of it one of the main culprits in the promotion of separation, but readily uses the mould of the Bible or even direct citations: that is, he uses the archaic cadence and prophetic, possessed tone to express an opposite Annunciation, of a new apocalypse. 2. In an inspired prologue, Lawrence attempts to fix the male and female typologies of the Brangwens: the men devoted to the ‘bloodintimacy’ and the circumscribed workings of the land, the women glimpsing something beyond, craving the unknown. It is the congenital mark of the dynasty, transmitted through the generations. This fault line reverberates almost a priori and in principle through parents and their children, as we know from Sons and Lovers. The parents are ‘two very separate beings, vitally connected, knowing nothing of each other, yet living in their separate ways from the same root’. Mother Brangwen is the fulcrum of the family; of the six children, Tom inherits the farm and keeps it going. As his mother’s pet and favourite, he is a first counterpart to the author, but disguised, since he has Paul’s furious urges, is intuitive but he is not an artist. Compared to Paul, Tom’s Bildung is followed by skipping or summarizing the stage of puberty, starting from when he is already twenty-eight. His loss of virginity is given en passant. He drinks and pursues women for sheer pleasure, a sexual promiscuity which is however the first sign of his alienation, and an experience which traumatizes and damages him. Aware of his ‘smallness’, he is disappointed by it. Even the affair with the provocative wife of a foreigner leaves him with a bad after-taste. The first third (at least) of The Rainbow cannot be said to be electrifying for its compelling plot. It is not even punctuated with the Dickensian sketches which crowded the previous novel, in a conscious decision, since there is no taste or inclination for them here. It is not even a new plot but rather it recalls some of Gaskell’s short stories, or Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, or the atmospheres of Trollope’s colourless second phase. The first couple hit by Lawrence’s

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alienation is that of Tom Brangwen and a Polish refugee, a widow who has a spirited but surly daughter from her first marriage.38 One day Tom sees a woman going past his house all clad in black and sets his sights on her; on another day this woman, who works at the vicarage, comes to the farm to ask to borrow a pat of butter. After a brief, curt and cold engagement, they get married. Lawrence can easily show the detachment of the two spouses also because one is English while the other a foreigner who speaks the language imperfectly. Tom’s perception of his own emptiness makes him want to ‘fill’ himself up with a woman, but he discovers that the union of two empty beings does not make a full one. The Polish bride too, Lydia, comes from a moment of crisis, wants to be regenerated, and believes that Tom might be the one to do it for her. Lawrence gives himself over to the study of an alienation that is also felt and perceived by his own protagonist, who creates a vicarious form of fatherhood for himself in the rough affection he develops for the child Anna, a kind of surrogate for the unity he has lost. The scene with the stepfather who undresses her to put her to bed while she rebels has the slight underlying power of a vicarious act, of a violence that hides an unease and at the same time is an outlet. Anna grows up with Victorian-type aspirations to become a lady – haughty, domineering and with a powerful sense of class. She cultivates her wild difference also at school, and at eighteen she falls in love with her cousin-in-law, Will. She too needs to escape an oppressive life, she too has much exuberance, too much yearning. In this relationship, Lawrence spasmodically attempts to fix the difficult, impossible relationship between a near-Platonic form of the feminine (an idea that embodies an irrepressible need, both physical and spiritual) and its concrete realization in life. Will is emblematically a wood carver who shapes his Eve out of it, a demiurgic creation to which

38

The reason why Lydia should be a Polish refugee is not that given by an anonymous reviewer who claimed that Polish characters were imported to introduce variety or strangeness into the monotonous solidity of an English landscape (CRHE, 158). The Polish Lydia disguises Frieda, since she is a foreign woman of a different and superior origin from Tom (cf. Delavenay 1972, 360).

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he periodically returns and which he will destroy in a desperate moment, and at the same time a subject-matter he will carve again.39 3. Tom and Lydia’s love story is a prologue; until that point, the reader has the feeling of a novel that has stalled, or that keeps in reserve its best cards and its thematic fulcrum. The plot is enlivened by the marriage between Anna and Will and its failure. Once again, Lawrence thinks he can credibly smuggle himself into the psyche and interiority of the two protagonists in order to listen to their pulsations, desires, aggressions, grievances, rebellions. This second relationship is an enlarged repetition of the sense of separation Tom still feels. Even after a considerable time into the marriage, the stepfather still feels the old sense of not belonging and of a psychic statelessness. At his stepdaughter’s wedding, he makes a speech that hails marriage as a guarantee and a universal, eternal pledge of fusion between man and woman, pouring salt on the wound left by the aspiration to unity which is however always unrealized, also due to the partner’s weakness. We have already seen at work the Brangwens’ congenital, hereditary attraction for the ephemeral affair, a yielding to the attraction of a casual approach in the street. The first stages in the marriage between Anna and Will lead to the isolation of the united couple, or the couple that believes itself to be united, and to a revelling in their detachment from the world, that is, to the erasure of the external world in their delight in unity. It is the symbolic journey of the Edenic couple which isolates itself in the intoxication of their unison. Will feels but tames the sense of responsibility, that is, the call of duty; Anna is arrogant and proud in her negation of any commandment that is not the enjoyment of their insulated unity. It is the iconography of a centre around which a wheel spins but seems immobile; 39 The continuing influence of Ruskin as teacher of the visual arts to the English, of Ruskin as the author of The Stones of Venice, is confirmed in Will’s reflections about the Renaissance. In the heat of the senses he discovers and experiences the fearsome ‘Absolute Beauty’, the beauty of the Renaissance semi-circular arch (also a rainbow), even though he had always preferred the Gothic lancet arch, which symbolizes ‘the broken desire of mankind’. Will is a Ruskinian follower as he is overwhelmed by the ‘absolute beauty’ and mystery of the cathedrals, in Lincoln, in Bamberg, everywhere. The rejection of Ruskin’s moral categories in life and in art is another ideological battleground in the novel.

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they live a stasis of time and a fixity of place. Anna remains for some time a little provincial empress, disdainful and contemptuous of conventions; Will falls under the blows of the duties of a ‘decent social being’. The spell is broken because paradoxically the conscientious Will does not want Anna to be the first to ‘open’ or ‘re-open’ to the eternal world under the guise of a party she wants to give in order to assert her imperial supremacy as ‘Anna Victrix’. Will then has learnt to enjoy this intoxication of isolation even if his conscience occasionally resists it and he realizes he is not everything to her. From here on, their relationship is made up of alternations between wars and truces, depending on which one of the two has the upper hand. It is a war for supremacy, even if the woman remains weak, capricious, inclined to need consolation after acting imperiously. This is also a clash of fundamental attitudes: she cares for the soul, he for the higher mystery of the absolute as expressed in liturgy and architecture. Will is de-personalized, absorbs and quietens his soul and its palpitations in the external forms of religion; Anna is genuinely devoted to the soul. Will amuses himself with Platonic images unrealized and impossible to find in life, like cathedrals, statues, ideals, art. Their inalienable and irreconcilable alterity increases, as does their awareness of being distinct rather than complementary beings. Another serious distancing between the two happens with the birth of the four children: the woman is entirely absorbed by motherhood and Will becomes increasingly alone, even if he receives devoted and vicarious affection from Ursula, his first born. The thematic and metaphorical expression that most recurs is that of ‘corrosion’: corrosive is their reciprocal love or attitude towards each other.40 Or the symbolism is that of the hungry animal who devours. Will wants to find elsewhere the unity he has lost, while Anna is satisfied with her children. Will has struggled, and found a partial regeneration in his daughter’s affection; but he also gets unmoored, loses his aspirations, being somebody who simply looks for pleasure and degenerates. His substitute satisfaction is the vaginal mouth, invitingly open, of an insignificant passer-by. The failed advance creates a new situation, where Anna feels his mental betrayal as he comes back, and both 40 Anna responds to this corrosion in Will in the confused scene of a dance which in her eyes celebrates his ‘nullification’.

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parties create and get involved in a calculated sexual encounter that is no longer passionate and a search for fusion, but just wild lust, blind discharge of the senses. The paradox is that this consenting pleasure, in many ways contrived, is suddenly satisfying. 4. With the discovery of sex practised as a simple and merely unilateral discharge between Will and Anna, and the ‘death by water’ of the head of the family Tom Brangwen, who dies by drowning in a flash flood, Lawrence draws the curtain across one of the emotional crises of The Rainbow. The long interlude that follows is equivalent to the ascent to the second peak, where love is born, is convulsive as it reaches unity, only to find again at its basis aggression, corrosion, hate mixed with devotion and finally leave an impulse towards reciprocal annihilation. With Ursula Brangwen, we reach the third generation, one more than in Wuthering Heights, a book given to Ursula, Will and Anna’s daughter. Lawrence puts Ursula on a journey of religious discovery, but of an aesthetic kind, where Christ is not conceived as human, wounded and bleeding, but only as a beautiful and attractive being, a romanticized, remote and sublime Christ. Ursula is also aware of the discrepancy between life and divine commandments, such as the impossibility of donating everything to the poor. She therefore rejects religion as unrealizable in the present.41 But passion must enter the scene, with Ursula believing she can satisfy and maintain it with Anton Skrebensky, an army sapper. Falling in love is a déjà vu, a mad intoxication, an unsustainable excitation that is yet threatened by the transient; it is then the release of corrosive aggression by both parties. Sex is a private pleasure for her; Anton’s orgasm is the moment when Ursula wins, proceeding to his ‘destruction’. Their separation is however brought about by the war, which reveals that Anton believes in the superior value of saving his fatherland. Ursula’s nihilism has just led her to reject the God of Genesis and with it the procreativity of the God she has been taught about; she is driven to 41

Ursula echoes the Freudian theory that religion is ‘a particular clothing for a human aspiration’. She rejects the fear which religion inspires and elevates desire to foundational unit. She is an alter ego of Lawrence as philosopher. Winifred, the school teacher she falls in love with, has also the task of expounding the critique of a whole class and of the male gender as being limp and emasculated.

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see everything realized in her own self, without descendants. She thinks that those who go to fight in the war are like dead souls and cannot be resuscitated. Sarcastically she almost charges her fiancé with being the follower of a life philosophy, while the news from the front does not arouse her interest but only evokes apathy. From here on the novel has a cardiac rhythm of great peaks and emotional anguish alternating with descents towards flatness and routine. Those descents may be more enjoyable than the peaks, since they are very readable passages of pathetic comedy, where Lawrence knows how to be the objective narrator: they are the scenes of Ursula being a teacher in the school for poor children, who are undisciplined daredevils and whose headmaster is a brutal sadist. After Anton’s departure for the war, Ursula struggles to insert herself in the world of responsibility, has a homosexual adventure with another teacher, is listless in her studies. Her only interest is botany, that is, the forces that guide and make nature proliferate. The erotic liaison with the athletic, sensual Winifred is sparked after the predictable swim in the sea, where the bodies can be in much more fluid proximity and intimacy. It is a homosexual experience that responds to the irrepressible need for an ecstatic moment of unity; but it is still selfish or one-sided, even if this is not acknowledged at first. Even this flame dies down, and Ursula directs her lover towards one of her uncles. Here Lawrence tests prospects that are for his protagonist antithetical to the current ménage: Ursula is against the life of the collieries and the culture of the machine, and once she has ripped the veil from her eyes, she sees her two lovers as the descendants and disciples of the machine. This puts her on a collision course with the dominant outcome in the narrative genre, the pivot of marriage. The Rainbow is fundamentally a nihilist novel, where marriage is rejected for the double reason that it is the grave of passion and because it deprives the woman of the ability to look after her soul and her soul only. As marriage fails, so does procreation. With Ursula the sun sets on the nineteenth-century myth of woman as the angel in the house, fully realized in the role of mother. But while Lawrence takes sides against woman as the queen of the domestic hearth, this does not make him closer to feminism. He is inimical to a feminism that demonstrates in the streets, a feminism of women who are politically engaged and campaign for women’s suffrage. On the contrary, he gets close to the

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demolition of feminist achievements and campaigns in view of a different target. Ursula is less and less on the road to becoming a ‘useful member’ of society, even though the school episode is an interval during which she tries to be one, even with some satisfaction. Predictably, she turns down an offer of marriage from the brother of a teaching colleague and Anton returns. The love which resurfaces is only a truce; they love each other, physically and completely, but are already, or are becoming, strangers to each other. Anton bursts into tears when Ursula rejects his marriage proposal, unaware that Ursula would not have been a good fit. An army officer,42 he wanted a bourgeois, procreating woman, without a soul. Ursula thinks she is pregnant and yields to the bourgeois imperative that she should marry; but shortly after discovering she is not pregnant, she receives a letter from Anton saying he has married already. The reason why Ursula does not get married can be deduced from the distinction between passion and love: she loves Anton, but only by not marrying him could she add passion to that love. With this she puts herself by definition beyond time and history. The epilogue of The Rainbow leaves Ursula apparently defeated on all fronts: failing as a teacher and therefore in her public role, emotionally unfulfilled, without love or passion, longing for something she does not have. The last scene is uneasily symbolic and visionary, with Ursula pursued by a herd of panting horses; when she comes out of this delirious vision she glimpses a rainbow, sign of a new creation. This rainbow stands out, though, against the background of ‘corruption’ of the reality that surrounds her. § 114. Lawrence VI: ‘Women in Love’. The agon between life and death Set on the eve of the 1914–1918 war, drafted in 1916 and published in 1920, Women in Love is the apparent continuation of The Rainbow. It turns out, in fact, to be profoundly different in its structure, and especially in its thematic offering and its prophetic stance. It is an accurate and complex 42 Anton is dispatched to India, where, in the eyes of Lawrence and of Ursula as the author’s spokesperson, he becomes a functionary ‘of the governing class, superimposed upon an old civilisation, lord and master of a clumsier civilisation than his own’. With this single stroke in the middle of a short paragraph, Lawrence manages to dispose of British Imperialism in India.

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weaving of arcane, sometimes enigmatic and mysterious scenes. Superior to the preceding novel, and while not without dross like all of Lawrence’s novels, on the balance of pros and cons it remains his masterpiece. It covers a shorter period of time, barely a calendar year, and is not therefore about the saga of a family. Having extinguished the obsessive focus on one single protagonist, Lawrence follows a quartet that can be widened to a sextet of young though experienced characters. Ursula Brangwen becomes co-protagonist, next to her sister Gudrun; but often they too are eclipsed to leave space to the symmetric couple formed by Gerald Crich, colliery owner, and Rupert Birkin, school inspector, very different personalities yet (or maybe therefore) friends. The markedly diachronic rhythm of the previous novel becomes then synchronic, or rather made up of parallel planes which very often converge, overlap or intersect. The difference is also in kind. Here there are more discrete events, to which corresponds a more varied plot peopled with minor, semi-minor characters and extras. For the first time a novel by Lawrence strays beyond and closes outside the boundaries of the miners’ district and of England itself. In the choral variety of its characters with intersecting destinies, Women in Love returns to the panoramic, kaleidoscopic form of The White Peacock and of Sons and Lovers. It is a return to the origin that is offset by obscure and muddled notions, as in all negative apocalypses. In the stories of the clear and perverted love affairs of his quartet of figures, Lawrence presides over the funeral of the western social model, or maybe only of the European model, English in fact, and of a section of the Midlands’ bourgeoisie. This was the new class of ‘scientific’ colliery owners and the lower middle classes comprising small traders and artisans. From this environment, Lawrence plucks his prophesying characters (hence the emblematic sense of the events) who condemn the blind alley of an England that is war-mongering and industrialized, unable to find the wellbeing that comes from the full enjoyment of sensual life, puritanically driven to the suppression of sex within married life. This is an historical analysis as much as it is guided by the psychology of the unconscious. In Women in Love, Lawrence has described the destructive and self-destructive fury inherent in sex with a tension that is unparalleled in any other of his novels. If he had to celebrate the end of a corroded world, he could not but hail the end of civilization and ultimately of the sexual

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function, ipso facto procreative. The final resolution offered by the novel is that of renouncing sex, a sort of figurative castration under the guise of homosexual friendship between women and between men. 2. The two Brangwen sisters are by now two grown-up women thriving in life, who symbolically wander around their native region looking for clarifying experiences, for cultural and emotional achievements and the fulfilment of repressed needs. They are, then, biding their time, waiting for their lives to take shape and have effect. At the beginning of the novel, their wandering nature allows the narrator to roam within the environment of social distortions in which they live. They offer a clear contrast of colours compared to the grey-black soot of the collieries. They wear fashionable hats, red or orange coats, tightly fitting or loose blouses, green or yellow stockings,43 shoes that are sometimes red. They flee from the narrow prison of the district, escape on the wings of art and fantasy, despite being (or perhaps because they are) one a schoolteacher and the other a design instructor recognized for her artistic talent and having been exhibited in Paris. They come from a country family that has moved to the city but have been educated; they are a notch below, well below, the wealthy or industrial bourgeoisie in the caste system; but since they are educated and sensitive, as well as attractive,44 they are often co-opted into that caste for social occasions. The visual focus shifts then in this way onto the two male protagonists, at first pursued by the demonic intellectual Hermione, who one day out of erotic frustration hits the intellectual Birkin, who has rejected her, with an ornament, in a fit of madness worthy of Dickens’s Rosa Dartle. Of Gudrun Brangwen we had learnt little in The Rainbow; her inner personality, which had been in the shadows, emerges here inductively. Ursula is more tame, more poised in her waiting, even seems to have 43 Gudrun’s coloured tights are legendary and fetishist. She leaves three pairs of them for her sisters when she heads south from the Tyrol: ‘One gets the greatest joy of all out of really lovely stockings’. 44 Brutal but very realistic – and at the same time symbolic of the separation and division even among workers – is the scene of the two bare-chested miners washing themselves and making smutty comments on the two sisters passing by, for whom they would pay their whole wages to spend a whole night with.

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returned to an innocence, an equilibrium and a sanity that preceded the erotic fury and Sapphic love of the previous novel. Alienation, Lawrence’s theme par excellence, and metaphysical doubt are shifted onto Birkin, the nihilist, convulsive, confused, contradictory and restless theoretician and prophet of the cosmic and historical apocalypse, a total destruction that heralds a new beginning. Strangely Rupert Birkin has no backstory; nothing is known of his past, his parents, his family of origin. Lawrence uproots him from any familial, epochal, geographical, formative context, to the point that he does not tell us where and how he got his ideas (but it is from Nietzsche). The fact that the four protagonists periodically meet in pairs or as a foursome makes it possible to table philosophical discourses and debates which the internal characters themselves at times find trying and ‘outlandish’. A dominant Birkin holds sway with his barrage of bitter aphorisms. He has a strange charisma, since even when he is pursuing a woman he always ends up by raising his fixed, gloomy and heavy notion that the world is on the way to dissolution.45 He preaches that it is necessary to regress from a world dominated by intellectual cognition (which Yeats called ‘abstraction’)46 until feeling is restored. The destruction that Yeats postulated for the end of a cycle is understood by Birkin as destruction ‘in the self ’; he is a nihilist who pursues the aim of self-destruction. Sex is ‘a great reducing agent’, splitting the unity of man and woman; getting married (as he does at the end) is therefore a contradiction and disproves his theories. As a pedagogue, Birkin critiques the false intellectualism that wants to preserve children’s animal-like nature, their lack of awareness, the blessed ignorance of the facts of life, which praises instinct but as if reflected in the mirror of the Lady of Shalott. He demands that children should know the facts of life and that they should be able to establish a hierarchy

45 His historical vision is not dissimilar to Yeats’s, who would have approved of the memorable dictum that history is a succession of cycles of dissolution and renewal, with an explicit reference to Heraclitus. On this cf. Kermode 1981, 40–2. 46 See the insistence on this concept, recognizable in Lawrence, in a letter by Yeats cited in CRHE, 298. None of Lawrence’s aphorisms is more Yeatsian than this, in chapter 2 of Etruscan Places: ‘The twilight of the beginning of our history was the nightfall of some previous history’.

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between intellect and sense, with the supremacy of the latter. Lawrence speaks through him, repeating his condemnation of the absence of flesh and body in life, and of the hypertrophy of the mind. The ménage of the two families, the Brangwens and the Crichs, is described as being structured by alienation. There is a historical, generational division in mentality between parents and children; the couple is in fact ontologically separate in its units, which do not fuse together but fight each other. As defined in relation to the Crichs, marriage is fundamentally ‘a relation of utter inter-destruction’. Birkin looks for a symbolic, redemptive marriage of the highest intensity; yet he knows each person is inalienably separate and rails against an old humanity clinging to pseudo-values, against a mass civilization of lying, in order to celebrate the thinking individual.47 3. One of the most concrete subjects touched upon in the novel is that of the reasons for and against war on the eve of its breaking out. The industrialist Gerald Crich puts forth the arguments for race and country; the progressives disagree, arguing that the propaganda in favour of war hides profit motives. Gerald speaks from self-interest, as a short-sighted and harsh industrialist, even if mindful of Morris and Ruskin’s call for improving the life of workers. Women in Love at the same time focuses on the shift from a micro- to a macro-economy of the collieries. Old Crich is a humanitarian industrialist and an idealist philanthropist of the old guard. With his collieries he has been feeding for years his grateful miners and would never show the door to anyone coming to ask for help. He overturns Bounderby in Hard Times, subscribing to a Christian faith that sees the worker as a Christ figure. Lawrence offers a sociological discourse on the different systems of managing a colliery, and on the overcoming of an evangelical, romantic, paternalistic form of capitalism founded on charity. Gerald Crich is a Homeric hero catapulted into a later age. Formerly a soldier, he has succeeded his father in managing the colliery, attracted by a dream of holding power and subscribing to the idea of a dictatorial and oppressive functionalism. Man is for him an instrument and not a Kantian end-in-itself, all the more so in the case of workers; the will overcomes 47 Though less incandescent, the autobiographical alter egos of the Victorian poet Clough – Hewson, Claude – reverberate through Birkin.

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matter and man too. In a historical sense, the late nineteenth-century brand of Christian socialism or even the atheist communism which the workers support while demanding equality is crushed by Crich, who raises the machine-as-God to an idol. In the Brangwen family, Anna and Will are unrecognizable from The Rainbow, since they are now integrated within the bourgeois code of respectability. Their wrenching sensual passion was then only temporary; or perhaps they are just hypocrites who do not betray the implosion they harbour.48 The four protagonists of Women in Love offer a very early example of a quartet of ‘angry young men and women’ and of a first novel of protest, which bitterly rejects the limited prospects of bourgeois marriage in favour of Lawrence’s ‘beyond’, to satisfy a boundless thirst for freedom and self-determination. Birkin and the Brangwen sisters perceive England as a country without future, on the way to extinction. Lawrence’s quartet of characters sarcastically attack the foundations of bourgeois consensus – with the only counter-weight provided by Gerald who, as Gudrun thinks, will join Parliament on the Tories’ side. In a snowy Tyrol that is nearly frozen out of the world, Gudrun reflects on the indissolubility of marriage by remembering how Parnell was martyred by Catholics over his adultery; but straight afterwards, she asks herself: ‘who can take political Ireland really seriously? […] And who can take political England seriously? […] who cares a button for our national ideas?’. 4. The largely ideological nature of Women in Love is already evident in the first scene, which is at the same time the clearest link with the preceding novel. While sewing, Ursula is asked by her sister if she will marry, adding that marriage is ‘an experience’. Ursula answers tentatively that marriage is perhaps ‘the end of experience’; she has therefore not changed her position since the last pages of The Rainbow. Gudrun is waiting, aware that marriage is ‘the inevitable next step’; Ursula tenaciously resists. The one, hopeful, has backtracked in order to jump further, as she explains; the other is lukewarm at the prospect. As if on reconnaissance in enemy 48 The scene where Will Brangwen, Ursula’s father, faces Birkin who has come to ask his permission to marry her, is a crescendo of muteness. The two clash because the father – who in his youth had his own indiscretions – is now a stolid defender of the values of bourgeois decorum. Ursula comes in, and feels ‘bullied’ by both.

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territory, shortly afterwards they attend a wedding. The internal evolution of the two sisters stalls for a while, while Birkin spouts forth a barrage of provocative statements that are visionary, delirious and often incoherent.49 The strongest and best-defined scenes centre on the introverted, troubled Gerald. He has no friends, pretends to have exorcized a trauma from the past through his brash self-confidence and unimpeachable manners: he is an involuntary Cain, having killed his brother with a shot inadvertently – or maybe deliberately – fired from a rusty rifle. If it is indeed the case, then he will get his punishment much later, an expiation under the guise of a solitary wandering to which he will banish himself in the very last stages of the novel. And if that is the case, Birkin appears as his Abel. Compared to Birkin, who is all mind, Gerald is all or mostly body. Athletic, godlike, Apollonian, he is an accomplished and much-admired swimmer; in another scene, he is Dionysus, a different Greek god, the opposite in fact of Apollo. The most symbolic, enigmatic and proleptic scene in the beginning of the novel is that of the level crossing. Gerald reins in his horse’s wild rearing as the train rushes past, while Ursula the animal lover shouts out to him to move back, to spare the animal, in which the horseman has dug his spurs drawing blood.50 She does not understand that like the Platonic charioteer, Gerald is trying to tame or maybe even express his erotic passion. The attraction between the couples which are about to form – Birkin and Ursula, Gerald and Gudrun – is a skirmish inching forwards very slowly, since it is very quick to turn into repulsion. It is in fact attraction and repulsion at the same time. A kiss between lovers is followed by a slap. The members of each couple study each other, tease, attract and reject one another; the moment of falling in love is an intimate, restrained spark, still very powerful – an epiphany.

49 In his 1969 film of the novel, Ken Russell has Birkin recite a shortened version of the fine poem ‘Figs’ (§ 121.5). 50 This of a god who tames animals is described even in its lexicon as the commanding gesture of physical possession and immobilization of Leda by the swan in Yeats’s sonnet (§ 81.4). The quantity of verbal echoes (‘indomitable’, ‘palpitating’ and other four-syllable adjectives) makes one speculate it may be the effect of a recent reading memory by either writer.

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5. Birkin resists love until the end because for him there is something beyond it. He admits he would love Ursula, but in that ‘beyond’ which belongs to an impersonal ‘I’. This exchange of views has the forced character of a Shakespearean dramatic dialogue, in fact of a modern and revised Hamlet.51 Birkin hates sex, especially marriage and the forming of couples isolated from the world, without an authentic life. Aware of the possessive role of women, he invokes a return to the ancient times when human beings were mixed, hermaphrodite, before sex became ‘polarised’. The others claim that Birkin is confused about the idea of marriage and that the passage to a ‘third heaven’ hides his need for feeling secure. In their view Birkin would be yearning for the oxymoron of a fusion of the married couple while preserving their separation; or rather, as Ursula explains, he demands the coupling of the demonic side of being without fusing together the spiritual or human side, which must remain not shared. In reality he wants everything from the woman, but he gives nothing of his. His unfulfilled search for something ‘beyond’, without finding it or defining it, is the other side of the need to subvert the commercial degeneration of the world and the absence of ideals (hence his strange casting aspersions on irredentism, particularly the Italian version). Ursula has won Birkin’s love but is ready to let herself be absorbed and attracted by the idea of death, and to glory in an intoxicated nihilism. All the main characters that have appeared until that point are gathered in the party by the artificial lake organized by the magnanimous Crichs at the first signs of midsummer. The two Brangwen sisters manage to withdraw from the loud company to enjoy their communion with nature by taking a naked swim on the shore of an islet they have reached by boat. This moment of authenticity – the room all to themselves, the all-female isolation, the fear of the cattle hypnotized by the dance – is interrupted by the two men. When tragedy strikes, and Gerald’s sister drowns in the lake despite his desperate attempts to rescue her, Birkin is indifferent. Indeed he extols death as the universal end of a

51

‘One shouldn’t talk when one is tired and wretched. One Hamletises’.

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false world; Gerald at least is consciously a life source, since he fights to save her.52 6. Birkin knows explicitly that sexual desire is a desire for destruction and death, while Gerald ignores it and will only discover it later. It is a desire for self-destruction as much as for the destruction of the other, due to the sudden change from love to hate and the inability to achieve – or even to desire in Birkin’s case – the fusion of body, instincts and spirit. Lawrence lets us glimpse and then makes explicit that the psychic block of the two men, no less than that of the two women, is homosexual attraction. A prologue to the novel which was deleted but later revived for Phoenix53 enquired without any reticence on the nature of this attraction, superior to that of the heterosexual. Birkin’s complex theories, his Hamletic ambivalence, and his philosophizing, mask his erotic hesitation, his secret and reciprocal attraction for the male figure of Gerald. In a scene that anticipates what will pass, Gerald and Birkin have a fight which is a convulsive fusion of bodies, a relief from ennui but also a disguised erotic conquest, which leaves the two friends panting as if after an orgasm.54 Ursula has a bisexual background – Skrebensky and Winifred; Winifred is also the name of Gerald’s young sister, 52

The enigmatic detail of Gerald’s bandaged hand following an unspecified wound, often mentioned throughout the chapter but never really explained by any critic, might suggest a ferocious act of self-repression and self-punishment, a Mucius Scaevola act. As EMW, 510, argues, in this novel ‘many passages resist interpretation’. The irruption of the cattle on the islet is one of the many examples of contact between human beings and animal nature, in this case subjugated and hypnotized by dance. The theme of the fight for supremacy also transpires in all those scenes where man subjugates, mistreats, tortures animals. In his film adaptation Russell, who skips the detail of Gerald’s manslaughter of his brother, inserts at the end of the failed rescue a fade-out (with an intertitle which in the book is spoken by Gerald: ‘she killed him’) between the drowned couple clinging to each other in the lake and that of Ursula and Birkin having sex, with the underlying sense of death that derives from it. In any case, I note that Gerald should be explicitly blond and pale, so very different from the dark-haired Oliver Reed in Russell’s film. 53 Vol. II, 92–108. 54 In the film version, Russell has them fight naked, emphasizing the analogy with the sexual act – which is hate and love at the same time – that is, the holds of the Michelangiolesque bodies which clasp each other then let go.

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with whom Gudrun establishes an unhealthy and dubious relationship. The title Women in Love is therefore misleading and ambiguous, or rather with double valence, because the men in the novel are also ‘in love’. In fact the only love that does not transform itself into hate is the one between the men and therefore the homosexual kind. In the copulation in the tavern before the epilogue, Ursula raves over the ‘electric’ fluid she psychically feels spurting from Birkin’s body, from his loins, halfway in his thighs. Lawrence describes a typical moment of mystical intoxication, almost of divine knowledge; it is like ‘the daughters of men coming back to the sons of God’ in the Bible. The jet is dark, demonic; the intoxication and erotic orgasm are symbolically not light but darkness. Like Tristan and Isolde clinging to each other, they try to destroy the world and isolate and free themselves in a nowhere. More prosaically, they must resign from their positions. Gerald and Gudrun too isolate themselves in the darkness of the world, in the emotional circumstances of the death of his father, but they experience a more natural intoxication. Gerald gives vent to his repression. But a shadow looms even over their wild erotic relationship: ‘to desire is better than to possess, the finality of the end was dreaded as deeply as it was desired’. In a well-realized if unbelievable scene, an irrepressible need leads him to Gudrun’s house, where he sneaks into her bed for a night of passion. But their copulation confirms sex is the death of the male, just as a stain of death covers him as he enters her house. A moment – the relief from tension, the end of sex – is all it takes to divide those who had been united. Ursula and Birkin get married, try to furnish a house, then give up, rebelling against this bourgeois prospect. They buy a second-hand chair at a market stall and then give it away to a couple of fresh, poor newly-weds. The latter want to establish a traditional family. It is an Orwellian scene where, just as with the crystal ball in Carrington’s shop in Nineteen Eighty-Four, finding the chair releases nostalgia for a past more harmonious than the present, which is only ‘sordid and foul mechanicalness’. Ursula and Birkin decide to give up on the chair and therefore on a fixed residence, and to live as nomads. It is a slap to the rigid bourgeois conventions on which the sisters were brought up, since Gudrun too leaves with her for the Tyrol. Gudrun dominates the Tyrolean epilogue from when Ursula and Birkin depart in the guise of a couple in name only, married but only formally so, looking for death; also from when the German sculptor Loerke comes onto the scene. Loerke is a ferret, a ‘troll’, the gnome with wild eyes

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and animal-like in features and movement.55 He is also as filthy as a piglet. As an artist he espouses a functional, engaged art, and his ‘work in progress’ is a Bacchic orgy of peasants sculpted on a marble frieze destined for a factory. Loerke and Gudrun agree on a Decadent, Paterian art subtracted from life, detached and contemplative. Gudrun is fascinated by the artist and his life as much as she is repelled by the idea of the ‘gentleman’. Overpowered, she detaches herself form Gerald and plots his murder in the middle of a sex encounter that is convulsive and powerfully destructive. Suddenly, it is torture for both to continue loving each other. She has pursued a superficial love, and only somebody like Loerke can fulfil her internal hunger and thirst, love as a flame that reduces and disintegrates. For his part Loerke is not interested in love but in an intellectual union. By leaving Gerald and the pettiness of a conventional businessman, Gudrun marries the artistic life of German Dresden. It is an intermediate and temporary choice; Loerke ‘was not a serious figure’; he is only for her a rejection of the old, not the choice of an alternative value.56 55

56

His animal nature is underlined through the many repeated comparisons with animals, and especially with the horny rabbit (there is an anticipation of this in a scene where Winifred plays with her pet rabbit), and with the vampiric bat. In the poem ‘Bibbles’, Lawrence remembers that as a child he owned rabbits with cut off ears; another two poems are dedicated to bats. For Leavis 1978, 202, who makes some acute inferences about names, ‘Loerke’ suggests ‘Loki’ in sound and sense, and if that is the case, it would make him the link-character with Gudrun’s deeds in the Nibelungen saga. Kermode 1981, 54–75, investigates at length the ideological context and particularly the European philosophy of ‘dissolution’ and its English echoes in Carpenter and Chamberlain. For him Loerke is rather a corrupt Jew and in this a symbol of the corruption that captures Gudrun, who with him chooses ‘dissolution’. In fact Lawrence modelled the sculptor on the Futurist painter Max Gertler. For Kermode, who does not mention Freud, the novel is then a quasi-schematic contest between dissolution and regeneration. Those who would like to argue on the basis of conscious relationships, of exact derivations, or even of the sheer coincidences and suggestions between Lawrence and Freud might consider the hypothesis that Women in Love is a great metaphor for Freud’s theory – expounded in the just published Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), translated into English in 1921 – about the clash between Eros and Thanatos, the drive for life and love and the death-drive, symptomatically discovered by Freud on the basis of the war trauma and the frequency of the ‘compulsion to repeat’. The novel is then a Freudian struggle between the erotic drive for life – Ursula and Birkin, but as I said

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7. Women in Love ends with three of the four protagonists instructing themselves to keep moving, without a precise destination and with openness to changing their goal in a matter of minutes. No goal is precluded, just as any excursion into the ‘beyond’ is entertained, which means beyond good and evil in Nietzsche’s terms. Gudrun then embraces her affair with a dubious German sculptor who sadistically beats the women who model for him; and she knows that she will get together with a homosexual with strange perversions. She is subject to the attraction of the beyond of sex, gives her own answer to the negation of sex, but she also dives into abjection and the thrill of sadomasochism.57 After all, heterosexual love has left her feeling empty. On the snow, Gerald can vent his destructive urge on Gudrun, in life and in death. But he is struck by heart-failure – actual and symbolic – which makes him stagger like Cain in the snow, until he collapses and dies.58 Arriving on the scene, Birkin seems to have modified his nihilist philosophy into a more positive and teleological credo: that of a divine commandment that makes possible for each creative cycle to be replaced by a new and better one, in a continuous and never interrupted creationism. Ursula looks up in horror at Birkin’s sincere tears over Gerald’s corpse. The marriage of Ursula and Birkin is considered by most critics in a constructive light, but it is a profoundly misguided inference. Birkin and Ursula both have a taste for death and destruction; they were already

57

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even they not entirely so – and the death drive (Gerald and Gudrun). According to P. Rose in her biography of Virginia Woolf (quoted in § 157.1, bibliography), that Freudian text was ‘part of the post-war cultural climate’ (131) and might also have been in the mind of the author of Mrs Dalloway. Loerke’s aesthetics as well as his sadomasochism are exemplified in his bronze statue of Lady Godiva. Loerke’s explicit ideas about women are unthinkably and brutally chauvinistic. In his film version, Russell was driven by his passion for music and for the biographies of musicians to turn Loerke into a reincarnation of Tchaikovsky and Gudrun into a made-up Cleopatra who dances to the music from the Pathétique symphony in the background, while Loerke pretends to be on a train in Russia. White as the colour of death is the same colour as for Melville’s whale, and the symbol of the dissolution of being (Lawrence’s essay on Melville is in Studies in Classic American Literature).

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on the way to the same destiny – the destiny of death – as Romeo and Juliet in Verona, when they were brought back to life by what happened to Gerald, who in extremis wished to dedicate himself to the Virgin Mary, having nearly reached ‘Mary’s refuge’. The ending is muffled, an exchange of banal and inconclusive lines left without a satisfactory reply: loving one woman is not enough, Birkin declares, because to complete love it is necessary to have an eternal union with a man, which is another kind of love. To which Ursula: there cannot be two types of love. Birkin doubts it and believes there can be. This makes Women in Love into a novel on the homosexuality of the quartet, in fact of the sextet; or it indicates that the completeness of love lies in bisexuality. 8. The binary opposition between life and death which structures Women in Love, between a dying north in the symbolic area of snow, and a warm, full-bloodied and therefore vital south – that is, between being and non-being – was explored in the sketches of Twilight in Italy (1916), a bare travel diary, limited in its reach (Lake Garda, where Lawrence stayed with Frieda between 1912 and 1914) and no longer addressed to a wide public, but composed of a series of fragmentary, lyrical and digressive impressions. This makes it something radically different from Dickens’s Pictures from Italy: no descriptive opulence, no uncontainable verve, no display of humour, precisely because exotic curiosity is no longer the driving criterion. It looks in fact as if Lawrence had descended upon the European south with a preconceived pseudo-theory he wanted to verify at all costs: that of the subsistence of blood, which is stronger in southern races and which starts to appear already in southern Bavaria from the crucifixes along the way, where ‘every gesture is a gesture from the blood, every expression is a symbolic utterance’, and ‘everything is of the blood, of the senses. There is no mind. The mind is a suffusion of physical heat, it is not separated, it is kept submerged’. The old spinner is the epiphany of a spectral, frugal, elderly Parca, not a realist caricature or even a surrealist one of times gone by. This can be observed in all the other few human types Lawrence encounters, pale or even failed portraits when judged with the measure of descriptive realism, but in fact phenomenologies of another expectation, a pseudoanthropological one, about Italy and Italians as shadows and not light,

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as ground and not sky, as unconsciousness and the cult of the phallus as symbol of his own ‘divinity’ for each man. Lawrence’s digression on the tendency of European civilization from the early Middle Ages onwards, away from the flesh and towards abstraction and self-consciousness, and with the Renaissance still towards the absolute fullness of the flesh, has literal analogies with Yeats’s own, and might in fact have inspired it. And yet Lawrence begins here to fear the flesh, to prefigure woman’s destructive power and the extinguishing of the phallic flame in the couple and to introduce a de-sacralized concept of a Holy Ghost which could hopefully reconcile the two infinites, that of the flesh and that of the spirit. Lawrence’s second Italian travel book, Sea and Sardinia (1921) is much more varied, more purely picturesque, freer from ready-made ideological patterns, and therefore more traditional. § 115. Lawrence VII: ‘The Lost Girl’ The Lost Girl 59 (1920, but conceived and started in 1913) is set from the beginning in Woodhouse, a town of 10,000 inhabitants, among families of small-time colliery owners, a self-promoting local bourgeoisie anxious to become distinguished, and proletarian workers. In this ideal ‘last calm year of plenty’, the year before the war broke out, a small-minded search for luxury brews, while personal relationships are superficially friendly but tense underneath. In the town’s social fabric, a host of Gissing’s ‘odd women’ stand out.60 But it is not exactly Gissing’s world that comes to mind. The first panoramic pages describe this calm and sleepy provincial universe which at times can turn treacherous, with affability, generosity, humour and even shards of sarcasm. It is right that Lawrence should not have written a sequel to or double of Women in Love, a second or third novel of complete immersion, empathic and epic, of Wagnerian solemnity. In his earlier work, Lawrence was so close to his alter egos that he could fill in any minimal distancing; but here he puts his subject-matter

59 The double meaning of ‘lost’ is discussed below. 60 Volume 6, § 125.2. The link with Bennett and his ‘old wives’ (§ 20) seems to me less convincing, despite it being very commonly observed.

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a good few feet away and can afford to be a funny, chatty narrator, and an amused spectator. To be frank, he can afford to ape Trollope or Oliphant or Gaskell. As in their works, he creates a plausible provincial universe where the defining social rite is the glorious and undying one of matchmaking. This is the matrix of Trollope’s minor works in his second phase, one of transition, works which as we saw are a little colourless, stiff and anonymous, hinging on the fortunes of mature spinsters looking for a husband; or of Oliphant’s Carlingford epic. Or perhaps the most obvious analogy is with the anachronistic and insulated universe of Gaskell’s Cranford. It looks suspiciously (though incredibly so) as if Lawrence, who lacked the relevant modernist taste for parody, had wanted to write a deliberate Victorian pastiche attempting to parody with this unusual falsetto a generation of predecessors. He seems to approve of the fact that the unchanging world of those three novelists and of others had stood still, substantially still, for another half-century or so, broken and swept away only by the war. The bright ideas of the trader James Houghton, an amateur arbiter of fashion who transforms himself from high-end haberdasher into a small-time coal industrialist, a hotel manager and a film entrepreneur, are eccentric, absurd, and of the same nature as those that come to mind to the spinsters in Cranford. In that Midland town, a plain, chubby and rosy-cheeked girl becomes as the years go by an introverted spinster suffering from some clear emotional complex. Her unease comes from her erotic dissatisfaction. Only at this point does Lawrence remember to be Lawrence, and sketches an explicit diagnosis his fathers would have been silent about, or only hinted at, bound to a reserve they felt bound to conform to. 2. Lawrence utters the taboo word, ‘virginity’, and does so to say that Alvina Houghton had reached a crucial stage in her pubertal development, in which the question of whether that virginity had to be preserved or lost could not be avoided. Alvina is a fearful and unawakened girl who does not know herself and what moves within her; she represses herself by forcing herself, even if with some resistance, to participate in repressive social rituals. Revealingly, she acts strangely and is at times hysterical and out of control. She wants to be a nurse, is wooed by two men whom she rejects, is on the edge of a crisis and a rejection. A plumber in the

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chapel falls and gets hurt, blood spurting from his shin; Alvina stanches the wound by pressing wet handkerchiefs with her hand on the painful wound, feeling a bodily shiver in seeing the hair on his leg and the blood gushing. She feels it is a virtual deflowering and therefore this is a symbolic and proleptic scene. She is faced with an anonymous maleness, one undefined, without vigour, composed of ‘strange fish’, which could be a euphemism for an indeterminate, amphibious sexuality, or one that is decidedly homosexual. In the second half, the novel detours into a fairytale with a flavour of Dickens or Chaplin. An alternative appears to Alvina with a circus troupe hired for the breaks in her father’s cinema. They have the not-entirely novel features of Dickens’s theatre companies, like the classic ones in Nicholas Nickleby and Hard Times,61 with the display of eccentricities, the rivalries that blow up like soap bubbles, the grudges, the intrigues. Alvina becomes attached to this troupe, a kind of irregular and transgressive family with one mother and four adoptive children, whom Alvina sees as representative of a nomadic, free life without rules and the oppression of any kind of morality. The Neapolitan in the troupe, Ciccio – with dark skin and eyes ‘that seemed to have been put in with a dirty finger’, with agile, light hands, tall, sinewy body, feline moves – has the lure of the southern Italian male which many Englishwomen felt at the time, as told by Trollope up to the more recent Forster. But he is also the first of Lawrence’s nomads galvanizing the woman who is sexually dormant. The troupe, and Ciccio particularly, are examples of a life lived by following one’s heart, even of a wild life, which is set up against a typically English reliance on the mind. They are both looking for escape from their prisons together. Ciccio, as marginalized as Alvina, in a predictable scene is insulted by the other actors of a superior race (French, Belgian and German) and, impulsively, he stabs one of them. Alvina is drawn into the circus family after her exquisite gift of Indian moccasins, even if they are too small. The scandal of the right-thinking bourgeoisie – when the father dies, the cinema goes bankrupt and Alvina

61

As Kermode 1981, 97, notes too.

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goes to live with Ciccio – is the same that hits Forster’s Lilia in Where Angels Fear to Tread. 3. Always dreamy, naïve even, Alvina has had numerous dalliances but none of them conclusive; even her relationship with the shy, dull, gloomy Ciccio does not make an impression in her, working only on the surface. Seduction is an act of violence for Alvina. According to Lawrence’s theory, Ciccio suffocates her, literally kills her. But the fulcrum of the novel is not sex, nor its meaning and its importance in youth. The prevailing theme is that of the flight from the imprisonment of roles and of bourgeois conventions. Ciccio too has a conflict with his milieu, being uprooted, defeated, a prisoner; his bitterness is alluded to by his surname, Marasca, a bitter, sour cherry. What resurfaces is an ultimate, inextinguishable sense of isolation, without a unity that can last and would not turn into pretence. Man is always alone in the middle of a road. Lawrence digs up again that sense of a separate, monadic life he had explored in The Rainbow. Alvina’s enthusiasm for belonging to the troupe does indeed cool as she discovers her own ultimate extraneousness to that group. Without too much forethought, as usual, and as if by intuition and a momentary impulse, the girl leaves the group, and therefore Ciccio too, to become a midwife. Here the novel takes on the shade of grotesque Victorian comedy with the figure of a queer Scottish doctor, a confirmed bachelor with his idiosyncratic therapeutic theories. He melodramatically declares his love to Alvina and they get engaged, but once again Alvina pulls out at the last minute and disappears.62 For the first time or nearly the first, Lawrence dates the action of the novel, which ends in 1915 with a violent temporal compression, on the eve of Italy’s entry into the war.63 Alvina is the ‘lost’ woman, powerless when faced with Ciccio’s subjugating force, but also in the sense of ‘fallen’, that of which her fellow citizens accuse her. But she has also lost her way, in the meaning that is most apt for the title, as she does especially in the rugged, dark, icy landscape of the Abruzzi that she penetrates, where snow 62 When the doctor discovers he has been dumped, he writes an incandescent and contemptuous letter to his former lover, in a separate sketch with echoes of Gaskell. 63 Ciccio turns up again one day singing ‘Torna a Surriento’ for Alvina, accompanied by a mandolin in a picturesque touch. This is enough to rekindle their affair.

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is not for Lawrence a symbol of untouched purity (as it is in part in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’) but truly of death. The third chapter from the end follows a journey through Italy, but the unusual one undertaken by Italian migrants returning as the war breaks out. This is a separate essay by Lawrence the travel writer, focusing on the traditional and cumbersome images of southern good nature. Images of the wintery snowy landscape impressionistically follow each other in Alvina’s alienated gaze. They are dominated by the wild, barren, frightening and slightly ‘Gothic’ landscape of the Abruzzi Apennines. How does the novel end? Alvina, needing isolation, and metaphysically alien, has managed to escape the mesh of the bourgeois codes of her country and the rigid protocols of marriage. She has then given in to compromise, but in an alternative and transgressive form, by marrying a dark man from Naples, an actor in England, and by following him to Italy and to his native village, in a setting that is not idealized or bucolic, but still natural and primitive.64 The last sentences are blunt lines of a continuing dialogue, ambiguous, left without resolution, as at the end of Women in Love. Alvina does not return to England, Ciccio is called to the front, their child will perhaps be born an orphan. Or maybe not, since Ciccio, indolent and fatalist, has a sudden manly outburst and promises to return alive in order to rebuild a life.65

64 Pescocalascio in the novel, Picinisco in reality, where the Lawrences had stayed in 1919. 65 The first part of Mr Noon, published posthumously in 1934 but written in 1921, is homogeneous with The Lost Girl and drafted in the same mannered and facetious register, always unconvincing in Lawrence. The novelist did not finish a second part, nearly contemporaneous but only published in 1984, in which the eponymous hero, a gifted teacher with a passion for music and mathematics, is expelled from the village school for impregnating a cheeky choirgirl. He then has a love affair with a wealthy married woman in Germany. Lawrence did not finish or publish it essentially because it is not a good start, even if some critics have hailed this as an unrecognized masterpiece on the score of a certain unprecedented experimentalism in the comic and metaliterary genres. The satirical scenes set in England lack vigour after all, while the German episodes are even more uninspired and outlandish, despite wanting to imitate Sterne and disguising Frieda and Lawrence’s ménage through the pretence of yet another travel diary.

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§ 116. Lawrence VIII: ‘Aaron’s Rod’. The biblical wanderer Aaron’s Rod 66 (1922) is a schematic novel derived from a series of aphorisms and theorems, not a plausible plot naturally illustrating the thought underlying it. Hence its laboured, often clumsy pace and progression; hence the long sections of pure debate detached from the actual events in the lives of the protagonists acting within it. The English scenes take up less than half the novel and are neat, distinct, stark, even in their own way evocative; but they are interrupted to give way to a didactic novel used by Lawrence as a means to expound fantastic and delirious theories in which he had a pathological belief as redemptive medicine for a civilization in ruins. There idea and narration become gradually out of step with each other and disconnected; and the narrative descends into the merely incidental, into a caption to the theory. As often, the starting point of a Lawrence novel is an apparently quiet family unit that is underneath it all already falling apart and as such breaks up and becomes dispersed into its constituent members. The dispersed, male or female, take a long jump that may land them in England and, much more often from now on, in Europe or in the farthest corners of the globe. It is the leap of those who are seeking quiet without finding it, by fleeing to the ‘beyond’ of themselves and of their own place of origin. The protagonist Aaron Sisson is a different type in Lawrence’s narratives: not the loquacious, prolix, wordy theoretician like Birkin, whose ideas he mostly shares at an intuitive level; he is rather Camus’s stranger, or Moravia’s indifferent man.67 He is a withdrawn figure who at first lacks definition, and is invariably announced by his simple dark suit and the unmissable bowler hat: a silent, listless, confused, chaotic, foundering man who gives himself principles and lines of conduct only to then contravene 66 Aaron’s rod is not just the flute, as I am saying, but also a flowering plant commonly designated with this biblical generic name. For the complete symbolic system in the novel, see below n. 68. The flute is also par excellence the instrument of Etruscan civilization (§ 122.3), characterized by ‘a profound belief in life’ and ‘acceptance of life’. 67 Aldington argues that Lawrence objectifies himself in Lilly while Aaron is Middleton Murry, whom Lawrence wanted to dominate and mould with his teachings. Except that Aaron’s Italian travels follow closely those of Lawrence in 1912–1914. So that Aaron is also, if not most of all, Lawrence.

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them, and who therefore also fabricates alibis for himself. He is someone who in the long run needs a partner and especially an interpreter. As he himself philosophizes, trusting only the subconscious means taking a gamble. Aaron’s Achilles’ heel is that of any other man: the weakness of the flesh which clashes with an irreproachable intellect; his momentary ruin is women, the sensual and sexual hook. Aaron stands in the middle of an unresolvable impasse and of the illusion that it might be possible to achieve in sex unity with one’s self and fulfilment, whereas the satisfaction of desire, the immediate satisfaction, rekindles the powerful need for inalienable solitude and for separateness. He is once moved by the wife he has left and whom he visits; he ‘falls’ with a woman who demonstrably lures him, then two more times in Florence with an American married to an Italian marquis. But already during intercourse he feels, as proverbially in Lawrence, torn, wounded, in need of solitude, and he runs away from the woman both mentally and physically, firmly ending the affair. In the usually far-fetched symbolism of the novel, Aaron is an ironic patriarch who shares with his biblical alter ego his wandering in search of salvation. His rod is the one that flowers in the Bible, symbol of a miracle which his flute can perform, and is also the phallic rod, the carnal desire which is always reborn and the magic amulet with which he conquers.68 Lawrence

68 I would just like to touch briefly on Aaron’s state of mind at the time of his stay at a gentleman’s villa in Novara, described in the loosest and most obscure and evocative half-page of the novel, where Lawrence peeks out from behind the scenes. There Aaron is seen to be alone in a state of virtual celibacy which transmits a serene fulfilment but not quite the superior ideal of the absence of ‘anxiety’ typical of the lily. The screen of metaphoric and imaginative language allows one to say that the lily here is the traditional symbol of purity and innocence and also and especially the symbol of Lawrence’s central proposition: immunity to the grip and pursuit of happiness and fulfilment in sex, that is, a fulfilling solitude, secluded creation, without loss of one’s own autonomy, or even the ‘splendid love-way’. This page is the fulcrum of a sequence of isotopies based on the lily. Aaron’s peregrinations once he leaves London are undertaken as he looks for Rawdon Lilly, his London Samaritan. This character is always identified by his surname ‘Lilly’, which has just one consonant more than the flower ‘lily’, since Lilly is even closer to the lily than Aaron, he is in fact the lily. In the end the two cannot but meet again in Florence, the city of flowers, indeed the city of the red lily.

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inserts these dilemmas into nearly all his characters, no matter what their intellectual level; all of them sooner or later reflect on love making them unhappy and leaving them divided and unfulfilled. It is a western disease of the age, and even Anglo-Florentine society is made up of dull, unhappy, divided couples. The antidote Lawrence dangles in front of his readers at the end is that of a male rebellion against the seductive power of women. A misogynist Lawrence imputes to women the perverse seduction of a Cleopatra, who rejects man in order to heighten his passion, and, once conquered, enslaves him. This woman is no angel in the house but rather a devil. Sexual initiative and seduction are in the woman’s hands, so that she uses man. After so many feminisms, we hear in Lawrence a fearless male chauvinism, or rather an inverted feminism. Lawrence’s mirage is however still that of a sexual relationship that would leave individual separation intact. The opening scene, placed in the tiny centre of an English colliery village, shows that the war has ended but has not brought about the resolution of social conflict. With a progressive widening of the field of vision, this motif is only part of a larger background, one of a metaphysical, existential, nihilistic negation of any chance of renewal. Aaron’s Rod weighs up then a number of alternatives: a prospect of resisting stagnation, even a return to the status quo within the context of a struggle between socialism and fascism immediately after 1919. In Italy, especially, Lawrence attempts to match an ontological unease with an epochal one. On the one hand, he advocates a return to origins, to the primeval state of civilization in order to restore to sex its reviving flame; on the other, he turns some characters into the champions of the need for a strong man, of a return to a firm hand and to a salutary dictatorship which would break up democratic anarchy. His England is that of miners’ demands, and Italy that of strikes, uprisings and disorders provoked by the socialists and repressed by the police and the armed forces. In Aaron’s Rod, Lawrence now demands of his readers a considerable ‘suspension of disbelief ’. A miner becomes an orchestral player and conceives a lucidly negative existentialist philosophy; and we are asked to believe in his daring musical fortune and in his English and Italian wanderings. Lawrence covers up the lack of verisimilitude by claiming that Aaron is instinctual: he has not read any books, lives by a philosophy he does not know and cannot articulate; and he does everything without any smattering of theory; when asked about his reasons for

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leaving the marital home, he cannot explain himself. His approximation to nothingness is music, of the Wagnerian kind, perhaps.69 The intrusion of the narrator from behind the scenes is kept scrupulously at bay in the first sections, and the backstory is not neatly narrated, but rather unveiled by the minor characters who investigate its mystery. 2. The year of the novel is that of just after the end of the war, 1920; the starting place a coal-mining district, the default setting for Lawrence; the season the most apparently promising one, of the far end of a cycle of chaos and wars and of the coming of universal peace – historically, Christmas. This actual, impending Christmas is mirrored – in a marvellous, perfect overlapping – in a family of hardy miners, with strong and responsible parents, who are valiant fighters against poverty and therefore enjoy a limited level of comfort forming a small Bethlehem hut, with the mother caring for a newly born baby and his two sisters. But the reader gradually discovers how deceptive this aura of peace and fulfilment is. The stereotypical halo which surrounds this initial scene is violently dispersed. On Christmas Eve, Aaron Sisson comes home from work; he is a trade unionist in the colliery who has just been sitting through (without much involvement) yet another episode of struggle between owners and workers. Crisis is nested deep in his family, since husband and wife no longer get along, their reciprocal love having been turned off and become a daily fight for supremacy. Their little daughters too are precocious rivals who fight and snatch presents from each other. Aaron is in fact a Joseph who has built the house, nest of conjugal and parental love, with his own bare hands. He patiently agrees to plant and decorate the Christmas tree for his excited girls. He appears to be a grumpy yet patient husband, affectionate and even submissive to a wife who is often rather curt with him. Without realizing the consequences

69 Throughout the novel Aaron shows he prefers ‘frail, sensitive, abstract music, with not much feeling in it, but with a certain limpidity and purity’. From the scene in the villa at Novara, it becomes clear that he rejects the idea of music as a tonic, and constructive like that of Bach and Beethoven, who according to the wife of the English gentleman who is his host, convince those who listen to them that ‘things [will] work out well in the end’. At the marchioness Del Torre’s in Florence, Aaron however plays a lulling music, ‘like the fire-music putting Brunnhilde to sleep’.

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of her words, his wife reproaches him for having time only for politics and himself, of being in other words selfish. Aaron in fact discovers or intuits he is not at all. After dinner is finished, he goes out and it is suggested he may not be sure to remember to bring back home to his girls the candles to decorate the tree. But the most ominous scene is that of an unbreakable blue ball, a toy and a present, which shatters when it falls, sign of the imminent break-up of the perfect, sphere-like family unit.70 From here on, Aaron gets progressively or rather violently farther from his family environment. His story also becomes however a testing ground, at first imperceptibly, then ever more instrumentally so, of the horns of a dilemma between love ad extra and introverted nihilism, between altruistic dedication to the other in order to create better living conditions – a kind of gloriously Christian or even secular socialism – and the defeated withdrawal into the self. It becomes an aimless wandering, a drifting, a withdrawing from any kind of social, civic, human commitment.71 Lawrence’s nihilist is always imperfect, either out of luck or of weakness. Sisson is endowed with a gloomy lucidity shared by few other of Lawrence’s characters, yet he retreats at least once, and Lawrence gives him this very human, contradictory weakness. The nihilist either kills himself, thus contributing to erasing the world according to his ideology, or must drift, and this too is a weakness. It is a penetrating or descending ever deeper in the gouffre of nothingness. Aaron betrays an imperious, indomitable need to uproot himself and cultivate his solitude, to withdraw into himself. He obstinately rejects any kind of sharing and of communion, first of all in love. This is why he systematically refuses the advances of progressive feminists from London. The only motivation he can give to his perpetual fleeing is that of freedom from the yoke, the need to breathe pure air. In a detached piece, in which Lawrence betrays his objectivity, the diagnosis offered for Aaron is that he no longer loves his wife and opposes her supposedly beneficial power which is, instead, ‘enveloping’. For her part, his wife is frustrated by it and hates him. In Novara, Sisson 70 Cf. Humma, 1990, 8, for a series of further implications of this symbol. 71 This sense of disengagement in a man who is aimlessly stalling recalls Conrad’s drifting (Volume 6, § 271 and passim), as displayed in many of his novels, preceding Lawrence’s. Sisson is like Verloc (Volume 6, § 279), but without the espionage plot.

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has the intuitive perception of his innate, inalienable separation, uniqueness and solitude; but this picture is revealed to his ‘subconscious’ or his musical intuition. He has pierced his mask and reveals himself nakedly: he is Wells’s invisible man, with the probable addition of a reference to Pirandello. Unmasked to himself, he solemnly, almost satanically decides to pursue his autonomy, utters his non serviam but directs it against women. 3. From the third chapter onwards, Aaron’s Rod, coherent in direction and nearly inexorable up to that point, declines into a vortex of flagrant improbabilities, or comes close to one of those famous and virtual cases of ‘one in a thousand’, as in Wilkie Collins’s novels.72 Coming out of the pub on Christmas Eve, he suddenly decides not to go back home, but to take the road leading to the house of the colliery’s owner, where a group of friends who have come down to the estate to decorate the Christmas tree, see him in the dark, invite him home, and after listening to him and offering him drinks, even give him a bed for the night. On Christmas night there is then no reconciliation, peace does not descend among the men of goodwill, but, heretically, separation is dug even deeper, since from this night Aaron will not come back home, except once. He reappears playing the flute in London in the orchestra at Covent Garden. He has dumped his wife and family, even if he still pays maintenance to them. Not an amateur like Forster’s Bast, he is an intelligent miner who has always nurtured a nearly professional passion for the instrument. Starting from that evening, he intermittently joins a circle of bored middle-class characters;73 but feeling awkward and nearly dumb, he looks like Melville’s Bartleby. In this evening at the opera, Lawrence exposes the confusion of intentions, the vacuity and the over-reach of the class Orwell will condemn shortly afterwards, that of the salon socialists, Bolsheviks in fact, who deliriously pant after a violent revolution without knowing what they are talking about.74 He also shows that a wrecked marriage can be replaced by a friendly and 72 Volume 5, § 173.1. 73 He is identified by them one evening during a performance of Aida, an ‘interminable’ opera of which Lawrence gives a far from flattering assessment in his characters’ mouths. 74 For instance in OCE, vol. I, 347.

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even sexual co-habitation among men. One day in his wanderings Aaron collapses to the ground close to Covent Garden,75 and is helped up by Rawdon Lilly, a writer he knows only superficially. Lilly has himself just temporarily left his wife and introduces himself as a conscious supporter of the necessity for love and for help not out of an abstraction or idea, but because of an actual person. Separated from their wives, the two men set up a male ménage that is even fulfilling for some time. Lilly’s massage to a weak Aaron, with camphor oil and all over his body (the most allusive scene in the whole novel, perhaps in the whole of Lawrence), is at the same time maternal, ‘as mothers do [to] their babies’, and also rather obviously a masturbatory mimicry of sex. But the two get tired of each other, most of all because for each the need to cultivate solitude and separation, to retreat into it, is imperious and relentless. After having reclaimed his freedom as a bachelor and having slipped through his wife’s grip, Aaron moves on again, drifting. His ‘quest’ is suspended through a string of decorative, fragmented, unsuccessful episodes drawn from Lawrence’s memories of travel. In Novara, guest of English expats with a following of surreal extras, Aaron counters the theory of homo faber and supports that of blind chance. Listless and alienated, his only mirage is to reach or find Lilly and the exit from inertia and total paralysis. The Italy of Aaron’s Rod is then a different Italy, unpredictably composed of strange and alienating spectacles, not the exuberant and picturesque one of stereotypes. When Lawrence takes Aaron’s pulse once more in Florence, he finds him more inclined to receive the beneficial influence of the land. Something is reborn and moved in him when he finds himself surrounded by real men.76 Aaron maintains an unshakeable, protective faith in his autonomy and safety, just like that of saints; he is diffident towards those males or females who may want to approach him; he censures himself at the first signs of giving in. But

75 This physical fall is also a first, programmatic failure – that is, a contradiction or a weakness: Aaron has indeed given in to love, has let himself be seduced by a woman. 76 Aaron does not stay at the (for him) expensive pensione Bertolini, like Lucy Honeychurch in Forster’s A Room With a View; the impact the city has on Aaron is to reawaken his senses, just as for Forster’s Lucy. It is however naturally impossible that in 1920 a street would have been named after Benedetto Croce!

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weakness sneaks up on him. His affair with the marchioness Del Torre is in itself a melodramatic and clumsy episode, blatant in its aim to show the infallible power of female seduction. The penultimate scene describes a debate at a café in the Florentine Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, where Aaron listens to the newly arrived Lilly bury socialism, both the fashionable variety of the snob circles in London and the official one clinging on to putrefying ideals. Lilly proclaims against them the ideal of disengagement, of caring for one’s own soul, of the total and limitless freedom of the individual. This proclamation is interrupted, and it seems confirmed, by a terrifying anarchist bombing which destroys the symbol of individual freedom, Aaron’s flute. Lilly is Lawrence’s spokesperson, and before he leaves the scene he lends Aaron his oracular truths: that ‘your own single unity is your destiny’ and that the task of each man is to develop one’s own soul, the only real god. Historically the ‘love-urge’ had ended, substituted by the ‘powerurge’, a ‘dark, living, fructifying power’, one different from Nietzsche’s in that it renews. Lilly’s words seem to prepare the ground for the advent of a heroic soul or super-soul which will ultimately overturn the male’s enslavement to female seductive power. Lilly’s enigmatic words leave open many doors. As usual, Lawrence closes them with a line of dialogue: Aaron will go looking for the strong, powerful man, becoming his follower. § 117. Lawrence IX: ‘Kangaroo’. An Australian fable Kangaroo (1923) seems to be a study of the reactions of an Englishman who is initially apolitical, then is dazzled by and therefore becomes involved in a nascent right-wing if not fascist revolution, whose stirrings he witnesses in contemporary Australia (of 1922, that is) but towards which he eventually turns apathetic. By imagining that this fuse would have been lit on the periphery of the British Empire, the novel is in some of its parts utopian and a work of political phantasy. Gradually, the Englishman’s realistic experience of the Antipodes disappears and a strange and surreal atmosphere prevails. This Australian novel is not then out of line compared to the visionary, dream-like, improbable, therefore somewhat utopian texts set in Australasia, by other Englishmen, from Trollope to Reade, Butler even. But Richard Somers, who faces two imaginary ideologues, the fascist and the socialist, points first of all to the route of Orwell’s novel two decades

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down the line: to the novels of equidistance from, or rather of symmetrical de-mythologization both of fascism and of socialism. The parable in this sense is even more precisely Orwellian, even though Lawrence decorates and furnishes his discourse with a sexual sociology and psychology, as well as a history of civilization which is highly evocative, poetic, fantastical, and therefore will remain viscerally foreign to Orwell in his committed materialism. Somers weighs up the double and ruinous proposals of the two radical extremisms of the immediate post-war and, after rejecting them, reverts to indifference, apathy, withdrawal. Kangaroo is already a vocal, Orwellian defence of the reasons for a detached art, custodian of the guarantees for the individual: ‘The self is absolute’, the path traced for man is ‘back to the central self, the isolate, absolute self ’.77 Except that Kangaroo is the most experimental and revolutionary of Lawrence’s novels to date, and perhaps the only one to be so in his oeuvre, since more than any others it has the nature of a heterogeneous, disintegrated, disassembled novel, to the point of not resembling a novel at all in some parts. The plot is slow and inconclusive, keeps on getting stuck and petering out; the dialogue is the most flaccid, repetitive and inconclusive Lawrence ever wrote. Long sections are digressions; a chapter ends with a page of quotations and arguments against the Sermon on the Mount; another is made up of imaginary newspaper clippings, just to give an idea of the mixture of its materials. But this is a deliberate flaw. The formula Lawrence explicitly mentions is that of the conversation novel, which had been abandoned in England after Meredith with the sole exception of Huxley and Norman Douglas. Lawrence develops it from beginning to end around two married couples. His challenge is to make the four protagonists talk almost of just one topic: the Australian model, the preparation of an Australian revolution, and the confrontation between two leaders. Having broken the boundaries of omniscience and objectivity, Lawrence controls the narrative and liberally pours onto the page interlinear comments and captions. He even inserts an entire autobiographical chapter entitled ‘The Nightmare’ at the climax,

77 These are echoes from Hopkins, as Burgess 1985, 120–1, also notes, though he argues they must be spontaneous, as it is thought Lawrence would not have known Hopkins.

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narrating there in the third person a dramatic segment of his own life, that of his individual liberty that had been trampled and insulted by the criminal and police system of British counter-intelligence during the war. Formally this episode is assigned to Somers, but this is such a transparent and thin veil that it becomes nonexistent. The third quarter belongs by rights to an essayistic novel like Proust’s, but in an obviously different modality, much more involved and passionate. The whole of Kangaroo can be said to be a hybrid philosophical compendium camouflaged as a fictional plot. It is the most theoretical novel of Lawrence’s. After many attempts, it is then Lawrence’s long-awaited modernist novel, while in many other respects it is also anti-modernist: the emphasis, the mad idealist passion, the incorrigible preaching on the one hand; on the other, a polymorphic narrative structure which, as in Joyce’s pastiches (from which it profoundly differs in equal measure), incorporates fake newspaper articles, fragments of bulletins, sudden and unrelated nursery rhymes. 2. Richard Somers is one of the variants – the cultivated one – of Lawrence’s wanderers and of the deracinated character in a quest for selfknowledge; ‘he wearied himself to death struggling with the problem of himself ’. A wanderer originally from the English Midlands, he has made the longest leap among Lawrence’s alter egos like Lawrence, he has landed in Australia with his wife Harriet, Frieda’s counterpart, propelled by his disgust for European institutions. He shares Lawrence’s size and facial characteristics, and the memories of Australian scenes, customs, landscapes stored by Lawrence. The emotional need to express the ecstatic wonder at the discovery of this untouched, or nearly untouched land is uncontainable; no page is without Lawrence’s dazzling, always precise, detailed and imaginative personal descriptions of the beaches and seas and skies and flowers and vegetation. The sense and sound of the looming Pacific with its waves and crests upon the Australian bungalow have never been rendered with such resonances in a novel. But it is also true that these minute, frequent descriptions are at times gratuitous purple passages, even if they aim to present themselves as objective correlatives. It is tempting in any case to treat Kangaroo as yet another travel diary filled in and objectified into a novel. In a reprise of the novel of the ‘quartet’, the recently arrived

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Somerses become friends with the Callcotts,78 a local couple. The Callcotts are a miracle of ancestral Australia: the husband grants his wife a just and reciprocal autonomy, he does not ‘want to occupy the whole field of her consciousness’. Victoria Callcott has a natural and reciprocated connection with Somers, who finds her exempt from that ‘feminine rapacity which is so hateful in the old world’. The two Australians make up a couple that is close, very close, to Lawrence’s ideal, solidly together yet capable of preserving and encouraging the inviolable separateness of each. But the Callcotts’ marriage is new, and their desire has not yet been satiated or weakened, while that of the Somers is mature, therefore more tired, always dangerously close to a crisis, and lived in the midst of conflict.79 The recognition of the Australian model starts from the positive realization that in Australia everyone is equal, hierarchies don’t exist, or if they exist they are not due to status; and if differences of status exist, it is not because a person is richer than the other. The feeling of an oppressive control by authority is unknown, a feeling which Lawrence basically liked. Arriving there, the first impression was then that this was the Eldorado, a society that had come as close as possible to an efficient democratic and representative order. But Lawrence’s alter ego is not so happy to notice this, because he invokes from the beginning the need for a regulating function, for a guide, for a leader. We have gone back to the starting point, when the rebel against authority still invokes an authority where there is none. The argument about the evolution of human institutions is never solved, because Australia too has adapted itself to the compromises of civilization, and gives the image of a ‘chiaroscuro’, visually represented by modern cities like Sydney (even if they are not entirely modern yet, with typical housing represented by the

78 By chance, Jack Callcott glimpses the Somers as they land at the beginning of the novel, later discovering the Somers had in fact rented the bungalow next door to theirs, so that the four become neighbours. 79 The story of the matrimonial ship which raises the flag of perfect love and is steered by its male helmsman only because his wife allows him to do so with curtailed freedom is an essayistic update of the theory of the fight for supremacy within the couple. This ninth chapter of Kangaroo is for Kermode 1981, 103, the worst one in the whole of Lawrence’s canon.

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bungalow), where the novel takes place, and the bush in the wild interior. As Somers gradually realizes, Australia is not a paradise of democracy and equality. Already the initial scene demonstrates symbolically the power of money, and even of profit, in the greedy taxi-drivers overcharging their customers. Somers and Callcott cautiously reveal themselves. Their ideas on politics, economy, on the state of the world coincide. Jack Callcott is a worker, a mechanic, but he fought in the war and is a dissatisfied Australian war-veteran; the gruff, wild Somers has ostensibly rejected western civilization, but equally strong is his contradictory nostalgia for Europe. His beard makes him look a socialist, but he is in fact an uninformed and uninterested neutral who wants to stew in his broth. The two male characters, one English and one Australian, are opposed to the reds, and both wish for an authoritarian crackdown. The theme of the novel becomes the nature of the contemporary world, or rather, that of the contemporary world and Australia together, and of Australia’s prospects. Lawrence transplants and tests his view of the crisis of western civilization in this outpost of the world. From Australia too – if not especially from Australia – there could have been a debate about whether there were ways of coming out of the global crisis. The echoes of the Great War had reached Australia, although in a somewhat softened form, since Australians had fought in Europe under British command. With Jack Callcott and the ‘diggers’ like him, a dictatorship is about to be born to put an end to democratic anarchy and civic disorder. Somers is tempted to emerge from his shell of apolitical solipsism and give an ideological contribution to the effort for renewal. The cells of veterans devoted to Kangaroo, the prophet of the Australian revolution, are a copy of the Italian ‘fasci’ and prepare themselves for action through athletic and military training. After 1919, fascism and socialism were then facing each other not just in Europe but also in the whole world: the fascism Kangaroo aims for is more idealistic and benevolent, a barrier against local socialism. Kangaroo’s opponent is Struthers, the ideologue and socialist leader Somers personally knows, but whom he rejects together with the nebulous, limp socialism which is too cowardly throughout Europe to be able to overturn the existing regimes. The political and the emotional plots are sutured together when Somers’s growing and secret involvement with politics estranges him from his wife, so that Harriet becomes frustrated in her sense of ontological possession of man by woman.

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3. The ideologue Kangaroo (a nickname) proclaims a confused programme of universal regeneration, with the aim of instilling the spiritual principle of life by means of a benevolent dictatorship (in what seems like an echo of Shaw and his optimistic ‘life force’). This is meant to enable the transformation of government, not its disintegration. The disagreement between Somers and Kangaroo is initially smouldering and then becomes stark. Kangaroo praises the creative power and idealist spirit of pure and sublimated love; Somers rebuts that there is a God who ‘enters us from below’ and is the phallic flame, the flesh, erotic love, sheer passion. He accuses Kangaroo of exploiting, even suppressing his ‘lower self ’ through the spirit. The greater god who waits at the threshold of the ‘lower self ’ must be invited in. A clash of prophets ensues. Lawrence’s alter ego discovers in the geographical alternation between urban and bush landscapes the synchronicity of two historical phases of civilization which had once (and up to a certain temporal stage) been separate and following each other. In a later and younger civilization, the bush indicates and evokes the residue of an earlier, primitive world which is that of the unconscious, of instinct, of an unknowing fall into obscurity. It is also a dullness of the spirit, unconsciousness and indifference. At the same time, the bush is a kind of primeval maternal womb to which one wishes to return; it is also then a drive toward death and annihilation. Somers calls for a humanity become vegetal, which once returned to that state could experience sex as an indifferent, automatic fact, as it is for plants. Having immersed himself in the enveloping twilight of this womb, Somers backtracks and breaks off any nascent political commitment. His figure gives voice to Lawrence’s need for going back to being irresponsible and apathetic at this stage of his life: one seems to hear Leopardi’s ‘e il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare’ [‘and shipwreck seems sweet to me in this sea’]. He formulates a theory of mass psychology in his support. ‘Life-urge’ is identified with god, but a god not revealed, and is a drive to never-ending development for the self and the soul. The mass is insensitive to this urge and acts instead by telepathy, like animal hordes or pods of whales. For Lawrence it was a case of preventing the dominant awareness of every age and of that age from being suffocated by the ‘collective, vertebrate psyche’, that of the horde and of the pod of whales. The speech of the socialist is not for nothing followed by a mob riot, in which Kangaroo receives a deadly wound. Having been

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asked to become a committed intellectual and literary ideologue, Somers declares the failure of both fascism and socialism because they are the same and opposites, both centred on horizontal solidarity, and on the love between men, forgetting the counter-urge to look for and cultivate the inalienable solitude of the individual, and his need to be ‘by himself ’. The Enlightenment principle of fraternity introduced into civic systems by the American and French revolutions was not rejected by Lawrence in absolute terms, but rather for empirical reasons: when tested by facts it is fragile and breaks down, and it is not a cornerstone. In fact lovers quickly become haters and Lawrence agrees with Wilde that we end up killing those we love. The only brake or inhibition, a heartening and regulating principle, is the ‘God-passion’. This is another hypostasis or terminological variation on Lawrence’s oxymoron, that of love as an offer and promise of communion without however spoiling the inviolable separateness of the individual. The rejection of politics is ultimately caused by the inability of the current revolution – and of any political revolution – to connect with the ‘dark god’. The war is revised as a war for a dead ideal; and after the devotion to the ideal there is vengeance against the enveloping octopus of the false ideal. The reasons for Somers’s negative answer are already implicit and inherent in the autobiographical chapter, placed right after the riot, and therefore fully justified in its delay. In narrating the attack against the centrality of man – his attempted de-personalization in a mass, the searches, the humiliation of the medical examinations to verify suitability for military service – Somers remembers having landed in Celtic Cornwall which he found the only English region where it was still possible to think of the soul and to feel in touch with a pre-Christian civilization, with ‘blooddarkness’, and where ‘consciousness pulsed as a passionate vibration, not as mind-knowledge’. The backward track followed by Lawrence is announced here: he realizes that the primitive has been overcome everywhere and that he is therefore always seeking other worlds where the primitive appears to be still living, towards a track leading to the awareness of blood and to the soil where that awareness has been preserved or where its last remains are more perceptible and closer. This quest has its narrative seeds in Kangaroo: after Cornwall comes Australia, after Australia Mexico, the location for the following novel. 4. The title Kangaroo warns that the fulcrum of Lawrence’s discourse lies in its eponymous ideologue and his psychological and ideological

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relationship with the novel’s protagonist. Unlike Struthers, a socialist of flesh and blood, Kangaroo transgresses the order of realism. He is the embodiment of an idea and he remains an idea. The novel tells us that it is the idea that tempts Somers until the end, and that idea he must counter with another idea. In his physical appearance, Kangaroo is ‘more like a real Jehovah’; he is then the Old Testament God who loves and punishes his people, with Somers as his unfaithful prophet. He preaches fraternity among men, ethical solidarity, a utopian love of free men. Somers is fascinated by a proposed rebirth founded on disinterested, brotherly love. He is therefore the scion of all the unfaithful prophets called up by the Jewish God; he is Christ too, in the supreme moment of being summoned for sacrifice for his Father. But he is a Christ who, while having suffered the temptations in the desert, rejects them. The temptations which Kangaroo offers Somers are not the insinuating ones of homosexual love, often encountered in Lawrence; the love he offers is rather the kind of love a father has for his son, or a friend for another friend, therefore a spiritual love. In this distant region of Empire, the Jewish Kangaroo envisaged a utopia of a better world, only to die like a sacrificial god. Lawrence never rewrote somebody else’s novel, but it is plausible to suggest that here he may have attempted a re-creation of Conrad’s Kurtz (probably Jewish, sharing his initial with Kangaroo and like him a sort of sorcerer who has the local population in thrall) and of his power over Marlow, an ambivalent investigator of the explicit and hidden aims of colonialism. Kangaroo suffers the same anguish, even if the historical situation is that of forty years later. It is not coincidental that the death of the god is followed by a profound upheaval in the guise of a devastating tornado; a fleeing Somers feels a biblical curse is on him. § 118. Lawrence X: ‘The Plumed Serpent’. In an imaginary Mexico The ideal destination after Australia, as the place of a possible cosmic regeneration propagating from a central fire – even though (or perhaps precisely because) the destination is at the backward periphery – is announced, as we saw, in the epilogue to Kangaroo.80 The Plumed Serpent (1926) reworks 80 Lawrence had landed in Australia on his way to Taos, in New Mexico, where he had been directed by the American billionaire Mabel Dodge Luhan, who had been captivated by a few pages written by Lawrence on Sardinia (§ 114.8). She wrote Lorenzo in Taos (New York 1932), brilliantly reviewed by Praz in SSI, vol. I, 107–11.

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Lawrence’s preceding novel and its parable, but by a miracle the outcome is not another insipid effort, but Lawrence’s second or perhaps even utmost masterpiece: a tri-dimensional novel, at the same time a picturesque reportage, a political fiction of a Mexican revolution, and a hypothetic, prophetic, anthropological novel, announcing a new religious dispensation based on the advent or more precisely the return of native gods, more ‘complete’ than those of Christianity.81 In Mexico it was still possible to perceive and feel a human condition that would later be lost, in which ‘the mind and the power of man was in his blood and his backbone, and there was the strange, dark inter-communication between man and man and man and beast’, before the advent of the ‘spiritual-mental’ hegemony of Christianity. The exiled western man is newly tempted to share in such a regenerative dream, but unlike Lawrence’s other utopian novels, this one does not end with an act of cowardice, and leaves enigmatically open the prospect of an involvement in its last few lines. The evaluation I put forth above – that it is a masterpiece – is based on the fact that The Plumed Serpent is like all Lawrence’s texts an example of an intermittent and discontinuous art, with a ‘sprung’ narrative rhythm and second-rate and at times even lame passages in the documentary, the realistic and the domestic genres,82 but interrupted by others dripping pure imaginative power, by visionary outbursts, by excruciating primordial screams, and by the pressures and eruptions of the demonic. In his last novels, Lawrence is bewitched and obsessed by figures of priests who pray to new gods, by shamans, witch doctors, god-like and prophetic beings; he investigates then the ambivalent bewitching power of one individual, of a shamanic individual, on the masses. 2. Having discarded the framework of the conversation novel, The Plumed Serpent is made up of events, of an uninterrupted and often overwhelming barrage of events, as in a traditional novel. It opens with an event 81 82

Vivas’s contention (1961, 81), that the Mexicans were in fact much more Catholic in reality than Lawrence shows in the novel, is obviously naïve. Don Ramón oozes a divine aura when he takes up the mantle of the god, but stutters and delivers a continuous flow of banality when he is the father of his children. In this novel Lawrence generally fails, and is even awkward and ineffective, when he narrates purely domestic scenes.

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which is minutely described in its different stages. Its surface appearance could be then that of a semi-objective survey of Mexico in 1926, just like Kangaroo was for 1922 Australia – an inspection or more properly a suggestive and impressionistic intuition, caught live, of the Mexican genius loci. In Mexico City we would expect yet another English married couple looking for the ‘dark god’, the true salvation for western civilization and also for its satellites, that is, civilizations by now subjugated and in any case riven by rebellious stirrings. But the couple of Lawrence’s and Frieda’s alter egos, debating the battle of the sexes while they breathe in fully the residual beneficial influences of another civilization, is missing. In the first scene, a group of westerners – an Irishwoman, an American and another American – reluctantly decide to watch a bullfight, a ‘must’ for tourists. The occasion becomes a superb opening in terms of pure narrative, while it also very naturally sows some seeds about the situation in that Central American country in 1926, as well as on the biographical and spiritual backstory of the characters. Among them the figure of the forty-something Irish widow Kate Leslie gradually emerges and becomes sharper, ending up by dominating the stage entirely from the point when the narrator decides to leave in the shade, and then finally dispose of first one and then the other male character. The centre of gravity is no longer the couple, or will only become so much later; the leading character is also female rather than male, as it had been in the two preceding novels. The bullfight shows Lawrence’s ‘mob’ in action, the dazed and animal-like mass which acts with the same psychology as a pod of whales. It also has the function of underlining the scepticism, the sense of contemptuous superiority towards the people and the place which the western visitors feel, mixed in, though, with a dark and secret attraction and with the romantic ‘attraction for abomination’. In the following scene Kate, among the pale Europeans and Americans at a reception given by a Mexican señora who is sculpted like a goddess or Aztec figure, is struck by the realization that Mexicans are ‘columns of dark blood’. The genius loci lies in fact in the sense of oppression by the night over the day, in a feeling of being magically enveloped by an Aztec dragon, or of a vegetation that ‘seems rooted in blood’: everything in the landscape oozes homicidal torpor, hate, impotence, dark lethargy.

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3. The Plumed Serpent then moves forward in the realm of the objective or quasi-objective over a number of chapters, sketching in the turbulent situation in Mexico in the early twentieth century. In the opening scene, the police on the look-out are searching members of the public at the entrance to the bulls’ arena, a way of informing the readers that everywhere in the country there are riots, attacks and disturbances, which a para-military political regime (an actual dictatorship in fact) is attempting to suppress. History takes on the colours of phantasy. The historical figure of the dictator Porfirio Diaz has been recently removed, and a republic presided over by an imaginary Montes, anti-clerical and with socialist leanings, has been instituted. In post-revolutionary Mexico, a freely elected president is kept in check by the military caste, the true seat of power. Lawrence hastily demonstrates that effectively (or perhaps only in theory) even that distant part of the globe reproduces the confrontation between the two poles of fascism and socialism. But some enlightened Mexicans and Lawrence himself offstage are highly critical of the intrusion of imported and not native ideologies: Kate is in favour of political self-determination, of the national choice for the model Mexicans will want to adopt. The danger lies in reducing the country to an American satellite, since it is the Americanization that is under way which levels and destroys all traces of authentic Mexican identity. The class of landowners has lost confidence, and if America is invoked as the panacea this automatically entails the natives’ inability to rule the country. Kate cannot wait to see these demoralized people redeemed. The fourth possible dimension of The Plumed Serpent might then be that of a colonial or postcolonial novel: ‘in attempting to convert the dark man to the white man’s way of life, the white man has fallen helplessly down the hole he wanted to fill up’. Kate embodies the self-critical westerner bringing the small benefits of civilization like hygiene, thrift, the correct use of utensils and natural resources. The locals and the pro-Mexican foreigners debate in the salons over the head of the people about how to bring them ‘light’. They are reminiscent of the international communities in the Costaguana of Nostromo, of which The Plumed Serpent seems a reworking, moved forward by a few years and set in a neighbouring country (a parallel that is seldom noted).

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4. The main and central master narrative of The Plumed Serpent is soon revealed to be that of the incarnated god, descended on Earth to assume human features and act out the dream of exercising a hypnotic power on the mass. This is the only respect by which the novel truly rises above Lawrence’s other fictions by a considerable margin. The parable serves one of Lawrence’s ideological mirages, but holds up better than the others which reveal their instrumental logic. This archaeological phantasy takes off from the moment in which an ancient Aztec god surfaces from the Lake of Sayula one day, revealing himself to the women who are washing the laundry. A local newspaper reports in a half-serious fashion that in ancient times devotees used to throw into the sea the icons of their gods which the sea would throw back again.83 This is an episode of mere popular superstition, and not a later revisiting of Pater’s tales of the return of ancient gods. The first news of this Moses-like surfacing of an ancient god from the waters of a lake is given in the novel right after Kate has rejected one possible approach to the renovation of Mexico, through a westernized, satirical art against political and religious power. It was not then by aping America and the west that Mexico could be reborn, but rather by re-establishing a contact with its own ‘blood’ and with a new metaphor for its ‘dark god’. At this point the novel successfully becomes almost a thriller in some parts, uniquely for Lawrence.84 The fantastic tale of ‘the men of Quetzalcoatl’ is called by the non-believers a Bolshevik ruse to instigate a popular revolt, therefore a battle-cry. A sect of devotees to the god is born out of it; they dance and sing and get fanatically exalted. The dance to the drum-beat and

Lawrence transcribes this imaginary newspaper article, but The Plumed Serpent is far less heterogeneous than Kangaroo in terms of the inclusion of this kind of material. 84 While traversing the lake by boat, Kate encounters a swimmer emerging from the waters who claims to be an emissary of the god, and who could be a handsome Mexican demanding a toll for passing through the lake sacred to the god. The boatman speaks and answers in an oracular language that contributes to the surreal character of the scene. At this point Kate is and feels herself co-opted into the magic circle, about to become a devotee of the ancient god. 83

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the flute, performed by the god’s devotees, is a symbol and a rite for the rebirth of life from the dark womb of the Earth.85 5. The symbolism of the plumed serpent is intentionally confused and opaque, in parts also artificially repetitive, successively redefined through the doubling of images which spring out from the author’s fiery forge. A snake coiled around a blue bird, later identified as an eagle, is drawn or stitched on the serapes, the Mexican mantles worn by the initiates. A symbol of the god, in his many facets he excites ‘manhood’, which means he is the phallus; the god is a phallus or a phallic god. But the bird which brings wisdom descends from above like the Holy Ghost. The god is then synthesis and joining of two principles, of earth and sky, of serpent and bird. In the infinite proliferation of metaphors, man and woman will have to give birth to the star of virility and femininity, recover phallus and vagina, which are what lies ‘between the loins and the heart’. The plumed serpent is stylized as a big eye, the icon which adorns the capes and is at the centre of the sombreros. The underlying philosophy or anthropology of religion is that the historical gods and those of the historical religions, including Jesus Christ and the Madonna, are mortals and must descend into the abyss of death in order to become young again and open up a new cycle.86 Lawrence supports and defends the theory of the alternation of the gods but not of 85

The anthropological essay that comes closest to the novel is ‘Indians and Entertainment’ in Mornings in Mexico (1927). Lawrence broadens there his reflections on the Mexican chant ‘around the drum’. The other essays in this volume also deal with the different forms of ‘religion of aboriginal America’, profoundly alien to western Christianity, without a god because ‘all is alive’, so that ‘you can no more pray than you can pray to Electricity’. The influence of some chapters of Frazer’s Golden Bough should also be assessed, since this was the moment of the latter’s maximal circulation thanks also to Eliot’s Waste Land. Among these intertextual references might be the second paragraph of Frazer’s chapter L, ‘Eating the God among the Aztecs’, of which the orgies and rites described by Lawrence might be a free rendition. Frazer’s chapter LIX, on ‘killing the god in Mexico’, is also relevant, and might even illuminate the later story by Lawrence, ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’ (§ 118.8), on the woman who is enlisted for sacrifice and who is the sacrificial girl-goddess. 86 This would presuppose that even the reborn Aztec gods will have to undergo a future cycle in which they will be eclipsed once more – a consequence that undermines Lawrence’s theory.

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their fighting to exclude each other, and this is the syncretic view coldly exposed by Don Ramón Carrasco. Quetzalcoatl addresses himself to Christ as a brother in the mythology of this religion, which describes his own assumption to heaven in ancient times as for Christ in the Scriptures. He becomes then Christ departing with the Madonna, and the churches are transformed into temples dedicated to this ancient god. Jesus delivers to Mexicans a strange and disappointing message, and the Catholic Church is expressly perceived as a collection of gringos. Quetzalcoatl is by now rejuvenated, ready to come back after a long hibernation. However, he clearly indicates he is the god ‘of both ways’. Christ is the lord only of the highest; Quetzalcoatl is the god of the lowest and of the highest, of the sky and the earth, this being his immeasurable superiority. Christian religion favours on the other hand a resigned, nearly Molinist forsaking of anxiety. Sung over a background of the muffled roll of the drum, the hymns to the god brim over with evocative and blurred images, like hypnotic litanies and dirges reaching an unsustainable peak.87 They express both the great poetic and imaginative fable of a conflict between gods and the belief in the potency of this dream of resurrection, as well as the suggestion of the roll of the drums and of the hymn-like chanting, and mass psychology. The rite in which The Plumed Serpent culminates is an inverted Easter rite. Lawrence updates and recharges a locus classicus of Christian poetry:88 it is not Christ who ousts and scares away the pagan gods, but rather he is eclipsed by the previously exiled native gods. Only Ramón believes that every people should rely on their own native gods, capable of connecting them to their own blood. His motto is that each people should return to their ancient, pre-Christian mythology. The three gods of the Aztec trinity are the first men and the first woman, prophets and reincarnations of the gods.89 Ramón becomes the St Peter of the new cult he must implant

87 Considered by Forster (CRHE, 346) ‘the most beautiful of Lawrence’s unrhymed poems’, they are found to be ‘formally abominable’ by Hough 1956, 137. 88 For instance, in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘The Dead Pan’ (Volume 4, § 67.1), the refrain of which, ‘Pan is dead’, seems to return in the piece ‘Pan in America’ in Phoenix, vol. 1, 22–31, but without citing Barrett Browning. 89 Both define themselves prophets and gods, depending on the level of their mania.

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when in a very precise parallelism he empties the Christian temples of Christ’s effigies to replace them with those of Quetzalcoatl. The most intense, bleak, overwhelming and imaginative chapter is entitled ‘Auto da Fe’. It hieratically sings farewell to Christ departing with his saints and the Madonna, whose icons are loaded on a boat during a slow procession to be burnt on a nearby island. It is an obviously reversed martyrdom. Some time later the re-consecration occurs in another splendid, torrid chapter, with the statue of the new god exposed to veneration to the rhythmic beat of the drums.90 6. If there is a Somers as in Kangaroo, or a second and complementary alter ego for Lawrence, and much more potent, it is Don Ramón Carrasco. If Kangaroo has a matching character here, he metamorphoses in Carlota, Ramón’s wife, the pious voice of universal love in the Catholic religion.91 Lawrence raises the same question as the last Victorian sages, though he answers it in a radically different way: how to save a corrupt, polluted, broken, drifting world? He does not offer pseudo- or post-biblical solutions, but rather visionary ones, truly and literally apocalyptic. Those Victorian masters were still by comparison concrete and constructive, and sufficiently close to reality. Lawrence was by now clear that the world could only change with a non-political revolution, one coming from below, from roots, the earth, the dark god, the old ethnic grouping.92 Indirectly, and in a veiled way, even the venerable Irish revolutionary nationalism is buried with it. It almost looks as if Joachim Leslie, Kate’s dead husband, was an insurrectionist among 90 The rite of greeting and welcome is troubled by Carlota’s last twist: she enters the church praying ‘on behalf of Christ’ and of the Madonna, but she will die of it. 91 Rather late but still present, the novel of the quartet or of the married couple returns here too: Kate and Cipriano form the homogeneous couple, but homogeneous in an arcane and symbolic sense despite their blatant racial and ethnic difference; Ramón and Carlota are the discordant couple, particularly on the ideological level. On the purely human plane, Ramón might appear as a degenerate father and husband, since his point of view is superhuman. It must also be noted that Carlota is devoted to life and promotes love, like Kangaroo, by running an orphanage; for Ramón universal love is a plant that has by now dried out. 92 It is also the case that many of Lawrence’s declarations on an incomplete, atrophied, castrated, unmanned, beaten, victimized man are taken directly from Nietzsche.

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those hailed by Yeats in ‘Easter 1916’, that is one of the great patriots devoted until death to a humanitarian, civic cause, but here condemned even more harshly than in Yeats, because unable to understand the sterility of their efforts and sacrifice. The Mexican president Montes is a rational, enlightened, reformist politician; Ramón knows that Mexico needs a religious, spiritual and cultural revolution. And in any case, Ramón could make the revolution he wants to lead into a religious and political one at the same time: he could change the regime into a new, mythical theocracy. With his own images, Ramón defines Montes’s way of working as acting over the eggshell; Ramón wants instead to work on the yolk. In other words, the approach of the president and of any ruling government is to adopt alreadyexisting and ready-made systems; Ramón knows that a revolution must start from the heart of a nation and from its deeply rooted traditions. Lawrence confirms his mistrust of the ability of politics and politicians to bring about improvements. Cipriano, the general who is Ramón’s righthand man, is the most destructive of the two resurrected gods or of their prophets, because he wants to destroy before he rebuilds, and destroy the world as in the coils of a snake. In one last symbolic contortion, the serpent becomes in Cipriano’s case a synonym for the demonic which lurks, always oppressed, in the Mexicans’ soul due to the centuries-long repression they have endured, particularly from the clergy.93 These two untamed Titans experience moments of intoxicated communion with the forces of the deep, which rise from the earth and vibrate with a sense of obscurity and darkness. But Lawrence powerfully participates in the preparation and planning of the revolution, much less so in describing the sunny outcomes that are expected from it. Christ’s defenestration is made practically possible with the support or tolerance of the regime, and the Mexican revolution

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Mexicans of old Indian ethnicity and heritage like Cipriano show in their dark and mobile eyes ‘the heavy-ebbing blood of reptiles’, and are caught in a ‘serpent tangle of sun and electricity and volcanic emission’. In an unadorned if unlikely detail, it is revealed that Cipriano has been brought up by an English Catholic bishop stationed in Mexico, who wanted him to become a priest; having studied in England, he has lost his faith, but is oppressed by the vow of chastity dictated by the clergyman. He therefore emanates the fierceness of the abstinent.

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originating from the restored cult of the Aztec gods translates instead into a para-fascist regime hinging on iron military discipline and surrounded with delirious calls to the figures of the new religion. An apocryphal new testament circulates and becomes popular, with its evangelists recognizable by the icon of the eye on their hats. The religious revolution is followed in the novel with a fatally improbable, almost ostentatious lack of verisimilitude in its concrete aspects: the Catholic Curia distances itself from it, but at the same time Ramón is opposed by the Church and by a ‘certain’ fascist faction. Both forces from the right fight against him as if he were an Antichrist, which is after all an accurate description. 7. Kate has emerged from her personal history with another fantasy, that of a heroic husband, not a tamed clerk, but honest, altruistic, a great innovator fighting to change the world. She has left Europe because the life-flow had been interrupted there, and ‘could not re-start in Europe’. In Mexico she admires the two men, Cipriano and Ramón, not with Eve’s tempted glance but with the inhuman gaze of Salome contemplating the distant beauty of John the Baptist. Here too Lawrence introduces the terror of sex and the desire to neutralize desire, turning it into a different emotion. The Aztec god Quetzalcoatl can show himself to an Irishwoman but not to a pragmatic Briton, as Yeats, the visionary of the Sidhe,94 knew only too well; hence the reason for the unusual nationality of the protagonist. The fire of the path beyond life and even beyond conjugal and parental love ignites in her too, a woman, leading towards an uninterrupted regeneration. Kate looks for the supreme realization of the soul in solitude, finally without the inconvenience of a spouse, and – as usual, and as with Somers – she finds something that comes close to this, and in a primitive land.

94 Kate is ‘more Irish than anything’; deep in her soul there is ‘the almost deathly mysticism of the aboriginal Celtic or Iberian people’, more exactly a residue of the times preceding the Flood. Towards the end, Ramón recommends or suggests that she should be giving ‘substance’ to her ‘far-off heroes and green days of the heroic gods’, rather than just speaking of them. Lawrence’s diagnosis is that Kate is attracted to the ugly and stunted Cipriano because she is Irish and therefore more sensitive to the call of the physical-corporal union, still felt by the Celts and the lineage to which she belongs.

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The bush in Kangaroo has now become the world of the ancient Mexican gods. Kate is tempted by the prospect of reincarnating a pagan and preChristian divinity, the woman and bride of the god Huitzilopochtli. Her ordeal, her Hamlet-like indecision, lies in the tension between, on one side, the demonic and the phallic and the utter surrender, and, on the other, the recapturing of her individuality, when Cipriano proposes to her. Hence Lawrence’s easy aside, that any kind of communion is impossible, be it sexual, physical, spiritual, and even that between Christ and the faithful in the Eucharist.95 This completeness of being is now named as the state of the ‘Morning Star’. It is the fusion of the two souls into one entity; so that Kate is the incomplete goddess, a half goddess only. When in the presence of Cipriano, Kate always feels the mysterious attraction of blood, of the phallus, of the Pan-like power, of the demonic god. She is split: at times rationally, coldly sceptical, then subjugated, and particularly when she lets the ‘priest’ Ramón celebrate her wedding to Cipriano. In showing that she considers her marriage as a game (‘I will be your wife in the world of Quetzalcoatl, no other’), Kate is a figure of intermittence, of supine fascination and yet of ‘revulsion’, that is once again of the assertion of concreteness, of her story, of her ownership of it. The last pages are all taken up by Kate who questions whether she should yield her autonomy to a husband who subjugates her, and who sees an instance of the subjugation and adoration of the male by the woman Ramón has married, and predicts and imagines for herself a similar destiny.96 The last few lines of the novel are of anguished distress; but the one that definitively seals the novel seems to suggest that Kate has decided to stay. 8. On the same conceptual line as The Plumed Serpent is St Mawr (1925), a brief, minor, anti-modernist novel, that is set against modernity and modern civilization: more properly an equine phantasy, rather curious

95 In passing, Ramón expresses and perfects the established premise of Lawrence’s theory of marriage: a reciprocal raping of the spouses, with the never-realized goal of reaching ‘the sensual fulfilment of the soul’. 96 The submission of women to men in the novel can be read as a revenge on the attempts at subjugation Lawrence was experiencing at the time of drafting the novel: a powerfully chauvinist revenge, including the figure of Carlota, Ramón’s wife.

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in its conception, by a Lawrence who is again chatty and relieved, very close in voice and register to the early The Lost Girl. Lawrence was not comfortable with the well-off and the cosmopolitans,97 so that there is no truthfulness or verisimilitude to the rich American Lou Witt, keen horsewoman, and her Australian husband Rico, pale and ineffectual in life and on the page. The plot does not fuse with the thesis, dealing as it does with this childless and divided couple who do not practice much sex, madly travelling across the world with the sole aim of defeating boredom. There are no noticeable events until the eponymous stallion appears, a bright horse with wild fury and a sixth sense in sniffing out intellectually sterile humans from those in whom flesh and blood still pulsate and who are therefore his potential kin. The one who understands the horse the most, and agrees with it, is a bearded groom whose abundant hair is one day shorn as a horse’s mane might be. The protagonist Lou predictably feels in the horse’s presence those visceral and dark vibrations of the senses her husband no longer knows how to excite. The woman intuits in the horse a store of stories, a heap of prehistoric memories and of links to the past. The saying the novel is meant to oppose is that ‘Man is wonderful because he is able to think’. And indeed since the human mind is capable of giving birth to banalities and idiocies, it is paradoxically better not to be ‘spoilt by such a mind’, like horses – it is better then to use intuition. ‘Born to serve nobly’, the horse has waited in vain, and knows that ‘nobility had gone out of men’. In their wordless dialogue, Lou understands that the horse is ‘superannuated’ for humanity in the age of mechanical locomotion, but so is man for the horse: once again, with Lawrence, modernity is not better than ancient times.98 This arcane sense of the positive demonic released by the horse becomes for a moment a suspicion of the negative demonic, that is a doubt that it might instead be an incarnation of evil, even of the mass-mind under totalitarian regimes. Or it may be the doubt that, in a link back to the stories of The Prussian Officer, it is the reactive lashing-out 97 Gregory 1934, 56; Hough 1956, 96. 98 St Mawr is a criticism of the absence of virility in men. The invoked return of the gods relates here to the old Pan, since no man in the novel is its incarnation. The text plays on Pan and ‘pancake’, to which debased level the men of the novel are reduced.

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of the slave who having vented his repression returns to his slavery, since even the freed slave remains enslaved to his owner.99 The Swiftian note of misanthropy surfaces when the horse is about to be sold and castrated. For the disgusted westerners, the symbolic and ideal move is to run away from England towards the unspoiled land of South America; already in its English section the novel shifts onto Wales, a location where the connection with the ancient and primordial layer of pre-Christianity still vibrates. In a preview of Lady Chatterley, mother and daughter are attracted by the rough, wild and natural charm of the two stable men, one of whom is of Indian descent (an improbable occurrence, but plausible on the symbolic plane of the story). Lou is left by Lawrence in a suspended state, a woman disappointed by men and by sex who celebrates the condition of the vestal virgin, in a Mexican ranch that still preserves the remnants and the signs of primeval virginity, before the arrival of civilization. The dream fantasy ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’100 appears at first as yet another anticipation of Lady Chatterley, shifted to Mexico in the silver mines. Here a man deeply absorbed by his work, a mine-owner like Sir Clifford, is married to a woman who has brought him children, but is sexually dissatisfied, at first submissive and then a rebel. Gradually a stronger connection emerges with The Plumed Serpent, since the story is again the story of the tired civilized man who is prodding the always-alive mystery of the Indians’ ancient religion and their devotion to the phallus-god. The nameless woman follows a symbolic journey of initiation and of discovery of other deities, which implies ipso facto the abandonment of her own gods. In the village of Chilchui, Lawrence suddenly conjures up the phantasmagoria of the serapes embroidered with strange and even monstrous animal figures, of the rites of robing and incense-burning, of the mythologies of sun and moon, of the dances officiated to the deafening sound of the drums. The story jumps from the realism of the first few pages to the surreal of the following and last ones, where the western woman, in a prolonged state 99 Like the orderly in ‘The Prussian Officer’, the horse rebels against a climate of submission, and kicks a human, and this is the reason why the husband Rico decides to sell it, an action that is prevented by his wife. 100 The best and most celebrated of a series of stories from 1928.

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of trance, offers herself as the propitiating sacrifice to the sun-god. The story ends with an abrupt fading-out of this epilogue. § 119. Lawrence XI: ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’. Broken taboos Lady Chatterley’s Lover101 (1928) is a novel belonging to the late nineteenth century in appearance, a Tolstoy or Maupassant tale of adultery on the surface, although without any exotic colour, taking place entirely within the confines of the homeland, bar a short change of scene in Venice. It rises in fact to the occasion and explodes like a complete revolution in Lawrence’s art. It marks a shift from the regime of metaphor, of circumlocution, of euphemisms to that of literal and explicit realism; it descends from a parable about the future to that of raw life, but as we shall see it then ascends from the level of raw life to exemplary parable again. After two or three peripheral novels, in flight from the centre to the outer circle, Lawrence returns to the centre and the womb, to his native mining district, even further contaminated and impoverished after the war. The contemporary social context is not however the subject but the background. War has cleared out and drained the mines, where in any case labour is needed far less after the advent of machinery.102 The luxury of patrician mansions 101 Written three times over and published in Florence (on which see the proverbially sparkling feature by Praz in SSI, vol. II, 345–8), the novel was only allowed in England in its unexpurgated version in 1960, having won the court case against a charge of obscenity after numerous depositions by eminent literary figures on its spiritual and moral value. Lawrence himself had passionately defended it in two densely packed pieces (Phoenix, vol. I, 170–87, and vol. II, 487–515), arguing its aim had been to stimulate a lively, refreshing sexual desire rather than being pornographic and obscene. For Lawrence the novel was healthy, while pornography is something that degrades and dirties sex, is lewd and is sold under the counter. Paradoxically in fact the true pornographers are the Puritans. Obscenity is that which encourages ‘the dirty little secret’, the vicious and narcissistic circle of masturbation. The London exhibition of a few of his paintings in 1929 (§ 121.6), which also represented the same joy of sex, was shut down by the police, and prompted from Lawrence a rather long-winded defence examining the most recent tendencies in European painting (Phoenix, vol. I, 551–84). 102 Lawrence’s critique of the machine is evident in the rather extended scene when Clifford’s motorized wheel chair gets stuck up the hill, with Mellors, who cannot

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and the wretchedness of the blackened villages face each other, while the workers’ discontent makes no dent in the masters’ well-being. Writing from the point of view of the disgusted and shocked aesthete, Lawrence describes the happy oasis of bygone Tudor England. The mansion of Wragby where the mine’s owner Sir Clifford Chatterley lives, is situated in the middle of Sherwood Forest, where Robin Hood used to steal from the rich to give to the poor. The baronet plans to modernize the mine and make it more profitable; he is so wealthy, and exploits the passivity of his workers to such an extent, that he can satisfy his ambition for power by writing stories for popular audiences, thus giving expression to his blocked creativity. Lawrence’s impassioned rhetoric is a late Ruskinian cri de coeur. But the critique of totalitarian regimes, of fascism and socialism, as a route to rebirth, is silent here, though it had earlier been compelling. The workers and miners are an amorphous mass, not a defined community of politicized and unionized individuals. 2. The lens has now shifted onto a matrimonial relation that is breaking down and on another extra-conjugal one that is being born. War had deepened Lawrence’s pessimism and his sense of a world in ruins, a sense that has roots in distant history, ontological, metaphysical and pre-emptive. This emptying out, this decline and death of the great ideals of humanity, replaced by ‘a stubborn stoicism’, has hit married life too. A Cambridge graduate from a wealthy family, Sir Clifford has returned from the war paralysed and unable to have children. His relationship with Connie, of Scottish extraction and a former art student who led a free life, has developed under the aegis of alienation: if there is a neat separation between masters and miners, the very union of the couple is ‘in the aloof modern way’. For Lawrence the measuring criterion of a couple’s unity is always that of erotic life. Still young, Connie suffers from sexual abstinence. Her life is displaced, monotonous, empty, obviously unfulfilled. The affair with the successful playwright Michaelis does not satisfy her, being the experience operate motors, only able to push it manually. For his part, Clifford vents his blind possessive urge vicariously onto the chair, which he addresses in the feminine. The mindless discipline he imposes upon his workers, as the master and owner of the mine, is also a substitute for sex.

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of a cold and quick sexual intercourse where the man reaches orgasm too early, leaving her dissatisfied. The fragility, the childishness of this temporary lover is indicative of the incapacity of contemporary intellectuals to feel true passion, on the same level as her husband’s paralysis. The intellectual aristocracy of the 1920s rejects eros in words, or wants to cut it down to size, and dolefully admits its own impotence while nostalgically desiring a new injection of phallic energy. Lawrence gives his intellectuals a sexual philosophy which his novel has the task of seeing rejected on the way. It is the tried and tested belief in an ultimate, ontological and therefore ineluctable separateness of man and woman, of which the woman is more aware than the man, who ravenously pursues sex like an animal. The woman knows that beyond sex there is the cultivation of her separate soul: she is more grown up, and never gives herself completely over to the man, who regresses to the infantile state in sexual experience. The conversations that take place in the Chatterleys’ drawing room give the veneer of truth to the mistaken belief that sex is merely the replacement for the feeling of power and ownership by man over woman, the ‘dynamo’ of success. The intellectual Tommy Dukes is the thinker against the grain who demotes sex to the status of a common human activity, but not a primary or absolute one. His critique of the supremacy of the mind is however well-founded, as is his approval of the integrated knowledge that springs from the body, taking for granted that love in any ideal sense has by now declined. Sir Clifford himself bravely announces to his wife that he would like her to have a child with another man, coming close to a conception of sex as pure mechanical function which ensures the continuation of the species and to that ‘vegetal’ sex Lawrence had theorized about and hoped for in his previous novels. Having assimilated Darwin, Clifford replies to the doubtful Connie that it is up to her to select the right man for the procreating act. The nature of sex, its essence now celebrated by Lawrence, is very subtle. It is true sex, opposed to its artificial, intellectual, enervated, timid, incomplete form. Lawrence does not deny, nor has his characters deny, that the sexual act can be also unfulfilling and a failure. The man who has intercourse and penetrates the female body is in fact, from some points of view, often ridiculous in the physical postures of his lust. And to reach reciprocal orgasm it is necessary to go through a kind of apprenticeship, and it is still possible to go from erotic ecstasy to disgust. The unreachable

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goal, historically never reached unless by primitive peoples, remains that of a sensuality accompanied by tenderness: this conjunction, of tenderness and sensuality, is the value and criterion missing from the sexual mores of the times; the first term – ‘tenderness’ – was originally the title of the novel. 3. Dukes the intellectual utters a decisive aphorism which he himself does not practise, before vanishing forever from the novel: ‘our civilization is going to fall. It’s going down the bottomless pit, down the chasm. And believe me, the only bridge across the chasm will be the phallus’. It is the thematic key to Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The new Adam-and-Eve couple is formed by a dissatisfied upper-class Lady Chatterley and the gamekeeper Oliver Mellors, a son of the land and a former officer stationed in India: two lonely souls, unattached, uprooted, denying. But an affirmation arises out of their two denials. In the novel men debate love and sex in purely intellectual terms, but are impotent; an authentic decadence of virility has thus come to pass, or its likelihood has become considerably more serious. The common people still have a vibrant body and an intact sexual potency. Connie has her first erotic quiver for Mellors when she spies him half-naked while he is washing himself, and admires his strong, smooth, white body; straight afterwards she undresses in front of a mirror and notices her own flaccid and already withered flesh, at just twenty-seven. Both come from two disappointments that have pushed them into hopeless solitude. Mellors is an exile returning from an impossible ‘quest’: a misanthrope coming from a failed marriage, a loser who must survive but does not know how or in the name of what. Like him, Connie has virtually separated from an exhausted marriage. Mellors refuses to make or receive sexual advances, attempts to resist the eruption of the flame, does not encourage it, but yields to it while anxious about the consequences, about Connie, about ‘complications’. The novel becomes gradually more and more Mellors’s, even if it appears to be and is told from Connie’s point of view. The reader gradually discovers to whom Mellors is connected in Lawrence’s previous novels. He is Adam reborn, Aaron from the eponymous novel, the ‘quester’ of distant memory, who travelled for a long time and has arrived at the ultimate shore and at nothingness. Like Aaron he wishes he had defeated sex, and like Aaron he falls for its appeal, though receiving from it benefits he could not have hoped for. More practical and experienced, he knows that this authentic, redeeming relationship, which saves two suffocating,

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withering, abolished lives, will inevitably clash against social prejudices. Lawrence therefore approves of sex enjoyed without inhibitions, unleashed from matrimonial ties, independent from human laws. He holds a puritan and conformist society responsible for the undesired effects of such an enjoyment. Conscience, religion, admonition and the divine threat against sin do not belong in Lawrence and in this Lawrence especially. Mellors has a ‘sense of foreboding’, not ‘a sense of wrong or sin’, and he knows that conscience is primarily ‘fear of society, or fear of oneself ’. If anything, he challenges the god of the established faiths with a blasphemous alternative, a new antithetical faith where the Pentecost is re-defined as the ‘little forked flame’ agitating inside him. 4. Mellors has a good general culture, is a passionate reader, has been an army officer; but has programmatically removed any trace or patina of his cultivation. He is an Arnoldian ‘scholar-gipsy’. His bitterness is sharpened by ‘subjugating’ women but also by the frigid ones or the ones who are not synchronized with the man, and with whom there is no simultaneous orgasm. Through him it is Lawrence who speaks and vents his misogyny. Mellors is surprised to find in Connie a surviving sexual desire and a woman who really knew how ‘to “come” naturally with a man’. The natural character of this desire transforms the conjunction of tenderness and sensuality into a triad. The novel backs then onto the couple of Kangaroo, as if in a circularity that is in fact a vortex without a way out – a ‘maelstrom’. In Kangaroo the couple discovers its physical-intellectual unison and then decides to realize it in more propitious, virginal lands that are fresher and better organized from a political point of view. Connie’s and Mellors’ plan is to go into exile for a second time in ‘Africa or Australia’ or the colonies. The weakness of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is that the rejection of intellectuality and of theorizing is not enough in itself and in its practice, but must in fact erupt in rhetoric. Mellors becomes to all intents and purposes a philosopher gamekeeper who rages against the threats to the integrity of sexuality, against mechanization and inequality, against the class structure and the power of money.103 The ever intuitive Connie is also made to predict 103 One of the first requests the gondolier makes to Connie and her sister in Venice is whether they would like to rent the gondola for the week at an exorbitant price, a

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and announce to her husband the rebirth of the body as a redemptive medicine, and to denounce the symbolic murder of the body in JewishGreek-Christian philosophy. She also attempts to convert her sister, who is about to divorce her husband, but is confused to the point of condemning Mellors, and thus different from Gudrun in her relationship to Ursula in Women in Love. Lawrence’s revolution in this novel, which at the time caused a great stir, is linguistic in complement to the theme. If sex has to be enjoyed in its totality in a new dispensation, then it too must be stripped of the bourgeois veil of false modesty. If sex means a direct contact with the primordial forces of the earth, language too must describe it and express its drives in those terms which, precisely because they have been excluded from common parlance, speak of it in the most burning, immediate, raw honesty. Like all cultural revolutions, the erotic one must also start from a gesture of re-naming – or of simply literal and truthful naming. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is the event always awaited in Lawrence, the epiphany of the body in its wildest and most unspiritual dimension. The taboo word is therefore innate to it, since it is a conscious polemical act, both linguistic and conceptual, which gives back to sex its lost animal character. The two lovers do not engage in any kind of conventional preamble, they do not flirt but fall into each other’s arms at first sight, pushed by sheer physical desire; neither do they use empty words of endearment during intercourse.104 The crudity of Lawrence’s language is necessary to avoid placing their

scene that is reminiscent of the beginning of Kangaroo. In Trapani too, in a stage of the Lawrences’ trip to Sardinia (Sea and Sardinia), a boatman complains of the fee of two liras and asks for an extra sixty ‘centimes’. After experiencing Mellors’s earthy sexuality, Connie perceives any other virility as being enervated. Lawrence reads her mind in Venice, venturing that Italians are ‘quite passionless’, just ‘easily moved, and often affectionate’, but rarely feel any ‘abiding passion of any sort’. Modernist and avant-garde art is criticized too in the painter Duncan Forbes, as symptom and evidence of the collapse of civilization, even if Forbes generously agrees to figure as the father of Connie’s and Mellors’ child: his is an ‘ultra-modern’ art, clearly abstract, all made up of ‘tubes and valves and spirals and strange colours’. 104 In Lawrence, introductions usually take place after intercourse, as is also the case in the short story ‘Love Among the Haystacks’, where Geoffrey the peasant overcomes his secret rancour towards his brother and finds his equilibrium after having sex at

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encounter within the confines of that amorphous, diaphanous, enervated form that is the hallmark of the age. After so much sexual euphemism, the time had come for Lawrence to reclaim sex as a radical experience.105 In this sexual education, Connie must naturally ape his dialect, partly in jest but partly out of truthfulness to the experience, using those concrete and immensely significant words, truly direct ones, to refer to their encounters. But this reified, brutalized, animal-like, wild sex produces in any case its own mystical-Dionysian ecstasy; in fact, it is the only one that can. In an internal echo the hut in the dark thicket is superimposed on Connie’s hairy mons Veneris, in which Mellors braids some flowers. Their pubic hair is not coincidentally a kind of symbolic meadow in which flowers are planted and take root, the symbol, that is, of an absolute naturalness and of the unison between the couple and nature, because it is a natural couple.106 5. In its last few stages, Lady Chatterley’s Lover lapses into trivial social satire, into an unfocused and tedious travelogue and into the novel of intrigue. After Connie leaves for Venice, having promised Mellors she will come back to get a divorce and marry him, Mellors is persecuted by his legitimate wife who comes back to the scene to confirm at a symbolic level that possessive and dominating femininity is always threatening to take over – but also to state once again Lawrence’s irrepressible misogyny. If Mellors is a defeated man who can only be roused by the thought of an isolating physical union, Connie becomes the driving force of her union with this

first sight with a vagrant. Love and sex are, uncharacteristically, entirely refreshing and with a happy ending in this story. 105 Mellors has not forgotten his literary schooling when, in the only relapse into literary reminiscence, he renames male and female genitals as ‘the Knight of the Burning Pestle’ and ‘the Lady of the Red-Hot Mortar’, remembering here Beaumont and Fletcher. 106 Right after her return home from the most heated sexual encounter with Mellors, Connie shows she has taken in his lesson about the central position of the body; while this theoretical reflection in her mind is not surprising, what is effective is the rhythmic mental echo of the rude, vulgar but very expressive compliment on the roundness of her backside Mellors had just made. Mellors who pretends to realize the totality of bodily functions in Connie may convey Lawrence’s polemic with Swift, recalled and criticized in the defence of the novel in Phoenix because he was horrified that Celia ‘s**ts’.

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disheartened man. She wants a child because it is a pledge; Mellors pulls an incredulous grimace at the thought of becoming a father. The epilogue of Lady Chatterley’s Lover makes it look like a text not less futuristic and parable-like than The Plumed Serpent. Connie’s stubborn decision to marry Mellors falls once more within the realm of the utopian; the measure of her challenge is that this represents the symbolic union of the still ‘respectable’ proletariat with a self-critical gentry, for as long as it rests on the rediscovery of the body. But will Connie be as constant as her name suggests? Lawrence draws the curtain without telling his readers, or letting them imagine, how long the gratifying and liberating power of desire will last – a desire which always reveals itself to be eventually illusory for Lawrence. The temporary separation and earlier the secret nature of their affair make it possible for desire to remain fulfilling.107 The novel wisely ends not with a line of dialogue but in suspension (no divorce has been granted, the child is yet to be born), and leaving open the question of whether and how the couple will manage the ebbing of desire, and of how they will practically deal with everyday life, in which it can be predicted that erotic ecstasies will be spaced further apart. It is nonetheless true that Lady Chatterley’s Lover is the first of Lawrence’s novels – even if it comes near the end of his career – to have a somewhat laboriously optimistic afflatus, and in which sex is not frustrating and repellent straight after intercourse, or the refuge and retreat of two solitudes. It is in fact truly fulfilling, restful, invigorating, a source of well-being and presaging hope. § 120. Lawrence XII: Later short novels and stories Nearly all of Lawrence’s short stories and novellas are variations on just one theme, the reawakening of female sexuality and sexual initiation in the immediate post-war period. The settings are sometimes military, as in the hospitals from which a fascination for the foreigner and even the enemy emerges to capture young Englishwomen with the much-represented figure of the veteran. They are written mostly from the point of view of the woman, who is a virgin in the precisely sexual sense of the word. The 107 A defender of chastity, at the time Lawrence was reading and criticizing Casanova; the novel closes with an explicit condemnation of Donjuanism.

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catalyst and deflowering agent is both inside and outside society, exotic like a gypsy or the Mexican Indian. But from the Brangwens’ cycle comes back too the female couple of two women who respond in different ways to the call of the blood, some of them at times rejecting it. The emblematic lesson derives from the always ingenious symbolic internal correspondences. The closing of the story fatally declines into an abrupt and prolonged diagnosis by the narrator who breaks his objectivity, or because man and woman must predictably fight over the nature of sexual love and desire. The always unsolvable impasse in Lawrence lies in the secret or conscious desire for carnal love followed by ‘revulsion’, by the return of the opposite drive towards autonomy and almost towards regained virginity: it is the sudden transformation of love into bullying, intimidation of one by the other. In ‘The Fox’ (1922), an elusive fox raids a chicken coop108 in a farm started by two no longer very young women with lesbian inclinations who have turned their backs on ‘civilisation’ and the horrors of the war in a return to the purity of rural nature. One of the two is obsessed by the fox and attempts in vain to catch it with her rifle; one day, she manages to flush her out and the fox stops in front of her, watching her intently as if to challenge her. The fox hypnotizes the woman, then leaves slowly while the woman finds herself unable to shoot. She then believes she sees fox-like features in a wandering veteran who is staying at the farm and is enthralled by them. The phallic allegory and the symbolic parallel are not dissimilar from those in ‘The Man Who Died’, since the fox is here materialized into a person, just as the rooster is in Christ in that story.109 The veteran wants to capture the woman slowly; his movements, his actions, the looks, the seductive manoeuvres are all phases of a hunt. When the imaginary ‘fox’ kills off the real one, the girl is won over; the veteran marries her after having overcome her hesitations and having eliminated her friend (who was against the marriage) by letting a tree trunk fall on her. The woman admires and caresses the white belly and reddish skin of the fox that has been finally killed, and smells its pungent scent. As often in 108 With hens which, like those at the beginning of Shaw’s Saint Joan, ‘refuse, obstinately refuse, to lay eggs’. 109 § 122.6.

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Lawrence, the ending is left open and coincides with an escape from reality and towards distant lands. 2. The balanced ‘The Virgin and the Gypsy’ (1930) is often paired with Lady Chatterley’s Lover by virtue of a gypsy who is Mellors’s double and performs a similar but far more external liberating action for a younger bourgeois woman, Yvette, who suffers from an oppressive, even neurotic, lack of awareness of her own carnality.110 The final scene, with the river breaking its banks and flooding the house, and the gypsy taking on a biblical and patriarchal role by saving Yvette from the waters, leaves the realistic register behind to enter a blatantly symbolic dimension of sexual baptism, of seminal flow and of breaking the hymen and therefore of a painful but liberating loss of virginity.111 The irresistible, magnetic and even mesmeric attraction of the wild man is a common paradigm in late Lawrence.112 But in the initial, preparatory stages the story, set in the stagnant rectory of an English district, dutifully follows the track of the cutting and curt, late Victorian satire of manners, with its vigorous, psychosomatic and idiosyncratic cameos of the rector, of the aunt, particularly of the hateful grandmother, near-literal translations of genre paintings into words to depict the repression of instinctual drives and the tyranny of social conventions – or ‘slavery’, as Lawrence puts it. On the other hand, in the delightful fable ‘The Captain’s Doll’ (1923) the Austrian Hannele feels a sublimated, sighing, Platonic and fetishist passion for the titular captain. The affair is uncovered

110 Yvette is genetically the daughter of a mother who has left the family home, with an Anglican priest as husband, to go towards Lawrence’s unknown or ‘beyond’. It is not clear why she left, or rather it is known as she is Aaron Sisson’s double, and flees the chains of hypocrisy and of a life that was sexually empty. 111 In the everyday register the gypsy was socially useful since he fought in the war. 112 A variation on this typology is in the weaker ‘The Ladybird’ (1923), where the seduction – still in the form of watery images, ‘like a full river flowing forever inside her’ – comes from a minute and not too handsome Hungarian count, convalescing in a London hospital after the war. The talisman that performs the spell is a thimble with a small scarab on its border. Lawrence fills up the story with too many lengthy dialogues on the definition of erotic love, and with artificial allusions to myth, such as that the count is called Dionys and the woman Daphne. On the weaving of name references in the story see the clever inferences by Humma 1990, 18–28.

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by his wife, thanks to the revealing detail of a doll that represents him in full uniform which the doll-maker shows her without knowing who she is. This detail has the tragic consequence of driving his wife to commit suicide, after which Hannele becomes aware of the unreal world of papier-mâché she has been living in, and gives in to the advances of the captain who has returned, but on condition of no longer being his doll. In Lawrence’s first, confused intuition of rugged Mexico, the princess of the eponymous ‘The Princess’ (1925) is also ‘a sexless fairy’ violently jolted into reality who, like Kate in The Plumed Serpent, is initiated into the throbbing life of the senses by a Mexican during a symbolic, impracticable but successful ascent to the ever more rarefied Rocky Mountains, a descent then into herself in search for her hidden ‘demon’. Like all Lawrence’s heroines, the princess has a liberating intercourse which is delicately skipped, even if she remains in the throes of her conflicting feminine impulses.113 § 121. Lawrence XIII: The poetry It is often said (and with good reason) that Lawrence’s early poems114 arose in Hardy’s shadow and orbit.115 The parallel holds since they were both novelists who became poets and not poets who subsequently became novelists. But a striking difference is that Lawrence is first born a poet and 113 For Kermode 1981, 114, she is ‘a frigid white woman cruelly treated by a sexually vindictive Indian’. 114 They were first published in 1908 in Ford Madox Ford’s English Review, to which the diligent Jessie Chambers (§ 111.3 n. 23) had sent them. The 1928 collection, complete up to that point and edited by the author, was meant to be in Lawrence’s own words an intimate autobiography. 115 Early on it was thought that Lawrence’s sexual-mystical celebration and the visionary violence of his language showed the influence of Richard Dehmel, a near-contemporary German poet (cf. CRHE, 204, and R. Gray, ‘Women in Love and the German Tradition in Literature’, in Clarke 1976, 188–202). The German poet is mentioned (though not particularly admiringly) in one of Lawrence’s reviews (Phoenix, vol. II, 270). An authoritative assessment by MIT, 899–900, enables us to establish a kinship between the two figures based on a symbolism which implied an escape from contemporary scientism both for the German poet and for Lawrence, and on the ‘liberation of erotic impulse from social conventions and even more from the tyranny of the intellect’.

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continues to cultivate the narrative and poetic genres at the same time and without interruption. Like Hardy, Lawrence feels the burning sense of nature, which in his home county is not that different from the nature celebrated by Hardy: rugged, rough, far from restful, exuding atavistic instincts, and a nature with which the poet resonates in unison, with the inebriation of immediate contact. Some of his compositions simply aim at pure ‘word-painting’ and tend to eliminate or dissolve any objective correlative and to reveal in Lawrence the poet in words. Where the philosophical coda or the personal consideration is missing, the poems are nature sketches as terse as Hardy’s, but from which any conventional sweetness is missing. They dwell on unusual, vivid, powerful spectacles in the changing of seasons and of agricultural labour.116 Pure descriptivism often gives way to subjective and visionary imagery with frequent pathetic fallacies: the ‘hysterical’ laugh of the poplars, the lamps ‘starting to bleed’.117 ‘Cherry Robbers’ points without comments to blood-red cherries as a traditional synonym of proffered sex, so that the lustful, laughing girl can hide her tears from shyness. In ‘Reality of Peace, 1916’, a short, obscure lyric, seeds fall in the autumn from the thighs of the dawn, and there wait to be fertilized. But not all the poems have this visionary, mysterious and successful afflatus. More often nature is the background of fulfilling or frustrated, even painful affairs between young country people. Even the naturalism expressed through dialect in anecdotes of the countryside and of the mine is a link between Hardy and Lawrence, and dialect, to which rhyme lends a macaronic effect of nursery rhyme, can become strident to the point of brutality and of occasionally indecent expression. From his first steps Lawrence is not in any case a metric poet out of a deliberate choice: ‘skilled verse is dead in fifty years’, he wrote in 1913. This means that any critic will be on the wrong track if focusing on the issues of rhythm, metre and prosody which preoccupied the cultivated poets of the Edwardian and Georgian era. His youthful poems were at first classified by Lawrence 116 ‘Yesterday the fields were only grey with scattered snow’, a rhythmically accurate, dactylic-iambic, descriptive line, and an opening that can seem lifted from the early Hopkins. 117 ‘At the Window’.

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himself as rhymed poems, and rhyme is indeed an ordering agent and factor. But his lines have a variable length and Lawrence’s quatrains often stretch one line beyond the right margin, to be wrapped over. The stanza is not the measuring unit,118 and rhyme itself is hardly noticeable, buried by a long metric measure that develops and unravels like barely rhythmic prose. In many instances, this expansive vein can be redefined as openly prolix; yet from time to time there appear more polished and better contained poems which keep in check the discursive vein, hinge on a minimal symbolism and close with an abrupt allusion. The slovenly character of Lawrence’s poetry is just an appearance, as with the novels. It is willed in order to uphold the criterion and principle of the subordination of form to content and to reject any accusation of academicism: they in fact underwent a patient labour of crafting, as witnesses confirm. Paying attention to the phonic texture, Lawrence also fashions an idiolect that is consolidated through time and rhyme couplings which frequently recur (‘front’/ ‘brunt’ – one of many), as also is the case for many similes and figures. An unredeemed prosaic character emerges especially in anecdotes that are barely made poetic, that is rhymed, but remain too raw to be poetry, as in ‘The Best of Schools’ and in others that are a teacher’s diary (as Lawrence had been in Croydon), which risk a certain roughness and an unpleasant friction between the pedestrian development and the rhyming scheme. 2. Lawrence’s persona is that of the young peasant who works in the fields and impatiently looks forward to dalliances with beautiful peasant girls, mostly and by necessity at sunset. There is also the persona of the student who feels himself alienated from the world he observes; or that of the miner coming back from work.119 In this context, there is space for some ballads and nursery rhymes in dialect which narrate typical or classic scenes, such as the arrival in the family of the news that a miner has died in the mine. The full enjoyment of the senses finds its place and 118 Lawrence’s excursions into closed forms, precise in rhythm and prosody, are hesitant and clumsy, overflowing with extended metaphors and neo-courtly clichés of love poetry. 119 These personae are not always male, for example, in rhapsodies of the wife after the first night of marriage, evocative of a sense of well-being and dismay.

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expression in the midst of nature, as does the remembrance of a love affair that has ended and is still being mourned. A new note is struck by lyrics that evoke or dream of a feverish, sick, painful physical contact, and a love that wounds, pricks, tears apart, and wants itself to wound rather than being joyful and euphoric. Burning sex in torrid, dark settings against stormy backgrounds is followed by speedy transitions into Lawrence’s ‘revulsion’, as in ‘Lightning’. Even as a poet, Lawrence complains of the lack of communion, since everyone subsides into their own darkness ‘below the flower of the soul’, and this darkness is aggression, drive to assertion, Luciferian pride, the impossibility of giving up or changing one’s own self (‘Discipline’). ‘Virgin Youth’ is the first orgiastic address to the dark and forbidden phallus, repressed and overseen by ‘hosts of men with one voice’, to the point where the heat of desire becomes painful. ‘Red Moon-Rise’ is the visionary cosmology of the same fire, which, as in Dylan Thomas, ‘boils within this ball / Of earth, and quickens all herself with flowers, / Is womb-fire in the stiffened clay of us’. The world is reduced to a big womb which issues forth all that is alive; the creative power and the emission of fire of each individual womb is linked to the great cosmic womb. War is beating at the doors in some of the last poems in the first collection, and Lawrence wishes for the total destruction of civilization. 3. One of the first compositions of Look! We Have Come Through (1917), ‘Ballad of a Wilful Woman’, offers a real thematic variation. It features a double of the Madonna fleeing towards Egypt, distracted by the imagination, by dreams, by sensuality; she neglects or slackens in her tasks provoking Joseph’s anxiety. Lawrence here announces that later type of religious fantasy, sacrilegious in appearance, which recognizing the human character of Christian deities, and of Christ particularly, catches them while they are experiencing the innocent stimulation of the flesh. The bulk of the collection is a German poetic diary that approximately follows Lawrence’s and Frieda’s peregrinations in the years 1912–1914. The diction is now strangely factual and purified, as in a slightly inflected prose style. It is then a type of easy and captivating poetry with only a minimum of extravagant images. Some poems take on the appearance of a little narrative poem, such as the one where Lawrence recalls Frieda’s departure for England to see her children. Outpourings accompanying the inebriated and ecstatic

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contemplation of the female body being washed, of the curves and the firm flesh, alternate with the venting of hate and resentment; in expressing itself, sensual pleasure also wounds. Emphatic, exalted, rejoicing celebrations of unity cannot but acknowledge, once cooled down, Lawrence’s separateness and the alterity of individual lovers. ‘“She Said as Well to Me”’ sings the poetry of the body from the woman’s point of view, the beauty of its parts and of naked muscles created by God for physical use, which men almost feel ashamed to show. ‘New Heaven and Earth’ sings out loud the ecstasy of a fulfilling union and the renewal of the old, ‘tainted’ world, now rejuvenated. A demiurgic and self-creating author has died of horror, and from his grave he is arisen, spreading his verbal delirium as he greets the world once again, the metamorphic power of true conjugal love. 4. In Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), the third of Lawrence’s poetic phases, the expansive, rhythmic, unrhymed burst and the sheer flow of free verse can no longer be contained. Along with Whitman’s model,120 a second one is at work here: Swinburne’s more English and native vein. Lawrence is not far from him in his protracted and delirious greeting to a nature pulsating with forces which vibrate in unison with those of man. He even picks up Swinburne’s stylistic habit of the felicitous compound-word, often double and newly minted in couplings not included in the dictionary, but also triple at times, as in Swinburne, Hopkins and the fin-de-siècle Decadents.121 Those who criticize Lawrence for his limited linguistic innovation should revise their position. The unprecedented novelty and the ingeniousness of this collection lie however in their conceptual and thematic design. It is divided into sub-sections which form a number of poetic catalogues: a herbarium, a bestiary, a flower taxonomy, with different selective classifications of exemplars for each of these realms. Is this an original, unpredictable, witty extravagance which, after Lawrence, would have looked artificial 120 In the far from favourable essay on Whitman in Studies in Classic American Literature, Lawrence acknowledges nonetheless that the American poet had ‘meant so much’ to him. 121 Without aiming to be exhaustive, I note that Lawrence often uses the compound word on the model of the ablative case in Latin, as in ‘death-edged’ which is equivalent to ‘edged by death’, or others such as ‘slow-blooded’, ‘icy-fleshed’.

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and cloying in any other poet? A curiosity, then, a piece of sophistry, a whim, a digression? Elegies for pets were a very popular Victorian genre, in Arnold and other poets devoted to dogs, horses, cats, birds. Lewis Carroll and Kipling had for their part humanized the fauna and the animals of the jungle. The exterior taxonomic design offers a principle of order to a poetry that had been merely chaotic. Apart from the prolix, sentimental, cloying portrait of Bibbles the little dog, the soul of brazen promiscuity and of endearing dirtiness, Lawrence avoids the Victorian rhetoric of the pet. His animals and some of his flowers are beyond the visual reach of any preceding writer and poet: they are exotic fauna and flora, found and portrayed in the most distant latitudes. So much so that the collection is also a sui generis diary, and its individual poems bear trace, if not of the date, of the location of their composition. In these poems, slightly eccentric rather than apocalyptically dark, Lawrence continues to pursue his investigation into that part of creation from which man has exiled himself. He explores the physical-spiritual unity in species he found very anthropomorphic from an evolutionary point of view, tracing back the same primordial impulses such as hunger, sex, aggression, female bullying of the male and therefore an evolutionary kinship and relatedness between the human family and the animal one. The secret of these ample and moving, almost always charming, very delicate, pungent, digressive floral and animal pieces is empathy; they could even be said to be free-wheeling discussions à la Montaigne or from the eighteenth century, essais turned into poetic form. Particularly successful and memorable are those where with a few, clear outlines Lawrence fixes the daimon of a particular floral or animal exemplar, letting this physiognomy emerge from a specific anecdote in which the human (Lawrence himself ) is involved. 5. Starting from fruit, Lawrence always gives a precisely functional, physiological and anatomical description, but one which soon becomes entirely impressionistic, subjective and phenomenological. He wants to give us his own personal reaction, abandoning himself to the personal power of association of any exemplar. Pomegranate and peach both have a round though irregular shape, with a ‘fissure’ or ‘bivalve’ furrow that resembles human buttocks. Associations are released by eating, holding, sucking or just looking at the fruits. Apples are the symbol of an autumnal

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creation, a little excrement-like, or of a farewell to a beloved. One of the two ways of eating a fig (‘Figs’) resembles a cunnilingus, confirming its feminine symbolism among the Romans and its female gender to designate female sexual organs in Italian. In Eden, the fig leaf of course covered the genital organ in the shape of a fig which had always been naked and visible before shame was aroused by ‘the apple of knowledge’. All of Lawrence’s fruit is then made up of vaginal symbols because of the pulp that is sucked up once the piece of fruit has been opened at its ‘fissure’. The classification of trees starts from the shady, mysterious cypress from Tuscany or Etruria, and from the fig tree, also custodian of secrets, mocking challenger of man and his idealisms. The tree digs into the ‘dark’ clod with its roots. The almond-tree looks like a web of wires from which it gives birth to snowy buds, to an acclamation of surprise and wonder. Its flowers are far from gentle, but more like demonic incarnations sprouting from below and deep underground. The rhapsody ‘Hibiscus and Salvia Flowers’ has however a polemical tone, and exploits the flower motif to rail against Sicilian socialists who marched through the high street in Palermo with those flowers in their buttonholes.122 A parenthesis or an interstice, under the aegis of the rejection of Christian spiritualism, is a quartet of extended monologues dedicated to the four evangelists represented by their animal icons. St Matthew is the only evangelist to be a real man, the only one who does not have a corresponding iconic animal, and unwilling to let himself be transported on high, stubborn in wanting to remain with his feet firmly on the ground. Lawrence gives him a significant address praising the renunciation of spirituality and sublimation, dictated by a concrete and earth-bound inclination. It is a challenge to the Jesus of religions. Even Mark, the winged lion of the spirit, is a lion subjugated to the lamb and its shepherd, and resigned to watching over the flock. John’s eagle is tired and dirty. Lawrence’s animals lie flat and close to the ground, leaning toward the earth and the centre of the earth; friendly to man, they are arrogant, suspicious, mysterious, unpredictable. The meticulousness with which the motions of each animal are studied is surprising and pleasing. This precision, as if of an entomologist gifted with imagination, 122 See also the poem ‘The Revolutionary’.

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is evident in the description of the witty and strange mosquito and of the unequal and surreal confrontation – a playful and half-serious duel – between the invisible insect and the great, big but impotent man. Fish represent the indifference, apathy and unknowability of the animals. The disgusting, repulsive bat is introduced in an anecdote set in Florence which is itself a pseudo-dramatic duel between man and animal, but harder still, since once the bat has entered the house it flies in irregular and twisted spirals. What can be done when the bat is stunned? Kill a creature for which God is responsible as its creator? Is God then the Blakean father of ugly and demonic animals as well as of angelic ones – in fact of the former only? ‘Snake’ deserves its reputation. A snake comes to drink at a trough in Sicily; when chased away, it produces reactions similar to those provoked by the bat, scarcely restrained in Lawrence who is watching, and reasoning that the snake is the symbol of the human bond with the deep, and in this particular case a peaceful snake, in fact as friendly and innocuous as Kipling could fancy. The stone thrown at it is a sign of anger and a way of preventing its escape, or perhaps it is the answer given to the instincts and the warnings of culture: the true and noble instinct reproaches the allegedly evolved man. No fewer than three poems show the highly sensitive nature of Lawrence’s empathy as it enters animal psychology and the customs of the tortoise family. He discovers the innate instinct for his own isolation and his lack of sympathy with familial bonds; the female tortoise seems a parody of the human female who bullies the minuscule, intimidated husband, he too an image of conjugal and sexual ordeal. The coupling of tortoises produces a rhapsody on the cry of ejaculation, which is the same primeval cry of the union of bodies in the human realm. In the turkey or the humming-bird Lawrence recognizes a symbolic royalty which was the object of adoration by ancient civilizations. He sounds out the mystery of the bloodthirsty eagle with tight, urgent questions. The lion that has been killed is more worthy of the afterlife than many humans. The most successful of these poems on the fauna are abstract cameos or are turned into anecdotes which sharply fix Lawrence’s marked idea of the animal: objective data, captured together with others that are inspired, arbitrary, at the very least questionable. Among these, the portrait of the Australian kangaroo is admirably dry, depicting the animal as the soul of nostalgia and of an indefinable yearning.

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6. The 1928 edition of Lawrence’s poems constitutes in effect not even half of the whole corpus. The following collection, Pansies (1929), is very large, with a title that wittily references the floral one of the preceding volume and which with even more irreverent wit is meant to render with approximation the English pronunciation of Pascal’s Pensées.123 These thoughts are irreverent in poetry because they are parodic and the most anti-Pascal (and therefore authentically unorthodox) one could have – in other words, they are thoughts of a profane religion. A few very short, early poems are in a captivating imagist style, dedicated to the elephants seen at the circus and then coupling on the side in blessed coolness. Or they are inconclusive nature sketches, mysterious and suggestive. Soon, though, the collection takes on the definitive features of a scrapbook or notebook where extemporaneous reflections are collected without any principle of selection, and verging, in their nature of unrhymed or slightly rhythmic poetry or prose, on the improvised and the careless. This discursive and colloquial voice pushes even further Lawrence’s rejection of closed forms and is not too far from that of the late Yeats, even if it cannot reproduce the latter’s miraculous blend of the disarming and the formalized. The register becomes therefore far from imagistic and suggestive, but rather settles in the declarative; the apocalyptic note is again dominant, the voice becomes inspired and prophetic, the diction knowledgeable, in an echo of the prophets and of Proverbs with litany and anaphora. As in Lawrence’s narrative prose, but more insistently, the discourse is oriented against the civilization of machines, against the newly magnificent and progressive destinies of humanity, against the cult of Mammon and the aegis of a ‘bestial’ bourgeoisie, and against an individual imprisoned in the cage of cerebral sex. Lawrence thunders against the industrially produced object made of cold iron, which ‘sucks life’ like a vampire; fights for work and sex to pass on life rather than death. Yet with the exception of the call for sex, he simply echoes the Victorian sages and champions of workers. For Lawrence work had to be creative and vitalizing (‘no point in work […] if it’s never 123 But compare the exquisite ‘Gladness of Death’: ‘I have always wanted to be as the flowers are, /so unhampered in their living and dying/ and in death I believe I shall be as the flowers are. / I shall blossom like a dark pansy’.

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any fun’). His peroration becomes impassioned, but the crusade against capitalist profit goes together with and is diluted into touching personal lyrics which reassert that the true, pressing revolution is not about having but rather about losing money and wealth. All primary needs should be satisfied, according to the true communism which was also supported by Orwell, and which was not the one realized in Lenin’s Russia, since Lenin and Bolshevism reduced man to an anonymous entity within the State (and ‘only the Soviet State matters’).124 The revolution or resurrection is sexual, since the malaise of the man reduced to a robot can only be cured with the recovery of joyful, instinctive sex: ‘Sex is a state of grace. / In a cage it can’t take place’.125 Lawrence invokes his own god, a phallic creative principle that is anterior to any revealed or fabled god; he is therefore polemical towards the pale God who preaches sexual renunciation, towards the historical Christ, or even the violent God of the ‘rod’ in the Old Testament (‘Spiral Flame’). The Decalogue of healthy sex is formulated in ‘Sex Isn’t Sin’. Sex is a panacea because it puts man back into physical contact with himself once he has been liberated from his cage, and man in contact with woman and with the whole of humanity, which has become a utopian network in which everything is in touch with everything else: ‘Since we have become so cerebral / we can’t bear to touch or be touched’.126 Together with intellectual sex, ‘the cold coupling of will’ must also be prevented. Lawrence backtracks and contradicts himself every time he withdraws from the amorphous mass, a target hit almost as often as technology, towards which he admits a clear and frank annoyance, for instance in the lethal lines of ‘Talk’. Lawrence is here partly Swiftian, that is, misanthropic, annoyed by the stupidity of the human race, and asking to be left in peace and therefore not wanting to have any form of ‘contact’. The three last collections – Nettles, More Pansies and Last Poems (1930, 1932)– comment with cutting and satirical pathos on the scandal the exhibition of his paintings had aroused because of the absence of the ‘fig leaf ’ on the human genitals denounced by British prudery. In the 124 But between Bolshevik and bourgeois Lawrence chooses the bourgeois, as ‘he least interferes’ with his life (‘Choice of Evils’). 125 ‘Wild Things in Captivity’. 126 ‘Touch’.

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new section of Pansies, nothing substantial is added, apart from occasional flashes and a short cycle of poems dedicated to Lawrence’s pantheistic god vibrating at large in living nature, a god who is more body and less spirit and who most of all creates the beautiful body. His stentorian voice grows soft in the premonition of death in ‘The Ship of Death’, where Lawrence identifies with the Etruscan who descends into his tomb furnished with the bronze ship that will carry him to the afterlife. The poem was inspired by Lawrence’s recent study of Etruscan civilization, which had revealed itself to him as the serene acceptance of death, ‘since life on earth was so good, the life below could but be a continuance of it’. § 122. Lawrence XIV: Prophecy and prejudice in Lawrence’s non-fiction Studies in Classic American Literature (1923, radically revised in 1924)127 has neither the appearance nor the slant of the traditional, academic collection of critical essays. None of the chapters has the procedure, the approach, the organic order of exposition, the coherence, the objective plan of explication typical of those. Especially in the second version, which is the text normally used and reprinted, it adopts a discursive formula not particularly congenial to Lawrence, the epigrammatic and ‘witty’ one pioneered by Wilde. Some of the essays, such as the last one on Whitman, initially unreadable, are series and juxtapositions of short, telegram-like sentences, and often lack any main verb. Their discursive freedom comes close to fleeting annotation, abrupt and disconnected. As I have often mentioned, Lawrence strikes a false note whenever he attempts humour or witticism. These are a writer’s essays after all, not a professional critic’s; as such, they are daring, and arbitrarily subjective reactions which loosen the moorings of their subject as soon as possible. He appreciates or criticizes according to whether writers reveal or at least allude to his own primary categorical conflicts and to the extent to which they find their resolution, at least in the form of ambiguity, of contradiction, or even deconstruction, as summed up in the formula (later taken out of context and often quoted), ‘never trust the teller, trust the tale’. The goal of reducing to a few general aphorisms such a pronounced variety

127 As is usual I will refer to the second edition.

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of nearly a century of ‘classic’ American literature is daring. The theory overriding Lawrence’s treatment is that of a critique of the American model as ostensible rebellion against a visible authority and the banner of a democracy which for Lawrence is not authentic freedom. It is most of all ‘tight mental allegiance to a morality which all their passion goes to destroy’, as is best illustrated in Hawthorne. The dawn of American literature lies in Franklin, Crèvecœur and Cooper, in the effort to domesticate and even ‘eradicate’ the irrepressible alterity of the native Americans, even while describing it and at times extolling it. The essay on Poe is the most acceptable and densest of the volume, simply because Lawrence naturally traces in the writer case studies of his own dualistic notion of sensual and spiritual love, especially of the spiritual love which kills, and of the ultimate sense of possession of the soul by those whose love is destructively spiritual only. Poe’s dilemma, the dilemma of the west, is being versus knowing: antagonistic states, so that ‘the more you know, the less you are’, and vice versa. Vibration in Poe is only conscious, and to love consciously is a mistake, because it implies capturing and possessing the mystery of somebody else’s soul. In Hawthorne, Lawrence discovers the historical trajectory that goes from unconsciousness or pre-knowledge to knowledge, and from innocence to awareness of sin. In the essay dedicated to him Lawrence launches his attack on the diabolical power of the pure woman and on the repression of the body in spiritual man, who nevertheless feels its bite. Melville was driven by an impulse to go back to the primitive paradise, away from human society into the womb of the primordial Pacific. Melville is in fact the most allusive of Lawrence’s doubles, a fighting Melville who pines for primitive life but is called back to social life, who knows that ‘love is never a fulfilment’, never an interpersonal ‘perfect relationship’ or a perfect friendship, and life ‘never a thing of continuous bliss’. Lawrence finds confirmed there that perfect relationships do not exist, that each soul is alone and that there is an impassable barrier between two beings – a maxim from La Bruyère he often cites. Whitman too had an excess of knowledge or rather of empathy. But Lawrence does not charge him with that, rather with the same utopia as Kangaroo, a Pauline, spiritual conception of love, which is therefore altruistic and sublimated, a Christian love in its sense of ‘charity’. 2. The relatively short essay from 1921, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, was added to and made more substantial the following year

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as Fantasia of the Unconscious, which turned out worse, more confused and muddled. A joking, witty and loquacious Lawrence who delights in constant exclamations, in chatty tones, in divagations and quips – who in sum apes Sterne – is barely credible. Lawrence starts from the Darwinian origins of life, but rejects scientific explanations throughout the whole book, appealing more than once to mystery and the unknowable, to which he bows. This is enough to call this volume a conservative, traditionalist, backward-looking work, fearful of the new; the stressing of the mystery of life is a Ruskinian chord, as is the blind and scornful rejection of any scientific explanation. If we did not know it is Lawrence writing, it could be mistaken for a late work by Ruskin for the sudden deviations into a prophetic and imaginary style imbued with an intoxicated and dazed vision, and therefore into a ‘poetic’ discourse that is in itself unverifiable. The diatribe against Freud concerns his pan-sexuality (sex comes ‘second’, since the first driver of human action is ‘religious’ or ‘creative’), whereas Lawrence’s point of view is biological and physiological, of impulses transmitted through ganglia and nervous centres.128 The solar plexus is the seat of consciousness and of the formation of individuality, at the same time also of the extension of the bonds of race and blood, so that the individual is a combination and equilibrium of ‘fluids’, some new and some inherited. Life is always for Lawrence a bundle of internal and external relations, and relations that are always described with poetic metaphors of liquidity, seas, waves, flows, downpours.129 Situated and born in the solar plexus is also a knowledge that Lawrence typically sees as ‘dynamic’, pre-intellectual and 128 The argument is tighter in the first essay, which opposes to the Freudian concept of the unconscious one that sees it as the forming centre of individuality (‘soul would be a better term’). Life and therefore individuality come into being when the male cell fuses with the female in the act of conception (an early announcement of future debates on abortion): ‘in that moment a new life-unit and a new consciousness come into being in the universe’. 129 The gestation of the foetus and its first unconscious experiences are described with original and moving metaphors, and I do not exclude that these pages were the incubation for the foetal poetry and of the hallucinations of genesis, as I shall define them, in Dylan Thomas. It would be easy to document several verbal echoes from Lawrence’s essay.

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decisively non-cerebral. This axiom provokes the usual polemic against an excess of intellectual knowledge in the field of education.130 Sex is a ‘flow of vitalistic communication’, a ‘magnetism’ or ‘electricity’ which establishes a ‘vivid relation’ between two adults; except that sex, considered and experienced as a prime mover, would disintegrate society in its isolating effect, and must therefore be subjected to a collective aim: ‘No great motive or ideal or social principle can endure for any length of time unless based upon sexual fulfilment of the vast majority of individuals concerned’. The monogamous sex he preaches, with the condemnation of promiscuous, reified sex, is a prelude to the closing letter of Lady Chatterley. Since Freud had investigated the way in which sexual impulse is sublimated, for instance in art, he is not as antagonistic as Lawrence claims.131 The discussion closes at the beginning of the ‘post-puberty consciousness’. 3. The essays in Etruscan Places were written from 1927 and posthumously published in 1932; Lawrence had intended to add others and only in this sense can the volume be considered incomplete. It is the most inspired of Lawrence’s travelogues, since it fuses in a pleasing equilibrium theory, or amateurish speculation, and pure narrative, inserting with ease these elements into a fully felt journey, enriched with unforeseen, always sharp and piercing observations on the contemporary setting through successful incidental sketches. Its tone is controlled, quick-witted and almost never prophetic. The counterpoint between caricature and erudition, some underlying theses, and the boldly arbitrary nature of many artistic, historical and anthropological conjectures132 recall Ruskin’s Mornings in Florence; but the voice resembles at times Pater’s rapt and reserved manner in his Greek studies. Lawrence’s enthusiasm for the lost Etruscan civilization wishes to 130 Like Swift, Lawrence’s ‘modest’, that is, utopian proposal is: ‘Let’s close immediately all the schools’. But more like Dickens is the assertion that schools ‘cram the mind of a child with facts that have nothing to do with his own experiences’. 131 Lawrence goes on to say that many dreams are ‘merely insignificant’, and paying too much attention to them is a mark of weakness. He consistently prefers a physiological point of view. 132 I am thinking here of the reflections provoked in Lawrence by the Etruscan museum in Volterra, where he claims that Etruscan urns ‘hint at the Gothic which lay unborn in the future’.

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be an act of resuscitation and mediumistic evocation: ‘The Etruscans are not a theory or a thesis. If they are anything, they are an experience’, and a life experience at that, ‘gay’ in its still burning radiance, which comes forth to the observer from the tombs, from the necropolises and from the mural pictures in particular. The founding point is the theory, or praxis, or Etruscan superstition, of death, which is a ‘natural’ continuation of life. But soon afterwards it is debatable that the Etruscans would have been swept away to exorcize the phallic layer and stage of civilization, represented by the phallic cippi and the vaginal arx. Lawrence therefore celebrates a civilization lacking an identified belief in personalized gods, but centred on the ‘elementary’ forces and powers of nature. At a further level, the focus is always on the historical dynamism of those times, which still rebounds on and can be traced in the contemporary age. Between Lawrence’s first and second visit, Italy became fascist, a development Lawrence notes by espousing the theory that the fascists are imposing a Roman aegis upon a country that is still largely Etruscan, and upon a people, that is, lacking ‘sternness’ and ‘will-to-power’, the latter ‘reflected on’ them ‘from the Germanic races that have almost engulfed’ them. 4. Apocalypse was provisionally finished shortly before Lawrence’s death, and is missing the finishing touches. It is therefore his virtual ideological testament, surprisingly not ‘apocalyptic’ in itself but conveying the message of an unexpected, un-hoped-for regeneration. It literally foretells an optimistic way out and a utopian salvation for a contemporary civilization torn and destroyed by war. As a strictly theological contribution to biblical exegesis, it is not in itself especially new, or appears less of a novelty when paired with the several improvised, rough, amateurish and impressionistic exegeses by late Victorians like Ruskin, Browning and particularly Matthew Arnold. All of them had been educated in the cult of the Bible, were saturated in the Bible to their inner fibre and obsessed with the long fallout of German new criticism which had arrived in England as early as the first decades of the nineteenth century. Apocalypse is then at first sight and from an exegetical point of view a late sub-product of the Tübingen school, whose most disruptive outcome had been the inauguration of an anthropological reading of religions which inevitably cut down to size the historical hegemony of Christianity. Like those predecessors, Lawrence is

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far from cautious and takes chances without hesitation, launching himself into conjectures and apodictic, arbitrary statements. Apocalypse then is read today not for its meagre heuristic value, but for the light it throws upon Lawrence and his idiosyncrasies. Lawrence seems at times to ape the creative and polemical style of Matthew Arnold’s two theological books; but he does step down from the pulpit and throws in a sharp remark, a quip, a scornful comment even. The aseptic tone of the theological essay emerges only after the recollection of his personal experience of reading this particular book and the whole of the Bible. It feels like hearing again Ruskin at the beginning of Praeterita, with Ruskin’s mother as a kind of double or pre-incarnation of Lawrence’s own;133 but Gosse, Rutherford, Butler and the voice of the whole mass of the greats who lost their faith a few decades earlier can be heard too. Apocalypse is an illustration of the evident, frequent phenomenon of saturation in the Bible and in practices of devotion, a saturation which especially in a dissenting environment translates into a backlash. Looking back at himself as a child, Lawrence between the lines praises his younger self for having precociously intuited a truth. He had felt instinctively rejected and repulsed not so much by the Bible as a book and cultural document, but rather by a specific form of hermeneutic approach: the dogmatic, blocked, and in a word allegorical interpretation of the text. The biblical Apocalypse, Lawrence argues, was turned into an allegory by its various and immediate interpreters, and maybe even by its different authors, but in the first instance it is not allegorical. If a text has been ‘exhausted’ at first reading, if its readers already know what will be found there, it no longer interests; there are effectively texts that can be exhausted straight away, and others that do not cease to suggest interpretations. The Bible and even more so the Apocalypse are texts that some wished to seal forever in a series of fixed interpretations, rather than taking them as fields of suggestions that are still free, unexplored and inexhaustible: an entropy, as information theory would have put it, in terms which Lawrence

133 About Ruskin, Lawrence writes in the tenth chapter of Fantasia of the Unconscious: ‘When Mrs Ruskin said that John Ruskin should have married his mother she spoke the truth. He was married to his mother’.

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prefigures. Lawrence then pragmatically launches in the first pages the plan for his argument, where a strict and tight exegesis, although arbitrary and idiosyncratic, is developed parenthetically in tangential digressions on psychology, anthropology, sociology, history, history of religions, philosophy. Without footnotes, there are few references to or discussions of scholarly sources, while the pace is that of an excursus that claims to summarize the historical evolution of thousands of years in simplistic schemes. One of the first theses proposed is that the biblical book of the Apocalypse expresses in imaginary form the ideology and expectations of the first Christians, those persecuted by the Romans and therefore wishing to see their Empire destroyed in order to immediately raise a millenarian realm of martyrs, therefore a purely spiritual realm according to the promise of the ‘second coming’. This secret plan was updated by the Protestants to become a different allegory, the destruction of papist Rome. At the time of Lawrence’s writing, the wartime, this plan had become the hoped-for destruction of the rich and the wicked in the whole world. In this sense Lawrence claims that the message of the Apocalypse is useful for a revolutionary political project, hence the ‘apocalyptic’ arrogance of the ‘humble’ dissenting miners who felt like the elect at the time of the Roman persecutions. In the wake of these views, Lawrence theorizes two types of Christianity: of Christ as altruistic love, tenderness and resignation away from the world; and of the self-glorification of the humble. The terms ‘aristocracy’ and ‘democracy’ are boldly overturned: aristocrats teach humility, democrats harshness and intransigence. The strong ones withdraw and the weak, threatening and subjugated as they are, rebel and pursue and impose the rule of might. The Apocalypse is the primer and the sacred Decalogue of the weak who want to become strong and establish their supremacy, more precisely the terrible gospel of dictatorial democracy imposing its rule. John of Patmos, its author,134 took on the task of spreading the ideology of the millenarian revenge of the persecuted, and of giving voice in this way to one of the first formulations of the will-to-power under the guise of a

134 Lawrence distinguishes him from John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, describing him as a violent Jew who re-wrote previous Apocalypses during his imprisonment by the Romans, injecting into the text his hate for his jailers.

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future, imminent kingdom of the martyr saints who dethrone their persecutors. It is for Lawrence the fulfilment of collective man who wants to serve himself rather than the others, as does the aristocrat. An aristocratic servant becomes tyrannical – Lenin – when he comes into contact with the mass. The Apocalypse is the expression of the mass-man, of a collective self in its frustrating search for power. 5. The central section of the essay contains a closer exegesis of the biblical text, especially its first half, and develops with the constant objective of showing the discrepancies between the evangelical, melancholic and crushed Christ on the Gethsemane, and the ‘Kosmocrator’, the ‘apotheosis of the weak man’ in the Apocalypse. Lawrence believes in a layered book, sharply divided into two parts, which could be said to be in the first predominantly pagan, that is, symbolic, and in the second dissonant, allegorical, Christian. In the latter Lawrence has far less interest since the destructive impulse towards the world overflows there, with the view of the future establishment of the Heavenly City. The centre of the argument is the reconstruction and identification – as if in a palimpsest in Lawrence’s concept – of a pagan residue subsequently papered over and misinterpreted but which is evidence of a powerful sense of contact between nature in its multiple manifestations and man, before the advent of Christianity and particularly of modern Christianity. There is gratitude towards that author, Lawrence maintains, for having preserved and not erased the remnants of the pagan adoration of the world, later condemned by mechanistic and abstract Christianity. The adult and the child in Lawrence coldly rejected an imagination delighting in the ‘splendiferous’, that is in the sensational, shocking, unnatural image; but those flamboyant images are reinterpreted as signs of a way of thinking organized in images rather than by logic and abstraction. Logos is always Lawrence’s number one enemy. In that first part of the biblical text, Lawrence sees the vestiges of a messianic mystery later adapted, deformed and rewritten owing to the Christian terror of paganism, identified only with the animal instinct, and in order to recognize only the Judaic-Greek-Roman world as the foundation of modern civilization. But the ‘barbaric’, primitive civilization of Egyptians, Chaldeans, Persians was in fact superior because of their ‘vital consciousness’. Once he has reached this point, Lawrence simply repeats the most established and traditional form of British intuitionism and empiricism, pushing it to the extreme.

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The awareness given by the senses is the origin of knowledge. Lawrence’s condemnation of purely intellectual and abstract knowledge echoes the ‘inscape’ and the ‘haecceitas’ of Hopkins and Duns Scotus; Eliot’s theories of the dissociation of sensibility provide an even closer parallel.135 When Lawrence picks up again the exegetical thread, Apocalypse becomes in preJungian terms a laborious survey of the historical transformation of the meaning of the symbols appearing in the biblical book. The birth of Christ and the persecution of Mary by the dragon start off an excursus on the two kinds of dragons, the vital and the demonic one; the vital dragon – white, golden, green or red, before the latter colour became synonymous with the diabolic – needs to be resuscitated by modern man. In this way, Lawrence can make the ancient layer of Revelation speak to the modern man. It was needful to oppose the ‘dark side’ of Christianity emerging from an incorrect or incomplete reading of the Biblical book – ‘dark’ here meaning something entirely different from the invariable sense it has in Lawrence’s doctrine of colours, and having for the only time a negative connotation. It is a question of saying ‘no’ to the cosmic suicide towards which contemporary civilization seemed to be heading, and of saying ‘yes’ to the renewed and rediscovered ‘connection’ of man with the cosmos. In what looks like proto-deconstruction, Lawrence argues that the internal resistance of the text does not prevent its reader from extracting from the Apocalypse the incitement to unison between previously divided men, and between men and the cosmos. 6. ‘The Man Who Died’ (1929) is not a theoretical essay with an argument, but rather a theological and Christological fantasy and a fairy-tale 135 Eliot’s well-known definition seems to be echoed or perhaps is alluded to in the paragraph starting with ‘To them [the primitives] a thought was a completed state of feeling-awareness, a cumulative thing…’. On Lawrence’s spontaneous anticipation or intuition of Eliot on this point, see Kermode 1981, 57 and 133–4, and on the echoes Lawrence transmitted to Eliot’s poetry see ‘Il loto e la rosa’, in MEF, 133–50. At the same time, the primitives’ thinking and argumentation in the form of a series of images, without a reciprocal link as if in a chain of ideograms, is a distinct prefiguration of the aesthetics of Imagism. The biblical book is a luminous instance of a wheel of images, a diorama of pictures following one upon the other and erasing each other in a non-logical circuit.

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story that starts from an aside in the last pages of the Gospels.136 With its periphrasis of ‘the man who died’, which is never resolved into an explicit naming of Christ, the story starts from the empty tomb from which a disillusioned, still dazed Christ has just come out. But the whole prologue is developed around a towering cock on heat owned by a peasant from Jerusalem, so overexcited and feverish that he must be tied down. It is an objective correlative of Christ chained in the cave, from which he comes out transformed, and transformed because he has been resuscitated as a body, a whole man and no longer Christ – that is, no longer the son of the God of renunciation, and whose message of death he must preach and realize. The cock-phallus is then symbol of a Christ who discovers and makes his own the phallus that throbs in his veins and in his stomach. Once this equivalence is established, Christ’s words, that he is aware of having ‘risen’ again, take on a witty meaning of a sacrilegious sexual-mystical nature.137 He will in fact be ‘raised’ to the phallic dimension he had at first lost or rather had never had, and to the conscious rebellion against death. The first of the two chapters develops with an effective rhythm that mimics the Bible, and is modelled on bare, brief and mysterious rhythmic sentences and litanylike repetitions of epithets and circumlocutions. Lawrence should have drawn the curtain when Christ enters the phenomenal world once he has freed the cock. What follows is much more forced, because in his wanderings Christ comes across a priestess of Isis who welcomes and houses him, thinking he is Osiris. To seal his sacrilege, Lawrence wants at all costs to have Christ consummate the reviving and inebriating physical copulation with the priestess, at the end of which Christ is truly healed.

136 At first entitled ‘The Escaped Cock’, with the phallic allusions I point out below. Christ’s regret, and his rejection of his mission, recall the evangelist Matthew’s in the poem dedicated to him in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (§ 121.5). 137 As is ‘died’, which by literary convention dating back to the Elizabethans can also mean the extinguishing of excitement after ejaculation.

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§ 123. Dorothy Richardson* I: ‘Pilgrimage’ I. The English harbinger of ‘monologue interieur’ The sprawling, chaotic and in some passages indigestibly long-winded novel-poem Pilgrimage, arranged and completed posthumously in 1967 in thirteen volumes, or ‘acts’ as the author, Dorothy Richardson (1873– 1957),1 preferred to call them, is without question her only historical work of merit, albeit a highly probative one. If it is true that it possesses *

Richardson’s output is extremely vast. Apart from Pilgrimage, republished by Virago (4 vols, London 1979, the edition that has been consulted and cited in this work, with Roman numerals indicating volumes, followed by page numbers), it includes essays, poems, short stories, sketches, a wide variety of literary, historical and scientific journalism, and translations not found in collective editions. J. C. Powys, Dorothy M. Richardson, London 1931 (rhapsodic and enthusiastic, it ends at the ninth novel); C. R. Blake, Dorothy Richardson, Ann Arbor, MI 1960; H. Gregory, Dorothy Richardson: An Adventure in Self-Discovery, New York 1967; J. D. Rosenberg, Dorothy Richardson: The Genius They Forgot: A Critical Biography, London 1973; T. F. Staley, Dorothy Richardson, Boston, MA 1976; G. G. Fromm, Dorothy Richardson: A Biography, Urbana, IL 1977; G. E. Hanscombe, The Art of Life: Dorothy Richardson and the Development of Feminist Consciousness, London 1982; H. G. S. Chauhan, Stream of Consciousness and Beyond in the Novels of Dorothy M. Richardson, New Delhi 1990; J. Radford, Dorothy Richardson, Hemel Hempstead 1991; C. Watts, Dorothy Richardson, Plymouth 1995; J. Fouli, Structure and Identity: The Creative Imagination in Dorothy Richardson’s ‘Pilgrimage’, Tunis 1995; S. Gevirtz, Narrative’s Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson, New York 1996; A Reader’s Guide to Dorothy Richardson’s ‘Pilgrimage’, ed. G. Thomson, with preface by K. Bluemel, Greensboro, NC 1996; also by G. H. Thomson, Notes on ‘Pilgrimage’: Dorothy Richardson Annotated, Greensboro, NC 1999; J. Winning, Dorothy Richardson’s ‘Pilgrimage’ as Archive of the Self, London 1996; K. Bluemel, Experimenting on the Borders of Modernism: Dorothy Richardson’s ‘Pilgrimage’, Athens, GA 1997; E. Bronfen, Dorothy Richardson’s Art of Memory: Space, Identity, Text, Eng. trans., New York 1999; M. F. Llantada Díaz, Form and Meaning in Dorothy M. Richardson’s ‘Pilgrimage’, Heidelberg 2007; V. Paradisi, Dorothy Richardson e il romanzo del Novecento, Roma 2010; D. L. Parsons, Theorists of the Modernist Novel: James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf, London 2014; R. Bowler, Literary Impressionism: Vision and Memory in Dorothy Richardson, Ford Madox Ford, H. D. and May Sinclair, London 2016.

1

Richardson suggested that her oeuvre be read sequentially, as if each single novel were like a chapter or a part of the whole, not something which is subject to extrapolation, as in the works by Galsworthy and Powell.

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the characteristics mentioned above, obviously it cannot be considered traditional; nevertheless, this anomalous, progressive polyptych, both in terms of its writing (the first novel dates back to 1915) and of its internal chronology (the action begins in 1890 and ends on the eve of the First World War), presents itself for several other aspects – that is, for the type of its protagonist, for the historical, social and ideological background and its general semantic organization – as an old-fashioned novel from the preceding generation. There is only one conspicuous discontinuity making it impossible to include it in the nineteenth-century canon or in interstitial literature, and this is its narrative method, its organization and its language. It is old-fashioned for the former reasons listed above, but also pioneering, revolutionary and avant-garde for the latter ones, even though it is not sufficiently recognized as such, and is snubbed even by scholars of Modernism. However, these reasons are enough to call for the history of this movement to be rewritten, and to locate Pilgrimage and Richardson herself, rather than Joyce and Woolf and their masterpieces, as the true beginning of Modernism.2 It should not be forgotten, in fact, that Richardson was born and grew up in the high or late Victorian period, and turned twenty-four the same year Queen Victoria died. Her father was a grocer who, as often happens in Dickens, cultivated dreams of gentility and wanted to stop working as a merchant. Having succeeded in this he transmitted the ambition of social climbing to his offspring, four sisters who grew up in an environment of showy extravagance, which was rather old-fashioned and garish, until their father’s financial ruin. Female advancement was still inconceivable, and generally did not take place at the end of the century, except by working as a governess, which allowed for contact with the wealthier members of society. Richardson later migrated to London in order to find work as a secretary in a dental clinic, and by living in the capital she was able to get close to the avantgarde and socialist circles, as well as the Bloomsbury group, albeit only

2

The first three novels precede 1921, but the third three coincide with the most important period for English Modernism and the fashion for the stream of consciousness. Richardson’s novels were read and reviewed by Virginia Woolf, as will be mentioned below, but not noted by Joyce.

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receiving a lukewarm reception.3 She was one of H. G. Well’s lovers and had a son with him who died at birth;4 and due to her classical beauty, and perhaps also to her intelligence, others like Yeats and Madox Ford found her difficult to resist. The purely literary result of these vicissitudes was that she embraced the vocation of writing at the infancy of the Modernist movement, yet her work was suffused with the remains of an earlier literary and cultural heritage. Richardson was a trail blazer because she interpreted and recognized a need shared, albeit slightly later, by male and female writers, that of refounding the literary language in poetry and the novel; this involved Green and Auden, Huxley, the young Waugh and the young Powell. Apart from Joyce, the English novel in the 1920s unanimously adopted a telegraphic style and an aesthetic of rapid brevity. Deferential to this trend, in Pilgrimage Richardson pared down authorial commentary to a minimum, and heralded the asyndetic narrative sentence; but she also alternated this with another syntactic form that is much more exuberant and imbricated. This long, undulating, interminable ‘sentence’ that sometimes continues for half a page before a full stop, is the more typical feature of the writer. To compose a saga could be considered, from another point of view, traditionalist and at the same time progressive, and to side with Galsworthy or with Ford Madox Ford: Richardson approaches, if at all, the latter more than the former.5 Her saga or pseudo-saga marks the progress of an emancipated woman who engages with the controversial issues of the end of the nineteenth century: those of feminism, agnosticism, socialism, radicalism and Zionism. Like Compton-Burnett, she does not venture beyond the watershed of 1910, although these two writers present two distinct perspectives making further comparison impossible. Richardson’s novel, thus, is often one of ideas and conversations about ideas, retracing

3

4 5

Her permanent move to London happened after the tragic suicide of her mother in 1895. She got married in 1917 to Alan Odle, a mediocre painter who was many years her junior, and a bohémien who had hair down to his waist and was known for his dirtiness. Wells is disguised in the novels as Hypo Wilson, even if he appears as himself and with his real name being used in other parts. Powys 1931, 31, denies that Richardson’s novels can be defined as a saga.

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the arc of fin-de-siècle feminist emancipation in its paradigmatic articulations: education at home by a self-taught teacher, voracious reading, the conflicts of puberty, leaving the family home and starting an independent life in London, with the abjuration of religious faith or its secular updating, but without coming full circle with a satisfying sentimental and conjugal relationship. Sex is treated by Richardson with strange reticence and evasiveness,6 in the form of an erotic uneasiness that is a constant of the female Victorian and above all Gaskellian novel. The inability to submit to a man, the irreducibility of the female self to the institution of marriage, the expedient of falling back on a homosexual friendship –7 these are all phenomenologies not completely dissimilar to those of Lawrence’s ‘women in love’, where they become, however, rather more conscious and explicit. On the other hand, Richardson’s novels began to appear at the same time as Wells had just written Ann Veronica. Miriam Henderson, like Wells’s protagonist, is a Victorian woman with modern restlessness, searching for her own full identity and self-realization within the constrictive circumstances and the handicaps that women at that time were burdened with. She burns with Titanism, and she is a woman who, despite not having a university education, is nevertheless cultured, albeit in a haphazard way, and in whose learning the female arts, especially music, have pride of place. Pilgrimage is the last Victorian epic about the exclusion of women, and also about their sense of ontological inability to find a spiritual ubi consistam; therefore, it is the epos of the wandering woman, always departing and returning in an uninterrupted quest, like George Eliot’s Romola.8 As to the question of why Richardson did not finish the series with twelve books, the traditional number,9 as Powell did, the answer is that Miriam, inasmuch as she is the

6 7 8 9

Critics, in the wake of Freud, have indicated the sexually revealing frequency with which Miriam climbs stairs. The plot of her relationships with men is counterbalanced by three periods of female cohabitation, with Selina Holland, Amabel and Jean. Also like Barrett’s Aurora Leigh, who has the same gushing, stubborn femininity, and shares the readjustment of the ‘I’ to reality, love, family, sex and life. Radford 1991, 4, seems to claim that the cycle could be protracted nearly to infinity, and would be interrupted only by the death of the writer.

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essence of femininity, can never conclude her search; on the contrary, she must always start again, that is to say, she must remain constantly searching. The last volume, the thirteenth, lacks an air of finality and any element of circularity, nor is there any intelligibility shed on the cycle as a whole, and this may support the criticism that deep down, all things considered, what Richardson puts forward is still a tame and pious form of feminism, which does not provide for any real cultural, political or sexual revolution, and dialectically returns to the nineteenth-century protective security of a Nonconformist religious faith, free from any adhesion to an actualized Church. In other words, the palimpsest ends up converging towards a novel à la Wells, camouflaged with a stream of consciousness technique that is nothing more than padding. 2. The stream of consciousness10 was not simply, or initially used by Richardson as a technical innovation tout court, and one which reflected the more recent studies on the operation of the psyche; rather it was a specific and exclusive requirement of gender. Miriam Henderson, a double for Dorothy Richardson, pursues her full identity, but she does not want to, nor can she define it and describe it, and neither can she actualize this quest, by reusing male parameters. She distinguished the male mode of expression and she criticized it as intrinsically false; that is to say, she also recognized insurmountable genderic differences in terms of expositive, expressive and stylistic modes. Female thought was synthetic, male thought analytical and atomizing; female thought was also, as she wrote in the preface to the collective edition of 1938, lacking punctuation and without ‘formal obstructions’. With this in mind, the outline of, at least, a female neorealism was born, that of a diegetic syntax amounting to a drift of free, unchecked verbal outpourings. In Woolfian terms, the contrast between Mr and Mrs Ramsay loomed,11 and Virginia Woolf recognized, in fact – in 1923, in a cycle that was, at that time, still in progress – that Richardson had invented

10 Richardson did not like the metaphor of the ‘stream’ in the expression stream of consciousness, and preferred, if anything, the image of a fountain to that of a river. 11 Literally reflected in the text: ‘between men and women there can be no direct communication’ (IV, 223).

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‘the psychological sentence of the feminine gender’.12 Pilgrimage aims to be an uninterrupted, demonstrative experiment of the operation of the psyche, but with the fundamental clause that it is a female psyche: ‘One moment of my consciousness is wider and deeper than his has been in the whole of his life’.13 This is the reason why there cannot be any other point of view, in the novel, than that of Miriam Henderson, and for which one cannot pass from one to another point of view as in the works of Virginia Woolf and especially Joyce. The narrative fabric consequent on similar premises is a recording of the conscious stimuli provoked by the external world, not sequentially organized: an ‘incessant shower of innumerable atoms’. The form of the novel would come close to being a diary in the third person but for the markers of a descriptive and representative register and the insertion of pure dialogue. In practice the narrative voice and the diegetic rhythm are mixed. The telegraphic style presents itself in dry, skeletal sentences, but these are alternated with ones which are typically feminine, zigzagging and never-ending, twisted and stratified by subordinated clauses, as in Proust.14 Proust’s sympathetic, lyrical and poetic writing is imitated, as is his concept of an undulating, sinusoidal psyche.15 Like Proust’s Recherche, Richardson’s Pilgrimage is a tribute to an overflowing narcissism, a luxurious and superb monument erected to herself by the author. Every moment of this X-ray is an expansion of the percipient ‘I’, and therefore the melodramatic outcome of the psychological analysis is constant. When she describes in the third person, Richardson’s heritage is no longer that of Proust, but rather the grandiloquent style of Conrad or of the poets of Catholic aestheticism, like Hopkins and Thompson and other followers of Milton. It is a writing style that focuses on expanded moments which are described in slow motion, or on turgid scenes of ecstasy or morbid delirium. It could also be described as an interwoven fabric of pictures in the fullest sense of the word, and not only Impressionistic or Imagistic pictures of the landscape 12 13 14 15

Quoted in Radford 1991, 3. IV, 132, with reference to a male character. By all accounts Richardson, in 1915, had not yet read Proust. Not without some Bloomian or even Finnegansian puns: ‘Laissez faire. Lazy fair’ (I, 244).

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and of effects of light,16 but also of poses, specifically Pre-Raphaelite poses, and each of them serial simply because they are or might be defined as replicas of Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix, the woman who stares into nothingness towards indistinct depths surrounded by opalescent lights and symbolic birds. All of these successive poses resemble each other, especially in the fixed, mystical, dreaming gaze of the figure. The historical backdrop is a Turnerian haze, a rain cloud, indistinct dust; and the speed of the story is measured in units that do not correspond with the incidence of public events.17 At the end of the saga, Miriam witnesses the evolution – or the Arnoldian ‘expansion’ – of the twentieth century, from something which was a type of torture (not only in terms of dental treatment) ‘to a highly elaborated and scientific and almost painless process’; but also the transformation from the age of the bicycle to that of the automobile and the airplane, or the late debate on Darwin, or the Wilde scandal, or the vogue of Ibsen and Ouida.18 However, there is almost no date explicitly declared in the novels; and the locations are either imaginary or nonexistent, except for those set in London. Similarly, one reads, at every turn, passage after passage referring to a ‘she’ or a ‘he’, where the subject is only identified several pages later. Here, too, lies the character and the ‘interior’ mark of this type of monologue. 3. Richardson’s role as a pioneer received rather cold and parsimonious recognition from the critics and the other modernist novelists while she was still alive; furthermore, the sales of her novels were never particularly 16

17 18

The Imagist suggestion can be confirmed by the fact that Richardson’s novels were first published at the acme of that movement, whose objective, as I mentioned above, was to render life not in the form of characterization and storyline, but in terms of pure impressions. Cf. Powys 1931, 12–13, for a comment on the divisionist contrasts of light and shade, on twilights and dawns and word-paintings. In one of her writings (cf. Staley 1976, 105) Richardson maintained that ‘all literature is in some degree pictorial’. The subject matter of another essay is cinematographic techniques (Staley 1976, 29). See I, 208, the beautiful cameo of the preparation and the lighting of a cigarette. Cf. I, 281–2 and 285–6, for a very penetrating analysis, made with no sense of inferiority, of the world of this controversial, yet extremely fashionable writer of the end of the nineteenth century.

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high and the entire series of her works remained out of print for a long time. A cult writer and an author of cult books, she still enjoys an initiatic or archaeological interest. She was the target of the scornful jealousy of Virginia Woolf, and from Joyce there are no documented appreciative comments. She was ultimately a figure too similar to the old icons of the Victorian female writer, like George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë, to whom, as I have already said and I shall indicate again, there are repeated literal references in various of her works. It seems as if the students of female Modernism tossed a coin and chose Virginia Woolf as their champion discarding Richardson. Favourable or enthusiastic criticism, and these certainly were exceptions, came from May Sinclair and John Cowper Powys alone, the former hailing the method adopted by Richardson as proof of the eclipsing of authorial interference and the first sparks on the scene of the stream of consciousness technique. Conversely, restrictive and negative judgements have been legion: it was not worth while lengthening the narrative thread to such an extent; the story in itself lacks ‘urgency’, it does not have the continuous lyrical afflatus of Proust, and the depiction of the life of a middlebrow bourgeois woman in the England of the early twentieth century does not match such uncommon breadth and such an extended use of technical virtuosity. But there were also expressions of regret that Richardson had not made better use of her skills and become a second Katherine Mansfield. So her case was soon dismissed, as one of ‘works […] of lifeless monotony’ that possess little more than ‘historical interest’.19 In other words the average reader and especially the professional critic have been discouraged by the sheer size of the work, and encouraged to opt for the habitual short cut when confronted with a saga: that perhaps reading one volume is enough to get an idea of all the others. It is understandable that those who emerge, for example, from the exegesis of Finnegans Wake should find themselves drained of patience, and induced to dismiss a difficult book that requires continuous concentration. What prevents Richardson’s work from being memorable and everlasting is that autobiography dictates the rules of the diegesis to much too great a degree

19

Like Praz, harsh and cutting in PSL, 693.

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and this crudely binds the story, without being filtered, and therefore, also restructured and transfigured. Richardson did not succeed in focusing on sexual uneasiness, she did not know how to objectify this in her alter ego and gets lost in turbid and twisted intellectualizations without any clear linearity. The more serious drawback is, however, the absence of an underlying myth or a principle of order – in short, of a pattern. Its action does not happen in the single day of Ulysses or of Mrs Dalloway, nor does it have the tripartite time division of To the Lighthouse; but it is precisely in this absence of a pattern that Richardson traces the intrinsic je ne sais quoi of the female consciousness, which otherwise would have been male. Nevertheless, this criticism is partially unjust, because a clear and proved frame of reference is The Pilgrim’s Progress by Bunyan, with the titles of individual volumes – as in Jane Eyre or The Mill on the Floss, and also internal allusions, scattered throughout – that refer back to allegorical stations in the journey of the soul (Deadlock, The Tunnel, Interim, Oberland). This framework is, however, much too tenuous, and submerged by the pressure of events that attract the reader’s interest but struggle to find epiphanic peaks; and besides, the mystical afflatus obtained from the Quaker conventicle, nearly at the end of the cycle, is overcome by a new phase and gives way to a new ‘progress’. A narrator cannot protract the stream of consciousness or the impressionistic diary on such an exquisitely technical plan without making a real selection, which may possibly give the impression of not being selective. Moreover, Richardson camouflages nineteenth-century narrative material without correlating the method to a psyche that faces a renewed historical rhythm. Therefore, this saga is still initially the old ‘novel of the governess’, and Miriam is the much younger sister of Jane Eyre and of Lucy from Villette; it is also a novel of the school life and of the boarding-house, those points of convergence that in Dickens and Trollope assured a variety of colourful characters. The inner conflict is that of a Bildung storyline that subverts speed because its unit of measurement is stasis, the framework that describes and morbidly investigates a state of mind, or a series of states of mind. In other words, flux is applied to a temporal context that almost ontologically refuses it: that is, taut, momentary and unextended time which in the classics of Modernism may be a series of times, but always or nearly always instantaneous.

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§ 124. Dorothy Richardson II: ‘Pilgrimage’ II. Towards self-knowledge The first trio of novels from Pilgrimage, which are the most popular because they are discreetly accessible and in some passages appealing due to a certain satirical humour, were published separately in the first three years of the war. They appeared impervious to the drama that shook other writers, and follow the dissatisfied and often fickle evolutions – or the intermittent illuminations, as it would be appropriate to describe them – of the female ego in an antedated milieu. Those who want to argue for the lack of structure and design of Richardson’s novel, should at least admit that the three units are held together by the themes of departures and returns: from the family home to the German boarding-school and back; from employment at the London school to the return home; from home to the wealthy family’s country house. It is a pilgrimage dictated by the events and necessities of life, as well as by an unfulfilled Sehnsucht. Pointed Roofs 20 (1915) moves very quickly to a rite of passage, because the impatient heroine, in need of autonomy, and eager to succeed and tired of the domestic milieu, makes a crossing. It is symptomatic that The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf and In a German Pension by Katherine Mansfield begin in the same way, but they register a drier and sharper symptomatology. The leap into the unknown most often takes place in Richardson in the wake of the old Victorian pilgrimages, that is, from spiritual emptiness to the position of governess, so that Miriam repeatedly reminds herself of Madame Beck from Villette, although not of Agnes Grey and many other Victorian novels. In reality, it is the shocking experience of the two Brontë sisters in Brussels that often comes to mind in these early pages, as if the work were a consciously updated version of The Professor and Villette, with the equivocal and troubled figure of the headmistress and other glimpses of a treacherous and neurotic reality. This parable is initially written with a descriptive, omniscient and asyndetic prose made up of gaunt and skeletal syntactic units. However, dialogue gradually gains ground, a dialogue consistently without clarification and dotted with internal allusions and winks that are dimly decipherable. The empathy of the narrative voice rhythmically intervenes, more

20 Such as those found in Hanover.

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and more frequently turning from introspections made from outside the scene to others made from within, when thoughts, and the mnemonic and psychic frames are separated – thus, as witness to their disordered stream – by three suspension dots. It is the first hint of that mixed method that has been mentioned earlier. The scenes that take place inside the Hanover school for girls are like a medley of characters and anecdotes created by means of fleeting impressions without any desire for synthesis, with their little idiosyncrasies and their reciprocal intimate reactions, which are often left unspoken or revealed in the form of allusions; they form cameos of some prominence that chime in with the contemporary, humorous depictions of Germany’s crass, materialistic, but also unexpectedly musical civilization, given by Mansfield and Maugham. Eventually, Miriam escapes the viscosity of this claustrophobic environment, filled with tensions expressed, especially, by the headmistress, who has discovered that there had been talk of men at the school. The German experience is not a success, and Miriam gets ready to face a new chapter in her life with her return home. In Backwater (1916) she accepts another constrictive job but she feels liberated in other ways (one such transgression is smoking her first cigarette); she attacks sermons and the Anglican faith and shows signs of rebellion and fin-de-siècle apostasy. With no way out, disappointed by love, and ousted by a new teacher, it is only in literature that she finds an absorbing narcotic. The novel recounts relevant anecdotes and experiences, while also alternating moments where the author’s voice becomes the voice of the thoughts of the character; however, even in these cases it is not true to say that there is an absence of a story or a plot. The illness of Miriam’s mother, which makes it necessary for her to find work with a family and leave teaching at the school, creates a Titanic clash between the romantic Sehnsucht, the dreamy delirium, the disregard for the miserableness of life, and the minute, prosaic daily necessities. At the beginning of Honeycomb (1917) Miriam’s objective correlative is a stray dog, and she measures her dissatisfaction on the marriage of her sisters. She is also like George Eliot’s Gwendolen, who vents and sublimates her frustrations through music, along with other spectacular and exhibitionist behaviour. 2. The Tunnel (1919) and Interim (1919), published in the same year and within months of each other, form Richardson’s second volume, which is

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historically situated after the reverberations of Wilde’s trial and during the height of the vogue for japonaiseries. The panoramic overview of fin-de-siècle London also includes the vogue for the bicycle and the Shakespearean theatrical successes of the actor Sir Henry Irving. Miriam confronts the world of work at a dental practice,21 but the main dentist turns out to be nothing more than masculine efficiency, and the first of a list of men that Miriam is attracted to, but who eventually let her down. The heterosexual relationship is juxtaposed with the ersatz of a small, friendly female community that takes shape in a Victorian boarding-house maintained by a humane landlady. In effect, the real action becomes quite spaced apart and the novel lingers on a continuous overlapping of changing moods. Deadlock (1921), Revolving Lights (1923) and The Trap (1925), constitute the third volume. They refocus on affective and emotional issues with a disappointing outcome for the ever passionate and metamorphic feminine sensibility, which prohibits the freezing of a relationship that must be, by its nature, always fluid. Shatov is a Russian Jew with whom infinite and winding conversations about art and literature and religion lead to nothing. In the first of the three, the novel of ideas re-emerges, following the long and often tediously detailed conversations between the two characters. The disagreement with Shatov, which scuttles the nascent relationship, seems to be a disagreement over the historical role of women, namely an inadequate or distorted idea of feminism from his part. Miriam eventually shares a room with a Miss Holland, from whose window she can see Yeats working – another of Dorothy Richardson’s real lovers. The pitfall is represented by the fact that not even purely female friendships have satisfactory outcomes, and this relationship too deteriorates, to indicate that woman is always a solitary animal. A sudden awakening of political consciousness drives her to criticize her employers for the injustices suffered by their employees, and she is fired. By the second novel, a superfetation of the description of mood over the event has now become predominant.

21

As suggested by the internal alter ego, here Richardson writes the first ‘dental novel’ or at least one about dental practices (IV, 396).

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3. Of the last five novels that make up the fourth volume, Oberland (1927), Dawn’s Left Hand (1931), Clear Horizon (1935), Dimple Hill (1938) and March Moonlight22 (1967), the first is a miniature masterpiece and, as a standalone novel, one of the most noteworthy books by Richardson. In her oeuvre this is a shining example of a narrative without plot. Nothing happens, very little guarantees the progress of the story; it is a summation and succession of gazes, frames and actions, all of them having internal resonance, or even of banal, off-centre dialogues without relevance: a diaphanous backdrop from which indistinct characters emerge, but it is unclear what they do, who they are or how to relate to one another. It is simply a prelude, without the consistency of a novel. In Dawn’s Left Hand, Miriam enjoys the benefits of a Swiss holiday, and renews contact with the socialist club, meets old friends, and gets close to a French companion, Amabel. She has left the room she shared with her friend Holland and has returned to the boarding-house. The birth of the writer looms, and the available genres are discussed in the arena of the English literary scene of that time. The end of this eleventh novel reinstates Miriam as a constantly departing figure, this time setting off towards the unknown. Dimple Hill marks the ancient idea of the recuperation of spent energy in the breast and in the restorative embrace of nature, a Romantic topos and the Blakean epiphany of divinity reflected in a blade of grass.23 It is also true that she yearns to be reintegrated into the anti-modern, self-satisfied, simple, traditionalist community of the Quakers,24 which embodies the rejection of the objective of the ideal that is constantly being chased, ‘a world-club […] unattainable by the angry social reformers’. Thus, a Wordsworthian, Arcadian climate reigns among the Quakers, and a sense of an immersion in nature and in the ancient and immutable beliefs of the fathers, and of the retrieval of solid English traditions and of messages of wisdom. These seem like exact echoes of Carlyle from a century earlier, with the celebration of a rough frankness capable of explaining the secret of the universe and of mankind. A sudden fade-out closes the chapter on the Quakers and brings the scene back to 22 An incomplete novel, found in manuscript form. 23 IV, 421. 24 To corroborate this curiosity, Richardson had been, in 1914, the author of two monographs on Quakers, one of which is a biography of their founder, George Fox.

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London. March Moonlight, which seems like an unsuccessful reworking of Oberland, is entirely centred on the blurry and protracted delirium sparked in Miriam by the new female companionship of Jean.25 § 125. Ford Madox Ford* I: The restorer of the old order from the trenches of formal Modernism The introductory interpretative key expressed in the title of this section derives its logic and meaning – and can be thus decoded – from the condemnation by Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939) of the ‘waste land’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He saw the causes of this in rampant industrialization, which was trampling on the old agricultural, rural and artisanal civilization, in the failures of nationalistic and warmongering European politics, and in the corruption of the western cultural model. As an antidote he turned towards the ideal of a pure, transnational order of a Europe which, as in Novalis, had been Christian and, qua pre-Reformation,

25

This stripped down, ethereal woman is also a Johannine hypostasis, as the name implies (Radford 1991, 42).

*

Selected works in The Bodley Head Ford, ed. G. Greene, 4 vols, London 1962–1963; Collected Poems, New York 1936; Critical Writings, ed. F. MacShane, Lincoln, NE 1964; Letters, ed. R. M. Ludwig, London 1965. D. Goldring, The Last Pre-Raphaelite, London 1948; R. A. Cassell, Ford Madox Ford: A Study of His Novels, Baltimore, MD 1961, and, as editor, Critical Essays on Ford Madox Ford, Boston, MA 1987; J. A. Meixner, Ford Madox Ford’s Novels: A Critical Study, Minneapolis, MN and London 1962; P. L. Wiley, Novelist of Three Worlds: Ford Madox Ford, Syracuse, NY 1962; R. W. Lid, Ford Madox Ford: The Essence of His Art, Berkeley, CA 1964; F. MacShane, The Life and Work of Ford Madox Ford, London 1965; N. Leer, The Limited Hero in the Novels of Ford Madox Ford, East Lansing, MI 1966; C. G. Hoffman, Ford Madox Ford, New York 1967; A. Mizener, The Saddest Story, New York 1971; V. Fortunati, Ford Madox Ford. Teoria e tecnica narrativa, Bologna 1975; T. C. Moser, The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford, Princeton, NJ 1980; S. Perosa, ‘L’impassibile ricostruzione di Ford Madox Ford’, in Il precario equilibrio. Momenti della tradizione letteraria inglese, Torino 1980, 240–63; R. Green, Ford Madox Ford: Prose and Politics, London 1981; The Presence of Ford Madox Ford, ed. S. J. Stang, Philadelphia, PA 1981; A. B. Snitow, Ford Madox Ford and the Voice of Uncertainty, Baton Rouge, LA

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Catholic, therefore medieval, feudal and courtly.1 Ford places the tiles of a conservative old-style feudalism throughout the mosaic of his work. His criticism and his social satire were not launched in the name of progressive campaigns like those of Wells and other Fabians, but of the recovery of the ideal of chivalry, which in England, due to its well-known historical and cultural delay, had persisted until the mid-eighteenth century and the beginnings of Romanticism. Naturally, this was a dream that was in part contradictory. His heretical, ‘Albigensian’, inconstant Catholicism was encouraged by, and accepted primarily to please a rich German uncle; it was an aesthetic, idiosyncratic and ‘cultural’ brand of Catholicism, which represented, like that of Wilde, an aspiration to forgiveness, a pledge of peace and relaxation, the hope in the realization of good in the world.2 This explains why many professed Protestants among his protagonists are Catholics in pectore, and many of his Catholics are repressed Calvinists and thus, Protestants. Consequently, the beacons that illuminate Ford are Morris, Pater and Rossetti, and to a different and greater extent than for those who had learned their lessons on these writers only from books. Due to a provident alignment of the stars, Ford’s relationships with this genealogy were personal. His father Franz, later known as Francis Hueffer, a German, had emigrated from Prussian Germany and Bismarck’s Kulturkampf in 1869

1984; A. Judd, Ford Madox Ford, London 1990; M. Calderaro, A Silent New World: Ford Madox Ford’s ‘Parade’s End’, Bologna 1993; M. Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols, Oxford 1996, 2012; Ford Madox Ford: A Reappraisal, ed. R. Hampson and T. Davenport, Amsterdam 2002; Ford Madox Ford and the City, ed. S. Haslam, Amsterdam and New York 2005; J. J. Wiesenfarth, Ford Madox Ford and the Regiment of Women: Violet Hunt, Jean Rhys, Stella Bowen, Janice Biala, Madison, WI 2005; L. Colombino, Ford Madox Ford: Vision, Visuality and Writing, Bern and Oxford 2008; Ford Madox Ford’s ‘The Good Soldier’: Centenary Essays, ed. M. Saunders and S. Haslam, Leiden 2015; R. Bowler, Literary Impressionism: Vision and Memory in Dorothy Richardson, Ford Madox Ford, H. D. and May Sinclair, London 2016.

1

Cassell 1961, 106, correctly situates Ford on the same cultural parallel as T. S. Eliot, for attempting to ‘give meaning to the fragmented and atrophied condition of contemporary life’. A similar parallel divide between north and south fancifully coincided for Ford with the so-called Great Trade Route, and passed through Provence. Moser 1980, 145–6.

2

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in homage to an idea. Not for nothing was he a scholar of Schopenhauer, Wagner and especially of Provençal poetry. As for Rossetti, Ford’s mother was the daughter of Ford Madox Brown,3 the mentor and the supporter of the historical Pre-Raphaelites, and the stepsister of the wife of William Michael Rossetti. Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti were thus his uncle and aunt by marriage. His familiarity with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood is completed by adding Ford’s own propensity, at least in some periods of his life, for living away from the city, in the countryside and in an atmosphere of ancient economy of subsistence farming, breeding farm animals and living off the fruits of the land. Ford’s idea of courtly love ultimately owes a great deal to Walter Pater’s notion of a Renaissance in the Middle Ages.4 The second ‘hemistich’ of my title is explained by the fact that in Ford, in a manner that is far from uncommon, there emerges at the minimum a friction between his dream of restoring an ancient order and the means by which he conveys and codifies it: his narrative technique is highly modern at least in his best attempts, and Ford is one of the cardinal figures of formal Modernism in the twentieth century. Finally, these works are written from the ‘trenches’, the trenches of militant Modernism as well as the very real trenches of the First World War, which the pacifist Ford had to necessarily pass through in order to update his ideal, and see if and how it was still possible and viable. 2. This, in fact, was not possible, or it was only in the virtuality of his alter egos. Ford’s theme is crazed erotic passion, out of sync in comparison with its consummation within the institution of marriage. This is the same, classical vision of Hardy, with the very same stages of falling in love, marriage, temptation, adultery, infidelity and promiscuity. Compared to Hardy, and other investigators of this eternal and eternally resurgent theme, Ford injected a torment of Slavic descent, a tortuous and viscid morbidity of Conradian and maybe even Dostoevskyan derivation. His heroes torture themselves, and the torture of the senses could be another epigraph for Ford. They believe in love, become disillusioned, are tempted, are about to fall but remain, teetering, on the brink. The recurring situations are doubt, 3 4

A biography of his grandfather, the painter, was written by Ford in 1896. Volume 6, § 169.

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indecision and maceration. On the other hand, the female character in his works is a femme fatale, above all a wicked, deceitful, seemingly amiable lady but underneath it all, a witch. Many of Ford’s bewitching women are Catholic, perfidiously Catholic. Ford pities his Protestant heroes, not least because they are always Christological victims; his women, by contrast, are satanic, aggressive and sinister. He fears these figures and he would like to exorcize them. Is Ford a misogynist?5 It is hard to think of another novelist and writer who has thrown so much mud on his female creations, who has made them so corroded and vindictive, ‘cruel animals of prey’ as they begin to appear very early in Ford’s narrative.6 Therefore, his Rossettian ancestry is not only recognized in the juvenile, joyous, silvery Dolce Stilnovo of ‘The Blessed Damozel’,7 but also in Rossetti the exhumer of the corpse of his wife, in the necrophiliac, in the funereal and half-deranged paranoid and misanthropic denizen of the atelier on the Thames, only a step away from moral dissolution: in Rossetti as the poet of The House of Life, the worn out troubadour of mad love, and the author, especially, of the three last ballads8 and of ‘Rose Mary’. Here Rossetti anticipated or echoed the theme of fatal passion that the aboulic, forgetful hero lost in reverie cannot resist.9 However, Ford regards this post-Romantic, heightened Rossettism as his material, and filters it: he never expresses it in its immediacy.10 Rossetti did not have to measure this nocturnal and enervating eroticism against the moral and collective destruction of any war, like every late Victorian. By contrast, Ford’s hero, mentally scarred, morally disheartened and passive, 5 6 7 8 9 10

Moser 1980, 71, asked himself this very question by defining Ford’s novels as ‘misogynistic’. Cassell 1961, 122, who also identifies (124) the other, and contrastive genealogy of the ‘sexually wise’ woman, which leads up to Valentine Wannop (§ 127.2). A parody of this composition is ‘On Heaven’, which describes the merry, cheerful, pleasurable life in heaven in terms of time spent in a cafe. Volume 5, § 194. This Rossettian heritage is highlighted by Moser 1980, 24–30. Obviously, Ford was acquainted with Rossetti not only because he was a relative, but also because he had written a book on him in 1902. As a pure critic, however, Ford is rather critical of Pre-Raphaelitism for its emotionality, lack of technical skill and artificial language.

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ethereal as in Pater, is subjected to the charm of insolent femininity and is somewhat indebted to similar characters from Swinburne, who frequented Ford’s grandfather’s house. However, between Ashburnham and Tietjens, the two masculine Fordian heroes par excellence, the catastrophe of war intervenes. Behind the second hero, the example of Tennyson’s Maud can be perceived, as is predictable in such a cultured novelist: it is the intersection that is classic in Victorian literature, that between love and war, and between love and love sickness. Thus, Ford took just as much as he needed from the past to be stimulated to make the pathology of erotic passion his elected theme. But adding the psychological breach of the Great War. He has a place in the literature of those ‘killed in action’, whose pallidly optimistic version – ‘a man could stand up’ – is that of the survivor; but just as typically, the survivor is mentally tried and debilitated, the so-called shell-shocked veteran. 3. The most immediate enthusiasm that Ford’s novels aroused among the modernists was more largely due to their technical and formal aspects. He had debuted in the wake of the impeccable cult of form and of the mot juste of Flaubert and James. In his critical essays he systematically recalled the maniacal phonological and syntactic perfectionism of Conrad in Heart of Darkness, and praised Hardy the poet to the detriment of Hardy the ‘slipshod’ novelist. No sooner had he venerated a master like James than he went on to subtly deride an arriviste like Wells, en route to becoming the Arbiter of the Universe. The definition of fiction as a conscious art, the recognition of a form which is ‘absolute in itself ’ and with ‘no more dependence of its content than is a fugue of Bach’, the codification of an ‘impressionism’ aimed at undermining the position of the narrator, and the psychological mimesis of temporal dislocation – this is all Ford’s doing as a critic. The progression d’effet, the increase and the rise of the impression of the reader until the climax of his involvement, is the formalization of that old English pseudo-critical norm of literary inevitability,11 or of the inexorability of a dramatic narrative and of its taut development, and

11

And, in fact, the term is used in the slightly earlier study Joseph Conrad.

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stripped of all ornamentation.12 Therefore, Ford possessed an extensive propedeutics, but not the subject matter, the intuitive sense of plot which is typical of a narrative genius. When he is a maximalist in formal experiment, as in Parade’s End, he is the worst defender and champion of the stream of consciousness. And he indirectly demonstrates that the stream of consciousness works well only in small doses. The war and trenches chapters of that series are at length unreadable and put to the test the patience of the reader, even if the repetition and the recurrence of the same associations is due to the intention of representing the mimesis of mania. The ‘considerable revival of critical interest’13 that took place in the 1960s, which was also reflected in Italian criticism some years later with many translations, essays and monographs, quickly burned itself out. Ford has the reputation for being a writer who implemented a method, but he did so mechanically, thereby rendering it cold and devoid of vitality. The most favourable criticism has identified and acclaimed only one masterpiece, The Good Soldier, which – as even Ford’s champion, Graham Greene, admitted – has resisted the ‘erosion of time’ much better than the Tietjens saga. 4. The textbooks, literary histories and the more traditional surveys until shortly after the middle of the last century – Legouis-Cazamian, Praz, Baugh, Ward, Kettle – either do not even mention Ford’s name or refer to him in hasty remedial footnotes. Also critical essays and studies have, in his case, had recourse to the category of ‘durability’ and ‘resistance’ to the ravages of time, a category that already in the middle of the twentieth century was introduced to build some kind of future library of Alexandria, that is, an anthology of masterpieces or immortal works to be extracted from a canon of contemporary English fiction which appeared precociously prohibitive and dispersive. Neither Ashburnham nor Tietjens, the two Fordian heroes that might deservedly appear in the arena of the

12

13

The most surprising reading made by Ford is that of Conrad, whom he transformed, from being a nautical novelist – a label that is in his case extremely restrictive – into a political novelist, of course in the unmistakable framework of a nostalgic restoration and in a perspective that leads Ford to the disconcerting verdict that Conrad’s best novel is The Secret Agent. BAUGH, vol. IV, additional bibliography on page [1553].

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paradigms and universals of twentieth-century consciousness according to the perspective of Bergson, William James or Sigmund Freud, were included in that canon. However, after ten years of incubation, fermentation, settling, and five years of war, Ford was ready for a revaluation, but in America only. And as further proof, until 1980 Ford has been the domain of and monopolized by the Americans, and the majority of published studies came from American scholars, mainly critical biographies with increasingly indexed interpretative keys, ranging from elementary psychology to psychoanalysis. Their result is the portrayal of a neurotic suffering from agoraphobia, depression, nightmares, and the ‘terror of judgment from on high’.14 However, the Fordian revival from the 1950s and 1960s – the years of New Criticism – were due at least in part to the fact that Ford was a forerunner of narratology, and that his narrative theory, reflected in his work, actually foreshadowed many of the speculations of that textual approach. Therefore, the Fordian canon was picked up again, and his insights were accepted as uncommon anticipations. Shortly after, Ford gained his apogee in virtue of another feature of his work, an interartistic technique that takes advantage of structural analogies with painting and music. This explains the shift in critical focus to the organizational and formal signifiers, to the detriment of content. § 126. Ford Madox Ford II: ‘The Good Soldier’. The crisis of chivalric ideals The gap between minor and major, youthful and mature novels, is more pronounced in Ford than in many other writers. Before 1915, Ford was a polygrapher, if not a hack, and authored best-selling novels which he churned out in series and which do not suggest the miracle that was to come later; and all books on Ford open by remarking on the astonishment caused by, and the exceptional nature of this delay.15 Therefore, by virtue of his birth, and by the varied nature and the internal chronology of his works, the first of which was published in 1891, Ford might be considered the last or penultimate ‘interstitial’ writer. Prior to 1915, he was also a critic, a theorist and a cultural promoter; after which he became, for a good 14 15

Moser 1980, 138. Moser 1980, 297 n. 1.

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decade, a creative, significant and homogeneous novelist; his decade of grace straddles the year 1920, but his inspiration declined once again and left him throughout the 1930s. He met Conrad in 1898, and they worked together on the remake of a novel about the ‘last buccaneer’. A section of the manuscript of Nostromo is clearly in Ford’s handwriting, but it is one of no import, which was most likely written down in dictation.16 The collaboration lasted for a decade, but Ford suffered because of the stronger personality and superior skill of Conrad. The friendship cooled, and Ford later wrote a Conradian memoir which was rather biased and disagreeable to Conrad’s widow, who distanced herself publicly from it. The English Review was born under the direction of Ford (1908–1910) apparently for the sole purpose of including a racy poem by Hardy. It was a financial disaster that nonetheless bore fruit in helping to launch several new talents, including Lawrence. In Paris, after the war, Ford founded without success the journal transatlantic which also welcomed some firstfruits from the avant-garde and published a chapter of Finnegans Wake. With Pound’s tutelage, Ford struck a chord with a section of readers, towards the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, with some stark poems about urban landscapes in free verse. ‘Views’ presents a colloquial and falsely unkempt opening that may recall the deliberate sloppiness of Clough. The Fifth Queen, from 1906–1908, is a trilogy about one of King Henry VIII’s concubines, Catherine Howard. They are ostentatious, spectacular novels, rich in colour, and indicating the author’s great historical competence. Conrad called them, ambiguously, the ‘swan song of the historical novel’. Among the novels prior to 1915, the most notable by far is Ladies Whose Bright Eyes17 (1911), because it is a Fordian Dream of John Ball,18 a journey back in time by a contemporary businessman who verifies the harmony of the medieval societal model and the superiority of the chivalric system; therefore, it is at the same time a refutation of the satirical A Connecticut Yankee by Mark Twain. 16 17 18

Mizener 1971, 89–91. The title is taken from Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’, ll. 121–2. The first version of the novel is from 1911, revised with a shortened and rewritten ending in 1935. Volume 6, § 148.1.

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2. The Good Soldier (1915)19 is a study of the pathology of jealousy, and therefore, also of overwhelming and uncontrollable erotic passion. Ford plays wittily, or tragicomically, on the fact that everything depends on the ‘heart’; and it is an ailing heart, both literally and symbolically, that brings about the death of Florence Dowell. Set in England and Europe in the first fifteen years of the twentieth century, the novel or rather short story deals with the mal de vivre of the couple, a recurrent theme in the contemporary fiction of the Russians, the French and the Italians. The overflowing of the erotic and adulterous impulse, the tragedy of passion and jealousy had been the trait d’union of European literature ever since the last decades of the nineteenth century. In England this involved Hardy, Galsworthy, Bennett and Wells, to varying degrees. In a strange recurrence, this masterpiece by Ford – most erudite, full of reading memories and literary allusions, acclaimed by many, with a certain lack of caution, as one of the triumphs of twentieth century literature – especially exploits the genre of the memoir of the jealous man, one equally well represented in the century. John Dowell brings to mind Latimer, George Eliot’s heart patient in ‘The Lifted Veil’, whose wife leaves him for his own brother and who gives a first-hand account of his odyssey. But Dowell is also an updated version of the Duke of Ferrara by Browning, because despite his apparent clinical objectivity he is consumed by ill-concealed frustration.20 The psychological mark of the jealous man is the maniacal observation of tiny, infinitesimal details, coupled with the neglect or the omission of other, macroscopic ones. Dowell recalls the gallery of the mentally ill from Browning, who present themselves falsely as sane and deep down are real or potential killers. A similar archetype is applied to the affairs of a quartet arranged in two married couples. On the one hand, the narrator, Dowell, is an American from Philadelphia and the husband of an American woman, Florence, who had in the past a flirtation which her husband only discovered much later. The work was written in 1913, and its first part appeared in Blast, the Vorticist magazine. 20 See a fanciful interpretation of the characters’ names in Meixner 1962, 157–8, and MacShane 1965, 110–11, for the reconstruction of the real-life characters behind those invented by Ford. 19

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However, there is another, fresh misdeed which happened only shortly before the beginning of the narrative: his wife’s adultery with the ‘good soldier’. The woman, after the first and especially the second liaison having come to light, commits suicide. But the novel is also the reconstruction of the past flirtations of the ‘good soldier’, Captain Ashburnham, a former military official who spent several years in India. Athletic, good looking, introverted, blonde and moustachioed, he is in all respects an English gentleman overflowing with instinctive generosity. His only vice is a chronic, insurmountable moral weakness: he cannot restrain himself from the vice of gambling, he is a spendthrift and gets into debt; above all, he is a ‘philanderer’ against his will, who passes with ease from providing chivalrous aid to anyone who needs it21 to making advances and attempting carnal seduction. Not even the locations and setting are, after all, new. Ford dusts off an old scenario that could even be said to hark back to Thackeray and his follower Kipling: the moral laxity and repressed sensuality, which are congenital, are aggravated by the Indian torpor; even more Thackerayan is this aetiology, if one considers the fact that the story takes place almost entirely outside of England in its principal section, namely in a fashionable German spa which is, indeed, largely invented by Ford,22 and where many wealthy Britons, fallen noblemen and enterprising young men would spend their holidays more half a century before, as we see in the slightly bitter burlesques that fill the early works of Thackeray and some stories by Bulwer Lytton. The reason the two couples, the Americans John Dowell and Florence, and the British Edward and Leonora Ashburnham, come into contact is that the latter couple, having left India, live off the income earned from the husband’s country estate, lucratively rented; and the two Americans have been ‘repatriated’ like many Americans, and proudly seek out their

21

22

A modern Don Quixote, Ashburnham passes, without really noticing, from platonic aid to seduction, and one of his conquests is, significantly, a Dolciquita. But he is also like Cid, Lohengrin and the Chevalier de Bayard. On Don Quixote as a pattern for Ford’s nineteenth-century hero, cf. Cassell 1961, 140. Actually, Ford often went to Germany for treatment for nervous breakdowns caused by bad economic conditions and the failure of his writings (Mizener 1971, 93–100, and 201 for his visit to Nauheim).

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English roots, and are thus the same type of Anglo-Americans that T. S. Eliot and James were, more English than the English. Therefore, a mingling of cultures is also reflected in the novel and a symbolic story is foreshadowed: the two Americans are descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers, and proud of their Puritan Protestantism (however, it is a purely nominal Protestantism, by now betrayed by their deeds and mores); the Ashburnhams are Anglicans, if not Anglo-Catholics or categorically Roman Catholics. Leonora is Irish, one of seven sisters from an impoverished Catholic family. Ford seems to prefigure the world war, the one which was really about to be fought, in the form of an inescapable rift in the consciousness and the powerlessness of the human being, completely at the mercy of his or her nightmares and obsessions. After Florence’s death,23 Leonora Ashburnham keeps Nancy the pure and naïve daughter of a British Colonel in India and a dishonourable mother, close to her. She is white lily in the middle of the mire; and yet, the incorrigible Ashburnham tempts her, with Leonora who in a deadly inner contortion is a mixture of complacency and indignation toward her husband’s escapades, and seeks in this way to win him back. She is Ford’s first all-round study of feminine contradiction; she tries to prevent, but at the same time she favours the promiscuity of her husband, and the entire second part of the novel is devoted to analysing the torture she inflicts on him and even on herself. Edward Ashburnham eventually commits suicide, defeated by his own mental imbalances; and Dowell becomes the country squire who cares for the catatonic Nancy, now scarred and insane. The Good Soldier immediately set the tone for its affinity with the mode of the modernistic memoir and for the subtlety with which some classic questions concerning the point of view, the treatment of time and the narrative functions are exemplarily anticipated. It is written in the first person, though

23

This is a crucial moment and a narrative nexus charged with ambiguity: it seems like death by heart attack, but in the reconstruction of events it is a suicide by prussic acid, determined by the fact that Florence, the object of jealousy on the part of both her husband and Leonora, is in turn a victim of jealousy herself, having seen Ashburnham flirting in a park with the young Nancy. Upon returning to the hotel, Florence was noticed by an acquaintance who knows about her marital betrayal with a painter, and this is an additional incentive for her to commit suicide.

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it does not use a complete stream of consciousness, rather it implements an intermediate form. Recollecting and digging up the sad story, the internal narrator Dowell searches the other characters’ psychologies but does not succeed in bringing much information to light, and the human soul appears unfathomable to him. This mimesis and this survey of the psyche owe a great deal to Henry James, and Florence is ideally one of the young Americans who arrive in Europe that are described by that narrator.24 The unfathomability of the human soul, however, is derived mainly from Conrad. It would be possible to reread the story simply to search for all the verbal and syntagmatic occurrences that are direct or simply slightly deformed quotations from the Polish writer. Often the paragraphs describing the internal motivations of an action close with the disconsolate assertion that everything is ‘darkness’, that everything is therefore the ‘heart of darkness’. Edward Ashburnham is a kind of mask of impenetrability: taciturn and introverted, he acts like an automaton; he is ‘pushed’ into his amorous advances, always reserved, and his behaviour is given the euphemism of ‘sentimental’. Truly Conradian, typical of Lord Jim, is the fragility of his moral castle, that is his inflexibility in a variety of duties, but his proneness to sag in front of an obstacle, and to crumble to the ground. Even Florence shares a fatal promiscuity, because her unhealthy heart – unhealthy in both senses of the word, as mentioned above – was caused by the strong wind during the passage from America.25 At the end of the day, Ford created in the narrator Dowell a new Marlow, who does not allow his memories to flow from the deck of a boat, but narrates, with the ambiguities of the written word – he is an author of a true memoir – to a spectator and listener sitting silently by the fireside. Ford’s skill lies in the uncertain boundary traced between the narrator and the actant involved in the storyline that he narrates; it lies in the unintended, or rather simulated and carefully planned ironies that recall those of Shakespeare’s 24 And somehow, Ford writes in an English that is more American than the norm, and welcomes some Americanisms which are perhaps justified by the nationality of his internal narrator. 25 This fatalism is also linked to the superstitious date of 4 August, a day when all the crucial events of the plot occur over the course of several years.

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Mark Antony (‘I don’t want you to think that I am writing Teddy Ashburnham down a brute’). Dowell, who writes in a cold, miraculously crystalline, dry and polished style, strives to maintain an objectivity that eludes him, because he is part of the fabric of the story that he is weaving. He lets his ideological idiosyncrasies – a sarcastic aversion towards the Catholicism of Leonora, for example – become known, and they filter through the text and slip out. Additionally, the treatment of narrative time is also Conradian. But Ford looks not so much to Heart of Darkness as to Nostromo, because in the mimetic vortex of the narrative every chronological reference point has been eliminated, and it is not clear how much of what is narrated is the recollection of the backstory and how much is the primary chronological narrative. Everything is background information to a certain extent. The functioning of memory is investigated in its operations, which are exactly opposite to those of Wordsworth’s ‘recollection in tranquillity’ when it functions in a state of shock, although the narrator tries to mask this fervour and this incandescence in an effort to be objective. Therein lies the reason for the deliberate temporal confusion, for the disorder with which the information is provided, and for the narration appearing as a series of pieces in a puzzle,26 that is, self-contained episodes that will have to be pieced together to form a streamlined diegetic pattern. These are episodes that must emerge without a preconceived plan, in an associative or purely emotional order, or as the result of the battles between the rational impulse for order and the irrational one of memory. The mimesis of memory hierarchizes the recollections according to psychological incidence, the degree of their power and the emotional furrows they have left. Aesthetically this expedient provokes another, aiming to impart a certain feeling of suspense to a plot which is not terribly exciting: the storyteller’s art lies in the allusion, in the reference to future developments that are revealed gradually, in a sort of striptease. 3. Ford himself at the time of the novel, but ultimately throughout his entire life, felt powerless to resist the assaults of the senses and felt a sense 26 Puzzle pieces which are also paintings, colourful brushstrokes, with an analogy to the Impressionistic and Post-Impressionistic painting of which Ford was a scholar and admirer.

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of guilt; therefore, The Good Soldier is a clever counterfeit and camouflage of autobiographical motifs. He passed from one woman to the next in a succession of relationships, but at the same time he dreamed of a harem, and therefore, of a loving relationship with multiple women at once.27 He married Elsie Martindale against the wishes of her family, and, in a kind of Browning-like rapture, almost immediately became infatuated with his sister-in-law Mary. He eventually left Elsie, who never granted him a divorce, for the novelist Violet Hunt. After the war, in 1918, he left Violet to live with Stella Bowen, an Australian painter, in a cottage that they renovated, working as farmers and livestock raisers according to an improbable neo-medieval dream inspired by William Morris. During his American travels in the early 1920s, Ford had met the sculptress Janice Biala and had become infatuated with her, and when he returned to Paris he confessed this love to Stella, who refused the ménage à deux that Ford proposed. In The Good Soldier Ford projects himself in Dowell no less than in Ashburnham: more precisely he seems to have split himself into the two halves of his personality. Dowell is a Puritan with a repressed, inhibited and implosive sexuality. An internal conceptual cornerstone is the debate about religions and monogamous fidelity, and a key scene is the one which takes place at the castle of Marburg where the Lutheran ‘Protest’ was signed, which came about with the complicity of Ludwig the Courageous, ‘who wanted to have three wives at once’. Dowell, with all his intolerable idiosyncrasies, his prejudices, his arbitrariness (he is anti-Catholic or agnostic), tells a home truth about Ford when he asserts that sex is a ‘craving for identity with the woman [one] loves’. Tietjens, the protagonist of Parade’s End, will go further: he will love a woman sexually in order to prolong and finish an ‘intimate conversation’. Edward Ashburnham embodies Ford as a member of that Albigensian and Provençal Catholicism that Ford idealized per se, ‘without our prejudices and our Puritanisms’. Conversely, Leonora represents a ‘nonconformist’, punitive, Calvinist Catholicism. In this disorienting reversal of autobiographical roles the Catholic Leonora is the embodiment of the Protestant Violet

27

MacShane 1965, 200.

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Hunt. Ford considered his women to be persecutors, he searched for them, loved them, and, eaten away by avidity, left them as unfit for use.28 He was, therefore, genuinely romantic, always victim to the spark of falling in love, and from every new love that he sought after and obtained, he was always in search of the romantic, Schubertian ‘rast’;29 but romantically this spark was too quickly extinguished into the prose of everyday life.30 War

§ 127. Ford Madox Ford III: ‘Parade’s End’. A consciousness in the Great

Four novels written between 1924 and 1928 about a single protagonist were united under this title in 1950; thus not by Ford, who designated them instead as the ‘Tietjens saga’. Typical of Ford’s vainglory was the desire to write something on an ‘immense scale’, and to act as the ‘historian of his own time’ emulating Proust: ‘Proust being dead I could see no one who was doing that’. He had not read Proust, with good reason, to avoid imitating his method.31 But is this, as Ford claimed, a ‘saga’? If the answer is yes, it is in an ironic sense or at least in an experimental one. The word saga suggests superhuman heroes fighting monsters, and in its more modern adaptation a long time span in which the vicissitudes of the characters are played out, whose heroics are diminished in a later period of relative peace. In Ford the sense of time is lost, if not denied entirely in a kind of fixity, or bent to become a circular motion, rather than outlined linearly. It is in any case a timeless saga, because the internal time, once measured, amounts to no more than six or seven years, too few for it to be considered a fullblown saga. All four novels, except perhaps the first, are narratives having an incomparably static nature, as they mainly take place indoors where the characters soliloquize – that is to say, they think, remember, perceive and receive impressions in their consciousness; and there is no action, except the resonance that an action itself has on their consciousness. It is easy to be captivated by the treatment of time in this work and to want to reduce 28 29 30 31

Mizener 1971, 368. Moser 1980, 298 n. 12. As is highlighted by Mizener 1971, 384–5. MacShane 1965, 174.

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it from its psychological dimension – and dislocation – to a purely linear one. To a lesser extent, Parade’s End could actually solicit those operations often attempted with regards to Wuthering Heights,32 and one critic has done this by meticulously tabulating the events, and measuring or trying to guess the various hiatuses.33 Parade’s End is therefore a kind of dramatic saga in four acts,34 with its symbolic and spiritual centre being the Great War; but it is, of course, a metaphysical or even surreal theatre, which does not want to assert any naturalistic or documentary style realism. This is the reason why this series of novels may be ultimately assigned to the history of the interior monologue and of experimental Modernism rather than to the literature of war. The trenches and the front become Shakespearean wastes where stylized characters struggle, and an absolute, allegorical story is played out; and therefore, appreciable space-time descriptions in the narrative are missing, or are difficult to ascertain, especially since they are always referred to the characters’ consciousness, through which they must be filtered and from which they flow. Nor is there a real alternation of generations, another mark of the saga. Parade’s End can then be usefully compared to, and of course contrasted with Galsworthy’s Forsyte saga, written in a slightly longer temporal arc coincidental with the years of publication of Ford’s novels. Is Tietjens comparable to Soames Forsyte? The answer may be yes, simply because they are both standard-bearers of the old England disrupted by the war; but theirs is not the same England. Soames Forsyte, as has already been discussed, is gradually the exponent of the mercantile middle class risen to virtual, de facto aristocracy; therefore, a self-made class. In fact he boasts a genealogy of medium calibre, and the values of this class, compared to those that Tietjens prides himself on, are pseudo-values or minor moral principles, because they are not those of the spirit, but those of property, of material wealth, adorned and disguised.

32

Sanger’s pioneering essay on the ‘structure’ of Emily Brontë’s novel (Volume 5, § 136.1 and n. 2) is characteristically dated 1926. 33 Mizener 1971, 506–15. 34 Ford agreed with Conrad that a theme had to be ‘gripped by the throat’ to squeeze every last drop of its dramatic possibilities. A thorough examination of the dramatic analogy is made by Mizener 1971, 494–501.

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Conversely, Tietjens is the eleventh descendant of the Dutch William IV who landed in England with a political, religious and moral project, and intent on resolutely putting an end to the misunderstanding of the seventeenth-century Anglo-Catholicism of the Stuarts.35 Tietjens’s traditionalism is referred to with various metaphors and allusions: diaphanous, dreamy, a misfit, he is also defined as ‘an eighteenth-century figure’, but not one of the late eighteenth century of mercantilism and of adventure, but that of the secluded country vicars and humanists; so that his figure of reference might even be an even earlier one, that of George Herbert, the parson of Bemerton, with the Bible in Greek perpetually under his arm. At any rate, in their own way, these two sagas, Galsworthian and Fordian, are a swansong and truly a leave-taking chorus, that military ‘last post’ that is a tribute to heroes and fallen soldiers. War is once again the tomb of the virtues of an outdated world, and Parade’s End liberally strews that ‘poetry’ which, for Owen, was in the ‘pity’.36 2. Some Do Not…37 (1924), the least successful of the four novels together with the fourth, immediately proves that Ford has lost the sober style of The Good Soldier; it appears to be an unfocused, far from captivating plot, quite laborious in its development. Ford does not want by all means to narrate in a traditional, linear, orderly and perspicuous manner; he has rescinded that contract with the reader and wants to stick to this decision. The author is not, although he pretends to be, a character provided with internal focalization, except in occasional flashes of narrative 35

36

37

The Groby estate is, however, the counterpart of that of Robin Hill in Galsworthy’s saga, especially in the way it becomes prominent in the final novel, Last Post. A comparison between the two sagas, slightly different from the one made here, is carried out by Cassell 1961, 210–12. Tietjens is not Ford, of course, but an actual acquaintance he made during the war. However, the precariousness of life in the marital couple derived, as we have seen, from his autobiography. He knew the torment of the Catholic indissolubility of marriage. The war episodes, which are so protracted, were rewritten from his autobiography: at the outbreak of the War, Ford, who was no longer a particularly young man, enlisted in fact on the ‘Western Front’. The title is an example of reticence or of Ford’s typical discursive suspension. However, it alludes to Tietjens’s failed attempt to seduce Valentine.

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omniscience. Therefore, the technique employed could be called impressionistic, or better yet a momentary unfocalization which then becomes a delayed focalization, continually causing confused and disconnected episodes, the meanings of which are clarified many pages later. There is very little action and what there is is random, and verging on the absurd; the internal chapters are not numerous because they are all uncommonly long, consisting of laborious dialogues or erratic choral conversations. The ultimate question is whether such an experimental technique was worth the trouble; that is, whether it succeeds in being artistically more effective. The bare facts concern the staid and somewhat absent Christopher Tietjens, who holds a highly appreciated post at the Department of Statistics – if it ever existed – but is going through a marital crisis. Having met Valentine Wannop, they both feel a mutual attraction, and shortly before leaving for the war he would like to ask her to spend the night with him but cannot find the courage. This unoriginal plot even has the contours of a Meredithian burlesque. Then a long, pompous telegram is sent by Tietjens who wants to bring his wife back to her senses and promises to come to take her away to a German spa. But before he leaves an extremely confused scene takes place in Rye in a golf club, where leading figures from politics and the military are having a meeting, and where Tietjens acts as the chivalrous saviour to two young suffragettes, who are not only the subject of an attempted lynching by the conference members, but are also on the point of being raped by two ordinary guests of the club. The subsequent, long section is about a morning breakfast at the house of a half-mad vicar, who will later be interned in a mental hospital, leaving his wife free to marry Macmaster, Tietjens’s careerist journalist friend. Even more exacerbating and trying is the second part, which moves directly to a time period situated in the middle of the war. Tietjens has reconciled with the furious and trembling Sylvia, his wife, just returned from the war but about to leave again. He is one of the many shell-shocked soldiers of the time and commonly found in the novels from that period, and has memory lapses, he who before had a cast-iron memory.38 He is now unable to refute the malicious accusation 38

Ford himself experienced memory loss during his participation in the war (Mizener 1971, 286).

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that he had signed bad checks. The structure is, therefore, triangular, with additions concerning aspiring executives caught in emotional events before and during the war, in a tale told with jumps back and forth in time and alternating in style between the stream of consciousness and an impressionistic omniscience. The thematic and symbolic synchronicity is between the war and the equally destructive emotional debacle. Tietjens, a new, quixotic ‘good soldier’, falls victim to female destructiveness, powered by a vindictive and aggressive Catholicism; he passively and pensively resists temptation, patches up his marriage, ends up mentally impaired by bombs; he leaves again, slandered. His first name is in fact Christopher. Yet in the end, having constantly played the ascetic, he wants to give in completely to desire, bathe in sensual pleasure, and so rebaptize himself. The novel closes on the eve of Tietjens’s second departure for the front, when he would like to declare again his passion to Valentine, and arranges to meet with her,39 but keeps his desire inside, unexpressed: both are silent, but burn with lust. In the wider historical context, Ford investigates the near extinction of the chivalric code of knightly nobility. The initial stages are dedicated to building two psychologies and two worldviews: on the one hand, that of Tietjens, forcibly and incoherently an employee in a government ministry, a clerical position that contrasts with his vibrant and pulsating culture,40 and, on the other, that of Sylvia, his promiscuous wife, sex-starved, devastated inside, a believer in a tempestuous Catholicism, the tormentor of her husband – and of herself, above all – due to a neurosis of obscure origins. Tietjens, in fact, arrives on the scene as a still immature university student, the classic protagonist of the early works by Forster, Huxley, Woolf and even Joyce. If it is true that, like Huxley,41 Tietjens has recently tabulated ‘from memory the errors in the Encyclopaedia Britannica’, the opening of

39

Typical of the character is the embarrassed euphemism of yesteryear: he asks Valentine if she wants to be his mistress. 40 Ford ‘intensely disliked statistically minded reformers’ (Mizener 1971, 117; cf. also Cassell 1961, 99). Tietjens’s refusal, at the end of the war, to return to work in his office at the Department of Statistics is dictated by the ‘Orwellian’ practice of statistics manipulation, to which he does not want to bend. 41 Volume 8, § 32.2 n. 5.

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the novel is on the same wavelength as the Huxleyan novel of ideas. At the same time, the special nature of the saga and of this saga by Ford lies in the emergence of sentences, epithets and proverbial designations, or in the repetition of proven facts or unverified references concerning the two spouses. They are tags or kennings like the designations of the gods in Homer: Tietjens is always the old Tory, his friend Macmaster is the critic; Tietjens’s son may or may not be his biological child. Just as in other sagas, wild rumours circulate about the hero; here Tietjens is always being accused or suspected of having had a child by the widow of Rector Duchemin; Valentine herself could be his half-sister, the fruit of a paternal fling. If it is a dramatic saga, as I mentioned, Sylvia enters uttering an aria as in a melodrama, which she will repeat until the end finding only variations in terminology, and which sounds like the mission that an Elizabethan villain might repeat to himself: ‘I can torment that man. And I’ll do it’.42 Like any perverse and defeated hater, Sylvia can never stop hating, but to continue to hate she must keep the object of her hatred alive, and hence the fact that she is always in hot pursuit of her husband, in order to increase the number of lies that are spread about him.43 In the great nocturnal, rural scene in the environs of Rye, at the beginning of the novel, the two newly declared or ill-concealed lovers, Tietjens and Valentine, emerge from the Edenic garden of nature like a couple of progenitors; more precisely, like a Lancelot and Guinevere transfigured in the English countryside resonating with the chirping of birds, referred to using their ancient names. This was the Provençal dimension of love that Ford was pursuing. The heart of the novel is the debate about fidelity, chastity, promiscuity and the lack of self-restraint. Tietjens keeps hold of himself better when faced with sensual temptation, but must modernize at least in terms of having as his ultimate goal a fulfilling relationship outside of marriage, which is never dissolved. He is mostly surrounded by erotic cynicism and careerist opportunism,

42 A stand-in for Sylvia is Mrs Macmaster, who, in her Scottish nationality, and even in the name that begins with the same syllable, matches Lady Macbeth in her treachery. 43 The excuse for this persecution is that Sylvia, nominally a Catholic, cannot divorce, even if Tietjens can.

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and he must defend himself from the uproar demonstrated by those who listen to his denials of purely carnal libertinism. 3. No More Parades (1925) is a theatrical act of interiors or a reportage of war which takes place entirely in a camp in the allied zone behind the front where Tietjens is captain. That it is primarily a stylistic and formal experiment can be understood from the prevalence of dialogue over stage direction; such a dialogical network undauntedly challenges narrative variety and specificity because in long stretches it becomes a parody of a war bulletin. Very precise details of the routine of daily life at war follow one another without apparent selection, in the speeches of soldiers and officers, in commands and orders, and the text itself is full of military acronyms that today require an interpreter, like certain seafaring stories that are just for specialists. At best it is all very topical material, certainly very pertinent within the context of recent history in 1925, but one which a later reader might chose to skip, finding it uninteresting if not tedious. It is similar in appearance to a real-life documentary, listened to live, without filters. The other piece of evidence for this stylistic experiment is the alternation of professional dialogue with infiltrations from the private personal history of the individuals involved, caught by the narrator in the form of psychological flashes and memorial snapshots in each of the psychologies analysed. Individuals from a socially and culturally stratified and diverse community bring with them their own complexes, problems, nightmares, obsessions and personal paranoias. Each of the many actors on this stage, each of the anonymous soldiers, has a short biography or a personal anecdote to tell. The technique of No More Parades, which ends in a crescendo, is, all things considered, quite mixed. At times Ford also narrates in his old manner, and everything seems more limpid, neater, more streamlined, and even moderately captivating. When he wants at all costs to narrate in an experimental way, more often than not he is pathetically unsuccessful. This variant consists of the inclusion of excerpts in a purely Joycean stream of consciousness, that is of both inchoate thoughts, disjointed impressions following each other with the proverbial separation by three dots, and associationism (like the handle that moves, which is a distant memory solicited by a perfume). The experimentation is also found both in the discursive word, which is explicit and communicated, but most often broken, fractured and elliptical,

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which, indulging in suspension, may seem to the reader an abstruse, private code.44 Is also an audible word, but ‘hissed’, and therefore, semi-audible; or a word that is simply thought about, voiced only in the character’s head, thus wholly uncommunicated. Tietjens is a sympathetic, compassionate, anti-war officer, but by association he is brought to think of his destroyed, precarious and frustrated love life. Indeed, he is suffocated by it. Because he continues to experience only fragments of his memories, he decides to write a story, an ordered recapitulation. However, this story is never linear, nor can it be, and what is more Tietjens is a Fordian character because he never perceives with perfect clarity what he has done or what others around him do or have done. Reality becomes that of the great nineteenth-century epistemological novelists: did he, or did he not ask Valentine – he thinks back and asks himself once again – to lie with him? And why had his terrible Sylvia arranged this appointment between him and her own rival? The salient moments of this story are morbidly magnified. And until the middle there is doubt as to whether the mysterious Rolls Royce which arrived behind the front lines really brings Sylvia, come to visit Tietjens. On a purely historical level, the satire of war-mongering only bursts forth in the discrepancy between the stupid and archaic formalisms and the concrete, vulgar and filthy reality of the action.45 In the second part a long-drawnout scene – it is the general unit of measurement in Ford – takes place at a hotel. If Ford’s psyche is eminently Freudian, if the characters know of their obsessions, and are victims of Freudian repetitive compulsion, then Sylvia is terrified by the possibility that Valentine is in Rouen. Tietjens, in 44 In the previous novel the allusion is conveyed by the three suspension dots in the title. 45 His comrades in arms are all in their own way mentally imbalanced from the war, and Tietjens has his work cut out for him, as a kind of watchdog. Among them are also young men released or escaped from universities, adepts of a classicism that is by now anachronistic. A small, grotesque or absurd act is played out between Tietjens and another officer comrade, in a challenge to see who is faster in writing a sonnet with set rhymes and translating it into Latin. The Latin version of this sonnet is delivered at Tietjens’s house in London on Armistice Day. The novel is peppered with similar details, including the rumour, which turns out to be true, that Tietjens on his departure stole ‘two pairs of [the] best sheets’ from home.

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this climactic scene, is lured into a trap by his treacherous, sadistic spouse. Invited by her, in a moment of weakness, to her room, they are about to engage in sexual intercourse when they are interrupted by a general and one of her old lovers, both drunk, bursting into the room. Tietjens defends his honour and decorum but, due to yet another misunderstanding, he is placed under arrest. The last chapter is the most convincing. It, too, is a long-drawn-out scene, and it can be defined as a Sanhedrin, because a Pilatesque or Solomonic figure, a general who is a family friend, must save Tietjens from court martial, and he does so, benevolently, by ‘promoting him’ to the command of a regiment at the front. Under the pressure of the level-headed, extremely practical and astonished questions from the general, Tietjens is even more so a Christ-like figure who speaks another language, with minimal counterpoints in his replies, which are not heard, only thought. He must defend himself, but, more importantly, also resignedly admit to a mountain of lies, and fails to prove that the truth is quite the opposite. Here Tietjens, who alternates his responses to the questioning with the free embellishment of his thoughts and associations, is the supplementary figure of a Dostoevskyan idiot.46 4. A Man Could Stand Up (1926) is the best and most successful example of Ford’s experimentation in this tetralogy. It strikes an almost perfect balance between necessary, humanly relevant, personally crucial thoughts, and action. Its first part may constitute a minor copy, and a slightly inferior experiment, in the exemplarity of its method, of the famous scene of the ‘brown stocking’ in Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse.47 Its durée is extremely dilated, a moment, if you will, or a couple of minutes that last indefinitely because the mental focus of those who experience it orients itself not only on present events, but on the whirling mixture of thoughts and associations that are released. The day and time of the announced end of the war are described from the perspective of a phone call that Valentine, a gym mistress, receives at her school, and she finds hard to make out the voice and the words being said above the deafening din. However, little by little, it is revealed that the subject of the call is that Tietjens has returned 46 As Seiden found, too, quoted in MacShane 1965, 187. 47 § 164.2.

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and is at his house, which has been stripped of furniture, where he can’t even recognize the doorman. Valentine’s other actions in these ten minutes of life are limited to her comforting a schoolgirl, who is also devastated by the war, and to an interview with the headmistress full of reticence, suspense, hesitation and hindrances. But throughout this segment, which is lacking in action, her love life, in hibernation for the past six years, from 1912 to 1918, bursts forth in an incoherent rush of impulses, and the passionate love affair is revived: the midnight ride and the accident, the starry night with the mist-covered moon, the demure circumlocutions of Tietjens, the haughty Sylvia and so on. Such is the successful counterpoint between the telegraphic objectivity and the associative flow in a pure stream of consciousness style. Yet Valentine feels the frustration, tiredness, indeed the insult of this man who had not seduced her. It is the best chapter written by Ford to that date, but is immediately followed by another that, violating the chronology, goes back to the last hours of the war. The heart of the novel is a kind of reverse countdown for the battalion of which Tietjens had unexpectedly been placed in command. And it is another tour de force because the narrative appears slower than the passing of time itself in the story: more precisely, a kind of nightmare marked by the clock. In the closed and claustrophobic space various anecdotes, which are themselves concluded, are exchanged, some of them tragic, others pathetic, humorous and even comic.48 In reality, at this point Ford has already given us too many of these prolonged live recordings of dialogue from the war and the trenches. However, he succeeds where he once again studies consciousness, in the counterpoint between the responsibilities that the commander constantly feels, and the infiltration of memories triggered by association. Behind this lies the psychological theory of the indelible, subliminal mark of certain actions: the theory of the unacted action that resurfaces, or one which was performed but is now regretted – in Tietjens’s case, the night of passion which never came to be, the proposal for which was on the tip of his tongue, and which he perpetually recollects. The chronological framework is effective, and completed in closing with a second phone call. 48 Among them the capturing of a German deserter, or the injury and salvation of ‘Aranjuez’ during an air raid.

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These two moments are chronologically subsequent, indeed temporally tied, but they introduce and follow the flashbacks of the exploits of war. On Armistice Day Tietjens wanders around like a ghost, psychically scarred, impoverished in his gutted house. Valentine comes to him like Septimus’ wife in Mrs Dalloway, and she may well have been inspired by her: fervid, quivering with passion, but also fearful that this madman might kill her. Her stream of consciousness always has a different pace, more expeditious and essential. On the phone her mother timidly tries to keep up the appearance of the old codes of conduct when dealing with extra-marital cohabitation. Tietjens ‘stands up’; but not before the touching scene of the veterans, cheerful despite being crippled and blind, who paint the town red, with their ever sympathetic captain, whom they honour. 5. But is not Last Post49 (1928) the usual closing act after the climax that comes across as fatally weak and watered down, slightly elegiac, and suffers from a shortage of material? The reader has, by this point, memorized the background story, the family outline and the marital disputes, and what remains is to judge whether recollecting and recapitulating the history of Tietjens has any psychological and dramatic necessity. Tietjens was primarily for Ford, as he wrote in the preface to the novel, ‘the re-creation of a friend’ who had remained ‘so vivid to me […] though he died many years ago’.50 The spark of the whole saga is revealed, at a distance, almost the same as that of Pater’s imaginary portraits, which rose in the author’s mind from the question ‘what came of him?’.51 This spectral and virtual existence is magnificently translated in the idea – at the very least – of the novel, because the expected protagonist is and remains off stage, and cannot pronounce his apology except in an indirect and reported way; and in his absence it is recounted and narrated by the peripheral characters, in the conflicting, partial, arbitrary and prejudiced interweavings of points

49 The title is also, in accordance with the internal meaning of the novel, the ‘last post’ played for the old England that existed before the war. 50 In real life this was Arthur Marwood, a mathematician (in the novel he becomes a statistician), Ford’s assistant at the time of the English Review, who died of tuberculosis, but before the war. 51 Volume 6, § 178.2.

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of view. The stage is not Groby, the ancestral estate, but a rented cottage where the two Tietjens brothers live together, forced by Sylvia’s cruelty. Tietjens’s brother Mark holds court here; bedridden, he is locked up in sheer mutism but – the stage is, as usual, mental –52 he has not ceased to think and remember. The psychology of Mark, his brother, is itself troubled, with traumas and unresolved scenes coming to the surface, such as being the cause of his father’s suicide, or his stupidity for having contrived to send his brother to war. This variant is a Browning-like other side of the story: the story of the saintly brother, the guardian of the ancient, impeccable codes of conduct, recounted and brought back to the surface once again with new flashes concerning the sadistic and vengeful Sylvia. Parallel to this recollected version, the story of two new characters starts to unravel, Mark’s French wife and the other Mark, who is definitely Sylvia’s son just as much as he definitely is not Tietjens’s, and who is now a student at Cambridge where the fashion for Bolshevism is all the rage. The symbolic opposition, which is just hinted at, is that of the bewilderment and prostration of the old family line, represented by the invalidity and the mutism of Mark,53 and the eccentricity of Christopher, who is now an antiques dealer, against new forces that are imminently approaching. Sylvia still has a score to settle with her husband, and a ‘new turn of the screw’, or ‘another outbreak of … practically Sadism’ is her renting Groby to strangers. In the clash of the two rivals Sylvia emerges cut down to size. Her blind fury comes to the point of her having Groby’s ‘Great Tree’ cut down; but this symbolic severing of the family tree is counterbalanced by the baby moving in Valentine’s maternal womb.54 In the last scene, Sylvia

52

However, thoughts are predominantly narrated in this novel, without the interior monologue. 53 Who ‘had finished […] with the world’. 54 Among the unshakable, and undoubtedly self-injurious principles of the old world to which Tietjens holds on is that of the indissolubility of the sacrament of marriage, where in the new world people have become indifferent to everything. Tietjens, a Wagnerian ‘pure madman’, to justify his opposition to divorce puts forward the reason, undoubtedly laughable, that divorce ‘would apparently ruin his old-furniture business’, as his American partner assures him!

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unexpectedly gives the go ahead for a divorce and softens, just as in a Victorian happy ending. Tietjens has at least kept a piece of the bark of the cut down tree, and in some kind of biblical miracle, like a Zachariah who regains his speech, Mark, before he dies, breaks his silence to prophetically greet the new couple. § 128. Joyce* I: The ‘bygmester’ of the palace of art The work of James Joyce (1882–1941) is a novum organum, and its internal lines of force – the impersonality, totality and truth of the artwork, 55

Historical or critical editions of individual works are The Critical Writings, ed. E. Mason and R. Ellmann, London 1959; Epiphanies, ed. O. A. Silvermann, Buffalo 1955; Collected Poems, New York 1936; ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’: Text, Criticism and Notes, ed. C. C. Anderson, New York 1968; Stephen Hero, London 1944 and, with additional material, London 1956 and New York 1963; ‘Dubliners’: Text, Criticism and Notes, ed. R. Scholes and A. W. Litz, New York 1969; Exiles, London 1952; ‘Ulysses’: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, ed. H. W. Gabler, W. Steppe and C. Melchior, 3 vols, New York 1984, 1986 (rather controversial, for reasons it is not possible to detail here); Finnegans Wake, London 1939. Scritti italiani, ed. G. Corsini and G. Melchiori, with the collaboration of L. Berrone, N. Frank and J. Risset, contains the originals of lectures and newspaper articles from Trieste, a fragment of an Italian translation of Finnegans Wake by Joyce himself in collaboration with E. Settanni, and a discerning essay by J. Risset on Joyce as a translator. The whole of Joyce’s non-fiction is now collected in Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, ed. K. Berry, Oxford 2000 (with English translations of the Italian lectures and essays, here cited as CW). Joyce’s correspondence is published in 3 vols (quoted as L I, ed. S. Gilbert, London 1957 [not always a well-chosen selection], and L II and L III, ed. R. Ellmann, London 1966). Unpublished works and manuscripts in The James Joyce Archive, ed. M. Groden, H. W. Gabler, C. Hart, D. Hayman, A. W. Litz and R. Rose, 63 vols, New York 1978–1980.    Bibliographies and Guides to Research. Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, ed. S. Givens, New York 1948, 1963; R. H. Deming, A Bibliography of James Joyce Studies, London 1964, 1977; regarding Joyce’s time in Italy, G. Cianci, La fortuna di Joyce in Italia. Saggio e bibliografia, Bari 1974; T. F. Staley, An Annotated Critical Bibliography of James Joyce, London 1989; T. J. Rice, James Joyce: A Guide to Research, London 2016.    Life. The best biography – but cf. D. Donoghue in LRB, 1984, no. 17, 14–15 – is by R. Ellmann, James Joyce, Oxford 1959, rev. edn 1982, which eclipses the one written while Joyce was still alive by H. Gorman, James Joyce, New York 1939. *

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Extremely useful but limited to his early life are S. Joyce, The Complete Dublin Diaries, Ithaca, NY 1962, and My Brother’s Keeper, New York 1958. P. Hutchins, James Joyce’s World, London 1957; J. Paris, James Joyce par lui-même, Paris 1957; K. Sullivan, Joyce among the Jesuits, New York 1958; G. Anderson, James Joyce and His World, New York 1967; F. R. Paci, Vita e opere di James Joyce, Bari 1968; B. Bradley, James Joyce’s Schooldays, New York 1982; M. Beja, James Joyce: A Literary Life, Houndmills 1992; P. Costello, James Joyce: The Years of Growth, 1882–1915: A Biography, Cathie 1992; G. Bowker, James Joyce, London 2010.    General criticism. The bibliography for each individual major work will be listed with the discussion of each work in its separate section below. H. Levin, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction, New York 1941, London 1944, multiple reprints (cited here from the reprint London 1971); W. Y. Tindall, James Joyce: His Way of Interpreting the Modern World, New York 1950 (rhapsodic and transversal, accentuates the links with symbolism and mythology), and A Reader’s Guide to James Joyce, New York 1959 (rather excessively ingenious); H. Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce, London 1955 (unsystematic, refined, digressive, generally considered a milestone in Joyce studies), and Joyce’s Voices, Berkeley, CA 1978 (far more marginal); K Smidt, James Joyce and the Cultic Use of Fiction, Oslo 1955; W. Noon, Joyce and Aquinas, New Haven, CT 1957; E. R. Steinberg, The Stream of Consciousness and Beyond in ‘Ulysses’, Pittsburgh, PA 1958, 1973; J. M. Morse, The Sympathetic Alien, New York 1959 (on Joyce’s Catholicism); A. W. Litz, The Art of James Joyce: Method and Design in ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Finnegans Wake’, London 1961, and James Joyce, New York 1966; S. L. Goldberg, James Joyce, Edinburgh and London 1962; A. Burgess, Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader, London 1965, 1982, and Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce, London 1973; U. Eco, Le poetiche di Joyce, Milano 1966, 1982, 1987, 2002 (an authoritative analysis of Joyce’s evolving aesthetics); James Joyce Today, ed. T. F. Staley, Bloomington, IN 1966 (outlines the history of criticism for individual works); V. Moseley, Joyce and the Bible, De Kalb 1967; M. Praz, ‘Joyce’, in James Joyce, Thomas Stearns Eliot: Due maestri dei moderni, Torino 1967, 3–82; B. Tysdhal, Joyce and Ibsen: A Study in Literary Influence, New York 1968; CRHE, ed. R. H. Deming, 2 vols with progressive pagination between each, London 1970; J. Gross, Joyce, Glasgow 1971; F. Gozzi, La poesia di James Joyce, Bari 1974; C. Marengo Vaglio, Invito alla lettura di James Joyce, Milano 1976; B. Benstock, James Joyce: The Undiscovered Country, New York 1977, and James Joyce, New York 1985; R. Ellmann, The Consciousness of Joyce, London 1977; C. H. Peake, James Joyce: The Citizen and the Artist, London 1977; R. Boyle, James Joyce’s Pauline Vision: A Catholic Exposition, Carbondale, IL 1978; B. Reich Gluck, Beckett and Joyce: Friendship and Fiction, Lewisburg, PA 1979; D. Manganiello, Joyce’s Politics, London 1980; W. H. Quillian, Hamlet and the New Poetic: James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, Ann Arbor, MI 1983; J. P. Riquelme, Teller and

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existential truth, that is, and above all psychological –1 are etymologically clarified by this definition.2 He was immediately intent on the progressive self-fashioning of himself as an artist, first and foremost as an Irish artist, but of a kind that was completely different from the norm and the commonplace, and subsequently as an artist tout court, with works that are Tale in Joyce’s Fiction: Oscillating Perspectives, Baltimore, MD 1983; Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, ed. D. Attridge and D. Ferrer, Cambridge 1984; C. Corti, Prospettive joyciane, Ravenna 1984, and ‘Esuli’. Dramma, psicodramma, metadramma, Pisa 2007; P. Parrinder, James Joyce, Cambridge 1984; J. M. Rabaté, Joyce, Portrait de l’auteur en autre lecteur, Bruxelles 1984, Joyce Upon the Void: The Genesis of Doubt, New York 1991, and James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism, Cambridge 2001; B. K. Scott, Joyce and Feminism, Brighton 1984; F. Senn, Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translating, ed. J. P. Riquelme, Baltimore, MD 1984 (witty essays on Joyce’s tropism); B. Schlossman, Joyce’s Catholic Comedy of Language, Madison, WI 1985; C. Herr, Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture, Urbana, IL and Chicago 1986; R. Brown, James Joyce and Sexuality, Cambridge 1989; The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, ed. D. Attridge, Cambridge 1990, 1993, 1996, 1997; F. Ruggieri, Introduzione a Joyce, Bari 1990; J. Fairhall, James Joyce and the Question of History, Cambridge 1994; G. Melchiori, Joyce: il mestiere dello scrittore, Torino 1994 (summarizes and updates essays written over nearly fifty years by one of the most illustrious Italian Joycean critics) and Joyce barocco, Roma 2007; E. Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism, London 1995; S. Manferlotti, James Joyce, Soveria Mannelli 1997; M. McBride, Ulysses and the Metamorphosis of Stephen Dedalus, Lewisburg, PA 2001; D. Adams, Colonial Odysseys: Empire and Epic in the Modernist Novel, Ithaca, NY 2003; J. Brooker, Joyce’s Critics: Transitions in Reading and Culture, Madison, WI 2005; A. Gibson, James Joyce, London 2006; F. Marucci, Joyce, Roma 2013. James Joyce: Whence, Wither and How, various eds, Alessandria 2015, contains my own ‘A Neglected Dialogue: Joyce and Giuseppe Giacosa’s Libretti and Plays’, 409–19. Since 1963, the University of Tulsa has been publishing the James Joyce Quarterly, and since 1967 international symposia have been held on a biannual basis, the proceedings of which are regularly published. 1 2

As was pointed out by Spender, regarding the interior monologue, in his obituary of Joyce (CRHE, 748–50). Which is the assumed point of departure in E. R. Curtius, James Joyce und sein Ulysses (Zürich 1929), passages of which are included in translation in CRHE, 466–70. The organic unity of Joyce’s work was also clear to P. Soupault, even as early as 1930 (cf. CRHE, 523–6).

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therefore subjective and autobiographical, while also being objective in the same outpouring of inspiration. His artistic identity is created as a sum of conscientious rejections, and by fashioning the objective of the artist who is cut off from society and searches for his impossible subtraction from the space-time continuum.3 This artist is partially Decadent (hence the relevance of Tennyson’s metaphor, the palace of art), and partly criticized, if not actually relativized and demolished at a distance. However, the metaphor of the construction or the edification of the palace of art, derived from Tennyson and the Decadents, is enriched and blended together, and crucially transformed, in and through the totally new coexistence of Ibsen and his ‘bygmester’: the metaphor of the ‘master builder’ that resonates from one end to the other in Joyce’s work, and especially in its end point Finnegans Wake, a title that is borrowed from the legendary mason Tim Finnegan. In the epilogue of the fifteenth episode in Finnegans Wake Earwicker rises to the position of founder of cities and builder of towers, domes and bridges and is, like the Ibsenian hero, a builder who falls only to rise again.4 But the intermediate development of this ubiquitous isotopy of construction is found in the writing on the walls of the toilets of the college from Portrait: ‘Balbus was building a wall’.5 Conversely, in Joyce, the objective world becomes the three ‘mothers’: the birth mother and family (thus, also the father and the emotional ties of kinship); the spiritual kin and atavistic filial relations, first and foremost, homeland and place of birth; and, third, the yoke of the Catholic faith. But parallel and integrated is the path towards form: a formidable, relentless escalation, which rises from timid forms of renewal to an apparently destructive and iconoclastic explosion. Joyce is a wordsmith of literary languages, a true creator of expressive language

3 4 5

The annihilation of time is often studied in Joyce within the context of Einstein’s theories. Forster had, before Joyce, sensed that the novel might move in that direction, but had only mentioned Gertrude Stein. This relevance is well highlighted by Atherton 1959, 152–7 (listed below in the bibliography on Finnegans Wake, § 148), who discusses the similarities of the plots of the individual works. A third resonance is of course even more evident, and it is that of Dedalus the creator, that is, the builder, not of a tower or a wall, but of a labyrinth.

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that spasmodically connects art and truth. His only work with multiple voices and objectified and non-autobiographical characters is the synthesis of the small-town paralysis which Joyce, who was by definition restless and constantly on the move, found it necessary to evade while at the same time being forced to describe it in the manner of an exorcism. And since art is always ambiguous, contradictory and deconstructable, Joyce cannot but be ambivalently both the critic and the praiser of his birthplace and homeland at the same time. He immortalized Dublin by demolishing it. Thus, his cosmos can be defined as integrated even down to the positioning of its foundation stone, and for this reason it has been imagined here as a palace. More precisely it is a body of relationships, in which very little material is wasted and remains extraneous, or turns out to be a misstep along the path: except perhaps for his poetry or his only surviving play. A cosmos, for this reason, of repetitions, reappearances, remakes and rewrites: more precisely, using a Viconian expression, of ricorsi, ‘recurrences’. Joyce, initially unaware of this entelechy, constructed it one word after another and work after work. The primary elements do not change, nor does the original story. Those who hope to find in Joyce diegetic variety and an assortment of characters and situations should seek elsewhere, in the works of another writer.6 In the most obvious place, Dublin, Joyce inserts the unique into the manifold: that is, his towering stand-in is placed in the modest and lowly hustle and bustle of communal, everyday life. Dubliners fits into this scheme because it is, already, a preview of the tenth episode of Ulysses, and because in the roll call of characters, the dramatis personae, there are already some who are recurring. Stephen and Bloom are missing in Dubliners, but it is as if they were nestled in the folds, camouflaged, unrecorded for the time being, pushed tentatively to one side. Each subsequent work is a reworking and an updated version of the previous ones; each subsequent work is a palimpsest. In the Joycean literary space, the characters circulate freely from one to the other layer of this palimpsest. Thus, it is symptomatic of Joyce’s work that the Portrait had three successive drafts; and that Ulysses is an amalgam of the earlier principal works. Bloom does not appear with 6

Joyce admitted that he did not have much imagination, as will be noted in more detail several times in this discussion.

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this name before Ulysses, but he has several prolepses and allotropic adumbrations. Stephen is, by contrast, the cornerstone of every work. However, in such an escalation that concerns the same characters in the same urban space, these characters are gradually charged with resonances, they accumulate and overflow with symbolic, archetypal and mythical motifs, and are objectified. Sometimes they become symbolic abstractions, even to the point of creating an overflowing symbolic galaxy. So these two protagonists are ‘open’ characters, just as Joyce’s works are stylistically ‘open’ in form. His is an abrupt or ‘sprung’ rhythm, like that of Hopkins’s poetry, and a kind of systole and diastole: the first Portrait is a short essay, but the second is expanded or rather re-expanded. 2. Joyce’s poetic and narrative world hinges therefore on a process of osmosis between biography and art regulated by a Dantesque retaliation. The son’s affection toward his homeland, repeatedly denied, continued to circulate in his veins, and the voluntary exile was condemned to make his hometown the constant theatre of his writings and the centre of his world, so that the intentional execration re-emerges in reverse, in secret exaltation. Despite his hatred for mediocrity and the more peaceful conventions of cohabitation (marriage, family, offspring), he gave birth to children and ended up being faithful, more or less, to a single woman, and wrote a work that, far from any trace of petty bourgeois smugness, still to this day dissolves, as in the nineteenth-century masterpieces, in a celebration of family affection and procreation. Joyce’s use of autobiography is subtle both because it is subject to a prodigious diversity of transpositions and because it is revisited in a mercilessly self-critical manner. His maturation as man and artist is reflected in the progressive disavowal of a youthful alter ego, a denier and solipsist who is contrasted with the hypostases and the various incarnations of a second alter ego, in whom and with whom Joyce offers a supremely ironic and de-sublimated version of himself, foreshadowing an optimistic resolution of the conflict between the artist and society. His greatest denial was pronounced against religion, imitated by a host of other apostates in a century that, unlike the nineteenth, was the era of great renegades and fighters against the faith. Born and raised in a type of fanatical and intense form of Catholicism, shaped by a school

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career undertaken entirely in colleges and institutions run by the Jesuits, Joyce remained an intimately and profoundly Catholic writer despite his own abjuration. The ‘Satanic’ rebellion against his ancestral faith failed to dent the mindset he had acquired ab ovo, or his familiarity with its dogmas, its ritual and its formulas. Stripped down, his work reveals among its more buried plot lines a vaguely theological problem: the justification and rehabilitation of the sinful man, and therefore, of himself as a weak and imperfect being, and ultimately of his own apostasy. In other words, Joyce’s rebellion was directed against a precise interpretation of the divine word that negatively influences the adjacent fields of culture and art: not against the essence of faith. His religiosity, while no longer orthodox, remained deep and substantial, but at the same time permissive and not rigorous, willing to forgive and ready to turn a blind eye on weaknesses and lapses. Humani nihil a me alienum puto is a saying by Terence that could be applied to Joyce with equal suitability, because in his two masterpieces he constructs, in the rejection of all sense of ‘must be’, a complete, unexpurgated man – and thus also a ‘base’ and mediocre one – as his theme of study, and at the same time completely toppling the juvenile Prometheanism tinged with Nietzschean, delusional supermanism. Joyce was not therefore the type of nihilist or denier to the bitter end, nor was he the solipsist devoid of human resonances, which he has often been accused of being, inasmuch as, for him, man is not disintegrated, rather he is reintegrated. Moreover, he was the author, through his work, of one of the bravest chapters in the literary history of his country. Of the two alternative, tried and tested possible positions that were offered to him – the most remote being literature written in Irish, cut off from any circulation or readership, even among the Irish themselves, and that of a regionalism with an irredentistic background, of strict Catholic observance and tightly bound to canons of moral elevation – Joyce choose neither. Instead he opted – without renouncing his origins – for a third, his integration into European culture. He thus fought for the de-provincialization and emancipation of Irish culture. The passionate ambition of his early alter ego is to ‘forge […] the uncreated conscience of [his] race’. 3. The truth of art was for Joyce a goal pursued in the form of an uninterrupted dialogue with tradition. As a university student, he had rejected

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an established educational system and intended to reconstruct the edifice of aesthetics and literary art. But at that time the incandescence of this controversy was still too strong, so that his first attempts failed to immediately put into effect his original intentions. It was during his long exile, first in Trieste, then Zurich and Paris, that he attained, with a decisive leap forward compared to his debut works but also following an ideal continuity, a more integral and coherent implementation of these intentions. As a young man, he had opted for synthesis and was infected by virtually every author he happened upon, assimilating with prodigious mimetic capacity the most disparate poetics of his time, which did not gradually cancel each other out, rather they were welcomed and accumulated in the form of contamination. His first attraction was for the naturalism of the French and of Ibsen, which were immediately placed side by side and amalgamated, not without visible conflict, with an aristocratic concept of art, the cult of beauty and a disregard – of a symbolist and Decadent ancestry – for mediocrity. This already hybrid strain of poetics was, in turn, grafted onto a lyricism and a musical and elegiac propensity which prove that Joyce was not insensitive to the influence of the then distant Romantic period. Each of these ancestries (and what has been mentioned here are by no means all of them, only the most evident) radiates in every single point or cross-section of his work. The naturalistic taste for the depiction of daily life in minute detail endures, encapsulated in a Thomistic superstructure which confers on his storytelling that mark of abstractedness, that antiquated flavour and the labyrinthine and outlandish approach that is typical of that philosophy. Nor is it difficult to trace, up to his very last page, Joyce’s constant search for the perfected, polished and euphonic sentence; equally unavoidable, although kept under control and in some ways nipped in the bud, are his impulses to include the purely lyrical evocation. For this reason, the early Joyce gives the impression of the ingenious adapter, rather than the true creator. His juvenile aesthetics is like a Flaubertian reading of a page from Aquinas, to which Romantic reverberations are not extraneous, as is admitted by the author; the Portrait was born in the wake of Goethe, Meredith and George Moore; Dubliners is a transposition on Irish soil of Chekhov and Maupassant, which, in the insistence on the unpoetical nature and the eclipse of the beauty in life, point to his kinship with the aesthetics of

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Decadence.7 Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, the two apogees, might ascertain the disengagement from tradition and the dissolution of narrative form, but they might just as rightfully claim to be the re-foundation of the novel form. Some of the most self-evident organizational principles of the nineteenth-century novel were set aside there, only to be replaced with others which were more outlandish, more sophisticated, more abstruse, but still organizational principles that were rooted in tradition or in a certain tradition, and thus a sub-tradition.8 Joyce’s work is an uninterrupted dialogue and discussion with tradition, and Joyce is well aware that he is the last link in the chain and its challenger and emulator: and parody and imitation, which lie at the heart of his work, are the indicators of a desire to desecrate 7

8

This belatedness has been highlighted and insisted upon by Praz 1967, who misses no opportunity in the opening pages of this book to substantiate that Joyce was a mildly innovative and basically unrealistic traditionalist, from whom the remnants of aestheticism or, at most, of the early twentieth-century avant-garde never disappeared. Since Praz believes that Joyce also and often sincerely looks towards and imitates Dickens, he ends up, far from unwillingly, tracing in him a veneer of the Biedermeier. To Praz, as usual generous with parallels, it seems that Joyce’s career followed the same lines as that of Picasso, that is, that he moved from nineteenthcentury imitations to falsely daring experimentation, as is also the case in Stravinsky (5). Dubliners is slightly misrepresented by Praz as a series of short stories that too often describe subjects taken from the works of minor nineteenth century painters (9–21), which he mentions and describes. There is some truth in what he says, but how deaf Praz is to other, innumerable innovative features. The Portrait is, in turn, analysed and quoted in lengthy excerpts in order to prove that they are attributable to anyone. Praz’s essay evolves towards a downright critical misconception when it moves on to discuss Joyce’s two masterpieces. The interior monologue is underestimated by citing sources and more outlandish precedents in nineteenth-century French, Russian, and English novelists. Boutades that send chills up the spine are used to disassemble Finnegans Wake and reduce it to being just the same as any Futurist work from the 1910s. Had this work been published at that time, Praz says, it would have gone unnoticed amid the works of Roussel and Lautréamont (75–6). Therefore, the final diagnosis is that Joyce is a late Cubist, and especially a metaphysical nihilist, which is precisely what later Joycean criticism categorically ruled out. For this aesthetic ambivalence see the detailed and illuminating discussion by Eco 1966.

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as much as the recognition of a debt. If, up to the Portrait and Exiles, Joyce may be considered, as he was, a product sui generis of late Romanticism,9 later he became a classicist. In Ulysses, and to an even greater extent in Finnegans Wake, the objectives that in a context of immediacy had acted in previous attempts, coexist, but arranged within a substantial and amused neutrality,10 an Olympian imperturbability of a classical nature, the goal that all of Joyce’s oeuvre aspires to achieve. 4. The truth of art has, in Joyce, the further meaning, and the goal, of portraying man in his entirety and indivision and, on the basis of the findings of fin-de-siècle psychology and Freud, of candidly inspecting areas that had been unspoken, and all the unknown and censored bag of impulses huddled together in the unconscious. That the interior monologue gains a kind of elephantiasis is due in equal parts to the crisis of heroism, to the urban alienation of the middle class at the end of the nineteenth century, and to the imperious demands for the representation of such a wholly integrated man. Having from a young age placed the dramatic genre as the ultimate ideal of art, Joyce, in his two masterpieces, recodifies the detachment of the author, in which be believes, as a playful comedy. And a part of the game is the recourse to a network of multiple metaphorical references to myth used as a system of support and, at the same time, with a contrasting function. This interplay is the ultimate outcome of the detachment, which at this point has become stratospheric, of the author from his subject. Joyce’s two masterpieces are the recapitulations of the See, for example, H. Read, ‘James Joyce: Romantic or Classic’, in Cambridge Review, LI (1930), 488–99, reproduced in CRHE, 518–20, restated elsewhere (CRHE, 520–2). 10 An immediacy that, however, can be questioned in the same early works, where one can detect the beginnings of a form of distancing. As will be analysed in more detail below, a vein of self-irony, due to the coprolalic allusions which subvert the declared lyricism, already emerges in the poems of Chamber Music. There is also a great number of models (Bildung- and so Künstler- and finally Geistesroman) and influences (in addition to those mentioned directly, Samuel Butler, the Pentateuch, the Confessions of St Augustine, Ibsen’s Brand) lying behind the Portrait, where the confessional element is frustrated by this interplay of imitations. Other parallelisms will be found in Dubliners, a work that is not quite so resolved in naturalistic objectivity as it appears at first glance. 9

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human condition in his time, just as the Homeric epic of ancient man, Dante’s poem of medieval man and Shakespeare’s plays of the Renaissance man were. But with a fundamental update and a mental reservation, for the epic is turned into its opposite, into the mock-heroic. Joyce picks up the tradition of the hero struggling with impervious reality, and he debases him; he is therefore the last exponent of a de-heroized heroic tradition. He probably would not have approved of Eliot’s famous definition, which claimed that he, Joyce, had given voice ‘to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’.11 The impersonal cult of art and detachment from his creation was too strong in him to allow him to recognize himself in such a definition. However, the form of the novel can be imagined within the context of the totality of the time period,12 and his work stands in line not only with the most advanced expressions of painting and contemporary music (with Picasso’s Cubism or the works by Stravinsky), but also with the theories of contemporary science.13 5. Joyce’s fame reached its apogee in the years immediately following the publication of Ulysses (1922), when there was no writer of note who did not bow down before its greatness and originality, and it seemed that in Paris, around him, the destinies of European literature were being decided. Once the dust had settled, and the first fragments of Finnegans Wake started to appear, some began to turn up their noses at it, and, when the new work was completed and finally published, even Joyce’s staunchest supporters

11

12 13

T. S. Eliot, ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’, in Dial, LXXV (1923), 480–3, repr. in CRHE, 268–71. In Joyce’s youthful essay ‘Drama and Life’ one can nevertheless read the following diagnosis of the ‘futility’ of the modern era: ‘What a blend of thwarted sight and smug commercialism [real life is]. Parnassus and the city bank divide the soul of the pedlars. Life indeed nowadays is often a sad bore. Many feel like the Frenchman that they have been born too late in a world too old, and their wanhope and nerveless unheroism point on ever sternly to a last nothing, a vast futility and meanwhile – a bearing of fardels. Epic savagery is rendered impossible by vigilant policing, chivalry has been killed by the fashion oracles of the boulevards. There is no clank of mail, no halo about gallantry, no hat-sweeping, no roystering! The traditions of romance are upheld only in Bohemia’. See H. Broch, James Joyce und die Gegenwart, Wien 1936. Eco 1966, 104–6.

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had already become less enthusiastic. His impartial contemporaries, in turn, had for some time recommended the utmost caution, unknowingly calling to mind the umpteenth case of an artistic form that, being too quick in its development, predates the codes necessary for the recipient to decode it.14 They urged readers not to be dazzled by the novelty of a novelist who spoke for the first time about sexual and digestive functions. False, hypocritical modesty reigned in the democratic admissions that the sale of Ulysses should not be banned, but that ultimately innovation for the sake of innovation did not ipso facto mean any guarantee of artistic excellence.15 With respect to the first two works that were complementary to Ulysses, until after the war, they merely had a succès d’estime. The Thomistic paraphernalia, and the Homeric and Viconian architecture revealed themselves to be rather unwieldy structural devices, and the same supporting motifs from his poetic world – like that of the woman-mother as a force of redemption in modern life and that of the artist turned aesthete – were recognized to be hopelessly dated. Critics of the old guard, who either knew nothing of theory or did not care about it, persevered in their impatience for the superstructures, and denounced the supposed mechanicalness of Joyce’s scaffoldings, not hiding their predilection for phases and moments in Joyce’s works of unencumbered simplicity and naturalness. J. I. M. Stewart and Edmund Wilson said all that was necessary to say with the quip that Ulysses ‘suffers from an excess of design rather than from a lack of it’. They reductively honoured it ‘as fiction’, as a story tout court, and only as such. In so doing, the novel was brought back into the narrow and limitative category of the ‘amusing’. This chain of authoritative critics, which Frank Kermode joined slightly later, had had its first link in Pound, who put

14 15

Almost until 1930 and beyond, reviewers and critics, blown away by the work, usually reacted by declaring that it was still too early to pass judgement on Ulysses. Among the eminent excoriations, the most picturesque and brutal came from Virginia Woolf (she defined Ulysses ‘[the work of ] a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples’), only surpassed by the comment made in the Sporting Times (CRHE, 192–4) by an anonymous critic for whom ‘much of the content’ of the novel was enough ‘to make a Hottentot sick’. Leavis and his Scrutiny group hermetically sealed the doors to Joyce after criticizing, characteristically, his unhealthy interest in language.

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Joyce’s effusiveness and the representation of character first and conversely glossed over, almost with irritation, the Homeric correspondences. The most significant work in recent decades has been the removal of Joyce from the clutches of the Joycean scholars, from the critical camarillas and the groups of fanatics, to which the writer himself had too slavishly ensnared himself. It has been the acceptance of the postulate that what counts is what Joyce knows how to ‘do’ rather than ‘say’ with words – or rather, the attention to the Barthesian game in and on the text (an observation that dated back to an admittedly negative appreciation by Wyndham Lewis in 1927). Of the many devotees that Joyce’s stream of consciousness won him, Virginia Woolf, Faulkner and Dos Passos were the first to adopt this revolutionary technique, Woolf without declaring her source. But the chapter of direct influences basically closed within a few years, to remain thereafter a vague and remote phenomenon. Finnegans Wake could not but remain a unicum, a daunting and unattainable touchstone. But not even Ulysses has had a wide-ranging or noteworthy following, and the English authors who after Joyce refer to him or can be considered as following in his wake can be counted on the fingers of one hand.16 Samuel Beckett, his disciple during his Parisian period, had a similar taste for multilingualism and a playful use of language; Anthony Burgess created in A Clockwork Orange a pale equivalent of the ‘Newspeak’ of Finnegans Wake. More recent Joyceans, for one reason or another, include Byatt, Martin Amis, Rushdie, and, among the non-English writers, Calvino, García Márquez and Umberto Eco. However, Joyce remains the antecedent ad sensum of a branch of twentieth-century writers, mostly poets (such as Dylan Thomas, or Berryman), who redeem a certain poverty of content with a disproportionate interest in sound. The Portrait is the prototype of all the twentieth-century overturnings of faith up to Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth; while Dubliners is the progenitor of the successful genre of short-story writing on urban alienation.17

16 17

Some of the other ‘fingers’ on this hand are discussed in § 152. From the world of ‘prisoners’ in Dubliners, Beckett himself, as will be mentioned when dealing with the author in Volume 8, may have drawn inspiration for his trapped

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§ 129. Joyce II: Biography Joyce was born in a suburb of Dublin on 2 February 1882, the first of ten children and the most gifted, along with his brother Stanislaus, who, two years younger, would follow him for a large part of life as his shadow (his adviser and biographer, ‘his brother’s keeper’, his admirer and, at the same time, as he had a very different temperament, his harshest critic). More that his mother, a simple woman long lamented by her son, Joyce took after his father, John, a colourful man, talented and in his own way extremely versatile. A native of Cork, from a relatively wealthy family, John Joyce in his youth had studied and practiced singing as an amateur and was a sportsman and theatre performer before abandoning his medical studies and moving to Dublin, at twenty-five, after his father had died. In Dublin, in 1880, he fortuitously obtained a position as tax collector and started a family. His aspirations of an aristocratic life, which first had to struggle with his extraordinary prolificness (which he initially supported by mortgaging the properties he had inherited from his father, until he was forced to sell them off completely), finally came to nought when, in 1891, he retired with only a modest pension. The most faithful and truthful of his many literary adaptations – that of Stephen Hero and Portrait – paints him as a man who was incapable both of resigning himself to a lower standard of living and of undertaking each new line of business: a classic wastrel, a talkative and gossiping frequenter of alehouses. Joyce, whose relationship with him was initially tense and stormy and did not immediately calm down, even after the move to Dublin, remembered him, as the years passed, with increasingly tender indulgence. ‘He was the silliest man I ever knew’, he wrote about his father when he died: ‘He thought and talked of me until his last breath. I was very fond of him always, being a sinner myself, and even liked his faults’.18 2. Politically, John Joyce, who claimed descent from Daniel O’Connell, the legendary ‘liberator’, was a nationalist with radical tendencies, since he

18

characters, although the references to location are lost, favouring the emergence of a dimension of atemporality. 17 January 1932 (L I, 312).

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was in favour of Ireland’s independence, but was also anticlerical, and as such a bitter enemy of his fellow countrymen who were supporters of the Catholic Church, which had caused the decline of Parnell for having had a scandalous extramarital affair. Political discussions were commonplace in Joyce’s home, as were the frequent clashes with the governess and teacher, Mrs ‘Dante’ Hearn Conway, a bigoted partisan, centred on the ‘betrayal’ of Parnell by his own party. This was an issue on which Joyce wrote, at nine years of age, a poem, now lost, called ‘Et tu, Healy’ (named after the principal traitor), which his father had published. Above all, the housekeeper instilled in Joyce that punitive and ‘apocalyptic’ religiosity that so weighed on his life and his imagination. It was she who weeded out a passing fancy he had had for a girl his own age, who was, moreover, a Protestant, with the threat that he would go to hell if he did not forget about her (or, according to another version found in an ‘epiphany’, ‘the eagles [would] come and pull out his eyes’). When Joyce was of school-going age, his father, who had high hopes of his son having a professional career, had to make the best of a bad situation by sending him to Clongowes Wood College, which was governed by the Jesuits in a medieval castle located in the woods some miles from Dublin. It was the best school in Ireland and Joyce was enrolled in September 1888 and there he remained – fearful, immature, homesick and desperately missing his mother – nearly three years, returning home only for the holidays. Five more years, from 1893 to 1898, he spent (after a brief hiatus during which his studies were undertaken privately) at Belvedere in Dublin, another Jesuit College, but more modest. Even this school would, nevertheless, have remained just a dream, if it had not been for the charitable intervention of the Rector of Clongowes, which allowed Joyce to study there for free. In this decade he matured, while experiencing along the way moments of rebellion and repentance, and he eventually reached the point where his faith was spent and passed to unbelief. Bolstered by a Promethean hubris which was, above all, literary in nature (as testified by his predilection for Byron), Joyce trudged along in his rejection not only of religion but also of the heritage of the more traditional Irish values, love for country and family. It was, primarily, an inability to conceive and observe premarital continence and the turbid, precocious knowledge of sex that set Joyce, at fourteen, on that path.

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3. During his three years at university Joyce was more listless than at Belvedere, where he had been a model student. He donned a mask of indifference and brusque hauteur toward his fellow students, whom he liked to tease and contradict; and he treated the Jesuit fathers, his teachers, no differently. Although they had sensed his genius, they made every effort, right to the end, to clean up his aberrations and to reconcile his points of contention with the terms of their own morality and prudent aesthetics. The debates organized by the university offered him a forum to proclaim his nascent iconoclasm, and he took an active part in them by presenting various provocative papers. But basically he followed personal lines of speculation and cultivated his own literary and philosophical predilections. Theatre polarized his interests at that time, and when, in May 1899, The Countess Cathleen by Yeats was staged in Dublin, he applauded the event, recognizing it as the act of rebirth of Irish Theatre. His fellow students sent instead a letter of protest to a newspaper claiming it was a defamation of religion (the letter was one of the first examples taken to heart by Joyce, for whom it highlighted the lack of freedom of expression in which the Irish writer was forced to operate). However, this did not stop him, having meanwhile discovered Ibsen and been transfixed by him, writing a violent pamphlet against the same rebirth movement when, a couple of years later, it seemed to him as if it had once again taken up a conservative position. The last months of 1902 were marked by a fervour of initiatives related to the theatre: he translated Hauptmann, went to London in search of work as a reviewer, found himself on cloud nine when he received a thank-you note from Ibsen himself for having written a favourable review on his latest play (later he sent him a letter written in Dano-Norwegian). Joyce had not yet decided to give himself body and soul to literature (despite flattering praise from the poet Russell and the enormous impression he had made on Yeats and Lady Gregory, who had read what little, immature work he had written). He kept literature rather as a backup, given that, graduating in late October 1902, after refusing a ridiculous proposal to work at the Guinness distillery, he enrolled in medical school, first in Dublin and later in Paris. In the French capital, where he stayed in December 1902 and from January to April 1903, his money quickly ran out, he left the classrooms and maintained himself by giving private tuition, preferring to take refuge

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in the warmth of the Paris National Library. He returned home precipitously due to the illness and death of his mother. Undoubtedly idealistic reasons (the unbreathable air in Dublin, limitations to his intellectual development caused by the prevalent parochialism, lack of esteem from his peers and an absence of pre-eminent intellectuals) but also and above all practical ones pushed him to leave Ireland. Unable or unwilling to ask his family for help, Joyce had no choice but to maintain himself. He also lacked a clear and definitive idea about his future, and he rejected various solutions and job offers, including one which would have allowed him to dedicate himself professionally to singing. When, on that fateful day of 16 June, 1904 (the date in which Ulysses would later be set, and for that reason later known as Bloomsday)19 he had his first meeting with the hotel maid Nora Barnacle, all his uncertainty was dispelled. He could not live with her publicly without arousing a scandal, nor could he consider the prospect of marriage, let alone a religious wedding ceremony. In Nora, a native of the mythical West Galway, Joyce had met the strong, courageous and maternal woman that he needed at that moment of profound confusion. In front of this simple and uneducated young woman, who did not understand and could not or would not ever read his works all the way through, Joyce felt subjugated, unable to exercise on her the charm, which on others was magnetic, of his personality. They did eventually marry, but in a civil ceremony, in 1931. Their relationship was subject, especially in the early days, to periodic and furious fits of jealousy, a jealousy that Joyce overcame with difficulty, sublimating it in his works. The writer, for his part, was no angel, and had various fleeting (and, apparently, all platonic) extramarital affairs: with the buxom student Amalia Popper, a native of Trieste; with twenty-seven-year-old Dr Gertrude Kämpffer in Locarno in the winter of 1917–1918; with the young and wealthy Jewess Marthe Fleischmann in 1919 in Zurich, and others. 4. The decision made by Joyce in October 1904 to escape with Nora to the Continent was an act of youthful recklessness, indeed a real leap into the

19

But prolepses do not stop there, because Nora worked at Finn’s Hotel, where Joyce may have had the first, as yet unaware, ideational spark for Finnegans Wake.

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unknown. He had only the vague promise of an English teaching position in Zurich, which later turned out to be nonexistent. Trieste was a fallback option (the real target was Paris), but Joyce resigned himself to remain there (after an initial, brief period in Pola, and an interlude in Rome in 1906 as a foreign correspondent in a bank), because the city proved to be congenial: indeed, for historical and ethnic reasons (it was at that time obviously part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) almost a second Dublin. The eleven years in Trieste were, relatively speaking, the most serene and fruitful period of his entire life. While it is true that he lived up to his neck in debt, he never lost heart, coping with the pittance of his salary and the uncertainty of his position at the Berlitz School with stopgaps measures and endless projects. He gave private lessons (this was essentially his lifeline), tried his hand at working as an Italian journalist, gave lectures, and in 1909 went so far as to establish in Dublin, with capital he had acquired in Trieste, a cinema which closed after less than two months. His two children, Giorgio and Lucia, were born in Trieste. It was in Trieste where all his major works, with the probable exception of Finnegans Wake, were conceived, written or finished. He published, during that period, the poems from Chamber Music, and after Dubliners had lain idle on the drawing board for almost six years (and the Portrait had been left stranded after the third chapter), Ezra Pound providentially appeared on the scene. Pound, whom Joyce had met thanks to Yeats, managed to get the Portrait accepted for publication by the magazine The Egoist and to persuade the publisher Grant Richards to reconsider printing Dubliners. The electrifying provisional nature of life, and that sense of constant struggle for survival that marked the period spent in Trieste, ended with the outbreak of war, which in July 1915 pushed Joyce to move to neutral Zurich with his whole family. From that moment forward his fame, which was gaining strength, was such that it allowed him, if not outright wealth, at least some measure of economic tranquillity. Yeats and Pound interceded on his behalf in London and obtained for him an annual grant from the Royal Literary Fund. Pound, in 1916, had him assigned a civil pension; not to mention that a benefactor who wished to remain anonymous (it was Harriet Shaw Weaver) made arrangements to have Joyce paid an annual sum. In Zurich, he returned to his old love, theatre, not only because he had decided and jockeyed to have the play Exiles performed there, but

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also because he directed in his spare time a troupe of amateurs which had embroiled him in a curious court case.20 Above all, he devoted himself, without too many distractions, to the writing of Ulysses, finding in Frank Budgen, a former sailor and painter with literary interests, that stimulating interlocutor whose role had been undertaken, until a short time prior, by his brother Stanislaus. 5. Ulysses was completed in Paris, where Joyce moved in July 1920, at the advice of Pound. But when it came to publishing it in book form no one was willing to take the risk, when already in America the novel was embroiled in legal troubles. So for some time Joyce feared the repetition of the Dubliners debacle all over again. Harriet Shaw Weaver and Sylvia Beach, an expatriate American who owned the small bookshop ‘Shakespeare and Company’, came up with a solution to sort out the situation. Sylvia Beach offered to publish it. Joyce found himself suddenly catapulted into the firmament of twentieth-century literature, presented and entertained as a legend in the salons of Paris, where he felt like a fish out of water and was unable to appreciate the sophistication of the capital due to his provincial roots. He met Eliot, of whose work he had read practically nothing, and treated him from the outset with exaggerated courtesy. His meeting with Proust, with whom he was for some time contrasted by critics in Paris, can be summarized in a famous, witty comment made by Joyce: ‘Proust would talk only of duchesses, while I was more concerned with their chambermaids’.21 His later years were much less intense and feverish, full of honours and punctuated by relaxing travels. Indulged in and flattered by a host of acolytes and young talents on the rise (including Beckett and Hemingway), he became the focus of a cult and of veritable adoration, because of which he felt entitled to all kinds of idiosyncrasies and whims. Around him a real literary industry was about to bloom, of which, behind the scenes, he was the skilled administrator. However, these were years also marked by the worsening of an eye disorder (Iritis, or inflammation of the iris) which

20 This episode was capitalized on by the playwright Tom Stoppard in one of his most sparkling works, as discussed in Volume 8, § 202.3. 21 Ellmann 1982, 509.

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revealed itself in 1917 and brought him, despite numerous operations, to the brink of almost total blindness, and embittered by the family’s misfortunes.22 His father died leaving him dismayed and full of remorse, and his daughter Lucia, with whom Joyce identified more than any other member of his family, became mentally ill. He believed he was the cause of this illness because he had not given her a more normal youth. The 1930s were an uninterrupted succession of relapses, of apparent improvements, aggravations and convalescences in various Swiss and Parisian clinics. Only when Lucia, in 1936, was committed to an asylum could Joyce resume and conclude Finnegans Wake, which he had worked on intermittently with long periods of interruption due to both his eye disease and the tragic illness of his daughter. When, in 1939, the work was published, Joyce, in part due to the lukewarm reception which it received, felt drained and empty. The outbreak of war convinced him to leave Paris at the end of 1940 and, after rejecting the idea of moving to America, he took refuge once again in Zurich. He had only just arrived when, a few days later, during the night he was struck by violent stomach cramps; he was hospitalized and operated on for a perforated duodenal ulcer, and died on 13 January 1941. § 130. Joyce III: Essays on criticism and aesthetics One cannot fail to notice that in the fundamental quintet of English modernists Joyce is the only one that does not boast an organically formulated literary theory. T. S. Eliot as a critic is a twentieth-century maître, Virginia Woolf wrote dozens and dozens of essays and articles collected in several volumes, and for Lawrence we have two thick and dense tomes of writings and features, plus an almost organic book on American literature. Yeats the essayist, in turn, also amounts to various volumes. Joyce simply was not out of habit23 a reviewer in newspapers and magazines. And after all his fiction is not ideological and one cannot derive from it a discourse 22 23

Critics frequently recall the parallel with Milton’s blindness, a comparison supported by the fact that both writers were very auditory and musical but not at all particularly visual. In Paris in 1902 Joyce in effect imagined he could support himself by writing reviews: he completed and published only two. It is true, however, that in 1903 he wrote 14

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on literature; instead, it is representative and mimetic (and indeed, with a boutade, Eliot himself said that Joyce, ‘unlike Tolstoy, tells us nothing’).24 Incidentally, it also needs to be noticed that Joyce, unlike Lawrence and Woolf, and also Yeats, did not particularly love, and did not understand painting, and had no familiarity with the visual arts, although he was certainly more competent, much more competent than those other writers, in the sphere of music. In the only theoretical piece of any length on the arts that we know of, on Munkácsy’s Ecce homo, as we will see, Joyce only succeeds in furnishing an orderly, scholastic though minute ekphrasis. Anyone who wants to work out Joyce’s ideas, in a sufficiently ample and total spectrography, has to bear in mind three previous documentations, unless they want empirically to infer them from his works: the three volumes of letters and the critical writings which in turn contain the Italian writings, with the reservation that the former and partly also the latter form a repertoire of pieces written by Joyce in his first twenty-five years, and that some very precocious ones are school essays by a sixteen-year-old. 2. No teleology can be guessed at reading the oldest of these essays, because they were required writing and above all are too erratic. From them there emerges a rather unctuous voice showing slightly hypocritical wisdom and a commonplace preaching voice that could even seem parodic, and a kind of first style or first attempt at style: or if we like, pastiches, imitations of voices and registers, the falsetto of a Joyce ‘trying out the instrument’. At least, however, by design or by chance, there is a synthetic perspective, a sense of the whole, a panoramic attitude: Joyce is himself, if it is true that in a short paragraph he traces out and sums up the evolution of a historical parameter. The third school essay preserved, dating from 1899, and perhaps a university paper, has a very inviting title, ‘The Study of Languages’, suggesting a distant, dawning formulation of Joyce’s polyglot and parodic style. In this essay one is struck by the attempt at a precocious systemization of universal knowledge, made of compartments that are not watertight but connected without a saltus: that is to say a reviews for the Daily Express. This failed career as a reviewer is attributed to his alter ego Conroy in ‘The Dead’. 24 Ellmann 1959, 2 and 542.

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small-scale organization of knowledge. From grammar he rises, through communicating degrees, to mathematics, to which he attributes primacy that however does not exclude the rights and prerogatives of language and literary language. The second chapter of the second book of Finnegans Wake will be the unrecognizable parody of this piece of writing. It is Joyce himself that meanwhile evokes Matthew Arnold, because his philosophy and his aesthetic, though progressive, were not in clear and open contrast with the Catholic doctrine and with fideism in general. Even the title of the essay only slightly modifies one of Arnold’s, and Joyce uses the artifice of quoting himself in the third person. The basic thesis is that language is a science, and it was a datum that was well known in the expansion of these studies at the end of the century (Saussure was only one decade behind): a system, more exactly, regulated by laws and endowed with symmetries; and a system of signifiers that however was a bearer of concepts and a potential vehicle of truth. The essay is not complete but is conceptually concluded, and on the last page it addresses the living and fluid character of language, which mixes elements coming from different languages, so the linguist will be attentive to the derivations of words and the circulations of semes and sememes within them. 3. It is not a chance matter, but a consequence of their possible frequency and centrality, that two, among the most important, of these university compositions or essays gravitate towards the definition of the dramatic genre: which is the ‘meaning of life’, a reflection of the archetypal, eternal tumultuous passions of historical man, and therefore primarily dynamism, which is the opposite of the calligraphic and the mechanical. Joyce does not know he is developing a precious apprenticeship, because in two cases at least he practises the art of paraphrase, a first step towards that of narration. The first of the two essays I am referring to – ‘Royal Hibernian Academy: “Ecce Homo”’ – is in fact largely a meticulous, radiographic ekphrasis. In view of the disputes of Stephen Dedalus, in the painting examined Joyce finds a human Christ, not a deified one; also, verging on acrobatics, one can further remember that an Ecce Homo and a Christological Everyman is Earwicker in Finnegans Wake, and that by pure chance his initials, HCE, ‘nestle’, camouflaged, in the title of the piece. The dramatic principle in this case is painterly, situated in and transposed into a trilogy of the Passion by

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a minor Hungarian painter, Munkácsy, displayed in Dublin. The dramatic is an inter-artistic principle and it vivifies and dynamizes paintings and sculptures and also literary works, provided that only the breath of inspiration infuses analogous life into the artistic expression. Joyce is precociously sensitive to the most mixed reactions of the crowd observed in the picture, which he calls ‘the rabble’; at the same time what he is trying to describe is a blinding revelation looking forward to the ‘epiphany’.25 ‘Drama and Life’, from 1900, is a luxuriant, often also delirious essay of post-romantic inspiration, with Hegelian and Wagnerian leanings, and hence of an idealistic and mystical type, and vibrating with a strong anxiety of influence, judging from the overflowing and asphyxiant quotations. This is the case, although finalistic and finalized, that is to say persuasive, religious and didactic art is precisely the target hit at the end. Joyce approves of an evolutionary theory of dramatic art and dramatic art tout court, since forms die, are fossilized and affected with gangrene and overtaken by others that follow. Severe with the Attic play, he seems to be so out of pure mania and iconoclastic fixation, since its essence is obedience to a system of laws foolishly accepted at every latitude. However, an exception is found to evolutionary dynamics because Shakespeare and the Elizabethans – who, jumping a millennium and a half, are identified as the next link in the chain – surpass and loom over those that follow them; but the rhythm becomes inexorable again, until Ibsen is seen as the peak of the positive evolution of drama toward the realization of its highest and purest essence. It was already said in the preceding essay that drama is a sacred rite, and the enactment of a primordial principle that can come down on the forms of pure ‘literature’. When this does not happen, for Joyce the term ‘literature’ is derogatory, referring to everything that is mechanical, emptied, conventional and devoid of inspiration. When this dramatic spirit descends, blends and is naturally integrated with expression, this leads to an organic whole. ‘Ibsen’s New Drama’ stands out in Joyce’s youthful essays not only for the impassioned and by now undelayable 25

At that time Joyce did not know, or perhaps confusedly intuited, that Hungary was the ideal sister of Ireland in being another nation oppressed by imperialism and yearning for liberation; at the same time this critique is prophetic because in Trieste he was soon to meet many Hungarians who like him were exiles.

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glorification of the idol, but also because it was the first essay by Joyce published after all these unpublished ones; for that very reason it stands out because the chameleon Joyce sets aside the previous esoteric style, which indulged almost smugly in the tortuous and involved sentence, and adopts a more visibly journalistic and therefore more anonymous jargon, which is therefore parodistically personal. The argumentation proceeds according to the laws of militant criticism, but, as I mentioned, it is also a brilliant and mature exercise in rewriting or transcoding seeing the skill and naturalness with which Joyce sums up Ibsen’s drama. Ibsen is above all an idol because Joyce admires and after all absorbs the datum of his artistic ataraxy: he first perceives it here in Ibsen, not in the Decadents. Ibsen had not participated in the tireless and searing debate on his art in the last twenty-five years, but had remained outside it in his ‘wonderful calm’, impassively writing his plays with the punctuality of a clock.26 4. There is an aesthetic connection between these essays, and it is that art is an absolute vocation that cannot accept compromises of any sort, moral, political or religious.27 It is at once, without Joyce yet saying it and using this term, an epiphany, a privileged instant of blinding, ecstatic revelation. He referred to this experience using two metaphors, one derived from Shelley, that of inspiration or of ‘the mind in creation’ as ‘a fading coal’, and another derived from the description by the physicist Galvani of cardiac intermittences, as ‘enchantment of the heart’.28 This metaphor of

26 The discussion of Ibsen in this essay will interact with Exiles, as is discussed below, § 140. 27 See the structure of a contemporary Clytaemnestra, ‘solved according to an ethical idea’ (CW, 88), and not according to an objective attention to pathological states that are ‘so often anathematised by theologians of the street’. 28 The medical metaphor therefore indicates stasis as the peak of the process of artistic perception. In the fraction of an instant in which the arrhythmic heart stops an analogy intervenes with that absence of stimuli provoked by art: true art, not kinetic or even pornographic. As far as I know, no Joyce critic or editor has really gone through the writings of Galvani (who however wrote his main work, De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari commentarius, 1791, in Latin), to track down in it the expression ‘enchantment of the heart’. Joyce as a young medicine student may have come across this expression, but at the time possibly not perceiving the nuances of the term

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fleeting inspiration, sudden kindling followed by deplored extinguishing, can in fact be recovered in numerous preannouncements in late Romantic aesthetics. It is present for example in the poetry of Hopkins, in which there is recurrent opposition between the kindling and the quenching of the flame, as in the sonnet that begins with the line ‘The fine delight that fathers thought’. Hopkins, before Joyce, is the strenuous champion of every art, and of the only art, endowed with ‘spiritual and living Energy’. Having established the absolute nature of art and the vividness of the creative vital afflatus, Joyce distinguishes art and literature, and art and life. In fact he borrows the famous saying by Verlaine: ‘Et tout le reste est littérature’. Many biographers at this point quote, in support, the reprimand impudently addressed by Joyce to Yeats himself during their first meeting: ‘You do not speak like a poet, but like a man of letters’. § 131. Joyce IV: The epiphanies The quaestio of Joyce’s epiphanies after so many years and indeed decades still remains tangled and open, regarding chronological and philological aspects, and internal arrangement and grouping, difficult to resolve and always in the last analysis questionable and therefore a matter of compromise. On a small scale, it is reminiscent of the querelles over Shakespeare’s plays. Summing up, the dates that they cover go from 1900 to 1904; and there are forty epiphanies that have come down to us, of which sixteen are of a dramatic type (that is brief scenes or more exactly prevalently lines and parts of dialogue assigned to named characters, and headed with a place caption) and twenty-four of a narrative type. Unlike Shakespeare, Joyce left autograph manuscripts of some of these forty exemplars, which have been acquired and preserved, and are consultable, in the libraries of two American universities (New York and Cornell). One has to speak of surviving epiphanies because we know this from the biography and because the New York sheaf, which includes twenty-two epiphanies in a final draft, has numbering of the single sheets up to 71. There are autograph copies of twenty-four other epiphanies, but penned by the writer’s brother Stanislaus who in turn transcribed them ‘enchantment’ which, prosaically, can refer to arrest of the heartbeat, rather than containing a metaphor or a poetic image, which Joyce attributes to the Bolognese scientist.

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from the original ones. They are in the second sheaf, a hotchpotch in which memorable passages by the most varied writers are precisely copied together with the aforesaid epiphanies of James Joyce, inserted haphazardly here and there. The integral publication of the forty epiphanies came in 1965, following an order of presumed composition, established by R. Scholes and R. Kain. The diatribe that has divided philologists regards the reconstruction of the chronology. Credit was subsequently given to the proposal by the editor H. W. Gabler, namely that Joyce, after attentive investigation of the manuscripts, appears to have first composed the dramatic epiphanies and then the narrative ones. The fine Italian edition by Melchiori29 follows Gabler’s division into dramatic and narrative epiphanies. For the dramatic ones Melchiori follows the order in Joyce’s manuscript, and for the fictional ones Stanislaus’ notebook, with the shrewd specification that this is at least ‘the order in which James Joyce gave them to his brother’. At all events, infallibly dating and ordering the epiphanies is not a tormenting thought for the critic and interpreter to lose sleep over, although it may obsess a philologist. The fact is that they constitute a largely unitary complex that corresponds to an aesthetic well circumscribed in time and well founded in its theoretical tenets, and to a four-year period at the end of which Joyce threw them behind his back, going out ad extra towards an aesthetic and a praxis that, though reabsorbing them, archives and transforms them. 2. So let us move on to what really counts: what the epiphanies are and how and to what extent they are a moment of maturation and transition in Joyce’s art, and in that four-year period a parallel praxis to the poetry. Like the book of poems, which in 1907, with 36 pieces, was to become Chamber Music, at the same time Joyce was developing an organic collection of brief prose pieces that he first gave the theosophist George Russell to read. In the first version of the Portrait it is Joyce himself that clarifies the status of the epiphanic genre as ‘a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself ’. The fact that even the clock of the Ballast Office could generate an epiphany tells us a lot about the character of subjective perception of the epiphany,

29 Epifanie (1900–1904). Rubrica (1909–1912), Milano 1982.

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which can be mute or inactive in other percipient subjects. The aesthetic theory of beauty, adapted from St Thomas, fits because the epiphany implies extraction, from the amorphous continuum of life, of a separate moment, and one therefore endowed with the Thomistic requisites of integritas, consonantia and claritas; that theory is less apt because Joyce’s epiphanies are not aesthetic dispositions of the sensible, the condition whereby an object is beautiful. Indeed, they more often if not always frame the ugly or at least the anonymous, the squalid or the meaningless, and are epiphanies precisely because of their not being epiphanic. The perception of the epiphanic in this sense can hardly be described with the metaphors of the fading coal or the enchantment of the heart, when the percipient brightly perceives beauty. Joyce went beyond the epiphany with the adoption of the epiclet (technically the invocation to the Holy Spirit in the Orthodox liturgy, for transubstantiation of the wafer to occur). Out of metaphor the term meant the acceptance of a structural law that now could not be eluded, since a novel, having a dynamic nature, could not be constituted as a collection of single static and unconnected epiphanies, but needed a spatio-temporal fabric. Actually Joyce could have done it, launching in orbit an unheard-of experimental novel, torn to pieces in its traditional ligatures. However, in 1904, this was not on the cards and in the author’s visual field. As a beginner he would have met even greater difficulties. 3. The reading test has as its result that some epiphanies do not give off fire, and, too splintery, do not exert on us the epiphanic effect experienced by and detonated for the first perceiver.30 Joyce himself is named in the first person in the dramatic epiphanies. Yet it makes us regret precisely that ultimate lack of trust, rather than of courage: the whole stands up, it has a meaning as an autonomous book, it forms in any organization (or also in its disorganization) a pioneering mixed canvas, narrative-dramatic, which at times looks forward to the Beckett of decades later, whose structural law is not the mutual connection of the pieces but the fulsomely exhibited 30 More or less only in one case, epiphany 31, Joyce pronounces a moral verdict (the absence of love): Parisian playboys ‘have given nothing for all that has been given them’. More nuanced is the disdain for the two women that, in number 36, fake grief at a funeral.

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hiatus, and therefore the simple suggestion of those connections; or those symbolic, enigmatic, visionary and mocking prose passages, with rhythms already having cadences, and therefore halfway between prose and poetry, that Rimbaud had written in Illuminations. A text conceived this way must programmatically alternate symbolic loci that can cyclically return, and that here are already cardinal points: the middle-class living room where satisfied and temperate conversations are held, the library, the main artery of the city, the pharmacy, or the brothel.31 Even the temporal linearity is preserved, and adult time is confused with and overlaps that of the child, evoking the acute terror and the sense of threat of the pupil and the punishment of sin. The first of the dramatic epiphanies is a trial sketch devised according to the sequence of symbolic guilt-confession-punishment with atonement. This punishment, if a satanic refusal continues, consists in the removal of perhaps synecdochic organs like the eyes and the liver. In this textual complex, as I am saying, Joyce did not have trust, and he used it as a container of preparatory studies, as tests and sketches, in a way more prudent, for both the major texts that he was conceiving before Ulysses. In them, as we will notice, they come across as unprepared cameos which digressively halt the linear advancement of the plot. Of the two departments the dramatic one gets itself preferred, while the narrative one includes numbers that are all too polished, and descriptions, elegant to the point of being prissy, of nonexistent paintings, and hence ekphrases or purple patches; epiphany 28 (an afternoon at the races) glows with decidedly Imagist chromatism. Or else they are also simple transcriptions of dreams.32 Together with the epiphanies an alphabetical notebook is usually published that is like the trace of every following piece of writing by Joyce. It contains the descriptions of a range of characters, sometimes 31

32

Epiphany 14, which unfolds in one, is on the same wavelength as the pub section in Eliot’s The Waste Land, above all for the vulgar, cockney quality of the linguistic register. Joyce was perhaps able to hear it live in London in 1902, on his way to Paris. The two passages are reciprocally independent, or so it seems. In view of what I will maintain about Finnegans Wake (that Joyce invents a new literary language, and does not necessarily try to reproduce an imaginary language of dreams), it must be noticed that various epiphanies are precisely transcriptions of dreams (in which Joyce said that reincarnations and therefore metempsychoses of Stanislaus had appeared), but transcriptions into a language that is not polysemic, and perfectly grammatical and syntactic.

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with their true baptismal names, and of behavioural phenomenologies, and a catalogue of sayings, deformed figurations or surreal anecdotes. Here Joyce really does not mince his words. Of Joyce’s various styles the pithy one prevails: some of the filed characters are the object of real grimaces in the manner of Buster Keaton, that is to say they are portraits of blistering and total impassibility. § 132. Joyce V: The poetry There are four poetic collections in Joyce’s career. Of the adolescent Dark and Shine little is known and little has survived. Chamber Music was Joyce’s first published work (1907). In 1927 he published Pomes Penyeach; the fourth and last ‘collection’ actually means poems scattered over the years, heterogeneous ones, never gathered together in a poetic edition in his lifetime. This repertoire includes two long and crackling broadsides, examples of buffoonish poetry hurled against Dublin culture. Joyce’s departure with Nora for Zurich, where he was told there was a vacant place as a teacher of English at the local Berlitz School, was followed by a roaring aftermath, the satire ‘The Holy Office’. A second vitriolic antipatriotic attack, ‘Gas from a Burner’, was launched by Joyce when in Dublin in 1912.33 Both are acrid compositions full of indomitable polemic and unleashing almost Swiftian verve. Joyce works out in the burlesque and coprolalic register the whole range of his denunciations against the culture of his fellow-countrymen who misunderstood him. Specifically he plays for the umpteenth time with the myth of the scapegoat: like a secular Christ he takes on himself the load of ballasts, were it not that now he is a ruler without a diadem, morphed into a garbage collector or more exactly a latrine cleaner; or better still a public, gigantic enema that empties the guts of his fellow-citizens of excrements. No names are given; instead, he uses circumlocution and antonomasia, which at that time made the targets unequivocal. The first of these is the band of theatre people devoted to Yeats, that is to say the entourage of the Irish literary 33

This broadside was written in one go on the train from Holland to Munich; it was printed privately in Trieste, and copies of it were sent to Dublin and there distributed by Joyce’s brother Charles.

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theatre.34 The second one is the prurience of certain Dublin bigots that are unnamed. With somewhat pathetic and high-flown heroism Joyce becomes a fallow deer that on mountain slopes makes its antlers flash. ‘Gas from a Burner’ puts in the mouth of the publisher that rejected Dubliners, or more exactly kept it unpublished for ten years, a dramatic monologue that, as Browning had taught, overturning its intentions constitutes an apology of the person criticized. With inflammatory irony the purported Irish national virtues are unmasked as foolish and conceited self-injury. Joyce cannot fail to remember indelible stains of recent Irish history, like the betrayal of Parnell or the crucial support given by the Irish clergy to the ‘sunken boat’ of the papacy, which propped up British oppression on the island. The Irish book industry itself inexplicably closed an eye on books that contained bold and semiheretical theories or disrespectful expressions, and offended national modesty – as in a play by Synge, who, reproached for having used the word ‘shift’, had nevertheless been published. Joyce limited himself to quoting by name places and living personalities violating what today would be called the law on privacy. The elusive publisher Roberts ends up shooting himself in the foot, and timidly defending the status quo of Ireland drowning in its pettiness, a place where nothing can ever change, because everything is all right. Here the names shine through, rather than being alluded to. 2. A glaring datum is that Joyce’s poetry was conditioned in its development, and crushed, by the author’s hegemonic absorption in the writing of the novels, into which he put all his energy. As early as 1936 he was considered finished as poet, seeing that he could entitle Collected Poems a complete edition that did not exceed sixty-five pages. For Chamber Music three essential reading approaches can be proposed, the third one of which is thunderously conflicting and even cacophonous. The first and most anodyne is that the collection moves and rests perfectly within the lyrical domain, and Joyce expresses himself within the millennial courtly tradition, 34 The revealing adjective ‘motley’ (‘motley crew’) appears in the first stanza of Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’; as this poem had not yet been written in 1904, on Joyce’s part this is a mysterious preannouncement.

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mimetically adopting its stereotypes. It is extraneous to the contemporary development of Irish poetry, that of the Celtic Twilight, and there is no mention of Irish history and mythology, and no voice expressing political passion. The very title of Chamber Music, taken at face value, is an interpretative aid and points towards synaesthesia. This means that these are not poems, and therefore actually not even words, but formally sounds in the form of words, or more exactly music: literal-musical synaesthesia, one would like to be able to say. The opening poem is exemplary in applying the strategies of the ‘musical’ lyric: ‘Strings in the earth and air / Make music sweet; / Strings by the river where / The willows meet. // There’s music along the river / For Love wanders there, / Pale flowers on his mantle, / Dark leaves on his hair. // All softly playing, // With head to the music bent, / And fingers straying / Upon an instrument’. This poem shows us how and through what modalities an oral text can be created that can be defined as musical: what the strategies, the forms, the phenomenologies and the mystifications are. The first modality is that a text for music can be mimetic, and enact this mimicry, speaking of music and describing instruments that produce music: the first word of the poem names the strings of an instrument, a guitar or a lute,35 and strings that ‘make music’ on a river bank and on the ground, and sounds that through sound waves are propagated to the sky. It is an instrument that is handled by an intent Cupid, and from it and from his fingers that pluck the strings there flow sweet sounds. A second modality of the musical text is imitation, on the oral plane, of the figures themselves and of the conventions of musical composition: in the first stanza the first and third lines are two incomplete four-syllable and five-syllable anaphoras, ‘Strings in the earth’ and ‘Strings by the river’: it is easy to imagine a brief musical phrase of four and five quavers, and therefore of four notes, of which the first and the third are the same. After this short introductory design, the second stanza instead introduces an epiphora: ‘on his mantle’ ~ ‘on his hair’. It is pointless to remember that the musical quid of a poem is decided on its phonic texture: which is given here, and is institutional, and it is rhyme, but it can be reinforced with additional 35

One of the most frequently reproduced photos of Joyce shows him bending over plucking the strings of a guitar.

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phonological figures, which we find in the form of alliteration, a pertinent datum when it goes beyond a certain middle threshold and therefore one of normalcy. But musicality can stretch and swell, and affect the organization of the poems with respect to one another by creating analogies with certain types of musical composition. Joyce’s brother Stanislaus took on himself all the organization of the order of the poems. According to him, Joyce sent him the manuscript from Rome, showing feigned indifference; and it was Stanislaus that realized that the corpus could be internally ordered to mime the movements of a symphony or a concert. In a letter he points out that the order is ‘approximately allegretto, andante cantabile, mosso’, and that the ‘arrangement’ starts on a rather attenuated note, a kind of adagio. Joyce himself, besides, specified that the book is a ‘suite of songs’, and that the first and third numbers are ‘preludes’. 3. The first five poems, at least, all contain descriptions of a musical phenomenon, since even without a player at their centre there is an instrument and from it there flows a type of timbre and music. However, from the second one on, the text, in addition to being musical, becomes visual. Joyce was close or closer to the aesthetic and praxis of Imagism in this first poetical stage, and his poems, some included in Pound’s Imagist anthologies, had much more right to be there than other less specific ones by other poets. Joyce had arrived independently and in advance at putting some rules of that avant-garde into practice. Already in the second poem the interplay of chromatic gradations stands out: the colour of amethyst, that is to say light purple, blue, the pale green of trees, the yellow keys of the piano, the final tonality of a dark blue colour that is darker and darker – it is a sinfonietta of colours that follow one another and paint their incomplete rainbow. The three quatrains of the second poem are as many pictures that follow one another with hiatuses and flashes and without introductions or comments, and their context must therefore be reconstructed, and it is that of a house in an avenue, at the moment when twilight exhales the last lights. It is a middle-class house where a young woman plays a slow aria, peaceful yet also cheerful, on an old piano with yellow keys, while a youth, from outside, listens thoughtfully. At this instant the faint light has already become darker. The single pictures are composed subsequently with elements that alternate but are figés, of a symbolic and stylized landscape,

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as in certain painters whose pictures are variants that remix in turn the same elements and figurative ingredients: the river, placid or agitated, the willows, the dark skies, the laughing or shady garden, the trees on whose branches there are tweeting birds of various kinds, above all the inevitable winds, also cold and sharp or weak and caressing; and in the sky the moon. The longing for peace in unison is conveyed by the omnipresent adjective ‘soft’. Nevertheless, there exists a slight, very slight internal biographical canvas in these 36 poems, which describe first a platonic love full of sighs, transitory and subdued, attenuated and disguised in mythological or oneiric motions; then the underlying story becomes more recognizable and familiar to anyone who knows Joyce’s spiritual context, and is gradually framed in an artificial love diary. At the end the man who is loved thinks, exhilarated, he has achieved fulfilling love with his beloved, despite his awareness of its ephemeral nature. He has convinced her to go into an exile that can be regenerating, thus also humanly Promethean, but heroically sets out alone towards the unknown. In a delicate, allusive and indirect way, the internal parable actually rises to an invitation to physical union. It is an alternative version of those much bolder, more brutal and literal incitements formulated by Stephen Dedalus to his beloved, especially in the first version of the autobiographical novel, to agree to lose her virginity with him. Towards the end of the collection the poetic ‘I’ lays down the masks and the apostrophes, and the timbre and the form are those of items in a poetic diary, anticipating the final pages of the Portrait, and of a songbook addressed to the Woman, in which repeated invitations are made to carnal enjoyment of love, no matter how long it lasts. And nevertheless anyone who wishes to read this collection as a real transposition of Joyce’s biography is amazed by the violent change of direction: poetry does not copy life, and the love described is really over and only pleasant memories of it survive. Another story is told: in short the imaginary story of two lovers that take stock of the end of their love, yet agree in savouring its carpe diem. Finally, what meaning can be given to the last poem, which stands out glaringly with its longer lines, its more accentuated rhymes marked in alternate form, and the vaster and more solemn depiction of a scene of ancient invading sailors? It is perhaps a contrastive and spurring image, one of bold heroes

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that infuse courage and a spirit of emulation.36 This visionary exemplum looms over the person that dreams it, who ‘moans’; so the collection fades away on a whimper similar to the one that closes Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’: ‘My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?’. 4. The doubt that arises at this point, allowing the possible second reading approach, is whether Chamber Music was extraneous or instead very pertinent to the escalation of Joyce’s playful stance, and whether it should induce us to postulate or confirm Joyce’s Protean ability. He knew how to imitate others and to write with various falsetto voices in the novels, but also in just one – for example in the rare and uniform lyric sincerity of an ‘Ecce Puer’, greeting the birth of his nephew and at once grieving over the loss of his father. Joyce, if this is true, may have enacted in Chamber Music, so to speak, a ‘cold fusion’, a skilled collage of fragments, clippings, leftovers and residues of a centuries-old tradition, to assemble them without showing it. With Joyce it is never implausible, and indeed we hit the nail on the head if we suspect looting, imitation, copying, parody and pastiche. And Chamber Music would be one of the first cases of this. A similar hypothesis has given life, in a kind of certamen between critics, to the indiscriminate hunt for echoes – as always in Joyce – and for practically every single lexeme in the text a source is found, from the Bible to the Elizabethans, from the Jacobeans and Metaphysical poets to Milton, from the Romantics to the Victorians, on down to the Pre-Raphaelites and the Decadents, and then Symons and Yeats, Meredith and Hardy. Also the non-Anglophone canon is believed to have left traces. Certain impossible references like those to poets whom Joyce had little familiarity with and little liking for – Donne or Rossetti –37 can also be included in a precocious selective mini-history and signposting of courtly poetry, as if Joyce remotely tried out the idea of the fourteenth episode of Ulysses. The third allusive field is exactly iconoclastic, as I announced, because if it exists it upsets the lyrical register or creates an alternative and desecrating sub-theme for it. It was reconstructed with 36 37

The Viking warriors’ green hair is curiously the same colour as the tremendous but in the last analysis good-natured and jokey ‘green knight’ in the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in Middle English. ‘An ice-cream Italian’ (Ellmann 1959, 78).

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all his ingeniousness by William York Tindall, with the important added merit of rehabilitating this poetic work, saving it from the negative status of an extraneous text and a cul de sac.38 Joyce, who openly hymns sublimated love, would instead allude in a covert way to the autoeroticism of a young and immature lover and to the physiological functions of the young woman he loves. In the first place we know that the poems of Chamber Music were read one day to a widow who, while she was listening to them, drained bottles of beer, and having drunk a lot of it withdrew behind a screen to urinate, and her urine was heard flowing.39 The associative ambiguity hinges on the fact that ‘chamber music’ also evokes ‘chamber-pot’, to which there are many other references in Joyce’s other works. In this wake or drift one can construct an intermittent internal pathway that hinges on some details, like the roaring of rivers and other water images, or the stooping and crouching of the woman, as if to micturate raising her underskirts. Women with raised underskirts from here on become an obsession of Joyce’s from the start to the end of the work, with the value of an erotic stimulus for the person who lifts them and the person who sees them raised. They will memorably reappear in the fable told by Stephen in the seventh episode of Ulysses, and in Gerty exciting Bloom. Taken in isolation the allusions that Tindall tracks down may leave one perplexed; a great deal less so when they are put together and contextualized. Masturbation (for example in poem I, ‘fingers straying / Upon an instrument’) for Tindall is in Joyce a recurrent symbol for the immaturity of the young man ‘whose egocentricity still prevents creation’. On the other hand, here begins the symbolic journey of ‘urinating equal to creating’ in Joyce’s work: ‘tea and urine are forms of water, and water is a natural symbol of life’. Tindall’s conclusion is that the short collection is a camouflaged preview of Joyce’s great theme, the contiguity and continuity of creation, fall and renewal, and of the fact that Joyce was dissatisfied with it, and abandoned the poetic genre, because he

38 39

In the Introduction to his edition of Chamber Music, New York 1954, 3–98, which is a real long essay or fourth book by Tindall on Joyce. A reliable anecdote, reported in Gorman 1939, 116. On the various versions handed down of this anecdote cf. the introduction by Tindall, cited above at n. 38, 71–3.

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was finding in the ‘poetic’ story and novel ‘a more congenial and spacious form for embodying what obsessed him’. 5. Pomes Penyeach, dated 1927, chronologically came out between Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Does Joyce drop his mask? The title seems to exclude it and indicate once more a ‘mediated’ operation and a false lyrical register: translated, with the disambiguation of its pun, it sounds like Poems – or apples – costing a penny each. But it is so. There unexpectedly emerges a more private, diary-like, intimist character, where the dominant element is melancholy recollection, the sense of change and loss, and particularly erotic frustration; or the unsatisfied need for warmth, for protection from a symbolic icy wind, and for objects that are round and bevelled rather than sharp. Above all Joyce superimposes Nora’s nostalgia for Bodkin, frustrating for Joyce himself, on his own unfulfilled love affairs with Amalia Popper and Marthe Fleischman. And nevertheless the poems in this collection not only were not all written at the same time (they were mostly written in Dublin, Trieste and Zurich, and only the last one, from 1924, in Paris); they also gradually vary in tone and theme. In the first of the thirteen, which is visual and descriptive, there is a little picture of the Irish countryside in winter, with the cows driven to the fold in the evening by a biblical shepherd with a branch full of flowers, who then stretches out, wholly fulfilled, by the hearth. The poet from a distance feels himself bleeding like a tree from which a branch has been torn off. ‘I bleed’ comes from Shelley (‘Ode to the West Wind’) and at the same time from Dante: it is not by chance that Canto XIII of Inferno is about Pier della Vigna and the suicides and squanderers. From the third poem we have confirmation of a pathos that wanted to gush out and pressed hard, and that Joyce could not and did not want to suppress. This was perhaps the price to be paid for disbursing parody and play. ‘She Weeps over Rahoon’ is the brief monologue of a lover, with weeping and poignant regret of the dead one that still calls; we could ideally attribute it to Gretta Conroy, and put it in her mouth as a song, and therefore also to Nora. ‘Tutto è sciolto’ (sic, in Italian), like ‘Watching the Needleboats at San Sabba’, softens the Sehnsucht with the quotation of two famous arias from nineteenth-century bel canto. The sixth one gives a landscape picture of a gravelly beach, but becomes musical again in the refined search for onomatopoeias; almost vicariously the father expresses the hope of being able to protect his fragile and defenceless son Giorgio.

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Similarly, the seventh one throws into relief Lucia Joyce who in the garden performs the simple operation of picking lettuce as she sings. But it traces a silhouette of her. The poetic ‘I’ expresses the hope of being able to plug his ears with wax to avoid hearing a dirge that is too poignant. The eighth, the description of a harbour in a storm, betrays a desire for objectification; and in ‘Nightpiece’ there is again drawn with a certain unusual Baroque mannerism a starry sky reminiscent of the Fall of the rebellious angels. The closing poem is a ‘prayer’ similar to those of Dylan Thomas: a vibrating, even roaring poem, in which the poetic ‘I’ invokes its own subjugation, therefore with a satanic voice that tries to repress his own rebellion without succeeding. § 133. Joyce VI: ‘Dubliners’* I. Devices of Joyce’s short story The publishing history of Dubliners has something fantastic, grotesque, even extenuating about it. The man of letters and theosophist George Russell, whom we have already met in the biography, in 1904 suggested to Joyce, who was down-and-out, that he write a realistic story about country life, a lively one with a bit of sentimentalism, for the new-born magazine Irish Homestead. There was never a more astounding misunderstanding, because ‘The Sisters’, the story contributed, is the exact overturning of *

A. Guidi, Il primo Joyce, Roma 1954; M. Magalaner, The Time of Apprenticeship: The Early Fiction of James Joyce, New York 1959 (essays on critical comparison of variant readings); Twentieth-Century Interpretations of ‘Dubliners’, ed. P. K. Garrett, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1968; James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’: A Critical Handbook, ed. J. R. Baker and T. F. Staley, Belmont 1969; E. Brandabur, A Scrupulous Meanness: A Study of Joyce’s Early Works, Urbana, IL 1971 (from a psychoanalytical perspective); H. O. Brown, James Joyce’s Early Fiction: The Biography of a Form, Cleveland 1972; E. San Juan, James Joyce and the Craft of Fiction: An Interpretation of ‘Dubliners’, Rutherford, NJ 1972; James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’ and ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’: A Selection of Critical Essays, ed. M. Beja, London 1973; James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’: Critical Essays, ed. C. Hart, London 1979 (one essay per story); J. Cope, Joyce’s Cities: Archaeologies of the Soul, Baltimore, MD 1981; D. T. Torchiana, Backgrounds for Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’, Boston, MA 1986; L. Guerra, Interpreting James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’: An Experiment in Methods, Udine 1992; G. Martella, Introduzione alla lettura di ‘Dubliners’, Imola 2001 (a perceptive summary of the main interpretations of the work, following the assumption that Dubliners ‘finds its originating model in the evangelical parable’ [70]).

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those aesthetic objectives. But Joyce had jumped on the bone like a starving dog, and in a flash had conceived a collection of stories, ten at first, to be devoted to the theme of that despondent and paralysed humanity that had already fallen under Stephen’s gaze in Stephen Hero. After the first three stories, accepted by the magazine, there came others spread out in time, springing from the interweaving of Dublin memories with fresher promptings from Trieste. However, the joint hesitations of the English publisher Grant Richards and the Dubliner Maunsel caused the unintentional benefit of increasing the final number of the stories in the collection to fifteen. Dubliners finally appeared in 1914, when the publisher Richards succeeded in overcoming his hesitations, which by then had lasted ten years. Previously various complaints had already come, manifested by letter, to the editorial staff of Russell’s magazine, and the publication of Joyce’s stories had been suspended.40 Dubliners, though the work has its own absolute aesthetic value, is at once a precious apprenticeship and a way stage. Joyce learns to do new things; he tries his hand at an art that is no longer oxygenated and indeed nurtured by the close link with his own autobiography; he invents and imagines, though he also takes many anecdotes from real life. He was starting not to be so young and was maturing, and since 1904 had been Nora’s partner and had become a father, and therefore in Dubliners he tries out some ways to escape from his double Stephen Dedalus, and for the time being he ages him slightly (except in the first three stories) and changes his name; perhaps he also works him out and varies him in a range of male protagonists, and if necessary also female ones. That is to say, he enacts procedures that we will see at work in the writing of the Portrait and in the two later novels. But at the same time one perceives some unwitting and timid confirmations, just hinted at, not of a transformation of Stephen, but instead of an antithesis to him, and therefore of a Bloom being defined: a ‘little Jew’ circulates in one of 40 A question pertaining to criticism of variants is the one relating to the revisions of the text of some stories. The author’s first intention was modified at least partially by the repeated requests to him to expunge offensive terms or so-called expletives. In this case too different and successive editions become autonomous and self-sufficient texts.

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the stories and a Farrington, employed in an office, is, for his thirst and hunger, for the repressions he suffers from, and for his absurd Casanovalike aspirations, the first sketch of an homme moyen sensuel. Nor can there be any doubt that Joyce intended to make up a map in which all the faces of his Dublin would be saturated. The objective was variety blended with representativeness, avoiding iterations and repetitions. It is certainly not by a mere oversight that the single stories form self-sufficient micro-universes that however intersect with the micro-universes of the other stories, so that certain characters go in and out of different stories, as if the latter were the fifteen chapters of a single novel. It must be stressed that Dubliners is the least playful, the most disciplined, the most normative, and without any fear of making a mistake the least futuristic of Joyce’s books. The narrating voice is meticulously loyal to the canons of the naturalistic story. There are at the most two memorable register switches: the journalistic account of the death of Mrs Sinico (‘A Painful Case’), and the Dickensian parody – almost a pastiche – of the refreshments table, with a prolonged military metaphor, in ‘The Dead’. 2. The structuring of the single stories, and as we will see the narrating voice itself, undergoes some changes, at first imperceptible, and then more evident, above all because they were not all written at the same time but spread out over a period of ten years. A similar evolution and progression is obviously essentially due to the technical fact that the first three stories are in the first person, and therefore dictated by, and all steeped in, empathy; and their tone is lyrical, elegiac and partly oneiric, visionary, or at the least flashing. The remaining twelve are set in the realm of objectification, at first cold and without throbs, dry and aseptic. But from the middle on and especially in the finale the narration becomes more affable, richer, more concerned with aims of entertainment and representation. And this leads us to guess that Joyce’s attitude at the very least rotated from severe and even dark phenomenological recording to geniality and to at least resigned but relieved indulgence. It is not by chance that the final chords of ‘The Dead’ are the romantic and melodramatic one of an old and pure love, and the elegy or epicedium of courtly devotion experienced down to death. And above all it is not by chance that the closing sentence of that story, and at once of the entire collection, points to achievement

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of awareness, melancholic and even timidly trusting, of reabsorption of the single identity, and of the single story, in the cycle of life, death and regeneration: ‘His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead’. The construction of the stories is accordingly gradually modified in Dubliners. The first ones centre on a single episode, although they have a preparation and an epilogue. In between there is an epiphanic climax, which is not a summary of repeated events or a succession of anecdotes, but precisely a decisive fact, a twist. The grammar of the story of Dubliners aims to be and must be epiphanic, that is to say instantaneous diegesis. It is here that there appears a certain, small difference from the organization of the Portrait, which hinges on a story worked out in time – not, as its first version is presented, a succession of presents. However, in the Portrait too the segmentation, within a continuum, is one of epiphanies not hanging together, that is to say juxtaposed. In the stories in Dubliners Joyce does not succeed in hiding the need to be retrospective too, and he has, though not methodically, to expound and reveal the prior events. In the first three stories mimesis makes this exposition fragmented, aimed to suggest, to allude, rather than to explain thoroughly. The durée in general is three or four pages up to the central and final stories. The internal action usually has a character, male or female, that goes through or reaches certain chosen places in Dublin, sees spectacles of mixed kinds and eyes up various and curious human types. This character dreams, fantasizes and, often seized, like Bloom, by the pangs of hunger and thirst, ends up in a tavern, in a beer house or at a snack bar. During these walks he or she almost always meets an acquaintance, and having taken a largely circular itinerary returns without many results, or more often with a worse condition of spirit than he or she set out with, to the starting point. The dynamic is more precisely that of the inebriation of imminent liberation and the ensuing sense of disappointment and also of anger (and it is not out of place to see here a prompting to the later ‘angry’ playwrights) about the opportunity missed, or lost, or believed to be so with too much emotional enthusiasm. A repeated device is the closing of the story in a fading, without the narrator saying frankly how things really stand, or only allowing the reader to guess. Up to ‘The Boarding House’ it is easy

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to determine and choose the protagonist; from this story on more choral constructions prevail and the narrative and diegetic organisms become more complex and also broader. Fourteen stories out of fifteen have unity of time, though with some prolepsis, as mentioned; only one diverges, and it is ‘A Painful Case’, which develops in two separate phases separated by a four-year gap. This story is isolated because it is more ‘sensational’ than the others, obedient to the rules of that genre, with an extramarital affair, a suspicious death and a police investigation. Joyce speaks moreover for the first and only time with a falsetto voice, reproducing the style of the newspaper crime story. The last and next to last stories verge in size on the short novel, especially the ‘The Dead’. The diegetic approach is mixed: the narration of the present, or of the epiphanic event, is given in the erlebte Rede form, which implies a dose of empathy and sympathy between omniscient narrator and subject. From the fourth story on a greater extension and linking of these recoveries of the previous events kicks in. Masterly, in ‘Grace’, is the choral dialogue at the bedside of the convalescent Kernan, on the greatness of Catholicism and the wisdom of the popes, banalized with gaffes mixed with gossip, inanities, digressions and extemporaneous interventions. A story that is ninety per cent dialogue, practically devoid of captions, is ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’. One can clearly see the gestation in fieri in ‘Eveline’, among the most scholastic in the collection, though one of the most famous. The narrating voice is often that of a writer that follows and scrutinizes; we can see him as the detective that shadows an unwitting guilty party, and drily annotates in his notebook, almost at times a stenographer: a sleuth who misses no clue and records everything and transcribes it meticulously, his pen always in his hand. 3. If these stories are to some extent thrillers, there can and must be a guilty party. The people of Dublin are guilty, and of various infringements, above all of their dignity and their humanity. They allow themselves to be ensnared, and are full of wild dreams, slothful, inactive, and easily satisfied. But the ‘thriller’ label is valid even in a literal sense in some cases (‘A Painful Case’, or ‘Grace’, where for once the omniscient narrator has to narrate, or pretend to narrate, through reported testimony). ‘Grace’ too is a ‘thriller’, though a sentimental one, because Kernan is the victim of an innocent ‘plot’, that is to say a well-intentioned conspiracy against him (a

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spiritual retreat). It follows that what is typical of this voice is recording, as by a precision instrument, of place and time. Nobody like Joyce is capable of annotating and reporting with such maniacal precision the places of the city where these characters are piétinants; and their wandering is followed once again on the map. As a supplement of verisimilitude the stories in Dubliners are rich in notices, signs, names of shops, a great variety of inscriptions, and characters that read them. But this is not all: there is also amazing chronometric precision in the reckoning of time: ‘it was ten minutes to ten’, ‘seventeen minutes past eleven’ and a great many others. Similar precision will naturally flow over intact into the time frame of Ulysses. The stories are always set in a season and in a precise moment of the span of day and night; in some cases the author also specifies the time and the minute. And we are told how much commodities and purchases cost, and how much the characters have in their pockets down to the last halfpence or farthing (ten shillings and eleven pence is the price of Annie Chandler’s blouse). Thus the merit, or one of the merits, or at least of the hallmarks of Joyce’s naturalistic art, is frequent if not intrusive quantification: the indefinite adjective ‘some’ is avoided because it is inaccurate and vague, and replaced with the exact quantity, of minutes, years, days or money. Farrington in ‘Counterparts’ has to copy not a lot of, so many or some pages, but ‘fourteen pages’. § 134. Joyce VII: ‘Dubliners’ II. Paralysis in the three human ages As in a symphony that immediately begins with its main theme, the general thematic chord rings out in the first sentence of the first story: ‘There was no hope for him this time’. Mutually strengthening themselves, each story of the fifteen certifies the absence of hope for the people of Dublin. Hence its other watchword, if it is true that the stories are influenced by an internal Dantesque weaving, is Dante’s ‘Leave all hope oh you who enter’. This primary thematic word, hope, must be measured and counted in the text, and from it we would draw a series of numerous recurrences. The people of Dublin are penniless, disoriented, evicted, or also nailed. They are above all alone and try to link up, but not through superficial and external and at times hypocritical and false or virtual relationships of friendship or acquaintance; but instead with true, deep, vital

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relationships. The common feature of the first three stories is the state of the orphan. It is a paradox that Stephen Dedalus towers up in two or three of Joyce’s novels, and that there he is a character oppressed by his mother, his father and his siblings; vice versa the child that speaks in the first person in Dubliners lives with his uncle and aunt and has neither father nor mother. Anyone who seeks bonds then wants to free themselves of them to find again other, true bonds, possibly away from Dublin. For this very reason the Dubliner seeks liberation, and ‘free’ is another very frequent adjective. Joyce, it has always been said, pities his fellow-citizens that have remained in Dublin; but, having escaped, he can also satirize and deride the people with wild ambitions that have failed. A case in point is that of Bob Doran, who as Stephen’s twin has shouted out his abjuration, but falls back into the ranks and grip of the Catholic religion. As a result the homicidal or violent fit of madness lies in wait, always in wait. Secondly the delusion of liberation can be cultivated within the confines of the city itself. At times Dublin gives the wrong impressions of being cosmopolitan: ‘That night the city wore the mask of a capital’. In ‘After the Race’, from which this quotation is taken, a delegation of European viveurs has come there, and a Dubliner with great hopes deludes himself that he can be part, on a basis of parity, of this whirling world. A false and indeed laughable air of cosmopolitanism is breathed in at the Mooney boarding-house. ‘A Little Cloud’ is based on an analogous paradox. The family in Dubliners is an institution in disarray, prey to breakdown and on the way to dissolution. If in the first three stories it is nonexistent, Eveline remembers nostalgically and achingly the happiness of the undivided home, and then the trauma of her mother’s death and her father’s ensuing mental derangement. Marriage must be a communion of affections, but that of ‘A Boarding House’, imposed by Mrs Mooney on her daughter, is a coercive, shotgun wedding, and therefore corruptio optimi. Chandler’s marriage is a failure, although he has only been married two years. The marriage of the Sinicos has also gone downhill in total indifference; it is affectively impoverished and lives on painful, daily misunderstandings. The curtain goes down, in various adult age stories too, on the return of the protagonist at the end of the day to the family ranks, where the veil is raised on the state of dysfunction of his or her marital life, which is an open verbal boxing match.

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‘The Dead’ is the epiphany and immediately afterwards the anti-epiphany or the climax and anticlimax. Here there is the indirect confirmation of the ephemeral nature of total love, and of its fatal drying up: all good is fleeting, and it is a beautiful thing only perhaps because it has been brief and is remembered with nostalgia. The breakdown of marriages also lies in sexual dissatisfaction. The family is created with marriage, but it is quite a commonplace that males flirt, and that there are virtuous little ladies that do not trust them. On the other hand, the young Dublin braggart waits for the chance to make a good catch, possibly one believed to be an heiress. Eros is venal, and not only in the sense that Dubliners pay for sex both as bachelors and as married men, but also because they eye up and seduce prostitutes who are a little romantic and naïve, to be kept by them, as happens in ‘Two Gallants’. 2. The representativeness of Dubliners also concerns the completeness of the social, cultural, religious and political spectrum. In the first stories the priest is an omnipresent and obsessive figure. There will be priests regularly and rhythmically in crisis, apathetic, mentally disturbed, even sinister and with something diabolic about them: the image is that of a Church that is not triumphant, but declining or already fallen. All this is in violent contrast with the image of the Jesuit in his chair, a surly and brilliant apologist, subtle and radiant in the dialectic and homiletic duel. The Jesuits, at the start oddly always in the shadow, appear in great pomp in the penultimate story, ‘Grace’, and the retreat will be held at their church. The Jesuitism glorified in ‘Grace’ is not the image of a Church being demobilized. But in singing its panegyric the three penitents who prepare for the retreat shoot themselves in the feet: the fact is they praise its worldly power, the respect that it enjoys, the influence that it exerts, and not its devotion. A little space is reserved in Dubliners for the Protestant minority, because Kernan is a convert and Mr Browne, in ‘The Dead’, is a Protestant. On the Catholic Church, Joyce thus operates a concentric or converging and simultaneous attack, here and in the Portrait. In the triad of the childhood stories it is a kind of Gorgon that grips and takes its strength from dark fascination that repels and at the same time attracts and bewitches. The spell not only binds laymen but also the priests themselves. The condemnation of the inhumanity of the priest Flynn’s sacerdotal vocation is in these words, spoken by one

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of his sisters with an evident breakdown of grammar: ‘The duties of the priesthood was too much for him’. The worldliness of priests, their devotion to Mammon, is the next target.41 If the bazaar in ‘Araby’ is in the dark and silence reigns in it like that which ‘pervades a church’, this means that the Church is a bazaar and, what is more, in the dark. And at the bazaar two people are seen counting takings. In this surreal scene a kind of replica is enacted, deformed and grotesque, of the condemnation of Jesus and the crucifixion. Faith has become a sweet fable for Maria in ‘Clay’, who however is blissfully satisfied with it: she is only capable of giving and puts up with being played with and mocked, without resentment; Joyce is oddly moved and there is no authentically negative figure in the story. 3. In the fifteen stories of Dubliners two internal movements intersect that are out of sync with one another: the physical one of the characters is repetitively concentric; but then it is rivalled, with groups of three, by a linear progression of the ages. A fourth section deals with public life. The first three stories, on childhood, derive their cohesion and distinctiveness from the fact that they are the only ones narrated in the first person. They can therefore be interpreted as materials of the ‘catchment’ of the Portrait, alternative versions, rejected ideas, unused fragments or extra chapters. The status of the authorial voice also differs. A fictitious ‘I’, no longer young but an adult, years later remembers certain events; but a second simulation is the childish ‘I’ of this adult self, a small autobiographical variation on Stephen Dedalus in the Portrait. Indeed he has no name, and not even parents, but lives in the Dickensian condition of the orphan, brought up, with all the predictable counterblows, by a uncle and aunt that are anything

41

Under the deforming effect of childish hallucination, the priest Flynn becomes satyrlike and satanic, as is indicated by his yellowish teeth, his dilated nostrils and above all his tongue dangling on his underlip. The Church, like the umbrellas in the shop window under the priest’s house, needs to be ‘re-covered’, that is to say regenerated. In the first stories there hovers a diffused stench of dead priests, who in terms of colours are placed in the area of yellow: also yellowed is a photo in the house of Eveline in her story. The true God of life, perhaps echoing Stephen’s definition in the second episode of Ulysses, is for instance in the noisy and animated games of children: ‘Our shouts echoed in the silent street’.

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but exemplary, though not wicked, and by other more equivocal vicarious figures, like the priest Flynn. The second and third stories end with the narrator admitting that at that time he was repenting of some vices like contempt and pride, or vanity and worldliness.42 The children seen in the first three stories are ready for departure, literally for ‘adventure’, but are immediately stopped. In ‘The Sisters’ the child is attracted first of all by the curious and ‘strange’ sound of certain obsolete words, by their ring and their possible meaning; having discovered it, he is obsessed by the perturbing element that they communicate. He is a phenomenologist devoid of real guidance, who without teachers picks up signs from reality and explains them to himself, effecting a cognitive exploration. Shortly afterwards he reads a death announcement and ‘persuades himself ’ that the priest Flynn has indeed died. In the second story, the protagonist is the same morbid and curious decoder of signs: ‘she was a Norwegian vessel. I went to the stern and tried to decipher the legend upon it’. Joe Dillon (‘An Encounter’) loves his vicarious freedom and scampers about like an Indian; then he becomes a priest, and that is to say traps himself. The onset of puberty is unwittingly disguised with the harmless hunting of a cat with a phallic catapult; and the two friends foil the paedophiliac assaults of a lewd old man with that same, instinctive ‘cunning’ or astuteness that is the weapon of Stephen: they trick him by choosing for themselves, like Stephen, false and fictitious names. But the meeting with the Swinburnian maniac, and with his delirium of scourging, seems to ruin the innocence of the two boys. In the third case, ‘Araby’, the same boy experiences the first sensual frissons and precocious crushes. There is romantic, and that is to say bookish and hence sublimated, handling of the plot here, because in its anamnesis there recur sentences and conventional tags of the Arthurian stories in Middle English, where to prove their love valiant knights often challenged the Saracens. For this very reason the narrating voice says that the boy’s heart ‘leaped’, using the same lexeme as in a famous idyll by Wordsworth; thus the boy is a kind

42 It was B. Ghiselin, in ‘The Unity of Dubliners’, a 1956 essay reproduced in Baker and Staley 1969, 35–62, that pointed out that the stories, singly or in groups, have the capital vices as their theme.

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of little Bloom who turns to the sweet languors of the Orient.43 But the case also concerns the girl that gives up a visit to the bazaar, that is to say harmless pleasure, because she is engaged in a spiritual retreat. The maniac of ‘An Encounter’ is a fetishist like the priest Flynn (he has a preference for women’s hair and hands, synecdoches of perverted sex, though for him women are all more or less sluts). At the end his sadomasochism explodes: ‘magnetised by some words of his own speech, his mind was slowly circling round and round in the same orbit’, which also prefigures the circular, unproductive and unhealthy motion of Dubliners.44 4. In the second section referring to young people, nineteen-year-old Eveline wants to run away with the sailor Frank, but at the last minute she changes her mind and is swallowed up in the paralysis. The mephitic air of the interior of the house and the odour of the ‘dusty cretonne’ wittily contrast with the ‘good air’ that will be breathed in the Argentinian capital (which not by chance is called Buenos Aires).45 Frank is literally about to give oxygen, that is to say air, to the girl, who is suffocating. This and the next story hinge on the crisis of will. In ‘After the Race’ Doyle, who is twenty-six years old, is the educated son of a man who has grown rich. This story is partly set mirror-fashion in relation to the previous one, as is also evident from its coming immediately after it. Doyle is inebriated by the speed of high-powered cars, cosmopolitan friendships, and the money that he has in his pocket. Disenchantment comes systematically, with dawn

43 On the symbolism of space and movements in the compass rose there is now almost unanimous agreement among critics, precisely because this is shared anthropological symbolism in the collective imagination. In his books Tindall has been an out-andout supporter of the ‘pure’ symbolism of the collection, at the same time denying any naturalistic dominant. 44 The key moment is when the pervert stands apart to perform an unspecified but certainly shameful operation (‘I say! Look what’s he’s doing!’, at which the narrator’s companion stays silent). This flash can unquestionably be taken for a remote preannouncement of the voyeuristic scene ‘in the park’ on which Finnegans Wake turns. 45 It is the city to which the governess ‘Dante’ Conway’s husband had emigrated (as Stanislaus Joyce reminds us in My Brother’s Keeper, 32), so the story can be an unrecognizable parody of the ménage of this couple.

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and his big losses at gambling. Here Matthew Arnold’s ‘criticism of life’ acts more openly and severely, against the moral weakness, the vainglory, the superficiality and the foolish materialism that lead Doyle to a false artificial paradise. Corley and Lenehan, the two friends or almost friends in ‘Two Gallants’, now overturn the sublimated adolescent and chivalrous eros of ‘Araby’.46 An immediate sign of this is, right at the start, the cloak or mackintosh that Lenehan, the more repressed of the two friends, carries on his arm as if he were a toreador and above all like an antiphrastic sign of his unreal ambitions, since he slavers but is excluded from love and even from sex (and Corley tyrannizes and stifles him). The toreador or conqueror becomes Corley himself. Lenehan hopelessly longs for a regular and fulfilled family life, at the end of his Ulyssean wanderings.47 And hence he acutely feels the estrangement and loneliness that torment him. For all this one cannot avoid evoking for the umpteenth time the preannouncement of Bloom: Lenehan is the morbid voyeur who follows step by step the seducer friend; he eavesdrops, mishears, wanders, meditates, dreams, grows weak, feels better, and feeds. Doran in ‘The Boarding House’ is brought back to the fold after he has confessed his sexual transgression and has put his conscience straight. His is a case, and a very frequent one in Joyce, in which the Church and religion loom over the individual to the point of suffocating him. With ‘little Chandler’ in ‘A Little Cloud’ something stirs closer to Joyce’s neuralgic centre, because a typology is specified, that of the writer, who however, timorous, is also unexpressed. This very prim introvert is also an aesthete behind the times who conceals a little disgust at the inelegant spectacles that surround him. He has secretly written a book of poems veined with borrowed Celtism. Yet this reserved individual cuts a better figure than the vulgar Gallaher, a cynical, rather superficial

46 With skilled interweaving of understatements Corley’s belle proves, at the end of the portrait devoted to her, anything but attractive, and indeed rather repugnant, having the usual qualities of Joyce’s sub-humanity: wide nostrils, protruding teeth and a stupid laugh. 47 I use the term ‘Ulyssean’ in a figurative sense, without accepting the specious conjecture by R. Levin and C. Shattuck, ‘First Flight to Ithaca’, in Givens 1963, 47–94, that Dubliners too is founded upon a Homeric parallel.

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and noisy profiteer that acts as if he were the master of the world.48 On the other hand Gallaher, a journalist integrated in London, is a different Conroy.49 At the end Chandler embodies the moral sin of idleness and fear of compromising himself; and Gallaher is one of the many males that sow their wild oats before marrying. Another literate sui generis is Farrington (‘Counterparts’), being a copyist. He appreciates the details of language and is sensitive to them and after all he turns out one retort that briefly leaves a mark. Of the middle-aged characters James Duffy in ‘A Painful Case’ worsens Chandler’s pseudo-aesthetic attitude, and carries further the repugnance of mediocrity and the desire to abstract himself from the human fray giving himself up to pure and rigid intellectuality, with the utopia of the extinction of sex life. He is therefore a rara avis in the whole panorama of the stories in Dubliners, because he boasts, at least, a victory over those stirrings of the flesh that nobody defeats. The flagrant exception from the norm is that Duffy does not have, and perhaps this is the only case in the whole collection, any hope: he is lucidly aware of living a life made up of habits without any frissons, conceiving no transgressions and expecting nothing different. But hope is revived and quivers when he meets Mrs Sinico. A platonic relationship thus arises, based on common cultural, literary and musical interests. However, as soon as it threatens to become a physical and erotic relationship, Duffy backs off. Here the paralysed person, but through irony and paradox, is Mrs Sinico, who can be criticized for having adapted to a marital situation that is dead or devitalized. Yet at the end the sense of superiority cracks in Duffy, who perceives the inadequacy of his world of values. In ‘Grace’ the gentlemanly Pendennis of the commercial agencies – the travelling salesman Tom Kernan, with gaiters and silk top hat – is in free fall, professionally and also maritally, and being in crisis he drinks. His story recalls an internal isotopy, already present in ‘A Painful Case’ (the moral, above all physical fall, under a train, of Mrs Sinico). But the most evocative foreshadowing is extra-textual and macro-textual: the Fall in Finnegans Wake. The theological question is: 48 Orwell was to remember some conventional inflexions in creating the idiolect of George Bowling in Coming Up For Air. 49 She is also a vague double of Eveline, not having had the courage to go away.

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can one reform after the fall? Is religion vivifying? ‘Grace’ at the same time provides a bridge with ‘The Dead’ because it eventually focuses on another aspect of Dublin and Ireland, peaceful cohabitation between Protestants and Catholics, in the sign of ecumenicalism (or subtle discrimination). However, it is comedy that prevails in ‘Grace’, and participation in a retreat is a formal gesture devoid of intimate regenerating power. In the sermon during the retreat we find in the preacher’s words a casual bookkeeping and monetary vision of matters of faith. § 135. Joyce VIII: ‘Dubliners’ III. ‘The Dead’. The game of cardinal points If one were to search for a metaphorical, symbolic or cryptic meaning in ‘The Dead’, apart from the literal sense – that is, a story which is not comical, in parts satirical and, it should be admitted, not particularly electrifying – we could perhaps discover a Joyce who ponders, not without a glimmer of hope or optimism, the fate and future of both Ireland at the beginning of the century and of Joyce himself, in terms of his art and in his relationship with life, and therefore, also with politics, and primarily Irish politics. In other words he was investigating where Ireland was going and where he himself was going, using Conroy as a self-test. The diagram of vectors within the story is conflicting and has gone haywire, and from the centre of the compass, Dublin, they are launched towards three cardinal points: west, east and south. According to an initial interpretation, Conroy is invited by Miss Ivors, and might follow her to the west, and Gretta Conroy comes from west to east. Conroy looks to the east as ‘pro-British’, or a defector according to Miss Ivors’s accusations; but intends to spend his summer in the south, in France and Belgium, therefore he is oriented towards Europe. Eventually, he recognizes that the time has come to move west. In reality, the changes of position and movements are also forward and backward in time. The internal assumption is that Ireland can regenerate – and Joyce visibly picks up where he left off in ‘Grace’ – adopting modernity, that is, moving forward. However, Conroy in his speech ends on a note of worry regarding modernity, claiming it to be a sceptical age, ‘thought-tormented’, and idealizing the Ireland of the past, the fine tradition of hospitality, seconded by almost all the guests. But this is, in him, a contradiction. Between the parties of those who want to move forward and

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those who want to go back there emerges that of those who want the status quo, that is, stagnation. The paralysis of Dublin and Dubliners, exposed as the target, may paradoxically be the recipe for transformation. Blended with this paradigm is the theme or the question of the generational change. The text does not specify what time of year the story is set in, or rather, it states rather vaguely that it is Christmastime. At Christmas we commemorate the cyclical renewal of life; maybe the story is set on the last day of the year, New Year’s Eve (another reference to Finnegans Wake); perhaps it is close to the Epiphany. The nature of the movements that need to take place turns on this night, which is the epiphany of Joyce-Conroy and of Ireland itself. A border has been crossed. What should be inferred from all this is that the death the story talks about is, in fact, life, that there is no real end, and that a new beginning is taking shape. Following the example of the Gospels and the nativity, there are signs of an old world that is about to end and a new and more positive power is about to take over. 2. This being a story about paralysis, like all the others in this collection, we should meet characters who are immobilized by it; and, in fact, the snow buries the human and natural landscape creating a cadaverous stasis, and causing limbs to become stiff or unusable. Thus, in stark contrast, the scampering of Lily the maid in the opening of the story, strikes a chord; it is remarked on twice in the first paragraph, along with the insistent ringing of the doorbell. There is a veritable frenzy of activity in the Morkan house, which is not that of a funeral or burial place. By propagation, the party is initially filled with frenetic, vigorous, vital, even trembling movements. The isotopy of life and death arises and proceeds in a symbolic as well as in a playful sense, that is, in the forms of the word play. From the very first word a clear path of hyperbolic and figurative terms, catachreses and sayings can be traced, which rests on the classematic length of life and death: eventualities such as ‘die’, ‘perish’, ‘existence’, as well as more literal references. The other term that should be emphasized from the first paragraph is ‘converted’. This refers to the simple case of the bathroom which is ‘converted’ into the ladies dressing room, but announcing nevertheless the paradigm of ‘conversion’ in its multiple uses, meanings and implications. ‘The Dead’ is a story that imagines if and how one can escape death/ paralysis, that is, whether there will be a miraculous metamorphosis. We

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will have conversions of faith and revealing epiphanies; eventually, something good will happen. All this is placed within the cosmic, cyclical theme par excellence, rebirth. T. S. Eliot prophesied a happy future from a snowcovered, buried and sterile land, about to become fertile. ‘The Dead’ is epiphanic and also yuletide, and without specific mention in the text it is set at the time when the old year dies and another is born. It includes, that is, a change, and maybe a positive change, a change that could put an end to the reign of death and ideally change the title of the story to ‘The Living’. The other subtle detail from the first paragraph is ‘literally’. The narrative voice is and is not that of a narrator or critic who is very precise and fussy. One might say that Joyce imitates his protagonist, plays with identification and dissociation, as he if were attempting to be mimetic. 3. The story is diegetically tripartite: the first subchapter is the party at the Morkans’ house; the second, the Conroys’ return carriage journey to the hotel; the third, the events and dialogues that take place in the hotel room. It is also subdivided into successive sections within these parts, without much urgency being apparent in trying to link one to the other; so the dietetic pace is not particularly taut. In the first compartment the participants’ past histories emerge, and with them, inevitably, the signs of time passing: hair which has become grey, and the lamented decline of physical and mental faculties. The roll call of the living and the dead is taken. Another, vague, Dantesque echo is that from the top of the landing one can see the guest arriving at the ground floor entrance hall, like so many pilgrims and souls welcomed into a dark cavern of hell. Gabriel Conroy has a biblical first name. He is the announced one and he is the announcer, in an ironic isotopy, of the coming or Second Coming of the Saviour. Gretta, his wife, is a slightly foreign and estranged figure, both because the Morkan sisters call her, with slight detachment, ‘his wife’, and because Conroy himself refers to her as ‘my wife’. Conroy makes his debut with clumsy impatience and with the hyperbole ‘my wife here takes three mortal hours to dress herself ’. It is therefore not a catachresis. And Gretta must be ‘perished alive’ from the cold. Conroy is an adept of colourful language, a language which is a bit over the top, pathetic and trite. He is, in fact, a linguist, or expert in things relating to language (he notes, for example, the three syllables that Lily uses to pronounce his surname). In

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the pantry he attempts a conversation that flounders and ends up being at cross-purposes. Even making the situation worse, he asks Lily about her upcoming marriage (a sign of life and rebirth) and Lily blurts out, with an ungrammatical sentence, that all men are scoundrels, and only want one thing, or they are all talk. It is one of those retorts that she is famous for, and that echoes the refrain of agape reduced to pure carnal love. Conroy is dapper, meticulous, with a touch of the dandy and in a patronizing way he gives her a coin, which is an ironic and symbolic offering to Charon. Bearing the name of an archangel, Conroy confuses spiritual rebirth with the material and ends up giving away money, saying, however, that it is Christmas. This is also an example of religion reduced to pure monetary value, or to simony.50 Linking this to the motif of time that is corrupt and in need of regeneration, Lily, pure as the flower whose name she bears, scolds men as being ‘now’ all like that; earlier they were better. At the same time, she is talking about her first experience of a broken engagement or amorous relationship, and therefore this is a proleptic element. 4. Conroy is expected to give a performance that he has carefully prepared and that he has tested and studied in minute detail. Betraying an inferiority complex, he thinks he has made a mistake in the way he has written his speech. Outside the ballroom he mulls over, with self-importance, which poetic quotations are most suited to his not particularly well-read audience. But in the interlude that separates him from his speech, the smouldering incomprehension between the two spouses comes to light (a fanatic of all things modern, Conroy wants Gretta to wear galoshes), while other newcomers arrive on the scene. Among these is Freddy Malins, the drunk, who, as expected at the party, must be warned and lectured by Conroy, and Mr Browne with the three young ladies to whom he serves soft drinks, telling rather stale jokes while sipping whisky. This Browne is twice interrupted, thus he is not highly regarded and blithely lends himself to 50

Cf. a development of this motif, along with the astute collection of examples of other symbolic paradigms, in an interpretation of the story influenced by Bataille, by Corti 1984, 13–34, who discovers an allegory of archetypal antinomies such as, especially, that between good and evil, and a Stevensonian Conroy, the archangel, who is mirrored in his malign and diabolical double, Freddy Malins, true to his name.

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underestimation, even though he is a Protestant. If the Morkans’ party is a microcosm of Ireland, this Protestant component could not be missing. In contrast to Browne, who speaks with a thick Dublin accent, Freddy Malins has a ‘catch in his voice’. The piano solo by Mary Jane, which Gabriel does not like because it lacks melody, is the first signal of an incommunicability whose isotopy started with Lily and her boyfriend, with Lily and Conroy’s difficult relationship, with Browne being ignored by everyone, and partly with Malins. While listening to the solo, Conroy thinks about his mother, who was talented but not musical, and about his brother who is now a priest. But he is also forced to remember that his mother, who objected to his marriage to a woman whom she referred to as ‘country cute’, was nursed by Gretta in the last hours of her life. At the end of the performance Mary Jane is nervous and the people who applaud most – a touch of insincerity – are those who have just come back into the room without having heard it. The intermezzo of Conroy with Miss Ivors, who talk of politics while they dance together, ends in a Solomonic draw.51 Conroy is reprimanded by Miss Ivors, a proud nationalist, for being a ‘West Briton’, but Joyce seems to justify Conroy because it is not for profit but because of his love of books that he writes for English newspapers, and literature is ‘above politics’. It is only right that Miss Ivors should invite Conroy on an excursion to the most quintessentially Celtic of Irish islands, the Aran Islands of Yeatsian memory. The linguist in Conroy protests that he must go on holiday to the Continent to keep in touch with the languages; she replies that he must learn and cultivate his own language (the same Irish language that not even Yeats knew, and whose admission, ‘Irish is not my language’, Conroy repeats). Relating to the motif of change, Conroy supports a new position, which was that of Joyce himself, that art is apolitical. Regeneration will hinge on the relativization of nationalism, on the transformation of Ireland into a modern country, more open to continental influences. Yet this is not exactly what Conroy believes, as he wishes to oppose a change for the 51

The heated debate on nationalism and cosmopolitanism is symmetrical to that between anticlerical nationalism and loyal and bigoted Catholicism that takes place at another Christmas in the first chapter of the Portrait, between Stephen’s father and Dante, the governess.

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worse – and that ‘thought-tormented’, Arnoldian age of the dialogue of the mind with itself – with the recovery of the old, immobile, human and hospitable Ireland, now waning.52 Modernity is also an internal dispute with the Church, which in religious ceremonies replaces female voices with children’s voices out of necessity, in order to adapt to the times. One of the Morkan sisters finds a way to remark her own frustration as a choir singer (she could have had a career as a concert singer), and bravely takes her anger out on the Pope, who had the choir singers replaced with boys. During dinner the guests speak nostalgically of past and modern life, of old opera singers, good operas, their superiority and the present decline of good singing. Incommunicability and the generational divide are irreconcilable, as are the divisions and misunderstandings between Catholics and Protestants, between drinkers and teetotallers, between West Britons and nationalists. A living tenor has never even heard of another, great tenor, who sang before his time. In short, was it better then or now? 5. Conroy’s speech is a small masterpiece of denegative and ironic rhetoric dressed up in stale idioms and outdated formulas, like anaphora, reduplication, stock-phrases and humorous jokes. It also re-applies Mark Antony’s discursive techniques and strategies in Shakespeare. Conroy leads the discourse towards the theme of pressing modernity against immutable traditions, at least that of hospitality. His mock humility is followed by overacting – ‘and I’ve visited not a few places abroad’. The moribund Morkan sisters are the expression of a living tradition, that is indubitable. Yet Conroy despairs that in the coming age there might not be a new generation that appreciates this tradition. The whole speech is, however, covertly directed, for his own purposes, against the absent

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Conroy’s speech closely recalls that of the Duke of Ferrara, because, like Browning’s Duke, he humbly boasts about his ‘poor powers as a speaker’. At the end Conroy gets upset, in his own small way, because he learns that his wife had loved another man before him, and a man for whom she cared more than for him. Could ‘The Dead’ be set in December 1889, after Browning had just recently died in Venice? Might Conroy’s book review, which is mentioned in the story, be of Browning’s last collection of poems, or could this review be Browning’s obituary? It does not seem to be the case, but it is a tempting supposition.

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Miss Ivors. The myth of Paris who must choose the most beautiful among the three graces also serves as Conroy’s admission that he is narcissistically showing off. The reference to the deceased is relevant for two reasons: the dead are the great figures of the past and now we who are alive must learn from them and curb this new generation that is taking over. Conroy feels as if he were a member of the enlightened, whose modernity, whose cosmopolitanism, whose modernism, however, relies on recovering the values of past generations. He wants to immobilize and paralyse time or make it move backwards. While waiting for the carriage – but, let it be noted, Gabriel wanted to go to the hotel on foot – he tells another, nostalgic anecdote, about his grandfather’s horse, bound for an event full of high-ranking people, a horse that ended up walking around and around the statue of King Billy – the hated William of Orange – almost by inertia, or in involuntary repetition of what he did everyday while working in the mill. It should be noted that there are three monuments mentioned in ‘The Dead’, the second being the statue of Wellington in the park (park and statue will reappear in Finnegans Wake as the symbols of British power, even though, or perhaps precisely because, Wellington was Irish). The third statue, by way of compensation, is that of O’Connell. The anecdote of the horse that walks around the statue is too long, and one wonders why Joyce wanted Conroy to tell it in such detail: the partial reason is that it cleverly returns to the isotopy of moving between cardinal points and it symbolizes non-movement, walking in circles: a double-edged image that is the historic and sterile piétiner sur place of Ireland, with the further one of hypnotic devotion to the central pillar of the establishment, British power. Yet it is also the positive one of an Ireland that has not been torn away from its values. 6. Before leaving the Morkans’ house, Gretta, as if Conroy were a painter, is caught on the landing as if enchanted while listening to a fragment of an Irish song hummed by a tenor who throughout the evening had refused to sing because he had a cold (Mr D’Arcy, who had also answered everybody gruffly). ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ tells the story of a woman abandoned by her beloved, who carries the baby they had together in her arms while searching for him. This is what triggers the argument in the last scene. Going back out into the snow does not cool but heats Conroy, who

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remembers pleasant scenes and anticipates an emotional and physical union with his wife after a noticeable, past and not long forgotten, disunity. He feels the flow of desire and it is impossible not to recall the ‘forgetful snow’ from the first lines of The Waste Land. There is no doubt that Conroy is sexually excited because he savours ‘a keen pang of lust’. Here is a further prospect of regeneration, a new love life that could resume between him and the distant Gretta. In the hotel room, Conroy wants darkness, since the light of the street lamp outside is enough. Always a victim of gaffes and blunders, he feels that the desire rapidly fades, as it is not understood by Gretta, who declares she is tired and after crying remembers an episode from her distant past in Galway, where she comes from. This is the same area Miss Ivors wanted to take Conroy. Towards the end of Gretta’s nocturnal recollection (different from, and yet also evocative of Moolly Bloom’s in the last episode in Ulysses), associations and early attempts at stream of consciousness proliferate. Furey is one of the dead among so many dying; he really died at seventeen-years-old having worked ‘in the gasworks’. Conroy is caught off-balance; he is seized by one of his fits, his inferiority complex, and he has become ‘a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist’. The title, in this light, could be read to mean ‘the dead one’, that is Gretta’s Furey, rather than ‘the dead’, i.e. those who are dead. Twice Gretta fails to respond precisely or appropriately when asked if she really loved Furey. ‘I think he died for me’. This is the piercing blow, which is also another version of an Ireland that has disappeared or been forced out, that is, romantic Ireland. The story could have been stretched out into a novel, because too many flashbacks punctuate it, such as the death of the consumptive Furey in the chilly night. Conroy did not know any of this and the fact resurfaced in Gretta through the associations triggered by the tenor D’Arcy while singing the very same air that Furey had sung. Conroy then realizes he had never really been very important in Gretta’s life, and feels mounting estrangement. The ending moves from a sense of life and vitality to a presentiment of impending death and a cosmos bound to become a shadow. Yet in what sense has the moment arrived for Conroy’s journey westward? Is it a sign of maturity and regeneration? As with all of the stories in Dubliners, or nearly all of them, the ending is open. Nevertheless, an epiphany has taken place.

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§ 136. Joyce IX: ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’* I. The first two versions At the beginning of 1904 Joyce was invited by the editor of the Dublin magazine Dana to write a sketch: it could not fail to be a sort of manifesto from which to fire off polemic barbs, by now usual for him, against the country and religion, and to observe the need for exile for an artist not intending to sell his art off cheap. It was rejected, but Joyce, rather than dropping it, put his hand to what was to be his first memorial novel, Stephen Hero. Skipping over the second version, the metaphor of the portrait was to reappear in the third and definitive one. Joyce had no marked preferences in painting, as I have observed, but it is certain that Walter Pater, an art critic and the author of Imaginary Portraits, served as his model. Joyce’s sketch is rather like ‘The Child in the House’, the title of a story by Pater which is heavily though not literally autobiographical; and Joyce also imitates its covert, elliptical, allusive, even misty style. The status is mixed, in the manner of Pater: a poem in prose or an example of word painting. The boy, later an adolescent and then a university student, at the centre of this sketch, does not have, in the manner of Pater, a Christian name or a surname; he is only, with a circumlocution, from the beginning to the *

Joyce’s ‘Portrait’: Criticisms and Critiques, ed. T. E. Connolly, New York 1962; Portraits of the Artist: A Casebook on James Joyce’s ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, ed. W. E. Morris and C. A. Nault, New York 1962; The Workshop of Daedalus: James Joyce and the Raw Material for ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, ed. R. Scholes and R. Kain, Evanston, IL 1965; Twentieth-Century Interpretations of ‘A Portrait’, ed. W. M. Schutte, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1966; E. L. Epstein, The Ordeal of Stephen Dedalus: The Conflict of the Generations in Joyce’s ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, Carbondale, IL 1971; J. Aubert, Introduction à l’esthétique de James Joyce, Paris 1973; D. Sörensen, James Joyce’s Aesthetic Theory, Amsterdam 1977; Approaches to Joyce’s ‘Portrait’, ed. T. F. Staley and B. Benstock, Pittsburgh, PA 1977; J. A. Buttigieg, ‘A Portrait of the Artist’ in Different Perspectives, Athens, OH 1987; James Joyce: ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, ed. H. Bloom, New York 1988; M. Harkness, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’: Voices of the Text, Boston, MA 1990; J. Blades, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, London 1991; W. Thornton, The Antimodernism of Joyce’s ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, Syracuse, NY 1994; ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism, ed. J. P. Riquelme, H. W. Gabler with W. Hettche, New York 2007.

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end, the ‘subject of this portrait’. The painting metaphor becomes extended when the criticism of university philistinism is so sharp as to be defined ‘sculptural’. The evolution of the ‘subject’ does not involve any annulment of previous ‘features’. There is a signature, as in a portrait, and it is Jas. A. Joyce; but it is not at the top of the text but, it could be said, at the foot of the picture or portrait. Another consideration concerns the haste to attain a self-diagnosis and the implicit certainty that the passage from youth to maturity had already been cut out and needed to be historicized. This antecedent ‘I’ was already put in perspective by Joyce, approved in certain scorns but rejected for other external and heroic gestures – yet not too much and not entirely rejected. The fact is he pursued high and noble ideals, not ones involving compromises, as an ancient romantic Titan devoted to entrancing metempsychoses, and engaged in metaphysical contests (‘he had annihilated and rebuilt experience’). But the counterpoint lies in wait: ‘Alas for fatuity! As easily he might have summoned a regiment of the winds’. In the ten-year-long project of the autobiographical novel of Stephen Daedalus (this was the original spelling, which became Dedalus, without the ‘a’, afterwards), the 1904 portrait would have been torn, quartered and disseminated, that is spread out properly in sections and fragments in Stephen Hero and in the Portrait proper. In the 1904 text Joyce traces out an outline that will only be expanded and enriched following a chronological order, and likelihood and perspicuity, on the part of an omniscient narrator. But between the Ur-Portrait and Stephen Hero there very evidently intervenes the replacement of anonymity with a name, an imaginary name and a hendiadys with elementary symbolic and allusive reflections, not recondite ones: Stephen martyr and Greek Dedalus. This vicarious self-exploration lasts down to Ulysses included. 2. We can see as providential, or as deliberate, the rescue of just onefifth of Stephen Hero. It is a portion that has undeniable unity, and strict consistency, and therefore its own autonomy, although it is a fragment extracted from a continuum. The Portrait is divided into fifths, that is to say into five parts. What we are now able to read is due to a chance find,53 53

The novel was published in 1944 in its mutilated form (the manuscript until then had been kept by Sylvia Beach) by Cape. The rescue from the flames of the fireplace was

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and it amounts to about 200 pages of text out of the almost 1,000 that Joyce intended to write; and these are divided into twelve chapters, from the fifteenth to the twenty-sixth.54 The author’s dissatisfaction must have concerned the lack of objectivization imposed on the material, which is not exactly raw autobiography but not yet autobiographical material from which he had sufficiently distanced himself. However, the thematic heart was not to change in the next version: the fulcrum remains Joyce’s quarrel with the Catholic Church and in the second place with Irish nationalism. However, in flashes Joyce is already aware of his entelechy as a playful novelist, and as a juggler of and with words. Literature as a jeu is an aesthetic principle of Joyce as much as it is a praxis of Stephen’s, who is a collector of unusual pronunciations and unintentional misunderstandings heard in common speech, and also a scholar of idioms: in flashes, Stephen Hero is already a parody and a stylistic exercise. There also kicks in a mannerism that we could define as self-intertextuality. From now on Joyce will include ad libitum parts of his previous writings in other pieces, setting going a process of self-inclusion ad infinitum. Another phenomenon of internal relationality is constituted by preannouncement, that is by the launching of a hint destined for future development. Cranly, Stephen’s schoolfellow accused of being an ‘Israelite’, is a ‘typology’ of Bloom (in the technical sense that this term has in biblical criticism), and of his curiosities and idiosyncrasies, with his gluttony and his alimentary fantasies on delicious pork and his dreams of becoming a meat industrialist.55 One need only add the preannouncement of the library, where the students read and

legendarily attributed to Nora. Joyce, always reticent, spread at least the rumour that it was a work written in one go in 1904. I will quote from the edition by T. Spencer, J. J. Slocum and H. Cahoon, London 1979. 54 According to Ellmann 1959, 190, the novel was to have 63 chapters. 55 The following lucubration by Cranly is a page ready to go into Ulysses: ‘Cranly replied that it was nonsense to consider the pig unclean because he ate dirty garbage and at the same time to consider the oyster, which fed chiefly on excrements, a delicacy. He believed that the pig was much maligned: he said there was a lot of money to be made out of pigs. He instanced all the Germans who made small fortunes in Dublin by opening pork-shops’.

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above all on different occasions discuss various topics: hence we have the incubation of the episode of the library in Ulysses. At the same time the privileged relationship, the particular friendship, sincere but also rough and dialectic, between Stephen and Cranly, foreshadows and launches the extended, secondary and at certain moments decidedly primary motif of the ‘two gallants’, intellectual antagonists and rivals for the same woman. This motif is reprised in the homonymous story in Dubliners and will be developed with Richard and Robert in Exiles, ending with Shem and Shaun in Finnegans Wake. Stephen is running away from himself and from institutions: family, university, friendships themselves, and sex, are an obsession. This first alter ego thus gives Joyce, so to speak, the subject matter of Dubliners. One should notice this anticipating observation: ‘Nearly every day Stephen wandered through the slums watching the sordid lives of the inhabitants’. In similar circumstances this is not an autobiography but a series of objectified sketches. It is not by chance that the recurrent action attributed to Stephen is ‘observing’, and observing what is around him. 3. The space of the novel, in the part that has come down to us, is delimited by Dublin, and the total time is three years, in which Stephen takes a first degree at the university and then weighs up the job perspectives open to him. In this period he tries to work out his own aesthetic, which, though drawn as he believes from Aquinas, is opposed by the Jesuits who are his teachers. He gets infatuated with Ibsen, reads the authors of the university courses but also others about whom there is some scandal; he clashes bitterly with Irish nationalism and above all with the precepts of the Catholic Church, and loses his faith although he is tangled up in it and the bill remains unsettled. Finally, he loves an Emma who provokes him but withdraws and is uncatchable, and he teases her with sexually bold proposals; but he also has a fleeting liking for a Lucy. At the end of the part that has survived, he has collected a slim volume of love poems that he would like to publish, and he is in line for a job at the Guinness distillery beer in Dublin or for an unspecified university appointment; but he rejects both ideas. His aesthetic of verse is based on elastic rhythmic scansion, although moulded on meaning; he works out a theory of literary language, distinguishing a language of the market contrasted with the language of tradition; he writes critical and aesthetic essays that he

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publicly expounds, and writes epiphanies of Dublin life and paralysis. His first lunge at the Jesuit pseudo-aesthetic comes during a discussion on the art of Shakespeare: the Jesuits think that passions are described by Shakespeare to show their ‘moral outcome’, and therefore with a didactic and cathartic value. The ensuing scene shows in support of this a Jesuit teacher who lights a fire ‘with art’, and maintains, and shows, that there is practical or useful art.56 In chapter XIX Stephen expounds the paradox of a modern aesthetic based and founded upon that of Aquinas, the champion of the Jesuits: an aesthetic, according to him, in which the moral function is excluded, unknown, not contemplated, a codicil of which no trace is found in Aquinas.57 The next paradox is that this self-styled revolutionary, Stephen, upholds a classical art of ‘security and satisfaction and patience’, and judges Romanticism too impatient of limitations.58 According to Stephen, every age needs a pathfinder, a prophet, a guide, a light to illuminate it; and it is not a politician but a poet. The underlying objective, in Stephen’s words, is to express one’s own nature freely and fully for the benefit of a society that in this way would be enriched, and at the same time for one’s own benefit. Joyce was to lose this ardent Messianic drive, to the point of admitting to total indifference to the cultural reform of his country. In other words, the paradigmatic and pragmatic value of the autobiographical operation declines and becomes a surface alibi, and the only true aim will remain for him the celebration of the birth of the soul of the free artist. The chastity of priests is doubted by university students like Stephen, and this is perceived from a knowing dialogue in which two 56 This example of practical art is repeated, ‘redone’ as it is, at times verbatim, in the painstaking lighting of the fire by Bloom in ‘Eumaeus’. 57 It must be remembered that Joyce’s youthful aesthetic, in the Paris and Pola notebooks, is also a verbal, as well as conceptual, play on the term ‘rest’ and its compounds: there the goal of art is defined as static, that is to say provoking feelings ‘which arrest us’; ‘this rest is the only condition’ for which art can communicate the terror, the pity and the joy of tragedy and comedy. 58 Aquinas, Stephen declares in this crucial debate, did not ask beauty to instruct and to raise, and instead only that sensible objects offered to perception be arranged in such a way as to please: ‘pulchra sunt quae visa placent’, that is, ‘I hear no mention of instruction or elevation’ (understood in Aquinas).

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students whisper that a seminarist has had an affair with a woman. The Irish themselves, Stephen suspects, above all rough but very pious peasants, do not go to brothels but appease the torments of the flesh by masturbating. Even the chastity of Christ is doubted: Christ in the Gospel is passive and bloodless, yet he had around him too many women of dubious character. An uncle of Stephen’s execrates ‘dirty’ books, and yet he blushes when he is asked if he has ever bought any. 4. The technique of this novel is at once that of not explaining or only alluding to unadvised and inconsequent behaviours. There can be and there is a symbolic aim behind certain actions, but it cannot immediately be understood. Stephen is courting Emma, and at one point their two faces are about to draw close and touch; but turning over some coins in his pocket he suddenly leaves her. This decision is followed by the epiphany of a rather short prostitute with a black straw hat on her head, to whom Stephen gives his coins. He perhaps feels he is Christ, who sends away and forgives the sinless prostitute, because while she goes away blessing him he wonders whether, as pure literature, the account by Renan or the one by the evangelist is finer. Parody comes out into the open in Stephen Hero right from the implication of the title. That is to say it lies first of all in a subtle, ironic form of epic tale. The text is in the third person but the narrating voice allows itself formulas of magnification and antonomasia, literal or more often ironic; the parody lies in a similar ambiguity, which leaves two possibilities open. To this aspect there belong kennings of the type of ‘the perturbed young Celt’, ‘the young sceptic’ and others. Above all when he quotes and reports indirect speech word for word, Joyce is already in his element. That is to say, he takes on a slightly unnatural and loaded falsetto, which communicates an imperceptible form of alienation and splitting. This can be seen for instance in the story of the Gaelic lessons in chapter XVII, or in the summary of the walks with Emma Clery, when the neutral chronicle voice of the stenographer is blended in, and some expressions are not the reporter’s but the character’s: ‘she was awfully fond of the theatre herself ’, for instance. The story of the debate that follows Stephen’s lecture at the university, indirectly reported, is also a parody of newspaper language. Reference has been made for good reason to ‘flashes’ because Joyce struggles with the dramatic principle or with the

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epic status, to use his own categories, and often falls within the lyrical, or at least subjective, or at least emphatic register. He does not succeed in distinguishing himself from his protagonist in these cases, and is no longer the objective narrator, but identifies with the character. The absence of elements like ‘he said’ or ‘he thought’ is fatal. That is to say, the narrator’s extra-diegetic voice stands above that of the protagonist and overwhelms it. Joyce’s ventriloquism has at last come into being, in Stephen Hero, at the moment when, on the second page of the text, Stephen climbs the staircases of the university with a first-year student from Limerick, and notices that he pronounces the word ‘matriculation’ stressing the first syllable. For the moment it is an observation that is unused; immediately afterwards the exceptional affirmation occurs: the dean had ‘vocal ligaments’ that seemed to be ‘coated with chalk’. The narrating voice attributes to Stephen a systematic exploration of the words of the authors that he reads and his creation of a private reserve of words. He continually consults Skeat’s etymological dictionary, and above all picks up words from the street, from shops and in trams, and archives them. He empties these words of their meaning and makes them meaningless, virgin and ready to be reused. The poetry he works on is craft activity and spasmodic combination of words, and even swapping of letters. Gaelic too is a source of game and hilarity: ‘gradh’ means ‘love’ in that language but at the lecture everyone laughs, perhaps because of some unintentional hidden meaning. Father Butt is an Englishman from the south and says ‘yisterday’ instead of ‘yesterday’, another detail wasted or not exploited. § 137. Joyce X: ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ II. The impossible perfection of faith At the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Joyce indicates that he has taken ten years to write it and specifies the geographical poles of the writing: Dublin 1904 and Trieste 1914. In the latter year the novel started to appear in episodes in the English periodical The Egoist.59 A little

59 The novel was published in volume form by Huebsch on 29 December 1916 in America. In England Harriet Weaver published an edition of it which came out on 12 (not 2!) February 1917.

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possible preliminary variant game is to superimpose the two novels, Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in a way that is, as far as possible, stereophonic. Up to the year 1899, referred to in the text, only one version exists; then, only in the fifth chapter of the Portrait, two alternative or parallel versions, or ones that are mutually integrated. Some scenes are almost transferred exactly as they are, while others are completely rewritten, shortened or transformed. The epilogue, again, is only present in the Portrait. Empathy limits omniscience in the Portrait, because in the fiction it renders superfluous particular pieces of information. The novel is like the narration of a posterior ‘I’ holding a dialogue with an earlier one, and in similar dialogues no intruder is necessary, nor is the clarification of facts which are known to both. The novel in this third version is subdivided into five so-called chapters, and it is a significant organizational arrangement. We can call subchapters those internal segmentations that are made visible and announced by spacing (another modest pointer): they also mark, and delimit, epiphanic or discreet moments extracted from the continuum. Such segments – they are the smallest unit of measurement in the text – may be linked internally; they are more often splinters that are not linked to one another, but are contrasted. Conversely, spatial determination is easy, because practically every scene in the novel is situated in a street, in a square, in a park, or in a public place in Dublin that is not glossed over but very openly declared; and we could also call it a space divided into millimetres. Slightly more controversial is the determination of time: the moment or time of day when an action takes place, morning, afternoon, or evening, is always indicated, and just as often we know the season of the year or the month; but almost never the solar year. The novel closes with perfectly dated diary excerpts (but only as regards the month and the day, not the year). The pattern of the five chapters is a progressive rhythm of moments of widening of a temporal, physical-spatial, cognitive, moral or affective type. An isotopic dominant exists chapter after chapter: selfcontained phases and therefore stages, yet connected in a design. 2. At Clongowes it is late autumn, about seventy days before Christmas, when the students will return home. At first it could seem like a repetition and imitation of the cheerful, comradely, optimistic routine of the Victorian sagas of Tom Brown, if one just exchanged Clongowes for Rugby, and replaced the good Doctor Arnold with the jovial Father Conmee.

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More exactly, the events are topoi of the literary genre of the school story that was so popular with the middle and late Victorians. Just as with the Brontë sisters and Jane Eyre, and Dickens with David Copperfield, we are told about the bad sanitary conditions, the cold dormitories, the cheap food, the ceremony of prayers in the chapel, the rite of the weekly bath, sports like cricket and rugby, the varieties of human characters and the idiosyncrasies of the students, subdued or bossy, and the good headmaster and the sadistic and tormenting teachers. In Stephen the child we almost read a journey from the animal to the first manifestations of the human: a divisionist world of pure physical sensations, cold, warm and lukewarm. We assist at the birth of the principium individuationis. Stephen gets his bearings and acquires awareness of his place and role in the universe, a medieval organon, as he rises from the individualized to the Whole, and embraces the arc that goes from the infinitesimal to the infinite. Alongside curiosity, in Stephen Joyce traces a Kierkegaardian primordial awareness of life as a choice among alternatives. It is the dawn of the formulation of that historical motor that is the result of two contrary vectors. That being and becoming obey the binary principle is proved by the oppositions between hot and cold, and above all between the white rose of York and the red one of Lancaster: one of the two will have to be the winner in the mathematics competition. And: what would the Jesuit fathers have become if they had not become Jesuits? And what is the third alternative, in actual fact nonexistent, to the question of whether Stephen’s mother ever kisses him before going to bed, which arouses hilarity in his schoolfellows whether he answers yes or no? Anaphoras confirm, on the stylistic plane, the deep trace that memories, experienced scenes or even momentary feelings (the rat that splashes about repugnantly in the pond) engrave in an impressionable sensibility. If there is a diegetic dominant and a symbolic prolepsis in the first chapter of the Portrait, it is that of rebellion and its repression. But rebellion depends on a binary historical principle that Joyce has already discovered; at the same time this dual reality cannot be reduced to a single dimension, and therefore remains given and open. History is rich in similar unresolved dualisms: after the one between York and Lancaster, there is the one between loyal Catholics and others who are anticlericals, which ramifies into further local dualisms. At the college the boys gang up against the Jesuit fathers, and threaten revolts and rebellions and also enact them, but

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they are brought back to discipline. The chapter closes with an action of – temporary – pacification, between the students, who send ahead a spokesman, and the representative of the enemy army, in actual fact the ‘general’, Rector Conmee. In Stephen’s home a revolt of atheistic progressives like Mr Casey makes an attack on the power of priests at the Christmas dinner; like Nietzsche, he would like to banish God himself. Back at Clongowes, the sacrilege of the students is faced, and perhaps also their homosexual sin. 3. An isotopy acting in the second chapter, derivable from the succession of elderly figures, or old or dying ones, who accompany Stephen, is Ireland aging and needing to replace its dead (also metaphorically) with its living: dead or about to die are Uncle Charles and Mike Flynn, the talent scout of the marathon runners in the park. Most of the characters are decrepit or only deceptively lively. Stephen’s father says, admitting an ideal aging, ‘We’re not dead yet, sonny. No, by the Lord Jesus (God forgive me) not half dead’. Besides, the evocation of the meeting between Stephen and Father Conmee, in the first chapter, and done at a distance by Stephen’s father, dismantles every positive impression that had been received, and Conmee too, with his nasal voice and vulgar laugh, has fallen from grace (but, as we will see below, the judgement on the Jesuits is destined to improve). Hence the visit to Cork, behind and under the patina of hilarity and bombast, is a journey to the land of the dead, or of the living dead, and that is to say beings that in the manner of Eliot are ‘hollow men’, who flirt with the maids and recall little secrets, little adventures, escapades, and macho pasts. Stephen attends in this chapter, without wholly knowing it, to an investiture of his with a great and brave mission; at the same time he becomes a pioneer and a discoverer; and first he had been a geographer. In a progressive widening of the radius of his explorations, he arrives at the harbour, where it is possible to make a leap. Eros is initially the idealization of bookish figures like Mercedes in The Count of Monte Cristo; but soon Stephen feels the real pangs of the flesh: perhaps a ‘flame’ truly lives in the house whose garden has a rose patch. A spiral or vortex starts, and the erotic fever rises and tears him to pieces. The second chapter closes with a symbolic action that fits in with the one with which the first one closed. They are two manifestations of self-affirmation, or enacted rites of passage, but intermediary and not conclusive ones, and therefore not crowning events; more exactly ordeals by fire. In the first chapter Stephen

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sensed he had risen into the pantheon of Jesuit glories, and was crossing the threshold or a threshold, and felt admitted to the heroic blazon of those glories, immortalized in life; here he crosses another one, and it is that of carnal sin. In both cases there is a physical approach, a contact like a handshake or a kiss. Regarding linguistic awareness we assist at the emptying of language or more exactly at its being deprived of meaning. Stephen is not sensitive to the representative or eidetic value of words: words do not evoke colours, nor are words in sentences a coloristic filter (‘associations of legend and colour’), but instead, he being weak-sighted, renderings of emotional states ‘in lucid supple periodic prose’. The sermon in the third chapter on the ‘four last things’ is reported in three phases: an introduction in direct speech in inverted commas, a second part in indirect speech, and finally a close that is still live. Aesthetically it is amazing that Joyce, who organizes the text through allusive splinters, and usually writes synthetically, includes unabridged the apparent copy of a sermon. Given by a Jesuit, this sermon obeys the rules and laws of Ignatian preaching: that is to say, it concentrates on compositio loci and tends morbidly to make the students feel the physical and also spiritual sensations of a post mortem state of eternal damnation. The ostentatious epic tone and the thick and opulent sonorities have a mimetic justification: the homily aims to defeat, persuade and smash the hearer with the unheard-of and superhuman strength of its apostrophes and its pleadings, and with its examples of obsessive redundancy. It conveys the self-destructive torment of the damned man magnificently described by Hopkins in his ‘terrible sonnets’. The sermon does not significantly close on the fourth of these ‘things’, or at least Stephen does not report this part or Joyce does not have him listen to it or remember it. So the sermon entirely centres on the terror of hell and on the appalling prospect of damnation for having lived in sin without repentance, and on the need for repentance itself. It already contains the idea of the endless or possible repetitiveness of the Fall: in the scheme of creation Lucifer and his angels fall, then God remedies by creating a second couple that falls (felix culpa); others will also fall again after the second fall has been remedied.60 Stephen’s confession is also proleptically prepared for by the

60 This scheme is traceable in the passage by St Paul in 1 Cor 15, 20–8.

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playful recital, in front of his schoolfellow Heron, of the Confiteor, in the third chapter. The pacifying contact with a priest duplicates the meeting with Father Conmee at the end of the first chapter and is symmetrical to it. The epilogue of the chapter marks an ironic triumph, since Stephen believes he has found the true life but will suddenly retract. At the same time Joyce here creates his first extended parody of a genre consolidated in space and time, both because the sermon effects a complete, perfect identification of the posterior ‘I’ with the contemporary one, and because it is a consummate stylistic exercise in neo-Baroque homiletics. So the long passage can be considered a distant preview of one of the final chapters of Ulysses: in this connection we know it paraphrases and adapts a sermon of a seventeenth-century preacher, Pinamonti. In this chapter the sixteenyear-old Stephen is outlined, even before Eliot’s Prufrock, as the type of the young intellectual who creeps lewdly into night-time districts, feeling lust mixed with a sense of guilt, and therefore visited by obscure hang-ups of conscience. Some anticipations are literal or synonymous by chance:61 the roads are ‘tortuous’, the corners ‘dark’; prostitutes, as in Eliot, ogle and sneer from doorways. Above all they effect that appropriation of phallic attributes, present also in Eliot, through ‘hairpins’ that stick out of their hair. And Stephen ‘prowls’ like an animal – and therefore in the guise in which and with which Eliot always sees sex (as a regression to the beast state, following the Elizabethans). If the previous ones describe the fall from grace, this chapter represents the recovery of it. That is to say, there is first the Fall, then the Resurrection, but also the prospect of the Judgement in the religious and biblical context. This is also the chapter of attempted metamorphosis, or of the return to the religious innocence of the beginning. It

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It is always difficult, as I mentioned, to determine the degree of deliberateness or simply the randomness of borrowings and echoes. However, Cranly’s invitation to Stephen in the fifth chapter (‘Let us eke go’) cannot be judged accidental. It is almost exactly the same as the incipit of Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’ (‘Let us go then, you and I’). However, the destination of the journey is not the same. We know that the first version of ‘Prufrock’ preceded the Portrait, and the definitive one followed it. According to Tindall, ‘Joyce […] always insisted that Eliot stole The Waste Land from Ulysses’ (A Reader’s Guide to ‘Finnegans Wake’, quoted in the bibliography on Finnegans Wake, 60); and Joyce, in Finnegans Wake, ‘always has Eliot in mind’ (ibid., 85).

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aims to re-establish a ‘lasting covenant’ between God and man the sinner. There is thus sighted and quoted the theological theme, a wholly Joycean one, of ‘atonement’. § 138. Joyce XI: ‘The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ III. The investiture of the artist In the fourth chapter of the Portrait it is symptomatic that the proposal to Stephen to become a Jesuit weakens rather than strengthening the intention that has just been born to lead a holy and pious life. Stephen recedes little by little from his intentions because of the delightful risk of being able to withdraw from the abyss when he has gone right to the edge of it. But he also feels a reaction common to the great saints: the emptying of faith and a sense of aridity and mystical inappetence – the same justification that critics who are believers give of Hopkins’s ‘terrible’ sonnets. The programme of faith and devotions is destroyed by the very maximalism in virtue of which Stephen had sinned. He cannot make certain sacrifices because the object of the sin is already repugnant to him. The Jesuit father that illustrates the beauties of priestly life to Stephen warns him, believing it to be a winning rhetorical move, not to say yes without conviction. Then he adulates him and tries to seduce him with the prospect of the priest’s spiritual power. As a hero in pectore Stephen undergoes the inverted temptation of Christ in the desert, that is to say he is very sensitive to the idea of spiritual power, above all that of the priest. As he comes back ‘from the desert’, the quartet of louts who vulgarly sing on the pavements is proleptic. In a polyglot language, the three swimmer friends greet ‘Bous Stephaneforos’ for the sacrifice, or Stephen’s ox soul, that is the epiphany of his name, Dedalus-Icarus, and the forging of his mission, antithetical to the one he has just refused. He listens to the call of another voice that is not ‘inhuman’. In the whole novel Stephen has been persecuted by some ironic baptizers, Johannine hypostases that he rejects according to the prosaic sign of a dirty person that hates washing, and postpones sine die having a bath. It is the satanic refusal of exorcism.62 At the end of the chapter Stephen 62 Indeed, in the first scene of the novel at Clongowes he is hurled into the ‘square ditch’ by his schoolfellow Wells, who just happens to be a seminarist, that is to say

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does not participate in the bath of the three companions splashing in the marshy water, but imagines taking flight. Mocked by the three swimmers, he discovers the literality of the sneers: he is a Dedalus who flies or will fly away upwards. The imagery that predominates and hovers in this scene is that of regeneration, of true regeneration, in comparison to death, by which he had been tempted: Stephen goes out of the ‘grave of boyhood’. He takes off his shoes and socks and grasps a cane or a wand; he then has a vision of a girl turned into woman-bird: simulation, symbol and vision of an artistic creation that is wholly telluric. In the diegetic sinusoidal syntax, he thus withdraws from boasted divine grace to a lay state that is entirely profane. Like Hopkins, Stephen believes that the Church puts up some obstacles to art, but a voice rises that tells him that at least the Jesuits do not establish pre-emptive boundaries between the two spheres, and that one can be a believer and an artist, perhaps also a priest and an artist, at the same time. His investiture as an artist is described from the point of view of the three friends who frolic in the sea and apostrophize Stephen with the same derision as that with which Stephen in Ulysses is treated by Mulligan: and it is a case in which Joyce the author dissociates himself shrewdly, and more visibly, from Stephen the protagonist and ‘young artist’. For the time being Stephen is a late Decadent artist that disparages those common souls that seem to enjoy their mediocrity, satisfied and blithe in this symbolic immersion in a kind of gratifying amniotic fluid, and talk in vulgar slang; whereas Stephen conceives the insane dream of spreading the wings of Icarus. The reference symbols become those of Icarus but also of an updated and unrecognizable Christ who leaves his tomb and his shroud and meets life. The scene with which the fourth chapter closes can already seem, and in effect is, a conclusive climax and a sufficiently stentorian, symphonic and even rhetorical chord. And instead the novel does not finish here, but goes on for another 65 pages. This fifth chapter only contemplates three internal subunits, two of which are so long that one could call them, in cinema terms, sequence shots. The second is a kind of single act without division into tableaux and therefore also a kind of miniature Ulysses, because a potential exorcist. His mother succeeds in washing him in the fifth chapter when she sends him to the Jesuits at the university.

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it develops in a well specified temporal unity, from dawn to evening. But the third section, the conclusive one, is brief and in the form of diary items, and therefore dated, which attain the size of the small paragraph, even only of one or two lines. The two previous ones alternate the dialogue, above all between Stephen and other companions, to the account of his mental lucubrations, his visions, his feelings and his superstitions. 2. In these three blocks that make up the chapter, Joyce experiments with yet other narrative forms, and the novel as a consolidated genre is close to its breaking point. The first subchapter is a tour de force carried forward through disjointed flashes: it consists of discussions that can jump from one subject to another, from the sublime to the banal, the sign of personalities that are either extremely unified and associated, or on the contrary divided and irreconcilable. In speeches that seem to be unprepared, and to occur abruptly, unrequested, and not introduced, there irrupt other epiphanic ones about Dublin, and these are further schizophrenic, befuddled, unplanned interventions. Right in the middle of a discussion on the aesthetics of Aquinas a scrap dealer’s cart enters the scene squeaking deafeningly, and it is described for some lines. Another time Stephen takes a flea off himself and starts to philosophize about it. Cranly tries to urge and persuade Stephen to compromise with faith while crunching some dry figs and handling a toothpick, with which he extracts some fragments of the figs. With the discussion between Stephen and the rector a type of novel within the novel or the section takes over: the philosophical dialogue. The third segment reverses the natural and evolutionary journey between lyrical and epic poetry, as it passes from the third to the first person, rather than, as in Turpin Hero, from the first to the third. In themselves these three diary pages are the rhapsody of a saturated mind, able to turn on itself 360 degrees. It is the wild phenomenology, not subject to the principle of selection, of a human mind, as in Ulysses. The episode is among the most amazing in the novel because a still young novelist, who speaks of an alter ego of his that is even younger, tries out a playful way of thinking and narrating. This is the germ of Finnegans Wake. Imperceptible and therefore very subtle literary embroidery is shown off in it, in which memories of Shakespeare, in the form of fragments quoted word for word, or distorted (Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra), are blended with other literary allusions.

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3. If likelihood is a criterion to follow, after the momentary, sudden, flashing ecstasy on the shore at the end of the fourth chapter, prose takes over, and with it the routine of daily life. Stephen has imperiously discovered that he wants to be an artist, and now he discovers what the art that the artist has to construct is, and where and how he can construct it. This can happen only by leaving Ireland as an exile. But these decisions are not sudden and are worked out in a certain time frame; humanly, in other words, the young student experiences scruples, doubts and hesitations; but he overcomes them. However, the ending of the novel is very blurred, almost undecided, interlocutory, not triumphal. For a further reason the conclusive diary extracts are fundamental: Joyce stops being the intermediary and the sound box of his character or his earlier self, and lets him speak directly; and he allows the reader to go back to the source and to draw his or her own conclusions. It is obvious that this responds to a precise desire for psychological realism: Stephen has demolished, decimated and removed one by one all his friends and confidants, and remains as the only interlocutor of himself in a regimen of self-communication. The Portrait thus ends by parodistically illustrating a third modality of autobiographical writing: it is not the diary of the author, but instead of the internal protagonist. § 139. Joyce XII: The journalist and lecturer The years in Trieste present the pleasant surprise of an ‘Italian’ Joyce, in the form of a group of writings that reintroduce him, not long after the university essays, notes and comments from the years 1898–1904, as a reviewer and arts writer, historian and political commentator, lecturer and theatre critic. All these articles and lectures are written in fluent, at times brilliant Italian, even almost ostentatiously so. Their style is rich in nineteenth-century vocabulary and obsolete Tuscanisms, and curiously attracted to certain expressive opportunities in the Italian language, such as diminutives and terms of endearment, which are rarely found or not possible in English. Aside from any contingent reason, and any informative purpose they might have had, these minor documents are extremely useful precisely because their topics were not imposed on Joyce, but freely chosen. Joyce dusts off his strong suits and his old literary flames and introduces

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us to new ones; revisits the political and cultural history of Ireland, summarizes in quick sketches the journey of the nation and the tradition that he is a son of. However, as usual, it is not this or that writer, or this or that aspect of culture or of Irish history that stands out, as much as Joyce himself, who regularly imposes on his subject a series of distortions and interprets it with a personal key. Almost everywhere in these writings one finds the traces of prefigurations or adumbrations of his own personal situation.63 His confrontation with his roots and an unprecedented interest in the evolutionary processes in the arts, as well as in history and its connecting elements, constitute the most relevant novelty of this body of writing. Joyce patiently recombines the threads of a plot, finds elements of unity everywhere, where only a few years earlier he had undone and untied every knot. In terms of ties with his narrative work, these Italian articles and lectures demonstrate once more the compactness of Joyce’s oeuvre, where nothing is created and nothing is destroyed but everything is transformed. It should therefore come as no surprise to find echoes and anticipations of variable relevance (from the single word or historical or literary character, to a sentence, anecdote or an entire textual fragment) to the three works begun or completed by Joyce at this time. 2. The group of historical and political articles published in the Trieste newspaper Il Piccolo della Sera indicates an oscillating attitude that is certainly not a model of consistency. The complaint over the vexatious exploitation of the Irish by the British64 is a recurring motif, as is a critical and severe judgement against his fellow countrymen. However, all things considered, it is the nostalgic patriot, who sings the praises of old Ireland, who gains the upper hand. Joyce, speaking to or writing for an uninformed and biased audience, strives to raise awareness about his country, its history, its traditions and culture (and even some of its geographical curiosities and some of its latent Italian characteristics), and is anxious to rectify the distorted image set by the press and to restore Ireland’s honour in an 63

A personal allusion is found in ‘L’ombra di Parnell’ [‘The shade of Parnell’] (1912), with the patriot depicted as a ‘cervo cacciato’ [‘hunted deer’]. 64 A subjective reading, where the emphasis is placed on Ireland as both the mother of martyrs and the birthplace of formidable heresiarchs.

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international context. Consequently, his historical reconstruction of Irish separatism, in the triptych of articles ‘Il Fenianismo: L’ultimo Feniano’ [‘Fenianism: The Last Fenian’], ‘Home Rule maggiorenne’ [‘Home Rule Comes of Age’] and ‘L’Irlanda alla sbarra’ [‘Ireland at the Bar’], all from 1907, aims to keep its violent and bloody wing (which according to Joyce was in decline) clearly separated from its peaceful and parliamentarian expression. The other side of the coin is the widespread scepticism and the cynical and bitter sarcasm with which Joyce, renewing the contentious rancour of Stephen Dedalus, stigmatizes a submissive and prostrate Ireland, a traitor of her heroes and the servant of two masters, faithful for centuries to a Church that, in reward, sold it as a slave to the English oppressor. 3. As for the writings on literature (including a series of lectures, now lost, on Shakespeare, likely the ‘source’ of the library episode in Ulysses), they prefigure the artistic ideals and aesthetic tendencies, not always clearly reconcilable at first glance, from Joyce’s Trieste period. The most interesting of these are some delightful biographical and critical features on British and Irish writers indulging in a purely narrative vein where an essential anecdotal style is combined with strange details and bizarre paradoxes. As in the previous critical writings from the years 1902–1904, Joyce projects himself into and partially identifies himself with the authors chosen, both past writers as well as contemporaries, and establishes with them a form of kinship and consanguinity derived from a similar spirit of rebellion, from an analogous estrangement from the environment or from marginalization and scandal. In Mangan65 he invariably sees the stranger in his own fatherland, in Wilde66 he points to the scapegoat and the typical product of the repressive British education system;67 already aware of his prismatic nature, he finds an

65

The patriotic tirade and denunciation of the horrors of British colonization, contained in ‘L’Irlanda: isola dei santi e dei savi’ [‘Ireland: Isle of Saints and Sages’] (1907), was later transferred almost bodily to the Cyclops episode in Ulysses, but with the substantial difference that what here is said in a serious and sympathetic version sounds ironic and only half-serious there. 66 ‘James Clarence Mangan’ (1907). 67 ‘Oscar Wilde: il poeta di “Salomé”’ [‘Oscar Wilde: the poet of “Salomé”’] (1909), mostly the Italian translation of the homonymous essay from 1902.

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elective affinity both in the gaunt, factual realism of someone like Defoe68 and in the visionary nature of Blake.69 Blake’s beloved wife, Catherine Boucher, in the remarkable portrait that Joyce dedicates to her, has the intellectual features of Nora Barnacle, inasmuch as she is neither cultured nor refined, rather a ‘simple woman, of hazy and sensual mentality’, an authentic ‘creation’ emerging from the hands of her husband. § 140. Joyce XIII: ‘Exiles’ I. The betrayed, betrayable and betraying husband Exiles, the only play written or rather completed by Joyce, was finished in 1915, between the Portrait and Ulysses, and was published, and it premiered, in 1919 (in German, in Munich). Joyce’s enduring Ibsenism filters through in the use, from the very start, of reticence and preterition, allusion and partial revelation. The characters rummage around in and dredge up one another’s past until they bring to light episodes that are unpleasant, turbid, and which have been hushed-up. The number and the proportion of guilty secrets that are revealed are excessive, with the result that the play more often than not seems to move backwards rather than forwards. The essential motivation of the protagonist, Richard Rowan, can be identified as distantly Ibsenian, as he acts with the desire to return to his wife Bertha the freedom that he thinks he has taken from her. This of course echoes the ideal framework from A Doll’s House, with whose protagonist Bertha has undoubtedly some affinities, just as she derives from many other of Ibsen’s wife characters. And yet the psychological contortion, the almost hallucinatory and torturing self-confession, and the mixture of desire and misogyny, make Richard a character who could very well, or perhaps even more successfully feature in Strindberg. Nevertheless, Exiles remains an immature and theatrically unsuccessful work, where the naturalistic and the symbolic plan, the autobiographical theme and the embodiment of an idea, are unable to harmoniously blend together. If Bertha is a character who is too simple and childishly candid, Richard is too rich and his aporias are not reflected in ambiguity and complexity but verge on mere implausibility. 68 ‘Daniel De Foe’ (1912). 69 ‘William Blake’ (1912).

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All four main characters, suspended in mid-air between the realistic and the symbolic, come across as unnatural and overly contrived. Moreover, Exiles runs aground in dialogue, no longer successfully witty and natural, except in the secondary characters, but almost exclusively dry and cerebral. More than the characters, it is the ideas and opposing voices of an inner debate that confront one another. However, Exiles remains invaluable in that it prefigures some of the roles and motifs on which Ulysses and Finnegans Wake hinge. At times these motifs are undefined or only hinted at, at others they are brought firmly to the foreground. The play is thus a work of transition. Its most striking foreshadowings lie in Joyce’s placing at the centre a married couple whose marital happiness is threatened by the ghosts of jealousy and betrayal, and in the identification, as a driving force, of an antagonism between two male characters. The naturalistic plan of the plot suddenly turns out to be enriched by a bundle of weak, faint symbolic and archetypal contrasts. Although not well implemented, the intention to cast the two male protagonists in defined roles and types is evident: ‘Every step advanced by humanity through Richard is a step backwards by the type which Robert stands for’, wrote Joyce in the notes later appended to the play. While not being the dominant motive, the conflict between Richard Rowan and Robert Hand, the two friend-rivals vying for the wife of the former, Bertha, overshadows the emerging conflict between the artist and the bourgeois. Joyce establishes in the play a pattern of opposition-reconciliation, delegating to the female character – through the sharing of her body, as Molly will later be in Ulysses – the task, for now only envisaged, of the ‘spiritual communion’ of the two antagonists, according to a Eucharistic allusion that Ulysses will develop in the full range of its implications.70 2. A neat parallelism, bordering on the schematic, shapes the assortment of the quartet of the main characters (whose names, Richard, Robert, Bertha, Beatrice, are two pairs of words starting with the same initials) and frames the play in every detail. The action unfolds along a series of dialogues between two of the four characters, without there ever being the 70 At the end of the play Bertha confesses explicitly: ‘I wanted to bring you close together – you and him’.

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simultaneous presence of all four together. Their simultaneous presence, which would thereby help avoid the prolongation of misunderstandings, might have anticipated the epilogue and shortened the play considerably. Act I pivots on a double seduction: the masked and devious one of Beatrice (piano teacher of the Rowans young son, Archie) by Richard, and the other, which is explicit, of Bertha by Robert. Bertha does not resist, not least because she is encouraged by her husband, whose unresolved conflict between intellect (which leads him to believe that he should allow his wife to be free) and emotion (which rekindles his jealousy) is at the origin of the dramatic development. In the confrontation between Robert and Richard, in the apartment where Robert has arranged to meet Bertha and which takes up half of Act II, it is first Richard, strengthened by his intellectual lucidity, who attacks the vulgarity and bad taste of Robert, who defends himself; soon after the positions are reversed and it is Robert, wearing the clothes of Iago and sowing in Richard the seeds of suspicion of Bertha’s infidelity, who counterattacks. The moral high ground and nobility of Richard collapse in the confession that he had wanted to be betrayed at the hands of Robert, even if in extremis, when Bertha arrives, he is able to recover his mask of superiority. Against the backdrop of a Lawrencian patter of rain, and while the candle flame symbolically fades, the curtain falls in this act on Bertha and Robert alone, leaving the reader and the spectator in doubt as to whether the adultery is actually committed. Act III, which takes place the following morning, subverts the perspective and looks at the marriage from the now disillusioned eyes of Bertha, who sorrowfully confesses her frustration. The conclusion is extremely provisional: Robert, who swears to Richard that Bertha has been faithful, goes into exile (while the Rowans have recently returned to Dublin after nine years in Italy), and Richard and Bertha make peace with one another, at least to all appearances. But Richard, gnawed by doubt, can do nothing more than observe his plan sinking on all fronts. § 141. Joyce XIV: ‘Exiles’ II. Towards a new ‘alter ego’ A reflection on marital status is once again prominently featured in Exiles, and it was modelled almost without transpositions on autobiographical experience. Joyce debates the thorny issue of the jealous and betrayed

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(or betrayable) and at the same time seducing husband, and even the masochistic instigator of his wife’s liaisons.71 This is a double-faced problem that, tested out on Gabriel Conroy in ‘The Dead’, was in the process of being fully reflected, but made light of and downplayed, in Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. In this auto-analytical test Joyce unmasks his morbid preoccupation to ascertain if Nora had followed him freely or not, and reveals the true motive behind that bet with himself which causes Rowan to throw his wife into the arms of his best friend: to give her the power to cheat so that he would have the freedom to cheat in turn. This bet was apparently contrived to find out to what extent Joyce could lightheartedly withstand Nora’s ‘controlled’ prostitution, which he himself had authorized. Besides staging his own marriage, Joyce also envisages in Exiles the fulfilment of a remote possibility and of a secret temptation, repressed or maybe vaguely, though secretly, cherished: reviewing his fate as an exile he tries to imagine his homecoming and projects himself into the image of the black sheep returning to the fold. If in ‘A Painful Case’ from Dubliners he had imagined his permanence in Dublin, in Exiles he reverses the situation, and the temptation that he discusses and questions is the same one that Robert Hand suggests to Richard Rowan: to reintegrate himself comfortably, ‘rich in fame and misfortune’, and having left the past behind, within the ranks of the cultural elite in Dublin. Ulysses was to be his definitive refusal to do so. 2. The moustache and spectacles, the crazed, squandered nights spent during his youth in an apartment which more truthfully would become in Ulysses the Martello Tower, the turbulent break with his mother and his persistent fits of remorse; the flight from Dublin with a sensible woman, throbbing with humanity but culturally inferior to him, and a long Italian exile – these are just a few parallel facts from his backstory that make Richard Rowan a transparent stand-in for Joyce during his time in Trieste. 71

As Kermode (KPE, 88) argues, Joyce ‘seems to have conducted small experiments in self-cuckoldry’. Stephen, in the library episode in Ulysses, calls Shakespeare a ‘bawd and cuckold’, but so is Bloom, who is therefore a development of Richard Rowan, at least, and especially, when he shows Stephen Molly’s photography at the cabman’s shelter, with the barely ill-concealed reason that both of them are passionate about music.

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The indignant and furious letters sent by Joyce to his wife in the rare periods they were apart, the agonizing doubts and constant questioning of fidelity even before his marriage to Nora (who far from defending herself, took pleasure in provoking, rather than banishing, her husband’s suspicions), are further points of contact between biography and dramatic transposition. ‘That I will never know’, Richard’s response to Bertha who offers to reveal what really happened between her and Robert during the night, is a phrase indicative of the secret uncertainty that always tortured Joyce about Nora’s past romances and her alleged sexual fragility. The play ends significantly without this doubt ever being dissolved: without, as in Pirandello, it ever coming to light whether the version given by Robert – of only having possessed Bertha in his dreams – is the truth or a white lie. In his deceitful search for a free pass for his own sentimental adventures, Richard embodies the further, contradictory but complementary autobiographical component of the voyeuristic and perverted writer,72 avid to derive material from the extramarital affairs of his wife, and especially of the seducer of various women, including Amalia Popper,73 Gertrude Kämpffer and Marthe Fleischmann, in whom Joyce seemed to recognize what Nora was not: neither a femme fatale nor a sharp and refined intellect. Richard is or would like to be an homme fatal or a superman à la Nietzsche, beyond good and evil, and he looks forward to a new statute regarding polygamy in marriage. He also uses his woman and other women as a source of inspiration. On stage we see the torture of characters who aspire to be above jealousy and would freely and modernly even prostitute their wives, while they are, in fact, secretly jealous. Richard craves liberation ‘from every law’, and ‘every bond’.74 In the search for a new alter ego to replace Stephen Dedalus from the Portrait, by that time outdated, Joyce most likely dismissed in Richard Rowan the possibility of transforming Stephen by simply aging him, and of updating him by transplanting him to a subsequent autobiographical context. Joyce was to retrace his steps, and restored Stephen unchanged in Ulysses, where he will resolve the issue by contrasting him with a second,

72 As confirmed by a bundle of ‘obscene’ letters to Nora. 73 The brief infatuation of Joyce with this pupil in Trieste forms the basis of the diary fragment Giacomo Joyce. 74 Bertha describes him as a ‘woman-killer’, including his mother.

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but quite heterogeneous, autobiographical projection, that is, Bloom. A certain reshuffling of the components of his own personal character does not prevent us from seeing in the two male characters two complementary facets and an equal distribution of Stephen’s traits. Richard – with a wealth of unamalgamated elements of personal information that determine his failure as a character – is Stephen and Bloom in the same person, and therefore, both the real and the ideal Joyce. He is, unusually, the self-confident and perversely rational character, while Robert is the one who suffers, the weak man, the loser. In Freudian terms, Richard, who Joyce presented in the notes to the play as an ‘auto-mystic’, represents the superego or the ego, if for no other reason than his heroic attempt to eradicate jealousy and his noble purpose to restore freedom to his wife. Richard, in fact, advocates the repression and sublimation of instincts, which nevertheless break out in him unconquerable, and he cultivates ambitions of diversity that Bertha wisely tries to return to normality. By contrast, Robert, pathetic in his twee, over-the-top mawkishness, is the id, Joyce’s vulgarly hedonistic and purely instinctual side. Perhaps this is also a mistake on Joyce’s part, in that Robert is the embryonic stage of Bloom.75 Similar to the juxtaposition of the male characters is that of the female ones. Bertha, inferior to Richard, in whose eyes she knows she is worthless, is clearly Nora. Though created ex nihilo by her husband and culturally not evolved, the two rivals bow adoringly before her and confess their subjection. Just as Bertha is a natural, genuine character, without mental superstructures, so Beatrice is the cultured intellectual, as Bertha recognizes, who sees in her ‘everything that [she is] not – in birth and education’. The heated discussion between the four protagonists, which is elevated to an almost stratospheric unreality is, at times, interrupted by the appearances of everyday life, offered with an obvious function of contrast. This is perhaps the meaning of the mysterious and very brief intrusion made by a fishmonger, who in the third act is heard shouting in the street about how good her herrings are.76

75 A reading in these terms regarding the opposition between the two characters is supported by the notes to the play, where Joyce says that ‘everyone is Robert but would like to be Richard’. 76 But cf. the subtle comment by Corti 2007, 69–70 (the ‘red herring’, together with an inference of an anthropological nature).

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§ 142. Joyce XV: ‘Ulysses’* I. The endogenesis The first outline of Ulysses, as far as the semi-novel about Stephen is concerned, can be found in some manuscript pages penned by Joyce in early 1914 and intended to be part of the end of the Portrait. They describe *

In addition to critical editions cited in the general bibliography, one of the numerous contemporary editions that is worthy of note is that of the 1922 text, ed. J. Johnson, Oxford 1993, last reprint 2008, especially for the expansive and faultless commentary. The very first statements and reviews (including those by Pound, Eliot and Larbaud) are collected in CRHE (cited in the general bibliography), 184–343. E. R. Curtius, James Joyce und sein Ulysses, Zürich 1929; S. Gilbert, James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, London 1930 (a landmark critical text, essential for the Homeric interpretative key); E. Wilson, ‘James Joyce’, in WAX, 191–236; C. Jung, ‘Ulysses: ein Monolog’, Europäische Revue, VIII (1932), 548–68 (excerpts in CRHE, 584–5); F. Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’, London 1934; H. Broch, James Joyce und die Gegenwart, Wien 1936; W. Empson, ‘The Theme of Ulysses’, The Kenyon Review, XVIII (1956), 26–52 (a stimulating essay that advances an unprecedented interpretation, on which cf. n. 85 below); W. M. Schutte, Joyce and Shakespeare: A Study in the Meaning of ‘Ulysses’, New Haven, CT 1957; G. De Angelis, Guida alla lettura dell’‘Ulisse’ di J. Joyce, Milano 1961, 1992; R. M. Adams, Surface and Symbol: The Consistency of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, New York 1962, and Afterjoyce: Studies in Fiction After ‘Ulysses’, New York 1977; G. Cambon, La lotta con Proteo, Milano 1963; G. Melchiori, ‘Joyce e la tradizione del romanzo’, ‘Il Waste Land e Ulysses’, ‘Joyce, Eliot e l’incubo della storia’, in MEF, 43–64, 87–106, 107–32; H. Blamires, The Bloomsday Book: A Guide through Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, London 1966; D. Hayman, ‘Ulysses’: The Mechanics of Meaning, Madison, WI 1970; R. Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey, London 1973; James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’: Critical Essays, ed. C. Hart and D. Hayman, Berkeley, CA 1974; M. French, The Book as World: James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, Cambridge, MA 1976; M. Groden, Ulysses in Progress, Princeton, NJ 1977, 1987; H. Kenner, Ulysses, London 1980 and, rev., Baltimore, MD and London 1987 (whimsical, bizarre paraphrases of a text ascribed to an ‘implacable realist’ [49]; adopts the opposite approach of Tindall, and surpasses the compilatory Blamires 1966); V. Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, ed. F. Bowers, introd. J. Updike, London 1980; K. Lawrence, The Odyssey of Style in ‘Ulysses’, Princeton, NJ 1981; P. Pugliatti and R. Zacchi, Terribilia meditans. La coerenza del monologo interiore in ‘Ulysses’, Bologna 1983; J. Derrida, Ulysses gramophone. Deux mots pour Joyce, Paris 1987 (a rather gimmicky essay); F. Gozzi, Fuori del labirinto: appunti per uno studio sull’‘Ulisse’ di Joyce, capp. 1–6, Pisa 1987; V. Mahaffey, Reauthorizing Joyce, Cambridge 1988 (an analysis of the last episode); G. Martella, Ulisse. Parallelo biblico e modernità, Bologna 1997 (a decidedly noteworthy tour de force: consistent with the book also by Martella on Dubliners, it aims to demonstrate the underestimated influence of the Bible, its models and themes and its ‘typology’; but it gets lost in preambles,

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a fight between two friends in a tower. The embryonic form of Bloom is in one of the many short stories, planned but never written, which were to be merged into the fifteen later collected in Dubliners. Its main character was supposed to be – a distant precursor – a Jew named Hunter.77 The novel was almost immediately interrupted so Joyce could dedicate himself to Exiles; it was resumed in July 1915, in Zurich, and continued without too much of a hurry until March 1918, when the three opening chapters began to be published in serial form, thanks to the intervention of Ezra Pound and Harriet Shaw Weaver, in The Little Review in New York, a publication that, continuing until the end of 1920, covered half of the text. In Trieste in 1919, and in Paris from 1920 to 1922, Joyce devoted his time to writing the remaining chapters of the novel, which was printed by an avant-garde publisher, Sylvia Beach’s ‘Shakespeare and Company’, after a fruitful search for subscribers, on 2 February 1922, the day of Joyce’s fortieth birthday. Preceded by publicity hype expertly orchestrated by

which weigh heavily on the demonstration of this point); V. B. Sherry, James Joyce: ‘Ulysses’, Cambridge 1994, 2004; A. Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics in ‘Ulysses’, Oxford 2002; J. Mood, Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ for Everyone, Or How to Skip Reading It the First Time, Bloomington, IN 2004; E. Terrinoni, Del parlare oscuro. Temi e tecniche occulte nell’‘Ulisse’ di James Joyce, Roma 2004, Eng. trans. Newcastle-upon-Tyne 2009, and Il chiarore dell’oscurità: narrazioni parallele e possibili nell’‘Ulisse’ di James Joyce, Roma 2007; D. Kyberd, ‘Ulysses’ and Us: The Art of Everyday Living, London 2009. 77 In 1904 this Hunter came to Joyce’s aid when he was beaten up by the boyfriend of a girl to whom he had made advances. However, this anecdote, according to Melchiori 1994, 120, ‘has not been confirmed’. Melchiori (127) maintains that Bloom was also modelled on the ‘philo-Semitic Guglielmo Ferrero’. Others, with less plausibility, have added Teodoro Mayer, the editor of Il Piccolo della Sera, and the French politician Léon Blum. The name Leopold (opines Ruggieri 1990, 98) came to Joyce because that was Amalia Popper’s father’s name; or because it was the first name of SacherMasoch (Corti 2007, 71). The question of why Joyce made a Jew the co-protagonist has never been, in this writer’s opinion, entirely satisfactorily answered. Levin 1971, 78–9, notes that Jewish characters had already been chosen by many novelists on the basis of the fame of Marx, Bergson and Einstein; but, he adds, this had to do with Bérard’s theory of the ‘Semitic origins of the Odyssey’.

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Joyce with the contribution of the influential critic Valery Larbaud (who in December 1921 had held a triumphant lecture at the Shakespeare and Company accompanied by readings), Ulysses immediately gained wide European appeal. In 1927 and in 1929, respectively, the German and French translations came out, and in the following year two pirated editions (in America and Japan) which were harshly denounced by Joyce. In 1933, in New York (the headquarters of The Little Review) a trial, brought against Joyce for obscenity in the book, ended with acquittal. This paved the way for the American edition of the novel in 1934, and two years later for the British one. An Irish publication of the work would have to wait until 1966. 2. Both the external and core structural anomalies (such as multiple quotations in different languages, pieces set to music, the scabrous nature of the plot, irreverence and even swearing in Italian) were at the origin of the genuine commotion which Ulysses caused upon its release. Cries of scandal could be heard from many quarters and the immediate reactions from many official critics and non-acolytes of Joyce were almost all negative. Some said it was an unreadable, heterogeneous, non-unitary text, and strictly speaking only a series of disconnected experiments that were not amalgamated into a finished work of art. Immorality (only in some cases amorality), obscurity, the disproportionate size of the work, the esotericness of the text, its monotony and boredom78 were the recurring themes of criticism. The sheer array of boutades, comments of insane enthusiasm or blistering rejection, and stunning resipiscences (like that of Yeats) is still proverbial. Lawrence classified it as an olla podrida,79 oddly indicating that Joyce’s predominant theme was ‘disgust with the body’. On the subject of slating criticisms, the most memorable remain those by Edmund Gosse (1924) and, venomous despite being partially retracted in 1950, by Wyndham Lewis in Time and Western Man (1927).80 Joyce did not

78 Boredom was denounced by Arnold Bennett in one of his dreamy, naïve and fakeobtuse reviews (CRHE, 219–22), and by Edmund Wilson (CRHE, 228; cf. CRHE, 481 and 575 for other negative appreciations). 79 Phoenix, vol. I, 270. 80 Broch 1936.

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fare any better with the Marxist critics,81 who harshly criticized him as the representative of Decadent and bourgeois realism (something quite different from genuine socialism), as well as a reactionary social pessimism. The slow cooling off period of the controversy favoured, in the early long essays, a more balanced and less extempore evaluation. Hermann Broch, in a dense and extremely shrewd essay, intuited in the dissociation of technique the expression of time – or rather the irreproducibility of time – and, in Bloom, the death of the heroic element.82 While many, like Shaw, had noticed nothing more than the purely ‘documentary demon’, that is, a story completely resolved in its naturalistic dimensions, others, like Edmund Wilson, identified a predominant comedic note and the attempt to insert burlesque into realism;83 or, like Broch, they consigned naturalism to the background and indicated the prevalence of an ‘allegory elevated to the second and third power’. Still others, like Mary Colum, assigned Ulysses to the ‘Confession class of literature’.84 In short, Ulysses, up to Finnegans Wake and beyond, continued to dominate the literary scene, while Joyce was careful not to deny the image that was being created, of a roman-àclef, and jealously guarded his alleged secrets, adopting a wise technique 81

See the review from 1933 by the influential critic, and the first, shrewd interpreter of T. S. Eliot, D. P. Mirskij (CRHE, 589–92), who pointed out in Joyce an exponent ‘of the decadent phase of bourgeois culture’. Cf. CRHE, 616–18, 624–6 and 654–8, for other harsh criticisms in the Marxist mould. Orwell later withdrew (with comments dating back to 1933) from this Marxist group with a balanced and chivalrous judgement: Joyce was, for him, a pure artist, but at the same time he was a writer of post-war despair, inasmuch as it was the despair of a Catholic who had lost his faith and lamented a world without God. Ulysses and The Waste Land were therefore on the same wavelength (OCE, vol. I, 145, 150–4, 557). However, Orwell drastically revised his opinion on Joyce after the publication of Finnegans Wake, which made him call Joyce – when the war had already broken out, and even though Joyce was among his twelve favourite writers – a ‘technician and very little else’ (OCE, vol. II, 23, 150, 236–7). Orwell’s only explicit judgement on Finnegans Wake, however indirect, is in OCE, vol. IV, 31. 82 CRHE, 227–31. 83 Cf. CRHE, 313 (for Gosse’s review), and 359–65 (for an excerpt from Lewis’s book). 84 M. Colum, ‘The Confessions of James Joyce’, Freeman, V (1922), 450–2, repr. in CRHE, 231–4.

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of revelations in dribs and drabs. In 1930, a book by Stuart Gilbert was dedicated to the elucidation of the principal of these interpretative keys, that is, the Homeric, marking the foundation of one of the most flourishing cultural industries of the past century, Joyce studies, of which Ulysses is the undeniable centrepiece.85 Outside the circles of experts and fanatics, Ulysses has not actually had an easy life. Frank Kermode, in 1959, began an essay with the statement that Ulysses was by then dated and suitable for those who, in that year, were the same age as Bloom rather than Stephen: indeed young people, he said, found the ‘endless experimentation’ and even the ‘polarity between prose and poetry’ – the former in the form of  ‘straight talk about the genitals’ and the latter in the ‘swooning pre-Raphaelite rhythms’ –86 to be boring. The young, he added, were by now insensitive and indifferent to the taboo about ‘drawers’ and garter belts that had aroused their fathers and their grandfathers. A sense of monotony and ultimately one of asphyxiation are reasonable and admissible reactions to reading, just as it is plausible that the aesthetics of the novel should be considered episodic Among the many interpretations of Ulysses the one that is furthest from prevailing opinions, and against the mainstream, is by Empson in his essay ‘The Theme of Ulysses’ (reprinted in LRB, 1982, no. 15, 3–5, and no. 16, 6–10, which, incidentally, savage Kenner 1980). According to Empson, Ulysses depicts a biographical hypothesis that, fortunately, never came to pass thanks to Joyce meeting Nora. Joyce, before meeting Nora – opines Empson – had had a relationship with a married woman and had been lured by the woman’s husband (this is, after all, adumbrated in Exiles, as we have seen). If this were the case, Joyce would have ended up choosing, without Nora, a career as an opera singer. In the novel, Bloom, according to Empson, deliberately encourages the creation of a friendship and later a sentimental and sexual bond between Stephen and Molly, thanks to which Stephen would be saved from his madness and Bloom would not only be able to get rid of Molly’s lover but also manage to have his legitimate, longed-for heir. Furthermore, Stephen could settle down with Milly, Bloom’s daughter. Stephen, for the moment, declines the invitation, but might return. Empson’s most astonishing hypothesis is that, if the aforementioned theory is valid, Joyce kept it secret in the novel to avoid jeopardizing – because of its manifest immorality – the free circulation of his work, that is, as a precaution against censorship. Of all the theories surrounding 16 June, 1904, this is definitely the most curious and circumstantial, and certainly the most fantastic. 86 ‘Puzzles and Epiphanies ( James Joyce)’, in KPE, 86–90. Kermode, in KRI, 171, also affirms that much of the novel is ‘extremely tedious’. 85

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and that each chapter should form a self-contained entity. It is true that Ulysses, a third of the way through, has fielded all its themes and proceeds by the adjunction of characters and events over the course of the day, without giving rise to any real turning points. Of the eighteen episodes, thirteen take up the first half, with the implicit corollary that the remaining episodes from the second half, of which there are only five, are much longer. However, the length of these second episodes is only justified with a strengthened ventriloquism and virtuosity that help support the insufficient and atrophied diegetic material. Three or four of these episodes from the second half are duplications and take place in a tavern, a pub or a restaurant. The mnemonic material, especially, remains unchanged, endowed as it is with a cyclic or wave-like rhythm, with ups and downs, peaks and troughs, and amplifications according to fortuitous associations. The fifteenth episode is undoubtedly independent, a dramaturgy of the brothel and almost a novel within the novel. Supreme inventions alternate, that is, with episodes in a slower tempo and which are more normal and less incisive. 3. When considered from within the general framework of Joyce’s entire oeuvre, Ulysses, and it could not be otherwise, does not constitute, in terms of content, that clean, absolute break which it represents by virtue of its form and technique. At first glance it looks like an extension and, at the same time, a mixture of Dubliners and Portrait. In its endogenesis a stark difference is indeed apparent, and it is the transition from the diachronic to the synchronic structure, diurnal and at the same time nocturnal, of the two last masterpieces. Until the fourth episode, which marks Bloom’s entrance on the scene, Stephen Dedalus is the unchallenged hero, and while in those following he must share his role as protagonist, Ulysses takes up once again (after an interval of two years) his clipped biographical thread, albeit with the notable variation in the organization of time considering that his story, first spread out over a number of years, is here compressed into a single day, 16 June 1904.87 However, Ulysses is also a third novel about Dublin and a new polyptych of scenes from the life of the city and of the pathetic, passionate, gossiping, frustrated citizens found there, who flank

87 A date with sentimental meaning, as it was when one of the first meetings between Joyce and Nora Barnacle took place.

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the wanderings of the two protagonists. Many characters from Dubliners reappear with their first and last name unchanged as extras and secondary characters. But continuity subsists particularly in relation to the stories from Dubliners with a choral structure. One of the most incisive depictions of ‘paralysis’ occurs in Ulysses in the episode of the funeral, with the mixture of pragmatic compunction, hypocrisy and blasphemous mockery of the attendees. Also relevant is the animalistic brutalization of the patrons of the restaurant where Bloom, disgusted, decides not to enter; or the ineffable vacuity of Dublin journalists (wind is the symbol of the episode). The tenth episode is a collection of razor-sharp snapshots, showing the characters who populate the novel as marionettes trotting along aimlessly and without purpose in perpetual motion. This episode is, unquestionably, a mise en abyme and a scale replica of the entire book, and a vision of the work itself from an inverted telescope. The episode of the brothel is itself an oneiric and nocturnal replica of the tenth with its confusing and chaotic round-up of all the daytime leftovers, and therefore, of all the ghosts of the psyche. Obviously Ulysses is an infinitely richer and more complex novel than both Dubliners and Portrait, and not only because in those two works there is almost no trace of the parodic verve or the divertissement, but also because the autobiographical element and along with it the picture of Dublin life, and the expansion or compression of a range of thematic and polemical motifs, operate simultaneously on a more abstract level, by casting characters in a symbolic and emblematic light, while never completely obliterating their purely realistic nature. In their interpersonal experience Joyce finds and points to a general mechanism of historical development, arrived at by reflecting on his life and artistic career from a mainly perspectival point of view. 4. From a purely autobiographical point of view Joyce repudiates or integrates the existential aridity of Stephen Dedalus by opposing his introversion, his solipsism and his self-centredness with Leopold Bloom’s extroversion, generosity and acceptance of life. Stephen and Bloom, with the addition of Molly (fertility, the Earth),88 rise to the dimensions of the 88 Ulysses is read by E. Wilson in WAX as a fertility rite, yet another paradigm. At the end, he finds that Bloom, after an eleven-year abstinence, will resume fertile, monogamous sexual relations with Molly.

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vital and regulatory principles of human personality and of historical development. They are cornerstones of Joyce’s philosophy or mythology. And they are principles that must interact and initiate a fusion, because only in this way are growth and evolution permitted and promised. However, anyone seeking an explicit and resounding confirmation of the fact that Stephen has attained maturity, and that this ‘fusion’ has taken place, would be disappointed. The ‘communion’ between Stephen and Bloom is in the order of those infinitesimal entities, almost invisible to the naked eye, that are so important in Ulysses. The fact is that between Stephen and Bloom, while there is undoubtedly a vague, mutual magnetic attraction, there is also and there remains, deep down, an unbridgeable divide. Implausible on an objective level, the ‘communion’ is prefigured on a symbolic and superhuman one. It is suggested in the alleged similarities between two languages and two cultures ( Jewish and Irish), supported by astronomical considerations, finally intuited by a temporary exchange of names (Blephen and Stoom). The morning part of the novel is punctuated by gestures and acts that make Stephen appear as the archetype and Bloom his debased stand-in. The former is the emblem of the Titanic, the latter its complementary opposite, or echo. They both carry out, in succession, the acts of waking up, having breakfast, going to the bathroom, and do so almost at the same time. Making Stephen and Bloom into two polar opposites, Joyce abandons the intention of showing a Stephen who ‘grows’,89 and limits himself to giving two approximations (and two fantastic recreations) of his young self and his contemporary self, skipping over the intermediate, and therefore, more credible version of himself, which may be Richard Rowan from Exiles. On the other hand, it is Ulysses itself, while also containing Bloom, that represents the evolution of Stephen.

89

The day after Bloomsday, Friday 17 June, 1904, will presumably be equal to the previous one; but several questions remain wide open in Stephen’s life, starting with the fact that no one knows, he himself included, where he will sleep, having vowed never to set foot again in the Martello Tower and never to go home again to his family, and having also rejected Bloom’s hospitality. The question that does not recur in the last episode is: ‘Where will Stephen Dedalus spend the night?’. What happens after the book has finished is, according to Tindall 1950, 27, that Stephen goes away to write Ulysses!

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§ 143. Joyce XVI: ‘Ulysses’ II. Threads in the maze Having achieved a minimum of perspective distance from Dublin, beginning from 1904 Joyce slowly passes from aggression to representation of his fellow-citizens and fellow-countrymen; and it is a transition already perceivable from the last stories in Dubliners, which develop by treasuring new biographical materials. A new datum, however, is philo-Semitism. Among the many components for which Trieste was decisive there is the fact that Joyce intimately met more Jews, and from close up. There gradually takes shape, with a few inventive aids, a composite simulacrum of a Dublin Jew, a creation not supported by a single model found in life, but by more than one. At the same time Joyce extracted from himself, with this character, an aspect that had matured in the meantime, of a sanguine and pugnacious person, attentive to the practical and the concrete; or he wanted to recognize himself in this character in an asymptotic way. Ellmann lists in turn all the real, unthinkable prototypes of Spanish-looking Molly, blended and amalgamated with Nora. It was, instead, above all the imagination, exceptionally, that led to the creation of Blazes Boylan. The transposition from real experienced life to art, with the latter imitating the former and taking from it the raw materials to transfigure, revolves around some tried and tested mechanisms: collation, fusion, amalgamation of several characters fished out of memory or Dublin chronicles. Once again a work of Joyce’s is more and more a summa, an encyclopaedia, a synthesis of all history, a mise en abyme in a banal canvas. On the conceptual plane the stimuli behind the novel had been found by Joyce in Bérard’s theory of the Odyssey: the Homeric poem, it maintained, was rooted in distant events of the epic of the Phoenicians in the Mediterranean, and the Phoenicians were Semites; for every place named in the poem a Jewish equivalent could be found.90 From the non-Homeric Greek myth Joyce learned above

90 The classic study of the Homeric correspondences is the one by Gilbert 1930. Both Gilbert and above all Joyce were writing precisely in a period of great popularity of anthropological studies, for instance those by Frazer and Weston, which also influenced Eliot. This was an interest that extended to Northrop Frye. Gilbert’s book is elegantly written, smooth and refined, and the scholar, who is clever and erudite, and competent on classical cultures and literatures, is only not sufficiently attentive

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all that Ulysses was a pacifist, who only agreed to participate in the war when, pretending to be mad, and surprised while ploughing the sand, the Greeks set Telemachus as a stripling before him, instigating Ulysses to cut up the body. And the plough is the symbol of peace. The superimposition becomes meticulous, not just vaguely symbolic but an allegory, because the correspondences are planned and worked out down to the smallest details. Besides, Joyce’s attraction to the Greek hero Ulysses is very precocious in time. We know from Budgen that Ulysses in Dublin was to be the title of Dubliners. And also that Joyce, conceiving the novel, reviewed various mythological, ancient and modern heroes. Specifically, he had weighed up the figures and relative candidacies of Hamlet, Don Quixote, Dante and Faust; or even Christ. He was looking for a ‘complete all-round being’91 – he alluded precisely to the polyhedral quality of sculpture; Christ, not having married, was ineligible.92 However, it has always been observed and remarked that the underlying Homeric scheme is only one of the organizing schemes of the novel, and therefore that it is necessary but not sufficient. Joyce himself gave his critics, readers and friends, schemes that were not alternative but complementary to the Homeric one. By relaying schemes that were not all coincident, and indeed discrepant, he cleverly created a context of readers and a readership that did not yet exist, and the consequent literary suspense. He himself gradually realized the indefinable aesthetic status of the novel, and used the metaphors of ‘epic’ and ‘encyclopaedia’, expressions later supplanted by the colourful and untranslatable pseudoTuscan epithet ‘accursed romanzaccione’. Two of the schemes furnished to critics are particularly competitive, because they were approved by Joyce; and they are called the Linati scheme (Carlo Linati, a writer and translator to narratology, technique and stylistics (except for the prodigious catalogue of the figures of speech in ‘Proteus’), and thematic criticism. His pedantic approach is rejected in too rough-and-ready a way in Nabokov 1980. 91 Budgen 1934, 16–17. Bloom is indeed defined an ‘allroundman’ by Lenehan in the tenth episode of the novel. 92 The inadequacy of Christ as a representative of the total ‘man’, not being a husband or a father, is pointed out by Stanislaus Joyce in My Brother’s Keeper, 177–8. Stephen too, in chapter XX of Stephen Hero, deems Christ too remote and too devoid of passion.

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from Como) and the Gilbert scheme (Stuart Gilbert). These schemes tell us that there are several overlapped and amalgamated frameworks, not mutually exclusive ones. And that Joyce pondered the work making the content correspond to several keys and organizational designs. It follows from these schemes that every chapter is set under the banner of an ‘art’, a bodily organ, a colour, above all a technique (a very important datum, because it confirms that in Ulysses the technique changes, is variable, not uniform and invariant). And again: a dominant symbol and sense, of man’s five. 2. Regarding the technique, the aesthetic and the narrative praxis, Ulysses pulverizes not only the novelistic form prevalent until then, but also the very procedural arrangements Joyce had previously followed. The two main fiction works before 1922 had been exploits of the student outdoing the masters of French and European naturalism; with Ulysses Joyce makes a triple jump, having received the impulse for it, if anything, only from Dujardin. But the aspiring playwright reappears and re-emerges not only in the dramatic form of an episode, but in the very stream of consciousness, an updated version of the old main expressive device of classical theatre, the soliloquy. However, Ulysses is not to be read and to be presumed homogeneous in its style and technique. It was written over a period of several years and one perceives some big or small ongoing redefinitions inside it. The suppression of the narrating ‘I’ is always intermittent, and integrally effected only (or almost) in the dramatic episode ‘Circe’ and in Molly’s final monologue. The most flagrant discontinuity is that Joyce, who had conceived of fiction, especially in the Portrait, as dynamic, now devises a synchronic plot. Ironically, Ulysses goes back to being an instant epiphany of Dublin, at least in the sense that on what is just any day, fished at random out of the calendar,93 Dublin becomes incomparably epiphanic. Nevertheless, because of what was said above, for Joyce every day is more or less the mise en abyme of all the others, and the chance datum for Joyce is 93

Returning from Dublin in 1909 Joyce brought home to Trieste Thom’s Directory, the street guide to his city, and a copy of the Evening Telegraph of 16 June 1904, which gave the results of the Ascot horse race, and reported an American disaster and a car race in Berlin. That night at nine o’clock there was a brief storm.

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always also the necessary one and the exceptional one. Ulysses is therefore a sensational, acrobatic, never-before-attempted daily and hourly novel, whose action occupies less than twenty-four hours, and whose internal operations are articulated by a clock with almost Swiss precision. On this hourly scheme a place is superimposed in Ulysses: the single episodes occur at a precise time on that Thursday, and in a place always identified (quite a different situation from Finnegans Wake). 3. Joyce told Budgen that writing a novel is ‘like composing music, with the same elements implied’. Ulysses is a score in which particular motifs are repeated, and it is mandatory to find analogies in it with the Wagnerian score with its leitmotivs. It is true, therefore, that it is a diegetic device in which tout se tient, planned down to the smallest detail without cracks or fringes to be trimmed: a veritable field of relationships, propositions and re-propositions of diegetic, figurative and verbal cells in the same form or in that of analogy, preannouncement, variation, transformation and association. This also presupposes some points de répère, some pivots or fixed points around which events revolve and which polarize them, and interchangeable events that can therefore happen to Stephen, Bloom, or Molly. That of Ulysses is therefore a typical day, and for the characters involved certain actions recur that are repeated shortly afterwards. Therefore there are few and defined fundamental actions of Dubliners, and typically primary ones; however, in turn they have some sub-specifications. In order, these effective primary actions are the following: eating, speaking, fornicating, remembering and dreaming. This gives rise to the statistical frequency of scenes only about feeding, or combinations of feeding and speaking. In speaking, the usual serial themes alternate: the facts of politics, the enslavement of Ireland to England, national rebirth, and the oppression of Catholicism. The places themselves are serial, and therefore are often the restaurant, the eating-house, the tavern, the cafe, the wine shop, the counter or the ‘shelter’. In five or six episodes or even more Joyce simply perfects, and therefore repeats – another mechanism of variation – the very successful structure and type of the story in Dubliners, ‘Ivy Day in The Committee Room’: he has a group of characters gathering in a closed space, and allows them to talk freely (but not entirely freely, because inevitably the topics are always the same), sure that sooner or

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later they will fall under the effect of some magnets. The exception that confirms the rule is the library episode: there a gathering of Dubliners truly thinks, and abstract though artificial theories clash, not only empty rumours and pure gossip. If Ulysses is also a physiological novel, the greatest of this kind that has ever been written, a form of reflected seriality is that of the functions of urination and defecation. 4. In the end, why was and is Ulysses revolutionary? The first answer is technical, linked to the intermittent adoption of the stream of consciousness, to the extreme compression of internal narrative time and the maximum extension of the field of facts worthy of and suited to being narrated; secondly, for the ever-changing and pyrotechnic stylistic virtuosity. A glaring aspect, regarding the revolution of meanings, is Joyce’s indifference to the thematic hinge, we would say the sine qua non of the nineteenth-century novel, which concentrated as a rule on intellectual formation and éducation sentimentale, or the Bildungsroman, of the hero or of the young heroine, and systematically ended with marriage, and therefore an emotional and social settlement. This strong point is literally turned upside-down: Stephen is not blessed with any resolving Bildung at the end of the novel, and Bloom and Molly, one thirty-one and the other thirtythree or thirty-four, are two half-mature married people. I am one of those people who deem the maturation of Stephen postponed to the category of the saltus, not just achieved chromatically. Ulysses presents the further break with the tradition of abolishing pathos and tragedy. It is a comic masterpiece. As Joyce himself told Djuna Barnes, ‘there is not a single serious line in it’.94 A similar definition, as a comic novel, can be valid in Balzac’s or Dante’s sense of the term, without wanting to imply that Joyce thought of a further scheme in comparison to those given and made known. The comédie of Ulysses is humaine because it swarms and seethes with characters and anecdotes as in the great Balzacian series; it is ‘divine’ in an improper and somewhat anti-Dantesque sense, because Dublin contains above all the circles of hell. Reflecting carefully, one has to admit that there do not exist, in the protagonists and secondary characters, ones that are purgatorial

94 A sentence said by word of mouth to the novelist, quoted in Ellmann 1959, 538.

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and therefore worthy of Heaven. In other words in all of Ulysses there acts no true redeemed character. Yet Joyce looks on impartially, because such, human and divine, is life. But does Ulysses therefore have a meaning? Critics seem singularly to shy away from this question, and in truth few venture to say, except en passant, what it is and if there is a general and global figurative meaning in the novel. The reconstruction of its semantic and symbolic interlacement is extremely easy. Joyce did not propose to write an ideological novel endowed with extra-textual meaning, nor did he have any thesis to demonstrate. Ulysses is not subservient to any thesis. Joyce, like Keats, rejects art that has ‘a palpable design upon us’.95 If this is equivalent to a firm rejection of the tradition of what in Victorian times was called a ‘novel with a purpose’, it is also inherent in Joyce’s aesthetic of stasis: stasis is synonymous with circularity, recursiveness, absence of development and therefore also of any Bildung. The ideological assumption that we can infer from Ulysses, even without Joyce emphasizing it too much, is therefore among the most rudimentary and reductive, obvious and elementary one can think of: that life continues unstoppable and it is worth living it after all, upsetting the sadly triumphant nihilistic adagio of the novel in Joyce’s day: that it is not worth living. Ulysses, in the form of self-contempt, is ‘this synopsis of things in general’ – one of the numerous humorous diagnoses that Joyce disseminated in the novel. § 144. Joyce XVII: ‘Ulysses’ III. From morning to noon A reading of Ulysses of a sequential type, integrated with the necessary synchronic and transversal observations, remains the most effective one to describe the diegetic, stylistic and semantic-symbolic content of the novel; and it seems to be invoked by its very organization and internal planning. In Ulysses there are the events of the early and late morning, of midday, of the early afternoon, of the evening and of the night, also late night. If the protagonists of the novel are three we will have, following this premise, the sub-novels of Stephen, Bloom and Molly. These sub-novels, through an internal law, have to be worked out, up to a certain moment of the day, only

95

Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds of 3 February 1818.

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with their protagonist onstage, without the others. Only towards the end of the day do the novels of the one and the other merge to become a new sub-novel; but the last episode only has Molly Bloom at its centre. Stephen occupies the whole early morning scene; Joyce abandons him in the late morning and reintroduces him in the afternoon, in the evening and late at night. Bloom is practically onstage all day, but he only meets Stephen at the brothel. Molly too is onstage in the morning, then she is eclipsed and returns onstage in the night. At the start of the novel Joyce only has quickly and evocatively to remind his previous readers who Stephen Dedalus is. But Stephen does not reappear as he was, because Joyce, having ended the Portrait, had accumulated other experiences and uses them. The first episode sees three figures that interact on Stephen and goading him induce him to get off his chest, in a confused but also hierarchical, winking, and enigmatically gnomic way, a condition of intense existential crisis. The reader that knows Joyce is if anything surprised by some relapses. The Englishman Haines, a guest at the Tower, a falsely enlightened folklore scholar, admits to Stephen that England has treated Ireland badly, and it is a fuse that immediately lets off sparks; above all the irreverent and blasphemous Gogarty, who in the novel is rechristened Mulligan, derides Stephen, accusing him on the one hand of still being too pious – the ‘jejune Jesuit’ – and on the other of having contravened his religious duties, thus cruelly turning the knife in the wound (the knife blade is an image that is used for the ‘language’ of both). Stephen broods on a rebellion in pectore against various maternal hypostases that are essentially his own mother and the Roman Catholic Church; but his country too is a repudiated mother. And the one with the consubstantiality of his father is another quarrel with religion that emerges in the figurative form of an obsession with heretics and heresies, above all those that concern the relationships between the Trinitarian figures of the Father and the Son. 2. The theme of the lesson at Deasy’s school, in the second episode, is not chosen at random, not only because Stephen, in comparison to the Portrait, is no longer a student but a teacher and the point of view changes, but also because Stephen’s mind is fixed on the dominant problem that faces philosophy, the meaning of life and therefore of history. The historical event, Stephen says to himself, is the result of a contest between possible

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alternatives, some of which have come true while others have not. Also alternative are two conceptions of history that Stephen weighs up: the deterministic one of Haines in the first episode, that the single individual is not responsible for history and that history exists as an inscrutable hypostasis; the second theory is the not very different Blakean one, that man can only see history through a veil and that truth is only known in the divine mind. The obtuse Deasy must unthinkably be revalued: not only with his letter to the newspapers does he propose a practical solution to curing livestock of ‘foot and mouth disease’, but he also evokes a vaguely Hegelian teleology of history, not distant from the optimistic final assertion of the novel: ‘history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God’. But as it is a history lesson, onto the stage there soon comes, in Stephen who is inattentive to his task, English power over Ireland. Shortly after Stephen helps the student Sargent to do some mathematics exercises:96 this gives confirmation of the frequency with which chance and banal events always arouse obsessive personal associations (a mother loved and loves this student). In psychic life everything is connected, and the students naturally do not know either the reason why Stephen proposes to them the riddle of the fox that buries its own grandmother, or why he does it so abruptly, or why he replaces the ‘mother’ with the ‘grandmother’. That is to say, they do not know about Stephen’s sacrilegious refusal to pray at his mother’s bedside and his sense of guilt at having caused her death, or made it more painful, through his gesture. The third episode throws out a bridge, not at all ‘disappointed’,97 to the last one: these are two uninterrupted interior monologues of two characters endowed with almost opposite mental and emotional baggage; and Molly’s will be more radical in technique, entirely devoid of interventions of a voice off. This one by Stephen on the seashore, after the teaching hour, is interwoven with disquisitions that are elevated and learned though punctuated by various lapses into bathos. The impression that we momentarily receive from it 96 Stephen’s only ‘Bloomian’ gesture in the whole novel. 97 A pier is a ‘disappointed bridge’, unlike a bridge that connects two shores, because in class during the history lesson Pyrrhus and his victory had been spoken of and Pyrrhus in English almost sounds like ‘pier’.

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is that of chaos, but ‘with a method’: Stephen remembers the procedures and the phases of the process of knowledge and meditates on the laws of life. All the knowable is known through the senses, sight and hearing, and every element of what exists has a beginning and an end. Every given of the walk is an index, a ‘signature’ related to this intimate connection. History is always, and throughout the novel, a thought that transmigrates from mind to mind and from psyche to psyche: the cycle of life and death and rebirth, symbolized by the midwives that Stephen recognizes, like him on the shore. The oscillation is accentuated between circumstantial givenness, of events that occur under his senses, and memories from which he goes off at a tangent towards visionary flashes of heroic deeds, like Stephen in the first version of the autobiographical novel. 3. The fourth episode is the true pyrotechnic beginning, strictly speaking, of Ulysses. The serial or stereophonic or parallelistic mechanism stands out for the fact that a second breakfast is staged, whose ingredients, however, are different. Bloom looks at the substances, and his appetites are physical and alimentary, and they mask another appetite, the always resurgent and never tamed one of the senses. At the same time, with the episode occurring immediately after Stephen’s walk, the link is between two walks, one along the seashore and one in the city streets. Stephen and Bloom are not too distant. But in Stephen the dominant senses, of the five, are sight and hearing, and in Bloom, in a very evident way, the sense of smell. The fourth episode must be read following the denser and denser preannouncements, at first remote, vague and nebulous, then subliminal, and finally conscious, that at eleven in the morning, three hours later, the funeral of Paddy Dignam will take place. It is a first mental appointment; a second one that gradually eclipses it is Molly’s infidelity. A similar shady complexion, dark, or also gloomy, is projected as a veil onto Bloom’s thoughts. Therefore here there is established, or more exactly resounds, a leitmotif, or the leitmotif, of the novel. This is the old Baroque equivalence, mnemonically captured in the perfect rhyme ‘womb’-‘tomb’. Joyce’s ability consists of jousting with and releasing this equivalence in a range of elevated and very banal, humorous and parodic meanings. Otherwise one would not know how to explain the question that Molly asks her husband, having found in a book she is reading the word ‘metempsychosis’. From this point on many deviations will lead back to a single starting point. I am not referring to

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the opening and fundamental sentence in Finnegans Wake by pure chance. Molly distorts the difficult word of Greek derivation, but unintentionally creates a second channel of meaning, whose pertinence is all to be clarified and investigated: ‘Met him pike hoses’. At the same time Eros attenuates and for now rejects Thanatos. The she-cat and the butcher’s little servant girl are figures of sensual excitation; Molly’s very appetite, a furious one, is an ersatz. With the fifth episode we have confirmation that Bloom will be in the foreground for three episodes in an uncontested way, and that the seventh will see him as the co-protagonist, because Stephen comes back onstage and the relevant episode slowly slips, as regards the point of view – and the internal monologue with it – from Bloom to him. At this point it is also possible to sum up Bloom. This 1922 hero is really such over and above the routine qualification due to a protagonist. We only have to remember that the heroes of English fiction in the 1920s are antiheros or little heroes or decidedly weak figures, on whom the author unleashes his or her irony and satire (Lawrence invents Birkin, Virginia Woolf Peter Walsh). Bloom is not satirized by Joyce, first of all because he relies on solid, unshakable, Shavian optimism. Besides, the novel is already mature enough for us to take stock of its organizational mechanism. Suspense is eliminated, trepidation is behind; the only noteworthy diegetic delay, but a very modest one, is that of the meeting, always postponed by a hair’s breadth, between Stephen and Bloom. The diagram of Ulysses is not the straight line but instead the circle, and its motion is circular rather than rectilinear. The definition, or a fitting definition, of the universe of the novel, is given by Bloom in one of his sentences set in the flow of his thoughts, apparently banal and diffuse, and in reality pregnant: ‘Wheels within wheels’. Bloom is a Joyce in pectore that tries in an irregular and exceptional way to construct some preannouncements of the verbalism of Finnegans Wake, as when he says ‘Eulogy in a country churchyard it ought to be that poem’. Bloom’s blunders are already slips, and therefore they are not this but clues to remote and arcane associations, and also contextual clues, that is of drives, tensions, disorders and complexes in the mind of the person that makes them. 4. The fifth and sixth episodes are worked out on the thread of clever antitheses and also of witty word games. It is the first rumbling of an intense oral work that will concentrate first of all on the ‘body’, and hence

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on the flesh, but at the same time also on the ‘corpse’, that is to say the body without life and without flesh, gradually being reduced to a skeleton and being stripped of flesh. Involuntarily, Bloom starts to rhapsodize on the theme of paternity, and therefore of birth, and therefore also the beginning of life, and also on its end, and on cases of death: death that has touched him closely twice, with the death of his son Rudy98 and that of his suicidal father. The ‘Hades’ episode sets up a rare, unthinkable interweaving of terms and events that follow one another and are inserted in the macroterms of the meditation on life, birth, death and resurrection, or rebirth. Bloom and Simon Dedalus are two fathers and husbands, and one has a son who has left the family and the other a stillborn son; but Simon will also visit his wife’s grave at the cemetery, whereas Bloom, always concerned to compensate Thanatos with Eros, thinks of the moment when Rudy was probably conceived: and his comment, in this panorama of death, can only be ‘How life begins’. From Bloom there always come life answers. The newspaper episode, which could seem like the most visible rehashing of a story in Dubliners, ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’ (the type is that of a group of rather idle Irishmen that chat freely in a closed space), shows spectacular virtuosity, and leaves several lengths behind it the possible precedent. Here we penetrate even more deeply into the mechanisms that regulate the production of the word, because the environment is that of the offices of a newspaper. It is therefore an eminently metalinguistic episode. The word is sound and meaning, although it can just be sound without meaning. This is especially true of the ephemeral and inane word, flatus, of journalists. Joyce therefore has the journalists gathered in the newspaper office recite to the bitter end anecdotes about tirades and excerpts from pompous harangues in the great rhetorical and forensic tradition of Ireland. 5. The eighth episode, the lunch one, allows a further specification: the sequence of events will now only have to bring out in turn the already consolidated psychic and memorial contents of the two protagonists, despite each episode having a reflection of a contextual and objective type for the

98 In Joyce’s biography Rudy stands for the third child that Joyce and Nora lost.

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secondary characters that move in and that give an idea of the surrounding Dublin scene. By the time we come to this episode Bloom is intimately known and self-revealed: his internal geography is known, the previous episodes of his life too, and we know his tics, his fixations, his manias, his desires, his fantasies and his tastes. By now he is catalogued and filed. The event only has the aim of polarizing a facet of his personality. If there is one of these that emerges in this eighth episode it is his unwittingly being a modern double, and therefore an ironic and humorous one, of Christ. Bloom adumbrates and embodies Christ with the quantity of humorous, thinly veiled, scarcely visible feeding actions that he carries out during the chapter (and Christ is he that nourishes and feeds, starting from the feeding of the 5,000). In this light we can also reconstruct the haste with which, having just got up, he has gone out to the butcher’s: that is to say, he is a supplier of food to others. Bloom’s endless inventiveness is also a religious datum: he wants to improve and therefore also to favour – more exactly to redeem – the life of this world. His optimism, however, is necessarily going downhill and indeed more and more in free fall, in this and in the following episodes, because the time of the betrayal is drawing near, which is not, or not only, Judas’ betrayal of Jesus. The proof of the relationality of Joyce’s universe is that Bloom more and more frequently thinks Stephen’s thoughts, and in him there heap up and thicken preannouncements of Hamlet and unintentional quotations from this play, as if to introduce the theme of the ensuing episode. In this case too Bloom knows a lot, and issues a revealing maxim: ‘Never know whose thoughts you’re chewing’. 6. Stephen Dedalus inaugurated the novel, and is the titular hero of its first three episodes, but he is then sent into lethargy, to reappear at the end of the seventh one. The lesser use of Stephen derives from the fact that he is a blocked character, even more blocked than the other characters, as has been said. He therefore also constitutes an aesthetic risk and a challenge for Joyce, because he has already created and presented him as a type, and evidently he always has to re-present him as such. One mise en abyme is his own repetitive boutade, that if Socrates one day went out of his home, on his return he would find the same wise man sitting on the doorstep of his house. Stephen owed to his acquaintances, and to us readers, sooner or later, his theory on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The leitmotif of the new episode, where

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Bloom is almost entirely eclipsed – and an episode again in a closed space, where a series of Dublin characters necessarily talk freely – is a reflection on physical, spiritual and literary paternity, which has as its radiating centre Shakespeare’s greatest and most famous play. A psycho-biographic essay on Shakespeare is expounded and worked out in a dialogue, and therefore staged in its making and gestation. As it unfolds it is interspersed with economical explanations by the extra-diegetic narrator, and with Stephen’s thoughts, which are often strident asides that create counterpoints to the specifically heuristic discussion. Mimesis reigns supreme because the disquisition on the relationships between Shakespeare’s biography and his works is a tour de force of erudition, presented as a portentous collage of lexemes, syntagmas, fragments or even whole lines gleaned from Shakespeare’s works. Stephen does not believe, as he confesses at the end, his own theory; he pretends he has perhaps thought it up only because it is useful for objectifying his fight to the death against paternity or above all filiality. He fights at the same time for liberation from every noose, and from every umbilical cord with his country, his family and above all the Church, repressive of the senses and of modern art. Stephen does not believe in a theory that, in the heuristic sphere, was in vogue and rather widespread at the end the nineteenth century, but had been progressively discredited and rejected.99 7. The tenth episode, ‘Wandering Rocks’, is flagrantly dissimilar from all the others. It is inevitably a mise en abyme and this time in a very literal and not a vague sense, of the whole novel, because in forty pages it brings into play almost all the characters that act in the plot. It also functions as link between the first and the second parts, and, as a link, it is like the number to be carried over of an arithmetic operation that is ongoing, and in

99 Shakespeare is believed to have been ulcerated for life by his wife Anne’s adultery with his brother Richard, and the trauma was transfused, in the play Hamlet, not into the son but into the father, that is to say the ghost. The usurpation is that of his bridal bed, and the revenge demanded of Hamlet transposes the vengeance that Shakespeare wanted to take against his brother Richard. An extremely sectorial and partial reading of Shakespeare’s canon, and of motives astutely but all too cleverly and speciously connected, is worked out by Stephen in support of this theory. Paradoxically, the scepticism of the Dublin literati whom Stephen addresses, and Joyce intends to satirize, is more modern.

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particular the amount carried over from the sixth episode, because several of the pieces, if not all nineteen, of which the episode consists, reverberate with Dignam’s funeral. At the same time it is an episode of revitalization and prolepsis: some characters that have not yet appeared are brought in and tested, like the ‘sirens’ of the episode coming immediately afterwards. Further, it confirms the relational, concentric, serial and recursive nature of the Dublin cosmos, where every element of the puzzle is destined to reappear and offers objectified, decentralized, no longer subjective and self-subjective views of Stephen and of Bloom, in a game of interweaving perspectives. The difference is also highlighted by the fact that Joyce reduces the stature and status of the three protagonists, though all three are present, and camouflages them and temporarily levels them: leaves them to stand, so to speak. Finally, no previous and subsequent episode is equal to this one, because it is the first one of a stylistic project that, in the second eight episodes, contemplates many more variants, and multiform changes, than in the first nine. Joyce in other words tries out well marked and diversified effects of voice and register. Father Conmee is the symbol of the supreme and ubiquitous control by the Church on all manifestations of Irish life, the counterpart of political power that parades in the last micro-episode. Actually, Joyce brings out, even in Father Conmee, the fact that in man there are drives that he cannot dominate and that uncontrollably slip out of him. From a bush, on the outskirts of the city, the Jesuit father sees a young fellow and a girl emerge that have just had sex. The blithe bonhomie of the Jesuit skips without a grimace over the tumult of real life that is whirling around him. If the Dublin cosmos is therefore relational, the narrator’s vision has to be cinematically stereoscopic, and we see this technique of synchronic development starting from the second micro-episode: while Corny Kelleher chats with a policeman, Father Conmee in another part of the city gets on a bus, and Molly’s arm reaches out of the window to give money to a cripple. Similar synchrony is also seen in numerous other cases. § 145. Joyce XVIII: ‘Ulysses’ IV. Afternoon and evening From the eleventh episode on, the organization of Ulysses becomes more markedly acrobatic. Presenting the eleventh one, Joyce stressed that it was structured like the eight regular parts of a fuga per canonem. And many critics have tried to tabulate the phenomenologies of the text on

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the basis of which it is to be considered a score regulated by acoustic laws, rather than by linguistic and semantic ones. This episode of the ‘Sirens’ is famous for having polarized and accentuated a search for sound effects and musical technique that, as mentioned, involves the whole construction of the novel. It is therefore a quantitative matter, since Ulysses is entirely constructed on the analogy with the musical form of the leitmotif type; and in many chapters, like the newspaper one, it relies on onomatopoeia, sound effect and the musical motivation of the sign. The explanation and revelation of the key to the episode provided by Joyce is naturally too superficial, and almost misleading. Language can remotely imitate music, but not be equal to it, let alone give rise to a fuga per canonem design. The purposes of the episode are wittier, more like university student pranks and more debunking, and the episode reinforces the allusion concentrated in Chamber Music. That is to say, it dishes up a range of musical figures that go from high to lower and very low. It could be said that Joyce here makes a complete exploration of the range of noise, from the immaterial sublime down to the fart, and vice versa. Determining the physical organ of the chapter and the primary action then becomes very easy: it is the ear, or more exactly the eardrum; and the primary sense of the five is hearing. The second implication of the phenomenon of hearing is that the ears can be very open to hear a distant noise; but also kept closed so as not to hear a noise nearby. Hence characters act here that are all ears, and the exception that confirms the rule is therefore the waiter Pat, repeatedly labelled as deaf and having no ear for music. The third implication is that sound can be sweet and melodious but also harsh, distorted or dissonant: the episode is among the richest in a wide range of verbs indicating a variety of emission of sounds from the throat, and sounds that are acoustically transcribed as far as it is possible to do with the letters of the alphabet, and that do not come from instruments or are perfect reproductions of sounds in nature. The fourth implication is the production of sounds with incongruous musical instruments, like the pipe Dedalus blows in or the suspender belt of the bargirl that clacking sounds like a sonnezlacloche.100 100 Music, by unanimous admission and implication, halfway through the episode conveys the sublime: it is ‘love’s old sweet song’ and ‘language of love’, when Simon Dedalus

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2. The last seven episodes of Ulysses in various respects form a unitary block, and give rise to a structuring that is alternative to those indicated by Joyce himself for the novel. Although they amount to little more than a third of the whole development in numerical terms, the first of them begins well before the natural centre of gravity, with the result that in terms of pages and length this textual set covers a great deal more than half. This will lead to an antiphrastic and powerfully ironic definition of the novel, falling at the end of the seventeenth episode, with the reference – in words actually answering the catechetic questions of a sleepy Molly addressed to her husband, who has just got into bed – to ‘this intermittent and increasingly more laconic narration’. Their unity is constituted partly by the timeframe in which they take place, going from mid-afternoon to late at night. Concerning verisimilitude, it must be remembered, incidentally, that the date 16 June is very close to the summer solstice, and that at a northern latitude like Ireland there is light, on that date, until very late in the evening.101 The decisive criterion, however, is that the seven episodes are exploits of voice and register and each of them tries out a new solution in this sphere of parody. It is in this way that Joyce gets round the possible accusation of repetitiveness of his subject matter, when the diegetic novelties have all been dished up. The characters by now being defined in the smallest details, the writer’s attention shifts to stylistic and expressive ‘definition’. The twelfth episode, the ‘Cyclops’ one, in itself forms the framework of a clash between Bloom and a local nationalistic fanatic. Bloom is offered a cigar to smoke, and it is the most evident signal of the Homeric equivalence, reinforced by other shrewd discursive operations, disseminated at various points in the text, of humorous debasement of the mythical episode. The nationalist throws himself into a famous opera aria. So we are talking about music that is above all aphrodisiac, which favours Bloom’s excitement and makes him remember one of his first intercourses and mentally to relive it; and it is semantic music, as Bloom reflects (a minor tonality evokes sadness). But a final and resounding overthrowing of this achieved position lies in wait: ‘Chamber music. Could make a kind of pun on that. It is a kind of music I often thought when she…’. Here Joyce reveals the implication kept secret in his collection of poems with that title (§ 132.4). And here another type of music is evoked, that of dripping urine. 101 Commentators inform us that on 16 June 1904 the sun set in Dublin at 20.27. Summer time had not yet come into effect.

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and Bloom, after digging at each other, almost get into a fight, and Bloom narrowly escapes being attacked, escaping on a carriage but pursued by the nationalist’s fierce Alsatian. In narratological terms this is a complex and ambiguous episode. The register of the anonymous first narrator, a kind of Noman, is uniform, colloquial, crammed with folksy expressions, lapses of tone and grammar errors. However, it is intermittently replaced by a second voice, a ventriloquist one, which seizes on a hint in the plot that is being narrated, and goes off at a tangent with disquisitions of various and at times doubtful relevance, which can even continue for a couple of pages; after this we return to the interrupted diegetic thread. Joyce is visibly turning into a comical narrator. The poles are those of squalid daily Dublin reality, degenerate, miserable and filthy, and of an imaginary Ireland, the one pompously idolized by lovers of the past and dear to nationalistic rhetoric. Also bipartite, in vocal and scenic terms, is the ‘Nausicaa’ episode. A natural caesura separates two different times and also two spaces, and above all the mental pictures of two consciences as well as two points of view, two gazes on reality that, through lack of contact, do not fuse, and therefore reach out-of-focus or reciprocally erroneous conclusions beginning from the ‘ineluctable modality of the visible’. Bloom, who constantly looks for and finds some contacts, although he is then rejected by the people he meets, does not connect with Gerty, and a physical distance that cannot be got over persists. He has a daughter and therefore does not expressly look for one, and is instead unwittingly searching for a son. But he also aspires to Gerty as the fruit of an overlap between a fatherly affective need and a purely sexual one that seeks an outlet, because of certain deviations and frustrations of his, his complexes and his social position and his awareness of being a cuckolded husband, only to mention the most important things. Technically the second part of the episode is a verification of the seriality of the expressive system of the novel, since it goes back to hinging on that stream of consciousness which characterizes the fourth, the fifth and the sixth. Bloom is caught at a time when his sexual appetites are pressing and find an outlet, though in a solitary and virtual way; and the novelty of his stream is an even more disturbed and intermittent discontinuity, in which memories of the remote past and also of the present, significantly linked to his carnal affairs, alternate with the most varied memos. This, significantly, is the last ‘instalment’ of Bloom’s stream of consciousness until the end of

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the novel. By contrast, the technique of the first part of the episode is new, though falling within the range of the parodic experiments and stylistic imitations set going by the previous one. Here Joyce makes fun of oldfashioned narrative models that dealt with melancholy and sentimentalizing contents with overuse of hackneyed, predictable, obvious and outworn expressions, that is to say again with a ‘market’ parole. Gerty’s idiolect and behavioural code are nurtured and moulded by romantic magazines, by the precocious système de la mode in magazines and newspapers already flourishing at that time, as well as by advertising, or by the idealization of virginity in Catholic propaganda. Before Gerty enters the scene, because her entrance is belated, Joyce splendidly insists on a similar register made up of worn-out euphemisms and old examples of antonomasia. But before Bloom appears, the narrator takes back the reins and adds a second parallel scenario: on the beach there are heard the notes and the songs of vespers and a liturgical service that culminates with the benediction and ostension of the Sacrament after the rosary and the litanies of the Virgin. The two narrative planes from this moment on draw asymptotically closer to one another, because two ostensions are synchronized, that of the Sacrament and that of Gerty, who begins a chaste ‘striptease’ in front of the mature and shady spectator, lifting her legs to get a better look at the fireworks that have gone off in the sky, furnishing a further mimesis of Bloom’s orgasm provoked by the sight of Gerty’s intimate parts. Gerty is an umpteenth paradigm of Joyce’s feminine because of the congenital and promiscuous bigamous tendency evident in the four main female figures in the novel: they are in fact women who divide themselves between the reality principle and the need to daydream, and they have a man for every day but desire another one or other ones, for the no less irrepressible need, from time to time, to transgress. 3. According to one of the alternative constructive principles in Ulysses, the fourteenth episode, Homerically called ‘Oxen of the Sun’, or of the hospital, again takes place in a closed space: it narrates the meeting of a group of medicine students – and also of others that are not students, and Bloom who hovers around its edge all the time – who in the hallway of the hospital exchange, drinking and also refreshing themselves, noisy and scurrilous anecdotes of a university student type, quips, jokes and disrespectful little songs, fomented by Mulligan and moderated by Bloom.

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To this it must be added that it is also an episode narrated from outside the delivery room, which no one enters and the events in which are reported, like bulletins, by the nurses, down to the delivery. But this is decidedly a nonce episode, because it is virtually devoid of direct dialogue, and instead all worked out in the third person and through reported speech. However, its fame, as the most memorably daring and reckless of all Joyce’s stylistic experiments before Finnegans Wake, is due to the maximum degree of its intertextuality. Joyce had already tested out multiplicity of styles in the ‘Cyclops’ episode, but with two differences: those interpolated passages were gradually anonymous imitations, vaguely inspired by historical literary genres, without the immediate visibility of a mould and imitation of a specific writer; in a few isolated cases, a vague diachronic approach was perceived, that is to say they were passages marked by genre but also occasionally by historical register. Hence there is no doubt that if Joyce can be accused of plagiarism, and in any case plagiarism of himself, the twelfth and fourteenth episodes of Ulysses resemble one another, whereas together they cannot be compared, stylistically, with the other five of the last heptalogy. In ‘Oxen of the Sun’ the succession of the imitated styles is strictly chronological, on one side, and, on the other, Joyce proceeds chameleon-like to make fun of a kind of chain of milestones of English prose over the centuries. Accordingly, one of the isotopies that are most evident and perceivable to the naked eye is a stereophonic procedure, and that is to say the parallel between the physical birth of the baby Purefoy and the slow, centuries-long gestation of English literary language. This parallel has countless implications. It is a parallel that is deliberately defective, it has repeatedly been said and objected, or perhaps a parallel to be seen, more exactly, though not only, as inverted, because the final stage of the transformation of the language seems to be a degenerate and cacophonous product, and also an aged one, rather than corresponding to the rosy freshness of the infant that has emerged from the mother’s belly. The last linguistic imitation is notoriously a Babel, the explosion out of the students’ mouths of incomplete sentences without a central thread, and a crackling in a mixed language of mumbled and deformed words.102 Naturally

102 Cf. Marucci 2013, 230–2, for an in-depth examination of this aspect.

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all the episodes in Ulysses are mises en abyme of its general plan; but it is so in a triumphal way in this episode. Almost every imitation cannot fail to converge on a hymn to procreation, though in a style which is always different. The sixty passages of the episode all support the need for the defence of life and condemn its opposers. The counterpoint resounds in the chorus of students that defend fornication and therefore contraceptives. Bloom is hence the biblical prophet of the tribe of Israel on whom there is superimposed another Jew, Christ the mild one who moderates the din of the students that are transforming the hospital, or also the hut in Bethlehem, into a market. Bloom is suddenly raised to the rank of the patriarch and at the same time of the authentic knight of the weaker sex. Metamorphosis and metempsychosis confirm their thematic and ordering role because gradually, according to the imitation, the people that have come together in the hospital are transformed and are disguised as characters from that past, in scenic compositions that are constantly changing. § 146. Joyce XIX: ‘Ulysses’ V. The night Anyone in a mood for boutades could maintain that the fifteenth episode of Ulysses, ‘Circe’, forms Joyce’s second, finished play, entirely dissimilar to the first one. An even bolder boutade is that this episode would reward the reader most if it were extrapolated from its context and from the whole novel. It is indeed a virtual single-act self-enclosed play, more exactly divisible into three acts and various coordinated tableaux. These scenic tableaux follow one another in sets that are violently juxtaposed to one another. Concrete actions of a ‘diurnal’ and therefore plausible code alternate with others that belong to the domain of hallucination and phantasmagoria. But after all the border between real and oneiric scene is always blurred. A similar fading technique plagiarizes an expressive means about which ‘Bloomian’ Joyce was curious, the cinema, which he wanted to get into as an entrepreneur (as I pointed out in the biography); he also investigated, and we know this for sure, its technical-structural laws. However, the label of oneiric theatre is not sufficient to cover all the technical implications of the episode. We discover, rather, that, confirming the serial nature of the novel, the episode is a reissue, at a different time and in quite another scenario and context, of the tenth one, ‘Wandering Rocks’. Joyce brings together, and subsequently causes to interact, either

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oneirically or because they have come, coincidentally, to the nighttown, all or almost all the characters on his list. Unity of time is inviolable in this episode, just as it has to be; but, as I mentioned, the development is divided into three virtual acts made necessary, if nothing else, by the change of scene: the first one sees the three Dubliners, Stephen, Lynch and Bloom, set out towards the brothel; the second takes place in an interior; and the third again takes place outdoors. Save for the initial overview and a brief appearance by Stephen, the first act, if my division and trisection is accepted, is all dominated by Bloom, who without anyone knowing has purchased bread and chocolate to restore himself after a day that has been at least taxing; later on, for the second time in the novel he enters a slaughterhouse and buys some pork: a well peppered shin bone, a symbol of the most tender meat and a sign of the wildest appetite (and therefore an aphrodisiac). But already while Bloom wanders around the district, innumerable visionary and hallucinatory interludes are opened up. Mentally, as by now we know, Bloom always oscillates in the novel between two extremes, and on one side he struts around in a Don Juan role surrounded by crowds of admirers, and on the other imagines he is a victim of the sadism of perfidious lovers, and experiences the Swinburnian and sadomasochistic frisson of the fatal woman and flogger. The long oneiric tableau of Bloom acclaimed as the mayor, a palingenetic figure afterwards betrayed and destroyed by his fellow-townsmen, is on one side the reprise or the reverberation of the idea of the regeneration of the world, while on the other it contains a burlesque and bitter symbol of the destiny of every Irish benefactor: Bloom’s decline is in fact ironically compared to that of Parnell, since anyone who wants to do Ireland good is ground down and destroyed by the factions. In the second part or act of the play, the scene moves to Bella Cohen’s brothel. The imagination is released both because of the late time, involving tiredness, and creating false bottoms, and because of the place, which arouses erotic fantasies. However, looking at the matter carefully, neither Stephen, nor Lynch nor Bloom are a prey to lust, and have come there for a sexual encounter; on the contrary, in particular the first two only show an uncontrollable desire to speak, even if not exactly to communicate. Stephen is like a keyboard whose keys produce a wellknown sound. He begins with the formulas and the liturgical rituals that he reuses mechanically, and without believing in them; he thinks continually

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about abstruse philosophical dilemmas, and elaborates on the concepts of time and space; his mother appears to him, to reproach in vain his unbelief and his guilt. His associations are all too propitious and mechanical. He does not miss a single cue, in the things said in the brothel, to vent his polemics once again. When Stephen is requested to communicate he has an outburst with two fractured, disconnected monologues, full of contextual transitions, and transcribed without punctuation, almost a preview of Molly’s stream. Stephen and Bloom, although in the same room, are distanced, and alternatively followed by the playwright. Reaching the epilogue we inevitably realize that a kind of exodus en masse has occurred of the whole city towards Gomorra, and that, because of the ambiguous confines between dream and reality, Dubliners are individuals with a double and equivocal life. Gerty’s own very pure female friends reappear as cunning and experienced child prostitutes; and a prostitute narrates that her clients have often been priests, so we would not be surprised to meet at least oneirically, in this ‘Walpurgis night’, the reverend Father Conmee too.103 But, with Rudy Bloom, who, eleven years old, rather than only having lived eleven days, is embodied before Bloom, Bloom has by now adopted Stephen, and superimposes him on the child. 2. ‘Eumaeus’, the sixteenth episode, is an interlocutory and transitional anticlimax, primarily descriptive though also dialogic, with a comichumorous dominant, and written rather methodically in the third person. According to the criterion of verisimilitude it now has to be recognized that while Stephen has nowhere to sleep at that late hour, Bloom is a modern husband left rather free by his wife. He has in fact been absent from his home for about fifteen hours, having left it at nine in the morning, and nobody has looked for him and he has contacted no one. In the asymptotic closeness of the two protagonists, Bloom is excessive in his fatherly attentions to Stephen, who, if he were a true man, would immediately get rid of him. On the other hand Stephen gives very few answers, at times impolite ones, and rarely appropriate. Thus he does not take part in the conversation that starts at the ‘cabman’s shelter’, and indeed is tremendously absent-minded; by contrast, Bloom relates, communicates, listens, answers and sets the 103 Who truly ‘appears’, though only in the recollection of the episode of the flogging at Clongowes College.

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conversation going again, though without adding many new things, and taking out of his hat the usual hobbyhorses. The dismissal of the subjective mode corresponds to the arrival on the stage, for a good stretch, of the wellgraven or caricatured figure of a character never met before, the self-styled and loquacious sailor W. B. Murphy. For this very reason ‘Eumaeus’, aside from its stylistic imprint, harks back to the type of story that in Dubliners is exemplified by ‘An Encounter’: at bottom two quasi-friends, Bloom and Stephen, though no longer children, come upon a dubious, suspicious, and bragging fellow. All Joyce lacks, having reached this episode, are a few possible variations in style among those that he still had up his sleeve, actually only two. Reading the first page one is immediately convinced that Joyce has adopted a kind of degree zero of writing and a literary language that loses its hallmarks and is almost neutral. Yet, perhaps for mimetic reasons, the style evolves more and more decidedly toward the false sloppy, the dowdy, the shabby, and therefore also the syntactically disconnected, progressively losing punctuation, and cleverly mixing objective narration in the third person with camouflaged stream of consciousness. This is the parody or perhaps also the satire of how an average novelist, in 1922 already a little old, could have written the episode. This kind of ghost writer is Joycean at least to the extent to which the episode returns to being supremely intertextual. He is therefore not the simulacrum of a rough and cheap narrator of whom Joyce makes a laughingstock: instead, he is very well-read, though many of his quotations and intertextual allusions are extremely obvious and conventional, not just refined but by now ended up in the sphere of the mouldiest catachreses. Naturally the acme of the episode is the long yarn of the self-styled sailor Murphy, who tells a string of probable lies and other surely unbelievable exploits. Here Joyce succeeds in fusing the most complete effect of reality with the reminiscences of the endless literary exemplars constructed on the figure, or more exactly the archetype, of the wandering sailor and globetrotter, concentrating for obvious reasons on his best-known embodiment, Coleridge’s ‘ancient mariner’. 3. In terms of events, the seventeenth episode, ‘Ithaca’, is also tripartite: Bloom remains onstage all the time, and in the first ‘act’, which is in movement and static at the same time, is going home from the ‘cabman’s shelter’ together with Stephen, whom he takes into the kitchen, where sipping a cup of soluble cocoa he answers his guest’s questions on a range of

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matters, until Stephen goes away. Bloom being left alone to brood, in the third ‘act’ an exchange occurs in the circuit of communication, because it is the drowsy Molly that asks her husband for an account of his day. The episode closes with a stupendous fading, Bloom’s kissing his wife’s ‘melonous hemispheres’, that is her bottom, and the little lies that he tells her on certain things that have happened or not happened. On the expressive plane there is yet another ‘banquet of languages’. The technique employed is very evidently and unmistakably catechistic. Catholic catechism, certain works of medieval and other philosophy, or Spinoza’s Ethics (an anthology of whose thoughts, actually never identified, is on the shelves of the small library in the Bloom household), or any course on any subject that is organized in the form of a quiz, have a similar external organization. But the parody of catechistic-philosophical-theological language is only one facet. Joyce is engaged here in a parody of other sectorial languages or of the very sectorial nature of language. Catechistically we could in turn ask ourselves: but had he not used up these sectorial languages by now? Answer: not yet, there were some that he had not yet faced and imitated, and with which, above all, he had not yet played. They are all or in large part vehicular and purpose-oriented languages, devoid of aesthetic aims, which, because of the parody, instead become aesthetic. But a similar demarcation, between the aesthetic and the pragmatic, is blown up and pulverized, and becomes purely virtual, in the presence of this experiment that Joyce carries out in the episode. Once more the novelist operates through synchrony rather than (as in the fourteenth episode) diachrony of registers and styles. The ritualistic undertone of the operations in the kitchen, all left to playful allusions, concentrates on Bloom preparing a ‘collation for a gentile’. The parody of the Eucharist is ubiquitous and resurrected under the banner of the humorous, the banal and the unexpected: for instance there re-emerges the recollection of Plumtree minced meat (mentioned, Bloom remembers, in an ad published in a newspaper under the obituaries), thus showing the divine Resurrection as an antidote, and antipode, to death. In one of the numerous irruptions of the religious, which are abrupt and disconnected, Stephen returns to his obsession with the Sacrifice of Christ. At the end what is drunk in a cup is an ambiguous ‘massproduct’. Analogous emphasis originates from the imperceptible theological twist of a neutral lexicon: as when Bloom addresses to the guest ‘supererogatory marks of

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special hospitality’. The theme of the episode is therefore history itself with a capital and a lower case letter: a history that is personal, and at the same time standing out against the history of humanity and the cosmos created ab origine. It is its recapitulation, its emblematic reduction in scale. Bloom’s frequent astronomic reflections, vaguely echoing Lucretius, serve to enlarge the scenario out of all proportion, enacting the integration of life in its evolutionary stages, including human life. § 147. Joyce XX: ‘Ulysses’ VI. Molly’s monologue Molly’s monologue, ‘Penelope’, has often been defined the keystone of the edifice of Ulysses. Indeed, it has an effective and essential orientational value, having been held back for so long, and therefore being expected. It is once again monographic, with a single protagonist; stylistically and technically it therefore wrong-foots the reader, because after various episodes in a polyphonic parodic style it is monophonic, and again, after four long episodes that avoid it, it again takes up a continuative stream of consciousness approach. However, this stream employs a different and highly idiosyncratic form of transcription on the page, with oral and linguistics features that are not Stephen’s or Bloom’s. Molly has in fact a storehouse of feelings and memories and an intellectual horizon that are different if not opposite to those of the other two protagonists. Molly’s psyche produces a linguistic code conversion that is all her own, whose salient and most evident aspect is the total absence of punctuation. Her mental language, not by chance, is of the river type, though with the moderation and ordering imposed by Joyce, consisting in segmenting the monologue into eight very long ‘periods’. Such a mark of femininity, and of this femininity, corresponds to a deep human intuition and an aesthetic canon for Joyce, who in Finnegans Wake was to compare femininity to a river. However, in Joyce invention is never very distant from reality. Molly’s language, already here classifiable as nocturnal syntax, is Nora Joyce’s written one, as can also be seen simply from the letters she sent from Locarno to her husband in the summer of 1917, when Joyce in Zurich was struggling hard with the writing of some episodes of the novel: it is an imitation of it.104 Thus the interior monologue cannot be

104 Cf. L II, 400–4.

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pure and absolute. Molly’s, the purest, also overflows, still more than those of Stephen and Bloom, into the dramatic soliloquy. Even though without syntactic segmentations, it moves forward and finds its propulsion in virtue of minimal introductory clusters formed by subject and verb. 2500 lines long, as Joyce said, it can be broken up into several small syntactic members of varying syllabic length, some of the normal dimension of a poetic line and others requiring enjambment. Some of these recurrent sentence cells are the following: ‘I suppose’, ‘I hope’, ‘I hate’ (a very frequent one, a mark of passion and ungovernable impulse), with the opposite ones ‘I love’ and ‘I like’, ‘I wonder’ (curiosity), and, obviously, ‘I remember’. Molly’s speech, in other words, has more markers than one would imagine, and though chromatism is obviously and evidently at work it also exhibits these divisions in virtue of normal stock phrases such as ‘anyway’, ‘anyhow’ or ‘still’. Hence it is more similar to a logically ordered monologue than to a pure memorial flow. Also, while there is no punctuation and the apostrophe of the possessive is eliminated, capital letters are maintained. 2. This is also the first case in which Joyce gets inside a female psyche, and since his characters are unique and archetypical, this reveals his idea of the female psyche and personality. Flame and passion are a prerogative of the woman. With a short cut Molly is the poetry of life, often cheap, superficial, banal, elementary poetry, yet poetry nonetheless. This is her boast: ‘I always liked poetry when I was a girl’. An occasionally lyrical and genuine élan, and rapt abandonment to memory, blend stridently with a kind of poetry that is antipoetic, burlesque, prankish and licentious. The most hilarious page is the very long and decidedly kitsch daydream on Stephen’s genitals, alongside which there are numerous others, as when she dwells with satisfaction on the size, the roundness and the attractiveness of her own breasts. Joyce inherited and accepted from psychoanalysis or psychology, or simply intuited, that the psyche is recursive and serial, as I have often observed. In other words, if Bloom is the homme moyen sensuel Molly is the femme moyenne sensuelle. Her thoughts range from jealousy (the other women that her husband has loved, the times that he has ogled and coveted women before and during their marriage) to her sense of possession and of her superiority to all other women; or from the desire for new things and unconventional sexual encounters to its contradiction (she can take back what she has said, re-examine her judgement, and

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correct it); or from generic and indifferent feminism against men who take their pleasure, insensitive but necessary to sexually hungry women, to the ultimate erotic dissatisfaction, to frustration, unsatisfied desire (over and above eros it is true affection that she lacks). Starting from this last observation and component, Molly is also the boredom of routine provincial life, and Hedda Gabler and Emma Bovary are thrown in too. All her erotic daydreams satisfy this need. Predictably this final episode is not tragic but humorous and literally comic. The conjugal comedy is a savoury little war of positions and simulations: Bloom knows that Molly cheats on him and pretends not to know it, and Molly for her part knows that Bloom too has a little secret life and she is not deceived by his lies: each knows about the other, and the ménage plays out on this game of pretences. Molly can lightheartedly grant her sexual favours, but Bloom has to be hers and no one else’s. She says terrible things about him, but has secret and boundless admiration for him compared with other males; sexually, he is even more potent than Boylan, and has many vices and defects but also many good sides. There is thus a funny alternation in her between the attitudes of a tyrannical wife who would like to dominate her coarse husband and others suited to a chatelaine that demands sublime chivalrous attentions. Authoritarian, a dictatress, she also wants, perhaps jokingly or perhaps really, to flagellate her husband. Reality is not univocal, and in the meantime offers the gaze other unexpected and above all unauthorized sides. In fact Molly opens up subjective perspectives of characters that the rest of the novel classified in a different way: she deforms, she misrepresents, she also illuminates. She preciously intuits, for example, that Stephen has changed in the space of a few hours, and, having agreed to chat with Bloom in the kitchen, is no longer ‘that stuck up university student sort’; but then she gets it wrong when she fantasizes about Stephen’s cleanliness and scent and the whiteness of his genitals. She tries to halt the instant and cling to a virtual synchrony: to crush history and therefore also personal history. This leads to imperceptible transitions and to the functional overlaps between historical times and the present. Only the train whistle and the church bells bring her back to the passing of time. Symptomatically the house clock has stopped or is wrong.105 Her consciousness is aware of 105 ‘I never know the time even that watch he gave me never seems to go properly’.

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the same problem that alarms Stephen and that Bloom investigates: life is a going out of nothingness and a return to nothingness, to which it is urgent to give a meaning. § 148. Joyce XXI: ‘Finnegans Wake’* I. The connections Like every novel of Joyce’s, Finnegans Wake too grew in a regime of endogenesis: concretely from the kilos, twelve of them, of notes not used *

Finnegans Wake was published as Joyce disorganically composed it in avant-garde journals such as transatlantic review, criterion, Navire d’Argent, and transition. A Shorter ‘Finnegans Wake’, ed. A. Burgess London 1966, 1968. A Concordance to ‘Finnegans Wake’, ed. C. Hart, Minneapolis, MN 1973. The critical investigation of the work started as early as 1928, when very little of it was known to the general public, with Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of ‘Work in Progress’, Paris 1928 and London 1939, a collective work written at the urging of Joyce himself by some faithful acolytes (including Beckett, Budgen, Jolas and Gilbert). This work, while much praised, is devoted almost entirely to the examination of the unprecedented technique and to the Viconian framework, and is not particularly useful today. J. Campbell and H. M. Robinson, A Skeleton Key to ‘Finnegans Wake’, New York 1947 (legendary, pioneering paraphrase, much criticized but undoubtedly useful, provided it is not taken as a substitute for the original); E. Wilson, ‘The Dream of H. C. Earwicker’, in The Wound and the Bow, New York 1947, 243–71; J. S. Atherton, The Books at the Wake: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake’, New York 1959, 1974; F. M. Boldereff, Reading ‘Finnegans Wake’, New York 1959; C. Hart, Structure and Motive in ‘Finnegans Wake’, London 1962 (overrated, with artificial and mechanical diagrammatic reductions of the novel); Twelve and a Tilly, ed. J. P. Dalton and C. Hart, London 1966 (includes a remarkable essay by V. Mercer [26–35] on the connections with macaronic poetry); M. C. Solomon, Eternal Geomater: The Sexual Universe of ‘Finnegans Wake’, Carbondale, IL and Edwardsville, IL 1969; W. Y. Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to ‘Finnegans Wake’, London 1969, 1996; A Conceptual Guide to ‘Finnegans Wake’, ed. M. H. Begnal and F. Senn, University Park, PA and London 1974; M. Norris, The Decentered Universe of ‘Finnegans Wake’, Baltimore, MD 1976; A. Glasheen, Third Census of ‘Finnegans Wake’, Berkeley, CA 1977; R. McHugh, Annotations to ‘Finnegans Wake’, Baltimore, MD 1980, 1991; V. J. Cheng, Shakespeare and Joyce: A Study of ‘Finnegans Wake’, University Park, PA 1984; J. Bishop, Joyce’s Book of the Dark: ‘Finnegans Wake’, Madison, WI 1986 (a gargantuan pastiche of quotations); Vico and Joyce, ed. D. P. Verene, New York 1987; James Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake’: A Casebook, ed. J. Harty III, New York 1991; T. C. Hofheinz, Joyce and the Invention of Irish History: ‘Finnegans Wake’ in Context, Cambridge 1995; R. Meloni, La sveglia di Finnegan: una chiave di lettura per i misteri di James Joyce, Paderno Dugnano 2007. The magazine A Wake Newslitter, founded in 1962, by the University of Essex, is entirely devoted to Finnegans Wake.

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for Ulysses.106 The first two pages were written on 10 March 1923; the novel was finished on 13 November 1938, printed on 2 February 1939 ( Joyce’s birthday, as usual), and published on 4 May 1939, simultaneously in London and New York, after sixteen years of gestation.107 The novel had appeared in instalments in various magazines, up to a few days before the publication in book form, with the generic title Work in Progress. In 1927 the Jolas couple had entered Joyce’s orbit. Eugene Jolas was the avant-garde American author of a Manifesto in twelve points, which expressed the hope of the advent of a revolution in art and formulated some aesthetic axioms that Joyce followed to the letter.108 The magazine transition, edited by Jolas, was ready to publish, though it was not the only one, Finnegans Wake, while its episodes developed and as they were completed.109 Looking at this years-long gestation Finnegans Wake is the twentieth-century work that made ‘both heaven and earth copartners in its toil’. It is difficult to think of another literary or artistic work (poems, paintings, sculptures, symphonies and operas), that after the Divine Comedy and Faust required more than a full and continuous period of fifteen years to be completed – and completed, bravely and as a challenge, against a background of massive and almost unanimous dissent. But even more amazing is Joyce’s complete immersion in his ‘work in progress’: absolute and maniacal concentration, to which there corresponded the same degree of inattention, and of indifference, towards surrounding reality. Joyce is formally absent, ‘not received’, from the point of view of the writer’s presence and social incidence in the period 1920–1940,110 though it is possible acrobatically to find a reverse side of 106 Ellmann 1959, 558. 107 However, the usual paratextual wording at the end is ‘Paris 1922–1939’. 108 For instance that imagination is autonomous, that reality must be metamorphosed, that expression is ‘hallucination of the word’, that the word of the langue must be disintegrated and syntax repudiated, and that literature is neither sociology nor communication but expression. Joyce was writing, perfectly fitting in (apart from the abolition of syntax) with what Jolas theorized. 109 Joyce gradually modified the expected total number of pages: first 518, then 618, then in the end 628. 110 Cf. Ellmann 1959, 672–3, for Joyce’s refusal, in 1932, to join a nascent Academy of Irish Letters, although Yeats had very warmly invited him. On the same page, 673,

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the coin. Metaphorically, in Finnegans Wake a second awakening from the nightmare of history is attempted (and, according to Giorgio Melchiori,111 happily achieved). The protagonist Earwicker embodies conscience overpowered and obsessed by ancient and atavistic sins, of a nature that is both moral and historical-political: the original sin that has not been atoned for, its repeatability, the mark of the sinful person, life as an endless trial instituted by imaginary judges.112 Thus for Finnegans Wake too we have the same ‘chance’ genesis as for Ulysses: Joyce went around with his notebook open, ready to pick up hints that he arranged and above all connected together within the pre-set scaffoldings and the conceptual chequerboards. For this very reason the preliminary question is the following: does a continuity exist, and if so can it be proved, between Finnegans Wake and the rest of Joyce’s work? And, in what, more exactly, is Finnegans Wake a continuation of Ulysses, and in what does it break away from it? None of the episodes in Ulysses is lexically so deformed as any one chosen at random in Finnegans Wake, although all the single chapters of Finnegans Wake stylistically show more uniformity than the episodes of Ulysses, which are all different from each other, especially in the second half; and this holds true although in Finnegans Wake one clearly perceives an increase in the density of the text in proportion to the time of writing. The treatment of the word is not exactly revolutionary, but there is absolutization and radicalization of a procedure already desultorily used, but controllable, in Ulysses (‘met him pike hoses’ and so forth). The pun becomes continuous and with it the allusive play on language. Concerning the structuring, the two novels are more or less of the same length and risk doubling the same segmentation. Finnegans Wake has seventeen chapters (no longer ‘episodes’), whereas Ulysses has eighteen, Ellmann says he believes that Joyce had never read Pound’s ‘late works’, that is his Cantos. In music, Joyce’s tastes were conservative: he loved the nineteenth-century melodrama and criticized Stravinsky (Ellmann 1959, 681). 111 Melchiori 1994, 171. 112 The investigators and at the same time the witnesses of Earwicker’s crime are invariably the ‘four evangelists’ who have a donkey with them and, equally metamorphic, ‘stand’ for the four wise men or also the four seventeenth-century analysts of the history of Ireland. They are often amalgamated under the name ‘Mamalujo’ (an aggregation of the initial syllables of the names of the evangelists).

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but we know that the tenth one is extraterritorial and extra-Homeric, and added ex post: otherwise the number of the internal sub-units would have been the same. But Ulysses is ternary and Finnegans Wake quaternary, although both correlate this organizational and conceptual rhythm with a binary one, and the one and the other are subsumed in the last analysis by a superior internal principle, that of circularity.113 In both cases some cultural and anthropological models act behind them: a very evident one is that of Homer, but amalgamated with others (Bérard, Aquinas, Shakespeare and Fletcher) in Ulysses; in Finnegans Wake the number of sources becomes plethoric, although in the first places in the hierarchy we find Vico, Bruno and Nicholas of Cusa. 2. As for autobiography, looking at the matter carefully, one can only confirm that we are dealing with two novels with a familiar structure, and that the repertoire of the sets of characters is Joyce’s last exploit on the material of his life, and by means of those tools and those stratagems that I have several times listed and mentioned. Finnegans Wake is the umpteenth objectivization, by Joyce, of his autobiographical trail: as Tindall says, ‘Joyce could never let himself alone’.114 It is also true that while in the other three narrative works the same characters circulate, and with the same names, now there is a total exchange of names and roles. We also have to admit that Ulysses is a biplanar or dovetail novel, about a father looking for a male son to adopt and a son who does not want to hear about flesh fathers, or even spiritual and adoptive ones, and who, in a personal battle aiming at the elimination of the father, aspires to be his own father, and therefore not to have a father (and in the end not even his mother, or any other mother). We have seen Joyce’s father in flesh and bones in the three preceding novels, in various versions that by and large coincide. In Finnegans Wake there is no father looking for an adoptive son and ultimately there is not even a son who wants to get rid of his father, at least with the tension of 113 Graphically Joyce represented this process as a ‘circling of the square’. The novel starts again by attaching its last word, ‘the’, to its first, ‘riverrun’. Circularity is ensured by the fact that the river, Anna Livia Plurabelle, flowing into the ocean, is water that evaporates and returns to the ground in the form of rain. 114 Tindall 1969, 154.

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a Stephen Dedalus. Earwicker has many features of Bloom, as we will see, and, the biographers inform us, he is at the same time, together with other models,115 John Joyce. In reality very little of Finnegans Wake is narrated from the son’s point of view, and Finnegans Wake is not a novel of the son but essentially one of the father. Or if it is about the son it is about another son and not about young Shem-Stephen-Joyce. On the autobiographical meaning of the dualism of Shem and Shaun, no convincing and definitive answers have been provided by the experts in my opinion. Meanwhile Joyce, who until then could have been accused of having capitalized too much on the continuity of the dummy Stephen Dedalus, foregoes it and glosses over it. However, Stephen reappears as Shem, especially in the brief moments in which he shares, deformed but recognizable, key episodes of Joyce’s autobiography. It is certainly to be ruled out, and unacceptable, that Joyce exclusively transfused into his twin Shaun his brother Stanislaus, and that he attacks him furiously, to such an extent, and so treacherously, as to make him the object of prolonged libels and mockeries. Shaun could again represent the germ of Bloom that nested in Joyce, contrary to the germ of Stephen-Shem: or practical sense against theoretical, or the principle of life against that of death. Shaun the postman could symbolize that Joyce whom his relatives and his father, or Nora, hoped he might become: symbolically and metaphorically one who carried letters written by others, the ‘literati’. He could have stayed in Dublin to work at Guinness, his relatives thought; Nora too mocked her husband and his literary pretensions. Then Shaun, if this is the case, is a hypostasis or hypothesis of the adult and retrospective conscience of Joyce. John Joyce after all was proud of his son, although in him he saw more Joyce-Shaun than Joyce-Shem. One should perhaps reply that Bruno and Vico forced Joyce’s hand, inducing him to give a purely philosophical interpretation, and one of philosophy of history, to the data of

115 Every search for the models in the biography always gives conflictual results. Costello 1992, 70, believes precisely that Earwicker was modelled on Joyce’s father, on the basis of an analogous ‘park incident’ and because in his office one Buckley worked; but he also maintains (28–9) that the Earwicker nucleus owes more to the family of Joyce’s mother: her parents had in fact a pub or a distillery, a daughter and two ‘quarrelsome sons’.

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his family history.116 Shaun serves as a ‘negative’ reference point that assures the evolution of conscience and art and, as a negative pole, rekindles the exemplary values of spiritual exile and dissent. A fourth ideological source of Finnegans Wake is Spengler, and in the light of the latter Shaun symbolizes the Spenglerian decline of the spirit going towards historical decadence and the triumph of bourgeois pseudo-civilization. If it is so, Joyce echoes or at least agrees with other contemporaries – Mann to mention just one – who were much more involved in this apocalypse. In III.3 of Finnegans Wake Shaun is the bigoted and reactionary Dublin conscience that has expelled Shem and still curses him, and Joyce constructs indirectly yet another monument to himself and proclaims yet another self-apology.117 The process of stripping the father of authority thus precedes the installation of the son at the end of the novel: but the successor son, like Earwicker, is a precarious reunion of Shaun and Shem, but with slight prevalence of Shaun.118 Has Joyce once and for all buried, or finished burying, that Shem-Stephen Dedalus whose erosion starts in the Portrait? However, the heroic Buckley that killed the Russian general is now a philosopher Berkeley, or also an ancient arch-druid that maintains and symbolizes the mistiest paganism in front of St Patrick, who supplants him with his concrete credo: therefore the nocturnal and druidic Shem undergoes an additional expulsion. But St Patrick is also the representative of religious and English political imperialism. So we see that is not wholly clear who for Joyce, at the end of Finnegans Wake, is tomorrow’s man.

116 I believe this is also the opinion expressed in Tindall 1969, 11. 117 The seventh chapter of the first part revolves around the vulgar, cowardly, drunk, vain impostor Shem, who writes with ink made from excrement. Threatened with lynching, he is arrested. The two brothers, renamed Justius and Mercius, then exchange accusations and insults. The endogenesis from Stephen is unmistakable because the ‘tic of his conscience’ is nothing but the agenbite of inwit that eats away at Stephen in Ulysses. As if it were not enough, he too is afflicted and tormented by an ‘ineluctable ghost’ (‘ineluctable’ was the modality of the visible in Stephen’s walk on the seashore in Ulysses); and Shem has a tenor voice and delights in singing. This chapter is therefore a kind of fanciful and surreal rewriting of the plot in the Portrait. 118 This is the opinion of Tindall 1969, 312–13.

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3. We do not clearly see a precise reason for the splitting of this new alter ego into two contrary hypostases, if not, I repeat, out of obedience to Bruno’s dualism, or else for the pleasure of playing with a dualistic concept of the psyche and the personality. Undoubtedly Joyce objectifies a taut and harsh antagonism that he had originally set up between Stephen and various classmates, from Lynch to Mulligan. In Finnegans Wake what is at stake is Isabel, who is young Nora, when Joyce is Shem; it is Nora the wife, that is to say Anna Livia Plurabelle, when he is Earwicker. And Anna Livia is gossiped about and at times believed to be the stepmother of her children, meaning perhaps another man is their father ( Joyce’s torment in 1909). Young Joyce is Shem but he is also, as an elderly man, an Earwicker that will find his successor in Shaun. Joyce in this way re-examines and interprets, in a semi-conscious phantasmagoria, his whole biography.119 Earwicker in turn is and is not an evolution of Bloom. Race and profession diverge, but other data fit in: the sense of family, the defence of his guiltlessness or of his crime, incontinence and sexual daydream, tics or certain tics. Taking an acrobatic attitude, Earwicker’s family is perfectly like Bloom’s. The further parallels

119 Shaun is necessarily a rival in love of Shem in the pantomime in the first chapter of the second book, with the hymn in honour of the former sung by the choir of Isabel, or Issy, his sister, and of her twenty-eight handmaids (the number of the days of the lunar cycle), and the defeat of Shem, or Glugg, in a struggle with Chuff or Shaun. The brawl between the two brothers returns in the second chapter of the second book, closing with one of the numerous, temporary reconciliations, and is further updated in the first chapter of the third part, with the spotlight on Shaun, an unctuous bigot, and therefore a hypocrite and someone who slavers, composes yet another letter of denunciation and then tells a fairy-tale about the vain and improvident grasshopper and the prudent ant, adumbrating himself in the ant and Shem in the grasshopper. At the end of the episode the reader realizes that on Shem there has been superimposed the father, because of the resurfacing of the charge relating to the ‘park events’. In the subsequent chapter Shaun or Yawn, going through a parodic Way of the Cross, addresses to the twenty-nine handmaids a sermon from a keg of beer drifting along the river. The main romance model of the sister Isabel is Iseult, abducted on behalf of King Mark by Tristram, who has come to the Irish shore. Earwicker’s tavern is in the Dublin suburb Chapelizod (literally ‘Iseult’s chapel’), bordering with Phoenix Park. Since Isabel is aspired to by the three males of the family, each of them is simultaneously Tristram and King Mark.

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are Molly-Anna Livia and Milly-Isabel (as regards feminine vanity). Bloom the father lacks twins, and indeed does not even have a male child. But it is evident that Bloom dreams an overlap between two children, one real but dead and the other adoptive but living: Rudy and Stephen. The text of Ulysses is clear on this overlap, but one cannot postulate any polar opposition, subject to continual reconciliations, between the two ‘children’. It is obvious, however, that Earwicker is a copy of Bloom when he has to exculpate himself, and the repeated exculpation scenes are much marked and engraved in both novels. But after all the equivalences between the two fathers are of an archetypical kind. Already Bloom was a paradigmatic character, and further and additional archetypes came to light in relation to Ulysses, such as Christ or the wandering Jew. Earwicker goes further:120 he has an infinity of contemporary aliases (he was also a politician who really was called that way, or almost: Hugh Culler Eardley Childers, a minister under Gladstone) and especially mythological, anthropological and archetypal ones: God the father and Christ, Adam, Noah spied on naked by his three children as is preannounced by the ‘park scene’,121 the giants and the patriarchs, Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty, Humphrey Clinker, Hamlet, Falstaff, his own father, a he-goat, and a chimpanzee. 120 Cf. Melchiori 1994, 194. 121 Finnegans Wake almost all revolves around Earwicker’s ‘indiscretion’ in the park, that is, Phoenix Park, though one never definitely clarified in its real implications, but vaguely similar to that of Bloom with Gerty, or better still of Bloom-Ulysses with the Sirens: he spies on two young girls, waits, masturbates, shows himself, defecates or urinates, but he also sees them micturating or doing something else that is improper. He therefore immediately plays two roles, the voyeur and the person spied on. Three soldiers are also present as witnesses, or perhaps have been lured there. On one side all Finnegans Wake is an investigation aimed to find out about the events in the park. This crime is not legally prosecutable, as is obvious, except in an oneiric logic; and it is guilt and ‘felix’ guilt only in the symbolic and biblical logic, that is to say of the sin of Adam and Eve in Eden (who had the children Abel and Cain, though no daughter), together with the reflections of Noah seen naked by his three children. That the sin of Adam and Eve was of a sexual nature is an apocryphal belief, though a widespread one. In the second chapter of the second book there is a second voyeuristic scene in biblical taste, in that the two twins represent and imagine their mother’s pudenda in the shape of a triangle.

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Himself Brunian, he is a ‘double’, at least in the sense that in him there reemerge some dualisms found in Bloom himself (a gallant and cuckolded Don Juan). A chapter can move ahead hinging on a temporary identity of his, until it crumbles and is transfused into another one or others. It is also a matter of oppositional roles: father and son, invader and invaded, accused and accuser.122 However, Joyce had perhaps ‘launched’ Earwicker as an archetype long before Bloom, in the youthful essay on Mangan, the poet Mangan that was criticized in Dublin for having had a dissolute and unpatriotic life; and he was a suspicious, avoided, wandering figure similar to someone being bent by the burden of sin, acquiescent but also at times bursting out and reacting. And what should one say of Dignam? Paddy Dignam, whose occupation we do not know, died and his funeral was held in Ulysses, and someone was confident that he would rise up one day. Here the person that dies is the labourer Finnegan, a remote antecedent of Earwicker, who diatonically appears answering the visiting king – a very first, non petita exculpation – that he only went to look for ‘earwigs’. The fact is he has no police record (‘vicefreegal’). As a Telemachiad existed, the first of the four partitions in Finnegans Wake is dominated by his presence, and the investigation of Earwicker’s crime reverberates throughout the text. 4. A person who likes Ulysses, even intensely and fanatically, does not automatically like Finnegans Wake. Even the first very qualified admirers of Joyce expressed some doubts about it. By contrast, the enemies of Ulysses automatically partly or wholly rejected and reject the later work. Two currents already formed when the first episodes of Work in Progress appeared in magazines, and the traditionalists implicitly lined up with the perplexed or decidedly negative response of Stanislaus Joyce, expressed in a 1924 letter. The normally judicious Harriet Weaver in 1926 a little obtusely asked Joyce to do two editions, an ‘ordinary’ one and an annotated one,123

122 In 1940 Joyce (cf. Campbell and Robinson 1947, 181 n. 1) complimented himself because he had preannounced a future incarnation of Earwicker, that was ‘Finn again’, in this case the Finn ‘invaded’ by Russia. As Burgess acutely observes in the Foreword to A Shorter Finnegans Wake, quoted in the bibliography (22), the language of Finnegans Wake can be defined as ‘Eurish’. 123 Ellmann 1959, 596.

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and complained with disappointment that he was wasting his genius: it is a verdict echoed by H. G. Wells, also decidedly refractory (‘For me it is a blind alley’). Pound too surrendered, and with Wyndham Lewis a quarrel even broke out.124 So Joyce, discouraged, in 1927 had a wild idea – like that of Browning with the material of The Ring and the Book – to ‘cede’ the material of the novel to James Stephens, an author of delightful Irish fables. He considered Stephens a kind of envoy of providence and a twin brother, having been born in Dublin in the same year and month and on the same day as him. That the recipient of Finnegans Wake, of the game of Finnegans Wake, is Joyce himself is a solution that can be considered ( Joyce himself told the co-translator Nino Frank that only he could understand it), but almost immediately discarded. Joyce wrote for a public, even if virtual, that his book was to form and allure, and against another public and a centuriesold system of reading.125 Tindall’s apparently rather insipid and tautological boutade, also echoed by Beckett, that ‘Finnegans Wake is about Finnegans Wake’,126 contains another partial truth: the absence of external referentiality or even the complete self-referentiality of Finnegans Wake, as a book that recapitulates all books. As for the first point, it is to be borne in mind that for today’s reader the circumstances, the modalities and the textual entity of reception have changed. As for the second, in 1939 Finnegans Wake sang a hymn to the constantly renewed and indestructible forces of life, a hymn that was literally, barbarically and ironically contradicted by Hitler’s war, and with resounding synchrony for the deafness with which it was being received and the implicit failure of its reception. Yet different conclusions were arrived at by those who, later, found in it precious indications and guidelines for another ‘waste land’ that had emerged from a second ‘great

124 Finnegans Wake disappointed more than one contemporary novelist, also akin to Joyce, and therefore unexpectedly, among them Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. Nabokov 1980, 408, defines it as ‘one of the greatest failures of literature’. By contrast, certain poets liked the novel, like Dylan Thomas. 125 Which, as Beckett maintained in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of ‘Work in Progress’, 13–14, was however to be a return to the primitive one, which did not distinguish form and content. 126 Tindall 1969, 323.

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war’.127 To that society reduced to rubble it offered, a century later, another Carlylean ‘everlasting yea’. The few pronouncements of critics on the semiotic statute of this work imply that it engrosses and stimulates, but at times also frustrates the hermeneutic ability of the reader, driven to search for the most recondite and boldest associations embedded in the text. Without knowing a very large mass of books, if not all or almost all the ‘western canon’, and more, the promised rapture is not achieved. The implicit premise is that successful and even enchanting passages (like Anna Livia Plurabelle’s final monologue) alternate with others that are less successful and enchanting.128 But the hope that Finnegans Wake would conquer a readership in future years has largely been disappointed.129 Indeed, one suspects that even among the specialists (Butor loyally confesses it) it belongs to that famous, long list of ‘books that are least read among those that are most quoted’. The result is that, historically, Finnegans Wake has been enjoyed for decades through that surgical extraction that is called its ‘skeleton’: A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake by J. Campbell and H. M. Robinson. Until a short time ago the reference term of Finnegans Wake was precisely either a few chosen passages that are clearer and more comprehensible, or other surrogates of the work. A Skeleton Key and similar books offer the opposite of Finnegans Wake, restoring that possible neutral and communicative language that Joyce evidently replaced with ‘expression’, recalling Jolas’s Manifesto. But it is not enough: another substitutive compilation of the work is the ‘census’ by Adaline Glasheen.130 The paradox is that the only operation on Finnegans Wake that has not yet been carried out or planned is a translation back into English! This digression can close by remembering that major critics like 127 Campbell and Robinson 1947, 295–6. 128 Joyce can be very clever, but nine times out of ten one guesses the outcome of a wordplay even if one does not wholly perceive the meandering pathway of associations that leads to it. When a critic like Tindall takes to pieces a lexeme or a syntagm showing great semantic condensation, and he does so very often with ingenious results, he then invariably finds in it the same field of allusions to the cycle of life, death and rebirth. Prolonged reading produces tiredness, because of the repetitiveness and prolixity, and impatience, monotony and frustration. 129 Campbell and Robinson 1947, 295. 130 Glasheen 1977 and previous editions.

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Contini and Butor131 also surrendered in the past faced with the true and complete Finnegans Wake, seeing it (the former at least) in the manner of Robinson and Campbell’s ‘skeleton’; and also finding that Joyce’s prophecy was utopian: that Finnegans Wake, unapproachable for average readers in 1939, would become the daily bread of those of a century later. § 149. Joyce XXII: ‘Finnegans Wake’ II. The sources Criticizing Joyce because no character in Finnegans Wake verges on the greatness and above all the ‘vividness’ of Bloom or Molly, or even of Stephen – because no character is ‘palpable’, and none could be recognized if we met them in the street – thus means getting the target wrong. It was not the objective of Joyce, a supreme creator of true characters, to create any here. The phantasmagorical and oneiric approach of the novel makes the five main characters gradually take on different roles and identities, so they are strictly transitory masks in a conjuring game of arcane overlaps; just as the parental couple is the reincarnation and the matrix of others in history and a universal wait for reproductions. Every character, and first of all the three male ones, has a range of simultaneous identities that are synchronic and diachronic. In this sense, Earwicker should have appeared in the title of the novel, which Joyce tried to get his entourage of friends to guess. He had great fun prompting them to do this and inducing them each time to get it wrong, mainly because the legend of the hod carrier Tim Finnegan – who fell off a ladder and died, but came back to life after sniffing some whisky (as is sung in an Irish popular ballad), and therefore ‘Finn again’ – is a diegetic cell that, placed immediately at the start, oddly is then not repeated and alluded to afterwards in the novel. 2. The basic algorithm is 8+4+4+1 as a tribute to Vico and his four historical times; but in each time, and therefore in each of the four parts, a quaternary cycle is drawn and suggested en abyme, and the hero-father is born, lives, rises to his apex, declines, dies and comes back to life four times, the last time in the guise of the son or the Son, ensuring the continuity and inexhaustibility of the vital cycle of the cosmos and the very intelligibility

131 By Butor cf. ‘Esquisse d’un seuil pour Finnegan’, in Répertoire I, Paris 1960, 226.

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of history. According to Beckett,132 who was close to Joyce, Vico’s New Science is a preview of Yeats’s A Vision, because it formulates the idea of the evolution of history through tripartite cycles, of ages corresponding to three social and political organizations, three functions of language and as many ‘human motives’ and ‘institutions’, above all then finding in this a series of human correlatives, like Yeats for the twenty-eight lunar phases. History, according to words of Beckett’s that are also echoed by Deasy in Ulysses, for Vico is ‘a work of […] God’. Alongside Vico, who had hence postulated and formulated the recursive rhythm of history,133 there are two other precedents or perhaps three: Bruno, Nicholas of Cusa, and Blake. In Joyce’s critical writings there is also a 1903 critique of a work by Bruno.134 It praises the ultimate coherence, the throwing out of bold hypotheses, and the multifaceted character of his philosophy. Bruno is the father of modern philosophy, Joyce maintains, as he showed the evolutionary mechanism of history as a series of polar clashes: reason and mysticism, God and nature, body and spirit, well distinguished but moving towards a reconciliation. The complementarity of the two approaches, Vico’s and Bruno’s, underlies Earwicker and his hypostasis, antagonistic in relation to younger figures that want to oust them. Earwicker is at the same time a living coincidentia oppositorum that brings together aporias that can unpredictably change sign – the invaded and the invader, the accused and the investigator. He is an outsider and an outcast because he is a Protestant in a mainly Catholic community; and nevertheless, a descendant of ancient Danes, that is of Vikings, he is also an invader.135 The derisive ballad in I.2 insists on this 132 See ‘Dante … Bruno. Vico ... Joyce’, in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of ‘Work in Progress’, 3–22. 133 For once at least one can challenge a judgement by Joyce himself on the structure of his novels: that Ulysses is a novel ‘with a beginning, middle and an end’, whereas Finnegans Wake, which is completely different, ‘has neither beginning nor end’ (22 February 1932 to T. S. Eliot, in L I, 315). According to the shrewd observation by Tindall 1950, 37, the ‘s’ of ‘yes’, the last word of Ulysses, is circularly linked to the first, ‘Stately’. 134 ‘The Bruno Philosophy’, in CW, 93–4. 135 Duplicity worked out in the anecdote of the ‘Norwegian captain’ (II.3) and the tailor Kersse, two equal parts into which his identity is split.

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marginalization and on the slanders to which he is subjected.136 However, Joyce in the last analysis remains doubtful, as I mentioned, about whether history is the nightmare of a continual reopening of the contest between Bruno’s two contrary vectors or the dream of their definitive reconciliation. Blake’s Jerusalem, discussed by Joyce in Paris,137 shows amazing analogies with Finnegans Wake, except for a complicated use of allegorism that in the long run it becomes impossible to follow: it not only required of its author about fifteen years of tireless revisions, like Joyce’s work; not only is it a summa of Blake’s thought, impregnated with philosophy and theosophy, with Kabbalah and esotericism, myth and symbol, making it necessary for the reader to have the same hermeneutical aids to get on top of it; it also has the identical structure of a vision and a dream and the same discontinuity and flashing, fragmentary diegetic disconnection. Cyclical, at least superficially Viconian though not at all conceptually, in Blake there is a vision of a triadic history, marked more than in Vico by the parable of the Fall and by a sex-centred obsession corresponding to a wrong evaluation and performance of sexuality. As a result the necessary apocalyptic regeneration (the marriage of Jerusalem to Albion, concrete beings and at once archetypes, as in Joyce) revolves around the re-established, correct and harmonious relationship between drive and reason. Joyce glosses over the difficult reconciliation of a recursive mythology and an apocalyptic one, the latter rather being the antithesis of the former. But the hazards of his synthetic and syncretic attitude are very numerous if not practically infinite. Joyce found the birth-death-resurrection paradigm of the hero, with the insemination of a female principle by a male one and the defenestration of the father by the son, reproduced in western and oriental anthropologies (Egyptian for example, the Book of the Dead), in theosophies and in the Kabbalah, in the occult, in alchemy and in numerology. Also, a very large portion of English literature, if not world literature, is sieved through and

136 Cf. L I, 401, letter in French to Louis Gillet, where Joyce says he has received confirmation from a German scholar of the ‘scandinavisme de mon héros Finn MacCool’. 137 Ellmann 1959, 506. Cf. also the precious indications provided by M. Pagnini in the introduction to his edition of Jerusalem, Firenze 1994, 5–23, especially 21.

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addressed as in a dialogue almost line after line,138 including more interactive and more prominent books, although some of them were ‘rare objects’ like Le Fanu’s House by the Churchyard. Joyce distinguishes and accumulates from universal knowledge above all paradigms, as acclaimed as they were bizarre, of dualisms and binary contests, especially looking to the history of Ireland.139 Swift and Sterne, for example, lend themselves to recurrent calembours because of both the etymological meaning and the antinomy of their names (‘fast’ vs ‘austere’), and because Swift also wrote a diary where he recounts his well-known unhappy loves for two women. Finnegans Wake is the apotheosis of the intertextual pun, and only detailed commentaries on the work can exhaustively investigate the extent and the proportions of this game; at the same time this is a datum to set aside and meditate on again, because Finnegans Wake remains above all a game, mostly epidermal and nominal. To return to what was said above, the philosophical scaffoldings were emphasized by Joyce himself, also through Beckett, to make people believe that the novel had a deep, ramified initiatory meaning and hidden keys, and critics soon fell into the trap. In an unusually transparent letter of 21 May 1926 to Harriet Shaw Weaver140 Joyce confessed the following regarding the theories of Vico and Bruno: ‘I would not pay overmuch attention to these theories, beyond using them for all they are worth, but they have gradually forced themselves on me through circumstances of my own life’. Joyce was never a great and original thinker. § 150. Joyce XXIII: ‘Finnegans Wake’ III. Technique If it is true that it represents an escalation from Ulysses, Finnegans Wake uses a technique and a style that, apparently revolutionary, prove above all to be an intensification of some phenomena previously irregular or intermittent. It was rare in Ulysses for an episode to reuse the style and register of the previous one; a paradox, although true, is that Finnegans Wake 138 The ‘books at the wake’ were first excellently filed by Atherton 1959. 139 Recurrent, and transposed in the many apologues, is the clash between paganism and Christianity, as well as the one between Irish and continental (English-Roman) Catholicism, or between Catholicism and Protestantism. 140 L I, 241.

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is formally more homogeneous than Ulysses, though with Joyce everything is relative. The day after the publication of Ulysses Joyce had already brusquely dismissed the stream of consciousness, which, he observed,141 had served him not because it was ‘veracious’ but ‘as a bridge over which to march my eighteen episodes’, and a bridge that once crossed could be blown up. Ellmann adds that in 1927 Joyce ‘began to lose interest’ in Ulysses, and answered anyone who asked him: ‘Ulysses! Who wrote it? I’ve forgotten it’.142 But not only the internal monologue or ‘monologuy of the interiors’ is not eliminated (the end of the novel is a very evident recovery of it in grand style, a pendant to that of Molly, now Anna Livia Plurabelle), and instead there are various cases in which one of the techniques of Ulysses reappears and is reprised, although it is so well camouflaged that it is difficult to recognize it. The peremptory time frame of Ulysses furnished a natural organizing criterion; here, it has often been noticed, there is a type of sequence through tableaux devoid of apparent logical-spatiotemporal connection. The linear and measurable time of hours that follow one another with the relevant canonical operations is rejected in Finnegans Wake in favour of mythical or archetypal time. For this reason the diegetic procedure is influenced by and acts on the basis of synchrony or timelessness: we vaguely know where, never when an event has occurred, whether before or after a certain sequence of other events.143 While Ulysses had juicy material to develop, though never too much in the end (and I have stressed this), Finnegans Wake has even less of it. Joyce referred to the novel that leavened as a ‘storiella’ (sic, in Italian). It is not a banalization by Joyce, an act of disdain typical of the great creator: he used the word in a literal sense, confessing that the diegetic edifice was constructed on strictly ghost materials. The content is reduced to the minimum in relationship to the proliferation of the signifier; and the diegetic organization is worked out on varied repetition of the Viconian form of birth, ascent, death and 141 Ellmann 1959, 543. 142 Ellmann 1959, 603. Cf. also the confirmation by Italo Svevo, who visited Joyce in Paris, in ‘Scritti su Joyce’, in I. Svevo, Opera Omnia, ed. B. Maier, Milano 1968, vol. III, 726. 143 On the dating of ‘Earwicker’s dream’ cf. however Tindall 1969, 126.

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‘recourse’ or resurrection. Concretely the text is a collection of self-sufficient ‘plates’ in the single episodes, often introduced by the omniscient narrator with transition formulas like ‘Now’, ‘But’, ‘Yet’, ‘However’, ‘Naturally’, which vainly disguise, and therefore disclose, that there is no real connection between the one and the other. These are therefore parodic formulas making fun of conventional literary technique. A chapter nevertheless can contain at the end, like the seventh with Anna Livia, a relaunch to the following one in the form of an announcement or a sudden evocation. Cinematic fading occurs between the third and fourth chapters of the second part, when the scene of the tavern is transfused into that of the departing ship of Tristram and Iseult. A further hindrance to reading is the suppression of quotation marks, an orientational aid signalling dialogue, so that omniscient speech in the third person and speech attributed to a first person occasionally get mixed up. But, as a phenomenon of compensation, two traditional norms at least are not violated, and they are punctuation (as a rule) and the sentence order, which obeys the syntactic laws of English. 2. The creativeness exhibited by Ulysses is now oriented towards the ingenious and bizarre variety of the arrangements of the single chapters, almost always verging on the tour de force. Aware of the lack of changes of subject, Joyce makes up for it by increasing from chapter to chapter the rate of difficulty and the extravagance of the organization. The voice in the initial phases mimes that of a storyteller that resorts to overused phatic and colloquial formulas, as such not subject to the ventriloquist gaps of Ulysses: ‘Now by memory inspired, turn wheel again to the whole of the wall’. In this way the voice, because of its very nature, may resort to the abrupt transition, lose the thread of the discourse and fall into strange haziness, and change the names and the theatre of events, and this is another indication of the absence of linear development and spatio-temporal consistency. This theatre manager, arranger or orchestrator, in whom Joyce is camouflaged, also indulges in long lists of epithets and strings of designations, and as a learned and erudite man often quotes ‘letters’ or invents them adopting special imitative and parodic falsettos. A variation on this hypostasis is the lesson or the rambling guided visits run by a teacher or guardian of young students, as in II.2. But starting from the second chapter of the first part – Earwicker’s meeting in the park with a certain ‘cad’ – Joyce rhythmically

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starts to insert, like overlaps, literary ‘genres’, tricks and various escamotages like the anecdote complete in itself, the fable often in dialogue form, the apologue, the mime and the pantomime, the little show and the gag, the dramatic dialogue, the dissertation, the account of a trial with the investigation, the inquest, the prosecution and the defence, and also the quiz, the radio programme, the slander, the invective, the defamation, and the catalogue. So many ‘fables’ are incorporated, always clearly binary ones (that is to say hinging on two contrasting hypostases), that all the rest seems like the specious framework to contain them. The rule is that similar discursive detours are not introduced and prepared for, but instead present themselves without padding. Among the tours de force are an episode all interwoven with the names of famous battles, and the very popular ‘cantata’ of the washerwomen rinsing the dirty clothes of the parental couple on the shores of the Liffey (I.8), dense embroidery of the names of goodness knows how many rivers. This could be a story within the story of the storyteller or a momentary suspension of his role. In itself it is also a not very frequent return of the technique of points of view of a Browninguesque type, that is to say of third parties. 3. Going through the text looking for the most ‘memorable’ effects, the sixth chapter of the first part imitates the formula of the seventeenth episode of Ulysses, not by chance the one that Joyce liked most and was also the most omniscient of the eighteen. It is devised as a quiz between the two twins, a pretext to introduce – or, at that point in the development, to re-present – the hinges of the diegesis. The ‘letter’, in the same episode at point 10, is in its mawkishness the disguising of a monologue in the style of Milly Bloom or Gerty. But previously, in the fifth chapter, a different letter, about Earwicker’s guilt, is submitted to a careful investigation in the terms of a parody of the interpretative methods and of the language of literary criticism itself, and of graphology, palaeography and philology.144 The quantity of literary references makes it a second ‘Oxen of the Sun’, but without that rigid chronological order. As in Ulysses, Joyce always likes listing: epithets,

144 With one of the first of the many references to the ancient Irish illuminated Book ‘of Kells’.

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definitions, slogans, small and indeed minimal syntagmas that describe a certain fundamental action, always the same. And the lists, like that of the insults or of the micro-actions and of the epithets of Finn in I.6, juxtapose the data of a stratospheric polar excursion – witticisms, mockeries, jokes, remotely pertinent extravagances, or that one always suspects are pertinent. In the eighth chapter of the first part Joyce resorts to the pretence of an omniscient narration and of an external voice that takes sides and lines up, with rhetorical questions, with the crowd of the conformists against Shem’s ‘lowdown blackguardism’. II.2 is the parody of an essay or a heuristic work, and hence the remake of episodes from Ulysses and in particular of ‘Oxen of the Sun’, as a parody of the liberal arts of the trivium and quadrivium and of the literary tradition itself (the liberal arts, seven, prophetically quoted in the university essay ‘The Study of Languages’), with the typographic exploit of the three channels of annotations on the text (at the two sides and at the bottom of the page), thus inaugurating and requiring a reading method that is not only stereophonic but also quadraphonic. ‘Ithaca’ is behind the subsequent parodies of sectorial languages, the grammatical, the historical and the mathematical. An amazing feature is the final collection of sketches and caricatural vignettes rich in symbolic allusions (two superimposed circles, the tip of a nose, two bones in a cross). II.3 hinges on another eccentric situation. Inside a tavern, or the tavern (whose name always oscillates between Bristol and Mullingar, or others) we are purposely prevented from distinguishing the words of the customers by the voices of a radio or television broadcast; two sound sources alternate and get mixed up. The script of a sketch titled ‘how one Buckley shot a Russian general at the battle of Sevastopol in the Crimean War’ is in itself a variation on the pantomime in II.1, and starts as a dramatic passage with speeches assigned to the single characters introduced by the stage directions. It is a kind of theatre within theatre, because two fellows, Butt and Taff, recount, or act, the story of the killing. It could be a third, futuristic example of a Joyce drama after ‘Circe’, or one in the manner of Beckett. But the sketch is interrupted and punctuated by announcements and various interludes, and the insertion breaks in, again similar to a section of the ‘Cyclops’ episode, of a horserace narrated in square brackets. Parody explodes again in III.2 in the preaching of Jaun, a Christ about to ascend to heaven and to leave his

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spiritual testament of warnings against the dangers of the flesh. Jaun is at the same time a reversal of Juan, and his sermon aims at the enjoyment of that flesh from whose dangers he would like to dissuade his sister. III.3 is in the form of evocation or spiritual invocation, because the members of the Earwicker family talk with the ventriloquist voice of a sleeping Shaun. The narration in III.4 is conducted in the form of telegraphic captions; however, as in certain future mini-plays by Beckett, the same scene (the sexual union of the parents)145 is observed, and therefore narrated again, and thus also repeated, from four separate visual angles, those of the four omnipresent evangelists. In this chapter we have the most enigmatic and apparently self-standing, sudden and ephemeral flash of the whole novel, on the iniquities of a late Roman called Honuphrius, followed by the account of the phases of the imaginary trial referring to the payment of a check. One episode is a pastiche and the other a parody of legal, historical and even banking jargon146 – flour from a previous sack, like that of a fragment escaped from Ulysses or left over from it, possibly from the ‘Cyclops’ episode. § 151. Joyce XXIV: ‘Finnegans Wake’ IV. The language In the course of time a theory and an idea of Finnegans Wake have spread and been consolidated, namely that its dominant, rather than conceptual or diegetic, is auditory, and, more radically, musical. And in this respect Finnegans Wake competes with the ‘Sirens’ episode in Ulysses (Butor: ‘la meilleure façon de faire connaissance avec Finnegans Wake est de l’entendre lire à haute voix’;147 Tindall: ‘a music of words’).148 Tindall also mentions Pater and his aphorism that art ‘constantly aspires to the condition of music’, and couples Joyce with Mozart, Wagner and Bach. In my opinion this analogy again conceals a misunderstanding. Language can mime music but it cannot be music tout court; Finnegans Wake is not a

145 The last of the metamorphoses of the Earwickers, who have become the Porters, whose little son, now called Jerry, and much younger than Shem, wakes up after wetting the bed. 146 Due evidently to mnemonic residues of the 1906–1907 Rome sojourn. 147 ‘Esquisse d’un seuil pour Finnegan’, 226. 148 Tindall 1969, 17.

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dream but the linguistic imitation of a dream, and therefore a conscious act of construction: it is folly, although corroborated and repeated by dozens of eminent critics, to say that it is the ‘language of dream’ (if nothing else for the sake of verisimilitude: what dreamer would speak an idiom with 65 languages thrown in?).149 Then if it is a dream, we need to ask ourselves who it is that dreams. For some it is the giant Finn that lying on the river banks sees the history of the world flowing past in a dream; for others Earwicker, that is, the Everyman that is Joyce himself; for yet others it is a collective dream.150 But if it is a dream, and whoever has it, the person that recounts and reports it is absolutely awake, not torpid and hazy. For me it is evident that the dreamer is Joyce himself; but it is Joyce himself, who does not dream, that very ‘logically’ translates an episode of it into Italian, that of the washerwomen. 2. Parts of Finnegans Wake can in truth can be read and savoured for their ‘musical wave’, and Joyce knew which parts they were and read them and had a recording made of his reading. At various points the text underlines some well marked requisites of a similar imitation: rhythm, alliteration, consonances and assonances, and rhyme. Joyce is musical in the recurrent uses of nursery rhymes or nonsense strings that can also make sense, of the type of ‘To dimpled and pimpled and simpled and wimpled’. Some strings are necessarily semanticized, like ‘tea-titty-thea’. But immediately afterwards we read on the same page, 273: ‘She wins them by wons, to haul hectoendecate, for mangay mumbo jumbjubes tak mutts and jeffs muchas bracelonettes gracies barcelonas’. Is this sentence ‘musical’? Hardly. Hundreds and hundreds of other passages, or perhaps most of the work, have no rhythm, or lilt, or sound recurrences, and they verge on spiky cacophony. There is no intention here to deny that Finnegans Wake can be recited aloud, above all because in it there are dialogues, clashes and oral

149 In the most canonical ‘interpretation of dreams’, Freud’s, when the dreamer dreams he or she sleeps, although at times he or she can speak during the dream; and when he or she is awake he or she tells the dream – although in the dream he or she may have ‘heard’ languages that he or she does not know – in the clearest and most univocal language possible for him or her. 150 For these opinions cf. Melchiori 1994, 178, and Tindall 1969, 19.

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diatribes between two interlocutors. But it cannot be read in public in its entirety, nor is it read as Ulysses is every year on 16 June. Finnegans Wake if anything is musical because a theme is chosen and submitted to a series of variations, each of which surpasses the others for the quantity of embellishments and ‘acciaccaturas’. And if it is truly valid, similar equivalence to music brings with it elimination of sense, or its atrophy; or even leads to an irreconcilable gap between signified and signifier. 3. The dominant element is work on the word: the agglutination of meanings or multiple resonances within the single lexeme or syntagma. Joyce’s sentence unit may consist, in its longer form, in a syntagma formed by subject, verb and complements, linked to other syntagmas in the paragraph. But the connective tissue is made up of integral and undeformed English particles, like to, on, after, in, and like the prepositions and the conjunctions and the personal pronouns, always or almost always unchanged. Starting from the monosyllable Joyce can operate with the chain or string of vocalic variations, which obviously cannot be more than five: for instance, he often plays at making up strings of the type of din, don, dan, dun, den or sick, suck, sock, sack, seck. At times a vowel variation is not canonical in English but is in other languages: lift-loft-left-[laft, which does not exist], but luft. The complete string with the exchange of the five vowels is rare, but we get close to it with the one on page 525, ‘Lalia Lelia Lilia Lulia’, but without ‘Lolia’. Another indicative example is ‘the brodar of the founder of the father of the finder of the pfander of the pfunder’. The contrary case also holds, namely strings of words with the vowel unchanged and consonant mutations, which however are selective because of the much higher number of consonants than of vowels. Among the many ‘things’ that can be ‘done with words’ Joyce discovered in advance the automatic proofreader of words in the computer: one often believes one has typed the right word but it is corrected, and Joyce’s cleverness is knowing how to connect together unsuspected and pertinent associations in this puzzle game. 4. Now, from how it looks and sounds, what does this language resemble? It is so futuristic that it copies forms and moulds of AngloSaxon and Middle English. Let’s look at rhetoric first of all. The kenning, the prolixity without restrictions, the string of examples and detours, the parodies of treatises, the internal disconnection and therefore hopping

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from one subject to another: these are all idiosyncrasies of a great poem in Middle English, by a Gower or a Langland. As for the kenning, Joyce follows the example of the latter, and there are some that are witty and ingenious (one of these is Henry VIII as ‘Hal Kilbride’). Joyce the etymologist motivates the word, that is the sign, like the medieval writers: he plays on buried etymons, dynamizes them and reawakens them. He is also the great exploiter of semantic or at least associative adjacency of words themselves, and he perceives this linguistic and therefore also conceptual and medieval tout se tient. The wedges of a letter of the alphabet, the subtractions or the additions, are enough to make these analogies squirt out, at least in the context. In short, an uninformed reader would at first sight take Finnegans Wake for a rediscovered, lost medieval treatise.151 Gower is a precursor of Joyce, though Joyce perhaps did not know him and did not recognize him as such, because in the same work Gower wrote in English mixed with French and Latin. Joyce widens the range: he is substantially a scalar polyglot who, as was normal, had more languages (65, as I said) to mix with his vernacular, and he had to mix more of them, compared to his medieval ‘colleague’. The paradox is that mixing English with Pidgin English, Japanese or Russian, the amalgamation turns out to be, rather than a language of the future, the imitation of one of the past! For all this, that of Finnegans Wake is a language born from cheerful frustration: from the realization, more exactly, that English – a language that, although the supplest of all those created, as it is – is ‘inadequate’. The semantics of life and history is not mirrored by the English lexicon, though it is so rich, and a new more economical linguistic system becomes necessary, such as can enact a process of abbreviation, of compaction, of amalgamation of a syntagma in a single lexeme. Joyce was in search of a super-language – as well as a neo-language.152 A very typical phenomenon, which confirms the paradigmatic principle in force in the novel, is the list, disseminated in the text at varying distances, of variations on a basic syntagma; this leads to the creation and we would say the exfoliation of a range of changing

151 Medieval above all is the recurrent stylistic feature of the riddle. 152 For an inventory or ‘census’ of cases of ‘language play’ cf. Marucci 2013, 281–4.

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definitions, mutable, rich in implications and amazing promptings, until the end never farfetched. In addition to the two protagonists, Earwicker (abbreviated as HCE), and Anna Livia Plurabelle (abbreviated as ALP), who regurgitate a variety of mini-syntagmas from their initials, Oliver Cromwell or Ibsen’s ‘masterbuilder’ can be pointed to (with ‘mysterbolder’ and an infinity of others), or the Norwegian captain, or ‘the now waging cappon’ or the ‘nowedding captain’, and above all the ‘Russian general’, who is in the course of the novel ‘the rush in general’, ‘the rawshorn generand’, ‘the rucks on Gereland’, etc. etc. § 152. Stephens, O’Brien Rumoured to be the illegitimate son of labourers, practically selftaught, James Stephens (1882 or 1880–1950) always maintained and wholeheartedly defended the fact that he was born not only in the same year, but also in the same month and on the same day as Joyce.1 Very little is certain about his life up to the age of twenty-five, apart from what was most likely mythological and self-promotional, and which he himself, like all good Irishmen, had invented and circulated. Employed in law firms as an apprentice, his early interest in literature developed within the context of the Celtic Renaissance of AE (Russell) and Griffith; and by 1912 he was persuaded and encouraged by them to write magazine articles, poems, short stories and he had produced The Charwoman’s Daughter, a novel which still denotes a naturalistic approach. In the same year, 1912, his fairy-tale narrative, The Crock of Gold,2 saw the light. With it Stephens demonstrated that he was not yet influenced by Joyce – who christened him his ‘heavenly twin’ a decade later and established a fraternal friendship with him – as much as by the fairy-tale theatre of Yeats and especially by the fantastic naturalism of Synge. To Synge one can attribute Stephens’s marked and witty sense of the self-contained comic sketch taking place on the side of the road, where peasants and artisans with a natural gift of the gab often chatter and squabble. Also from Synge is taken the emergence from the 1 2

Cf. KPE, 88, for the investiture of Joyce to Stephens, if Joyce had not been able to complete Finnegans Wake. The crock of gold coins, in fact, stolen at night by the leprechauns.

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Irish humus of obscure shadows of local myths, in a deliberate admixture and interrelation of quotidian reality and timeless fantasy. The Crock of Gold, to put it bluntly, is just as enchanting as Synge’s work and more so than the overly schematic theatre of Yeats. It is written, in the descriptive passages, in a distilled and polished style – yet this does not come across as detached simplicity – and with delightful obedience to the stereotypes of the fairy-tale. Another point of merit is that it presents a fresh picaresque, where each casual encounter overlaps with stories within the story in an inexhaustible anecdotal sequence. Almost every skit that emerges hits the mark, creating humorous or truly comical exchanges, ready in every respect to become a farcical dramatic sketch. In the best examples, Stephens brings to mind Shakespeare’s scenes set in the wilderness and the forest, often recited as they are by false illiterates who do not realize they are satirizing the language of pettifoggers and logicians. Those who explore The Crock of Gold quickly learn that it is a container of small subplots linked together in a rather free way and that the fable contains a minor multifocal whose connective thread is a ‘philosopher’3 who, it might be said, self-deposes himself along the way and discovers, like the Romanic Titans or Browning’s poet in Pauline and Paracelsus, his own contradictions and, as a consequence, also the weaknesses of pure, abstract, rational knowledge, and the demands of the ‘heart’. But this allegorical fulcrum splits into several units. The first contradiction is that the two abstract philosophers are tricked by two cantankerous women at the same precise moment as they denounce the noose of marriage and welcome their intellectual freedom. The misogynistic apothegms from the only remaining philosopher sound like those of a slightly more acidic, concrete and disheartened Zarathustra. The philosopher’s monologues are especially amusing in that they are a paradoxical and contrary type of wisdom, as in the disquisitions on the beauty and naturalness of dirt, or of the rat, or of the functionality of water, or the case studies of sleep, or the fortuity of clothing and – with Carlylean implications – of the innocence of nudity. The title of the first ‘book’ (‘The Coming of Pan’) is 3

At the beginning, there are two philosophers, but one is particularly disappointed by the failure of his quest for absolute knowledge, so he decides to do away with himself in a hilarious death by ‘gyrating’.

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justified by the arrival of the semi-bestial, semi-human Pan who seduces a beautiful young local girl with his allure of nudity and absence of shame. The Irish mythology of the Shee and the ‘leprechaun’ – the fairy-elf dressed in green so as to be better camouflaged in the grass, who lives under trees in cavernous homes, survives by theft and on rats and works as a cobbler and, if necessary, also as a tailor – is grafted onto Greek mythology in a combination inaugurated many years earlier by Woolner, and with equal delicacy. Pan has just emigrated from Greece and for the first time is seen in the countryside of Ireland, and represents therefore a playful development of the famous and by now well-known fable by Heine, so widespread in the nineteenth century after Pater, of the mythological Greek gods transformed into devilish emigrants to the north. As for the parable of the god Pan, the tale ends with the complete subjugation to his wishes of the young abductee, who becomes devoted and obliging to him despite the gossip of the countrymen surrounding her. In reality, it is Pan, in the presence of the philosopher, who exposes a Nietzschean, superhuman ethics of virtue as a pleasure and not as its repression or surrender, words that echo the eastern philosophies of Omar Khayyám reinterpreted by FitzGerald. The philosopher temporarily loses the verbal battle and is discovered in the grip of his carnal desires; he kisses a woman and he proclaims his ataraxia. A later episode – the story moves, as I mentioned, from side to side rather than in a straight line – is dedicated to the two homologous gods, Pan and Angus, who both express the same unrestrained paganism, with the local god who wants to force out and hunt down the other in a mythological contest. The philosopher’s mission, to snatch the young lover back from Pan, and his subsequent arrest and his transfer to the police for a murder of which he is innocent, unleash an amazing, phantasmagoric, Synge-like chapter, which is also a pre-Beckettian picaresque of roadside encounters that are more unpredictable and bewildering than it is possible to imagine, overflowing with wonderfully humorous and comic contrasts. Hilarious examples of quid pro quo in a long dialogue between two deaf men occur in the magical and often ambiguous nocturnal landscape of the forest. Irish Fairy Tales (1920) is the tangible internal link between Stephens and Joyce in the name of the national hero Finn, who for Stephens is Fionn. Stephens’s epic is more literal and erudite, less autonomous, halfway between philology

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and invention: an amalgam, that is, of translations and revisions from late medieval Irish manuscripts, exploited with the aim to add piquancy. 2. Nolan is a common surname in Ireland and it is encountered quite often in Joyce, who, as an inveterate exploiter of the playful and combinatorial possibilities of language, used it also and above all for the assonantal similarities and the allusions to Giordano Bruno, his biographical and philosophical alter ego born in Nola (whence, in English, ‘Nolan’). I say this because Flann O’Brien (1911–1966), according to his birth certificate, is none other than Brian O’Nolan, and especially because his most successful book contains quite evident traces of the funambulism of his great predecessor and compatriot. This book, The Third Policeman, was published posthumously in 1967 in England. Joyce comes to mind, right from the start, for the dry stylistic quality of the writing made up of short, neat sentences, and for the imperfect vision of the child that recalls the opening chapter of the Portrait (his novel is also written in the first person); and, in particular, for O’Brien’s conspicuous, if not exceptional bravura in the alternation of stylistic registers and idiolects. A banquet of languages and a delight to read, once again, are the speeches of the three policemen who are the main characters, peppered with blunders and flights of fancy, incongruous malapropisms, asphyxial pedantries, outlandish pseudo-scientific theories, idioms and stock phrases. A distinctive stream of consciousness-like effect is recognizable in the speeches of the ‘soul’ in the form of a small, petulant and advisory voice. But Joyce is essentially mediated via Beckett, at the very least the Beckett of the ‘trilogy’ and of plots suspended between reality and hallucination, that is the Beckett as creator of Molloy, who has a wooden leg just like O’Brien’s protagonist (who is unnamed, like the ‘unnamable’) and gets around by bicycle. Further back it is possible to recognize Stephens and his oneiric tales, Lewis Carroll’s and Lear’s nonsense and the fairy-tale genre in its grim variant. The three eccentric policemen would not at all be out of place in one of the first, lively and quirky novels by Kurt Vonnegut, under the common banner of the satire of abstract science, no longer commensurate with the needs of real life. The least important and most secondary thing in The Third Policeman is, naturally, the plot, which is the main character’s attempt to get back a black box containing the riches of an old merchant, and to locate the

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hiding place where his partner, with whom he carried out the murder and robbery, has hidden it. The climax comes with the protagonist’s arrival at the police station, certain he will obtain enlightenment from the policemen. The search for the box stagnates but, by way of compensation, the novel is enriched by three hilarious caricatures, and by the most astonishing vicissitudes and the most amazing oneiric adventures (such as a visit to ‘eternity’, regularly shown on the maps). From potential collaborators in the search for the lost box the policemen suddenly become inflexible, if somewhat distracted, executioners: a gallows is ready for the protagonist when he jumps on an inviting bicycle, taking advantage of the absence of the policemen, who have run off to ambush a group of his rescuers. The epilogue is yet another prestidigital exploit. Through another dream-like or visionary meeting the protagonist learns that the black box had just a short time earlier been delivered to his home, and he rushes back there, causing his old partner to die of a heart attack when he arrives, who had long believed the protagonist dead: he himself had set a deadly trap for the protagonist, pretending to reveal the hiding place and placing a bomb ready to explode in the box. At this point the reader is, as it were, dumbfounded: as the author reveals in a statement, ‘when you get to the end of this book you realize that my hero or main character has been dead throughout the book and that all the ghastly things which have been happening to him are happening in a sort of hell which he earned for the killing’.4 Among the most unusual structural acrobatics is a substantial apparatus of erudite and scholarly notes on the writings and the outlandish theories of the bizarre philosopher and scientist De Selby, deriving from the fanatical admiration of the protagonist for this imaginary figure. This almost creates a second text, contrapuntal to the first, and a parody of a scientific treatise, filled as it is by comments, clarifications, disquisitions, and improbable novelistic details about a personage as nonexistent as he is eccentric, and about his related and equally invented critical bibliography. As such this adds another register to the stylistic range of the novel. The Third Policeman has delighted hosts of lovers of the dream-like arabesque and of the metaphysical tale, and

4

On a similar stratagem by Golding, cf. Volume 8, § 140.4.

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§ 153. Mansfield I: Out of Eden, but towards purgatory

O’Brien, as evidence of this, counts people like Calvino, Giorgio Manganelli and Juan Rodolfo Wilcock among his followers and illustrious admirers. § 153. Mansfield* I: Out of Eden, but towards purgatory The New Zealander Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp, who from 1910 wrote under the pseudonym Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), settled once 5

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield, London 1981; The Journal of Katherine Mansfield, definitive edition, ed. J. M. Murry, London 1954; The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, ed. V. O’Sullivan and M. Scott, 5 vols, Oxford 1984– 2008; The Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield, ed. C. Hanson, London 1987; The Poems, ed. V. O’Sullivan, Auckland and Oxford 1988; The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, ed. M. Scott, 2 vols, Canterbury, NZ 1997.    Life. R. Mantz and J. M. Murry, The Life of Katherine Mansfield, London 1931; J. M. Murry, The Autobiography of John Middleton Murry, London 1935 and Katherine Mansfield and Other Literary Studies, London 1959; O. Lenoël, La vocation de Katherine Mansfield, Paris 1946; A. Alpers, Katherine Mansfield: A Biography, London 1953, completely rewritten as The Life of Katherine Mansfield, New York 1980; J. Meyers, Katherine Mansfield: A Biography, New York 1978; P. Citati, Vita breve di Katherine Mansfield, Milano 1980; C. Hanson and A. Gurr, Katherine Mansfield, London 1981; C. Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life, New York 1987 and 1988; J. Phillimore, Katherine Mansfield, Hove 1989; A. Smith, Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life, Houndmills 2000.    Criticism. S. Berkman, Katherine Mansfield: A Critical Study, London 1952; I. A. Gordon, Katherine Mansfield, London 1954; S. R. Daly, Katherine Mansfield, New York 1965; N. Hormasji, Katherine Mansfield: An Appraisal, London 1967; M. Magalaner, The Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, London 1971; C. A. Hankin, Katherine Mansfield and Her Confessional Stories, London 1983; A. G. Mattei, L’architettura e i frammenti. Tre racconti lunghi di Katherine Mansfield, Pisa 1984; K. Fullbrook, Katherine Mansfield, Brighton 1986; G. Boddy, Katherine Mansfield: The Woman and the Writer, Wellington 1988; J. F. Kobler, Katherine Mansfield: A Study of Her Shorter Fiction, Boston, MA 1990; S. J. Kaplan, Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction, Ithaca, NY 1991; Critical Essays on Katherine Mansfield, ed. L. R. B. Nathan, New York and Toronto 1993; M. Dada-Büchel, Katherine Mansfield’s Dual Vision: Concepts of Duality and Unity in her Fictional Work, Tübingen 1995; P. Billè, A Passion for Technique: esperimento e disciplina nei racconti di Katherine Mansfield, Bologna 1996; The Critical Response to Katherine Mansfield, ed. J. Pilditch, Westport, CT 1996; P. Dunbar, Radical Mansfield: Double Discourse in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories, Basingstoke 1997; W. H. New, Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form, *

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and for all in England in 1908. The daughter of a Wellington banker, she had moved to England the first time in 1903 to study at a female college in London; returning to New Zealand in 1906, she studied music there with the prospect of a career as a concert performer. In 1909, with the mad impulsiveness I will immediately describe, she married an opera singer, but separated from him on the very day of the wedding. From 1912 she lived with the critic John Middleton Murry and in 1918, after getting a divorce, she became his wife. In the twelve years from 1911 to 1923 she was a protagonist, if not a prima donna, of the London literary scene. She had begun as a freelance short-story writer and sketcher in those avant-garde magazines that dauntlessly came into being overnight with very limited financial means and could fail from one moment to the next.1 She only published three collections of stories in her life; a fourth one came out posthumously, including others not polished up and not completed; a fifth one brought together scattered texts partly dating to before 1911. She only shared the limelight with Virginia Woolf in the field of women’s writing, because great English literature had suddenly become masculine after having been mixed for a long time, and equally divided between the genders, until the end of the nineteenth century. Mansfield remained, later too, a contagious and legendary figure that left no one indifferent. Proof ot this is found in the numerous writers that crossed paths with her, from Lawrence to Huxley and Isherwood.2 Virginia Woolf became her friend and then her enemy, and undoubtedly imitated some narrative Montreal and Kingston 1999; A. Smith, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two, Oxford 1999; Cinema and Imagination in Katherine Mansfield’s Writing, ed. M. Ascari, Basingstoke 2014; Katherine Mansfield and the Bloomsbury Group, ed. T. Martin, London and New York 2017. 1 In New Age, where the arts, humanities and music, fauves and Cubists held a dialogue, Mansfield published her first satirical sketches. With Murry she was the cofounder of Rhythm (1911–1913), an outlet for new poets. In 1916 husband and wife together started another short-lived magazine, Signatures. 2 In whose novel, The World in the Evening, the heroine is modelled on Mansfield (see Meyers 1978, 261). Mansfield was Gudrun, one of the ‘women in love’ in the novel of the same title by Lawrence.

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and thematic situations and stylistic choices of hers, and as a literary critic wrote slanderous judgements against the ‘very thin soil’ of her mind, under which for her there was only ‘barren rock’. What struck contemporaries was first of all her instinctive physical charm, which, however, did not derive from showy attractiveness. Photographs show her in an unvarying attitude and pose: short and not very thick hair, a little unkempt, big black eyes that seem to betray confusion, absence, tiredness and congenital melancholy: they stare at the lens but they also look beyond, faraway, at the horizon or in space, or slightly askew. The small mouth, always half shut, sometimes hints at a timid and pale smile: she was a kind of sphinx, also because she knew how to play a part and to wear various masks.3 In her actual life this slender and delicate brown beauty was anything but submissive. Devouring fire burned inside her. Her fifteen years of English and European life proved to be very lively and overflowed with human, affective and cultural experiences which were savoured with instinctual appetite and a frenzied desire to go beyond every assigned confine. She was not a prey to be captured by the many intellectuals she met and also often sought out: it was she herself, challenging the conventions, that offered herself and seduced people. Her first marriage was decided on and contracted out of spite, as she had conceived the child of a man that resisting her had refused to marry her; and before and after getting married she had affairs with numerous lovers. In her incessant pilgrimage, always seeking to achieve new goals, her affairs were promiscuous, hetero- and homosexual. But she was soon aware, after and as a result of her frenzied desire to live, of the threat of illness and death through tuberculosis. People were long fascinated by this twentieth-century Mansfieldian myth of the writer dying young, cut down by fate and unfair illness, and induced to exploit her written work, with the result that down to today biographies have prevailed, in terms of number and ampleness, over true critical studies. Or there has been appreciation, almost more than for her creative writing, for a dramatic intimate journal and a collection of impassioned letters, 3

Mansfield as a child was far too chubby and wore glasses, but with the years her profile was sharpened, and she launched a hairstyle fashion, short ‘bobbed’ hair, and also a model of attire.

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through which her human vicissitude emerges more or less without veils.4 The vulgate is now that a ‘very false light’ was thrown on Mansfield by her husband Murry, responsible, as the editor of her journal and first biographer, for fabricating that romantic myth of beauty and holiness, shattered, and for that very reason also accentuated, by death. Murry clumsily sought to be Shelley the immortalizer of Keats; he wanted more precisely to take on the role of the prophet of Katherine, who instead was fully aware of the modesty and mediocrity of his role as a husband and interpreter.5 I will have to return to this aspect shortly. After a short decline in popularity in the ‘politically engaged’ 1930s,6 Mansfield powerfully came out on top again in the post-war period and has not ceased to occupy one of the first positions in the transnational Olympus of female writers and writing, together with Virginia Woolf, Karen Blixen, Sylvia Plath and Doris Lessing. 2. Provisionally leaving the myth aside, and looking at the written work, Mansfield was the umpteenth vivifying contribution coming to England from the periphery of the empire, and she joins James and Eliot (her exact contemporary) and Yeats and Joyce. Kipling is the illustrious absentee in almost all the genealogies that have been drawn up in the Mansfield story – he who maintained that nobody can speak of England if they only know England.7 Kipling undoubtedly is not recorded among her favourite readings, unlike Chekhov, even plagiarized by her;8 yet the Mansfield canon developed in the years when Kipling had long been building up his collections of novellas, having by then reached the status of the greatest twentieth-century English short-story writer. A strictly technical comparison, and also a thematic one, would not be out of place. At the same time, in 4 5 6 7 8

Praz confirms ‘through direct experience’ (SSI, vol. II, 362–5, feature entitled ‘Si riparano anime’), that ‘the posthumous publication of her Diaries was one of the literary sensations of 1927’. For a deadly but cursory debunking of this myth created by Murry, see Praz, in SSI, vol. II, 363, feature quoted in n. 4. Orwell noted that her story soon becomes a formula, a diegetic mechanism done by heart, and the fruit of routine (Meyers 1978, 261). Volume 6, § 264.1, but see all the sections dealing with Kipling’s stories. Berkman 1952, 43.

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the second decade of the century, Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad formalized and practised the ‘impressionistic’ story. After 1908 Mansfield did not return to her native country, and therefore became a naturalized British writer and an integral part of the English canon, though continuing to be disputed or even amphibious, and one of the first historical borderline cases between British literature and colonial literature in English.9 She perforce embodies a writer in the natural state that is the opposite of the bookish type, of the ‘defector’ from Cambridge and Oxford, also through mediated experience (like Virginia Woolf ), and that filters little from the acquired book culture. With modest studies behind her, she fashioned her own means of expression, and composed from her exclusive point of observation and perception; she did not write literature on literature. Everything was squeezed out of her own existence, and her main gift was objectivization. Pulmonary illness killed her but infusing lymph into her art, if only because it caused her to wander around Europe, going from one sanatorium or thermal spa to another, allowing her to know the kaleidoscope of life, so as to recreate it with a truly Browning-like mimetic capacity. Mansfield founds a modernistic version of the English short story in the second decade of the twentieth century. It was all transfused into a little tome of 700 pages, her Collected Stories. Her canon is only made up of the latter, about ninety stories that from the sketch of a few lines grow to the point of almost becoming short novels, but only skirt the novel without her ever being tempted to rewrite the Victorian baggy monster. Rhetoric and prolixity are her enemies; rapidity, concentration and suggestion her expressive commandment. In an author so rich in natural talent for the arts, and a musician, it can make sense to make a comparison with Chopin,10 who did not write symphonies but only little poems of the soul. Hence it is easy to answer the question of how come Mansfield never wrote novels, and of the fact that only in her prehistory as a writer that there are two sketches of novels. The three chapters of the autobiographical ‘saga’ of the Burnell family, which could be seen to correspond to the three moments 9 10

The linguistic background and ‘colonial impurity’ emerge in certain habits, idiolects and jargon terms, even Maori ones (Gordon 1954, 27–8). Also done en passant by Meyers 1978, 128.

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of Woolf ’s Ramsay family, were not put together as a novel because they were not conceived as such. Did she want to write a novel or would she have written one sooner or later?11 And did she realize with the passing of time that she did not have the strength for it? It was instead, perhaps, a firm decision of hers and a matter of principle, which had to do with the oxymoron of a genre traditionally synonymous with a diegetic chain, seeing that in her stories there is no plot, but only successions of emotional states. Mansfield does not look for the summa, the Joycean or Lawrencian novel in which an organized vision of being is formed, and an ontology. The plot having been abolished, prior events having been suppressed, the Mansfield story detaches from the continuum an action or a scene – an epiphany, that is the sudden revelation of a whole life. It is the aesthetics of the fragmentary and the phenomenological, it is the recording of ‘atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall’, without a link, ‘disconnected and incoherent’, of which Virginia Woolf was to speak in 1925. Mansfield’s stories aim to represent, and release, a series of flashes and impressions, rather than to prove anything. That is the reason why it is difficult, indeed often impossible, to extract from them systems of thought, ideologies, messages, truths, or an ethics. There is no Keatsian ‘design’ loaded on the reader’s shoulders; in extreme cases they do not set out to say anything and do not say anything.12 They only seem to be pure illustrations of how the perspicuous traces of experience are deposited and impressed on the consciousness that perceives, according to laws and modalities that are not absolute but contingent; so that what is acute and discreet for one consciousness is not for another, according to the working of perception itself. By the same token, Mansfield’s Modernism does not lie primarily in the use of the stream of consciousness. In her canon there are only two cases of interior monologue and hence of stream of consciousness or of thoughts.13 Most of them concern narrated and empathized thought. 11 12 13

Kaplan 1991, 83–4. This is more or less the thesis put forward by T. S. Eliot in his discussion of the story ‘Bliss’ in After Strange Gods (§ 105.3). On the similarities with the stream of consciousness, see the judicious comment by Berkman 1952, 82.

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Mansfield, rather, interposes in her short fiction about existential situations and states of mind clean little pictures of a neoclassical kind, slightly comical-satirical, which hark back to Mrs Gaskell and through her to Jane Austen. In these little pictures the narration is more traditional and grammatical, and the temporal development more orderly. 3. After her first trip to England Mansfield returned to New Zealand with her head full of Wilde and of Pater, and with an ‘aesthetic’ thirst for experience, all experience, and anxiously waiting to set out again for her chosen country and its literary capital, against her family’s will.14 The otherness of the artist, and of the woman artist, reached its climax in Mansfield for these literary reasons and because of these geographical origins. She was to become a spiritual exile, never settling down, and a traveller always incapable of finding an ubi consistam. She was caught up in an affective pendulum-like motion which was conscious repudiation of her origins, however followed by an affective return to those origins. She never became a British citizen and felt like a guest, a stranger, a foreigner, living in a no man’s land; this led to her self-exclusion from the social fabric and her apparent indifference to the political controversies of the times, though she sympathized with the suffragettes.15 As for her feminism, it was entirely intimist, not the militant and outward feminism of marches. Decadent infatuation also involved the inevitable experience of sexual promiscuity and homosexuality. But the systole and diastole of impulse and reason or of wisdom after the event, were active right from the start. One seeks with Mansfield, in her diversity, some sort of repeatability or repetitiveness or cyclical recurrence, or even metempsychosis. From the heart of the English nineteenth century with Mansfield there

14 15

Her impatience, her anxious desire, the tyrannical impulse to movement were revealed from the time when, having returned to her homeland, she set out for a ‘wild expedition to lead a field life’ in the New Zealand bush. She shows she realized this in the diary entry of 1 January 1919: ‘I am the little Colonial walking in the London garden patch’, where she feels like a ‘stranger’ and an ‘alien’. For Orwell it was not enough for certain heroines of hers, who yearn for purity, to repudiate ‘class distinction’ and bring comfort to the poor and proletarians (Meyers 1978, 261)

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in fact reappears the spasmodic writer who without knowing it, or only suspecting it, is fated to burn up life in thirty-four years and to go along with his or her devouring drives, throwing himself or herself into their vortex: burning, cooling, rekindling, making mistakes and repairing. Often the words used for describing ‘her fury, her darkness, her violence’,16 can be interchangeable, and work for Emily Brontë as well. There is an analogous artistic objectivization, and the style of both is of a prose seen as lyrical prose, marked and at the same time airy. The eternity of the present of the Brontëan children is the same, with the childlike empathy and the writing and thinking from inside the psychology of the children. Growing means getting soiled; infancy is an Eden as in Wordsworth and Traherne.17 Except that, in the last analysis, Mansfield breaks away from Emily Brontë because she does not destroy the ‘God of creeds’ but gropingly seeks for him. Everything leads one to say that anyone who sets out to prove this ventures towards the impossible. No biographer has identified or highlighted particular religious predispositions starting from Mansfield’s childhood or youth, lived out in a family with solid bourgeois traditions in which the Anglican religion was a practice of undisputed routine. Leaving behind her youth, Mansfield even seemed to challenge every possible form of obedience to a credo, and she read and modelled herself on Nietzsche.18 To discover this religious pathway it is necessary to look more deeply into her stories and to corroborate the possible ambiguous findings in them with the journal, a fundamental and essential prop. For this very reason this operation involves defence and at least partial absolution of John Middleton Murry. It is true that Katherine Mansfield’s husband was an equivocal and in many respects unpleasant character, and in this guise the most satirized by novelists like Lawrence and Huxley.19 It is also true that Murry became the posthumous hagiographer of his wife, presenting her with the air of a devoted worshipper or 16 17 18 19

Citati 1980, 17, and cf. also 22 and 65. Berkman 1952, 13. And together on Dostoyevsky, whose works she is known to have read and annotated starting from the end of 1916. § 116.1 n. 67 for Lawrence.

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idolater that stayed genuflected in front of his saint’s icon. He remains a reliable witness if this disagreeable veneration is excepted; but it is above all the text of the journal that brings out an authentic aspiration to truth, to nobility of mind, to purification, to expiation, even to praise, alongside the self-incitement to compositional rigour and to the imperative of absolute art.20 And one should therefore not impugn Murry’s final gloss, which gives meaning, or a meaning, to this spiritual history. Katherine had naïvely entrusted herself to the charlatanic treatment of Gurdjieff, who had founded a brotherhood that was supposed to lead its members to ‘spiritual regeneration’.21 At the end of this experience, if we are to believe Murry who quotes his wife’s own words, ‘the last grain of “sediment”, the last “traces of earthly degradation”, were departed forever’. This journal, even in the reduced version edited by Murry, arouses the impression of a person that auscultates herself day by day, and in front of the mirror strips herself of every mask. It is a ‘construction’ by Murry, and should be reread in its entirety; it is also true that though incomplete it was written by the writer; that is to say, it is incomplete but not distorted, and it grasps a component of the diarist, an indelible facet of hers, though it should be integrated with other facets. Murry’s enemies denounce above all the removal of the ‘lesbian’ passages; but just as in the diaries of Hopkins some passages alluding to his homosexual passions were blacked out, these passages by Mansfield only confirm the analogous and subsequent dialectics of impulse and reason. An item in the journal, for instance, confesses a hot and uncontrollable passion for a female New Zealander, and speaks of Mansfield herself as ‘absolutely powerful licentious’, but with the immediate clause: ‘this is unclean I know but true’.22 That is to say, in Mansfield a subsequent conscience was always active that repented, and reproached

20 Reading of the words that do not come, of the inspiration that languishes, of dissatisfaction or of moderate satisfaction with what she writes, one thinks of Hopkins’s eunuch. Mansfield echoes Virginia Woolf in saying it would be dreadful if death left her works unfinished, fragmentary, ‘nothing real finished’ ( Journal of 19 February 1918). 21 On this very pragmatic guru cf. the sparkling feature by Praz, in SSI, vol. II, 362–5. 22 Meyers 1978, 10.

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a previous action. Mansfield’s journal is the classical hotchpotch in the manner of Leopardi, in which there is a disorderly successions of sketches, notes, critical reflections or much less articulated memos, together with glimpses of landscapes in various seasons and natural little pictures that are objective correlatives or serve for contrast. In the journal one reads in particular confessions, soul-searching, examinations of conscience, complaints, warnings and spurrings addressed to herself. It expresses and encompasses a journey of exclusion but glimpses the goal of purgation. Murry was studying Hopkins in those years and was one of his first critics. Mansfield never names Hopkins,23 yet at times she echoes not only the diaries and the letters of that poet, but also sinks into the spiritual night, the Hopkinsian ‘fell of dark’, and feeds on ‘carrion comfort’. However, from these ‘terrible sonnets’ she goes out into the light. 4. Hence it is not true that Mansfield was a nihilist, and on this precise point she definitely diverges from Emily Brontë. Rather, she had an indomitable desire to live, not to surrender to death, though aware of its ineluctable immanence: ‘The more I suffer, the more of fiery energy I feel to bear it’ (21 January 1915). She had presaged as a young woman that her death would be suicide, but now (November 1915) she urges herself not to think of it even remotely. She often expresses the hope of having a child, imagines what it can be like and what a person can feel fondling it (early February 1914); on the same page she expresses amazement at what a young mother can feel, and repeats to herself (3 April 1914) the joy that a person feels having a child. She did not want to die; she was the fly that writhes hopelessly with ink-soaked wings in one of the last stories. Very sparing but for that very reason acute and abrupt are the questions about whether ‘there is a God’ (30 August 1914). Having lost her brother, she has faith in immortality and knows she can reach him (29 October 1915). She is a regular reader of the Bible (? March 1916), but evidently the explicit declarations 23

Murry’s essay, which appeared in Athenaeum in 1919, just one year after the first edition of Hopkins’s poems, only moderately praised him, accusing him of formalism only overcome in the ‘terrible sonnets’ (cf. my own The Fine Delight that Fathers Thought: Rhetoric and Medievalism in Gerard Manley Hopkins, Washington, DC 1994, 5 and n. 4).

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count little. On 8 February 1920, however, the journal records: ‘I for the first time think I should like to join the Roman Catholic Church. I must have something’.24 So in other words Mansfield was, and one could have guessed it starting from her adolescent admiration for Wilde, a Catholic in pectore. The journal is dotted with invocations to purification, to regeneration (2 January 1915), to fortitude and hardness of character to face death, evil and suffering. One again seems to hear Hopkins: ‘Give me a hard heart, o Lord! Lord harden my heart’ (December 1915). These are cries that are repeated over and over again. The weakness of her will is admitted on 14 February 1916. And in March (?) 1916 she notes: ‘I was thinking yesterday of my wasted, wasted early girlhood’,25 and immediately afterwards added how difficult it was to find the ‘only genuine mushroom ungathered’, that is true love (August 1917). But the shadows grew thicker and thicker, and in 1920 Katherine was in her ‘hell’ (7 January 1920). She longed on the same day for a God not ‘to praise or to entreat’, but ‘to share my vision with’. And she asked herself when ‘this cup’ would be taken away from her (12 January 1920). The whole year 1920 is marked by similar complaints, but she does not give herself up to reproach and comes out of it, having to pass from personal love to a greater love. Her illness was however coming to an end, and like the recalcitrant Hopkins she recognized that it was ‘God-given’ (24 November 1921). She wanted to exhale herself, and wrote in her will that she yearned ‘to leave an infinitesimal trace of [her] terrestrial sojourn’. One can even speak of a flashing and intermittent sacramental vision, as in the emotional outburst of 31 May 1919 on seeing a blue sky and trees rippling in the wind, and flowers, with the same cry as in Hopkins’s sonnet

24 See also Meyers 1978, 201, for similar intentions expressed in letters to Murry, and 238 for ‘flirtation with Catholicism’ in the spring of 1920. Alternatively, in the last months of her life Mansfield had approached the ‘cosmic anatomy’ of A. R. Wallace, who had written a book of the same title (1921) with the pseudonym ‘M. B. Oxon’. This is a ‘pastiche of deep occultist doctrines’ that, according to Meyers 1978, 239, was enthusiastically accepted by Mansfield, especially because Wallace taught the survival of the soul despite the disintegration of the body. 25 Hopkins applied the same root, ‘waste’, to designate his ‘unreticent youth’, in a bitter confessional sonnet (Volume 6, § 196.2).

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‘Spring’: ‘Praise Him! Praise Him! No, I am overcome; I am dazed; it is too much to bear’. 5. The primary theme of Mansfield’s short fiction is the awareness or the epiphany of death, first manifested to her by the death of her brother Leslie, who went to England in 1915 to join up and fight in the Great War. From a world sunk in the material and the superficial there silently rises a powerful need for authenticity. With Mansfield we do not get away from a recurrent paradigm, that of the writer who stuck in the mud longs for purification. The heritage of aestheticism persists in the aspiration to purity and mortification, as in another Decadent English poet that died young and was a real Catholic convert, Ernest Dowson.26 For Mansfield, writing became a rite of recovery and a liturgy of expiation. She was not capable of any form of continence, and she threw herself into the vortex of life, crossing every limit, but every satisfied and subduing impulse was followed by regurgitation, when the time of cooling came, and of reason. Her beings are catapulted out of the magic circle but they try to get back into it, a situation not dissimilar to that of Kafka, but less existentialist and less hallucinatory, yet always that of fallen humanity. The recovery of purity comes about in her stories in various ways: the first is the revival of the childhood Eden, of an existence before the original sin. But the freedom of her children is revoked or always threatened by adults. Subsequently Mansfield can even appear self-punitive and Calvinistic in rebuking cases of superficiality that is above all female, joined with compassion for women who are subjugated and dominated, and unfulfilled dreamers. The complement is not denunciation, but rather cold and phenomenological cataloguing – subdued, whispered, imperceptible – of materialism and egoism, from which unselfish beings, above all female, try to break away, thus becoming lay saints. § 154. Mansfield II: ‘In a German Pension’. Sketches at the spa One can build a transversal anthology of Mansfield’s stories, one independent of the times of composition of the single ones, or – and this 26

The poet was presented to Mansfield by her German teacher (Praz, SSI, vol. I, 99, in the feature ‘Vita di Katherine Mansfield’).

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is the method adopted here – follow the leitmotifs and the symbolic ciphers of every collection taken on its own. The biographical hinterland of In a German Pension (1911) was the writer’s lightning marriage to a singer and singing teacher, and more precisely a miscarriage which occurred in Germany, through which she lost a son fathered by another musician that had refused to marry her. Katherine’s mother, who came to the rescue, tried to cover up the scandal of the pregnancy by sending her daughter to a German ‘convent’.27 From here the writer, left alone, moved to Bad Wörishofen, a small Bavarian thermal spa near Munich (June 1909-January 1910), where she stayed at various pensions under a false name and had the miscarriage. She was full of disgust at conjugal life and maternity, almost a cupio dissolvi, and execration at the forces and functions of procreation. As in the early poetry of Dylan Thomas, in this work one can speak of a ‘foetal obsession’ and for very good reasons.28 These are pungent and vivid stories, written with an acute spirit of observation, therefore impressionistic, and showing prodigious skill in reproducing dialogue. Hence the error that can be committed facing this collection is to consider it an apprenticeship and an immature attempt to approach higher goals. Instead, it is already a high point of Mansfield’s narrative art. At that date the only term of comparison in terms of internal dimensions is the Joycean epiphany, but Joyce’s collection of stories was still unpublished and therefore unknown and unusable. Hence Mansfield’s is all new, or more exactly has a newness that exhumes a narrative type and subject which was by then forgotten in the tradition. The type is the bare sketch of a few pages, with an elementary design that is clearly divisionist thanks to the internal situations and the eccentricities of character. The subject is the choice of a symbolic place, the German pension in the thermal spa, with the sample of humanity that it displays. Not only the modesty of the debutante, but also a careful aesthetic option, drove Mansfield to choose this format. The first decade of the twentieth century was that of the great sagas by Bennett and Galsworthy, and of the abundance of big ideological words in Wells. 27 28

Actually the most expensive hotel in Bad Wörishofen (Alpers 1980, 95). After the miscarriage Mansfield, bearing witness to her love for life, asked the friend who had accompanied her if she could adopt a child, and her wish was granted. The details of this brief ‘adoption’ have never been fully clarified by biographers.

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Lawrence had also begun with the generational novel overflowing with plots and people; Woolf had not burgeoned yet and I have already hinted at Joyce. The spectacular novelty of Mansfield’s sketch therefore cannot be underestimated. But it was an intelligent reprise, or at least it appears to be such, conscious or not. The neatness of these little sketches, the weighing up the single word, the eschewment of clamour, the aesthetic of removing rather than adding, the neatness, the impalpability of the voice – these are all classical and neoclassic gifts that bring the name of Jane Austen to mind. Mansfield composes cameos and little pictures etched with Indian ink, in black and white, not frescos. After Jane Austen a second deity wanders around behind these endeavours and is its prompter, and it is Thackeray. Mansfield’s satire of the German middle class may bring Dickens to mind, but Dickens, as we know, was a Baroque, a romantic and anticlassical writer at the same time, and his satire operates in the domain of redundancy and adjunction. In his early sketches Thackeray had been the inventor of satire on Germans and Germanism; and, unlike Dickens, he was also capable of polishing up his texts. However, I wish to close this diorama of reminiscences that Mansfield starts with two further suggestions. The Thackeray of the German sketches is far too exterior, a little too gross and grotesque for us to be able to compare him seriously with Mansfield. The measure and the theme recall, rather, The Book of Snobs. In a German Pension is precisely Mansfield’s book of snobs. However, since it is also a series of little pictures that illustrate strangeness, incongruities and human follies, it is the reissue in prose of another ‘book’, that of Edward Lear’s nonsense.29 2. Rather than a succession of rapid unconnected pictures there is formed something like a short novel, though with loose temporal and spatial links. Because of the very nature of the sketch, all biographical depth is denied, and the character has to be constructed – sketched above all – by his or her verbal manifestations and his or her actions. Each story is a little drama played out on brevity and an exchange of lines that seem admirably translated into English from a German original. The pension is the link between them, even though in the end it is not the same pension 29 For example in the story ‘The Luft Bad’, ‘a Hungarian lady of immense proportions told us what a beautiful tomb she had bought for her second husband’. And Frau Hauptmann ‘has come out in spots all over on account of her nerves’.

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every time,30 but is a sum of various pensions, and gradually the guests’ faces and names change and there are new arrivals and new, comic, grotesque, curious, exhilarating and embarrassing cases that arise. This microcosm usefully and propitiously draws on the nineteenth-century and picaresque tradition of inns, and in its richness of occasions it launches in twentiethcentury literature a new kind of writing which Bennett appropriates and which above all is emulated by Virginia Woolf, who starts from here for The Voyage Out.31 From the first words – ‘Bread soup was placed upon the table’ – the continual target of satire becomes the material, physical, corporeal and above all alimentary civilization of Germany, with its symbolic barycentre that is in the ‘stomach’ and not in the mind, and therefore is ‘eugenic’, devoted to uncontrolled procreation. The pompous German guests boast of nine or five children. The successive and repetitive operations are breakfasts, lunches and snacks; the discussions in the dining room themselves concern food and gastronomic habits and predilections. Feeding itself is at the top of the hierarchies of values of this micro-community. But the food cycle necessarily has to contemplate an evacuation, and therefore the internal narrator is a Gulliver who feels surreal Swiftian disgust in hearing people say and in observing certain unusual animal habits, or indecorous infringements of etiquette. A baron, who confesses that his ‘stomach requires a great deal of food’, consumes his rich and slow meal ‘rabbit-wise’. In the breakfast scene food is skewered with male vigour and the gesture is accompanied by a ‘booming’ voice, as if the table companion were metamorphosed in visionary fashion into ancient Viking or Nibelungian warriors. Other sketches insist on rigidly Germanic protocol and on bourgeois haughtiness and hypocrisies. In one story all the guests mistake a tailor’s daughter for the sister of a baroness,32 and cover her with smarmy kindnesses. Satire on linguistic pretentiousness targets posturing poetasters who declaim pompous lines, and in a story an 30 A list of the German pensions Mansfield stayed at can be found in Meyers 1978, 49–50. 31 A story by Mansfield is entitled ‘The Voyage’, but it was written later than The Voyage Out. 32 Here too there is a bathetic mixture of Swift and Thackeray, because the baroness’s false sister says to the suitor who wants to kiss her: ‘But you know I am suffering from severe nasal catarrh, and I dare not risk giving it to you’.

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‘advanced’ lady philosophizes and boasts about her performance. This is southern Germany, Bavarian, Catholically bigot, and some sketches show slaveries to decorum and conformism of religious origin and the denunciation of unsuitable behaviours. The voracious appetite of the guests is contrasted right from the start with the lack of appetite of the narrator. The first-person narrator is a young bride in treatment, wary and controlled, a little detached, who is afraid of revealing herself and hides. In the prevailing objectivization the contrast springs from short comments between the lines which are endowed with exceptional, indeed deadly contusive power, rather than explicitly. Hers is above all an eye that takes stock of the entourage. Summing the sparse self-revelations the Mansfieldian alter ego is a denier of life if not actually a nihilist. A vegetarian, she has no children, and her husband is faraway, and forced to speak she says he is a sea captain; secretly she judges the ‘profession of procreating’ ignominious. She is also disoriented, lost, precociously alienated, and she often has to answer in monosyllables that she ‘doesn’t know’. Without defenders and allies, even verbal ones, she has to defend a spiritual or more spiritual model, but with how much conviction? Lastly she is stateless, or feels she is, not English and not American, and once, asked, she leaves her nationality vague. The historical context, in the table conversations, is that of England unarmed and bled dry, unwarlike and unprepared against the threat of expanding Prussian power. In 1911 Prussian military superiority was overwhelming, and disdainfully aware that it could at any time prostrate England, defended by soldiers ‘with their veins full of nicotine poisoning’. Only a few stories break away from the climate and the location of the pension; and when, in rare cases, we escape from its sphere and Mansfield ‘yields’ to stories with more plot, they lose pungency, and above all the admirable and incisive contrast between the observer and the observed.33

33

A different view is expressed by most critics, especially feminist ones, who in these stories outside the pattern of the pension evaluate very positively the motifs of the overbearing male and of the female who is submissive or sexually unaware.

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§ 155. Mansfield III: ‘Bliss and Other Stories’. Existentialist motifs in Mansfield’s stories Anyone who hoped for or expected an escalation from In a German Pension is slightly disappointed. In that collection Mansfield wrote within the limits she knew she had; in the ensuing years she sought to do bigger and more ambitious things, organizing more complicated, more curvilinear and diachronic plots, with interactions between more complex characters; so she verged on the long short story and even the short novel. Except for one, none of Bliss and Other Stories (1920), fifteen in number like Joyce’s Dubliners, is very convincing, because they lack the irresistible and burning ripple of the objective, caption-free anecdote, and since various stories are artificial and not well defined narrations, deliberately devoid of suspense, and dragging and inconclusive, with sparse action. Those collected in it, written over the years, were commissioned or even urgently requested by magazines, and Mansfield herself, always hard to please, recognized that they were not ‘inevitable’. However, an aesthetic had been born, and it was one of those risky aesthetics that hinge on not narrating. Satire ends, and the interior narrator disappears once and for all, becoming heterodiegetic though at times with the pretence of getting inside a male character that acts as a first-person narrator. The narrative grammar has altered according to that impressionistic or dislocatory method that Ford Madox Ford was theorizing. Exposition is not orderly and calibrated, but it unwinds starting from a phenomenal datum, backwards and at once forwards, in zigzags and flashbacks. Thus the stories begin preferentially with a personal pronoun, an anonymous ‘he’ or ‘she’ who performs an action or has a feeling, with contextualization occurring little by little and with identikits being filled in little by little, but never in an orderly and complete way. The focusing should come about through the summing of the data sown and the little case study cut out. The ending is deliberately abrupt, and often leaves one disconcerted because it is halfway between realistic and oneiric.34 Exceptionally, ‘The Little Governess’ is a residual product faithful to a 34

As in ‘Feuille d’album’, the story of a drifting and listless artist, who hands the woman that he is spying on an egg that dropped out of her bag, without having the courage to speak to her.

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traditional procedure, and a small masterpiece of old-style short fiction. In it a governess goes to Germany, and excessively afraid of sex and of the food – which is always a sexual ersatz in Mansfield, especially when cherries and strawberries are involved –35 believes in a pure and protective relationship – as between a grandfather and his granddaughter – with a very old and kind gentleman she meets on a train, until the world collapses around her when in Munich the old man invites her to his house and asks her to let him kiss her. One looks for and expects progression, internal logic, a balance between story and story, to see Bliss and Other Stories, made up of fifteen units, as a companion or answer to Dubliners, and indeed a few Joycean atmospheres end up emerging. One is the affective crisis and the imprisonment of the couple, imprisonment in turn of two monadic entities. ‘Mr Reginald Peacock’s Day’ describes the conjugal dissatisfaction of a music teacher who gallantly courts his female students and dreams of escaping from a wife who is too arid and concrete. The daily misère is more oppressive in self-aware and socially marginal figures like artists, musicians, writers, journalists, singers, and novelists striving for success, sheltering in the garrets and without a penny to buy food and drink and a little warmth. Mansfield lacks attention and sensitivity to politics and the story of the writer or down-and-out artist is the only concession to the literary climate of the day. Besides, she starts frequently to diagnose the division of the female subject into two ‘beings’ or two ‘I’s, a public one that is ‘false’ and one that is jealously private, and ‘real’, doubleness and displacement that are perceived in front of the mirror – that is to say, the concept of ‘submerged life’ against ‘emerging’, and therefore the need for truth suffocated by the rhythms of daily bourgeois life and routine. Only children escape this split, in separate worlds from which the elderly are shut out; they are not understood in their palpitations by brutal parents trapped in their adult insensitivity. A range of these motifs is found in the inaugural ‘Prelude’, which in various subchapters describes the relocation of a well-off family to Mansfield’s autobiographical scenario of New Zealand. In the Burnell family, in which the narrator remembered and recreated

35

For a different association cf. B. Brophy, quoted in Fullbrook 1986, 70.

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her own,36 there are from bottom upwards the two little daughters, still emotionally introvert and abandoned to themselves, fresh with childish palpitations; the wife and the sister-in-law of the head of the family; and the old grandmother. The centre of gravity rests and leans on interior motions just outcropping, repressed and introjected, and therefore on the contrast between the pulsating but smothered interiority of the female figures, sacrificial though openly devoted and accommodating, and dull masculine superficiality, which truly has no doubleness: between dream and prosaic daily life. Stanley Burnell has a physique of ‘amazing vigour’, and is therefore a corporeal and not a spiritual being, and indeed is imperceptive; he is not ungenerous, but his limit is total satisfaction with concrete things; and he is an average reasonable man, always predictable. One of the first scenes shows him tasting some chops that he offers in vain to his wife, whose spiritual malaise is not only reflected by her headache, but by her lack of appetite. Hence it is a fragmented plot, resolved in situations that are not only emblematic but also remotely symptomatic, and in descriptive pictures of states of mind, as well as in closed dialogues that reveal impalpable contrasts and alienations.37 The two sequels of this story, which make it the little saga of the Burnells, stitched together could very well prove to be the only true novel written by Mansfield. They were not however put together and published, and instead were placed in the first position in Mansfield’s two subsequent collections, because they are explicitly intended not to be continuous and adjoining, and isolated epiphanies rather than meshes of a fabric. That is to say, they are intended to deny the formal dimension of the novel, and therefore I perform an incorrect operation treating them here as a whole. 36

37

Burnell was the maiden name of the writer’s mother. In turn the surname Beauchamp is transformed, translating it from French, as Fairfield. The first act of this saga, which is therefore a tetralogy, is in the early story (1912) ‘The Little Girl’, in which there first appears the alter ego Kezia. In this and other autobiographical stories the uneasiness of the child faced with the adult world – and especially the gruff father – is symbolized by stuttering. The central symbol of feminine resignation is the aloe, because it flourishes, it is said, ‘once every hundred years’, and also because in a visionary perspective it has the shape of a ship ‘with raised oars’.

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2. In the outstanding ‘At the Bay’, which symmetrically inaugurates the subsequent collection The Garden Party, the clock has moved forward, and the Burnells now have a fourth male child. This further Burnell story, though it is spoiled here and there by some purple passages (as in the glimpses of landscapes), could be considered an imitation of Joyce’s Ulysses, as it describes in its forty pages a whole day in the New Zealand life of the Burnell family, which starts at dawn with a dip in the sea and ends late at night. In the manner of a cinematic tracking shot, there are gradually focused the imprisonments or the false proclaimed freedoms of the single members of the family, for this reason reflected in chance daily actions. Stanley Burnell is even stronger and more athletic, and bursts with even more life and sexual energy, which is unchannelled and therefore deviated. His stupidity, however, emerges from his dry and impatient commands that like a monarch he dictates to his female court, and paradoxically by his childish reparatory actions, in themselves sincere, towards his wife. This woman even more distinctly becomes a Ruskinian and Patmorian icon of the angel in the house as in the evening she awaits her consort at the hearth, and specifically watches over her little son without showing the dissatisfaction that is seething inside her. Alongside the adults, the throng of children lives in their separate dispensation of spells, of dark threats, of a fresh, anxious though ephemeral wait for life. The need for the authentic and the Sehnsucht of imprisonment and hence of escape – more acute due to the claustrophobia of an island distant from the centre – become more explicit and conscious, and therefore also melodramatic, in the young spinster Beryl, Stanley Burnell’s sister-in-law, and in a second male character, his brother-in-law Jonathan, the dreamer artist forced to be a clerk. In the third ‘act’, ‘The Doll’s House’, the adults have almost disappeared from the scene and the footlight is appropriated by the children. This could seem like a deliberate polemic exclusion, as if wooden dolls could be more human than parents in flesh and bones; but then all the children except one reproduce in a scalar form, or preannounce, the egoism and above all the classism of the adults. Even the most positive adults in the two preceding stories, like the romantic aunt Beryl, are degraded to reactionary forces that check and halt the children’s desire to let two ragged female friends, a convict’s daughters, visit the doll’s house. Kezia Burnell preannounces the altruistic

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gesture of Laura in ‘The Garden Party’, and the author is camouflaged in both these characters.38 3. The other stories in Bliss are inferior. The much praised but artificial ‘Je ne parle pas français’ revolves round the principle of association, because some words written by chance on a napkin in a café bring to the narrator’s mind the memory of a person and a story, that of an English writer pathologically affected by an Oedipus complex, who loves his mother too much and is therefore unable to love any other woman.39 Mansfield considered it a new aesthetic beginning, and more precisely the subversion of the credible narrative alter ego for an abject, filthy and equivocal one; but the rendering on the page is inferior to the intentions. Bertha Young in ‘Bliss’ is the forerunner of Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway, as she is preparing a dinner though not for a very big party. She bursts with wellbeing and happiness, goes over her life again and overflows with joy and thankfulness – the mirror does not reflect her psychic split but seems to tie together the two beings and the two egos, public and private – until her castle collapses after she by chance discovers her husband’s infidelity. The ending is dramatized by an effective contrast between the superficial and banal chatter in the room and the heroine’s negative flash of intuition. § 156. Mansfield IV: ‘The Garden Party’. Rites of passage The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922), again a collection of fifteen stories, is the high point of Mansfield’s short fiction. It is nevertheless an uneven collection, which contains a couple or perhaps three or four stories among the most perfect and intense ever written by her, alongside many others that are anonymous and strained. Time, space and motives of actions are now constantly to be focused on along the way. There is an evident oscillation of geographical poles, England and New Zealand,

38 39

Beryl drives away the snotty-nosed children thus venting a disappointment in love, more or less with the same conditioned reflex as Miss Meadows in ‘The Singing Lesson’. The story has been reconstructed in its exorcizing function: in Duquette, Mansfield depicted the French poet Francis Carco, with whom she had had a brief love affair.

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which could also be confused and juxtaposed in the same story.40 The characters’ personal hinterland is not reconstructed, and instead there are gradually added, with no particular order, and with defective phenomenology, data that are not unified in an all-round portrait. A now recurrent mannerism and a secret internal disposition is the ‘proleptic’ beginning, with a starting personal pronoun that is immediately filled out in the ensuing lines with a delayed identification. Invariably each story leads to an epiphany, which can be a disappointment, a disenchantment, an illusion, a road to Damascus transformation. We can also consider them supreme moments, symbolic baptisms, existential passages, agonies, morbid situations of waiting, of quivering, of lack of courage and therefore also of trembling hesitation, or of suspense. This comes about in a kind of map of human ages, rising from infancy to adolescence and adulthood, as in Joyce, who at least in this case may have been an influence. Mansfield goes back in a subdued and imperceptible way to being satirical and moralizing, and these stories are subtended by a search for the authentic in a degenerate world. From this it follows that they can imply, and indeed do imply, the exposition of the inauthentic. Some are stories in themselves strained, overloaded or extravagant because they are too busy obeying their symbolism, the impossibility of loving in the displacement of feelings, which are either too pregnant or too light. The conjugal couple is confused, uncommunicating, affectively split; but the disconcerting aspect is the recurrence of empty adult female portraits, emblems of frivolity and superficiality: not only the fiancée in ‘Mr and Mrs Dove’, but also the wife in ‘Marriage à la Mode’, who hangs out with a little group of affected socialites, and highlights the distressed integrity of the husband. ‘The Stranger’41 is dedicated to conjugal alienation, with the husband on tenterhooks for having discovered the ambiguous particular that his wife, who has just disembarked from a ship, held a dying person 40 In ‘Marriage à la Mode’ one Saturday afternoon William returns from his London office to his home, which seems to be in a seaside resort that is too tropical to be English. 41 An emblematic title, which must be understood from the husband’s point of view. Exceptionally, that is, it is the wife that is selfless and the husband possessive.

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in her arms, an action that she claims to have been one of compassion and pure succour but which can conceal or render explicit her rejection of or impatience with a precarious marriage. The charming and pathetic figure of the grandmother, perhaps a stand-in for the writer’s own, is refracted and immortalized in some primary roles. Deeply devoted to her grandchildren, she prays at difficult moments, and therefore is a believer. The grandmother-grandchild sodality, which is fully developed in two stories, may also be a way to leapfrog the one between parents and children, and to deny or reject filial and parental connection, and thus to valorize the happy state of the orphan, as often happens in Dickens.42 It seems evident that the children-parents axis is contrasted with the much more emotionally effective grandmother-grandchild one. 2. The eponymous story ‘The Garden Party’ proves to be the most intense and deepest ever written by Mansfield, above all because it fulfils her aspiration to expiation and purification, discussed at some length above. In itself it is the chronicle, at once objective and subjective, of the approach of an afternoon tea beginning from early morning awakening in the house of the well-off Sheridans in New Zealand. But these and others are data, and we are accustomed to this by now, which arise en passant, and sometimes do not arise at all and simply have to be conjectured. The anxious countdown is experienced and followed step by step, and admirably narrated in dry, concrete, natural prose through its apparently normal incidents, and more and more gradually from the point of view of the sensitivity of the eighteenyear-old daughter Laura. The whole organization of the party falls on her, and the party is a metaphor of art, and Laura who takes care of it is indeed ‘the most artistic’ of the sisters. In the brief span of a day the symbolic pathway is that of art that reflects life and a life that is born, expands and wears out. However, it is complementarily, and above all, that of a rite of passage from adolescent irresponsibility to adult awareness. In this story Mansfield works on one of her interior chords, the threat of death always lying in wait. The main symbol is calmly and quietly formed by means of 42 ‘Whose boy are you?’, the grandmother asks her grandson in ‘Life of Ma Parker’, and her grandson replies: ‘I’m gran’s boy!’. However, the story is too Dickensian, that is to say slightly spoilt by the mawkish ending.

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small, accidental and unobtrusive premonitions: for example, the words of the song that says that ‘This Life is Wee-ary, Hope comes to Die. A Dream – a Wa-kening’. Gradually during the morning, however, Laura becomes vaguely dissatisfied and aspires to the new and the authentic; indeed, she is surprised by the unexpected niceness of the workmen and she compares it with the stupidity of her usual companions. Familiarizing with them she also overcomes ‘class distinctions’. The death of the poor workman not far away is death breaking into the party and into Laura’s spiritual horizon. The party takes place nonetheless, but it is rapidly recounted, in a few lines, compared to the space devoted to the preparations – meaning the scarce mental time that Laura devotes to it. Laura is isolated, she has not found anyone who agrees with her about the party being postponed, since worldly common-sense teaches and prescribes other things. She is not only, like every female, separated from the males of the household, who are symbolically resident ‘in the office’, but also isolated within her own sex. The human chorus that surrounds her is made up of self-directed beings, determined to establish walls and barriers, and concerned not to let their own spaces be invaded.43 Her family members precisely back away with disgust from the news of the death of the workman, and remove from their mental radius an event that does not concern them; Laura, instead, expresses her democratic attitude of sympathy. Mansfield, we have in the end to conclude, portrays in her a metaphor of anachronistic holiness that rejects the logic of the world and applies the ultramundane one. Laura is a little saint on earth, one of those ‘archangels’ visiting nature, as pure and blooming as are the flowers in the garden. An imperceptible and dreamy atmosphere of miracle and sacrality is what comes down on the scene at the opening, with the colours of the morning that are blue and gold, and the roses that have come out in ‘hundreds, yes, literally hundreds in a single night’, and trees ‘lifting their leaves and fruits to the sun in a kind of silent splendour’. The Eucharistic isotopy rises in the flower garden or vegetable garden of the house, where a kind of Sermon on the Mount is prepared, and the apostles, parodistically reduced to four units, lay the miraculous 43 The mother has a typical reaction on hearing that someone has died: ‘Not in the garden?’.

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table at which later the guests arrive ‘in streams’. There the Christological Laura goes round with buttered bread and also wants to give a drink to the performers. At the end44 she takes the Viaticum to a dead person and pays tribute to his family, like a Christ always ready to rush to succour the sick and the needy.45 In ‘The Voyage’, which is another little jewel, a New Zealander child who has been orphaned of her mother, at night boards a ship with her grandmother to go to live perhaps forever far from home. The prior events are a mystery for her as for the reader, and it is so because the story is all recounted in empathy, seeing the magnified and hallucinatory threats of a hostile environment devoid of love on the immature sensitivity of a child, who instinctively seeks refuge under the protective wings of her grandmother, whose meekness belongs to another world. Hence this is also an encounter with death, a crossing towards a rite of passage, an acquiring of awareness. Of the other stories, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ opts for a completely different approach, that irregular and retro one, in Mansfield, of the polished, ‘Gaskellian’ parody of the late Victorian old maid, rich in bright sketches, squabbles, dialogues of the deaf, even gags. ‘The Singing Lesson’, equally proverbial and popular, in the end relaxes into comedy after a dark start: the singing teacher in the school is tense during the lesson because of the break-up of her engagement, but she later receives a reassuring telegram of denial from her fiancé, so the music that she gets the students to sing immediately afterwards, on going back into class, also changes in text and tone, and breaks into accents of joy and exultation. It is one of the most blatant examples of non-coordination – or coordination, substantially – between thought and action studied by modernist psychology. Actually the happy ending is deceptive, and it does not wipe out the 44 Just as after the Sermon on the Mount a lot of loaves and fishes are left, there are ‘sandwiches, cakes, puffs, all uneaten’. 45 The dead man seems just to be asleep in a dream and blissfully raised in an intangible and rarefied atmosphere of supreme indifference to worldly cares. And the comment is: ‘this marvel had come to the lane’. This is an aura that is often not perceived by critics. I do not agree that Laura after this experience ‘slips easily back into the frivolity of the garden-party’ (Fullbrook 1986, 122). In the much less natural continuation of this story, ‘Her First Ball’, the dance becomes ‘macabre’, the dance of death, and the first dance ‘the beginning of the last dance’.

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immaturity and the inconstancy of the not-so-young couple, which is not a basis for happy conjugal cohabitation. 3. The very few other stories concluded by Mansfield before her death, all showing signs of imperfection, were published posthumously in The Dove’s Nest (1923). They continue to develop the theme of the latent dissatisfaction and the uneasiness of the couple or of the single woman, in exotic settings like Spain and the French coast. For these very reasons these situations are experienced by well-off characters who grow aware, often in incongruous flashes of intuition, of suffering humanity around them. The best of these stories, apart from ‘The Doll’s House’, already discussed, is ‘A Cup of Tea’. Rosemary in this story is the umpteenth dissatisfied uppermiddle-class person with an empty existence spent in whims. However, her gesture of taking into her home a poor exhausted girl from the street, to the astonishment of her husband,46 is not exactly humanitarian and philanthropic, but rather an ‘aesthetic’ compensation, that is the substitution of an object she owns – and therefore precisely a whim, a plaything which she has provisionally renounced – with another object.47 A state of anguish and dilemmatic indecision between erotic and religious life is studied in Edna, the protagonist of ‘Taking the Veil’. One might take for an apocryphal text by Kipling ‘The Fly’48 with its boss who has lost a son in the war and eases his pain by assisting at the desperate efforts – the vital élan – of a fly to get out of the inkpot into which it has fallen, until it dies. But ‘The Canary’ slips into the mawkish pathos of the little bird in the cage.

46 He judges the unexpected event with the same adjective as used by Laura’s father about the neighbour’s death in ‘The Garden Party’, namely ‘beastly’, which can be taken to mean ‘damned’. 47 Indeed, the poor girl looks like something out of ‘a novel by Dostoevsky’. 48 The finest section of this story is the writhing of the fly followed in slow motion and as if with a magnifying glass. ‘A Married Man’s Story’ recalls George Eliot’s ‘The Lifted Veil’ being the first-person live lament of an old man who in turn also has ‘disconnected’ thoughts about a ‘waste land’ like those of the other Eliot, T. S., and of his Gerontion. In the final eponymous story of The Dove’s Nest, in ambiguous and slightly mysterious atmospheres two diaphanous and exhausted English ladies, mother and daughter – the latter bearing the Jamesian name of Milly – lead a sheltered life in a villa in the French Riviera where an American guest shakes them out of their emotional torpor. The story was not completed, and the curtain falls just at the beginning of lunch.

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§ 157. Woolf I: Exorcisms of incompletion

§ 157. Woolf* I: Exorcisms of incompletion The first modernist novel of Virginia Woolf, nee Virginia Adeline Stephen (1882–1941), came out in 1922, immediately after Joyce’s Ulysses. She read the latter masterpiece in its serial publication, and it was offered 49

*

The Hogarth Press Uniform Edition of the novels is now replaced by the Shakespeare Head Press Edition, London 1992–2004; The Complete Shorter Fiction, ed. S. Dick, London 1985; The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. N. Nicolson and J. Trautmann Banks, 6 vols, London 1975–1980, anthologized in one volume, Congenial Spirits: The Selected Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. J. Trautmann Banks, San Diego, CA, New York and London 1989; essays, ed. A. McNeillie, 4 vols, London 1986–1994; diaries, ed. A. O. Bell and A. McNeillie, 5 vols, London 1977–1984; Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed. J. Schulkind, London 1976, rev. edn 1985.    Life. Q. Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, 2 vols, New York and London 1972; R. Poole, The Unknown Virginia Woolf, Cambridge 1978; L. Gordon, Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life, Oxford 1984, 1991; L. DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work, Boston, MA 1989; T. C. Caramagno, The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf ’s Art and Manic-Depressive Illness, Berkeley, CA 1992; J. King, Virginia Woolf, New York 1994; P. Reid, Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf, New York and Oxford 1996; H. Lee, Virginia Woolf, New York 1997; M. A. Leaska, Granite and Rainbow: The Hidden Life of Virginia Woolf, New York 1998; N. Nicolson, Virginia Woolf, London 2000; R. Gruber, Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman, New York 2005.    Criticism. D. Daiches, Virginia Woolf, New York 1942, 1963; J. Bennett, Virginia Woolf: Her Art as a Novelist, Cambridge 1945, 1964, rev. edn 1975; E. Auerbach, ‘Der braune Strumpf ’, in Mimesis. Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur, Bern 1946, 467–93, Eng. trans. ‘The Brown Stocking’, in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Princeton, NJ 1953, 525–53; R. L. Chambers, The Novels of Virginia Woolf, Edinburgh and London 1946, 1955, 1957; B. Blackstone, Virginia Woolf: A Commentary, London 1949; V. Sanna, Il romanzo di Virginia Woolf. Ispirazione e motivi fondamentali, Firenze 1951; J. Hafley, The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist, Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, CA 1954; J. Guiguet, Virginia Woolf and Her Works, Eng. trans., London 1965 (a lavish book, a good half of it on the critical prose, with a reading of the novels along the lines of the diary); V. Amoruso, Virginia Woolf, Bari 1968; Virginia Woolf: ‘To the Lighthouse’, ed. M. Beja, Houndmills 1970; A. McLaurin, Virginia Woolf: The Echoes Enslaved, Cambridge and New York 1973; A. Fleishman, Virginia Woolf: A Critical Reading, Baltimore, MD 1975; J. Hawthorn, Virginia Woolf ’s ‘Mrs Dalloway’: A Study in Alienation, London 1975; CRHE, ed. R. Majumdar and A. McLaurin, London 1975; M. A. Leaska, The Novels of Virginia Woolf: From Beginning to End, London 1977 (highly rated, but often only paraphrastic); H. Lee, The Novels of Virginia Woolf, London

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for publication to the newborn company, the Hogarth Press, which she had founded with the intent of publishing experimental and revolutionary works, but it was rejected and it always seemed disagreeable and alien to her, and not only on grounds of rivalry and precedence. Joyce was the child of a historical, cultural and geopolitical context that was radically different from Woolf ’s, and that novel sounded vulgar and coarse to her;1 it sprang from total immersion in life, and moved without barriers into

1977 (an honest reading, perceptive but traditional); P. Rose, Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf, Oxford and New York 1978 (Freudian-feminist, passionate but without extremism); M. DiBattista, Virginia Woolf ’s Major Novels: The Fables of Anon, New Haven, CT 1980; S. Perosa, ‘Virginia Woolf e la dissoluzione narrativa’, in Il precario equilibrio. Momenti della tradizione letteraria inglese, Torino 1980, 264–304; M. Billi, Virginia Woolf, Firenze 1982; J. H. Miller, ‘Mrs Dalloway: Repetition as the Raising of the Dead’ and ‘Between the Acts: Repetition as Extrapolation’, in Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels, Oxford 1982, 176–202 and 203–31; Virginia Woolf: A Feminist Slant, ed. J. Marcus, Lincoln, NE 1983, and Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy, Bloomington, IN and Indianapolis, IN 1987; A. Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World, Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, CA and London 1986 (bulky, rich in documentation, but redundant, with a theory that is so provocative that it appears to be on one side obvious and on the other acrobatic: that the writer had ‘a strong interest in realism, history, and the social matrix’ [15] and was not detached from the ‘historical forces of her time’ [32]; there follow readings of the novels that are decentralized and go against the tradition); E. Abel, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis, Chicago and London 1989; ‘Clarissa Dalloway’, ed. H. Bloom, New York 1988; R. Bowlby, Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations, Oxford 1998; J. Batchelor, Virginia Woolf: The Major Novels, Cambridge 1991; E. Bishop, Virginia Woolf, Houndmills 1991; Virginia Woolf: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. M. Homans, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1993; Virginia Woolf: ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and ‘To the Lighthouse’, ed. S. Reid, Houndmills 1993; C. Hanson, Virginia Woolf, Houndmills 1994; G. Luciani, La polvere della lettura. La critica letteraria di Virginia Woolf, Bari 1994; G. Beer, Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground, Edinburgh 1996; J. Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf, Cambridge 1998; B. Silver, Virginia Woolf Icon, Chicago 1999; The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, ed. S. Roe and S. Sellers, Cambridge 2000, new edn 2010; E. Dalgarno, Virginia Woolf and the Visible World, Cambridge 2001, and Virginia Woolf and the Migrations of Language, Cambridge and New York 2012; L. Marcus, Virginia Woolf, Tavistock 2004; M. Whitworth, Virginia Woolf in Context, Oxford 2005; J. de Gay, Virginia Woolf ’s Novels and the Literary Past, Edinburgh 2006.

1

Bell 1972, vol. II, 54, and § 128.5 n. 15.

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territories of experience that Woolf eschewed or did not even know, those of the street, the tavern, the brothel, the sacristy, or even into the most impervious domains of abstract speculation, This was not exactly the direction Virginia Woolf was going in. She is a ‘Proustian’ novelist devoted to regret and memory of the fleeing instant, swallowed up by the inexorable becoming, and a singer of unrepeated wellbeing remembered by a now or by a present that is more fragmented and marked by tragicalness. Hence she is a ‘female’ narrator of imperceptible and wavering vibrations of ‘androgynous’ minds,2 in exquisitely lyrical and poetic novels, airy and rhapsodic, never very dynamic, and slender, diaphanous, and a little enervated. At their basis, as in Proust, there cannot fail to be intuition of childhood and her own childhood. Its celebration comes about above all on holiday, when childish creative imagination is unleashed. Hence Woolf ’s first and third novels begin or are entirely played out at seaside resorts, and in a broadened community, that of a family surrounded by friends and acquaintances. And in them there is exhaled Woolf ’s sense, symbolic and evocative, of the sea.3 This childish community is knit together, and undivided, and formed by beings who are in a secret conspiracy against adult violence, and engaged in protracting the moment of escape from the flow of time. Indissolubly united, morbidly bound entourages of children were already studied and depicted in Victorian children’s fiction, from Dickens on down to Kingsley, Carroll, and Barrie; and they had already throbbed in the life and the pages of the Brontë sisters, Elizabeth Barrett and the Rossettis.4 As a matter of principle there reigns in the web and in such webs a sense of brotherly and sisterly unity, which allows one to forget, or more exactly not yet painfully to discover, the dividing barriers between single individuals. Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights experiences and exemplifies such undiversified fusion of beings, the spasmodic indivision between herself and Heathcliff, in the

2 3 4

The very masculine Mr Ramsay in To the Lighthouse also becomes androgynous in the end, as we shall see. For Daiches 1963, in the symbolic universe London represents the masculine-fatherly element, the sea the feminine-intuitive-maternal one. No end of times Woolf in her essays refers to these female figures. In an analysis of the work of Mr Barrett she says that there is an ‘infantile fixation’ at work (Three Guineas, London 1954, 236). On the following page a parallel between him and Reverend Brontë is indicated.

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famous sentence ‘I am Heathcliff ’. For Woolf, growth also means growing aware of the dividing barrier, and realizing that identification with many other selves, at the limit with everything, is no longer possible. Central, therefore, in Woolf ’s novels is the motif of time, the enemy thwarting the moment detached from the flow. Walter Pater had encouraged his adepts to live in the moment in all its intensity, to experience the gemlike flame of experience.5 Woolf sees and embraces, one inside the other, historical becoming – from the zero point and from the alpha to the omega of the present, from nothingness to existing – and the immobile moment or frozen instant. 2. The originality of her fiction, the variety of her fiction, lie in her ability to describe time spans that are either extraordinarily long – Orlando, The Years – or extraordinarily short, down to the single day or part of a day. And therefore her novels can be divided into two groups, the historical ones and the instantaneous ones, those that trace the change from a certain starting point – the most distant in time is the Elizabethan period – and those that are all played out in the present. But past and present overlap and are fused. However, Woolf ’s novels are not only unhistorical or metaphysical, because the boundary of knowledge with respect to childish unawareness is crossed, since the children playing on the beach will soon be thrown into the vortex of war and will die in it. Woolf dwells on the pessimistic death drive, absolute, ontological, but aggravated by and in the slope of history. The shadows that loom over the instinctive sunniness of her imaginative universe derive from two nightmares, one of a world war directly experienced, and the other, even more terrible, so much feared that she could not believe she would be able to survive it. If Woolf ’s novels are about time and its flow, not univocally measurable, then they are always also meta-historical. The non-instantaneous ones, the ones with great breadth, ask themselves where the world and history are going, if becoming has a meaning, and if there is good finalism and where it is. And they often deny it. Just as central, and dramatically correlated, is the motif of erosion, literal 5

Miller 1982, 184, observes that for Woolf ’s characters in Mrs Dalloway ‘the moment is all that is real. Life in the present instant is a narrow plank reaching over the abyss of death between the nothingness of past and future’, itself a fine paraphrase of Pater. On this analogy with Pater cf. also Rose 1978, 91. The possible channel of this influence of Pater was Pater’s own sister, Clara, who gave Virginia Greek lessons.

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and symbolic: the sea gradually swallows up the earth, and ground disappears under one’s feet, scratched away from one second to the next. The leitmotiv of exorcism of the unfinished is therefore manifested in Virginia Woolf in various phenomenologies. It is the formal perfection that characterizes her best and most successful novels, which seek to be balanced organisms in structure, recurrences and repetitions of patterns, and tend towards immaculate purity of style and spasmodic finish of form. Woolf ’s anguishes before and after publication, her hesitations, her famous, meticulous and never satisfactory drafts, the ordeals of going out into the world and to the public with the finished product, hence were fears that the finite could seem to be, or truly not be, finite or not sufficiently finite (and here also Pater’s legendary teaching is recognizable). The work leaving her hands was therefore a product that changed from liquid and fluid to solid, to which she could never again return, and which was closed forever and sealed for history, while she would always have liked it to be fluid, susceptible of fluidification, thus of becoming finite. My metaphor also concerns the concept and meaning of becoming. Woolf records present instants that overwhelm those who experience them, progressively becoming past moments. The issue is whether these instants are linked in an intelligible becoming, or have not already ended up in unrelated chaos. If history ends in a port and a landing place, then it is known, and ipso facto an invisible demiurge exists who regulates it and organizes it; otherwise history is the frightening realm of disorder, and life is a senseless rush towards nothingness. Woolf ’s novels are contests fought out down to the wire, and to the last page between the hope that everything will end well and the fatalistic suspicion that everything will end badly. Her protagonists are busy giving, understanding, snatching a meaning from becoming, discovering the sketch of a conclusion and of a closure. Her anguish is at once fear of what there will be after the presumed omega, that is if the circle really has closed. A similar aporia or dilemma is reflected in the alter egos closest to her, writers, artists, painters, historians, historians of literature, biographers,6 who appear in almost every novel in foreground or

6

Woolf ’s interest in biographies or in the biographical approach in some novels also derives from the fact that her father, among his many tasks, edited the monumental Dictionary of National Biography.

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secondary positions, busy defining an evolution, biographical, temporal and epochal. This is the case from the first novel, where a historian of literature appears, about to finish her compendium and unaware of what will happen afterwards. In the second one too an imaginary biography is compiled that is never concluded. Painters take decades to finish a canvas. But we cannot avoid referring right away to Mr Ramsay, who as a pure rationalist sees the cognitive parable of a genius as a chain of connected points, limited in number, exactly like an alphabet. Finishing and achieving, in Virginia Woolf, means above all finding a design, understanding a meaning or the meaning in an otherwise chaotic chain dominated by chance. 3. These metaphysical and parabolic arpeggios are entrusted to a narrative technique that rises from the most conventional novel to one that is ultra-innovative, and that with unthinkable and immediate transformations rises exemplary and disruptive within the context of the psychic method of the twentieth century and the technique of the stream of consciousness. In Woolf, as in Joyce, we see action devalued in favour of attention addressed to the psychopathology of everyday life. The psyche is so receptive in this early historical twentieth-century milieu, or so the writer interprets it, that the human being lives mechanically, and while performing a routine concrete action he or she thinks about a thing, or a series of other things, through the thread of private association. Woolf ’s characters always remember distant particulars ‘as if it were yesterday’. Two lives are experienced, the second of which is the secret one of momentary thoughts, fancies, mental embroideries that could also be defined idle, ephemeral, to be sifted and filtered especially on the written page, and which – removed to a great extent – they always had been. Woolf therefore programmatically needs, and creates, faded public and social occasions that are insignificant, devoid of tension, as a background against which to pursue and to auscultate this intimate life, like Mrs Dalloway’s party or the trip to the lighthouse. Unimportant occasions like these would make any other novel collapse, and they do not even always support Woolf ’s very well. Why that type of choice and selection? Woolf ’s is also the aesthetic of the random slice of the mental life of the subject, an examination of the psyche measured on any day. Her ‘moments of being’ are memorizable peaks of existence, isolated intense instants that can still be relived; alongside others of not being, drifting ones,

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to forget and be forgotten. These peaks are synchronic or also timeless, and they form an invisible pattern behind the chaos of daily life. From this there arise other implications. Woolf does not possess and does not want to have Joyce’s variation of register. Her habitual technique is to follow almost mimetically the range of thoughts not closely geared to her characters’ action. In order to do this she often has to insert phrases like ‘he thought’, or ‘she thought’; and what is thought is reported with the nearest words to a sort of verbalized thought.7 Hers is always a stylistic compromise, not the almost pure stream of consciousness – because totally pure, in principle, it cannot exist – of Joyce. As a result she is close to Joyce in the fourth or sixth episodes of Ulysses, to Bloom’s meditative walks rather than to the mimetic monologues of Stephen and Molly. For that reason her novels, in which there is such meticulous attention to mental operations, and in which mental time is almost longer than the time of the clock, have to be brief and almost instantaneous, or at any rate to be novels with action lasting one day or a succession of days, even of hours. This stylistic uniformity makes Woolf ’s novel a great deal less experimental than Joyce’s, who varies his technique again and again, and in whose writing no technique, unless parodistically, is equal to the other. The second consequence is that Woolf has to alternate her focuses, and cannot construct a novel around a single character: she has to interweave the psychologies, to make them interact, always showing however that they are essentially monadic universes – we are not confined to our bodies, and what is outside it constitutes the self like what is inside it; we ‘participate’ in other people’s being.8 She has to pass from a consciousness to that of the other character close to him or her. Finally, her novels are about the educated class; the man in the street, the worker, the proletarian is never onstage. The protagonists are uppermiddle-class people that attend public schools and university, blasé like the cadets of those universities. Or they are writers and artists, painters who have failed to express themselves, or teachers, dons or state managers.9 In 7 8 9

It is a procedure that Pagnini (PLE, 162) defines ‘linked indirect speech’. We know ‘only our versions [of someone], which, as likely as not, are emanations from ourselves’ (letter of 2 March 1926). Conrad Aiken was among the first to be sorry about it (cf. CRHE, 205–8).

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the autobiographical ‘Sketch’ Woolf herself admitted a controlled division, a conscious game on two existential tables. In the daytime she was the scholar, the reader, the adept of the classics, then in the manner of Machiavelli she stripped herself of those clothes and gave herself up to receptions, ceremonies, the obligations of social life. Dressed up, perfumed, with her hair combed, even bejewelled, she unfailingly went down to the living room to receive the guests. In the piece ‘Am I a Snob?’ she openly confessed her attraction to the world of receptions and dances and the pleasure she derived from these social occasions. In the witty, affable and elegant essay ‘Middlebrow’, Woolf sees herself divided between being and knowing she is highbrow and lowbrow, and then tries to define herself as middlebrow. After all ‘highbrow’ is a synonym of ‘snob’, and – as Thackeray had said – as the snob needs the person to be snobbish with, so it is with the symbiosis of the high and the low. 4. In contemporary readers and in militant criticism there was a recurrent set of synonymous physiological metaphors to designate the character of Woolf ’s novels: they were ‘bloodless’, ‘anaemic’,10 ‘emaciated’;11 they lacked that ‘elemental force’12 that gushed out of Hardy, Dostoevsky and Dreiser; that life, that tumult, that intensity were not to be found in them. The current charge was that Virginia was a ‘weak’ narrator, to whom passion was unknown, even more so erotic passion, and that she did not contemplate or have in her repertoire the strong and virile character, the conqueror. This was also often observed in relation to Forster’s delicate and feminine soul. Another judgement, that she was an impressionistic novelist, implied a datum that was technical as well as being ideological: the impressionist writes a painterly novel, works on the basis of a visual poetic, of natural pictures and landscape or atmospheric descriptions, of flashes and dots of colour (and there was unanimous appreciation of the style of the poet in prose). But such a writer also had neither a philosophical culture nor an ideological framework. Virginia Woolf admitted, and the critics echoed her, that she had ‘nothing to say’. One of the pioneers, Floris 10 11 12

This is the judgement on The Waves by Gabriel Marcel (CRHE, 294). CRHE, 451 (Kronenberg). CRHE, 363.

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Delattre, indicated the numerous analogies between Woolf ’s idea of time and Bergson’s of durée.13 Lastly, critics complained about how circumscribed the radius of the experiences narrated were, how narrow Woolf ’s optical focus was.14 Before and immediately after the Second World War Woolf, as a result, was unpopular with, if not actively disliked by, many critics with a politically committed background. She was seen as a ‘technical’ writer and nothing more, and dismissed, by Orwell, who was echoed by the politicized and socialist writers.15 Nor did she get much recognition at Cambridge, of which she felt she was an honorary citizen and scholar.16 T. S. Eliot launched the obvious conflict between barbaric Lawrence and civilized Woolf.17 The 1934 blasting by Wyndham Lewis, in Men without Art, was followed by Leavis with the accusation, taken up by all the ‘Scrutineers’, of ‘sophisticated aestheticism’ and belated and adapted Paterism. To the Lighthouse was the only novel of Woolf ’s, for the Leavises and their followers, that had any chance of surviving. By the generation of the militant novelists she was respected though not entirely appreciated. Forster overflowed with praise as every new novel of Woolf ’s appeared, though he secretly remained faithful to the tradition and maintained the old centrality of the all-round character. With her, Arnold Bennett always had a relationship of guileless, cleverly studied clumsy and servile obtuseness in several skirmishes, both live and by letter; he knew he was inferior to her, and took with equanimity all the blows that fell on him. He shows Olympian resistance in a recollection of the writer in a face-to-face meeting at a reception. Bennett, precisely, read and reviewed every novel of Woolf ’s without failing every time to define himself as more stupid than he was, frankly admitting that he failed to understand them. But he never inveighs, or answers the scolds in kind, 13

Hafley 1954 continually refers to the Bergson model, though without including a systematic chapter. The parallel is undoubtedly stimulating, but it is a mere coincidence for Lee 1977, 111 n. 3, who believes it extremely unlikely that Woolf had read Bergson. 14 Chambers 1957, 2, notes, for instance, how facile and generic is the attribution to many characters of a past as government officials in India. 15 OCE, vol. II, 150. 16 Batchelor 1991, 22 and 23–5. 17 CRHE, 192.

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but rather strives to be objective. Walter Allen, writing in 1954, observed in The English Novel that the reaction against Virginia Woolf was reaching its apex at that date. Some18 date to around 1970 the definitive comeback of Woolf, the protagonist of an upsurge that made a laughing stock of the catastrophic forecasts of the 1950s and raised her to one of the top places, in terms of popularity, with the big transnational public, and at the centre of academic interest. The 1980s gradually perfected the feminist and Freudian readings, studying how a particular range, one could even say a galaxy, of sophisticated, complex, initiatory foundations interact with Woolf ’s texts, to the point of declaring her, as usual, a precocious forerunner in intuiting and prefiguring posterior speculations or single theoretical points. Later books and critical studies, faithful to this type of poststructuralist approach, still today cut out and reduce Woolf ’s texts and the whole corpus along the lines of strange optical effects, so that a minuscule detail often becomes an interpretative architrave. The book by Phillis Rose,19 perhaps the last before the advent of a truly initiatory phase, studies in a balanced way a writer suffering from guilt feelings for not having duly complained about the loss of her mother, and in search of vicarious figures that she finds in other women, in friends and finally in her husband. In this perspective Woolf ’s novels are the fruit of a consciously ambivalent attitude towards the female role of the angel in the house: it was the rejection of her mother, proud at one moment, disturbed by guilt complexes at another.20 Yet the artist, if she wanted to burgeon, had to become masculine, that is to say selfish, and to partly acquire gifts and sides of that gender. No less anguish-ridden was the decision to procreate mentally and not physically; and therefore, after every novel in which she had ‘rejected her mother’, Woolf felt that to be loved she had to be like her mother, and she suffered from it. Her refuges were her room – hence the recurrent label of ‘immured maiden’, vaguely reminiscent of a poem by Christina Rossetti –21 and holidays at St Ives.

18 19 20 21

Like Leaska 1977, 3. Rose 1978. Rose 1978, 158–9. The epithet is often used by Woolf in her essays. For Christina Rossetti poem ‘An “Immurata” Sister’, cf. Volume 4, § 200.1 n. 47.

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§ 158. Woolf II: Woolf ’s hours in a library22 The stature and historical importance of Virginia Woolf as a twentiethcentury literary critic essentially rest on the two series of essays The Common Reader; as a polemicist, a feminist, a sociologist and a pacifist on two books, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. The Common Reader 23 contains and tests Woolf ’s aesthetic of literature, defines the modern technique of fiction and specifies the very concept of the act of reading, in addition to inaugurating a particular, wholly Woolfian style of essay writing. This specifically heuristic value must not be disjoined, precisely, from a specific and contingent one.24 Although these books, some of them collections of essays that appeared in no particular order, accompany the whole extension of Woolf ’s fiction, I extrapolate them and discuss them here because they constitute an ideal prologue to it, an indispensable pendant, and a network of precious preannouncements and references. Even simply browsing through the indexes of the two series of The Common Reader, a map is traced out of the writers and atmospheres that moulded Woolf and transmitted to her a considerable or even indelible experience. And in them we perceive, as in a watermark, her literary genealogy and her ideal family of affiliation, a family that was a substantial continuum, though with breaks, according to that organicistic vision on which Between the Acts is orchestrated. This atemporal family has its foundation in the Elizabethan age; Woolf then dwells at length on the eighteenth century and on its appendix and ramification represented by Jane Austen; she investigates the figure and the elusive and then dawning woman writer, down to the closing of the exploration with contemporary fiction. The greatest density is found within eighteenth-century literature, peopled by male and above all female roles, often sensitive figurines that trace out, with supreme grace and delightful attention to words, vignettes of themselves and the world. Woolf is visibly at her ease here, and would like to go back nostalgically in time and identify with that world of etiquette made up of politeness and bows. In this veneration, she resembles and echoes Thackeray. The essays Hours in a Library is a Woolf collection with a title, as I argue, that is very much ad hoc. 23 Published in 1925 (first series) and 1932 (second series). 24 As Bishop 1991, 61, notes en passant.

22

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of the second series of The Common Reader in turn form a kind of further test and parallel re-examination, and imitating those of the first one they again start from the Elizabethans and close with the death of Hardy (and one, on Defoe, studies the same author and the same novel as in the first series). There is thus compiled and constructed, or completed, an empirical historical theory of English prose and the English novel. This means that the great absentees from Woolf ’s exploration are poetry tout court and the prose and the fiction of the Romantics. In virtue of these tastes and preferences for the Augustan period and eighteenth-century classicism one can perceive, in a writer who is so anti-Victorian and modern, a form of residual Arnoldism. Woolf often invokes the criterion of comparison to draw up a hierarchy of values: it is the Arnoldian ‘touchstone’, comparing every single specimen ‘with whatever is the best or seems to us the best in its own kind’,25 the Arnoldian standard. The secret or declared purpose of Woolf ’s essays is therefore testing out the survival in time of an author and a book, and these are largely essays that celebrate centenaries, and strive to measure how and to what extent a book has held up a hundred years after the death of its author (in one case, that of Hardy, the essay is an obituary). But conversely there is an antiquarian and archaeological ante litteram interest at work, that of the person that removes the dust from the books of writers and aspiring writers, or simple and frail memoirists of the past, people of the type of Geraldine Jewsbury, Reverend Skinner or Jack Mytton. Woolf at all events does not have a true, organic theory of the novel. In ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’,26 her most complete theoretical essay, strictly speaking she only succeeds in destroying the narrative convention of some of her predecessors – Galsworthy, Bennett, Wells, and also in part Forster and Lawrence, called the Edwardians – but without constructing, except nebulously and vaguely, a new type of realism, which was only to burgeon in 1910. Really, she asks herself, does fiction, does all fiction have to centre on character, and must it first of all create characters, and real characters, vivid ones, to the point that it seems you can touch and be able to meet them in life? Every novelist sees and has seen character in a different way, 25 On the echoes of Arnold cf. Volume 4, § 149, especially sub-section 5. 26 This essay is not included in the two series of The Common Reader.

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though this difference does not consist in acting like those predecessors, champions of minute observation, detailed but purely inventorial, and factual and external. Hence the dull anecdote of Mrs Brown put on the spot and suffocated by Mr Smith in the train carriage, guessed, reconstructed from her phenomena, from her behaviours, and never seen again. This phenomenological character, without noumenon one would say, embodies the new and vague conception of character and of narratorial awareness that is advocated by Woolf, and put in practice beginning from Jacob’s Room. It is the personal vision of prior events, an imagination: the narrator does not know everything of his or her character, he or she senses it, imagines him or her, spies on him or her, a centre of irradiation of feelings and associations. 2. Do these essays in The Common Reader respond to the poetic, the aesthetic and the norms established in ‘The Modern Essay’, namely that the essay has to be agile, light, ‘without polysyllables?’. Many in the first collection are actually immature, sometimes abstruse, and sometimes prolix; a good step forward is taken with those in the second one, little cameos done with elegant, round, clear, smooth taste. A supreme one, not without reason, is the one on the family of Fanny Burney, which showed many analogies with her own for the fervour and the intense rivalry between sibs; and the one devoted to the pitiable figure of the poet William Cowper.27 In Fanny Burney Woolf herself is mirrored for the insuppressible, neurotic desire to write or scribble starting from a tender age. The sketch of the war of gazes at the reception of Doctor Burney, the guests at which included Doctor Johnson, Mrs Thrale, Greville and Piozzi, is a little satirical masterpiece on its own, and it looks ahead to Orlando. But also the portrait of the nest of affections of the Barrett siblings, with the misfortunes and the griefs and the imprisonments, reveals the degree of her identification (‘she had been immured by the tyranny of her father’: could one not apply this sentence to Woolf herself ?). Invariably the channel of access to the most secret recesses of a writer’s is biography – ‘the fascination of reading biographies is irresistible’ – and the letters or the diary. Woolf has a preference for the writer who is a letter writer or a diarist, because the diary is the scalpel with which to 27 Another alter ego, affected by excesses of bad mood and pessimism, which had to do with the obsession with his own damnation.

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pierce him or her and the tool with which the writer really bares himself or herself. In a bold flash, devoted to the obscure Reverend Woodforde, Woolf maintains that the diary allows the ‘first being’, or superego, to talk to the second self, lower and more transgressive, in a kind of confession with one’s own double: an observation that closely echoes, once again, the rough and approximate psychoanalysis of a Matthew Arnold. The ideal of a poetic biography is disregarded by Woolf, who also uses the absence of this criterion to reject Strachey’s biographies: ‘Cannot biography produce something that has the intensity of poetry, something to excite the drama, without losing the virtue typical of the fact, its evocative reality, its own creativity?’. In these essays of Woolf ’s there is a wish to enact the possible, desirable elimination of every distance between book and reader. Every book is a living and pulsating substance, and, if it is alive, reading it one feels a sense of affiliation with the chain of readers that have read it since the day of its publication. When Woolf writes about Sidney’s Arcadia, it is as if she felt she was browsing through the same copy as other past readers have handled. 3. The slightly unhappy title The Common Reader means precisely, or alludes to a similar, burning encounter without intermediaries between a cultured reader, and also a writer, and another writer through his or her book: it means ‘read for oneself, expose the mind bare to the poem, and transcribe in all its haste and imperfection whatever may be the result of the impact’.28 It is a reading that is disenchanted, skin-deep, without any theoretical baggage or preconception. The closing essay of the second series, ‘How Should One Read a Book?’, repeats the need for and prescription of an instinctual and independent approach, intolerant of authorities. One has, alas, to become an author, but people have to ‘remain readers’; the authorities are to be faced later, to recover a confirmation of those confused upheavals, of that swarm of spur-of-the-moment impressions that reading arouses in us. In this essay we again find applied or implied the same concept or the same practice of reading and criticism as Thackeray’s in The Four Georges, perhaps because Virginia’s father personally knew so many eminent 28

In the essay on Christina Rossetti. This common reader boasted in limine is all right, but Woolf ultimately addresses a learned, well-read public, able to decipher the numerous winks.

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Victorians, who had in turn known so many other predecessors; and perhaps because Laura Stephen was also the daughter of Thackeray’s daughter, whose ancestors had been experts on the great men of the eighteenth century. Thus Woolf ’s reading here is ghostly backtracking, in which one shakes the ancestors’ hands, and in this way a magic act of resurrection. And reading and writing are therefore imagined as taking place in a library, that actual library of her father’s, in which Virginia had been wont to spend so many hours as a child.29 Ideally, every essay mimes the action of the bibliophile, of the reader that extracts a book from the shelf, not before blowing away the dust from the upper furrow between the covers, to experience or to verify once again the sense of topicality and vitality of a book read in the past. The essay and its reasoning gush out freshly as if they were consequent on a new action of reading, just concluded, and ‘fresh’ is also its expository style. Woolf ’s most typical essayistic style has the aroma of immediateness and of high, sophisticated informality, and it is correlated with the style and technique of Woolf ’s novels. It wants and must be a falsely, pretendedly impromptu, digressive, unplanned style; it pretends to catch one’s thought in the making. As a matter of principle it eschews the doctoral, academic and pompous debate; the idea and the impression are those of the spontaneous, of the immediate, of the candid, and of the colloquial. This explains the abundance of images, of colourful images, often bold, often hyperbolic, and the striking mode of expression. And together there is the frank, unexpected, even scandalous argument, admission or declaration. Virginia Woolf ’s essayistic style gradually solidified into a mannerism, and it has gone down in history as inimitable and incomparable, however often aped by subsequent women writers, and therefore sometimes mawkish in its cloying imitation and forgery quality; but read in small doses in the true original it is enchanting. Conversely, where Woolf passes from an immediate

29

A possible reverberation of the irascibility and neurosis of Woolf ’s own father is in the portrait of the seventeenth-eighteenth-century erudite Richard Bentley. Browning’s ‘grammarian’, that is, the bookworm that isolates himself or herself in a kind of cavern, or soundproofed cave, and deals with his or her painstaking researches, is often in Woolf the other face of her respect and admiration for her father.

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style to a mediated and even meditated one, and obstinately documents and annotates her thoughts, this pristine freshness is lost. 4. Woolf would always have little to say in her essays on the historical development of poetry, and only a little more on the play; but she formulates a more circumstantiated historical theory of essay writing and of the novel. On the former she maintains that the art of essay writing, light and electrifying, is in decline at present, and she only saves Beerbohm, though before arriving at him she has sung the praises of Pater, quoting with approval ten years before Yeats30 the passage on the Mona Lisa. The point of view is Arnoldian, namely that there had not been any essay writing of any value in English for a long period, and that the high point had been the neoclassical one, with Addison foremost together with Dryden, not to mention Johnson – these are Arnold’s idols too. A possibly debatable affirmation she makes is that English is or has been a not very supple language, in which it is easy to express concepts of metaphysics and philosophy but not daily facts and service communications. On the novel – in the essay ‘Modern Fiction’ – Woolf shows she does not believe in the evolutionary law that that of her present is better than that of the past, judging from the triad Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy, guilty of writing novels that reduce their subject matter to material, low, vulgar, and transitory actions. It is a matter of portraying life as a ‘luminous halo’, as a semi-transparent envelope surrounding consciousness; of recording atoms as they fall upon the mind in random order, according to the very famous definition of her poetic. The emphasis is placed, in the modern world, on the ‘dark places of psychology’. For the fact is, who does the writer write for? Not to make money or for an identified recipient possibly belonging to his or her own time, but for eternity, for a future recipient, ‘for the world at large’, though it is difficult to escape the temptation to write for the newspapers and therefore to produce ephemeral literature. ‘How It Strikes a Contemporary’ analyses the state of extreme instability that governs judgement on value and therefore the potential immortality of a contemporary work, in comparison to the much greater – and, it seems, missed – unanimity, and more narrow

30 Volume 6, § 170.2.

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normativeness, of the past. There shows through the apocalyptic feeling of a great lack of masterpieces to hand down to posterity, of a break in the continuity in all branches of literature – ‘It is an age of fragments’, Woolf complains, echoing the ending of Between the Acts, and Ulysses is now defined ‘a memorable catastrophe’, though writers are encouraged not to desist but to believe heroically in their activity. In ‘The Strange Elizabethans’, which opens the second series, we find confirmation of Woolf ’s theory of English prose, long unsuited to communicating daily life. The collections of letters reporting daily events are faded, or are too stilted, pompous and rhetorical, and the writer is still stiff and does not reveal himself or herself. The essay on Donne on the third centenary of his death starts from the question of what still strikes us about the poet after three centuries; and invariably Donne is alive because he involves us, strikes us and allures us. The essay on Sidney’s Arcadia – one of her most relaxed, most fluid and most elegant – in turn confirms that books are subject to a kind of stock market, and go up and down according to the epochs. That book was written to please people and make them forget present reality, but it must be reopened; once savoured anew it may however be put back in the shelf. On the other hand Woolf ’s empathy, her identifying with the distant climate of the Elizabethan or eighteenth-century or Romantic or Victorian era, leads to the affirmation that the hierarchy of values has profoundly changed, and that in recent times an epistemic turnover has intervened, or even simply a psychological or psychic one. A procedural concept or criterion now insisted on is possibly that of the transient character of literature. Books extracted from the continuum, and republished, are reviewed; but what right do they have to be read, to be vital, and alive? It is a threat, it is precariousness that torments her. Therefore these essays are all panoramic surveys of literary evolution, canonical operations that anxiously distinguish the perennial from the transient, and decree or deny a survival that is more and more arduous as the centuries go by. Virginia Woolf had good reasons for expressing these worries, discouraged as she was by the thousands of volumes of the modern Babel library. That is to say, already in 1925 and in 1932, a time was dawning of productive surplus, and this was the eve of a worrisome, threatening surfeit of books and printed paper. This is naturally prophetic of the times that we live in today. This is

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the reason why she too was committed to acrobatic rescues of unknown writers; but the essays that deal with them fail themselves to attain their survival. On the other hand, Woolf is always ready to regret a precocious death, or an interrupted career, and to wonder what would have happened if some writer had lived longer. The sign of the vitality of books, for example the novels of George Eliot, is that someone goes back to reading them to again find in them ‘energy and heat’, the heat of the living and not the coldness of the dead body. The history of the novel, in the second series of The Common Reader, is re-examined from Defoe on to confirm that the novelist is also an incisive observer of minute and insignificant events that he narrates and even sub-narrates, without magnifying them. It is up to the reader to discover the hierarchies concerning the reality and the metaphysics of the novelist that he or she reads. Sterne, whom Woolf moves among the moderns, revolutionizes the hierarchies, is not interested in cathedrals but leapfrogs them, and his narration revolves around the green satin purse or the dead donkey, and foreshadows Woolf ’s art of omission or of the parenthetical notice. The only true foray into modern poetry, leaving out faraway Donne, concerns Elizabeth Barrett and the brave experimental example of her novel in verse Aurora Leigh, which, for all its awkwardness, has not had a second chance. In the evolutionary fabric male and female memoirists alternate with novelists, without neglecting the historical obstacles against women, for whom writing was considered improper, though these impediments were got round or overcome by obscure letter writers like Dorothy Osborne. With her the writer starts to lay bare his or her intimacy.31 This getting rid of the courtly attire, and breathing, far from the imposed etiquettes, a ‘breath of fresh air’, becomes an imperious necessity, as for Swift with Stella. Letters were written by women like Mary Wollstonecraft and Wordsworth’s sister, the latter very accurate in annotating peculiar natural spectacles. 5. In A Room of One’s Own, the fiercest of Woolf ’s attacks on patriarchy, Woolf challenges herself to an arduous and rather acrobatic assignment. As 31

Woolf ’s ‘moments of vision’, thus defined in the essay on Hardy’s novels, and indeed an expression of Hardy’s, indicate unexpected because sudden peaks of strength, and therefore ‘single scene[s] that break off from the rest’.

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a successful and esteemed novelist she argues that women cannot and have not been able to write in the past and until very recently, though confessing that she has a room of her own and an income of 500 pounds a year, and hence the best presuppositions to do it. That is to say, she proposes to show she is the exception that confirms the rule, which is that women cannot and have not been able to write because they do not have nor have had either the one, the room, or the other, the income.32 The demonstration gets started with some difficulty amid pure polemic, the abstract and theoretical point and the facetious story of how the above assumption derives from facts and the concrete and daily personal experiences of the writer. At the universities of Oxford and Cambridge the woman, only because she was such and because of a prejudice that was slow to die, still saw access refused to her, along with use of equipment and the prerogatives granted to males. At the British Museum one vividly witnessed the exclusion of women from the benefits of culture and the penalty of the too many pregnancies. The historical overview of discriminations against women starts from Elizabethan times, with the ascertainment that the woman at that time had no voice, and was precluded from authorship because she lived exclusively in the service of the man, who could beat her, subjugate her, clip her wings and humiliate her. Woolf successfully overcomes the possible objection, saying that the fiction – in which the woman even appears, in various forms, as the man’s dominator – is one thing, while reality is another. A gifted woman, intending to undertake a career as a writer in the Elizabethan period, would have gone mad, or would have been overcome by the surrounding conspiracy of silence and by prejudice. And in the past the state of mind necessary to writing was lacking: that is the spiritual and material circumstances, the silence and the loneliness in which creation is possible. Time for writing was lacking, being sacrificed to marital and above all maternal duties; and the prejudice of female chastity had great weight. In continuing the exploration Woolf notices that even in the nineteenth century the conditions for female writing had not improved: Victorian 32

Arnold Bennett (CRHE, 259) candidly criticized the absolute validity of this axiom, pointing out that Dostoevsky’s novels, and indeed his own, had been written in rooms without a bolt and in conditions of poverty!

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novels were written in precarious conditions, furtively, without the daily bread of experience, and anger does not benefit the integrity of art.33 The admission that there had been two colleges for women in England since 1866 sounds like an invitation to contemporary female academic culture to deploy more forcefully against masculine prejudice within culture. The last theoretical clause concerns the female quid, the specificity of the gender, indeed the formulation of an androgynous mind – from Coleridge – that is masculine and female only because of the prevalence, a subtle one, of one element over the other. It is only a blow struck against masculine writers, in favour of androgynous ones. 6. Three Guineas34 (1938) is a flagrant denial of the lightness and rarefaction of Woolf ’s writing and a polemic pamphlet full of extended arguments which is irremediably impaired by prolixity and repetitions, and could really have been condensed in a few short sections. The dramatically topical question was how to prevent the imminent war; but the radius is broadened, and becomes how and whether to induce women to make a contribution to prevention of the war. With this the centre of gravity is fatally shifted, and Woolf writes an appendix – all the more documented, circumstantiated, full of allusions, but in the end an appendix – to A Room of One’s Own: a little treatise on disabilities and the historical penalizations, past, present and future, of women. The pleasantry of the three symbolic guineas, and of an offering to the pacifist cause, is isolated and erratic, and freshness and improvisation are more often sacrificed to the tone of the dissertation. The three chapters are presented as open letters to imaginary constructive and activist characters of the progressive, pacifist, and democratic British 33

34

The conquest of the written word by women is admirably summed up in the brief lecture, not included in this book, ‘Professions for Women’. With the usual ability – the candid mannerism of disclosing, and therefore forgiving and getting others to forgive, her snobbery – Woolf admits that she invested her first earnings as a journalist in the purchase of a Persian cat (and those from her first novel in the purchase of a car!). The wittiest passage concerns the killing, required for the writer to be born, of the Victorian angel in the house which, being a ghost, never entirely dies. The first edition ironically came out with photos of dignitaries in full dress with wigs, medals, decorations and other symbols of pomp, in order to provoke in women not reverence but indifference (Zwerdling 1986, 236).

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intelligentsia; and only here and there do they preserve this characteristic of improvisation and of orality and militancy. In the last analysis Three Guineas is to be placed in the category of the Victorian, late Victorian and early nineteenth-century utopias, in the wake of Arnold and Ruskin: the assumption is that society can be reformed starting from culture, democratic culture abolishing privilege and only transmitting human arts. Naturally Orwell, lucid and crystalline, is quite another thing, and Woolf repeatedly reveals her effort and uneasiness while dealing with numbers, statistics and the language and techniques of the polemicist. The harsh controversy against patriarchy further seems to echo Tennyson’s bizarre polemic in his no less strange feminist poem The Princess, as it prophesies a society without men, or one in which masculine power is overturned, and education is only imparted in female colleges where female autonomy is a conquest that has come true. Yet, in Tennyson as in Woolf, this does not take us very far, because the woman becomes more a woman, or only a woman, in virtue of sexual and also spiritual union with the man.35 Woolf is not distant from Tennyson’s hypothesis, and she tries to react like Tennyson’s princess Ida,36 but she is forced to share his thesis, when in the end she has to give, is forced to give, her symbolic guineas. 7. The opening issue in Three Guineas is communication between educated women and men, and how it is possible – in a mixed and mixedgender society – to prevent the fascist and Nazi war; actually the point becomes spurious in relation to the impasse of the historical penalties, to be straightened out, between two different genders. The man and the woman genetically communicate in a different way and relate in a different way. But then it is also a matter of historical aftermaths: the woman carries with her a penalty also deriving from the fact that, in the class of the ‘daughters of educated men’, in money investments for the education of males and females the ratio has been ten to one. First these disparities should be focused on and dealt with, and then there can be a debate about how and 35 36

Cf. Volume 4, § 89, for the comparison with Tennyson. ‘One method by which [the woman] can help to prevent war is to refuse to bear children’. This means the rejection of maternity in the sense in which it was conceived down to 1938, and also, more practically, the refusal to provide ‘cannon fodder’.

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whether women can and must sign petitions for peace and disarmament. Women, through the simple fact that males have been given more in terms of education, have propped up patriarchy and can give nothing more, and indeed must be indemnified for this privation. Religious institutions too have acted against the education of women. The florid and farraginous argument of the first chapter closes with the hope that the symbolic guinea to be paid to rebuild the female university college be devolved to more human and more egalitarian objectives; yet the woman is always a giver, she closes an eye, and in times of need she always gives succour.37 The second chapter faces head-on the question of whether women can and must have access to the professions, and therefore have a proper income, in a regime of parity with males. Women were still underpaid, and fewer women studied at universities than males. The profession of the efficient wife and housewife was not recognized and therefore not paid, and this amounted to subalternity that prevented the woman from having an independent influence, that is to say one independent of that of her husband. The third chapter, which aims to discuss the invitation to women by an eminent personality to sign a manifesto advocating culture and intellectual freedom, returns to the point that women have amply contributed to educational expenses for males by depriving themselves of the money necessary for their own education. Coming to the main point, Woolf does not sign the petition and announces the birth of the utopian Society of Outsiders, that is of women, external but not organic supporters of other movements. The salient points of its programme include abolition of patriotism, especially towards an extraneous country, indeed an enemy one, and female indifference, which can prevent war better than intervention. This utopia is based to a great extent on the foundation of a New Testament religion freeing the present one from its ‘slavery’. It is an argument that gravitates towards the implementation of the priesthood for women and towards an attack on St Paul; but one notices traces of a thought still imbued with

37

Just as often Woolf evokes for herself consanguinity with the mythical figure of Antigone, cited as an example of devotion to real causes and loyalties, not fictitious or convenient or servile ones.

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Arnold’s humanism, especially when the creation is formally requested of a Ministry responsible for the increase of beauty in contemporary society. § 159. Woolf III: Biography In many of her novels Virginia Woolf disguises her childish Eden, which is, though, also interspersed with sharp, painful thorns. Her novels start from a large community of brothers and sisters who come to suffer impositions by adults and intensely and bitterly experience the gradual discovery of the self and become conscious of their own growth. The radiant summer holidays spent by the Stephens at St Ives, in Cornwall, are their seaside backdrop. The childhood tensions derived from the fact that Virginia was the daughter of two remarried parents – the first wife of her father, an umpteenth rebel against the Thirty-nine Articles,38 was a daughter of Thackeray – and therefore she felt she was part of mixed issue, of two parents and different father and mother. The Stephen sibs were those eight children or fraternal childhood friends and members of a Brontëan ‘web of childhood’39 of The Waves, where they are reduced by two,40 and of To the Lighthouse, where they are blood brothers. In order of seniority they were Vanessa,41 Thoby, Virginia and Adrian, the children of Julia and Leslie 38

Batchelor 1991, 4. As a result the family grew up atheist and none of the Stephen children was baptized; the godfather of the ‘secular’ baptisms of the eight sibs had been James Lowell, the American ambassador who had a preference for Virginia, on whom he lavished gifts. After a temporary return to the faith, Virginia once again took up the family atheism and a mild and in some cases aggressive agnosticism (Bell 1972, vol. II, 135–6). Both Mrs Dalloway and Mrs Ramsay are explicitly non-believers, though Mrs Swithin in Between the Acts is not. 39 There were six Brontës, a brother and five sisters, and their life was marked by a similar series of bereavements: first the two eldest sisters, then the mother, and then the brother. Virginia was the ‘storyteller’, as in turn, at Haworth, the Brontë sisters were, and hers was the ideation, the editing and the layout of the home children’s paper. The Brontë parsonage was visited by Virginia in 1904, and an account of this visit was, not surprisingly, the subject of her first published article. 40 Virginia was a beauty, and was also nicknamed Ginny, almost like a character in The Waves, Jinny. 41 On the Swiftian wit involved in this name, given by her father, who had also been a biographer of Swift, cf. Bell 1972, vol. I, 18.

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Stephen; from her previous marriage Julia had had Gerald, George and Stella, and Leslie the retarded Laura. Julia is the mother of all of them except one daughter, but by two different fathers. Woolf ’s posthumous Moments of Being insists on the primordial sense of an organic and undivided life, and a true monument is carved to the altruistic gifts of the mother Julia, an immobile and fixed star around which devoted satellites revolved. And the father is a devouring tyrant, particularly devouring three women, his wife and his two daughters Vanessa and Virginia. There is in Moments of Being an explicit reference to ‘victims’ of the executioner. Woolf ’s second version of her childhood, that of the autobiographical ‘A Sketch of the Past’, is less documentary and analytical, more inspired and more Proustian, and it is a canvas of colours, sounds and relived feelings. Sex was spoiled forever in Virginia by the ignoble attentions, or more exactly the sexual abuses suffered at the hands of her stepbrothers George and Gerald: by the latter42 Virginia, as a child, was hoisted up on a stool and sexually ‘explored’ (this expression recurs in the ‘Sketch’); the other entered her room, put out the light and in bed caressed her.43 Vanessa perhaps flirted with her half-sister Stella’s husband after her death, just three months after the wedding. Virginia grew up with a morbid and also fragile sensibility (a vein of madness ran through the family, and had struck Thackeray’s wife and his granddaughter Laura).44 Her mood swings were always to be an alternation of euphoric and ecstatic moments and others of deep mistrust and disenchantment. In Victorian times Virginia would surely have been a candidate to become a recluse, and to be committed to a mental hospital.45 2. Educated at home, envious of a university education she could not receive, but only because of an inveterate prejudice that had by then

42 Who as a publisher was later to publish the first novels of his half-sister. 43 The realities of sex were revealed to Virginia, who like her alter ego Rachel Vinrace (§ 160) ignored them, by her brother-in-law Jack Hills, as the ‘Sketch’ also reveals. 44 Bell 1972, vol. I, 12. 45 On the extent and exact diagnosis of this mental illness there has been a long debate. Feminists have linked it to her incestuous experiences and the erotic attentions of her brothers; the subsequent positions are summed up in Hanson 1994, 16–22.

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collapsed,46 Virginia became an avid reader, with a passion for Greek literature. One can see a certain analogy, indeed a strong analogy, with Elizabeth Barrett Browning.47 Her first psychophysical breakdown came on the death of her mother in 1895, and a second one in 1904, when her father died and Virginia made her first suicide attempt, after which she was periodically treated by neurologists. Yet her father’s death, and the disappearance of his threatening shadow – a double disappearance, as she also loved him with sincere love – definitely freed up her ability as a writer, and her debut came with an article published in the Guardian (not today’s newspaper of the same name). It was the first expression of a feverish, constant and conscientious activity as a reviewer in periodicals. From 1904 the family, who had grown up in Kensington, moved to Bloomsbury, and, Stella dying, Vanessa was like a mother to her orphaned sibs. At the Thursday evening parties at the house in Gordon Square, the silent guests revived when the theme of ‘beauty’ was introduced as an object of discussion. The Bloomsbury group included breezy and disrespectful intellectuals, determined to contest the establishment, and therefore antimilitarists and anti-imperialists. Bawdy pranks were also organized, like presenting themselves in Weymouth on the battleship Dreadnought, the pride of the British fleet, disguised as an Abyssinian delegation.48 At those reunions the prohibition on coarse and scurrilous language was soon removed, and the swearword or the unbecoming expression admitted – and therefore the way was opened to frank debate on every possible matter – when Lytton 46 Theoretically Woolf could have attended university (two colleges for women had by then opened in Cambridge), but there has been speculation on the concrete chances that she would have had of passing the entrance examinations; in any case she had an intense perception of the university as a masculine institution, and of male chauvinism that saw the woman as an encumbrance. 47 Like her, at one stage Virginia thought of marrying a Greek tutor. On Flush: A Biography (1933), and the witty decentralization of the biography of the Victorian poet, seen from the point of view of a dog, see, also for the previous observation, Volume 4, § 61.2. 48 One can glimpse in this episode the rise of the frisson of disguise and sex swapping. Moreover, at parties Virginia loved carnivalizing and playing with masks. Details on the Bloomsbury group are given below at § 169.

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Strachey, noticing a stain on Vanessa’s white dress, conjectured, and said in a loud voice, that it might be sperm. Roger Fry,49 the organizer in 1910 of the first postimpressionist exhibition in London, deepened and guided the interest of the entourage of the Stephens and the Bells in visual arts. The group came to resemble a replica of the Pre-Raphaelites, because, like the Pre-Raphaelites, they did not issue manifestos or proclamations, but only expressed an inexhaustible thirst for the new. The programme also tacitly included absolute sexual disinhibition. In his Principia Ethica, the philosopher G. E. Moore taught that what is material cannot be excluded from the state of perfection because of the impurity of the matter; and that matter is ‘an essential constituent of the Ideal’. Every human action has to be justified and approved if – echoing Bentham – it brings an increase of good in the universe. This led to a weakening of the priority of duties and a re-examination of the charter of moral obligations.50 The ethical choice becomes arduous, for Moore, because there are so many parameters to consider before being able to decide what really brings an advantage to humanity. Some Bloomsbury disciples were able to draw from Moore the lesson of an elimination of the very idea of duty, and this explains the permissiveness that dominated that movement. 3. In 1906 Thoby Stephen, the soul of the group of aesthetes that had arisen in Cambridge, died of typhus; and after Vanessa married Clive Bell in 1907, Virginia was truly alone, a loneliness assuaged by irregular participation in the bright life of London intellectuals under the undesirable and hypocritical guidance of her stepbrother Gerald. In 1909 she accepted without reflecting a proposal of marriage from Strachey, who the following day changed his mind. By now she had started an independent career, having received from an aunt an inheritance that allowed her to give up her fatiguing and extenuating activity as a reviewer. Meanwhile between the survivors a strange lifestyle had come into being: Clive Bell flirted with Virginia, and Vanessa at one point was infatuated with Roger Fry. Leonard Woolf, whom Virginia married in 1912, was a cultured Jew, not 49 Woolf wrote a biography on him in 1940, governed by sober academic criteria and therefore a little anonymous and opaque. On Fry cf. below, § 169.2. 50 Cf. Zwerdling 1986, 153–4.

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very well-off – or indeed, ‘penniless’51 – who had had to earn a living as an official in Ceylon; in England on short leave, he did not go back and got engaged. Perhaps the marriage was never consummated, and Virginia’s frigidity was revealed already during the honeymoon. Her sexual inclinations always oscillated between heterosexual love, cold, emptied, asexual, and lesbian love. Her first attraction, veined with rejection and aggressiveness, was for Katherine Mansfield; in 1922 a tempestuous passion budded for Vita Sackville-West, a rich aristocrat of high lineage, with Moorish blood in her veins that appeared on the surface in her dark eyes.52 She was mar-

51 52

The epithet ‘penniless’ is recurrent in the letters. Zwerdling 1986, 115–16, insists on Virginia’s act of courage, and of defiance of the conventions of her class, in marrying Woolf. The most intense lesbian affair of Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962, the daughter of a baron and a Spanish ballerina, Pepita, whose biography she was to write) was with Violet Trefusis, with whom she often ran away to France, where she dressed in public as a man, and with whom she also wrote a book. Praz talks about her son Nigel Nicolson in SSI, vol. II, 355–8, where Sackville-West’s biography is imagined as a script suitable for a film by Luchino Visconti. Vita Sackville-West also wrote, by herself, her most famous, ambitious, and partly scandalous novel, The Edwardians (1930), with a vaguely Wildean plot being a depiction of the degeneration of aristocracy from the point of view of an aristocratic woman, and therefore self-critical (also the theme of Visconti’s films). In the novel a brilliant court lady is in love with a fearful and weak noble, Sebastian, whom she sacrifices after the affair is discovered, though the young man then finds a way of redeeming himself in extremis, together with his sister, in whom the novelist is reflected. The need for female authenticity is the theme of Sackville-West’s two subsequent novels, the first of which appeared to Praz to be her masterpiece, whereas another, spoilt by many clichés, because of its atmospheres also seemed to him to demand ‘in a loud big voice to be made into a film’ (CLA, vol. I, 287–90). But Sackville-West’s true and first interest was in poetry and gardens, particularly those of Sissinghurst Castle in Kent (on gardening from 1946 she did a column in the Observer), and so the writer is today perhaps more famous as a horticulturalist than for the number of her bisexual relationships. The poem ‘The Land’, which in 1927 won a prize, is a sort of ‘calendar of the English farmer’ and his daily toils and his pugnacious relationship with nature and the elements. It was praised for its Virgilian freshness blended with eighteenth-century sobriety (GSM, 505) and a complete absence of sentimentalism, while to others (WAR, 182) it contained Georgian and therefore also ‘Georgic’ echoes, and brought Blunden to

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ried to the critic Harold Nicolson. However, the series of lovers is even longer. Anorexic and bulimic crises – especially in concomitance with the publishing of her novels – alternated with periods of euphoria and wellbeing, and the treatment, though wrong, was expensive. Hence Leonard Woolf decided to give up his feeble aspiration to be a novelist and to start to balance the budget. In 1917 the Woolfs glimpsed in the window of a confectioner an old and disused printing machine, leading to the idea and the launching of the Hogarth Press, founded to publish work by emerging and innovating writers, and particularly those of Virginia herself, in complete freedom and independence.53 After the war Leonard Woolf became an authority in the field of international affairs and also attempted to undertake a political career in the Labour party. Between 1922 and 1932 there came the largest number of novels and other writings by Virginia Woolf, with big sales, also in America. In 1927 she was able to purchase her first car, which was to allow the Woolfs to indulge in the new passion for motoring. In 1932 Virginia, anguished at the deaths of friends, among them the Stracheys, refused various honours; actually, always solitary, and therefore needing friendships and props, by now she saw the English intellectual community as impoverished. To her sorrows there was added the death in the Spanish Civil War of Julian Bell, her nephew and Vanessa’s son; and as early as 1934 she had begun to be anguished about Germanic expansionism. She had already intervened against war and rearmament, and was prey to the apocalyptic nightmare of an invasion of England. In 1941, after wandering around London destroyed by bombardments and having tried to save tokens of the past (plates, letter paper) from ruin, she killed herself by jumping into the river Ouse, near her house at Rodmell in Sussex, after filling her pockets with stones.54 She had felt an uncontrol-

mind. Two poems of hers, testifying to the contemporary respect she enjoyed, were included in the poetry anthology edited by Yeats in 1936. 53 Some have supposed that Woolf ’s novels are what they are thanks also to the editing of the novels and poems of other writers done for the Hogarth Press. She is said to have learned, and even to have emulated, the technique, for instance, of T. S. Eliot. 54 This expedient of burdening oneself with stones so as to be sure of not floating in committing suicide is a stratagem noticed in the son of Dorothy Osborne, the

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lable fit of madness coming. Leonard Woolf too meditated suicide. The reason, or one of the reasons, was that they were both certain that the war would be lost. This self-destructive gesture was suggested to her or imposed on her by ‘voices’; and death, she had observed, was the only electrifying experiment that she would never be able to describe. § 160. Woolf IV: ‘The Voyage Out’ Largely inferior in value to Joyce’s and Lawrence’s beginnings, the first two novels by Virginia Woolf contravene the internal law, later inflexible, of brevity, conciseness, even suddenness, the aesthetic that is habitually associated with her; and they verge on the size of the big Victorian novel. The last part of The Voyage Out (1915, after a full seven years of gestation) overflows into the category of the interminable, loaded with freewheeling suspense; and from the beginning it appears like an unbalanced novel in its construction. In it there badly blend two novels, one set on a steamboat and one in a hotel, one of movement and one sedentary; and it is as if, despite Rachel Vinrace being the link between them, in the one and the other there is a complete character swap. The Dalloway couple disappears, Rachel’s father goes out of the picture, and the light almost entirely goes out on the Ambroses, who were apparently set to be the coprotagonists. If Woolf ’s typical novel is quintessentially a London one, The Voyage Out develops entirely away from and far from London, but without a real definition of the exteriors; indeed, there is no genius loci, and the landscape data and the topographical and geographical indications referring to South America could be perfectly suited to Scotland or coastal England. Lawrence’s Mexico, narrated live, was to be quite another thing. However, The Voyage Out inevitably ends up having some Woolfian traits. From now on Woolf ’s novels will always be poor in plot, and this is an indelible mark. The psychological method is not yet at work, but the characters already experience a kind of schizophrenic split between public life and interiority. The Voyage Out shows off unusual skill in following the dialogues of a community in forced cohabitation in closed places, like a ship making a seventeenth-century letter-writer to whom an essay is dedicated in the second series of The Common Reader. The son had inherited ‘perhaps his mother’s melancholy’.

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crossing and a hotel. People talk a lot but say nothing in this group; they blabber and gossip, but remaining on the periphery of the soul. The idea is inaugurated of the character as an atomic and monadic structure; so many individual entities constitute a group, in apparent familiarity, but without a transfusion being made. From the first to the last page we meet sensitive souls that are suffocated by the need to communicate their own stories and to be listened to, and unexpectedly given this opportunity end up wasting it. Hewet – a mise en abyme – is a budding novelist that has a novel in the pipeline on ‘silence’ and on ‘the things people do not say’.55 Thus the objectives are the incommunicability that is masked under the commonplace and the disunity of the individual, both ontological and against the background of a fin-de-siècle England with imperial illusions that are now worn-out, and in the imminence of war. These objectives are related to the awakening of femininity, even to an early twentiethcentury feminism fighting for the extension of franchise to women and parity in civil rights. But Rachel in turn is part of a historical community that is disoriented, unbalanced, devoid of guidance. On the horizon no commander, no hero invoked like a Garibaldi, is outlined. The microcosm of the hotel, representative of England, advances towards the unknown, a tomorrow without certainties, unstable, ruinous, full of question marks. 2. Woolf is camouflaged in the orphan Rachel Vinrace, who has not emerged from the cocoon of childhood, and is unaware of life and even of the facts of sex; the more mature Helen Ambrose is her aunt and is the dissatisfied wife of a scholar that does not pay much attention to her. For Rachel the cruise symbolizes an adventure of self-knowledge, a rite of passage with a tragic result. The framework is therefore similar to that of To the Lighthouse, where a more circumscribed excursion is expected that will not take place, and where, however, the attention is concentrated, as here, on the insidious relationships that are created within a community, although the story is filtered by a single organizing centre. The ship heading for Santa Marina is the first microcosm. Rachel plays the piano, and has taken one onto the ship; she lives in the ecstasy of music, which means dreamy isolation 55

But the ‘land of silence’ was a painting by Sickert discussed in the essay dedicated to him (§ 162.1).

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and separation from the world.56 Ridley Ambrose is the scholar blind even to realia and vibrations of feeling, thus a first study of Professor Ramsay; so that Helen Ambrose could be Mrs Ramsay, and up to a point she is that protective figure, before the focal centre becomes Rachel. In the climate of the tropical holiday Professor Ambrose will shut himself away in a villa to deal with his Pindar, and his wife, like a patient Penelope, will weave the cloth, a preannouncement of the brown stocking. On the ship the development, immediately very dilatory, focuses on the interpretation of unspoken thought, alongside public tirades or often torrential soliloquies of the characters during the crossing. There is therefore a study of the gap between an internal life that cannot express itself and the demands of social life. On the ship there already start those banal dialogues that gravitate towards intimacy but do not pierce the barrier, spoken by characters having a burning desire to recount and to reveal themselves but failing to do so. Rachel’s inexpressiveness, or what is judged to be such by the others, is a deep well of feelings that have not burgeoned but are ready to overflow. The sleepy rhythm of the narration – to which a caption is applied in the text itself, referring to a dialogue: ‘The story seemed to have no climax’ – is shaken up by the arrival on board of the Dalloway couple, who get on in Lisbon. Mrs Dalloway faffs and frolics, animated by a vital élan that is even more vibrating and external than in the novel that will be named after her. Some attention is paid to Rachel by this amiable woman, who is as jaunty and as sparkling as a gust of wind. In Rachel there burns an ‘enormous question’ to ask Mrs Dalloway, but she has to repress it. Dalloway too, a bold petty politician, a blind follower of conservative reformism, and a firm believer in the white man’s burden, is an agent of formation and awakening for Rachel. With the help of a sudden roll of the boat, once unwittingly he embraces her and kisses her. But after a part of the crossing the Dalloway couple leave the ship. Later Dalloway will reveal himself to Rachel, in a contrary epiphany, as a pretentious type, a void braggart, a spineless gabber. 56

The symbolic weaving is intended to allude to the historical clash between uprooted art and materialism, in the relations between the daughter and the father, a practical and over-concrete ship-owner, who owns the ship of the cruise. As in Victorian novels he is largely responsible for the educational errors committed against his daughter.

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3. After the first third on the ship ends, the other two of the novel are imagined to take place in a hypothetical South American English colony, Santa Marina. Rachel is a guest at a villa rented by the Ambroses, not far from a hotel where a variegated colony of fellow-countrymen spend the winter in the mild climate. Between the two groups a transfusion soon takes place, but only a superficial one, which gives rise to episodes of satire and postVictorian social comedy. Woolf needs, and will always need, a closed place in which to bring more characters into contact and to make them interact. First there was a ship, now a hotel. Here there is a more palpable echo of the novels of Trollope and more recently of Forster. Trollope not only often set his novels on ships, and even more often dealt with the amorous approaches between women that dillydallied and fops in the professions, people from rich or middle-class families, or graduates. Forster had just built up his fame on the cultured university youth with an immature heart. Nothing is more Forsterian than the two young and pretentious academicians and poseurs, with unmistakable homophile leanings, Hewet and Hirst.57 At the hotel, types appear that have already been seen in Victorian picnic scenes – which bring protagonists and secondary characters into a narrower sphere, and arouse some flirtation between people of the same age and also between elderly ones – and dance occasions. Even ampler is the selection of characters that talk and talk but in the end either talk to themselves or do not communicate anything. In all this piétiner sur place at the hotel one distinguishes yet another influence at work, that of Chekhov, for the inane prattle, the freewheeling chatter that does not interest anybody, and shreds of useless conversation. Dissatisfaction and immaturity induce Hirst to insult Rachel though he secretly loves her, and to relieve his feelings and open up with the mature Helen, with a gallantry that is not entirely devoid of sensual frissons. In the midst of

57 The two academics have at most vague ideas on their future, and being conceited are only able to speak of books, and believe that books are the panacea for every existential crisis. Consequently the counterpoint of the novel are the passages from various writers that are read and commented on in their leisure time, as are the titles of the books that the various characters lend one another. On Hewet and Hirst’s similarities with Forster’s academics cf. Blackstone 1949, 25.

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this entourage an angel in the house, who is looking after a sick relative, crowns her Victorian dream of a pure marriage full of devotion, but also a pedestrian and not at all romantic one – and the narrating voice lays on plenty of details – promising herself to a man who is just as mediocre, and in truth insignificant. In this phase the novel is choral, the point of view is mobile, and the objective is satirical: the marionettes at the hotel move without awareness in a world with collapsing values and gradually drifting. ‘The paper lay directly beneath the clock, the two together seeming to represent stability in a changing world’. The final third of the novel, which as mentioned is more prolix and dragging, becomes on one side melodramatic and on the other programmatic. Rachel must complete a voyage of her own, ‘ignorant of her own feelings’. The most debatable scene is the religious service at the hotel for all the holidaymakers, with the sermon by the vicar which unleashes abjuration of religion – unjustified, too abrupt – in Rachel, who was previously very devout. The vicar after all limits himself to a good, innocuous paraphrase of Kipling’s white man’s burden. The two events on which the novel dwells after this scene are a second excursion, to the heart of Amazonia, in a boat or on a steam engine,58 and Rachel’s illness and death due to food poisoning.59 Why does Woolf have Rachel 58

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With some imitation of Conrad, as is observed by Batchelor 1991, 13, who also notes inaccuracies due to overlooking the inversion of the seasons in the southern hemisphere. Hanson 1994, 31, reads the exploration along the river as a ‘terrifying penetration into [Rachel’s] own body’. Among the two events, a substitute for the characters’ desire to undress is a strange series of requests by the tourists at the hotel, who each in turn ask Rachel if they can show her their room, which she agrees to, and having got her to go in they pour out all their intimacy. The mannish Evelyn, always a good sketch in the novel, tells Rachel about her two suitors she cannot choose between, and about the project for a ‘Saturday Club’ for rehabilitating prostitutes. Miss Allan is the first apparition of the Woolfian artist who finishes, that is to say finishes her literary compendium at the end of the plot of The Voyage Out. This writer is a further alter ego of Woolf, because she is a writer, or more exactly a historian of literature, who, writing a chronological manual, from ‘Beowulf to Browning’, shows she possesses a sense of becoming, a becoming that threatens to have reached its terminus, since there are no more literary epochs to be dealt with at the present moment. With this acute sense of history and becoming, Woolf throws out a long bridge to Between the Acts and particularly

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die, when she and Terence Hewet have just laboriously overcome their ideological hesitations and ontological perplexities on marriage? Both by now burn with the desire to achieve a future as a married couple, and they believe it will be rosy. Death prevents that dream of unity and harmony being shattered, and that impassioned and vibrating love cooling off in mere routine. Death is indeed salvation from conjugal life over which various shadows already loom up, and which would have been unhappy, miserable and full of misunderstandings, or to which that deeply unsatisfying status is announced that instead cheers the betrothed Susan and Arthur.60 It is therefore bitterly ironic that at the hotel the couple is complimented on being the one in which ‘one is made for the other’. § 161. Woolf V: ‘Night and Day’ Night and Day (1919) is not a step forward but a step back, although it can be considered an advanced and ambitious psychological novel, in the late nineteenth-century European tradition, which clearly shows Woolf had learnt the lessons of James, the French and the Russians. Not a ‘portrait of a lady’, but at any rate one of a woman, of a young English woman, is built up on Katharine Hilbery, the absolute opposite of Rachel Vinrace, and – alive, vigorous, self-aware, fully awake – the alternative or complementary face of the writer.61 Though with this difference, the theme is again the difficult adjustment of the young alter ego to life, and the final resignation to bourgeois love grounded in marriage, after brave experimentation with all possible but unachievable forms of a surrogate of it, like the pure platonic friendship. In itself it is the story of a lacerated, unavowed passion, also to the pageant that is performed in it (§ 168). The scene in which Rachel goes up to Miss Allan’s room, among the most evocative and enigmatic in the novel, and among the most Forsterian, preannounces the tragic ending when Miss Allan shows Rachel a talisman against misfortunes, in the form of a little bottle of ‘Crème de Menthe’, which Rachel refuses to taste. 60 This is also the opinion of Zwerdling 1986, 177. 61 She too is also ideally the daughter of a library, but she boasts she has not read Shakespeare, and to reject the humanities cultivates a strange abstract passion for mathematics and astronomy. Her father, Mr Hilbery, is the usual Woolfian ‘grammarian’ living out of the world. Katharine is therefore not an orphan.

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fought against class pressures and conventions, crowned by a happy ending, the daily bread of the nineteenth-century masterpieces. Katharine belongs to the wealthy upper middle class; Ralph Denham, who is not handsome and comes from a needy family, is a proud unexpressed poet who publishes law articles in magazines, and meanwhile is burdened with an arid and depressing secretarial job in a law firm. Katharine is also, for him, a dream of getting into the gentility. The two love each other surlily, without admitting it to anyone, above all to themselves, and with that veiled form of love that is rejection. Katharine at first accepts the proposal of marriage of an empty and pretentious humanist who is inadequate to her, and Ralph loves Mary, a feminist with a golden heart,62 but with vicarious love, not as strong, passionate and total as his love for Katharine. The discovery of their real affections leads to the break-up of the two engagements, without necessarily immediately bringing together the two half-hearted lovers.63 The narrative method of this novel is precisely an asphyxial psychological analysis, out of focus in a Jamesian manner, which fixates on subtle details, even hazy ones, of the psyche. This concentric psychologism, to a great extent an end in itself – these contortions suited to a Russian novel, these shadow zones, these eternal tergiversations – make the two protagonists abstract, over-constructed, far from alive on the page; as a result the plot is exceptionally slowed down. However, both thinkers, and reflexive, conscious investigators of their interior life, they allow themselves to be overpowered by passion. They dissertate and argue subtly on the nature of feelings, at times contradicting themselves; and there is continual incapacity to define to themselves what they feel stably, a continual conflict between control and passion, reason and impulse. Fighting not for, but against love, they love each other madly in ‘lapses’, instants of vision and excitement that then

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Mary introduces in the novel history and topicality, from whose sphere the two protagonists are distant, in the form of historical female demands for the vote. Trodden on insensitively, exploited, sacrificial, she is always ready to listen to the confessions of the two lovers, above all those of Ralph, whom she loves unrequited. 63 Cassandra, another larval and slightly artificial character, is the cousin whom Katharine brings close to her betrothed William Rodney, who in the end falls cerebrally in love with her.

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fade away and lead to indifference or rejection. The partial rehabilitation of the novel comes actually from the peripheral alternatives to this major plot. Katharine is the granddaughter of an imaginary great poet whose biography she and her mother are writing; and there are numerous amusing and satirically successful scenes in which this work in progress, which will never be finished – an exception to the rule – grows with added sentences and disconnected anecdotes. Katharine’s forgetful and eccentric mother is a delightful marionette reminiscent of the old maids in Mrs Gaskell’s Cranford.64 She is also the only authentically Woolfian character because – a distant harbinger of Mrs Swithin in Between the Acts – she lives in the past, and therefore she feels she has to be a chronicler, while she only succeeds in capturing inspiration, always fleeting, for a few dazzling instants. What she puts on paper is then not an orderly biography but instead a series of flashes. The whole environment of the Hilbery household is peopled with the most proverbial eccentrics of Victorian novels. Equally successful is the ‘suffrage office’ where pleasant, harmless and dreaming caricatures – but in themselves once more caricatures of a Victorian or Dickensian type – try to uphold the campaign for the vote to be given to women, printing manifestos, letters and fliers. Around Denham there arises a London Grub Street postdated to the early twentieth century of aspiring writers who are in the red, if not on the pavement, collaborating with magazines of varying type, stature and scientific competence, or poets in pectore who live in the notorious garret. For this very reason the tutelary deity that one perceives behind it is Gissing.65 The only and true excursion into the realistic and even into the naturalistic is the Denham family, with interiors that are miserable, damp, overcrowded, with humanity able nonetheless to show a sense of humour, who live happily in indigence and console themselves. It is perhaps the only case in the whole of Woolf ’s fiction in which humble people receive such prolonged attention.

64 Her reading of Cranford is confirmed by her diary for 6 August 1901. 65 It is not without a reason that Woolf mischievously gives the surname Milvain – one of the protagonists of Gissing’s New Grub Street – to Katharine’s aunt.

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§ 162. Woolf VI: ‘Jacob’s Room’. The novel as a splintered biography Katharine Hilbery is often forgetful, or ‘absent-minded’. In one case she forgets some fish that she has to bring home for lunch; another time she forgets her purse, and another to deliver a letter. That is to say, in Night and Day Woolf has developed or sighted a binary concept of the daily life of the individual. The public sphere is a chain of visible actions, or of thoughts connected to action and of words linked to it; but there is a secret track in that psyche that is not applied to public and social behaviour. Thus a person does one thing but thinks about another; indeed, this disconnected, contrapuntal psychic life gets the upper hand over that of action. Woolf owes the concept of the psychopathology of daily life to Freud. Parallel to a production that after the first two novels becomes briefer and more concentrated, so much so as to allow one to speak of an aesthetic revolution, as further proof there are some sketches, a format the writer returns to throughout her career, and which therefore shows a parallel development, backing up and commenting on her achievements in the field in which she is best known, that of the novel. Four early stories, in addition to lightning brevity, exhibit some thematic paradigms: the life in society of two marriageable girls, with their haughtiness, hypocrisies and affectations. Then there is an antiquarian interest worked in the form of the pastiche. One story in deliberate falsetto constructs the imaginary diary of a sixteenth-century landowner. The most artificial is the fourth, the imaginary diary of a nineteenth-century woman novelist, one of those that confirm the exclusion of women, and who is an amalgam of symbolic and paradigmatic data referring to the female Victorian writer, like the secluded old maid’s life, provincial neurosis, philanthropy, tics, and at the same time of preannouncements, of the recovery of and curiosity about the past, and of an oppressive and sorrowful sense of time. Of various kinds are the later sketches, spread out between 1917 and 1921, which never exceed about ten pages. They are very airy rhapsodies, disconnected, sophisticated, recherché in form and content, and digressions that verge on the artificial, at times decidedly poetic passages and little poems in prose. They can hardly be defined stories in the traditional sense, with a linear plot and linearly exposed; rather they are reminiscent of the Joycean aesthetic category of the epiphany. In ‘Kew Gardens’ a snail or an earthworm crosses a flowerbed, but

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on this flowerbed or nearby there pass a series of other characters, a couple with a child, two men and two women of various social classes. However, this series of snaps, which preannounce the later French école du regard or the phenomenological cinema of our time, has been taken reversing the emphasis or the natural hierarchy, and the snail is the human being and the human being comes after the snail; then everything dissolves into patches of colour. In the essay on the painter Walter Sickert, Woolf formulates the theory of the ‘silent land’, of a weakened or evanescent border between the arts and of the liberation of the artist, who becomes a musician and a painter, and proclaims victory in the battle against the impurity of verbal language. The paradigm of the essay is the one indicated by Roger Fry, from impressionism to the formal and structural postimpressionism of Cézanne and the abstract. But, unlike painting which was developing into abstract art, the verbal cannot live without representation; it remains anchored to reality even if it tries to transcend it. Among the later sketches an exception is the folktale-like story of the poor old woman who – with an evident variation on George Eliot’s Silas Marner – is left a rich inheritance that she believes to be a scam, where with the help of a parrot she discovers a treasure, in the form of a fine cache of sovereigns. Even when narrativity resurfaces intact, it gives us a text resolved in an asphyxial and telegraphic parataxis, which therefore fragments the diegetic progress into many small inputs of attention, and constructs consciousness like a mosaic, or an electroencephalogram of peaks of perceptive intensity. 2. In Jacob’s Room66 (1922) Virginia Woolf starts to draw on her inexhaustible storehouse of childhood memories, of seaside holidays, of the time of infancy over which the axe of school looms, and of the end of the

66 Jacob was inspired by Woolf ’s brother Thoby, who however had died before Jacob Flanders, and of typhus, caught in Greece, and not in the Great War. Zwerdling 1986, 64, brilliantly argues that the surname Flanders, which cannot have any connection with that of Defoe’s heroine, was chosen as ‘synonymous with death’ and in memory of the thousands of young Englishmen that died at the Flanders front; but he says nothing about the possible implications of the Christian name.

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blessed Eldorado. Without emphasis, with diaphanous, bare anti-rhetoric,67 and with big temporal hiatuses among its salient phases, she traces the biography68 of a young Englishman who is dreamy, lethargic, distracted and neurasthenic, taking him after various sentimental vicissitudes to a timid awakening of public involvement and to the eve of a life of action, or of some action. But the rapid, brutal ending of the novel allows us to intuit his death in the war. His paradigm is the tragic one shared by many young British intellectuals educated at universities, whose pre-war mood was boredom, habitualness and emptiness. The narration impassively records, in its pure phenomenal skeleton, a freewheeling life, reduced to small aimless daily gestures passively performed: also a collective moment of national inertia, of the well-off middle class, a model with an absent framework, in which individuals intersect but do not meet, find each other but leave each other, and without any real interpenetration go their own way like unwitting and dreamy automatons, beings on which life does not hew out any trace and does not arouse any strong passion. At the start Mrs Flanders, a Scarborough widow, is courted by a comical and stiff captain, and in a September sunset an elderly painter on the beach paints the scene that he sees and that, like Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse, he seeks in vain to immobilize. The daring child Jacob climbs on a rock and comes to a puddle where a crab splashes about; in a typical childish deformation of perspectives, he glimpses a couple of ‘enormous’ lovers lying in the sun, and then is shocked by a sheep’s skull that he would like to take home with him. These are all data taken up again later for James Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. In fourteen chapters – but the term is improper: we should perhaps say files – Woolf, with a style which is just as fragmentary, impressionistic and indirect, delineates Jacob’s brief career, from his time at Cambridge to an apathetic life in London, to his loves and friendships and society life, his cultural interests and ideals, and the grand tour in Italy and Greece. The last page lists – in the place of his funeral, and with a displacement and narrative omission that became 67 In Woolf ’s declarations of intents the main innovations are the abolition of ‘scaffoldings’ and the suggestion of simultaneity. 68 Hafley 1954, 48, connects the novel to the fashion in the early 1920s of the ‘life-novel’, the novel-biography.

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epochal – the inventory made by his relatives and friends of his personal effects in his London lodgings.69 Previously his evanescent individuality had been connected with the objects familiar to him: the pipe, the books, furniture. There are actually almost more times when Jacob is temporarily abandoned to follow other people’s cases. The university chapter is subnarrated, hurried through in a synecdochic way, with sparse and remote allusions to some expected experiences, and with the sketches of three eccentric teachers. In London Jacob becomes a freelance essayist, cultivates music and love for the Greek classics, courts without much conviction the psychopathic Clara Durrant and has an erotic relationship with Florinda, a naïve prostitute without a surname, which ends because she is unfaithful to him, and even more passively with a painter’s model. Italy and Greece are tableaux without stereotypes, filtered as they are in the form of impressions engraved on the psyche. The last flirtation of the lethargic young man, now twenty-six, is in Greece with the beautiful, vaporous, vain, superficial Sandra Williams; then come war and death. This thin and slipshod plot is recounted in a brief novel, the most experimental with The Waves and Virginia Woolf ’s boldest in its destructive, iconoclastic and revolutionary rigour, and for this very reason the least mature among those of her major phase. The traditional reference point of a protagonist, indicated by the title, on closer inspection collapses. Linear diegesis is lost, the tacit contract of the narrator with the reader is repudiated because the former no longer takes the trouble to inform him, in a novel that contradicts its name, mostly having become a notebook of impressions and private reflections interwoven with a patchy narrative plot that fails to hold together, so much so that it seems to have been deliberately improvised. A corpus of laws, archived, is replaced with a new one. Woolf from now on will be fond of the mannerism of the incipit with an abrupt sentence, in medias res, taken from a continuum; of the refrain and the recurrent motif, or the formula of chapter and paragraph endings giving information in the manner

69 On the isotopy of the shoes cf. the ingenious Leaska 1977, 83–4; but the critic constructs it without deriving much meaning from it, perhaps because it is not so influential after all.

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of a bulletin of dry events, perfectly datable; or of the series of sentences, phenomenal observations and mixed fragments of dialogue. 3. Jacob is a vanishing point, more often than not a nominal protagonist. The novel, which hinges on a protagonist and is at the same time choral, therefore diverges from him, and pushes him to the margins to consist in and exist through a series of cameos devoted to accidental and peripheral figures. Such is the page of the reading room at the British Museum, with the variety of readers working and studying there, or that on the whimsical Miss Marchmont; Mrs Pascoe, an old lady from Cornwall, simply observes the arrival of Jacob with his friend on a yacht on the sea in front of her. These and other caricatures are introduced ex abrupto, leaving the reader to guess at and reconstruct from heterogeneous, psychic and behavioural signs their whole physiognomy. In such a brief novel one is struck by the large number of characters70 – protagonists, co-protagonists, secondary figures, minor ones. Some of them appear in the space of a single line, while broader tableaux are devoted to others; many remain mere names, are presented in impressionistic flashes and then disappear forever, swallowed up in oblivion. The information that was all previously given in the introductory parts of a novel, such as the physical features, the somatic data, the mental picture, is now decomposed and furnished in small doses, even parenthetically, and from this scattering of details the reader has to reconstruct the whole mosaic. The dialogue too is deliberately snagged, not consequential, played out in different and divergent keys, often interrupted, and caught without a filter, live. The trail of incidental characters sets up an evocative but indistinguishable counterpoint. They are figures that contain crowded in themselves their past, but of which we only know a few phenomenal manifestations. A similar procedure, of deviation and sidestepping in order to introduce and follow characters that have no influence afterwards – this stereoscopic gaze, able to shift to the simultaneous perspectives of so many characters – shows that Woolf believes in the reverse of the ‘web’ of a George Eliot, in which everything holds together and is connected with everything. For the moment, formally, there is no internal monologue,

70 Lee 1977, 87, counts more than 160 of them.

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but demiurgic, empathic omniscience; more exactly an erlebte Rede that would be of a classic type if it were not so disconnected and broken. The author is not eclipsed, and has not yet disappeared behind the scenes as an anonymous and half-mute transcriber of the characters’ thoughts. Woolf not only expressly cuts out some asides, some suspensions in which the text becomes a diary of metaphysical or psychological maxims; she not only makes up poetic rhapsodies of marine glimpses, or paints patches of colour and gouaches; she not only allows herself comments and explanations, but also arrogates to herself knowledge, even though ontologically defective, of the creatures that her imagination has created. Her psyche qua narrator is the same as that of the characters whose stories she tells, both because she does not contemplate temporal linearity and because she works on impressions, associations and memories that are deposited in it. The continuum of life is made up of peaks of intensity that are separated from the more anonymous flow, rippling it, and only on these is it worth dwelling. Scarborough dock, like the Acropolis, is a synchrony of stratifications, but anyone looking from the Roman fort goes back in time to the first invasions of the island. Time proceeds in violent jumps, spoken and given by the way or indirectly. The psyche is submitted to solicitations which it does not order and govern, and while it is engaged in following and accompanying an action it is captured by something else. Attacks of neurasthenia or Dickensian behavioural oddities reveal disorders deep down. Sometimes the text is suspended with dots, or is shortened and contracts into simple isolated lines that refer to moments and phases which are not consequent or subsequent to the narration; and flashbacks alternate without warning with flashforwards. The empathy of the character is limited by the law that ‘nobody sees anyone as he is’, an axiom that sounds like the inversion of the stark realism prescribed by a very similar aphorism of Matthew Arnold’s. Hence a vision that is relative and imperfect: ‘It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done’. § 163. Woolf VII: ‘Mrs Dalloway’. Life, death and resurrection The debuting Woolf had therefore until then reflected herself in two female projections, her doubles; with her third novel she camouflages and objectifies herself. The third alter ego, Jacob, if he is such, is a male, and we discover that it is her brother. Afterwards, she chooses as protagonists adult figures, vaguely reminiscent of her mother. From now on there will not be

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a real unmistakable double of hers, only vague analogues, possibly like the two female figures in The Waves. This is perhaps because she recognized herself to be faceted, polyhedral, a blend of several human types. It is also true that from Jacob’s Room on no other novel of Woolf ’s will obey the traditional constructive and constitutive laws of the traditional novel, or if it does it will be in a spirit of parody or of reform and of metanarrative rediscussion. Persevering in this absolute refusal Woolf will strive, with imperceptible formal and technical variations, not to rewrite the same work anymore. The later writings will be either camouflages or outright cancellations of omniscience; or choral arrangements, polyphonic or with a single protagonist; analytical or synthetic, and both analytical and synthetic in the treatment of time. Time will be measurable public time and interior timeless time, that is to say time remembered and re-emerging through associations in the psyche; and long time, but decomposed and broken up into ‘moments of being’, and instant time. This leads to the apparent distinction between novel-biographies, or also sagas which encompass whole lives and even whole centuries, and novels whose time span is compressed into a single day. Mrs Dalloway71 (1925), its action all contained in a single day72 in June 1923, though in London, and being entirely modelled and alternating on the thoughts of some characters with intersecting destinies, cannot hide its debt to Ulysses. The narrator’s task is again the empathic one73 of coordinating the stories and movements of a group of characters, above all of entering, with astute and brilliant forms of transition, into the mind of each in turn, showing that each of these psyches is mobile, that the pressure of memory overwhelms daytime vigilance, and showing at the same time the call to active life that has to be carried out. Naturally Woolf ’s stream of consciousness continues to be regulated by the pact of ‘she’ or ‘he

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The laborious gestation of this novel is confirmed by the numerous preparatory sketches and by the scenes not inserted in it in the end, which can be found in Dick 1985. The closest version to the final one is ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’ (where the protagonist goes out early in the morning to buy some gloves, and not flowers). In the first version, Septimus did not appear, and Clarissa – a name chosen, as has been noticed, as a Richardsonian reminiscence and also for the sexual, virginal and sororal frigidity of the character – committed suicide at the end of the party. 72 More exactly from morning to late at night. 73 For Miller 1982, 191, even ‘telepathic’.

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thought’. In it there acts this little diaphragm or hiatus, and they are mimetic thoughts, at times not very grammatical though without the upheaval we find in Joyce, while the narrator, now omniscient in a subdued way74 and now a homodiegetic and anonymous spectator, ensures sparse sutures in the form of captions. Flashes of unparalleled evocative freshness and of sharp satire75 follow one another and alternate with other episodes that are a little feebler. In the long run one perceives in this tour de force, without an internal division into chapters, and therefore a true uninterrupted flow, that Woolf has to fill out too slender a canvas and enlarge it to other psychic entities because a single one is not enough, though certainly she also does this to discuss and prove their apparent or hidden relationship. Some of these side entries are less incisive, or decidedly more far-fetched than others: that of Doris Kilman is a colourless and excessively demonstrative insertion,76 and the regrets of Clarissa and Peter are gone over too many times. Of these deviations, which for a while make one character that is secondary central, one fails to see as inevitable even that of Septimus Warren Smith with his Rezia, an Italian milliner met at the front, even though Septimus does have fundamental symbolic importance. 2. The occasion and the connective tissue in the novel is Mrs Dalloway’s party, starting from when she goes out early in the morning to buy flowers personally, while she has left orders at home, the home of a politician, on the details of the preparations. Of the set of characters only one or perhaps two are totally extraneous and separate, and do not know of her existence: only Septimus, the repressed soldier with hallucinations, traumatized at the Italian front by the explosion of a bomb, does not participate in the party, formally because he is not invited – and yet, as I will discuss, he is spiritually 74 Which is also the opinion of Miller 1982, 191, who puts it forward in the first part of his essay on the novel. 75 Of the two objectives of the novel, according to the author, one was criticism of the ‘social system’. But on the public values of Mrs Dalloway as hostess, Virginia Woolf is ambiguous, and hence the social satire is not only negative. 76 Doris Kilman may be a double of Septimus, in the visionary obsession, in the destructive fury, in the sense of guilt that she feels, in her psychic complex. The couple formed by Elizabeth, Mrs Dalloway’s daughter, and Doris Kilman is in actual fact a homologue, also in the walks round London, of that formed by Rezia and Septimus.

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present. In Clarissa Dalloway above all, but not only, the themes of the novel are regret, nostalgia, looming tragedy, the sense of an end disguised by a joie de vivre that is false, deceptive and evanescent.77 A little older than Virginia in the year when the novel was written, Mrs Dalloway, who knows she is a snob, allows the narrator to play with identification and objectification. The most Woolfian agon is related to time. The succession of the hours is marked out for everyone by the chimes of Big Ben sending out vibrations of sound; and it is tyrannical time, regular, measurable, competing with another time undermining it, the eternal present of memory – one seems to be quoting Wuthering Heights – which does not have a true before and a then, but exact and ideal simultaneity. Clarissa’s coexistent past is at Bourton, her juvenile Eden, the elsewhere; it is her being courted at that time by her suitors, it is the sweet and also humorous scenes, it is the gaffe about the suitor Dalloway or the female loves with uninhibited Sally. This is a memorial wave that appears on the surface in flashes that must be and cannot be reordered, a mnemonic dust in which present sorrows – indifference to the practicality of her husband, or the difficult relationship with her daughter – are inserted, and with which they interfere. The meeting with her old suitor Peter, a spring from which distant memoirs gush out, is also a subtle form of mutual rejection and ill-concealed hypocrisy. The two past lovers say one thing to each other but think another; as often happens, they were more suited to one another than the partners they then chose.78 Around Clarissa the same

77 The role was modelled on Kitty Maxse, a socialite who died in 1922 falling down a staircase. 78 Peter Walsh, a gentlemanly womanizer who is something of a voyeur and gourmet, is the most Joycean, and therefore the most similar to Bloom among the characters of this novel and in Woolf ’s novels in general. He too represents the ineluctable human contradictions, because he loves and criticizes Clarissa, rejects her and is attracted by her, and always and still desires that woman whom he has not had. Woolf weaves a canvas of the imperceptible, not even entirely conscious forms and psychic phenomenologies of desire: Walsh and Dalloway, Clarissa’s old lovers, now after such a long time facing her again, compete in exquisite gallantries, and still suffer from mutual jealousy, one that one might call posthumous. There have been endless discussions on the meaning of the pocketknife which Peter Walsh plays with all the time, and which he continually opens and closes. That it is a phallic symbol, a

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effervescence reigns, the same expectation; all are outwardly sparkling and always fresh, but in isolation they feel, though disguising it, discouragement, and reveal to themselves the fragile and foolish life they live. Public actions are also highly artificial and disproportionate, inane like the crusades for emancipation of women, Irish independence, and the policy of emigration of the surplus population.79 The weight of regrets even produces in balanced temperaments some neurasthenia: they are always on the verge of resentment, of the little gesture compensating wounded pride. But there is also something more serious, and this occurs when an experience has been too tragic to be overcome, and has left an unhealed trauma. Septimus, an alternative study for and a double of Jacob Flanders, is the representative of immature English youth nurtured on escapist and vaguely humanitarian poetry who has been sent off to the front and has returned marked, unhinged, incapable of recovering. This sense of death in progressive expansion –Septimus at the end of the day commits suicide by jumping out of a window –80 hovers over the festive occasion, and the story, all revolving around the party, discloses that the second model, or perhaps even the first, underlying or coexistent in the novel is actually Joyce’s ‘The Dead’.81 The word ‘dead’ appears on practically every page and the range of the synonyms substantiates this parallel. As in Joyce there are dying or symbol of dissatisfied love, or at any rate of aggressiveness and of frustration, like all blunt objects in Woolf, is the opinion expressed by Batchelor 1991, 87, who adds the connotation of a ‘failed growth’. For Leaska 1977, 103–4, the knife is also a symbol of castration. Zwerdling 1986, 135, connects it to the ‘compromised rebellion’ of the character, politically a conservative. 79 The contemporary scenario is that of Britain discussing withdrawal from India, and Peter Walsh is in London after thirty years of civil service, having come just that day to carry out the formalities to marry a young Indian woman. 80 The physicians who try to heal him are in favour of him going into a clinic, as Doctor Savage was for Virginia Woolf in 1904 (letter of 30 October). The name Septimus, though not rare in English, was chosen for precise Dantesque echoes: Septimus reads Inferno, and in Dante’s seventh circle there are people who have committed suicide; and the name ‘Warren’ contains ‘war’. 81 The ample discussion of Joycean echoes in Guiguet 1965, 241–5 does not consider precisely ‘The Dead’, the similarities to which are instead cursorily noticed by PSL, 697–8 n. 1.

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half-dead people on the stage, like Aunt Parry, who is fond of remembering like the Morkan sisters; there is above all the theme of erotic frustration with Dalloway corresponding to Gabriel Conroy, and Peter Walsh who is like Furey for Gretta Conroy. Towards the end, the tables are set out with food in a description that literally seems to cite the scene of the refreshment in Joyce’s story.82 Clarissa is a wandering ghost that does not know she is close to death: she has recently been ill, her hair has turned white, and she has a bad heart. Nothing survives, there is no future, death ‘ends absolutely’; but she lives inebriated with present time, a vibrating part of a whole which is a kind of Spinozian Deus sive natura. Septimus hopes for death and kills himself, in a quivering wait for a renewing apocalypse, a new dispensation of universal love, and communion of humanity; but, an unheeded prophet, he despairs of this being possible and is the first to succumb. Hence the hours that strike, and are declared, beat with a kind of inexorable Marlovian rhythm, and are steps towards an hour x that is death and dissolution. 3. In Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf wove what apparently was missing from Jacob’s Room, a fabric reminiscent of George Eliot in which everything holds together, in virtue of relationships that link the various characters to one another, just as they link actual and virtual reality. The former irrupts in the form of a car with a mysterious character in it, perhaps a minister or even the queen; an aeroplane furrows the sky and for an instant forces all London to look up. London is certainly a labyrinth, but a rather small labyrinth after all, in which sooner or later everyone meets. But this mechanism of reunion and dispersion is above all one of dispersion: only external events, like a mysterious limousine or an aeroplane in the sky leaving traces of white vapour that enigmatically write a text,83 can gather and assemble the characters and make them intent on a common action. Meeting does not mean knowing, nobody surrenders their intimacy, being jealous, and Clarissa’s 82 83

From Lily to Lucy – the two maids – and from ‘was literally run off her feet’ to ‘came running full tilt downstairs’. This too is an apocalyptic parody, since the message that the aeroplane forms with its white smoke trails is not very clear and is variously deciphered, and banalized by many as a sweets advertisement.

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party is the last plenary reunion but it is also the triumph of ceremony and gossip, and strengthens and highlights the monadic dimension of each of the guests. It is again complete unrelatedness, and alienation, that prevail, not Eliot’s web. Septimus commits suicide when it seems that in him life is about to get the upper hand over death, and the transition to Peter Walsh – who, unaware of the misfortune, sees and hears the ambulance passing as it takes the dying man to hospital, and with bitter irony judges it a sign of civilization – is very effective. The party closing the novel is an event that will often be reused by Woolf to bring her characters together onstage. It is orchestrated at first on the reflexes that it arouses in the servants, in the old lady of the wardrobe, in the announcing butler, in the cook who undercooks the salmon. The reverberation of Septimus’ death offstage is well wedged in, because the great doctor that treated him comes to the party. At the end, under the action of the funereal news, Clarissa pronounces the basic formula of the novel: the pursuit of happiness is crowned in death. Suicide is the only form that allows one to embrace the fleeting and mysterious centre of life, a deceptive and fragmentary mirror of reality. She feels therefore an extraordinary affinity and harmony with the dead man; in other words, spiritually she is all one with him. If in the novel there is a Joycean rapprochement it is therefore between Mrs Dalloway and Septimus, who repeat Bloom and Stephen. This tragic, metaphysical rendezvous is death, and it happens in the evening. However, from now on Woolf will accustom us to unexpected changes in extremis that outline a compensation of the tragic, and a glimmer of optimism. ‘There she was’, the last sentence of the novel, means a resurrection, and it means that a new Clarissa has been born, regenerated, in peace and harmony with herself, able to take back the difficult pathway.84 § 164. Woolf VIII: ‘To the Lighthouse’. The metaphysical parable of a landing: failed, delayed, successful, with human losses The first of the three parts of To the Lighthouse85 (1927), the most complex and most densely woven novel by Virginia Woolf, and the one 84 So it is also for Leaska 1977, 117. 85 A psychoanalytical self-reading is contained in the autobiographical ‘Sketch’ in Moments of Being, in which Woolf confesses a need to express her thirty-year-long

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most carefully organized down to the slightest details, is a study of the masculine and the feminine. It stages the relationship, often precarious, problematic, with sharp corners of deaf incomprehension, of a couple, a man with elevated egotistical intellectuality, and a woman with pure, even sublime altruistic sensibility, with their numerous children suffering the repercussions. This relationship is then examined, in the two following parts, in the context of two holidays separated by an interval of ten years, concentrated and emblematized in single days or parts of days. The first and the third parts are separated by an evocative rhapsodic interlude. I am not the first to notice the musical analogy with a symphony in three movements, with leitmotifs.86 Modelled, though perhaps not exactly, on Virginia Woolf ’s parents, the Ramsays,87 late in summer, have invited various acquaintances88 to their house on the coast of one of the Hebrides.89 Amid the eight children, immature and eclectic like the Stephens and the Duckworths, there stand out an oldish poet, always asleep in a deckchair, an acid young philosopher

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obsession with her mother, and to spit it out in order to achieve her own independent perspective and her own autonomy. As for her father, Leslie Stephen, according to Leonard Woolf he ‘exasperated’ his daughters, above all Vanessa, and they were unfair towards him ‘owing to a complicated variety of the Oedipus complex’ (quoted in Beja 1970, 65). The a priori tyranny of feminist-Freudian theories (cf. for example Hanson 1994, 73) leans, however, towards some forced interpretations, of the type that Woolf perpetrates the killing of her mother, and then has to compensate for it, and therefore is forced to make her father positive, even to rehabilitate him. The novel is written, if anything, from the perspective of the son James. My reading seeks to disregard an exclusively autobiographical approach. And, as I am about to say, of a dialogue between themes that in a Beethovenian manner are ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. The very evident detail that in the novel neither Mrs nor Mr Ramsay has a Christian name was first noticed on the spot by Mayoux (CRHE, 214–21). However, no one has clearly explained the reason why the Christian names are not given. The remaking of the set of characters of The Voyage Out, reunited in the context of a home during a holiday, was acutely sighted by the reviewer O. Williams (CRHE, 201–5). None of the Hebrides coincides with the descriptive details, as is noticed by Daiches 1963, who in an amusing footnote (83–4 n. 1) reports his vain, tireless coastal explorations aiming to identify the exact place of the novel. However, the novel itself tells us explicitly that the island is Skye.

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waiting to be called by a university (who believes that women are unable to think), and a not-so-young botanist who platonically courts a painter, Lily Briscoe. Flying around like a bee from one to the other of these members of the company, Woolf follows the visible skirmishes and the less visible gap between what is said and what is thought,90 and that is to say the magma of pleasant memories and also wounds and very painful regrets and sorrows that regurgitate in each of them. Synthetic and fantastic female intuition clashes right from the first line with masculine intellect, which is analytical and is concerned with rigorous, agnostic factual causalism.91 It is a diatribe, a specifically gnosiological aporia camouflaged in a practical and pedestrian issue: scrutinizing the afternoon sky and getting the weather forecast from it to decide whether or not to make a trip to the lighthouse the following day; the clouds may be passing ones or bring stormy weather, and the west wind may weaken and calm down or blow harder. The woman’s female possibilism clashes with the pessimism of the man, aware that courage, steadfastness and lucidity are required in another crossing, that towards the fabled land where hopes are smashed, that is to say death and nothingness. Mr Ramsay is a leader, or would like to be one, of a heroic metaphysical expedition – a Childe Roland ready to die standing in inhospitable zones, after a surreal trip towards nothingness. At this first stage Mrs Ramsay is

90 When the novel appeared Arnold Bennett (CRHE, 201) rekindled his muffled polemic, noticing that the distance between subjects and verbs ‘continually increases’. 91 In the opposition between imagination and fact an allusion can be perceived to Dickens’s Hard Times and to Gradgrind (‘Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life’), to which there are opposed the female appeals of his wife, his daughter and Sissy, the daughter of a circus performer. In this connection it is not by chance that in both cases the imagination is symbolized by the world of the circus. In the second scene of the novel Mrs Ramsay in fact moves from the seaside house to the city, and during the journey she sees a poster for a circus to which she thinks of attracting the ‘factual’ Tansley, who is accompanying her. It also seems highly likely that this conflict between female and male alludes to the doctrines of Moore, who in Principia Ethica establishes a dichotomy between knowledge by intuition and by definition, between simple and complex, between the indefinable and the definable.

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constructive, Mr Ramsay destructive.92 She is credulous femininity, a lay believer in a teleology of the cosmos; against this, just after the male forecast of a storm, another atheist enters this scene of theatre and interiors, the ‘atheist’ Tansley, a spiritual alumnus of Mr Ramsay, much as Lily Briscoe is destined to be one of Mrs Ramsay. 2. Mrs Ramsay’s lay religiousness emerges, is concretized and reveals itself in the disinterested gift ad extra: she sympathizes with the poor, the abandoned and waifs, with those who are deprived of comforts and perhaps are also sick, because this is one of the complementary objectives of the planned trip to the lighthouse. The symbolism of the lighthouse has been admired by everyone and its polysemy highly praised ever since the novel appeared. Succeeding in going to the lighthouse is a mise en abyme of achievement and therefore a proof, a confirmation, or more exactly a challenge to Mrs Ramsay’s purely intuitive and optative teleology. It is the fulfilment of a beautiful and radiant dream, the satisfaction hoped for and strongly believed in of the search for an order in life; it is a crowning. With a different meaning, the husband and wife are themselves a lighthouse. Mr Ramsay would like to be a lighthouse that shines its own light on others and reflects itself. For him every man is a lighthouse that shines or has attenuated its light, and life is a competition about who has the most brightly shining lighthouse.93 The isotopy of light is tinged with comic aspects, as when during dinner Ramsay ‘seemed to emit sparks but

92

Mr Ramsay savours the anecdote that he tells of Hume falling into a puddle because he is too fat; actually his inspiring philosopher is Berkeley, because his philosophy is summed up in the realism of the subject and the object, and ‘lies’ in that certain kitchen table, which is not there, and ceases to exist, if there is no one to perceive it (a fixation of the Bloomsbury group, being the diatribe that opens Forster’s The Longest Journey [§ 31.1]). It is singular that Bertrand Russell (HWP, 631) seems to echo, if not to quote word for word, this example from the novel, and precisely in his chapter on Berkeley, in order to define experiences ‘which no one experiences – for example, the furniture of my bedroom when I am asleep and it is pitch dark’, and that immediately afterwards he evokes precisely G. E. Moore as Berkeley’s successor. 93 A subsequent image confirms the metaphorical continuity with reference to the lighthouse: Ramsay is a stake driven into the bed of a channel, whose pleasing task is that of ‘marking the channel out there in the floods’.

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not words’ to a discourteous guest. But Mrs Ramsay too is a lighthouse, the beacon of the household, of the family and of life. She identifies with that concrete lighthouse, off the island, and feels as her own its third and longest impulse of light: ‘often she found herself sitting and looking […] until she became the thing she looked at – that light for example’. But the lighthouse is also an intermittence, of light and darkness, and therefore Mrs Ramsay herself is an alternation of peaks of hopeful activism, made strong by actual and final teleology, and of frightening descents into the darkness of chaos in which she recognizes the world, in a slope and drift of things; and it is then that she is accused of being a pessimist, a nihilist paradoxically, by her husband, a pure rationalist. From the acme of joy and ecstasy she sinks into the depressed perception of the senselessness and inanity of life, which has become her ‘antagonist’. In this sense she is a veritable lighthouse,94 and in this sense knitting a stocking for the lighthouse keeper’s son is at one and the same time the hope of a conclusion, her personal symbolic contribution to the continuation of life,95 and at the same time a yielding to nothingness, and the unaware action of a kind of Parca. This stalemate established, the first part insists more concretely on the defective integration of character and affection of the couple. The eight children suffer the tyranny and the insensibility of their don father, always

94 If Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse are the expressive peaks of psychic life and Woolfian vital, descensional-ascensional rhythm, the striking thing is the recurrence of the word ‘lark’ in the beginnings of both novels, with two different meanings and on two different linguistic planes, yet connotatively and ingeniously connected. ‘What a lark, what a plunge!’, right at the start of Mrs Dalloway, alludes, as has often been observed, to the vitalistic and affirmative leap up, and immediately afterwards to the dive down, deadly and suicidal, as if to give the tone, to set the musical and symphonic rhythm, the founding oppositional articulation of the novel. ‘But you’ll have to be up with the lark’, the first words of To the Lighthouse, contains the same word ‘lark’ and also ‘up’, the skylark being the romantic bird that flies higher and higher. In it one feels the energy, a transmission of strength and indomitable impulse, a certainty of a meaning in life that, in her mood swings, Mrs Ramsay, as I am saying, will not always manage to possess. 95 Mrs Ramsay, an inveterate matchmaker, indeed seeks to marry, in addition to Lily Briscoe, two young people among the guests; they will actually get married, but the marriage will flounder.

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threatening, gruff, engrossed in his readings; actually, with this masculine drive of dominion Ramsay disguises his mediocrity and a torturing, almost childish need to be understood. In fact he knows he is not a genius, and reveals it imperceptibly by asking others, friends and acquaintances and relatives, to reassure him, and above all by asking himself the insoluble question of whether history is made and changed by geniuses.96 Mrs Ramsay understands this spasmodic need and grants her protectiveness deferentially, respectfully, with Ruskinian submissiveness to her husband, like a feudal Madonna to her knight, and therefore with a sense of giving and an expectation of receiving, and of a synergy, though always a very momentary one. She is not a Victorian angel in the house – and she has given birth to eight children – because she is cleverly able to procrastinate, without entirely denying, the attentions that males ask her for. During dinner the symbolism of Mrs Ramsay as a beacon strengthens. She is an authentic lighthouse towards which everyone converges, a magnet and trait d’union at the same time. This dinner lasts longer on the page than the time necessary to experience it, because Woolf auscultates as if with a stethoscope the humoral curves, the sudden resentments, the anamnestic outcropping of the single people. The Woolfian individual always experiences instants of warm expansion followed by the return into himself or herself and by irritation; indeed, he or she possesses an explosive charge that it is difficult to check. Mrs Ramsay, it is now revealed, is an artist sui generis, an artist who in the meantime is gastronomic, because she is the inventor of a succulent bœuf en daube; on the table she sets out a still-life, and she has that intimate spiritual vision of near and distant things, although ironically she is short-sighted and has to wear glasses all the time. But the supper is also a Last Supper, a lay Eucharist – of gravy and meat, of liquids and solids – in which a female greets the apostles close to her unwitting, imminent departure from earth. Immediately afterwards the storm breaks out in a Gethsemane that turns from a garden in bloom to a dried-up one, and a form of crucifixion is followed, as we will see, by a kind of transfiguration of the resurrected Christ, who by now has radiated in absentia his message of 96 As I noticed in the introductory section, Mr Ramsay conceives the thermometer of genius like an alphabet, an archive of names and voices, a taxonomy. He fears above all he will not manage to cover all the letters of this imaginary alphabet.

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love. The nights in the sepulchre are swollen to ten years, and the recurrent and final refrain will become the consummatum est of Golgotha.97 3. The action of the novel, which is bipartite, has on principle to take place before and after the war, that is to say it has to foresee the outbreak of the war apocalypse. The symbolic rain that falls is also that of the bombs that decimates the Ramsay family. Thus the beginning and the end are respectively 1914 and 1924. 1914 is already the year of a threatened cosmos, still falsely oriented towards a purpose, an improvement, a conclusion. The Swiss governess is nostalgic for her mountains and her father is dying of cancer; a billsticker has had an arm truncated, the lighthouse keeper’s son has tuberculosis. To the fatalistic and looming sense of private and collective death there also contributes the gradual erosion of that ‘spit of land’, as does the counterpoint of the fragmentary quotations, often also out of place, from Carlyle, Shakespeare,98 Scott, in the speeches and the dialogues. In the interlude between the first and the third part we are informed en passant of the misfortunes that have occurred: a son has died in action, a daughter giving birth, and the mother suddenly. The seaside house has been kept ready during and after the war by a housekeeper, and it is from her point of view that, in a memorial upheaval, associatively and parenthetically, the reader learns about the intervening events. The war doubly makes the sea house a ‘bleak house’ or a ‘waste land’; it makes it above all, in the light of the Christological symbolism, a holy sepulchre deprived of its Guest. After the war the waste land is reclaimed, but only apparently, because its mainstay, Mrs Ramsay, is not there, and everything is disunited, more broken up than before. As in an oneiric drama the survivors are reunited, in the third part, in exactly the same places as before, to continue ideally after ten years that evening on which the rain poured down. Hence this third part, extremely elusive, comes into being with the aura and dominant tone of the elegy, of the emptiness and the affective desert provoked by the demise of Mrs Ramsay, and it is, as if in the form of a counter-demonstration, the measure

97 The sentences ‘It is finished’ and ‘it was finished’, referring to the trip to the lighthouse and Lily Briscoe’s picture, appear close to one another in the thirteenth and last chapter, as always brief, of the third part of the novel. 98 The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare, thinks pessimistic Mr Ramsay.

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of her spasmodic ability to keep bound and united that human context, now fractured, broken, fragmented. Above all Lily Briscoe harps on the metaphysical sense of uselessness, of cosmic emptiness, of loss of universal meaning now that that sort of mainstay or irradiating centre is no longer there. The ending is the achievement of the awareness, first of all, that that present has become a past, that is to say memory, and pleasant memory in itself; it is at once the awareness of the impermanence that condemns the instant to its end. The action, even too extended and slightly slowed and prolix, now alternates and counterpoints two achievements in progress. Lily Briscoe completes the picture left interrupted ten years before, and Professor Ramsay in effect now makes the boat trip to the lighthouse with his son James and daughter Cam. In the first pages of the novel the student Charles Tansley, grumpy and full of complexes, dropped a sentence that echoes again in this distant third part, because he says he is studying ‘the influence of something upon somebody’. He thus harbingers the final meaning of the novel, the delayed influence of Mrs Ramsay. Indeed Tansley, so scathing and egotistical, has in the meantime been transformed – converted – into a preacher of ‘brotherly love’. Gradually destruction and unrelatedness, and hence the incomplete and the broken, are succeeded – though in minimal and indeed infinitesimal manifestations – by the reconstructed, the complete, the finite. Ultimately the novel revolves around three main symbolic actions: the brown stocking for the lighthouse is not finished, it is irreparably and tragically not finished; but the trip to the lighthouse and the picture are ‘finished’. The image with which the novel leaves us is the finished, the created, and the achieved. As I mentioned, everything is repeated; all that is missing is a person who is nevertheless strenuously, passionately evoked, like Catherine in Wuthering Heights by Heathcliff. The latter novel, dear to the author,99 is divided into two parts that are repeated here in Woolf with slight but decisive symbolic variants. ‘You will find us much changed’, a sentence that Mr Ramsay considers appropriate to address to Lily, does not allude to the tragic bereavement, but to the fact that really something, as in that novel by Emily Brontë, has effectively changed. The irony is in the fact that Mr Ramsay, though always a threatening commander who sets out lance in rest, is now a ‘king in exile’, who desperately seeks understanding 99 It is deemed superior to Vanity Fair in a letter of 1 December 1923.

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and protection, and asks Lily for it, but she only communicates comically with him – a scene reminiscent of Meredith – by praising his shoes! Mr Ramsay then shows, or rather dissimulates, the fact that he has acquired a minimum of his wife’s spiritual legacy. Indeed, he goes to the lighthouse in her name, though without mawkish proclamations; and he makes her charitable attentions his own. He is her double and executor, and on the boat there is loaded the brown paper parcel containing basic provisions. A significant moment of ‘female’ philanthropic compassion occurs when he tells his daughter not to throw the remains of the sandwich in the sea but to save it for the poor fishermen; and on the boat, surprisingly, Mr Ramsay familiarizes without any haughtiness with the two ship-boys.100 He also becomes a good tyrant for his children, who realize this. Young James Ramsay began on the first page of the novel with the impulse to take ‘a knife and strike [his father] to the heart’, a vivid and recurrent bloody day-dream in the child, because his father brutally announced to him that the trip to the lighthouse would not be made because of bad weather, while he reached out to his mother, more optimistic, affectionate and understanding. The children James and Cam, now adolescents, hold out in a rebellious coalition, and then surrender. The lighthouse they go to is still the lighthouse but it is not that lighthouse anymore, as if they now had to emerge from illusions towards reality, to resign themselves to a lowering of the imagination and to the end of mirages. Hence the trip to the lighthouse is also a Bildung for the children, who face a barer reality, ‘For nothing was simply one thing’. In the last phases of the approach to the lighthouse Mr Ramsay

100 If the parodic Christological model is truly active, this crossing with the fishermen, in an alternation of wind and calm, is a camouflaged remake of the evangelical episodes of Jesus on the lakes of the Holy Land. On the boat, while an imperturbable Mr Ramsay, seraphic and distracted as Jesus often is, reads a book, loaves are consumed and fish are caught. Particularly Christological is the very bizarre detail, during the crossing, of the catching of a fish from which a small piece of flesh is cut to use as bait, after the ‘mutilated body (it was alive still) was thrown back into the sea’. The fish is a paleo-Christian symbol of Christ, but it is also a symbol of Mrs Ramsay, who has given her life for others; and this underwater banquet is a parody of the dinner of ten years before.

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is transfigured in the eyes of his children; he gives them new and Eucharistic nutrition, and rewards them with his approval. He is now a grandee of Spain, who gives a flower to the dame at the windowsill, courteous in his ways. ‘There it was’, said of the lighthouse when it is reached, is the usual act of assertiveness, of resumption, of recovery after a crisis, and it is more or less the same sentence as the one that concludes Mrs Dalloway. Life’s threads are tied together again, and a fabric forms anew. Lily Briscoe, on the other side, on the lawn in front of the house, has had her vision, which means that she has indeed seen – and only her, and incapable of stifling a cry – the ghost, the revenant of Mrs Ramsay, and also that the vision has been had, that the moment of being is irrecoverable, and therefore that the law of the impermanence and fatal incompleteness and precariousness of existence must be accepted. § 165. Woolf  IX: ‘Orlando’. The historical cavalcade of the hermaphrodite Orlando (1928), a flagrant break with Woolf ’s work so far, and with the novel with a spasmodic psychic plot, triumphantly rejects the accusation always made against her – because it does have a plot, and indeed its soul is intrigue, the vicissitude, the unforeseen event, the unexpected twist, and the variety of the action. Yet the mark of innovation remains, more through the theme and the astonishing unfolding of internal events than for the technique. If we look at the matter carefully, it is a little confession of impotence and it means the exhaustion of autobiographical material, or a provisional halt. The book was described by Woolf ’s intimates as a ‘love letter’, and therefore figurative, to Vita Sackville-West, whose photos in male attire enriched the first edition. But let us try to set this approach aside. The genre can be defined more precisely that of an imaginary biography – just as there were Pater’s ‘imaginary portraits’ – which pretends to pay its respects to the scholarly publication, learned, loyal to the conventions, and which instead almost immediately ends up inevitably revealing it is the parody of the academic biography, and therefore a joke, an eccentricity, a divertissement, a virtuoso and manneristic work, and an imitation. Is it mock-heroics in prose? Is Byron the tutelary deity or is

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it Thackeray?101 It was said until the previous novel that Woolf possesses neither the sudden variation of tone nor the chameleonic spirit of Joyce. Here is the answer. This slightly postmodern parodic approach is dissimulated by the preface, which contains notices of perhaps true debts and of others that are certainly false or hyperbolic. It is also highlighted by the index of names, names of historical characters mixed with others that are entirely imaginary. The joke rests on the main fact that on the stage, in a time span of almost four centuries divided into six historical epochs, and as many chapters – from the Elizabethan period, and the late sixteenth century, to the day when the book ends with its last word, 11 October 1928 – there is a probable aristocrat, who from his age of seventeen years as he first appears remains almost eternally young and does not grow old, yet changes sex when the curtain comes down on the eighteenth-century epoch. Hence he is an effeminate and hermaphroditic young man, who more exactly does grow and become old, but with an autonomous and much slower speed of aging. This is enough to perceive and guess at the models behind the book and the little wink at the myth of the asexual puer aeternus. From this idea there proliferates a novel that is precisely more objective, more based – but only in its first half – on the pure and overwhelming vicissitude, and narrated with brio, with humour, and a very fine taste for the sketch. 2. Orlando as a young Elizabethan first appears in a very Woolfian scene: venting repression of which he is unconscious, and an obscure emotional upheaval, he chips at the embalmed skull of a black person hanging from the ceiling together with many other similar trophies. Around him there is erected, in this novel of reconstructions, and of descriptive scenarios of single epochs, the first model of a cultural climate. Orlando is the young Elizabethan gentleman who loves nature, courts death, writes feverish poems, reveres paper idols rather than unattractive women in the flesh. Queen Elizabeth, neurotic and sick,102 comes once on a visit 101 The great Victorian novelist was read aloud by Virginia to Vanessa as a child. 102 Queen Elizabeth experiences the neurotic precariousness of Woolf ’s elderly women. In the late sixteenth century, however, a greater association of sensibility was in force, and life and reality were not seen with twentieth-century squeamishness.

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to his noble abode and he devotedly offers her a bowl of rose water, the viaticum of a possible call to court as a page. Here the symbolic value of the oak is delineated, solid and eternal against mutability, a value reflected in a poem of the same title that Orlando will only conclude after four centuries, as his life’s work. In this first episode the parody is aimed at the Victorian historical novel by Bulwer Lytton, Thackeray, Kingsley and Shorthouse, in the common search for the definition of the Elizabethan Zeitgeist. However, the more one reads the more one feels Woolf is quoting and alluding to the great ventriloquist, Thackeray in Esmond and later in The Four Georges. When Orlando is called to court by James I, the multi-coloured story of the fabulous ‘big freeze’ is completed and reflected in Orlando’s love for the Russian princess Sasha, who one day ditches him, already having a lover, and escapes on her ship.103 The Russian Sasha, at first dressed or disguised as a male, preannounces the Woolfian theme of the illusoriness of love and its impossibility, and of hermaphroditism. The following phase opens metanarratively with the explicit revelation of the hybrid nature of the text, admitting the gap between the real and the marvellous. Behind this confession, which is followed by other extravagances, Sterne is the presiding deity.104 The first unreal event, or stroke of magic, is perhaps that Orlando after the disappointment with Sasha falls asleep for seven days and on awakening does not remember anything. He plays the part of Rip Van Winkle, and reading Browne – the further literary reverberation – demonstrates on himself, apathetically, the theory of humours, a prefiguration of the later one of being as a mixture of various selves, indeed millions of selves. But a rib of this melancholy Elizabethan is now taken from Byron in Childe Harold and also and above all in Don Juan,105 seeing the unlikely, chance and unpredictable course of his adventures in this phase, and also

103 Orlando almost cannot believe his eyes after recovering from a faint, faced with the spectacle of this betrayal, and from this moment his idea of the purity of love begins to break down. It is not by chance that his loves all have Othello as their symbolic background, a play seen in an impromptu performance. 104 Half a blank page, empty of characters, in the manner of Sterne, is inserted in the text to suggest that space is ‘full to repletion’. 105 A model she was aware of, as her diary reveals (cf. Batchelor 1991, 16).

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some bold, macaronic transition formulas. Another historical character that blends with the invented one is Robert Greene the playwright, who astutely swindles Orlando by writing a lampoon of the tragedy that he hopefully entrusts to him. In the evocations of this witness there opens up before the reader a cross-section of the intense rivalries between the great Elizabethan playwrights. Greene’s amusing interlude is in the manner of Thackeray, but in it there starts to appear the secondary theme of the commodification of art. Orlando’s flight from the Romanian archduchess Harriet takes him as an ambassador to Constantinople amid garish local colour. The parodic reference has become that of the oriental stories of Beckford and of Byron himself. A popular insurrection is the prelude to another transforming sleep – Orlando becomes a woman – and constitutes a narrative break.106 Orlando, as a woman, returns to the England of Pope, Addison and Swift, rendered with inimitable, illusionistic reconstructions in the wake of Thackeray, a curious cartoonist of that same climate. The style too is mimetic in the manner of Thackeray, with its pompous roundabout phrases, its circumlocutions, the typical diction of those famous poets and prose writers, informed by the law of literary decorum and of immaculate precision of the word on the model of elevated Latin prose. In the London of Queen Anne, the archduchess for whom Orlando had run away is now metamorphosed into or disguised as a male, and the two characters undertake role-play. But the archduchess from her first appearance was a male who out of platonic love for Orlando had disguised as female. The ‘duke’ is ditched by Orlando, disenchanted, enervated by love. A second case of a game, prurient and therefore also obsessive, with the impersonating of the antithetical sex, comes when, harrowed and disillusioned, Orlando seeks a prostitute, who is happy that Orlando turns out to be a woman, so that there is an exchange of sincere remarks, outside role-play.107

106 More exactly we are talking about two episodes of trance that cloud and annul the past and make the protagonist start again from scratch. The doctors, like those of Septimus in Mrs Dalloway, in both cases prescribe ineffective treatment. Fish and eels too, during the big freeze, are visibly a prey to an underwater trance. 107 From Wilde there comes the philosophy of attire, together with the theory of the hermaphroditic mixture of the sexes in a personality.

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3. The nineteenth century had announced itself, in the plan of the novel, with the symbolic and demarcating arrival of dampness, the increase in progeny and the prevailing scale of the gigantic. Orlando purchases the whole corpus of Victorian literature and has it sent to his home, but dismisses it having synthesized it ‘in just six lines’. It is the age of the crinoline, the hypocritical tool of hypocrisy, born to conceal what everybody could see, namely pregnancies. The Zeitgeist favours procreation, and hence because of the conventions Orlando must get married; but her husband then goes away to sea as a brave captain, and theirs is a formal union, a sexless marriage. The change of sex turns perspectives upside-down and opens the eyes of the male turned female: Orlando learns what it means and has meant historically to be a woman, that is to say to serve the man, and the woman’s historical penalizations, also of a juridical nature. Woolf is finally in the position to describe the changed identity of the writer, more independent and less needy of patrons, in the nineteenth century;108 but it is only specious liberty. The conclusive pages are of bitter disorientation and nostalgia, indeed more exactly of elegy for a vanished world. In Orlando there is intermittent prevalence of heterosexual and homosexual love, but the human person lives better alone (this was also Lawrence’s last word). The impressionistic intuition of two climates, the Elizabethan one and the early eighteenth-century one, blends with a personal discourse, for the moment playful, on the evanescence of gender, and on misandry, that is to say on refusal of matrimonial union and of heterosexual love, and on the preference for friendship between women. And the blend also comprises the continual and never interrupted meditation on time, in the opposition between the inexorable flow and the isolation of the unchangeable, a crucial theme of Modernism which we also find in Eliot’s Four Quartets. Art too submits to it, with the artist that, eternally dissatisfied, works on polishing up for life an opus that he or she never succeeds in concluding. Art is symbolized by a poem entitled ‘The Oak Tree’, as I mentioned, a symbol of eternity, firmness, rootedness and longevity.

108 The Elizabethan playwright Greene reappears as the ghost of the greatest Victorian critic – Arnold? – and publishes Orlando’s poem in Victorian times.

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§ 166. Woolf X: ‘The Waves’. Six soliloquists, stereophonic voices of a single author The Waves (1931) is the most experimental of all Woolf ’s novels, and it marks her apex in the use of the stream of consciousness. The innovation is radical in the method precisely because, overturning the double speed and the double track of Woolf ’s procedure – public talk which is out of phase with and often alternative to mental embroidery – it enacts the complete abolition of dialogue among the characters and of every authorial caption linking the single scenes (nor are there any more episodes developing in the traditional sense). This function is silenced, without there being a single phatic intervention or a single dialogue, and – although Woolf always tells us that such and such a character ‘said’, rather than ‘thought’ – we only have his or her free internal discourse. The weft of the facts, more than ever terse and distilled in the pure impressions hewn out in the single interiorities, hence becomes exclusively mental, with voices rather than characters in the round – an unbroken relay race, that is, of thoughts and a flow or fluctuation of monologues. Woolf wrote a real novel-drama or dramatic novel,109 although each of her other novels has, at least latently, a dramatic nature and framework. The type of the monologues that constitute the whole fabric is eminently lyrical, and a substitute and ersatz of poetry, as every word that is uttered is suspended, ethereal, every sentence hovering on the wings of imagination, metaphor, symbol, private evocation. This is, more exactly, a great operatic text, a musical melodrama almost in a strict sense, that is to say a fabric of recitatives and great arias to be warbled on an imaginary, stylized stage, in the form of an oratorio. The succinct caption ‘said’ and not ‘thought’ is revealing, and sustains this pretence. It is an ambitious and audacious operation that yet remains largely artificial. The six characters are too alike, at least to be grouped in sets of three. Woolf failed to mark them in an indelible way, and to make us remember them afterwards and to hand them down through a conspicuous and unmistakable datum of their psyche and their story.110 All of them remember, dream, 109 As is confirmed by the diary, on which cf. Guiguet 1965, 281. 110 Bennett 1964, 32, correctly observes that the six characters are not distinguishable even at the level of lexis, of register, of tone, and therefore of idiolect.

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ramble; all six express grammatical, orderly, syntactical thought, almost revised and corrected, not tumultuous, boiling, volcanic in its magmatic outcropping. In their mental horizon and in their derivable identikit they are all too much, and show too much that they are, products of the English public school. The necessary chronicle of events is given with slight delay, almost live, by the actants themselves, who fix the few salient facts or the very circumstances of each single monologue of theirs or the time that has passed; but in this gap between aria and recitative – we could say – the novel languishes. A similar drawback, if we look at the matter carefully, may well have been planned.111 Woolf explores the possibility of being – and at any rate of her own being – all other beings, and each of the six characters pursues fusion with the other. Hence the six voices in The Waves can be seen as the result of the fragmentation of the many separable selves and of the many facets of the Woolfian psychic unity seeking synthesis. If this is true, Woolf ’s stream and the stream of consciousness in general, created to overturn omniscience, is actually the method that makes it possible to restore it to the highest degree. What we have are voices in which the author herself identifies and is projected, keys and registers of her imagination, to which she lends the same poetic efflorescence and attributes the same aesthetic and existential questions. The Waves, whether Woolf had read Pirandello or not, takes up the idea of his Six Characters in Search of an Author, of a sonata of ghosts, larvae, fantasies that, independently, ask the author to let them become incarnate and to have an existence, here only vocal.112 Biographically The Waves is yet another revisiting of the morbid indivision of the Stephen siblings’ web of childhood,113 located in the Woolf house on the sea, with the six equal and different children 111 Cf., among many, Guiguet 1965, 296. 112 ‘those half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night’. It seems to me the comparison with Pirandello is only made by Edwin Muir, always an attentive and perspicacious critic (cf. CRHE, 291). 113 The six characters are not sibs. They come from various parts of England and one of them is originally from Australia, but they share a morbid, brotherly bond as if they were blood relations. At the beginning of the novel they are reunited in an ideal abode, a kind of atemporal unity. Only Percival is extraneous to this original magic circle, as I will mention, and enters the scene later, re-cementing it.

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and a metaphor of the impossible eternalization of the moment and with the feared prospect of the future, of dispersion and death. Its paradigm remains the celebration of the sense of union and complete and timeless cohesion of infancy followed by the breaking of the cosmic egg, with the ordeal of school that makes way for self-awareness. This is in turn followed by the discovery of gender,114 by the relationship with the world at large, by the pain of senseless living or finding a meaning in living. In extremis it is an umpteenth act of courage and survival, a battle cry against the enemy, death and nothingness. 2. The only breaks in the uninterrupted flow of memory are marked by charming and ‘poetic’ descriptions of a seashore, always in italics on the page, another dramatic device. The novel could have been entitled The Hours115 just as the one that came immediately afterwards is entitled The Years. On the temporal scheme – the relentlessness of the diurnal cycle, from dawn to sunset and night – a second one is superimposed, from childhood to maturity, adulthood, on to old age. To the rhythm and in the rhythm of the frames of the sea pictures, of the sun rising and going up on the shore, the monologues flow. The waves are also the waves of memory or the psychic storms of every single psyche. The internal law is that each of the six characters has to return, also projecting himself or herself forwards, backwards, to frames engraved in the psyche. As always in the stream of consciousness, there are memorial flashes, snatches, fragments, traumas, ecstasy, gratifications and satisfactions. Each character carries with him or her from infancy a mental and associative badge that he or she again puts on show. The repetitiveness and monotony of the novel can partly be justified with this Freudian return of the repressed or the unforgotten. It gradually becomes clear that the novel is a contest between life and death, and that the characters can be divided into two symmetrical classes and two subgroups of three:116 on one side the gloomy ones, the nihilists, the ones with hallucinations, who are unable to 114 Neville develops a violent homosexual passion for the sunny Percival; the web is also that of the loves and flirtations declared and not declared among the six in turn. 115 This was instead the provisional title of Mrs Dalloway. 116 Hafley 1954, 106–7, instead divides them into three groups of two.

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recognize any teleology in life, and these are Neville, Louis and Rhoda; on the other the throbbing ones, the ones burning with life, Bernard, Jinny and Susan. It is not by chance that the first three are all potentially suicidal, and indeed Rhoda does commit suicide; while the others frolic, strut, get married, and have children. In Louis’s thoughts there is a rhythmical image of women carrying red pitchers to the Nile. Isolated, sensitive, dazzled by nature and its spectacles, the son of an Australian banker, he is surprised early in the morning by Jinny kissing him. Susan sees, and wounded and envious she is comforted by Bernard. Rhoda, fatherless, psychotic, fragile, subject to hallucinations, shakes rose petals in a basin. In the second ‘hour’, the dispersion having begun, the males witness at a public school the arrival of the fascinating Percival, who has no voice in the novel. He is a seventh character on whom the attentions of all the other six converge. He could be, as the seventh character after the six, another Septimus, but quam mutatus ab illo; he has a value and a symbolic and historical function, that of being a magnet attracting the others to itself; and that of a virile leader who, concrete after so many larval and emasculated males in Woolf ’s novels, could have had a high public and administrative function. The six childhood friends are in London to say goodbye to Percival, who is departing for India, where he will die through a banal accident, reflecting Woolf ’s tragic sense that always condemns the most promising people to death. Having reached the evening of life and the last meeting, at Hampton Court, all, by now ‘middle-aged’, feel a sense of estrangement and separation from the whirlwind world. How will it be possible to fight against impermanence? Does one truly celebrate unity, symbolized by the flower with six petals but still a flower? In the evangelical ninth hour, night, Bernard reappears in a scene like a Browning-like soliloquist who improvises, grey hair now on his temples. He recapitulates, sums up, remembers again, retraces the story from the first page on. Bernard is ab ovo the historian and a biographer of the group. His assignment is to observe, to testify, to estrange himself from the flow, stripping himself of his own identity. He lives on the reflexes that are produced in him by the figments of his imagination, including those of his childhood friends: the character is made up of stimuli furnished by other people. As a novelist, collector and cataloguer of stories,

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Bernard enacts Woolf ’s empathy; he is all of them rather than just himself; he must play with the other from himself and project himself into it like Browning in his dramatic monologues.117 His function is that of the person who discovers and possesses the connection between things, their continuity and contiguity, their ‘general sequence’, not the broken line that others perceive. The symbol of this porosity of Bernard, directed always ad extra, curious about everything and everybody, is precisely the sponge that sprinkled him with warm water, in a rudimentary shower, in the ancient baths at the time of the nursery. § 167. Woolf XI: ‘The Years’. The crowded kaleidoscope of modern times The Years (1937) periodically is bizarrely and imprudently declared by some critics to be Woolf ’s best novel,118 while it is instead a minor novel, mediocre if not shoddy. It is yet another reflection on time, on the impossibility of fixing the instant and on the inexorability of its being swallowed up in duration, as well on the ordering of experience and the availability of a pattern making it intelligible, and therefore on the meaning of history, history as linked narration and history tout court, that is public history. It is inevitably made up of chapters that all bear titles that are not verbal but numerical ones, that is dates: 1880, 1891, 1896… Each year, corresponding to a chapter of varying length, is correlated with a precise atmospheric and therefore symbolic season, and starts with a prelude that recalls the lyrical frames separating the monologues in The Waves. The central focus is that of the Pargiter family, the father a retired colonel, embittered and sexually frustrated, who has an extramarital affair while his wife is dying after a long illness. The Victorian world is revisited in 1937 as neurotic and hypocritical, regulated by mechanical gestures and conformist rites. For instance in the beautiful London house the ceremony of afternoon tea, always a little false, is being celebrated; and

117 The last fifth of the novel, which coincides with Bernard’s last gigantic monologue, is reminiscent, not only for the size but also for the philosophy of life – equanimous optimism, acceptance of chiaroscuro – of that of Bishop Blougram. 118 Starting from Hafley 1954, 145.

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the sick mother is left to herself and is like a hindrance to all the family. One of her daughters devotes herself to the poor, a son studies at Oxford, the youngest has an unbridled imagination and daydreams; another son is training to be a lawyer. The scene moves to Oxford, where Edward Pargiter, the promise, is studying for his Greek examinations and is haplessly in love with his cousin Kitty, the daughter of the chancellor of a college. Thus with the Pargiters there returns Woolf ’s theme of the brood of brothers and sisters of varying age and with various temperaments, and closer up the community in harmony, but already less in harmony than in The Waves, formed by people that are not peers but to all intents and purposes blood relations,119 first united and then dispersed. The team grows and the single characters are followed, as their age increases, against the background of public events. A certain date is chosen because Parnell dies on it, and in order to see how some of the sibs deal with politics and others do not, and some are in favour and others against Irish independence and the cause of liberty. In 1891 some of the Pargiter siblings have had children of their own and are raising families; the mother is dead; the colonel cannot confess his affair to anybody. In the ensuing decades there are premature and sudden deaths, and the colonel vegetates having had a stroke. The Woolfian dreamer is Rose Pargiter who, forty in 1910, as she walks looks fixedly at the Thames, perhaps remembering a disappointment in love; but Woolf is perhaps reflected even more in the old maid Eleanor, the witness and impartial historian of the family. Kitty, by contrast, has become a lady who dressed in a lamé gown goes to Covent Garden to hear Sieg fried.120 After the war the generation of grandchildren move into the picture, and with a longer gap the novel ends with an enormous 119 One of the Pargiter sons becomes a colonial official, and risks dying in India, like Percival from The Waves. 120 Interest in associations causes the ‘hammering’ of the hero Siegfried to remind her of the scene of years ago, at the Robsons, and of the brawny hammerer by whom Kitty had desired to be kissed: a true, Woolfian ‘moment of being’. On the popularity of Wagner in the first decades of the century, here confirmed, cf. § 73.1. Kitty experiences a second epiphany, corresponding to a halting or abolition of time, in one of her northern estates.

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chapter entitled ‘The present time’, which covering exactly a third of it orchestrates with rare and exasperating slowness a party at which all the survivors are on the stage. 2. The Years is yet another change of direction in Woolf ’s journey: from abstract, rhapsodic and dramatic tension, to a big ‘veristic’ canvas, full of minutiae and crowded with details. Woolf seems by and large to have rediscovered a balance between event, word and thought and coordination of them, without any elephantiasis in favour of the one or the other. It is the most similar to her early novels in its arrangement, and traditional or more traditional, also because some episodes are taken up from them and re-narrated much more directly. In Oxford, Edward Pargiter undergoes the routine study experiences that were blacked out in Jacob’s Room; nor does it escape our notice that the project of The Years imitates that of Orlando, though in a deeply changed naturalistic vein, and in a more realistic climate and horizon, though with a reduced historical radius. We should therefore correct the judgement and the norm established at the beginning to present Woolf ’s development starting with Jacob’s Room; were it not that the involution is only apparent. The Years is a calendar, or more exactly a diary; the plot is loose and the narrating voice records the uneventful without a quiver. It is monotonous and flat because out of principle it mimes a historical flow that finds no orientation, flabby and amorphous because no one knows where it is heading to and because it has no connective thread. The symbolic and optical focus is that of separation and of the hiatus within a possible continuum. Public and private events are not in communication, just as the members of the same human group are not.121 The melancholy calm is enlivened by ‘moments of being’, by epiphanies, by the recovery of talismans that retransmit emotions and

121 It is symbolic that on the eve of the First World War Kitty makes a long journey by train and – with the sense of the unknown that war represents – enters a tunnel, wondering what is awaiting her at the other end. After the war, in an equally symptomatic hint, two cousins meet again, and the female cousin ‘came back in sections; first the voice; then the attitude; but something remained unknown’.

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vibrations.122 Without emphasis, there is a true and strictly Proustian sense of mental associations with objects. Places also change: houses are decorated, above all sold, and are depositories of affections and memories. There is no more elegiac and moving page, though after all a facile one, than the one in which the old housemaid of the Pargiters is forced, brooding, to leave her employment after half a century of honourable service. At the same time The Years is a novel of twentieth-century or perhaps also of ontological and timeless incommunicability. Almost everyone is about to reveal their dark secret, or to disclose their intimate essence, on a certain supreme occasion that they have prepared or expected, but then fail to do it. The unsaid is also that of mute regrets, of dissatisfactions and daily frustrations. The dialogue, of which the novel consists to a very great extent, is banal and fatiguing because it overwhelms an inner life that fails to flow out. The old keep remembering, are aphasic, forgetful, affected by symbolic elations and snoozes. At the final party the novel again turns from being a painting and a polyptych to being eminently theatrical: it is the last act of an oneiric or even absurd play, with dialogue broken up into disconnected sentences, interrupted speeches, sudden changes of theme. Woolf re-executes this scene to give live, without apparent selection, insipid dialogues, ‘animated’, but ‘lacking substance’ by embarrassed, awkward and scarred characters. The Pargiters now symbolize the English nation that is about to come out of the abyss, wants to reconstruct and even toasts a better tomorrow. ‘The world will never be the same again’, says a guest, gaily but no less truthfully. In this Babel, Eleanor Pargiter is the one who reflects more than any of the others on the flow of time, time that seems cyclical to her, a repetition of scenes already seen and experienced, with a pattern that is re-presented and a ‘theme’, ‘recurring, like music’. But her trust sounds like a delusion; and around her there rises a choir, or more exactly a screeching of voices that take a stand and draw up a discordant, indeed cacophonous, balance of the past and the present. No less symptomatic is the fact that the caretaker’s children, who have joined the party in a decidedly oneiric scene, are given

122 A depository of associations, and at once a relic in the Pargiter household, is a never disused teakettle, which absolutely refuses to work properly.

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refreshment and sing two stanzas in a mysterious and incomprehensible language. § 168. Woolf XII: ‘Between the Acts’. A forecast of the future At her death Woolf had not given Between the Acts123 (1941) to the publisher, and intended to revise and improve it. This reflects her uneasiness about the unfinished, or what is forever closed, and in a novel that faces with its theme the same opening-closing of a historical time towards an unknown and perhaps catastrophic future. However, even in the form in which it has come down to us, it is a tightly orchestrated story, in nuce the most natural and most evocative one ever written by Virginia Woolf. Woolf paradoxically reaches this point at which she starts again, or really starts, with this last novel in her canon. In continuing her formal adventure she goes and looks back, and for a very good reason. It was not possible to evoke and build a metaphor of the birth, life and death, possible or feared, of the English tradition and civilization except in the forms of a traditional or more traditional novel. Here we find a narrator super partes who follows the stories of some characters intent on a connective background action that serves to measure interpersonal relationships. These characters also speak, and partly communicate, in addition to thinking without saying. The traditional nature of the novel therefore lies in there being more narrated action, more visible tension, even if only suggested, between the characters, although once again the time span does not exceed twenty-four hours. Its setting seems late Victorian or Edwardian, since it is that of an old home that exudes history and is rooted in the past, in the ‘heart’ of old, once felix England. There a déjà vu set of people – an elderly couple, he a retired official of the Indian Civil Service, she a dear, pathetic ‘grandmother’, a little forgetful and always late, Mrs Swithin, the

123 A title that draws on a functional ambiguity, because the ‘acts’ are at one and the same time the two world wars and the interval between them; and they are also the sexual acts, again rich in love and procreative, of the Olivers, as Batchelor 1991, 132, sums it up. Hafley 1954, 147, confusedly notices a further nuance deriving from Bergson, stating that the novel is first of all about ‘free will’, and posits freedom as a condensation of clock time and mental time.

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soul of the book –124 kill time. In the nineteenth century too – one need only think of Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters – the local rich and well-off people would put on a little theatrical show to subsidize the local church. Between the Acts recounts precisely this, the preparations for the show that will be performed in the afternoon, and that is performed – a sort of show within the show, as we will see – in three acts, with local people as the actors, instructed by the director Miss La Trobe. The latter is one of those symbols and figures of the artist always or most often present in Woolf ’s novels; she too spasmodically pursues the completeness of the work, completeness and perfection that escape her.125 The two pathetic old people are humorous figures that would not be out of place in the universe of Trollope or Meredith. A different case is that of the daughter-in-law Isa, neurotic and alienated in her life as an unhappy bride and as a mother, and pursuing an escape and a romantic temptation.126 Another and different case is that of the man of the City, her husband Giles, and also different is that of the last two characters of the few that people the novel, the intruders Mrs Manresa, a superficial and frivolous woman, and the mysterious William Dodge, a clerk who is partly an artist. A noticeable change is that Between the Acts does not contain the almost ever present community of children, contrasted with that of the adults. 2. Structurally, a step forward is that the first text, inside which, generously transcribed, there is inserted the second one – the show of the quasi-Shakespearean strolling players –127 is itself a pièce in the form of a story. The characters densely converse with one another in a surreal 124 Mrs Swithin is the umpteenth Woolfian figure of a certain age, nostalgic, dissatisfied, but gently resigned, and the human type Woolf succeeds best with. Like Mrs Ramsay she hopes that tomorrow ‘will be fine’ because the pageant will be done outdoors; otherwise it will have to be in the barn. She is a Mrs Ramsay at least partly rewarded by fate, because the weather holds up and rain only comes at the end. 125 And therefore, for many critics, also the androgynous writer à la Woolf. 126 Isa is not wholly convincing: she cultivates a Sehnsucht for past times, and is searching not for routine love but that of the unattainable ‘man in grey’. She is a mother, but an unfulfilled one, who wanders wearily about, finding no rest. 127 With her candid, bizarre remarks – the story of the teeth and others – in this play within the play Mrs Swithin plays the part of the Shakespearean fool.

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atmosphere, always a little oneiric. Therefore an ideal dramaturgical script is played out in this novel, or this framework of a novel. In it one breathes the atmosphere of Shaw’s Heartbreak House, not very distant in time, of Barrie’s Dear Brutus, or of The Cherry Orchard.128 And this is because, despite the reference situation being changed, the sense of the first text, as much as that of the second, coincides with those of those plays.129 At the end of the show, a very brusque and abrupt end because the storm really has burst, all the people present rush to the road that leads to their cars, asking themselves what the show meant. Between the Acts is a pessimistic metaphor of the extinction of English civilization, of civilization tout court, through the threatening signals visible on the horizon. The internal date is declared and emphasized – a day in June 1939 – and the show towards the end is disturbed by some aeroplanes appearing, and not peacefully, in the sky. The Second World War was just round the corner, starting in August 1939; indeed, Hitler had already started it with the invasion of Czechoslovakia. If almost all of Woolf ’s novels show characters who remember nostalgically, these of Between the Acts are instead more often seen in a state of amnesia. It is significant that Mrs Swithin dabbles in history, reads compendia of history books before going to sleep, and in other ways tries to keep memory alive. The Swithins’ home is full of heirlooms, of old paintings of ancestors, of relics that are all traceable; it is a kind of living calendar, of testimony to the passage of time and the bond between epochs. Poetical fragments often well up in the characters’ mind, but they are not placed in the works they belong to and are like free and suspended pieces. A revealing mannerism, especially of Mrs Swithin, is wondering what the origin of a certain idiomatic expression is: the symbolic and epistemological implication is that of the primitive literality of language, later faded in a historical process leading towards the loss of verbal expressiveness and to the distance between 128 For the latter association cf. Batchelor 1991, 140 and 144, who refers to Lee 1977. 129 Is Mrs Swithin not an older keeper of unshakable ancient values like Ruth Wilcox in Howards End? She understands the allegories of time, has a sense of things that exude history, and religiously cultivates family and local traditions. By the same token Wilcox, Ruth’s husband, comes back to life in the ‘stockbroker’ Giles, Isa’s husband, brusque, impatient, devoid of fantasy. These are similarities noticed by more than one critic, including Batchelor 1991, 136.

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res and verba. In the unstoppable flow of time names change, metaphors become catachreses, places and homes are restored and adapted, and reality changes its appearance. The anguish of forgetfulness acts in Mrs Swithin, who, engaged in ‘her imaginative reconstruction of the past’, has the task of keeping alive the sense of indivision. But it is a metaphor to the square root that represented by Miss La Trobe’s pageant, which is nothing but a dramatic reduction, through separate and amateurish scenes, of English history and tradition itself, from its dawn to the present, passing through the Elizabethan, eighteenth-century and Victorian epochs.130 It is also an allegory – this is an old story – of indivision itself, this time elevated and made absolute as a geographical union between prehistoric England and the European continent; an elegy, at the same time, for the undivided European continent. In it we also hear the chord of necessary but not always pleasant modernization, and therefore an elegy for old countrified England, self-sufficient, archaic, even backward.131 A sense of inevitable progress is present in the minds and the psyches of the characters, but it is a historical progress that is thought of and summed up, and revised, in terms of geological eras; it is the historical stage of the dinosaurs Mrs Swithin reads about. 3. A similar moral fable on indivision is formally undivided, because the action advances and is narrated without a break in the usual span of one day, from morning to evening, and in particular because it is not divided into chapters, or into separated and identified units; instead it is a flow, uninterrupted or only interrupted by small asterisks. The pageant prepared by Miss La Trobe has an audience that is like a delegation of old England, a paradigm of various generations, and England sees itself mirrored in its history: this is the theatrical intuition of the director. It is a pageant of sketches in verse, recited by local people, and sketches that do not stop radiating to the public a kind of Brechtian alienation or provoke it, since all the spectators know who the actors are in everyday life. A child that is England in swaddling bands begins; and like a metaphor 130 Undoubtedly this parody may remind us of the mechanism of episode XIV of Joyce’s Ulysses, if it did not directly copy it. 131 The opening dialogue is symptomatically about the construction of sewer systems in an outlying region of the country which still has none; and the pageant is put on to give the church electric lighting, and hence to follow the dictates of progress.

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of union and dispersion at the end of the first act a refrain is heard that is perhaps from the hymn ‘Dispersed are we’. This sense of dispersion is naturally reinforced by everyone running away when the storm bursts. It is at the same time an allegorical storm, the war, which then sows in everyone the enigmatic doubt about what Miss La Trobe wanted to show. The atmosphere, a little before, had become surreal, with the priest with a megaphone, behind the wings, trying to decipher that meaning, in a voice that seemed that of a deus ex machina. The single actions of the show are brilliant elaborations and parodic recreations of literary styles. Above all the second act – that of the eighteenth-century dame plotting against her niece and only arranging a marriage for money – is a parody of Restoration theatre. The third is a disguise of the very occasion of the novel, in that it is the representation of a picnic at which at the end all the food left is collected, and the participants leave and return home invigorated in body and in spirit. A few pages from the end the reality of the framework and that of the imagination overlap. The fourth act is the present, in which the very characters of the framework become actors or spectators that through a stage stratagem by the director see themselves reflected in a series of mirrors brought on the stage. The hermeneutics of the pageant reveals its fleeting and multifaceted meaning. According to the explanation given by the reverend, it is a confident patriotic message in view of the imminent war: we are all members of a single body, let us huddle together, and let us save English civilization and keep it alive. As the reverend speaks, into the sky there irrupts, as I mentioned, a formation of threatening airplanes, and at any rate there is heard, infusing into everyone its invitation to unity, the anthem God save the King. Even in this novel, written a short time before her suicide, Woolf opens up to a glimmer of ambiguous hope, and salutes life or the strength of a community, necessary to its continuation. § 169. Bloomsbury, Roger Fry, Strachey Bloomsbury was a sort of London offshoot of the University of Cambridge, and more exactly of its Trinity College, and the mediator and inseminator of it was Thoby Stephen, the brother of Vanessa Stephen, who through marriage had become Vanessa Bell, and of Virginia Woolf.

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Thoby studied at Cambridge and with his magnetic personality attracted to himself some gifted talents who were his own age, before dying in 1906 as the double of Jacob, the protagonist of the homonymous novel by his sister Virginia. After they finished at university, the members of this orphaned entourage of Thoby – at first not very big, as Clive Bell remembered – found themselves habitually frequenting the home of the two Stephen sisters, who by then had lost both parents, at number 46 Gordon Square, near the British Museum. A joint impulse came from Clive Bell and Roger Fry, painters and arts scholars, and from the eclectic writer Leonard Woolf a little later. There soon formed a small dynasty of quasi-relatives, because one son of Clive and Vanessa Bell was the essayist and lecturer Quentin Bell, himself the historian of the movement,1 while their other son, Julian Bell, went to the front and died prematurely there. The substantial or ambiguous bisexuality of the members of the group nurtured interwoven loves, virtual or explicit courting and swapping of partners of both sexes in an atmosphere of openly declared superiority to the ‘genealogy of morality’, and total liberty and disinhibition of mores. The Thursday meetings were free, unprejudiced symposia, tribunes at which people touched in turn on the polyhedral and eclectic interests of the members and guests, who, experts on general culture, were at the same time specialists on literature, on history, on philosophy, or on the visual arts.2 Reference has already been made in the biography of Virginia Woolf to the model and epistemological orientation impressed by the philosopher Moore, which revolved around mental states and a dispassionate search for the truth; here it is necessary to recall again the artistic penchant of the group, and the polarized interest in visual arts, from the perspective of an updating of an aesthetic which in

1 2

Bloomsbury, London 1968, 1986, where there is a confirmation of the amorphous and loose nature of the group, which also included, though marginally, a mathematician, a psychologist, a diplomat, and a schoolteacher. As Q. Bell, Bloomsbury, 49, notes, it is difficult to be a historian of Bloomsbury because the members above all spoke and conversed and ‘nothing is more difficult to reconstruct’ than conversation. In other words the movement had produced, at least by 1910, above all ‘conversation’ (50); and according to Virginia Woolf (83), in 1914 Bloomsbury was practically over.

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England was still indebted to Ruskin in the first two decades of the century.3 Here two sufficiently autonomous and important figures will be touched on at most, in particular one, since I have already dealt more broadly with others that, peripheral or organic in relation to the group, then left it, carving out their own spaces, like Forster and obviously Virginia Woolf herself.4 2. Roger Fry (1866–1934) was a landscapist painter, but not of exceptional calibre, and an honest, cultivated art historian whose most outstanding merit, however, was the organization in 1910 of a postimpressionist exhibition at the Grafton Galleries in London. It made the English familiar with Cézanne’s revolution in painting,5 and therefore aroused in the same measure enthusiasms and cries of disapproval. From that day on Fry became ‘the father’ of future English painters, made aware of the importance of the laws of painterly form over and above impression. From a Quaker family, Fry was the son of a judge. He studied at Cambridge and was a friend of the philosopher McTaggart, and at Cambridge was a member of the student society of the ‘Apostles’, of which Tennyson in his day had been a member. Fry was attracted to art issues after cultivating scientific and more precisely botanical interests. Influenced by an eccentric teacher, John Henry Middleton, he disappointed his parents who wanted him to take up a career as an executive. He travelled in Italy and France, and tried to be a painter, with little success, and then a columnist and lecturer on artistic topics.6 His wife Helen Coombe, who soon fell mentally ill, after giving him two children had to be permanently hospitalized; he then started a bond of virtual conjugal ménage with another artist, Helen Anrep. Until shortly before his death he was denied the position of professor of art at Cambridge. Omega, founded by him in 1913, had become a laboratory for young artists also employed in the production of furnishing objects, enacting a blend between elegant art as an end in itself and applied art, reminiscent of Morris. This laboratory was closed by a disenchanted and embittered Fry, who was convinced that 3 4 5 6

The group also included Duncan Grant, the greatest English painter between the two wars; Vanessa Stephen, later Bell, was herself a painter and decorator. On the economist Keynes see § 74.1–2. Keynes’s brother, Geoffrey, was the meritorious editor of the poetic edition of Blake in 1957. He wrote a monograph on the painter in 1927. He was among the first to appreciate Hopkins, having seen the manuscripts through his friend Bridges (V. Woolf, Roger Fry, London 1940, 85).

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the war had destroyed every hope and every possible constructive idea. With his initiatives and his essays and books, Fry made up for the delay in the visual arts accumulated by British culture since the time of Ruskin. Clark7 said that he had changed the taste of the English, as had been said before of Ruskin and Morris. Vision and Design (1920), his most essential book, includes some essays on painting ranging from Giotto to Beardsley and Cézanne, together with two theoretical ones that strive to define and illustrate the category of ‘signifying form’, whose origin is tracked down in African primitive art, and – a less new concept, derived from Ruskin and from Pater, and partly also from Clive Bell and his 1913 book Art – the essentially personal and individual experience of artistic perception, which revolves not only and not mainly around the pure representation inherent in the object, but around emotional states and the sensibility of the perceiving subject, through his imagination.8 3. Like later Isherwood, to give just one name, Giles Lytton Strachey (1880–1932) had a possessive mother and a military father, a former high officer of the Indian colonies, and his adolescence and affective life were likewise unbalanced and ruined by it. Mollycoddled, a victim of morbid maternal attentions and intransigence on his father’s part, the repercussions were eccentricity, idiosyncrasy, exhibitionism, mania and homosexuality – even a long, thick and masculine beard that, he said, made him look like a ‘decadent French poet’. This also accounts for the objective and concrete results of his career as a writer and intellectual, actually inferior to expectations and his potential. His production is often assigned to the category of the ‘slight’, the slender and the weightless, and he did little in the creative dominion, for which he would have had the stuff, but only wrote in the more parasitic ones of biography, historiography and literary criticism. His mother was not only a passionate supporter of female suffrage but a fine mind that was a little too megalomaniac; a student of languages and 7 8

V. Woolf, Roger Fry, 259. It is very strange that in ‘Roger Fry: An Obituary Note’, in Abinger Harvest, London 1936, Harmondsworth 1967, 49–52, E. M. Forster passionately celebrated not Fry’s intuitionism but his rationalism. The gist of Fry’s perceptivist aesthetic, expounded in the final essay in Vision and Design (294), is that the recipient must trace backwards the process of the detached artist, whose original emotion has flowed into the structural and structured shape of the painting.

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literatures, she forced her son to write poetry and plays starting from an early age, dreaming for him a radiant future as a great artist. Accordingly he was sent to study at prestigious public schools where he could excel. Here, however, Lytton was the target of jokes and pranks by his schoolmates because of his sickly and feminine appearance, which meant that in school performances he also played female roles, indeed much better than male ones. Though an enfant prodige, he failed the entrance examinations for the University of Oxford, but was accepted at Cambridge, where he distinguished himself as a poet and remained after graduating, intending to compete for a fellowship.9 At Cambridge he had met personalities of the calibre of G. L. Dickinson, a Greek scholar who was a great friend of Forster’s, the economist Keynes, Bertrand Russell, and the philosopher Moore. At the outbreak of war he was a conscientious objector, but without any need for this, because he would certainly have been exonerated for health reasons. He already maintained himself with occasional writing as a reviewer when a short history of French literature was commissioned from him (1912). This went unnoticed and largely unsold, but has subsequently been revalued as one of his clearest and most balanced works. Strachey was someone whom anyone would have liked to meet, because he left no one indifferent with his lanky silhouette, his strident voice, his reddish beard, his tics and mannerisms,10 and the barrage of sharp jokes and perverse epigrams in his conversation.11 After writing essays on the eighteenth century

9

With Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf and Saxon Sydney Turner, and with a younger student, A. J. Robertson, he set going the ‘Midnight Society’, the germ cell of the Bloomsbury group. Quentin Bell dates the birth of the movement to 1899. 10 See the splendid stylistic exercise by Emilio Cecchi in CSI, vol. II, 129–34, which describes a visit to the writer. Generally ecstatic and excessive is the judgement of the two best-known Italian English literature scholars who were contemporaries of Strachey, Cecchi himself and Praz. 11 Among the victims of this magnetic fascination were Keynes, Virginia Woolf who received and weighed up an imprudent marriage proposal (§ 159.3), and the painter Dora Carrington, who later committed suicide, although Strachey was enamoured of her husband, Ralph Partridge. Strachey is camouflaged in numerous figures in the novels of the period: Neville in Woolf ’s The Waves, and before him Hirst in

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in the wake of Sainte-Beuve,12 with Eminent Victorians (1918) Strachey launched and patented the successful fashion of fictionalized biography, a formula that does not excel for objectivity, and has little or no heuristic value since it brings into play one’s own deforming prejudices (as, in the case of Strachey, disesteem for religion and a Voltairean iconoclastic laicism).13 In itself Strachey’s legacy is still remotely Paterian, since Pater was himself an unreliable historian of culture and art. Therefore also Paterian is the mannerism of Strachey’s partly imaginary literary portrait,14 although the prose is not Paterian, but florid, Baroque, flowery, and serpentine. As has been frequently remarked, it is a prose from which, without sacrificing and jeopardizing the basic meaning, one could remove many of the frills and paraphernalia.15 However, this does not mean we have to downplay or ignore the merits of a historical revisionism that are his by right. Strachey, with his biographies, did away with the widespread biographical custom which in the late nineteenth century meant that when an eminent figure died his most intimate friend, or often his devoted spouse, dedicated an arid memoir to him. This was a monument to Victorian hypocrisy, I have myself several times observed, because it served solely to cover up secrets, indiscretions and above all scandals, which had better remain buried to save the honour and not dirty the record of the deceased, thereby preventing the writing of unofficial biographies. It is symptomatic that Strachey’s Eminent Victorians achieved fame with a kind of parody of this kind of memoir, because he worked on four famous Victorian subjects (today The Voyage Out; and he obviously also appears in Lewis’s Apes of God and Forster’s Maurice. 12 WEL, vol. V, 108–9. 13 In the past Strachey was often erroneously praised as a very scrupulous historian who sifted through all the sources. Sutherland has incontrovertibly unmasked him as a plagiarist, albeit a very elegant one, in TLS, 5 September 2003, 5. 14 There is a collection in Books and Characters (1922), mainly on eighteenth-century French and English writers, but with parts on Browne, Shakespeare and Blake. Roughly the same set of characters is studied in the posthumous collection Characters and Commentaries (1933). 15 WAR, 227, who wittily tries to prune a sentence, and WEL, vol. V, 109, who cites some typical hyperboles that are extravagant or even shocking.

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we would call them icons) and therefore his was, implicitly, the genre of the remake.16 In practice, however, the skeletons in the cupboard are not revealed, nor do there emerge scandals or foul deeds regarding the four eminent Victorians; but simple reticence as a system was nonetheless to be blown open. Strachey rummages in all the cupboards, but finding very few skeletons; however, he studies a character that is no longer monolithic, one-dimensional, but cubistic so to speak, that is to say multifaceted, and therefore more complex and less statuary than the one handed down; he turns the subject showing it ‘from the sides and from the back’.17 Florence Nightingale is Longfellow’s ‘lady with a lamp’, but also an exterminating angel, that is to say a woman with the strength of tenacious will, and the mannish operator of good like Tennyson’s princess Ida. Cardinal Manning was not in the end so spiritual as was believed and he sought, almost diabolically, to marginalize and suffocate Newman all his life. Doctor Arnold had, perhaps, legs that were too short,18 and General Gordon constantly read the Bible, but sometimes, ‘under the parching African sun’, in his tent reached out his hand ‘towards stimulants of a more material quality’.19 This is the scope of a debunking that is always attenuated, and always kept at the level of the nuance and the allusion. Eminent Victorians appeared in a key year for English letters, that of the publication of Hopkins’s poems: they are, without mutual connections – and certainly on two very distant planes – parallel events and instances of reopening of the debate on Victorianism, whose reading they modify. Strachey had by then reached an estranged outlook that was distilled in the famous image of the Victorian age as a

16

17

18 19

This is highlighted, in a discussion that for him is exceptionally analytical and favourable, by WAR, 225–9, ending with the observation that Strachey left a small trail of biographers who were bad imitators of him, like Philip Guedalla, St John Ervine and Lord David Cecil. See a broader discussion in my own ‘I testi nel tempo: il vittorianesimo’, in MAR, vol. III, 562, also for a short examination of collections of essays and articles cited at n. 14, where the greater and more eminent is the Victorian character the less space is dedicated to him. Eminent Victorians, Harmondsworth 1984, 165. Ibid., 203.

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strange fish in an aquarium, which you do not know whether to admire or to look at with shivers. These ambivalences, however, were almost entirely lost in Queen Victoria (1921), where Strachey fell victim to sentimentalism, compunction, and the Victorian reverence that he wanted to satirize, unthinkably writing a hagiographic biography. Equally anonymous is his third historiographic work, Elizabeth and Essex (1928). § 170. Compton-Burnett* I: The dirty laundry of Victorianism In one of the rare explanatory definitions of her art, which is among the most elegant, sophisticated, meticulously designed, and at the same 20

*

Burnett’s twenty novels were almost all published by the London publisher Gollancz. P. Hansford Johnson, I. Compton-Burnett, London 1951; R. Liddell, The Novels of I. Compton-Burnett, London 1955; F. Baldanza, Ivy Compton-Burnett, New York 1964; C. Burkhart, I. Compton-Burnett, London 1965; B. Nevius, Ivy Compton-Burnett, New York and London 1970; R. Glynn Grylls, I. Compton-Burnett, ed. I. Scott-Kilvert, London 1971; The Art of Ivy Compton-Burnett: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. C. Burkhart, London 1972; C. Greig, Ivy Compton-Burnett: A Memoir, London 1972; V. Powell, A Compton-Burnett Compendium, London 1973; E. Sprigge, The Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett, London 1973; V. Ramakrishnarao, Ivy Compton-Burnett: A Critical Study, Waltair 1974; R. N. Sarkar, Ivy Compton-Burnett: A Trend in English Fiction, Calcutta 1979; B. Bini, ‘“Words Are Such an Unsatisfactory Medium, Dear”. Ripetizione e discorso in Ivy Compton-Burnett’, in La performance del testo (Atti del VII Congresso Nazionale dell’Associazione italiana di Anglistica), ed. F. Marucci and A. Bruttini, Siena 1984, 235–43; H. Spurling, Ivy: The Life of I. Compton-Burnett, New York 1984 (brings together the two volumes Ivy When Young: The Early Life of I. Compton-Burnett 1884–1919, London 1974, and Secrets of a Woman’s Heart: The Later Life of I. Compton-Burnett 1920–1969, London 1984); J. Bhagyalakshmi, Ivy ComptonBurnett and Her Art, Delhi 1986; S. Cenni, ‘Narrazione e strategia discorsiva in Brothers and Sisters di Ivy Compton-Burnett’, in Il sortilegio della parola. Voce narrativa and enunciazione in Conrad, Lawrence, Joyce, Compton-Burnett, Beckett, Roma 1989, 79–104; R. F. Kiernan, Frivolity Unbound: Six Masters of the Camp Novel, Thomas Love Peacock, Max Beerbohm, Ronald Firbank, E. F. Benson, P. G. Wodehouse, Ivy Compton-Burnett, New York 1990; K. J. Gentile, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Houndmills 1991; V. Olejniczak, Subjektivität als Dialog: Philosophische Dimensionen der Fiktion: Zur Modernität Ivy Compton-Burnetts, Munich 1994; B. Hardy, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Edinburgh 2016. The feature by Praz, ‘I romanzi di Ivy Compton-Burnett’, in CLA, vol. IV, 106–12, also filtered into his PSL, 709–12, with the ‘portrait’ of the pythoness

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time more unexpected examples of twentieth-century narrative experimentalism, Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884–1969) claimed she had no ‘real or organic knowledge of life later than about 1910’, and could not write ‘of later times with enough grasp or confidence’. It is true: in her novels anachronism of theme and subject reigns supreme, and she depicts Victorian society at the end of the nineteenth century and in the early Edwardian years. Alongside this fixity of time there is unity of place, since her novels, in some cases set in the very English institution of the public school, always have a choral arrangement, with scenes of a community, sometimes that of the teaching staff but more often that of a family, with the co-presence of two or three generations, without counting other branches and family links.1 This decided option regarding the spatio-temporal setting, with the addition of a certain heat and warmth of the nursery, could appear nostalgic, and indeed it is, but it is well contained. Compton-Burnett’s narrative corpus is an album of Victorian photos, but not exactly in Arnold Bennett’s sense:2 it is double-edged nostalgia, veined with sharp satire, and rejection. The writer wants to exhume and at the same time to satirize. This Victorian ‘fake’ accentuates the slowness of the life of that ethos, an ethos that was already on the way out at the end of the nineteenth century, or still offered a little golden age to a wealthy middle class that, having cut off the links with the working class, was still to be autarchic for a while. The world depicted is an autobiography, recovered but filtered by an impassive and inflexibly objectified narrator. Ivy Compton-Burnett, the daughter of a homeopath, lost her father at sixteen. She was one of eleven children from two marriages, like Virginia Woolf; a further affective lack was due to her mother sending her children away to study as soon as possible. She was in harmony above all with two brothers, Guy, who died of influenza, and Noel, killed

and Sibyl, ‘bony, wrinkly, with sharp features and griffin’s eyes’, ‘with lips tightened by a lattice of wrinkles, disguised as an English spinster, whom you might meet at a pension in Assisi’, is a splendid example of personal impressionism, though it has little to do with Burnett’s novels. 1

The school is physically separated from the house, but is contained in the house and is the ‘schoolroom’, when young children are educated by a private tutor. 2 § 17.

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in the war; and two sisters, who both committed suicide one Christmas day. Likewise autobiographical is the claustrophobia of these novels. In narrow oppressive environments, morbid and tortuous relationships prevail, also visible in the endless dialogues with which the characters torture one another rather than communicating decisions. But from these elements of personal history her work rises to the status of an objective gallery. An imaginary community is constructed and set apart, like the cosmos of Jane Austen. There comes into play that separate dispensation on which Gaskell splendidly insisted in Cranford (in turn the founder of utopian and nonexistent communities created by women, the universes of Carlingford of Mrs Oliphant, of George Eliot with Middlemarch), and whose cardinal points are the rectory, the mansion and the patrician residence, small trades, with the reduced echoes of life at large, and contacts with the world chopped off; or with the microcosm of the school, the house and family. Taken as a whole, Compton-Burnett’s corpus swarms with hundreds of characters, from the absolute protagonist to the occasional walk-on. There are twenty novels, but removing the first one, which was disowned, and the last one, which was unfinished, they amount to eighteen, almost half the number of Shakespeare’s plays, and almost the same number as Dickens’s novels. And one has also to mention Browning as a precedent for the varied sample of humanity. There is also similar richness of situations and plots. Gradually a kind of manual of possible conjugal and parental combinations is formed. The Compton-Burnett family structure is in some cases very broad, and every household is a living genealogy, three generations usually, with servants. Brothers have intercourse with the same woman, sons steal women from their fathers and their children, and vice versa; widowers remarry, vanished husbands and wives return, cousins would get married but discover they are stepbrothers and stepsisters. These were not rare situations in the Victorian period, as statistics bear witness, and several writers also came from these generational alchemies. Hence one way of reading Compton-Burnett is in terms of a game with Victorian sensationalism and of a parody of it. That template, in its final phase, is employed with the exact ingredients of the genre: stolen letters, wills changed in extremis, or scammed with deception, eavesdropping, godfathers and godmothers and hence adopted children, or natural children who appear thanks to the overused intermediate or final recognition – the daily bread of Dickens, Trollope, even Meredith,

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or Hardy, or also, when she resorts to changed identities and homonymy, Wilkie Collins. But at a distance the vision is more unprejudiced and mischievous. Compton-Burnett does not shy away from the skeletons in the Victorian closet, like incest, murder, premarital and extramarital liaisons, conjugal infidelity, and despicable about-faces. The criminal rate has risen, the cloak of respectability and prudery is torn. Yet the foul deeds are quietly reabsorbed, and narrated and discussed they do not arouse horror. If there is an ideological frame in such an impassive narrator, one has to point to financial aims and therefore the incidence of avarice in life; and, because of this, a struggle for supremacy of a Darwinian kind. The cardinal points of Compton-Burnett’s ‘philosophy’ are indeed Darwin, Marx and partly the theologian Calvin. Late nineteenth-century life is a struggle by everyone against everyone for goals of supremacy; and therefore a kind of eliminatory competition in which the strongest win. Compton-Burnett does not believe in any god, even if there is a strong desire in her to take revenge against him, in figures of sceptical and burlesque reverends. She fundamentally believes that humanity is corrupt, that history is a drift towards evil, and that man is predestined, even if he valiantly fights to redeem himself. She is therefore a radically Manichaean writer, as one gathers from her often binary titles, and one that constructs an unredeemed narrative cosmos and a chain of defeats. Poetic justice can only be abolished. Critics hoped to find in her novels epilogues that rewarded the good and punished the wicked; the author retorted that evil in the world is almost never punished. 2. Compton-Burnett is placed at the opposite end of the scale from popular and easy-to-read novelists who dealt with family histories and sagas in her time. She is a revered and mythicized cult author, one of a coterie.3 After all her background was one of austere classical studies and her work, extremely intertextual and allusive, is interwoven with continual literary references.4 She began with the novel of the parsonage, or of the governess 3 4

There were ultimately few imitators; among the great writers was Nathalie Sarraute, the author of an appreciation that noted in Compton-Burnett a dialogue which is on the border between conversation and sub-conversation. Subtle and continual are references to literary works, following refined threads like the chain of allusions formed by proper names and surnames. The names are always deliberately chosen, never at random, and last but not least in almost every work characters have surnames of writers in the tradition.

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and the Oxfordian and therefore university novel (bringing Newman and Froude to mind), blended with that of female sacrifice, with countless precedents. With her second novel she may have stimulated the public school novel, which became popular again in the 1920s with the early Waugh. With a clean break in 1924 she inaugurated the novel of the patrician abode of the upper middle class. She could only write until the end objectified autobiographical variations. It is normal that usually and proverbially tense relations should be absolutized and hypostatized, like those that reigned in the typical Victorian family. She also captures the romance of childhood in the nursery, with loving nurses more maternal than mothers when they are not instead perfidious plotters, and with the poetry and pathos of children. And spontaneous solidarity exists among gentlemen, until it is spoilt by the Hyde side of their personality getting the upper hand. Few other novelists have succeeded in creating scenes in which members of the family debate frankly and wittily with servants and subordinates, or others in which instead of studying students tease their tutors, or where we have the prattle of cooks and butlers. Compton-Burnett’s detailed biographies have proved the facile assumption that autobiography is a basis from which to break away along the tangent of imagination and reinvention.5 The paradox is that the anachronism of the theme and the subject is worked out in Compton-Burnett with a technique that can be defined at the same time conservative, modern, modernistic, even postmodern. Some aspects of her writing are modernistic, others are not; others are modernistic through a conscious form of conservation, others through violation that however regards quantity, not quality, like the prevalence of dialogue. Her novels almost seem to belong to the comedy of manners, the world of school and the abode of the squire, the distinctive figure of the middle and late Victorian novel, but deprived of all exteriors, and resolved in dialogic skirmishes that are made denser and prolonged, and without selection. Recounting the plots of Burnett’s novels one may give the impression that they are charming like few others. The actual test of reading them casts doubts on this: the events, numerous and tending to the nature of the sensational novel and the thriller, are not narrated and described (possibly 5

These discrepancies are all highlighted in the indispensable biography by Spurling 1985.

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analytically) with the weapon of climax, but reported in dry and hasty lines, summed up and hence even quickly submerged in the dialogic development (and we will have to be surprised at noticing the few exceptions to this method). The risk run, a calculated one, is that the experiment sooner or later may be tedious, and indeed many phases of Burnett’s novels do not avoid being that. In practice, her materials are obvious ones – the landowner, the patriarchal family, the rector or vicar, the school headmaster – and yet they are submitted to radical revision in relation to the plots that could derive from them.6 The mixed technique of the middle novels, which alternate rapid captions and dialogues, and introduce in an orderly manner every character as soon as he or she appears in a sort of parade on the stage, with the classic physical and psychosomatic portrait, can be seen as showing a retro taste and as a form of respect for a tested genre. Small variations with respect to the classic technique are the change of place between presentation or portrait of a character and the latter’s words. Compton-Burnett reverses the relationship and sequence of the series, and invariably first gives the words of a dialogue, proleptic in relation to the portrait that confirms and follows them. She goes beyond the drama without captions, because she is not interested in placing a scene in space and giving information on the weather or the historical time of an action. The space is a bare scene to guess at or to imagine. And if many scenes take place during breakfast or lunch, nothing is said of their actual phases, and all documentary naturalism has disappeared. Compton-Burnett’s experimentalism is never that of the stream of consciousness, because we do not have monologues but dialogues. The psychology of the characters constructs itself, and is to be deduced by putting together the empirical data disseminated in the dialogue, thus indirectly. Actually, her dialogic technique is precisely the opposite of the stream of consciousness, which implies a psyche that is socially split, introverted, solitary, whereas in Compton-Burnett one can only think of the character as interacting with other characters, thus socially related, and extrovert. Not even the concept of time is that of Modernism, since it is neither convex, nor retroactive, nor epiphanic: it is 6

Cf. the treatment of this point in Nevius 1970, 11.

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simply linear, and it is always advancing, so that there is not a single prolepsis in the whole corpus. The school and the multigenerational family in the country house are two chronotopes that lie both outside the city. This aspect seems categorically to exclude Compton-Burnett from Modernism, one at least of whose hallmarks is being a literature of the city and of movement (‘In the twentieth century movement is felt, in the nineteenth century it isn’t’, declared Gertrud Stein).7 Sooner or later, reading and continuing to read Compton-Burnett’s corpus, one has to play the game and accept its aesthetic contract. A great many times people have deprecated the conversation novel, the novel of ideas or the dialogic novel, and hence purely dilatory dialogue, vacuous, banal, with an expletive function. With Compton-Burnett we need to undergo and positivize the subversion of this preconception, that the novel is indeed taut diegesis with dialogues that are functional to it. The relationship is turned upside-down, and the dilatory becomes primary and the primary dilatory. The dialogue subsumes the narrative function, and takes on the task of constructing the character and enwrapping and enucleating pure events. In ComptonBurnett the prelude, the interlude and the connecting piece strictly speaking do not exist. The question that one has to ask oneself in the end is whether there is a single novel of Compton-Burnett’s eighteen in the canon that does not start with a line of dialogue; more certain is the answer to the question of whether dialogue is the technical pivot of all of them. The dialogic novel, which is a kind of contradiction in terms, turns in asymptotic progression towards the pure play, and for some scholars it indeed overflows into it.8 Anyone who considers Compton-Burnett unique forgets that this dialogic novel is a phenomenon that is attested in the 1920s, perhaps as a reaction to the excess of omniscience and hence of authorial comment and of psychological, descriptive and moralizing remarks in the Victorian and post-Victorian novel. Compton-Burnett’s stubbornly remaining in the domains of the novel is explained by the paradoxical 7 8

Quoted in Nevius 1970, 12. The author was aware of it, and said that her books were halfway between the narrative genre and the tragic one, and that the novelistic form ‘suit[ed] [her] better than the pure play’ (quoted in Nevius 1970, 20).

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realization that the novel affords greater margins of freedom and indeterminacy. The pure play is more tied to stage conventions, it has to last a certain time, and necessarily has to be more placed and the action more unitary. In the novel, instead, several separate scenes may follow one another ad infinitum.9 In Compton-Burnett’s external design one distinguishes a main plot and a subplot, as in Elizabethan plays, with the almost inevitable funny character who shoots off tirades and great successful speeches. This theatrical approach can certainly have, in the assortment of characters and in the blood relationships, the complications of the second phase of Trollope, who practically wrote his novels in series. But they cannot fail to evoke classical dramatic situations from the Greeks on. A reviewer wrote that Compton-Burnett transposes Aeschylus into the key of Jane Austen.10 From the Greeks comes the concept of impending fate that weighs on the unwitting, often in the form of children that do not know they are adoptive but are natural children, so that there are secrets about them that, jealously guarded, inexorably surface. Vaguely Oedipal material is blended with other material coming from Plautine, Elizabethan and Shakespearean comedy. Each novel opens on a fragile equilibrium ready to fall apart; and an out-of-sync milieu is created, outside historical time, in plots that are forerunners of the drama of the absurdity of violence, as in Bond, sometimes in Beckett, sometimes in Pinter, also because a nihilistic postulate acts in them, namely that one cannot believe in anything except unbelief. Also abolished are all marks of dramatic realism because one perceives no regional differences of pronunciation, and no humble character, such as the waiter or the cook, speaks with dialect inflexions.

9

This is what the novelist herself suggests in one of her laconic interviews (cf. Gentile 1991, 22 and n. 12). 10 Quoted in Burkhart 1965, 65. The inapplicability of the laws and forms of Greek tragedy is maintained by KRG, 204–5, who notes that incest, matricide and parricide are reabsorbed into normality and do not cause any tragic consequence.

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3. Praz11 noticed, but without too much praise,12 that one novel of Burnett’s was worth as much as another, and implicitly, therefore, that they constituted a series. The surprise that Compton-Burnett holds in store is her devotion and dedication to the vehicle of the novel and nothing but the novel; it is also her rigour in adhering to the finished form. No notebooks, manifestos, plays or stories or poems or travel books and books of impressions has come from her as diversion or residue or pastime; only a few interviews, and hence production limited to a great many homogeneous ‘acts’ of a single macrotext. Seriality means in particular brave repudiation of the obligation to renew: what novelist would have or can have had the courage to write the same novel eighteen times, and not plan any change, not choose as his or her own the law of revision or even of revolution? Behind Compton-Burnett’s novels there nests an aesthetic of challenge and an aesthetic challenge. One can look at this edifice from afar to appreciate the homogeneity of its floors. And ComptonBurnett is the writer who most plans, and the most architectural one, of the twentieth century. She seems to have sat down in advance at her desk to plan and organize this layout or this planimetry, and she remained faithful to it in time. Like every architect, she also laid down the time schedules, and the building grew to the inexorable rhythm, and with the deadline respected, of two novels a year.13 They remind us of the pictures of painters like Constable and Monet, frequently on the same subject, or of those puzzles that consist of a comparison between two vignettes only differing in a few small details; or, an overused simile but one valid in this case, the changing images in a kaleidoscope. Compton-Burnett, like Shakespeare – and more than Shakespeare, who did not write prefaces to his plays and wholly objectified himself in them, but at least left us a corpus of sonnets; like Beckett, and more than Beckett – brings us face to face with the repetition in a series of the same nucleus and the same varied 11 12 13

PSL, 711. The suspicion of seriality as monotony or lack of specification and relief is also found in KRG, 211. This seriality is fully witting, self-conscious, in the declaration ‘I’m a biennial’ (quoted in Nevius 1970, 33).

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narrative skeleton. Now this strong sense of seriality, which makes the novels sequences or acts of an imaginary single work, has as a consequence that one can read them passing comfortably from one to the other, for the purposes of a reading tending to trace motifs that are repeated, and are varied and modulated, as in a musical score.14 The seriality is very subtle when the novels are an artificial onomastic game. A Swift can only be called Jonathan; but a person with the surname Bacon is not called, because of failure to understand this seriality, Francis. In the same novel a teacher is called Maria Rosetti. Compton-Burnett’s intertextuality is precisely a serial game, as well as being a postmodern one. Some novels, in virtue of the evocative names and surnames of its characters and the nature of the plot, mix resonances of classics of the past and of the tradition, like Oedipus or King Lear, and therefore redo them. The purity of this seriality is even greater than that of Beckett, because Compton-Burnett did not contaminate and vary, and therefore also dissolve it, veering towards other genres. In the single microtext the seriality lies in the clever combination of the elements, once they are given. It is not rare for Compton-Burnett’s novels to begin and end with a family reunion, which is repeated and returns after a trajectory of order-disorder-reordering, but with a dramatic change in-between; so the final order, which in a sense cries out for revenge, is sarcastic, a pure arrangement or a cover-up.15 Nor is it rare for this initial family reunion to be the prelude to a rite, that of breakfast,16 either at school or in the family. To this rite – the inauguration of the school year, Christmas day or the birthday of the head of the family – some characters always come late, thus setting the plot going. The ticking of the two worlds 14 Almost all the critical monographs share out the roles, patterns, narrative functions, and the pure statistics of a cosmos or universe which is precisely serial, and one is surprised at the absence of any study by the formalists and structuralists of the 1970s. 15 Nevius 1970, 33, notices a return to the status quo, highlighting the staticness of the characters, which have no appreciable evolution, so that the plot does not advance through ‘causative’ links, but only through occasions that bring to light an always latent identity. Nevius cites the disapproval of Kingsley Amis for this way of constructing the plot. 16 A rite always signalled, like other meals, by the sound of the gong.

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remains fixed, with the oscillation between childhood and adulthood, or between the three generations of the grandparents, the children and the children of the children’s children; or that between the family and the school. In the long run, however, the exasperation of seriality and the absence of breaks cause an aesthetic damage, because the writer has to retrace her footsteps. The last novels shuffle the cards, and are serial because they are mature rewritings, or worsened versions, of previous plots. The early novels are bitterer, more vigorous and daring; the ones that follow more elliptic, flashing, refined to the limit of exhaustion. § 171. Compton-Burnett II: The beginnings A serial corpus contains the implicit rule of the need for and of the appropriateness of a transversal, relational and paradigmatic reading, rather than chronological, syntagmatic, and analytical, of every single unit. Some critical works on Compton-Burnett do the one and/or the other, following a mixed method, by including in an appendix a summary of the novels one by one, which is necessarily a summary of the plot in the impossibility of operating on the microstructures. I would like to re-emphasize that their reduction to pure plots yields a distorted idea of Burnett’s novels and of their narrative development, and that, to use an English proverb, ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating’. In the present discussion, reluctantly, it was only possible to opt for the second solution, though I will always try to highlight every possible structural and serial connection. The subdivision of Burnett’s novels into three phases, the early one, the middle one and the final one, can be accepted with some difficulties regarding demarcation, and it is the result of some parameters. All through the 1940s the plots are slender, clear-cut, taut, and the characters well sculpted and their names stand out very clearly in the memory, like certain characters of Shakespeare’s. A decline appears when the inventiveness has used up part of its resources and the writer has to redo her remakes, so that plots are more conscious and schematic, implausible and even more abstract, and the dialogue is arid and rambling, or the human context has become plethoric and therefore blurred in some cases. As may easily be imagined, Compton-Burnett’s canon opens with an extra-canonical prologue, which in 1911, as for many other novelists, was at the same time a recapitulation

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of, a tribute to and a rejection of a waned civilization. It was not by pure chance that one had been born into it. Dolores, which was subsequently disowned by the author, has an unmistakable system of signs and a certain taste for looking back and backdating, with nostalgia mixed with elements of comedy and satire. The first and most evident of these hallmarks is the parsonage, with a vicar who remarries twice. Others are the daily routine of the village, the timid feminism of the old maids, the ineffectual romance of dreaming and sacrificial young girls; the recovery, from Jane Eyre and Middlemarch, of the motif of the young girl falling in love with an older man.17 But this young girl, who later becomes a submissive woman, was also a portrait that had just appeared with Bennett’s Anna of the ‘five towns’; and she also moves in an opposite direction to that of Wells’s Ann Veronica and Orwell’s ‘clergyman’s daughter’. Dolores is an ardent heart, but not to the point of wanting to assert herself with actions of supremacy. Her rough father does not perceive her ordeal, and the modest woman is violated in her intimacy by the two marriages which bring two stepmothers to her house. The novel follows her intellectual development against the background of her hurt feelings. She distinguishes herself at a female university college, where she could have a career, but meets an older playwright and becomes his disciple, like Dorothea with Casaubon.18 But she is even robbed of this achievement and the man of letters marries a fellow-student of hers. Always prodigal, she assists him as he is dying, and returns to the vicarage, where her father has remarried for the second time. The curtain comes down on a not very radiant tomorrow. The novel is more choral, more a community one, than one based on the nominal protagonist, starting from the first chapter which, with a bird’s eye view, and with the hallmark of the omniscient narrator, passes in review the figures of the magnates of the village, with the obligatory reference to the various religious confessions of the little village in Yorkshire, all separated by captious theological issues but united against abhorred popery. This sense of the small community, which unleashes continual storms in a 17 18

For other Victorian paradigms employed in the novel cf. Gentile 1991, 36, and Spurling 1974, 167–8. Both are in fact half-blind and have bad hearts.

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teacup and never fails to exhibit its phobias and its eccentricities, remains alive until the end. However, the novel is not yet exactly a Victorian ‘fake’, but instead a copy and a consummate parody between the lines. The preannouncements concern the style and the embryonic study of the psychological war between the characters. The showy stylistic mannerism points to Meredith and attracts the greatest attentions; hence there is not a search for the anecdote or the comic and humorous cameo, and when there is the quality is a little colourless. Often the style appears to be not very English, rather artificial, rich in circumlocutions, such as to run into occasional solecisms (‘a great solemnness’),19 and to operate through precarious constructions and twisted formulations, when a simple one would be at hand, almost as if it had come from the pen of a non-native doing a translation20 (without it being clear if it is due to lack of familiarity with the language, real immaturity or deliberate choice). The effect is sometimes that of a rough draft with strange, flashing moments of linguistic eccentricity. The narrative pace itself is weary, the plot is of slight interest and does not generate suspense, and the main links are alluded to, often also skimmed over. The only incisive portrait is that of the first stepmother, a grim figure who with her brute commonsense wants to subjugate her stepdaughter. At the vicarage, besides, a whole mute struggle is fought between everyone for supremacy, with hidden or only insinuated barbs; and in the village feelings and self-respect are stamped on, and marriages are badly made up between young girls and no longer young men. 2. This first novel came out before, and the second one after, 1922, the revolutionary year par excellence in English literature. The fourteen years of inactivity are explained by the trauma suffered by Burnett over the loss of two brothers. When she published Pastors and Masters in 1925, her friend Jourdain said she was not aware that Compton-Burnett had worked on it; the funny thing is that the novel concerns in one aspect the very inspiration and gestation of a book that had matured in her for decades, and its fantastic misadventures. Two old friends, vain though almost seventy years old, are about to publish a book, but the first one has taken the manuscript 19 Which goes hand in hand with ‘the erraticisms of genius’ in Pastors and Masters. 20 Cf. Liddell 1955, 15.

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from a dying man believing he is the author of it, while it was instead written by the other friend (the fantastic tone, recalling that of Swift’s Tale of a Tub, is highlighted by the comic literary echoes: a Herrick steals a book from a Crabbe, though the real author is called Bumpus). The acme of the farce comes when the two authors read their book publicly, and Herrick at the first sentence realizes the imprudent step, stops abruptly, and burns his copy. At this stage the novel is a satire on fake inspiration, and hence a ‘vanity fair’, targeting the pompous dilettantism of those who feign to have been visited by sudden inspiration and by the muse. Headmaster Herrick makes a fine show of himself with borrowed creativeness, in the surge of his presumably senile inspiration, and is surrounded by people who butter him up. Technically Compton-Burnett by now has drastically cleansed the narration of informative captions, and limits herself to routine insertions showing rigorous objectivity. What there is of plot has to flow from the dialogue, and scene succeeds scene without perceptible connections and almost at random. Of course not everything is new, and indeed in its design this is still an apprenticeship novel that falls within a well defined sub-genre, that of the extravaganza, of the burlesque story, of the brief fantasy without spatiotemporal connections, set in the tried and tested scenario of a public school. The cunning and intemperate schoolchildren, the complacent headmasters, the picturesque masters together with others full of complexes, with matrons in the background – this is a mythology harking back, if we like, to Dickens. But, as in Firbank, the dialogue is not filtered, but random, nonsensical chatter, and the narrative development is not consequential, but only a series of dialogues from which events emerge in the domain of the surreal and the parodic. The opening chapter has a certain verve and some movement, although it does nothing but follow a well-known track already beaten countless times, the uproar of school, the rowdiness of pupils and the idiosyncrasies of the teaching staff in the classic moment of morning assembly and breakfast. Waugh’s Decline and Fall begins almost in the same way, and Compton-Burnett seems to have taken a lot from this novel, for example the prize-giving ceremony, though she develops the plot in a more traditional and neo-Dickensian way, therefore airier and more amusing. Then the second chapter gets bogged down in a multiple dialogue, hopping from one subject to another in the headmaster’s

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office, and is followed by numerous others without much connection. With hindsight we can discover that Compton-Burnett aims at creating an abstract and in a sense allegorical community, and hence examples of duplications of veiled or explicit tyrannies, without however making us feel the author’s touch and in a climate of complete abstention. The groove is dug out not so much among the pastors, of which there are always many, but among the frustrated old maids, sadly though wittily resigned, and other figures of males who are gratified in their desire to tyrannize. The man is puffed up, the woman only has the weapon of the repartee. With this pudeur in the dialogue there surfaces the controversy on the agenda, the rights of the women who have just ‘won a prize’ with the granting of the vote. Emily, Headmaster Herrick’s fifty-year-old sister, is a more elderly Dolores. An inevitable reverend, demanding and excessively severe, treats his children roughly, and it is a contained satire because the tyrant plays the part of the misunderstood victim.21 § 172. Compton-Burnett III: The nemesis of parental tyranny Brothers and Sisters (1929) is still a novel of transition, or of adjustment, and largely traditional. Hence it cannot yet be taken, or not entirely, as the structural foundation and norm of Compton-Burnett’s fiction. Meanwhile it is her only non-juvenile novel that begins with a prelude in the third person, not with dialogue and in medias res. And while the time is vague, the second half of the nineteenth century, the place is in effect imaginary but is named, and there is equilibrium between description and dialogue, and there are changes of scenario, rather than the prevalence of the proverbial

21

More Women Than Men (1933) will return to the school setting, a girls’ school, and therefore it seems like a reworking ‘in series’ of Pastors and Masters for the many similar characters and repeated episodes. The headmistress, Josephine Napier, hypocritically masks vested interest and her own advantage as altruism, and exemplifies evil that often goes unpunished, since in the end she is praised as ‘a noble creature’. The dominant feature of her wickedness is promiscuous libido, starting with her taking for herself her nephew by killing his wife. Discovered by one of her teachers, she silences her by making her a partner in the school, and also her lover. Also partly set in a school is Two Worlds and Their Ways, which I discuss below.

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claustrophobia of the country home. There is also a mixed visual focus, because the cases of the Staces are discussed by the marginal and secondary characters placed alongside them. Taken in itself, and extrapolated from the canon, it can even seem like a revisiting of the neo-Gothic and the sensational in the wake of Poe and Wilkie Collins. It narrates the ‘doom’ and hence also the ‘fall’ of the house of Stace, and revolves around Wilkie Collins’s motif of the ‘dead secret’; and it is precisely the homonymous novel by Collins that lies visibly behind it as a model.22 In the opening scene an old squire who is a widower, Andrew Stace, is nervously about to bequeath all his property to an adopted son, Christian, with the dark threat of disinheriting him if he marries his daughter Sophia. Immediately afterwards the eighty-year-old man dies and Christian wonders why the old man preferred to make him his heir although he is not a blood relative. The explanation is in a letter to be read after his death, which contains the ‘inviolable secret’ of the consanguinity of Christian and Sophia, who are stepbrother and stepsister. But Sophia has hidden the key to the drawer, because she believes that there is a will that disinherits them if she marries Christian. When the second chapter starts, twenty-five years have elapsed and the two stepbrothers – by a decree of Collins’s fate, as it were – have got married and have three children. Christian is unaware; Sophia, instead, is shattered by torment and vents her neurosis with acts of gratuitous imperiousness. The imprint, as I mentioned, is that of the atavistic, original, unwitting curse that Calvinistically falls on the following generations: the sins of the fathers are visited on the children.23 The series of inexorable recognitions starts with Christian’s discovery, thanks to an album of photos, of the identity of his mother, seduced by old Stace, a mother who has also had other children who with their marriages threaten to perpetuate and propagate the incestuous curse. However, the secret is half out, and Christian does not yet know who his father is, and his mother, who could have told him, dies. He pursues the truth, and also wants to foil and stymie 22 23

See my analysis of The Dead Secret in Volume 5, § 170.4, to get an idea of the many ingredients – sin, the natural son passed off as adoptive, the letter contained in a closed drawer, heart disease – which may have been taken from it. KRG, 217, but referring to another novel.

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the curse, sharing the paradigmatic effort of all the anti-Calvinistic novels. Old Stace too is a ‘strait-laced’ puritan who failed to withstand evil and temptation, because against sin and evil there is no defence. The defeat of these efforts appears complete, and human capacities for redemption annulled, when, having opened the drawer and read the letter, Christian dies of a broken heart. The drawer has to be opened and the letter read; but the truth is not revealed coram populo, and Sophia dies too, taking the secret with her to the grave. 2. Men and Wives (1931), a second ‘fall’ of a ‘house’ in the manner of Poe, really inaugurates Compton-Burnett’s major canon because it essentially is – as will be the case from now on for a good number of novels – a dramatic study in temporal continuity. The absence of prolepsis, flashbacks and chronological hiatuses accentuates both the real absence of an aetiology of psychic disorder and the ineluctable propagation of the fatal curse. Harriet Haslam is a demonic and raging mother, but humanized in the breakdown of the desire for power over her family. For this tyranny no cause or distant genesis is recognized in the novel, just as the helpless husband Godfrey knows of none. Harriet is therefore as unaware of her thirst for power, and incapable of controlling it, as Sophia Stace was aware of it. Harriet dies but having induced her children to follow the careers that she intended for them; her husband as the result of a testamentary disposition cannot remarry; and her son, who has killed his mother with an overdose of sleeping pills, turns himself in but is not believed. The plot overflows with events, and the design is superficially very similar to that of famous Victorian detective stories, with an attempted suicide, avoided, and a murder which succeeds. Actually, the suspense is allowed to dissolve even when it could easily be exploited. The narrative register is fluctuating, and dialogue of a daily and functional type and real melodramatic arias alternate in it, said and recited by characters conscious of reciting; therefore the narrating voice does not identify with them but is alienated.24 The break-up of a family, as we can guess from the title, is also the theme of A House and Its Head (1935), which, in a narrative modality 24 Especially in the scene of Harriet saying goodbye to her family believing that she has ingested the deadly poison and not a harmless soporific.

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that verges on pulp genre, lays on no end of horrors as in the remake of some dark Elizabethan tragedy or some Gothic or Grand Guignol novel.25 It also seems to suggest the allegory of the ill-omened effects of puritanical religiousness that, suffocating eros, produces impotence of love. The domestic despotism of Duncan Edgeworth, who resorts to sadistic brutalities against his family and demands that reach the point of absurdity, cloaks itself with abstract and contradictory divine love, thus becoming a study on religious hypocrisy. In reality, the imperious reasons of fate cooperate with the Darwinian struggle for supremacy. Duncan’s nephew and heir commits a human error and vainly asks his uncle for forgiveness for having impregnated his second wife, but the latter abandons both; and the child dies. It is here that Duncan’s daughter Sibyl gradually emerges on the scene as the winner, with a real final rush out of relative anonymity. She has had the heir eliminated, artfully succeeds in obtaining a sizeable legacy, and imposes her new power on the family, ousting her father and subduing him with everyone else in the family. The curtain comes down on a family reunited in forced cohabitation, without anyone being punished and without the guilty being condemned. 3. The novels that immediately ensue exclude the natural or unnatural misdeed and are oriented towards a demonstration of human cowardice and moral weakness, loosening the grip of Greek fate and reacquiring the taste of the Victorian farce centring on the deluded person or the bitterly reawakened fool. Daughters and Sons (1937) presents itself at the start as the paradigm of Compton-Burnett’s seriality in its purest and most quintessential form. An umpteenth upper middle class community is in trouble and must once again incur the fatal threat of the ‘fall’.26 No less classic is the set of the characters in its most complete genealogical tree, which at the vertex has Sabine Ponsonby, a grandmother who is over eighty, and further down her daughter

25 26

Burkhart 1965, 108, judges the comic subplot a form of attenuation of the ‘dark’ colour of this novel. This motif emerges, threatening and at the same time humorous, in the conversations in the family, aware that the decrepit grandmother is shaky and is about to hand over the sceptre. Of her it is said that she always speaks with ‘some explicitness’, as ‘the result of her pre-Victorian youth’.

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Hetta and her son, John, a widower and novelist with five children, some of them adults, while the youngest one, Muriel, is still entrusted to a governess. In the claustrophobic space a cosmic contest is played out, the irony being that its theatre is made up of the four narrow domestic walls. The curtain does not fail to go up on the ceremony of breakfast, preceded by morning prayers, with the regular delay of at least one table companion. The dialogue is entrusted with suggesting, rather than really declaring, the silent clashes of character and the longstanding neuroses that, taking advantage of the weakness of the paternal figure, brew in an environment governed by a double and joint matriarchal power, that of the grandmother and the daughter, which the grandchildren oppose with timid rebellions. The closing of the horizons and the oppressive climate are testified to by the further rites of the Sunday church service and of the theatrical show, which brings in some excitement through the fact that the script is taken, unbeknownst to the father, from the first novel of one of his daughters. The big issue with which the novel gets going in the Ponsonby household is the search for a governess for the youngest granddaughter. The plot struggles more than in other novels to get going, and to lose the anonymity and predictable asphyxial stillness of Compton-Burnett’s novels. But at the expected striking of its middle point it sets going an action that on a small scale is fatal, with a dense intersection of matrimonial negotiations which, proverbially implying older people, are opportunistic and cynical moves rather than ravishing romantic passions. The thematic pattern emerges as the inexorable passage from the imposition of domestic power to its erosion and surrender; in actual fact, power passes from the hands of the grandmother and her daughter to those of the daughter-in-law (‘Who will be the most important in the house?’).27 It is evident that Compton-Burnett’s inexorable restoration of the status quo implies in this case a radical change, ‘a great change’. Among these changes is a budding female novelist who arouses her father’s jealousy, and exploits the name of the governess to present a manuscript to a publisher. This governess becomes the plotter of a series of complicated stratagems that lead to the death of the grandmother and that of the mother, and to her installation as 27

Threatened with the loss of her power, Hetta pretends to run away from home, but returns thinking she has taught ‘a lesson’.

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the mistress of the house. All the plots and secrets come out during a disastrous lunch. Hetta completes Dolores, Compton-Burnett’s first heroine, in the uselessness of her sacrifice, which does not benefit anybody. 4. A Family and a Fortune28 (1939) is a cynical moral fable on weakness and on the collapse of the feeling of brotherly honour, and hence among blood relatives, not only of purely interpersonal feeling. It therefore pessimistically shows an inexorable process that leads to the ultimate exchange of roles between the subdued and subduer, a conclusion that derives from cold evaluation of human corruptibility due to avarice. Dudley, a bachelor, lives with his brother Edgar and his family in their paternal mansion; Edgar’s wife is sickly, and the family in financial straits. The turning point, the announcement of a very large inheritance, comes exactly halfway through the novel, which at first sails slowly gathering manifold minor characters on the way. That unexpected inheritance is generously shared by Dudley and made available to his brother’s family. But when Dudley decides to get married, his sister-in-law being dead, his brother Edgar steals his betrothed from him. Dudley makes the best of a bad bargain, runs away from home, wanders in the heath like King Lear and humiliates himself, but finally returns to undergo subjugation. The Darwinian lesson is clear: the good succumb and are punished, the wicked survive and triumph. The corrupting and unhinging power of money in the two brothers, one altruistic and the other wicked and an exploiter, recalls Dickens, beginning from Nicholas Nickleby. In other words, the question is how money influences those who receive it. Dudley philosophizes, echoing Montaigne and other stoics, that it does not make people happy and must not change life; but everyone suddenly makes his or her rapacious and indefeasible requests. This confirms the rule of the return, only apparent, actually profoundly altered, to the status quo. A similar demonstrative context is applied to two friends in Parents and Children (1941), Compton-Burnett’s bitter De amicitia. Eleanor Sullivan is essentially a woman and mother who is disoriented for sociological and historical reasons, such as financial difficulties in the class of impoverished 28

This novel opens predictably with the family going down from the top floors to the dining room, where the day opens with the breakfast rite.

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squires, in that the large family is forced to live in unnatural cohabitation with in-laws.29 Her husband, having for work reasons to spend a period away from home, has his bachelor friend Ridley come there, and the latter makes Eleanor believe that her husband has died at sea and marries her. It is an old Victorian serial trick,30 and indeed on the very eve of the wedding the husband reappears, like Tennyson’s Enoch Arden. This is almost the only time in Compton-Burnett when the initial situation is restored in extremis without apparent damage, and without a change; but the intentions were malignant. § 173. Compton-Burnett IV: Novels of servants and of three generations The female protagonist of Elders and Betters31 (1944) has no more adversaries. Greatly enlivened by surprise twists and alternating the spheres of the families of two in-laws, the novel witnesses the emergence of a chain of relationships in which a dominator dominates; but the dominated person can also seek compensation in a form of subjugation. A principle is established and attested, namely that a division is no longer possible but only a mixture between good and evil, positive and negative impulses, in the human psyche. The offstage comment by the author herself was that ‘it would go ill for many of us, if we were faced by a strong temptation’.32 A Victorian stratagem33 is that of Aunt Sukey, who first writes a will in favour of her niece Anna, then repents and burns it. Or so she believes,

29

The portraits of the nine Sullivan children, divided into the three groups of the small ones, the middle ones and the older ones, and accompanied by those of the nurses, the wet-nurses and the governesses who give them the love which the mother is incapable of giving, are among the most moving and sympathetic in all the writer’s novels. 30 Done by suppressing a letter, as often in Victorian novels. 31 In this novel Benjamin Donne utters the ritual sentence right at the beginning: ‘Well, my daughter, […] so we are united once again’, but alluding to the move of the entire family to a new house, and not to the usual morning breakfast. 32 Quoted in Burkhart 1965, 113. 33 The watch over the sick rich man, who can favourably alter a will, recalls a scene in Middlemarch.

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because Anna prevents it.34 She stands up to her mother, causes her suicide, and catches a rich husband, without anybody discovering and revealing her machinations. She finds a rare pendant in Sukey, since they are two exploiters and egoists united by a common design. Anna plays the part well, able to put on an imperturbable air with anyone who has suspicions, and to lie brazen-facedly without flinching. The ninth chapter of the novel is a long third degree, which proceeds with a confrontation between aunt and niece in the tenth; these are two chapters, especially the second, in which the language rises to the Elizabethan ‘grand style’, with all the tonal gradations from challenge to invocation and sarcasm.35 Manservant and Maidservant (1947) for the first time undoubtedly blends the comic with the caricatural and the tragic, and mordancy with caresses.36 As it deals at length with the servants, the Dickensian echo and imitation are more unmistakable, and never as in this novel is there empathy with the portrait of the childish community, of whimpering children ganging up with one another, a source of witty and often scandalous answers and observations. The macroscopic novelty is precisely the shift of the magnifier from the ‘betters’ to the socially inferior, that is to say from the upper noble floor to the area under the stairs and the basement. Or there is an equitable division of spaces. Lamb tyrannizes his children, Bullivant treats inferiors haughtily, but with his superiors he observes a code of perfect obsequiousness; he is

34 35 36

This is one of the longest scenes narrated in the third person, instead of reconstructed from dialogues in the first, in Compton-Burnett’s novels. Anna, a woman with a dwarf ’s physique and a rachitic head, made Nevius 1979, 35, think of Richard III. One caricature is a local shopkeeper who cannot read or write, and manages victoriously to keep this shortcoming hidden from a great many characters that are on the point of finding out. The footman George grew up in the proverbial Victorian workhouse, but he specifies that the experience was much less unhappy than Oliver Twist’s. Above all in this case, the characters’ speech does not differ in pronunciation and correctness from the neutral standard of their superiors. In other words, it has no dialectal or cockney inflexion, as happens in Dickens. The oscillation of the stylistic register, however, is highlighted as in no other novel, especially in the inflated and formalized language of the butler Bullivant. On the imperceptible oscillations of the discursive register see the discussion in Burkhart 1965, 40–1.

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a philosopher of service. The plot, deliberately less inexorable, dissolves into modest little comedies, small accidental and ancillary subplots; only a minor thriller is that of a footman who tries to make his master fall from a precarious bridge by removing the ‘danger’ sign; he is discovered and repents. Horace Lamb is a Murdstone that keeps his children on short rations; they are shabby and underfed, as well as being frightened by their father. These are the old symptoms of the introverted and imploded loneliness of Victorian and Dickensian characters: of a Nickleby, a Scrooge, or other unbalanced people with an unhappy childhood.37 Lamb got married for profit, unlike his wife Charlotte. He is therefore hated by everybody as a Dickens villain, and his children want him dead and one of them even amuses himself with the perverse little game described in a poem by Rossetti, making a wax statue of him and piercing it (piercing the statue of a hated enemy is also a literal reminiscence of Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop).38 No less resoundingly Victorian is the scene of the deathbed, in which the misanthropist full of complexes, unavowedly needy of love, asks everyone for forgiveness; even more Dickensian is the surprise twist, when he recovers and must bring himself to perform again the part that he has played. But tyranny ends up being accepted by his family, and it is the umpteenth case of a Compton-Burnett novel that stages the restoration of the status quo. 2. In Two Worlds and Their Ways (1949), the oppositional pattern concerns the little pranks of children set alongside the revelation of the phobias and idiosyncrasies of adults. The title contains yet another allusion to the childish and adult worlds, with the weight of responsibility and guilt that mostly weighs on the latter. Balanced, symmetrical, based on coincidence, the plot overflows with a host of characters whose identity is not clearly defined and is therefore cursory. It begins with very long and laborious chapters in which the Shelley couple discuss the possibility of 37

38

Compton-Burnett almost never uses the symbol, at least insistently and evidently; but immediately at the beginning the fire that gives off smoke stands for the cooled affections in the Lamb household, and many of the initial phases are played out in the form of the symbolic, and grotesque, opposition between heat and freezing. Volume 5, § 33.6.

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sending their two young children to public school, rather than continuing to have them taught at home by a governess. The decision is taken to send them, and two other chapters describe in dialogue form their life at school during the first term. Both at the female school and at the male one, the asphyxial and morbid dialogue is devised as a snip-snap interrogation of schoolmates. This middle phase has the purpose of showing, as in a Dickens novel, the educational error of parents who demand from their children the greatest possible success at school, and it is a figurative symptom of tyranny, the author’s standard theme. The result is that, to get a good end-of-term report, both siblings use little tricks to cut a good figure, and are unmasked. Up to its middle point, the plot is one of the dullest and least varied of Compton-Burnett’s. In its second and final part the novel declines further. In itself the arrangement of the family relationships has the same improbability and exceptionality as we find in some novels by the early Thackeray or Trollope in his second period. Shelley has had a son Oliver from his first wife, who later died, but has also had a natural child from another woman; his father-in-law, his first wife’s father, has also had a son through an affair. The result is a burst of denouements, no fewer than in the most classic Victorian sensational novels;39 and no fewer than three characters, disorientating the reader, are called Oliver, one more case of homonymy than in Collins’s Armadale. The finale, because of its extremely high number of coincidences, is the most illegible in all Compton-Burnett’s novels. 3. The equally weak Darkness and Day (1951) could be defined as Compton-Burnett’s true Oedipus in modern dress. The Lovat couple, Bridget and Edmund, are not only husband and wife but, they fear,40 also brother and sister, with the threatening return of the theme of unwitting incest from Brothers and Sisters. The web of characters is hardly less complex and labyrinthine, as if programmed in a test-tube, with numerous 39

It is difficult to agree with Burkhart 1965, 118, that this novel is less sensational than the previous one. 40 Lovat knows he is the father of one of the two natural daughters by a woman, but does not know exactly which of the two, and Bridget, his wife, until the very end could be the one or the other daughter.

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paternities that gradually emerge, and a commute between two country estates. The form is further schematized, the dialogue is more elliptic, more skeletal, epigrammatic and allusive, and the writer intensifies the tendency to construct through extended dialogue sequences devoid of explanation; this accounts for the small number of the chapters. Bridget Lovat is the umpteenth neurotic wife and mother who oppresses others essentially because she herself is oppressed – but the topos is valid in Compton-Burnett for both genders. The couple’s two daughters are grimmer, sadder and more dejected than any other female characters. Another internal reprise, less successful and more disappointing, is the second or third world, that of the servants, who are allotted some arias and situations typical of this subplot, with analogous roles to those we find in Manservant and Maidservant. The suspense that has accumulated dissolves by chance when the truth comes to light and Mildred the governess discovers she is Edmund Lovat’s daughter; and it is in this way that the Oedipus complex is recovered from or warded off. § 174. Compton-Burnett V: Sour family comedies Funny, petty if not decidedly grotesque matrimonial hitches, which borrow the unpredictability of the game of roulette, are the common element of many of Compton-Burnett’s last novels. In The Present and the Past (1953) one has grown accustomed to the elderly or even very old progenitor, troublesome and hypochondriac, or the hysterical, demanding and centralizing matron. Hence the model behind it is not Greek or Elizabethan tragedy, but rather Plautine comedy. The inventiveness is fertile and unbridled, and produces savoury and accelerated scenes of embarrassment and sketches in the rich farcical manner. And dialogue loses its ephemeral and banal quality, and becomes either narrative or a preparation for action, at least more than normally happens in Compton-Burnett. In other words, except for a few absurd scenes the novel could appear to be not a copy but an authentic Trollope story. In a descending order, in the initial overview we see entering as in a roll-call the children and the children’s children, and continuing on down we penetrate into the domains of the servants with their various roles: governesses, waiters, butlers, cooks and others, all characters that animate the Elizabethan subplot or that of

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the commedia dell’arte; they spy and comment on the action furnishing lateral illuminations. Cassius Clare, a despot in his family, having remarried has children from two mothers; but affectively he is more linked to his father and the butler. He is not exactly a widower, and instead he and his wife have divorced by mutual accord; the comic piquancy is in the embarrassing reappearance of his former wife in the vicinity. The magnanimous man allows her to satisfy her unsuppressible desire to see her children again after nine years. The two women, instead of fighting, familiarize, and in this we can see from afar the idea of a coalition of women against smug male despotism. The husband has to fake a suicide to be once again the centre of attention, but he is discovered.41 Depressed and crestfallen, he tries again, and this time the attempt works. The friendship between the two women ends, and the children have to decide what mother to be with. The focus alternates between adults and children, who speak like adults conscious of their uneasiness at being the children of two parents. Nostalgic and empathic curiosity, always gushing out in Compton-Burnett for the world of children, is particularly evident in the two scenes of the killing of a hen, with which the novel opens, and of the funeral of a mole. 2. Mother and Son (1955) is a succession of scenes showing slightly noir and absurd humour, some of them interlocutory and incidental and overflowing into prolonged effects of Victorian farce, particularly in the manner of Gaskell.42 A binary Compton-Burnett novel alternating its settings in two households, it concentrates more on that of the Humes, where the eccentric Miranda has to take on a governess and finds her in Hester (recalling Ann Brontë’s Agnes Grey). Predictably, halfway through the novel wakes up and a dialogue that is not incidental brings us to the 41 That is to say, discovered in his fake suicide, and the discoverer being his little son Toby, who delightfully always cooks someone’s goose and is not capable of any falsehood. 42 In the second chapter, which launches a typical Victorian and even Bennettian comedy, there comes the comic explanation, or joke, about the name Plautus given to the cat, which receives pathetic attentions throughout the novel: that neither of the two wrote good comedies. The name of the matron is semantic and means ‘big heart’; she is thus distinguished from the more cynical, opportunistic and tyrannical Miranda Hume.

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inverted situation of Brothers and Sisters: it is not the dying woman who confesses a secret, but one is confessed to the dying one, and it is that her two nephews and a niece are actually natural children of her husband. How is this scandalous secret handled? The wife forgives the husband, but she forgives him because she is guilty of the same sin, and therefore her son Rosebery discovers he is illegitimate. The secret – the ‘dead secret’ of many Victorian novels, and reprised, as we have seen, in Brothers and Sisters – again surfaces from the Collins-style letter found and read post mortem. Rosebery is the innocent person who suddenly feels himself burdened with a sin that he has not committed, and transmitted to him by his ancestors. Intending to set out to look for his father, he resigns himself to staying as a guest, and everything is the same as before, yet everything has also changed. A Father and His Fate (1957) revives, but now mechanically and too slavishly, the scenario of the egotistic father who ruins all his affections, and resorts to deception to get them back; moreover, from a preceding novel Compton-Burnett reuses the return of the consort believed lost or dead. The father is Miles Mowbray, similar to a Lear with three daughters, at least one of whom recalls Cordelia, particularly at the raising of the curtain, in a recitative that sounds like a game of absurdity. In an excessively Learlike interrogation the father asks his daughters if and for what cause they would be prepared ‘to go to the stake’ (and the literary analogy appears explicit, and is not missed by the bystanders43). In reality Miles is mostly inconstant, and can be loving and just as well as suddenly bitter; that is to say, he is a very skilled hypocrite. The plot is classical in its slow development, gradually bringing on all or almost all the characters involved; it also has a flavour of Shakespearean romance, and with the living wife’s setting out for sea, and miraculous return and reappearance it blends suggestions from King Lear, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest and other plays. 3. A Heritage and its History (1959) is perhaps the most anonymous and indistinct of Compton-Burnett’s novels, and its quarrels and notarial issues regarding the passages of inheritance between uncles and nephews is sometimes reminiscent of the no less grey plots of some minor novels by 43 A parallel subplot presents a pendant to Miles in a tyrannical woman – Miles’s sisterin-law – who has three children subjugated to her.

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Trollope in his second period. In her failures Compton-Burnett can indeed arouse this analogy. The thematic centre is the disappointment of Simon Challoner, who only succeeds at the end of the novel in taking possession of the rich family inheritance. Edwin, his uncle, is an unmarried landowner without any children and he is fond of his brother Hamish, Simon’s father, who is close to his brother Walter, a poet studying at Oxford, both restless, and at loggerheads with his parents. Edwin, having lost his brother, marries Rhoda, who is unfaithful to him and has a son with Simon. But Edwin considers this infant his and in the Victorian manner ‘the truth must be out’. From this point on there are incised for the first time or re-incised in Burnett’s novel, always by and large synchronic, some temporal grooves; and the chapters close with serial novel fading, the results of which emerge from the dialogue in the opening of the next chapter. When the new chapter begins, Edwin, previously twenty-five years old, is now twenty years older, and, having married Rhoda’s sister Fanny has five children, one of whom, Naomi, is promised to Edwin’s ‘son’, also called Hamish, so that the two young people are stepbrother and stepsister, and in marrying would commit incest. Hamish foregoes the inheritance, then demands it and marries another woman. When he dies the inheritance goes to Simon. No better is the ironically entitled The Mighty and Their Fall (1961), which opens with the proverbial, petulant and pressing questioning by the numerous children of a father who, a widower, has decided to remarry. This decision having been taken, a stormy conflict builds up between the father, Ninian, and his daughter Lavinia, who flies into a rage when her father changes in his own favour the will of a rich brother that benefited his niece instead. This injustice, in itself an overused event and one reprised from a previous novel, is strenuously defended by the guilty party. But Lavinia in turn has fraudulently hindered her father’s marriage. Hence the two transgressions with their consequences are symmetrical. As usual, the guilty are unpunished, all are unbelievers and deceitful, including Ninian’s children, and nobody is completely innocent. A God and His Gifts (1963), which shows a family likeness with Hardy’s The Well-Beloved because of the modular repetitiveness of the seductions of the protagonist

§ 175. Garnett

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(‘what has happened can happen again’),44 achieves even more marked abstraction of dialogue, and appears like a stylized play for voices in the complete absence of circumstantiality. It describes the artistic career and the promiscuous erotic self-assurance of a novelist,45 and it is for this very reason the self-portrait of Compton-Burnett, who has made a panoramic, indulgent gaze on the world her own.46 § 175. Garnett David Garnett (1892–1981) followed in his grandfather’s and his father’s footsteps. The former was an almost eminent Victorian, a critic, reviewer, translator, bibliophile and poet on his own account, and enjoyed the esteem and deep respect of many literary celebrities of the late nineteenth century. His father Edward was a publishing consultant whose only memorable blunder was rejecting Joyce’s Portrait. In his turbulent, restless and partly lunatic life Garnett refused as a conscientious objector to go to the front. He was then marginally part of the Bloomsbury group, the manager of a bookshop near the British Museum in the 1920s, and he worked on a fruit and vegetable farm in Suffolk and in Sussex with the painter Duncan Grant, becoming his lover before marrying his daughter. After divorcing her he found his ubi consistam in France, where he died. We need to speak of him because amid so many now forgotten works of his there stands out the small but rare, and unfortunately unrepeated, jewel of Lady into Fox (1922),

44 This is said by the second son, who knows that his father has seduced his elder brother’s wife and had a son with her. And the third one foresees that ‘history can repeat itself ’. This is seriality within seriality. 45 A constant of Burnett’s novels is that conjugal issues are discussed and explained to the children in an open court, frankly and without veils. 46 The mutually symbiotic relationship between art and life is formulated as follows by Hereward Egerton’s son: ‘He gives hearing to all his instincts. In fact, it feeds them. And so it can then transfer them to the page. If he subdued them, they would lose their force. And releasing them he sets them free in his life’. The Last and the First, whose primary plot, not new, concerns a tyrannical father who has remarried, and hence the father of offspring by two different wives, was deciphered and published posthumously in 1971 from twelve notebooks left by the writer, and edited by Cicely Greig and Charles Burkhart (Powell 1973, 230).

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which was also his first published work. Strictly speaking a story, it begins with an aphorism that seems to have been stolen from Chesterton, namely that the most unbelievable thing about miracles is that they happen; and it is an aphorism that chooses its further target in the materialism of the age, which was also a secondary bugbear of Chesterton’s.1 But the possible barb at radical rationalism fades away with the story entering the fantastic genre of the Ovidian metamorphosis, which turning more and more livid becomes Orwellian and even Kafkaesque. Actually, behind this story there is a host of literary metamorphoses, including the classics of the marvellous of every epoch. The alienation effect is achieved by a narrating voice that talks to the reader, and immediately makes it clear that miracles do happen, but to those who are already prepared and willing to accept them. The funny thing is that Sylvia Fox doubly bears already engraved in her name, like predestination, the marks of woodiness, wildness and vulpinism (a fox was at the centre of a story by Lawrence, and there are more than a few similarities).2 She is a beautiful woman, but this is an understatement or a denegation since she has dark reddish hair, vulpine freckles, and moles and boils on her face. Nor can it be forgotten that with quite different anguish Wells in one of his best novels had described a pseudo-scientist who turns men into beasts.3 As for Orwell, he is recalled because the story is played out in an Orwellian manor house, where a not dissimilar metamorphosis takes place, in that in his novel there are speaking and intelligent pigs, and hence a metamorphosis of animals into human beings, and here in Garnett of humans into semi-human animals. The first vulpine trait during this more and more dehumanizing metamorphosis is the loss of language; the story continues enumerating the stages of the progressive disappearance of human attributes and those of the simultaneous acquisition of vulpine ones in Sylvia. Through residual humanity or a desperate automatism, she struggles to retain the last forms of life as a human, but the metamorphosis is inexorable and irreversible despite her ardent expectations and hopes and, so to speak, her husband’s therapies. The first eloquent symptom of 1 § 46.2. 2 § 120.1. 3 § 14.5.

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the transformation is that while a chapter of Richardson’s sublime Clarissa is read to her, she ogles a dove in the cage, that is to say suffers the first bites of an appetite to devour her fellow creatures. And she feels this appetite again with the ducks. In the continuation the story has three satirical targets: the first is the old Darwinian fear that man could regress to being a beast and fail to eclipse his evolutionistic footprints; the second is the middle class with its rituals; the third is religion. Sylvia has no blame for her metamorphosis, so that, an old indictment, God allows his cosmos to go adrift – the cosmos that He created and to which He is indifferent. The richly allusive quality of the story emerges in the final tableau, hallucinatory and grotesque, of Sylvia’s compunctious husband who, betrayed, now meets his ‘rival’, that is to say a male fox.4 § 176. Poets of the Second World War The overriding, impelling and inevitable question is the following: how much is the poetry of the Second World War worth compared to that of the First World War? The answer is clear and unequivocal: a great deal less. None of the poets of the Second World War rose to the stature, though always a relative one, of an Owen or a Rosenberg, or even of an Edward Thomas insofar as he is a war poet; none of them left a unitary and hallmarked chapter of English poetry like their predecessors, who had had a small, timid but undeniable role in the launch of Modernism. The second consideration is that the Great War had by now exhausted and dried up – ‘foresuffered’, one could say with Eliot’s Tiresias – all the capacities for amazement, incredulity and militancy, and the poet and the writer and the intellectual, emptied of all war rhetoric, had also often already fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, in many cases returning home disappointed and disenchanted. The Great War at bottom had had two theatres par excellence, the Dardanelles and to a greater 4

A poignant episode is the discovery of the fox-wife that has run away and has had cubs, a spectacle the husband has to put up with. Tebrick, the husband, has them baptized and becomes their godfather! He himself regresses to the bestial state, and in any case the final scene restores him as a heroic husband who uses his body to shield his fox-wife during a foxhunt.

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extent the Somme, and its symbolic emblem had been the trench. Both scenarios were still ideal for old heroisms and put man in close contact with man in possible bayonet attacks, and war action was still governed by the Homeric code of honour. In 1939 the chequerboard goes crazy in its successive planetary widening (‘there is nothing new, from a soldier’s point of view, about this war except its mobile character’, said the poet Keith Douglas), and the war machine, the sophisticated explosive device, the submersible and the bomber, and the professionals armies, and lastly the atomic bomb, have got the upper hand. The unit of measurement is no longer the single soldier; it is the human mass. The third consequent consideration, of a quantitative nature, is that in 1939 fewer and fewer intellectuals, and therefore writers and poets, joined up voluntarily, and therefore there was, in proportion, a lower number of fallen poets; it is also that the survivors, like Graves or Sassoon thirty years before, incidentally definable as ‘war poets’, after the war moved into other experiences and expressive climates. 2. The survival of the poet of the Second World War can be framed in two ways: after the armistice some, demobbed, passively went on with an absolutely honest career without much distinction; a far different thing is survival in the intrinsic terms of a more personal and lasting chord, and of a truly original contribution to English poetry. Eliot, Graves and Spender, and other authoritative readers, expressed themselves in even enthusiastic terms on three or four of these fallen poets, on the basis of a pure future projection or some precocious fruit, declaring this one or that other the greatest voice that had appeared in English poetry in the post-war period. One should conjecture whether they would have confirmed the judgement on reflection, and with a little more perspective. For example Henry Reed (1914–1986), from Birmingham, a classicist and an academician manqué, and a critic and journalist, exploited an innate talent as a showman and imitator making fun of the sergeant instructing recruits in that humorous and also incendiary catechesis, a little satirical monument to human stupidity, that is ‘Lessons of the War’.1 Sidney Keyes (1922–1943), already an enfant 1

Its epigraph makes a very indicative play on words on a pair of lines by Horace and therefore also mocks the hero’s dulce et decorum. Reed’s imitative verve extended to a

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prodige, a promise at Oxford, killed in the African campaign, is the closest descendant of Owen, both because very few poems had been published when he died aged just twenty, and because he was full of foreboding and raptly and fatalistically meditated on an almost cosmic sense of predestination for death. The Welshman Alun Lewis (1915–1944), an admirer of Edward Thomas and whose death in India was perhaps suicide, was a prose writer and an uneasy and perhaps also paranoiac poet. Actually he shows in the poem ‘The Soldier’ the influence of the other Thomas, Dylan; it is a neo-apocalyptic poem, with a phantasmagorical whirling of images and horrid visions to which ephemeral contrastive truces are provided by the calmer sights of nature. The famous ‘All Day It Has Rained’ chronicles the boredom of a rainy day in a tent, and hence that forced inaction that formed the leitmotiv in the poetry and memoirs of the First World War. By contrast, the war poetry of Charles Causley (1917–2003) had nothing to do with that ‘pity’ that Wilfred Owen had painfully and sarcastically sung. In the poem of the soldier at the front who nostalgically daydreams of his birthplace, the destiny of fallen soldiers is inscribed in a paradigm fatalistically but after all also cheerfully accepted, which means that both the great and the humble sometimes do not return to the fatherland they yearn for from the distant place. His other production is worked out in very simple little parables and fables that deal for instance with the hunger for the exotic in the little boy who dreams of distant lands seeing ships set sail from the dock, and by the time he is an adult and a man, and sees those ships returning, human losses have occurred in the meantime. Causley’s popularity is due in short to the hallmark of a poetry that is above all anecdotal, jovial, humorous and witty, unproblematic and lighthearted, and to his clear and flowing diction. He tells stories in lines that are even too regular and simplified in the images, in rhythm and lexis, and sings feelings that are normal and shareable, always seasoned with a dose of common sense and messages that are even a little obvious or even childish. His speciality is the village ballad concentrating on the eccentric event or character

parody of Eliot’s Four Quartets, and to distortions of the name of his quasi-namesake Sir Herbert Read, whom he was often mistaken for.

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with marked comic and even coarse effects; or they are easy little tunes, graceful and pretty, or the stornello to be sung or of the type of American black poetry for the paratactic development, dry and abrupt, and the taut working out of the phases. Some poems of his are avowedly and excessively démodé, deriving from Victorian nonsense and light verse, or in childish falsetto. More debatable and less successful are occasional poems consisting of alienated and extravagant tableaux, like the slaughter of the innocents, or the story of the soldier who is a double of Christ tempted in the African war desert; hence these are also poems with a religious background, but never tragic and racked, only stereotyped. 3. The creativity and versatility of Keith Douglas (1920–1944), killed at the age of twenty-four in the Normandy landing, struck Edmund Blunden, he himself a combatant who had survived the First World War, when he was a tutor at Oxford. The first poems by the student were submitted by Blunden to Eliot in 1940, and were to be prefaced by Blunden himself in a 1966 collective edition. The hundred or so poems by Douglas have had four following reissues, and the last reprint was published by Oxford University Press with an introduction by Ted Hughes:2 an evident sign that Douglas in the course of time has gone past the stage of immediate and ephemeral notoriety and the provisional stature of a poet at most ‘of one decade’, to enter a more lasting and definitive dimension. Something in him reminds us of Rupert Brooke: death in action at almost the same age, the magnetic charm of yet another star of Oxford blending passion for sport with intellectual talents, and above all – as the son of a career soldier – a warlike boldness that was still romantic, which also remained a mask that could be taken off at any moment. His war poetry overflows on one side with echoes of and dense dialogues with the tradition of English poetry, and therefore with small parodies astutely camouflaged. Douglas captures the comedy or at least on the tragicomedy of war, perceiving 2

The Complete Poems, ed. D. Graham with introduction by T. Hughes, Oxford 1998. The memoir Alamein to Zem Zem, appreciated for the alienation with which it chronicles the war that Douglas experienced, was published posthumously in 1946. Douglas, left to vegetate behind the lines, disobeying orders seized a tank and went to the front line in 1942 to participate in the battle of El Alamein.

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its marginal phenomenology, its pathetic epiphanies, its unintentionally curious facets. One could also speak of a witty neo-Metaphysical vein, of sometimes saucy nonchalance rejecting all grandiloquence and all rhetoric, as Douglas underlined in some declarations of intents. After his Georgian beginnings in adolescence, already hinting at extreme care and formal skill in his respect for traditional forms, the second of Douglas’s five brief phases, which editors identify with the places of his biographical career and that of the combatant, is already shot through by threats of war on the horizon, and by the premonition of his own death as against the eternal renewal of nature, but precisely accepted in a new equilibrium between the discursive and the formalized (‘Canoe’). It is a favourite chord of his that reappears in ‘Time Eating’, in which the incessant renewal of nature à la Dylan Thomas does not touch man and above all destroys human love. Just before his departure for the African front, Douglas had already written the epitaph for his grave, which, beginning with the line ‘Remember me when I am dead’, cannot fail to sound like a free variation on Purcell’s complaint of Dido for Aeneas. Actually the brief and witty composition, which without any concession to the macabre describes the ‘simplification’, that is, the progressive decomposition of the dead body until it reaches the dimensions of the newborn that has just come out of the mother’s womb, and therefore unites life and death, symbolically repeats Yeats’s own longing to free himself of ‘mere complexities / The fury and the mire of human vein’. The poem also speaks of a desire for recovery of primitive innocence, particularly of a ‘long punishment’ always chastely kept hidden, and hence of how bitter and painful the war experience was. Douglas’s poetic hero, however, was Owen, purified of his ghostly and expressionistic vein and of the austere sacred rite of ‘pity’, and softened into more impartial, more tranquil and disenchanted compassion.3 The poem ‘Vergissmeinnicht’, which starts in the apparent sloppiness of an unrevised experiential transcription – of an impromptu, as is immediately revealed by the repetitions and the anacolutha in the first quatrain – if we look at it carefully is a rewrite of Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’, with the English soldier who, though 3

Hughes insists in detail on this comparison in the introduction to the edn cited above in n. 2.

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alive, fraternizes with the dead German enemy, on whose dead body there is a photo of his beloved, a detail that provokes in the coda a delicate and contained moralization. ‘How to Kill’ investigates the psychology of the soldier killer who was once a boy who throwing a ball in the air came as an adult to have an explosive device in his hand, and now frames his victim in his sights and fires, realizing too late that he has killed a person who like himself loved a woman, and like him had tender memories. In the last stanza there is the neo-Metaphysical analogy of the mosquito, an immaterial insect that touches its ‘shadow’ on the stone, an image of the imperceptible border between life and death, with the distant memory of the Shakespearean gods who kill men like flies for their sport. The poems written while Douglas was stationed in Egypt exude an impressionistic sense of the east similar to the atmospheres of Durrell, with the memory of Cleopatra now vanished, or perhaps suspended in the air, in a climate of sinister and turbid traffics (‘Cairo Jag’).4 4. Durrell crossed paths, though briefly, with a female novelist, therefore not certainly or primarily poet, but equally one ‘of the second war’, though very much in a way that was sui generis. This was Olivia Manning (1908–1980), with whose ‘Balkan’ and ‘eastern’ novels this overview can close. However, before coming to this contact of hers with Durrell and to her war novels, it is a good idea to go over the stages of an extremely unusual, turbulent, wandering career, out of the consolidated grooves of the sedentary life of the writer, especially a female one. The daughter of an Englishman and an Irishwoman, tossed between England and Ireland, as a girl Manning precociously suffered from a kind of psychic statelessness intensified by feeling deprived of maternal affection in favour of a brother; and her mother forbad her to read and therefore also to write. Having attended an art school, she moved to London, where after various jobs in publishing she wrote her first novel in 1937 on the symptomatic dilemmas of a woman in love with an 4

Roy Fuller (1912–1991) began with war poems, especially on the inertia and boredom of war, in which he was a combatant. He then became a prolific poet, a novelist and a professor of poetry at Oxford. His career ended up converging independently on the aesthetic and poetic of the Movement (Volume 8, § 75.1–3), that is, on a faded, objective and ironic recording of daily events.

§ 176. Poets of the Second World War

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Englishman and an Irishman. Having got married, so to speak, from one day to the next, on the eve of the war she followed her husband, who lectured for the British Council, to Roumania and subsequently to Greece, Egypt and Palestine, by now bombarded by the Germans, where she had a miscarriage which left her with the aftermath of a long nervous crisis. When the war was over the couple returned home after six years. Bisexual, Manning had had an affair with the poet Stevie Smith before leaving, and now she had another one, contorted, complex and jealous, with Iris Murdoch. Her husband was a long-standing womanizer, but his escapades were tolerated and the couple never thought about divorce. Anthony Burgess (actually with subtle and imperceptible restrictions) often intervened, almost in isolation, in favour of Manning, according to him the greatest English writer to have appeared after the war.5 Her two trilogies accept and exploit the formula of the saga or epic novel but shifting its barycentre, or more exactly widening it, to a European and planetary dimension. The Middle East gave rise to a strange, unprecedented war chronicle that, hinging on a couple of British cultural officials largely reflecting close up that formed by the author and her husband,6 and on their conjugal ménage, practically covers the war years from the beginning. It is a work that lies somewhere between the documentary, the historical and the inventive, which Burgess was not the only one to appreciate as the ultimate version of the paradigm of the Spenglerian decadence of history and of the collapse of a civilization, testified to, however, from a decentralized point of view. She was also praised for the alternations of register, which ranges from the solemn to the domestic and the humorous, for the sense of the particular and for documenting local custom. The first trilogy7 takes the couple from Bucharest,

5 6 7

See his The Novel Now: A Guide to Contemporary Fiction, New York 1967, 94. Perhaps subtly sentimental reasons led to these judgements: according to a rumour Burgess had made a declaration to Manning immediately after his own wife died. Reggie Smith, a fun character, exuberant, a vitalist, often fickle, capable of heroisms but also of pettiness. He was also a pro-communist that was kept under surveillance after the end of the war. Made up of the novels The Great Fortune (1960), The Spoilt City (1962) and Friends and Heroes (1965).

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conquered by the Germans, to Athens in tu•mult, and then to Alexandria. In this epilogue the reader may automatically remember Lawrence Durrell, actually to gauge the discrepancy between the fascinating, transcendental, voluptuous fiction, always overflowing with promptings that are the most varied and bewitching, of Durrell’s quartet, and the plainer and more pedestrian, though much tauter and more factual trilogy by Manning.8 The second trilogy, set in the east, was begun in 1975 and completed shortly before the author’s death.

8

During the period spent in Egypt, Manning contributed to Durrell’s magazines Desert Poets and Personal Landscapes.

Index of names (In this and in the Thematic index, references, including those to names and topics appearing in footnotes, will be to section and sub-section numbers) Abercrombie, Lascelles  60.3; 67.1; 67.2; 102.1 Abraham 62.3 Achilles 64.2 Ackroyd, Peter  92.1; 92.4; 99.1; 102.4 Adam  85.5; 94.2; 148.3 Adams, Henry  95.1; 95.2 Addison, Joseph  103.1; 158.4; 165.2 Admetus 102.5 Adonis  82.3; 96.2 Aeneas  62.3; 102.2; 176.3 Aeschylus  12.2; 102.4; 102.5; 170.2 Aesop  49.3; 95.8 Africanus, Leo (Al-Fazi)  79.3 Agamemnon 95.9 Aiken, Conrad  75.4; 157.4 Alcestis 102.5 Alcibiades 79.4 Aldington, Richard  68.2; 75.4; 76.1; 76.2; 76.3; 76.4; 89.2; 111.1; 116.1 Alexander, Samuel  90.2 Alfred the Great, King of Wessex  43.2 Alighieri, Dante  13.2; 14.3; 14.4; 32.3; 33.3; 41.4; 48.4; 50.2; 57.1; 62.3; 78.7; 79.3; 79.4; 80.6; 85.5; 89.2; 91.1; 91.2; 92.1; 92.4; 93.2; 93.4; 94.2; 94.3; 95.1; 96.1; 96.2; 97.1; 97.2; 97.4; 98.2; 98.3; 98.4; 98.5; 100.4; 101.7; 103.1; 103.2; 103.4; 103.5; 103.6; 104.1; 105.4; 106.2; 128.2, 128.4; 132.5; 134.1; 135.3; 143.1; 143.4; 163.2 Allen, Walter  20.5; 22.1; 22.5; 71.2; 104.1; 103.6; 157.4

Allen, Woody  14.1 Alpers, Antony  154.1 Alvarez, Al  75.2 Amis, Kingsley  170.3 Amis, Martin  128.5 Amoruso, Vito  76.2 Andrewes, Lancelot  95.2; 98.5; 105.1 Angiolieri, Cecco  92.2 Anne, Queen of England  165.2 Anrep, Helen  169.2 Anscombe, Elizabeth  48.4 Antheil, George  85.2 Antigone 158.7 Apollo  41.1; 46.1; 69.3; 69.5 Apuleius 69.3 Archer, William  2.1; 15.2; 52.2; 103.2 Arden, John  12.2 Ariadne 95.9 Aristophanes 102.1 Aristotle  2.4; 29.2; 81.4; 101.1; 103.3 Armstrong, William Arthur  10.3 Arnold, Edwin  92.2 Arnold, Matthew  2.4; 12.1; 13.4; 16.6; 23.1; 29.5; 34.1; 42.1; 44.1; 44.2; 64.4; 68.4; 78.10; 80.2; 90.2; 91.3; 94.8; 102.1; 103.1; 103.2; 103.3; 103.4; 103.6; 105.4; 105.5; 119.4; 121.4; 122.4; 123.2; 130.2; 134.4; 135.4; 158.1; 158.2; 158.4; 158.6; 158.7; 162.3; 165.3; 169.3 Arthur, King  48.3; 48.5; 80.5; 87.1; 92.1; 94.3 Asquith, Herbert Henry  3.1 Astor, John Jacob, Lord  74.1; 74.4

746/II Atherton, James S.  128.1; 149.2 Atkins, John A.  71.1 Attis 96.2 Aubrey, John  87.1 Auden, Wystan Hugh  8.1; 9.1; 13.3; 22.5; 23.3; 28.1; 28.3; 43.1; 43.2; 43.4; 63.4; 65.1; 69.5; 73.1; 73.2; 74.4; 77.2; 88.2; 89.2; 90.1; 100.7; 103.7; 106.2; 123.1 Augustus Octavian, Emperor  79.4 Austen, Jane  29.1; 32.1; 88.2; 88.5; 153.2; 154.1; 158.1; 170.1; 170.2 Ayers, David  89.2 Babbitt, Irving  92.1; 104.1; 105.1 Bach, Johann Sebastian  73.4; 73.8; 73.10; 116.1; 125.3; 151.1 Bacharach, Alfred Louis  79.3 Bacon, Francis  40.2; 75.3; 170.3 Bailey, Paul  111.1 Bailey, Philip James  67.4 Baker, J. L.  134.3 Balfour, Arthur  3.1 Ballantyne, Robert Michael  14.5 Balzac, Honoré de  20.5; 143.4 Barker, Dudley  17.4; 24.1; 25.1; 28.2 Barnes, Djuna  143.4 Barnes, William  49.2; 65.2; 70.1 Baron Corvo (Frederick Rolfe)  88.5 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth  26.4; 29.4; 50.2; 73.3; 118.5; 123.1; 157.1; 158.4; 159.2 Barrie, Sir James Matthew  3.1; 5.1; 10.2; 14.3; 47.1; 66.1; 88.1; 102.5; 157.1; 168.2 Barthes, Roland  29.2; 128.5 Bartók, Béla  100.5 Bataille, George  49.2; 135.3 Batchelor, John  13.3; 14.1; 14.8; 15.5; 16.6; 157.4; 159.1; 160.3; 163.2; 165.2; 168.1; 168.2

Index of names Baudelaire, Charles  40.1; 67.3; 75.1; 94.2; 95.1; 97.1; 97.2; 103.6 Baugh, Albert Croll  23.2; 60.2; 60.3; 125.4 Baum, Vicky  22.5 Beach, Sylvia  129.5; 136.2; 142.1 Beardsley, Aubrey  39.1; 40.1; 52.2; 88.1; 90.3; 94.7; 97.3; 109.2; 110.1; 169.2 Beato Angelico (Guido di Pietro)  10.5 Beaton, Cecil  86.1 Becket, Thomas, St  102.3; 102.7; 107.2 Beckett, Samuel 2.2; 8.1; 10.6; 11.1; 14.6; 15.7; 15.8; 18.5; 22.4; 28.1; 58.2; 71.3; 88.2; 89.3; 91.1; 102.7; 107.1; 128.5; 129.1; 129.5; 131.3; 148.4; 149.2; 150.3; 152.1; 152.2; 170.2; 170.3 Beckford, William  88.1; 165.2 Beer, Gillian  38.2 Beer, J. B.  38.1; 38.2 Beerbohm, Max  1.4; 39–41; 45.1; 49.3; 52.2; 71.1; 71.2; 73.1; 76.2; 87.1; 88.1; 158.4 Beerbohm-Tree, Herbert  40.1 Beethoven, Ludwig van  25.4; 32.3; 36.1; 36.2; 73.5; 73.6; 100.5; 116.1; 164.1 Beja, Morris  164.1 Bell, Clive  159.3; 169.1; 169.2; 169.3 Bell, Julian  74.4; 159.3; 169.1 Bell, Quentin  157.1; 159.1; 169.1; 169.3 Bell, Vanessa  159.1; 159.2; 159.3; 164.1; 165.1; 169.1 Bellamy, William  17.4 Belloc, Hilaire  1.4; 42.2; 45.1; 48.1–48.3; 65.2 Bellow, Saul  14.1 Benedict XVI, Pope ( Joseph Alois Ratzinger)  44.1; 105.2 Benkovitz, Miriam J.  88.1 Benn, Gottfried  103.7 Bennett, Arnold  1.2; 1.3; 13.1; 13.3; 17–22; 23.1; 23.2; 24.2; 25.1; 25.2; 25.4; 25.5; 25.7; 27.2; 28.4; 39.1; 40.3; 52.2;

Index of names 53.1; 53.4; 92.2; 115.1; 126.2; 142.2; 154.1; 154.2; 157.4; 158.1; 158.4; 158.5; 164.1; 166.1; 170.1; 171.1; 174.2 Benson, Arthur Christopher  88.2 Benson, Edward Frederick  88.2 Benstock, Bernard  8.2 Bentham, Jeremy  159.2 Bentley, Nicolas  99.1 Bentley, Richard  158.3 Bérard, Victor  142.1; 143.1; 148.1 Bergman, Ingmar  96.3 Bergonzi, Bernard  13.1; 14.3; 14.5; 14.7; 59.1; 92.2; 93.4; 96.3 Bergson, Henri  75.3; 76.2; 78.3; 90.2; 92.1; 92.2; 94.5; 100.4; 125.4; 142.1; 157.4; 168.1 Berkeley, George  31.1; 78.2; 82.1; 82.2; 164.1 Berkman, Sylvia  153.2; 153.3 Berlioz, Hector  73.10 Bernhardt, Sarah  111.2 Berni, Francesco  92.2 Berryman, John  128.5 Best, Richard I.  145.1 Biala, Janice  126.3 Bianchi, Ruggero  76.2 Binni, Francesco  76.2 Binyon, Laurence  70.1 Bishop, Elizabeth  158.1 Bismarck, Otto von  125.1 Bizet, Georges  10.1; 52.1; 53.4 Blackstone, B.  160.3 Blake, William  43.1; 49.1; 49.4; 64.4; 68.4; 76.2; 77.1; 77.2; 77.4; 81.4; 84.5; 85.5; 86.5; 91.1; 95.2; 98.4; 103.2; 103.5; 109.4; 121.5; 124.3; 139.3; 144.2; 149.2; 169.1; 169.3 Blamires, Harry  100.7; 101.1; 101.3; 101.5; 101.7 Bloom, Harold  75.2; 78.1; 79.3; 80.5; 82.2; 84.4; 85.7 Blixen, Karen  153.1

747/II Blum, Léon  142.1 Blunden, Edmund  62.2; 68.3; 68.5; 159.3; 176.3 Boccaccio, Giovanni  48.2; 58.2 Boccioni, Umberto  75.2 Boleyn, Anne  90.3 Bond, Edward  170.2 Bordone, Paris  80.2 Borges, Jorge Luis  71.3 Borgia, Cesare  57.4 Borgia, Lucrezia  41.4 Borrow, George  65.2 Bosch, Hieronymus  91.2 Boswell, James  40.3 Bottomley, Gordon  65.2; 67.1; 67.2; 102.1 Boucher, Catherine  139.3 Boucicault, Dion  9.1; 28.4 Bowen, Elizabeth  72.2 Bowen, Stella  126.3 Bradbury, Malcolm  75.2; 106.1 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth  21.1 Bradley, Francis Herbert  92.1; 92.2 Brahms, Johannes  73.8 Bramhall, John  105.1 Brancuşi, Constantin  78.1 Brecht, Bertolt  2.2; 5.1; 6.6; 8.3; 28.2; 84.2; 102.2; 103.2 Briand, Aristide  74.1 Bridges, Robert  60.3; 64.2; 70.1; 77.1; 77.2; 81.4; 86.2; 107.1; 169.2 Britten, Benjamin  12.1; 61.1; 73.1; 73.4; 73.9 Broch, Hermann  128.4; 142.2 Brome, Vincent  13.1; 14.3 Brontë, Anne  49.1; 53.1; 72.1; 73.10; 112.1; 113.2; 124.1; 137.2; 157.1; 159.1 Brontë, Charlotte  26.4; 49.1; 49.2; 53.1; 71.2; 72.1; 73.10; 123.3; 124.1; 137.2; 157.1; 159.1; 171.1 Brontë, Emily  20.5; 25.8; 49.1; 49.2; 53.1; 72.1; 73.10; 109.5; 110.2; 111.5; 127.1;

748/II 137.2; 153.3; 153.4; 157.1; 159.1; 163.2; 164.3 Brooke, Jewel Spears  103.6 Brooke, Jocelyn  88.5 Brooke, Rupert  61.3; 63.1; 63.2; 64; 66.1; 67.1; 68.3; 68.4; 95.1; 95.4; 97.2; 176.3 Brooks, Harold Fletcher  103.6 Brooks, Van Wyck  14.8 Brophy, Brigid  155.1 Brophy, James D.  86.1 Brown, Ford Madox  125.1 Browne, Thomas  71.1; 87.1; 165.2; 169.3 Browning, Robert  3.1; 3.2; 10.2; 12.2; 16.5; 21.5; 22.4; 25.1; 30.4; 33.3; 40.1; 40.3; 43.1; 47.2; 56.1; 64.5; 65.1; 69.3; 69.5; 80.2; 82.3; 85.7; 88.3; 88.5; 91.1; 92.3; 94.2; 94.3; 96.2; 100.1; 102.3; 107.1; 122.4; 126.2; 126.3; 127.5; 132.1; 135.4; 148.4; 150.2; 152.1; 153.2; 158.3; 160.3; 164.1; 166.2; 170.1 Bruckner, Anton  73.5; 73.6; 73.7 Brummell, Beau  39.1; 40.1; 41.2; 42.1; 50.3 Bruno, Giordano  148.1; 148.2; 148.3; 149.2; 152.2 Brutus  151.1; 151.3 Buchan, John  45.2; 59.2–3 Büchner, Georg  4.1; 88.3 Buckingham, Bob  29.3 Buckley, J. H.  75.2 Budberg, Moura  14.1 Buddha  79.4; 84.4; 92.2; 97.4; 100.3; 100.4; 109.3 Budgen, Frank  129.4; 143.1; 143.3 Bulwer Lytton, Edward  126.2; 165.2 Bunting, Basil  73.1; 106 Bunyan, John  48.4; 91.2; 123.3 Buonarroti, Michelangelo  50.5; 80.2; 84.4; 84.5; 94.2; 95.5 Burch, Francis F.  92.2

Index of names Burgess, Anthony  48.5; 111.1; 111.2; 117.1; 128.5; 148.3; 176.4 Burke, Edmund  82.1; 82.2 Burkhart, Charles  170.2; 172.2; 173.1; 173.2; 174.4 Burne-Jones, Sir Edward  109.2 Burney, Fanny  158.2 Burnham, James  4.2 Burton, Robert  69.3; 69.5; 71.1 Bush, Ronald  96.2; 101.5; 103.7 Butler, Samuel  2.3; 13.3; 14.2; 14.4; 53.1; 91.2; 105.2; 117.1; 122.4; 128.3 Butor, Michel  148.4; 151.1 Byatt, Antonia S.  128.5 Byron, George Gordon, Lord  21.4; 30.2; 48.3; 58.2; 63.1; 63.2; 63.4; 64.2; 67.2; 73.5; 78.6; 84.5; 86.3; 90.1; 92.2; 97.4; 103.1; 104.1; 129.2; 165.1; 165.2 Caddell, Richard  106.2 Caesar, Gaius Julius  43.2; 78.7; 79.4; 84.4; 85.7 Cahoon, H.  136.2 Calder, Robert L.  52.2; 53.2; 54.1 Calimani, Dario  94.2 Calvin, John  20.9; 21.3; 48.3; 49.2; 49.3; 78.7; 93.1; 95.2; 95.5; 100.3; 101.1; 153.4; 170.1 Calvino, Italo  107.2; 128.5; 152.2 Camões, Luís Vaz de  57.2 Campanella, Tommaso  105.2 Campbell, Joseph  75.3; 148.3; 148.4 Campbell, Roy  74.4 Camus, Albert  116.1 Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal)  39.1 Capaneo 96.2 Carco, Francis  155.3 Carlyle, Thomas  3.2; 15.7; 24.3; 33.2; 42.1; 44.1; 47.1; 48.2; 78.6; 78.7; 88.5;

Index of names 92.4; 101.4; 103.6; 105.3; 109.4; 124.3; 152.1; 164.3 Carpenter, Edward  29.5; 114.6 Carrington, Dora  169.3 Carroll, Lewis  14.2; 14.8; 43.1; 72.1; 86.3; 88.1; 91.1; 101.1; 148.3; 152.2; 157.1 Carter, Angela  49.3; 71.1; 71.2; 71.3; 121.4 Carter, Denis Nicholas Giles  69.3; 69.5 Caruso, Enrico  6.5 Casanova, Giacomo  119.8 Casement, Roger David  84.3 Cassell, Richard A.  125.1; 125.2; 126.2; 127.1; 127.2 Catullus  69.4; 106.3 Caudwell, Christopher  74.4 Causley, Charles  176.2 Cavafy, Constantine P.  29.4 Cavalcanti, Guido  98.3 Cazamian, Louis  125.4 Cecchi, Emilio  42.1; 169.3 Cecil, David, Lord  39.1; 41.2; 88.2; 169.3 Cézanne, Paul  78.2; 162.1; 169.2 Chamberlain, Arthur Neville  74.4 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart  74.3; 114.6 Chambers, Jessie  111.3; 121.1; 157.4 Chaplin, Sir Charles Spencer (Charlie Chaplin)  6.6; 115.2 Chapman, George  95.2; 107.1 Charles II, King of England  7.1 Charles I the Great  83.1 Charles VII, King of France  3.2; 3.3 Charon 48.4 Chaucer, Geoffrey  29.2; 48.2; 70.2; 71.2; 93.3; 97.1 Chekhov, Anton  20.5; 55.3; 88.5; 110.1; 128.3; 153.2; 160.3; 168.2 Chesney, George Tomkyns  14.7; 59.1; 59.4 Chesterton, Cecil  42.2

749/II Chesterton, Gilbert Keith  1.4; 13.3 42–47; 48.1; 48.2; 48.3; 48.4; 53.4; 59.4; 71.1; 73.1; 175.1 Childers, Erskine  59.1 Chomsky, Noam  93.4 Chopin, Frédéric  73.9; 94.8; 153.2 Christie, Agatha  12.1; 18.4; 146.4 Churchill, Reginald Charles  49.2; 49.3 Churchill, Winston  22.2; 60.1; 64.1; 74.3; 74.4 Cianci, Giovanni  75.1; 89.1; 114.7 Circe 41.2 Citati, Pietro  69.3; 153.3 Clare, John  60.3; 65.2; 68.3 Clark, Kenneth  169.2 Clarke, Colin  121.1 Claudel, Paul  77.5 Cleopatra  64.5; 93.4; 95.8; 97.3; 114.7; 116.1; 176.3 Cleto, Fabio  88.2 Clough, Arthur Hugh  48.2; 64.4; 78.9; 88.4; 92.3; 94.3; 114.2; 126.1 Coates, John D.  42.2; 45.1; 47.3 Cocteau, Jean  96.3 Cohen, John Michael  69.2 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  6.4; 22.5; 29.5; 62.3; 66.1; 68.4; 71.2; 78.1; 86.1; 94.2; 103.3; 103.6; 105.4; 146.2; 158.5 Collins, Wilkie  15.2; 21.1; 21.4; 46.2; 47.1; 87.1; 89.3; 94.2; 102.6; 112.2; 116.3; 170.1; 172.1; 173.2 Colum, Mary  142.2 Compton-Burnett, Ivy  88.2; 123.1; 170–174 Confucius 44.3 Congreve, William  88.1 Conlon, D. J.  43.1; 45.1; 46.2 Connolly, Cyril  106.1 Conrad, Joseph  1.2; 6.3; 14.5; 15.6; 20.1; 22.2; 23.1; 23.4; 24.2; 38.2; 45.2; 46.2; 57.2; 58.1; 58.2; 64.2; 67.1;

750/II 67.2; 70.2; 98.2; 116.2; 117.4; 123.2; 125.2; 125.3; 126.1; 127.1; 153.2 Constable, John  10.5; 66.2; 170.3 Contini, Gianfranco  148.4 Coolidge, Calvin  74.2 Coombe, Helen  169.2 Cooper, Ada  24.1; 25.5 Cooper, James Fenimore  122.1 Corbière, Tristan  92.1; 92.2; 95.1; 95.7 Corcoran, Neil  106.2 Cordell, Richard  51.1; 52.1; 57.1; 58.1 Cornford, Frances  64.2 Cornford, Rupert John  74.4 Corti, Claudia  135.3; 141.2 Cosgrave, William Thomas  83.1 Constantine, Emperor  43.2 Costello, Peter  148.2 Coward, Noël  8.1; 12.2; 55.2; 88.2 Cowasjee, Saros  9.1; 10.1 Cowper, William  49.4; 158.2 Cox, Katherine  64.2; 97.2 Crabbe, George  49.2; 66.2; 73.1 Crane, Hart  63.2 Crashaw, Richard  21.3; 103.6; 107.2 Crawford, Robert  92.4; 94.2; 95.2; 95.8 Crèvecœur, J. Hector St John de  122.1 Croce, Benedetto 105.4; 116.3 Cromwell, Oliver  8.2; 60.2; 74.3;  84.3; 103.1; 105.1; 151.4 Cuchulain  84.5; 85.1; 85.3; 85.4; 85.5 Cummings, Edward Estlin  76.3 Cupid 41.1 Curtius, Ernst Robert  128.1; 143.5 D’Annunzio, Gabriele  17.4; 24.2; 63.1; 87.1; 110.3; 111.1 Daiches, David, 157.1; 164.1 Dalí, Salvador  96.3 Daniel, prophet  7.1 Danson, Lawrence  39.1; 39.2; 40.1; 40.3; 41.2; 41.4

Index of names Darwin, Charles  13.1; 14.3; 20.2; 65.4; 78.8; 94.6; 119.2; 122.2; 123.2; 170.1; 172.2; 172.4; 175.1 David 14.7 Davidman-Gresham, Helen Joy  48.4 Davidson, John  65.2; 65.5; 94.2 Davies, William Henry  60.3; 65.2 Dawson, George  74.1; 74.4 Day Lewis, Cecil  62.2; 77.4. de Foucauld, Charles, 102.5 de la Mare, Walter  1.4; 64.2; 71; 72.1; 72.2; 86.3 De Quincey, Thomas  71.1 De Sola Pinto, Vivian  63.1; 68.4; 71.1; 71.3; 76.3; 78.1; 86.5; 96.3; 98.4 de Valera, Éamon  77.1; 83.1 de Valois, Ninette  85.2 Dean, Basil  28.1 Debussy, Claude  73.9; 73.10; 76.1; 88.5 Defoe, Daniel  14.5; 29.2; 139.3; 158.1; 158.4 Degas, Edgar  85.4 Dehmel, Richard  121.1 Delaney, Shelagh  12.2 Delany, Paul  64.2 Delattre, Floris  157.4 Delavenay, Emile  113.2 Delius, Frederick  73.2; 73.9; 73.10 Dent, Edward Joseph  30.1 Dermorgilla 85.5 Descartes, René  78.2; 91.3; 92.1 Diana 103.2 Diarmuid 85.5 Dick, Susan  163.1 Dickens, Charles  1.2; 1.3; 1.4; 2.3; 9.1; 9.2; 9.3; 9.4; 12.1; 14.10; 15.2; 15.3; 15.6; 15.7; 17.3; 18.3; 19.1; 19.3; 20.3; 20.4; 20.6; 20.9; 22.2; 22.4; 25.1; 25.2; 26.1; 26.2; 41.4; 42.1; 46.2; 47.1; 48.2; 49.3; 53.1; 53.2; 53.3; 53.4; 55.3; 63.2; 71.3; 73.8; 88.3; 88.5; 92.3; 93.2; 102.6; 111.1; 111.2; 111.4; 113.2; 114.2;

Index of names 114.8; 115.2; 121.4; 122.2; 123.1; 123.3; 127.3; 133.1; 134.3; 137.2; 154.1; 156.1; 157.1; 161.1; 162.3; 164.1; 170.1; 171.2; 172.4; 173.1 Dickinson, Emily  62.1 Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes  29.4; 29.5; 169.3 Dido 176.3 Dionysus 85.6 Disraeli, Benjamin, Lord Beaconsfield  22.2; 24.2; 24.3; 34.1; 86.5; 111.2 Djerjinsky, Felix Edmundovitch  6.4 Dodge Luhan, Mabel  118.1 Domenichelli, Mario  23.3 Don Juan  17.4; 47.1; 50.5; 57.3; 102.6; 109.3; 148.3 Don Quixote  23.3; 28.3; 47.3; 49.3; 89.2; 91.3; 126.2; 127.2 Donizetti, Gaetano  30.4 Donne, John  49.4; 63.3; 64.2; 64.2; 64.3; 67.2; 82.2; 87.1; 94.2; 103.7; 105.1; 107.2; 132.4; 158.4 D’Orsay, Alfred  41.2 Dos Passos, John  128.5 Dostoevsky, Fyodor M.  65.5; 89.3; 92.3; 102.4; 112.1; 125.2; 127.3; 156.3; 157.4; 158.5 Doughty, Charles Montagu  60.2 Douglas, James  21.4 Douglas, Keith  176.1; 176.3 Douglas, Norman  75.1; 88.2; 117.1 Dowson, Ernest  39.1; 71.1; 73.9; 92.2; 153.4 Doyle, Arthur Conan  46.1; 46.2; 59.2; 94.2 Drabble, Margaret  17.3; 17.4; 22.5; 49.5 Dracula 14.4 Dreiser, Theodore  157.4 Drew, Elizabeth  93.4; 94.2 Drinkwater, John  60.2 Dryden, John  7.1; 103.3; 158.4 Du Maurier, Sir Gerald  28.1

751/II Du Pré, Jacqueline  73.8 Duckworth, George  159.1 Duckworth, Gerald  24.2; 159.1; 159.3 Duckworth, Stella  159.1; 159.2 Duffin, Henry Charles  71.4 Dujardin, Édouard  75.3; 143.2 Dukas, Paul  73.10 Dulac, Edmund  85.2 Dumas, Alexandre, père  137.4 Dupré, Catherine  24.1 Durrell, Lawrence  69.2; 176.3; 176.4 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich  69.3 Dvořák, Antonín Leopold  73.4 Eco, Umberto  127.3; 128.4; 128.5 Edward III, King of England  6.5 Edward VII, King of the United Kingdom  12.1; 15.1; 40.1; 87.1; 133.1 Eichendorff, Joseph Freiherr von  15.7 Einstein, Albert  2.3; 128.1; 142.1 El Greco (Dominikos Theotokopoulos)  53.4 Elgar, Edward  63.4; 73.1; 73.2–8; 73.9; 73.10; 95.2 Eliot, George  16.5; 19.1; 20.1; 20.2; 20.5; 20.7; 33.1; 41.4; 49.1; 50.5; 69.3; 88.2; 110.1; 110.2; 113.1; 123.1; 123.3; 124.1;  126.2; 156.3; 158.4; 162.3; 170.1; 171.1; 173.1 Eliot, Thomas Stearns  2.1; 14.2; 16.8; 25.9; 39.1; 44.1; 48.3; 48.4; 50.5; 57.4; 60.2; 62.1; 62.3; 63.3; 64.2; 64.3; 64.5; 66.1; 67.2; 68.2; 68.4; 68.6; 68.7; 69.1; 69.3; 69.5; 73.1; 73.2; 73.10; 74.3; 75.2; 75.4; 76.2; 76.3; 77.2; 77.4; 81.2; 81.3; 82.2; 84.2; 84.3; 85.7; 86.1; 86.4; 87.2; 89.1; 89.2; 92–105; 106.1; 106.2; 107.2; 107.3; 109.5; 118.4; 122.5; 125.1; 126.2; 128.4; 129.5; 130.1; 131.3; 132.3; 135.2; 137.3; 142.2; 143.1; 145.2; 149.1;

752/II 149.2; 153.2; 156.3; 157.4; 159.3; 163.3; 165.3; 176.1; 176.2; 176.3 Elizabeth of Austria, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary  97.2 Elizab eth I Tudor, Que en of England  97.4; 165.2 Ellmann, Richard  8.2; 75.1; 78.7; 129.5; 130.1; 132.4; 136.2; 143.1; 143.4; 148.1; 148.4; 149.2; 150.1 Elyot, Sir Thomas  92.1 Emerson, Ralph Waldo  95.9; 105.5 Empedocles  78.3; 78.6; 101.1; 101.3 Empson, William  63.3; 69.2; 106.3; 142.2 Epicurus 46.3 Epstein, Jacob  76.2 Erni, Hans  96.3 Ernst, Max  96.3 Ervine, St John Greer  169.3 Euripides 102.6 Evans, T. F.  7.1 Eve  60.2; 118.7; 148.3 Ezekiel 98.3 Falkner, J. Meade  50.3; 87.1 Farr, Florence  75.3 Faulkner, William 51.1 128.5 Fawkes, Guy  98.2 Fenollosa, Ernest  75.3; 78.2; 85.2 Ferrar, Nicholas  100.6 Ferrero, Guglielmo  142.1 Fforde, Matthew  74.3 Field, Michael (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper)  73.9 Fielding, Henry  15.6 Filippani Ronconi, Pio  97.4; 100.4 Firbank, Ronald  1.4; 39.1; 41.2; 45.1; 52.2; 57.4; 71.2; 87.1; 88; 90.3; 107.2; 171.2 Firdusi (Abū’l Qāsim Ḥasan) 106.3 FitzGerald, Edward  92.2; 95.2; 100.1; 106.1; 152.1

Index of names Fitzgerald, Francis Scott  42.1; 44.1 Flaubert, Gustave  1.2; 14.10; 18.1; 60.1; 92.2; 125.3; 128.3 Fleischmann, Marthe  129.5; 132.5; 141.2 Fleming, Ian  56.1 Fletcher, John Gould  76.2; 76.4 Fletcher, Phineas  148.1 Fletcher, Valery  92.1 Flint, Frank Stuart  75.3; 76.1; 76.2; 76.3; 76.4 Foerster, Norman  105.1 Ford, Boris  71.1 Ford, Ford Madox  1.4; 24.2; 61.1; 75.4; 76.3; 89.1; 103.4; 121.1; 123.1; 125– 127; 153.2; 155.1 Forster, Edward Morgan  1.3; 12.2; 17.4; 26.1; 26.2; 29–38; 56.1; 73.1; 86.1; 88.1; 88.2; 88.3; 102.7; 115.2; 116.3; 118.5; 127.2; 128.1; 157.4; 158.1; 160.1; 160.3; 164.1; 168.2; 169.1; 169.2; 169.3 Fox, George  3.2; 7.1; 124.3 Franck, César  73.6; 73.9 Franco, Francisco  6.6 Frank, Nino  148.4 Franklin, Benjamin  122.1 Frazer, James  69.3; 96.2; 97.2; 103.2; 118.4; 143.1 Fréchet, Alec  23.3; 24.1; 25.1; 25.5; 26.2 Freud, Sigmund  63.2; 75.3;  77.3; 78.9; 93.3; 93.4; 94.9; 100.3; 111.5; 113.4; 114.6; 122.2; 123.1; 125.4; 127.3; 128.4; 151.1; 157.4; 162.1; 164.1; 166.2 Frost, Robert  65.1; 65.2; 66.1; 75.4 Froude, James Anthony  48.1; 49.2; 170.2 Fry, Christopher  102.1; 107 Fry, Elizabeth  107.1 Fry, Roger  29.5; 86.1; 89.2; 159.2; 159.2; 159.3; 162.1; 169.1; 169.2 Frye, Northrop  95.2; 101.7; 143.1 Fullbrook, Kate  155.1; 156.2

Index of names Fuller, Roy  176.3 Gabler, H. W.  131.1 Galsworthy, Arthur  24.1 Galsworthy, John  1.2; 1.3; 8.1; 9.2; 13.3; 17.1; 23–28; 39.1; 40.3; 46.3; 51.1; 53.1; 55.3; 88.2; 123.1; 126.2; 127.1; 154.1; 158.1; 158.4 Galvani, Luigi  131.4 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand  74.3 García Márquez, Gabriel  128.5 Gardner, Helen  93.4 Garibaldi, Giuseppe  24.2; 74.3; 160.1 Garnett, David  73.3; 175 Garnett, Edward  24.2; 29.4; 175 Garnett, Richard  175 Garšin, Vsevolod Michajlovič  75.3 Gaskell, Elizabeth  19.1; 19.2; 20.1; 20.5; 20.9; 28.3; 71.3; 88.2; 88.3; 88.4; 92.1; 110.1; 111.2; 113.2; 115.1; 115.3; 123.1; 153.2; 156.2; 161.1; 168.1; 170.1; 174.2 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri  89.2; 90.4 Gauguin, Paul  54.1; 56.1; 57.4; 76.1 Gautier, Théophile  95.7 Gay, John  3.1 Gentile, Kathy Justice  170.2; 171.1 George IV, King of the United Kingdom 40.1 George V, King of the United Kingdom 60.1 George, Stefan  78.1 Gershwin, George  73.9 Gertler, Max  114.6 Ghiselin, Brewster  134.3 Gibbon, Edward  69.3 Gibson, Wilfrid Wilson  60.2; 61.2 Gibson, William  13.5 Gielgud, John  107.1 Gilbert, Stuart  142.2; 143.1 Gilbert, William Schwenck  86.3; 88.4; 88.5

753/II Giles, Richard F.  60.3; 77.4; 101.5; 103.7; 131.3 Gill, Eric  68.6 Gilson, Étienne  42.1 Gindin, James  1.3; 23.1; 24.1; 24.2; 24.3; 25.1; 25.2; 25.5; 27.2; 28.1 Giotto 169.2 Giraud, Albert  86.3 Gissing, George  13.5; 15.3; 15.4; 16.5; 17.3; 18.2; 26.1; 26.2; 26.3; 51.2; 52.1; 65.3; 75.1; 115.1; 161.1 Givens, Seon  134.4 Gladstone, William Ewart  21.4; 148.3 Glasheen, Adaline  148.4 Glendinning, Victoria  86.1; 86.3 Goebbels, Joseph  89.4 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  41.4; 49.5; 54.1; 78.1; 103.3; 104.1; 128.3; 137.2 Gogarty, Oliver  144.1 Gogol, Nikolay  89.3 Golding, William  14.5; 69.3; 152.2 Goldsmith, Oliver  82.1; 82.1; 97.4 Goliath 14.7 Gonne, Iseult  77.5; 81.1 Gonne, Maud  77.4; 77.5; 80.4; 80.6; 81.2; 81.4; 82.1; 83.1; 84.5; 85.8 Goossens, Eugene  17.4 Gordon, Charles George, General  65.6; 169.3 Gordon, Ian Alistair  153.2 Gore-Booth, Eva  82.2 Gorky, Maxim  14.1 Gorman, Herbert  132.4 Gosse, Edmund  16.6; 40.3; 53.3; 122.4; 142.2 Gourmont, Remy de  103.6 Gower, John  151.4 Goya, Francisco  25.1; 25.8; 26.4 Graham, Desmond  176.3 Grant, Duncan  169.1; 175 Granville-Barker, Harley  28.1

754/II Grattan, Henry  82.1; 85.7 Graves, Robert  63.1; 69; 71.4; 75.1; 176.1; 176.2 Gray, Ronald  121.1 Gray, Thomas  43.2 Green, Henry  88.2; 89.2; 89.3; 123.1 Greene, Graham  1.4; 27.1; 39.1; 46.1; 46.2; 56.1; 57.1; 88.2; 90.4; 125.3 Greene, Robert  165.3 Gregory, Augusta (Persse), Lady  9.1; 81.4; 82.1; 82.2; 84.3; 85.7; 129.3 Gregory, Horace  118.8 Gregory, Robert, Major  79.1; 82.2 Greig, Cicely  174.4 Grene, Nicholas  2.4 Grenfell, Julian  61.2 Greville, George, Lord  158.2 Grieg, Edvard  73.9; 73.10 Grierson, Herbert John Clifford  60.2; 64.2; 64.3; 87.2; 159.3 Griffith, David Wark  96.3; 152.1 Grove, Sir George  73.2 Guarini, Giovan Battista  88.5 Guedalla, Philip  169.3 Guenevere 127.2 Guido da Montefeltro  94.2 Guiguet, Jean  163.2; 166.1 Gurdjieff, George  153.3 Gurney, Ivor  61.1; 61.2; 61.3; 68.5; 68.6 H. D. (Hilda Doolittle)  76.2; 76.3; 76.4 Hafley, James  157.4; 162.1; 166.2; 167.1; 168.1 Haigh-Wood, Vivien  92.1 Hale, Emily  92.1 Hamlet  9.1; 84.4; 94.3; 101.1; 143.1; 144.5; 144.6; 148.3 Hammond, John R.  14.3 Hamnett, Nina  106.1 Handel, Georg Friedrich  73.10 Hanson, Clare  159.1; 160.3; 164.1

Index of names Hardy, Thomas  15.4; 15.5; 19.1; 24.2; 25.5; 25.5; 29.2; 31.1; 40.3; 49.2; 51.2; 53.1; 53.2; 53.4; 56.1; 60.1; 65.2; 65.4; 70.1; 70.2; 73.10; 109.2; 109.5; 110.1; 110.2; 111.2; 111.4; 111.5; 112.2; 121.1; 125.2; 125.3; 126.1; 126.2; 132.4; 157.4; 158.1; 158.4; 170.1 Harland, Henry  41.4 Hart, Clive  76.2 Hartleben, Otto Erich  86.3; 92.2 Hartley, David  75.3; 76.1 Hauptmann, Gerhart  40.3; 129.3 Hawthorne, Nathaniel  14.5; 49.2; 55.1; 58.2; 92.1; 122.1 Haydn, Franz Joseph  100.5 Heald, Edith  77.1 Heaney, Seamus  60.3; 72.1 Heard, Gerald  57.4 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  78.2; 86.4; 101.3; 101.6 Heidegger, Martin  75.2 Heine, Elizabeth  29.1 Heine, Heinrich  31.2; 152.1 Helen  64.5; 81.1; 81.2 Hemingway, Ernest  51.1; 88.2; 129.5 Henley, William Ernest  73.9 Henry II, King of England  102.3; 107.2 Henry VIII, King of England  126.1; 151.4 Henze, Hans Werner  73.1 Hepburn, James  17.3; 17.4; 20.9 Heracles, see Hercules Heraclitus  78.3; 81.1; 101.1; 101.3; 101.8; 114.2 Herbert, George  43.1; 63.3; 103.7 Hercules  95.8; 102.5 Herrick, Robert  60.3; 65.2 Hesse, Herman  96.1 Hibberd, Dominic  61.3; 62.1; 62.2 Hill, Geoffrey  100.7; 106.2; 106.3 Hill, Ralph  73.9 Hills, Jack  159.1

Index of names Hitchcock, Alfred  14.2; 28.4; 59.2; 59.3; 73.9 Hitler, Adolf  2.3; 6.6; 12.1; 13.3; 74.1; 74.3; 74.4; 77.1; 90.2; 168.2 Hobbes, Thomas  105.1 Hodgson, Ralph  60.2 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von  88.5 Hogarth, William  7.1 Hohenzollern, German Royal Family  59.4 Hollinghurst, Alan  88.5 Hollis, Christopher  45.1 Holroyd, Michael  2.1; 2.3 Holst, Gustav  61.1; 73.2; 73.10 Home, David  85.7 Homer  19.3; 62.2; 103.2; 127.2; 128.4; 128.5; 134.4; 142.2; 143.1; 145.2; 145.3; 148.1 Hoover, Herbert  74.2 Hope, Anthony  18.4; 88.3 Hopkins, Gerard Manley  42.1; 43.1; 48.1; 48.2; 48.3; 48.5; 60.3; 61.3; 62.1; 64.2; 64.4; 64.6; 65.2; 65.4; 66.1; 66.3; 68.2; 68.5; 69.1; 69.4; 77.3; 77.4; 78.10; 80.2; 81.1; 81.4; 85.3; 86.1; 86.2; 86.3; 86.5; 89.2; 90.2; 92.2; 92.4; 94.2; 94.6; 95.2; 95.5; 95.6; 98.4; 99.2; 100.1; 100.7; 101.3; 101.4; 101.5; 101.6; 101.7; 102.1; 102.3; 103.1; 103.4; 103.6; 103.7; 105.3; 105.4; 105.5; 106.2; 107.3; 117.1; 121.1; 121.4; 122.5; 123.2; 128.1; 130.4; 137.3; 138.1; 153.3; 153.4; 169.2 Horace  69.4; 106.3; 176.1 Hough, Graham  78.3; 78.5; 101.4; 118.5; 118.8 Housman, Alfred Edward  43.1; 48.1; 62.1; 77.4; 81.4 Howard, Katharine  126.1 Howe, Irving  75.3 Howells, William Dean  17.3

755/II Hughes, Ted  69.3; 70.1; 71.4; 176.3 Hugo, Victor  20.1 Huitzilopochtli, Aztec god  118.7 Hulme, Thomas Ernest  75.3; 76.1; 76.2; 76.3  76.4; 89.2; 94.3 Hume, David  164.1 Humma, John  113.1; 116.2; 120.2 Hunt, Violet  126.3 Hunt, William Holman  19.1 Hus, Jan  3.3 Huxley, Aldous  15.1; 29.2; 42.2; 49.3; 51.1; 57.4; 73.1; 88.2; 89.3; 89.4; 90.3; 90.4; 105.1; 108.1; 109.1; 109.5; 117.1; 123.1; 127.2; 153.1; 153.3 Huxley, Thomas Henry  14.1; 42.2 Huysmans, Joris Karl  18.5; 88.1; 90.3; 92.2 Hyde-Lees, Georgie (George)  77.5; 81.1 Hynes, Samuel  29.5; 61.2 Ibsen, Henrik  9.4; 15.2; 25.4; 26.3; 28.4; 33.2; 40.3; 44.1; 53.2; 53.3; 73.9; 85.7; 102.4; 102.7; 123.2; 128.1; 128.3; 129.3; 130.3; 136.3; 140.1; 151.4 Icarus 37.1 Inge, William Ralph  5.1 Innes, C. D.  7.1 Irving, Henry  124.2 Irving, Washington  165.2 Iseult  77.4; 110.4; 114.6; 149.3; 151.1; 151.3 Isherwood, Christopher  8.1; 22.5; 23.3; 28.3; 57.4; 88.2; 106.2; 153.1; 169.3 Ishiguro, Kazuo  22.5; 74.1 Itō Michio  85.2 Jackson, Holbrook  41.4 Jakobson, Roman  93.4 James, Henry  13.2; 13.3; 16.3; 16.8; 17.3; 25.4; 50.4; 50.5; 55.2; 56.1; 57.4; 64.1; 64.2; 73.1; 94.8; 125.3; 126.2; 153.2; 156.3; 161.1 James, William  75.3; 125.4

756/II James I Stuart, King of England  165.2 James II Stuart, King of England  7.1 Jammes, Francis  88.3 Jeffares, Alexander Norman  85.1; 85.5 Jefferies, Richard  65.2; 65.4 Jerome, Klapka Jerome  14.10 Jesus Christ  2.4; 7.2; 8.3; 10.2; 10.3; 20.2; 29.4; 43.1; 44.3; 47.1; 48.3; 51.2; 53.3; 69.3;  77.5; 78.9; 79.4; 80.2; 80.6; 81.4; 85.5; 85.5; 85.6; 86.5; 93.3; 94.7; 95.2; 95.2; 95.4; 95.5; 95.6; 95.8; 97.2; 97.5; 98.1; 98.3; 98.5; 99.2; 100.3; 101.4; 101.5; 101.6; 101.8; 102.3; 107.3; 109.3; 113.4; 114.3; 118.5; 120.1; 121.3; 121.5; 122.4; 122.5; 122.6; 127.3; 136.5; 143.4; 145.2; 146.4; 146.5; 149.3; 151.1; 156.2; 164.2; 164.3; 176.2 Jewsbury, Geraldine  158.1 Joan of Arc  2.3; 2.4; 3.2; 88.3 Johnson, Anthony L.  64.2; 77.1; 77.4; 78.1; 78.3; 78.6; 79.3; 79.4; 80.6; 81.1; 82.2; 82.3; 93.4; 94.2; 94.9; 95.2; 96.1; 96.2 Johnson, Esther (Stella)  85.7 Johnson, Samuel  40.3; 42.1; 71.1; 158.2; 158.4 Jolas, Eugene  148.1 Jones, David  61.3  68.1; 68.3; 68.4; 68.6; 106.1 Jones, Peter  76.4 Jonson, Ben  73.3; 95.8 Jove 97.4 Joyce, Eileen  136.4 Joyce, Giorgio  129.4; 132.5 Joyce, James  1.2; 8.2; 8.3; 9.4; 10.5; 11.1; 16.5; 17.1; 17.2; 19.3; 22.1; 25.1; 26.1; 26.2; 29.1; 29.4; 30.5; 31.1; 37.1; 38.2; 39.1; 40.3; 49.5; 53.1; 53.3; 56.1; 61.3; 68.6; 71.3; 73.1; 75.1; 75.2; 75.3; 75.4; 76.3; 76.4; 77.1; 77.4; 78.1; 78.2; 88.5;

Index of names 89.1; 90.1; 90.2; 90.2; 90.3; 91.1; 91.2; 92.3; 92.4; 93.3; 93.4; 94.8; 96.1; 100.7; 101.1; 101.2; 102.1; 104.1; 105.3; 109.1; 109.2; 109.5; 115.3; 117.1; 123.1; 123.2; 123.3; 127.2; 127.3; 128– 151; 152.1; 152.2; 153.2; 154.1; 155.1; 155.2; 156.1; 157.1; 157.3; 160.1; 162.1; 163.1; 163.2; 163.2; 165.1; 168.2; 175 Joyce, John Stanislaus  129.1; 129.2; 129.4; 129.5; 131.1; 134.4; 143.1; 148.2; 148.4 Joyce, Lucia  129.4; 129.5; 132.5 Joyce, Nora  129.3; 129.4; 132.1; 132.5; 133.1; 136.4; 139.3; 141.2; 142.2; 143.1; 147.1; 148.2; 148.3; 151.3 Judas  39.1; 60.2; 67.3; 69.3; 85.6; 95.2; 95.5 Julius, Anthony  93.4 Jung, Carl Gustav  16.6; 122.5 Jungmann, Elisabeth  40.3 Juno  9.4; 97.4 Justinian, Roman emperor  78.10; 81.1 Kafka, Franz  14.2; 36.2; 45.2; 69.2; 71.3; 91.1; 175.1 Kain, R.  131.1 Kämpffer, Gertrude  129.5; 141.2 Kant, Immanuel  54.1; 114.3 Kaplan, Sydney Janet  153.2 Karl, Frederick Robert  170.2; 170.3; 172.1 Kavanagh, Patrick Joseph  68.5 Keaton, Buster  131.3 Keats, John  62.1; 62.2; 64.2; 67.1; 67.2; 69.3; 69.4; 78.2; 79.3; 84.1; 86.3; 86.4; 153.1; 153.2 Kellogg, Frank  74.1 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald  70.1 Kenner, Hugh  89.1; 90.4; 142.2 Ker, Ian  42.1; 46.1 Kermode, Frank  64.2; 75.2; 78.1; 89.2; 111.5; 112.1; 114.2; 114.6; 115.1; 117.2; 120.2; 122.5; 128.5; 141.1; 142.2; 152.1 Kettle, Arnold  17.4; 23.3; 125.4

Index of names Keun, Odette  14.1 Keyes, Sidney  176.2 Keynes, Geoffrey  169.1 Keynes, John Maynard  74.1; 74.2; 169.1; 169.3 Khan, Florence  40.3 Khayyam, Omar  92.2; 106.1; 152.1 Kierkegaard, Søren  57.2; 95.5; 137.2 Kingsley, Charles  24.2; 64.4; 70.1; 157.1; 165.2 Kipling, Rudyard  6.3; 14.2; 14.5; 16.2; 16.4; 20.8; 24.2; 24.3; 27.1; 38.1; 43.2; 45.1; 58.1; 61.2; 63.2; 70.1; 71.1; 92.2; 95.2; 98.2; 99.1; 99.2; 112.1; 121.5; 126.2; 153.2; 156.3; 160.3 Kitchener, Horatio Herbert  3.1; 43.1 Knowland, A. S.  85.1; 85.5 Knox, Ronald  46.2 Kosok, Heinz  9.1; 9.3; 10.6; 11.1 Krause, David  8.1; 9.1; 10.1 Krishna 100.3 Kun, Bela  74.1 La Bruyère, Jean de  122.1 La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Earl of  58.1 Lacan, Jacques  93.4 Lady Godiva  114.7 Laforgue, Jules  88.1; 92.2; 94.9; 95.1; 95.7; 107.2 Lafourcade, Georges  20.5 Lamb, Charles  48.2; 87.1 Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di  16.3 Lancaster, English House  101.8 Lancelot 127.2 Land, Stephen K.  31.1 Landor, Walter Savage  78.6 Lane, John  40.1 Lang, Fritz  13.5 Langland, William  151.4 Larbaud, Valery  142.1 Larisch, Marie  97.2

757/II Larkin, Philip  17.3; 88.2 Latimer, Hugh  41.2 Latini, Brunetto  96.2 Lautréamont, Earl of  128.3 Law, Bonar  22.2; 74.2 Lawrence, David Herbert  1.2; 10.5; 10.6; 13.2; 15.2; 15.4; 15.5; 16.5; 16.6; 17.1; 17.3; 17.4; 22.1; 23.3; 24.2; 25.1; 25.5; 26.4; 28.1; 29.1; 31.2; 33.2; 36.2; 37.1; 50.2; 53.1; 54.1; 55.3; 56.1; 60.1; 69.5; 70.2; 71.1; 73.1; 73.3; 74.3; 74.4; 75.1; 75.2; 76.2; 76.4; 92.4; 103.1; 105.3; 106.1; 109–122; 130.1; 140.2; 142.1; 144.3; 148.4; 153.1; 153.2; 153.3; 154.1; 157.4; 158.1; 160.1; 165.3; 175.1 Lawrence of Arabia (Thomas Edward)  5.1; 12.2; 74.1; 97.4; 106.1 Lazarus  85.6; 86.4; 86.5; 94.2 Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan  46.2; 69.5; 71.4; 149.2 Lear, Edward  43.1; 72.1; 99.1; 152.2; 154.1 Lear, King  21.4 Leaska, Mitchell Alexander  157.4; 162.2; 163.2; 163.3 Leavis, Frank Raymond  23.3; 29.1; 30.1; 64.2; 86.1; 109.5; 113.1; 114.6; 128.5; 157.4 Leavis, Queenie D.  23.3 Leda  60.2; 78.2; 78.10; 81.4; 85.3; 85.5; 85.8; 114.4 Lee, Hermione  157.4; 162.3; 168.2 Legouis, Emile  125.4 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von  78.5 Leicester, Robert Dudley, Earl of  97.4 Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov)  74.3; 121.6 Leonardo da Vinci  13.1; 33.1 Leopardi, Giacomo  14.8; 100.3; 117.3; 153.3 Lessing, Doris  153.1 Leverson, Ada  87.1 Levin, Richard  134.4; 142.1

758/II Lewis, Alun  176.2 Lewis, Clive Staples  14.1; 48.4; 48.5 Lewis, Wyndham  17.3; 49.4; 67.1; 73.1; 74.4; 75.2; 75.5; 76.2; 78.1; 78.2; 86.1; 86.3; 89–91; 128.5; 142.2; 148.4; 157.4 Liddell, Robert  171.1 Liebknecht, Karl  74.1 Linati, Carlo  143.1 Lincoln, Abraham  60.2 Lindsay, Vachel  75.4 Linnaeus (Carl von Linné), 65.4 Lion, Leon  28.1 Liszt, Franz  86.2 Lloyd George, David  22.2; 74.2; 74.3 Locke, John  75.3 Loftus, Cissey  41.1 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth  169.3 Longhi, Pietro Antonio  39.1 Lowell, Amy  76.1; 76.2; 76.3 Lowell, James  159.1 Lowry, Malcolm  69.2 Loy, Mina  75.5 Lucas, John  17.4; 22.2 Lucifer, see Satan Lucretius  101.3; 103.5; 106.3; 146.3 Lukács, György  75.2 Luther, Martin  43.2; 48.2; 78.7 Luxemburg, Rosa  74.1 Macaulay, Rose  50.5; 103.6 MacCarthy, Desmond  55.3 MacDiarmid, Hugh  8.2; 73.9 MacDonald, James Ramsay  2.3; 70.1; 74.2 Macellari, Liliana  48.5 McFarlane, James  75.2; 106.1 Machen, Arthur  29.4 Machiavelli, Niccolò  16.2; 57.4; 106.3; 157.3 Mackenzie, Alexander Campbell  73.1 MacKenzie, Norman H.  77.4 MacNeice, Louis  77.4

Index of names MacShane, Frank  126.2; 126.3; 127.1; 127.4 McTaggart, John Ellis  29.5; 169.2 Madge, Charles  77.4 Madonna, see Virgin Mary Maeterlinck, Maurice  88.1; 88.3 Mahler, Gustav  73.2; 73.5; 73.6; 73.7; 73.10 Maier, B.  150.1 Mallarmé, Stéphane  41.4; 103.1 Manet, Édouard  53.4 Mangan, James Clarence  139.3; 148.3 Manganelli, Giorgio  152.2 Mann, Thomas  2.1; 20.6; 23.2; 50.3; 51.2; 54.1; 110.3; 148.2 Mannheim, Karl  105.5 Mannin, Ethel  77.1 Manning, Cardinal Henry Edward  169.3 Manning, Olivia  72.2; 176.4 Mansfield, Katherine  29.1; 36.1; 53.3; 73.1; 75.4; 105.3; 123.3; 124.1; 153–156; 159.3 Manzoni, Alessandro  33.1 Marcel, Gabriel  157.4 Marcus Aurelius  44.2 Marconi, Guglielmo  14.9 Marenco, Franco  29.1; 64.2; 88.2; 169.3 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso  39.1; 75.2; 89.2; 89.2; 89.3; 90.1 Mark, King of Cornwall  148.3 Markiewitz, Con  80.4; 82.2 Marlowe, Christopher  82.2; 94.8; 94.9; 107.1; 163.2 Marsh, Edward  60.1; 60.2; 64.2; 64.4; 65.1; 67.1; 67.4; 69.1; 75.4; 86.2 Martindale, Elsie  126.3 Martineau, Harriet  71.4 Marucci, Franco  50.3; 87.1; 145.3; 153.3 Marvell, Andrew  64.2; 64.3; 93.3 Marx, Karl  6.2; 7.2; 8.3; 13.3; 14.3; 16.7; 17.4; 23.3; 28.3; 71.4; 80.6; 90.4; 142.1; 142.2; 170.1 Mascagni, Pietro  73.9

Index of names Masefield, John  60.2; 60.3; 63.1; 68.5; 70 Materer, Timothy  89.3; 90.3; 90.4; 91.3 Matisse, Henri  76.1; 87.1 Matthiessen, Francis Otto  92.1; 102.3 Maugham, William Somerset  8.1; 12.2; 51–58; 124.1 Maupassant, Guy de  20.5; 24.2; 25.5; 39.1; 51.2; 52.1; 110.1; 119.1; 128.3 Maurras, Charles  92.1; 92.2 Mayer, Teodoro  142.1 Mayoux, Jean-Jacques  164.1 Meixner, John Albert  126.2 Melchiori, Giorgio  77.5; 78.2; 78.8; 79.4; 81.1; 81.4; 100.1; 102.1; 107.1; 107.2; 109.5; 122.5; 131.1; 142.1; 148.3; 151.1 Melville, Herman  14.5; 73.1; 92.1; 110.3; 114.7; 116.3; 122.1 Memmi, Lippo  80.2 Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Felix  73.1 Menelaus 64.5 Mercier, Vivian  150.3 Meredith, George  15.6; 16.2; 20.9; 22.1; 22.4; 26.3; 29.1; 39.1; 86.1; 87.1; 88.4; 117.1; 127.2; 128.3; 132.4; 164.3; 168.1; 170.1; 171.1 Mew, Charlotte  60.1 Meyers, Jeffrey  89.2; 153.1; 153.2; 153.3; 153.4; 154.2 Michael, archangel  49.3 Middleton, Christopher  106.3 Middleton, J. H.  169.2 Middleton, Thomas  97.3; 102.2 Mill, John Stuart  2.3; 13.4; 16.2 Miller, J. Hillis  92.1; 93.3; 157.1; 163.1 Milton, John  3.1; 48.5; 49.2; 68.2; 91.1; 103.1; 103.7; 104.1; 123.2; 126.1; 129.5; 132.4 Milward, Peter  101.5 Mirskij, D. P.  142.2 Mittner, Ladislao  78.1; 121.1

759/II Mizener, Arthur  126.1; 126.2; 126.3; 127.1; 127.2 Modigliani, Amedeo  87.1 Molière ( Jean-Baptiste Poquelin)  9.3; 9.4; 22.4 Monet, Claude  170.3 Monro, Harold  60.2; 76.3 Monroe, Harriet  75.4 Monroe, James  16.3 Montaigne, Michel de  40.2; 48.2; 103.6; 121.4; 172.4 Moody, Anthony David  98.2; 100.3; 100.5; 102.5 Moore, George Edward  8.2; 17.2; 17.3; 29.5; 31.1; 52.1; 69.3; 128.3; 159.2; 164.1; 169.1; 169.3 Moore, Henry  75.3 Moore, Janie King  48.4 Moore, Marianne  69.2; 75.4; 76.3 Moore, Paddy  48.4 Moore, Thomas Sturge  60.2 Moravia, Alberto  116.1 Moreau, Gustave  81.3 Moro, Tommaso  105.2 Morris, Margaret  25.5; 28.3 Morris, William  1.4; 14.4; 45.1; 50.2; 50.4; 53.4; 68.7; 71.1; 77.4; 78.6; 78.10; 88.3; 105.4; 109.4; 114.3; 125.1; 126.3; 169.2 Moser, Thomas C.  125.1; 125.2; 125.4; 126.1; 126.3 Moses  14.5; 16.5; 40.1; 67.4; 107.3 Mosley, Sir Oswald Ernald  2.3; 74.2; 74.3 Motion, Andrew  66.1 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus  69.3; 88.5; 100.5; 151.1 Muggeridge, Malcolm  39.2 Muhammad  3.3; 151.1 Muir, Edwin 56.1 166.1 Munkáksy, M.  130.1; 130.3 Murdoch, Iris  9.1; 12.1; 176.4 Murray, Gilbert  103.2

760/II Murry, John Middleton  75.4; 105.1; 109.3; 109.5; 116.1; 153.1; 153.3; 153.4 Musil, Robert  13.4; 16.5 Mussolini, Benito  2.3; 6.6; 74.3; 75.2; 77.1 Mussorgsky, Modest Petrovich  96.3 Mytton, Jack  158.1 Nabokov, Vladimir  143.1; 148.4 Napoleon I Bonaparte  2.3; 14.7; 15.6; 45.1; 61.1 Narcissus 85.4 Nathan, Leonard E.  85.1; 85.6 Nausicaa 95.9 Nelson, Horatio  12.2; 136.4 Ne vinson, Christopher Richard Wynne 89.2 Nevius, Blake  170.2; 170.3; 173.1 Newbolt, Henry  61.2; 70.1; 71.1 Newman, John Henry  12.1; 44.2; 48.1; 48.4; 48.5; 73.2; 73.4; 78.7; 88.5; 95.1; 95.2; 103.2; 169.3; 170.2 Newton, Isaac  7.1 Nicholas of Cusa  148.1; 149.2 Nicholls, Peter  75.5 Nicolson, Harold  159.3 Nicolson, Nigel  159.3 Nietzsche, Friedrich  15.1; 15.2; 44.1; 44.2; 45.2; 46.1; 54.1; 60.1; 73.9; 90.1; 90.3; 101.3; 109.2; 110.3; 114.2; 118.6; 128.2; 137.2; 141.2; 152.1; 153.3 Nightingale, Florence  169.3 Niobe 95.8 Noah  43.2; 85.5 Noble, James Ashcroft  65.4 Nordau, Max  23.2 Novalis (Georg Friedrich Philipp Freiherr von Hardenberg ), 48.2; 105.4; 105.5; 125.1 O’Brien, Flann  152.2 O’Casey, Eileen  9.1

Index of names O’Casey, Sean  8–11; 77.1 O’Connell, Daniel  83.1 O’Connor, John  46.1 Odle, Alan  123.1 O’Duffy, Eoin  74.3; 83.1 Oedipus  85.3; 155.3; 173.3 Oisin 84.5 Oliphant, Margaret  20.1; 88.2; 115.1; 170.1 Olivier, Lawrence  64.2 O’Neill, Eugene  10.1 Orwell, George  1.2; 1.3; 2.2; 2.3; 4.1; 4.2; 6.1; 6.2; 6.3; 6.6; 7.2; 8.2; 12.1; 12.2; 13.1; 13.2; 13.3; 13.5; 14.1; 14.2; 14.5; 14.10; 15.2; 15.7; 16.4; 16.7; 16.8; 22.2; 23.3; 24.3; 25.1; 25.3; 27.2; 33.1; 38.1; 42.1; 42.2; 45.1; 45.2; 48.3; 48.5; 51.1; 51.2; 53.4; 59.1; 59.4; 60.3; 61.1; 63.3; 64.1; 65.6; 68.2; 68.3; 68.4; 74.1; 74.3; 74.4; 78.10; 86.1; 86.3; 87.1; 88.2; 90.4; 92.4; 93.4; 100.7; 105.4; 105.5; 109.5; 110.2; 111.2; 114.6; 116.3; 117.1; 121.6; 127.2; 134.4; 142.2; 153.1; 153.3; 157.4; 158.6; 171.1; 175 Osborne, Dorothy  158.4; 159.3 O’Shaughnessy, Arthur  71.1; 73.3; 73.9 Osiris  96.2; 122.6 Ouida (Louise de la Ramée)  17.4; 25.4; 50.2; 50.5; 53.1; 93.4; 123.2 Ouspensky, Peter D.  12.1 Ovid 175.1 Owen, Harold  62.2 Owen, Wilfred Edward Salter  10.1; 26.2; 61.1; 61.2; 61.3; 62; 63.1; 63.2; 64.1; 64.2; 65.1; 67.1; 67.3; 68.2; 86.2; 176.1; 176.2; 176.3 Pagnini, Marcello  75.3; 76.1; 92.2; 92.3; 94.9; 96.3; 100.5; 149.2; 157.2 Pan  29.4; 31.2; 68.4; 69.1; 118.8; 152.1 Paris, son of Priam  135.5

Index of names Parker, R.  60.2 Parnell, Charles Stuart  83.1; 83.4; 129.2; 132.1; 139.1; 146.1 Parrinder, Patrick  14.5; 16.5 Parry, Charles Hubert Hastings  73.1 Parsons, Ian  67.1; 67.2; 67.4 Partridge, Ralph  169.3 Pascal, Blaise  103.6; 121.6 Pater, Clara  157.1 Pater, Walter  29.2; 29.4; 31.2; 40.1; 45.2; 50.2; 50.3; 62.2; 66.2; 69.3; 73.1; 77.4; 78.10; 79.1; 79.4; 84.4; 88.3; 89.2; 90.2; 90.3; 103.1; 103.2; 103.3; 103.6; 109.2; 118.4; 122.3; 125.1; 125.2; 136.1; 151.1; 153.3; 157.1; 157.2; 157.4; 158.4; 165.1; 169.2; 169.3 Patmore, Coventry  48.3; 86.2; 92.1; 155.2 Peacock, Thomas Love  88.2 Pearse, Pádraic  9.5 Peele, George  20.5 Pericles 98.5 Perlman, Itzhak  73.8 Perseus 82.3 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca)  94.3 Petronius 107.1 Pfeiffer, Karl J.  54.1; 56.1; 57.1; 57.2 Phidias  84.4; 84.5 Philippe, Charles-Louis  94.8 Phillips, Sir Percival  74.3 Phillips, Stephen  41.4; 102.1; 107.1 Picasso, Pablo  87.1; 89.2; 90.4; 128.3; 128.4 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni  78.2 Pinamonti, Gian Pietro  137.3 Pinero, Arthur Wing  55.3 Pinkney, Tony  111.1 Pinter, Harold  2.2; 8.1; 71.3; 170.2 Piozzi, Gabriel Mario  158.2 Piozzi, Hester  158.2 Pirandello, Luigi  2.1; 17.3; 21.1; 84.2; 102.5; 116.2; 141.2; 166.1 Plath, Sylvia  153.1

761/II Plato  78.9; 79.4; 81.4; 82.1; 85.6; 100.3; 105.2; 109.3; 114.4 Plautus  2.2; 9.3; 174.1 Plotinus  78.2; 78.8; 79.4; 82.1 Poe, Edgar Allan  14.2; 46.2; 50.3; 71.4; 75.3; 103.1; 109.3; 122.1; 172.1 Poggioli, Renato  96.1 Polyphemus 14.7 Pope, Alexander  39.1; 86.1; 86.3; 87.2; 90.3; 165.2 Popper, Amalia  129.3; 132.5; 141.2; 142.1 Porteous, Hugh Gordon  89.1; 91.1 Pound, Ezra  17.3; 39.1; 60.1; 63.3; 64.2; 64.3; 67.3; 68.2; 68.6; 75.2; 75.3; 75.4; 75.5; 76.1; 76.2; 76.3; 76.4; 77.1; 77.2; 77.4; 77.5; 78.2; 85.2; 89.1; 89.2; 90.1; 92.2; 92.4; 94.3; 95.1; 96.1; 97.2; 100.2; 101.7; 103.1; 103.6; 104.1; 106.1; 106.2; 106.3; 126.1; 128.5; 129.4; 129.5; 132.3; 142.1; 148.1; 148.4 Poussin, Nicolas  78.2 Powell, Anthony  88.2; 88.5; 89.3; 123.1 Powell, Violet  174.4 Powys, John Cowper  49.1; 49.4–5; 68.6; 68.7; 69.3; 123.1; 123.2; 123.3 Powys, Theodore Francis  49.1–3; 49.4 Praz, Mario  14.1; 39.1; 48.1; 50.1; 50.2; 50.3; 64.2; 64.3; 64.5; 69.3; 70.1; 71.1; 71.2; 78.2; 78.7; 86.1; 87.1; 88.1; 96.1; 96.3; 102.3; 103.5; 103.6; 107.2; 109.3; 118.1; 119.1; 123.3; 125.4; 127.3; 153.1; 153.3; 153.4; 159.3; 163.2; 169.3; 170.3 Priapus 94.9 Priestley, John Boynton  12.1; 73.8 Pritchard William H.  89.3 Prokofiev, Sergej  73.10; 96.3 Prometheus 90.1 Proust, Marcel  13.4; 16.5; 16.8; 23.2; 25.9; 26.2; 33.1; 50.1; 66.2; 117.1; 123.2; 123.3; 127.1; 129.5; 157.1; 159.1; 167.2

762/II Puccini, Giacomo  41.2; 71.2; 73.9; 85.8 Purdom, Charles Benjamin  2.1 Pym, Barbara  88.2 Pythagoras  79.4; 81.4; 84.4; 85.4 Queneau, Raymond  40.3 Quetzalcoatl, Aztec god  118.7 Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur Thomas  24.1 Rabelais, François  48.2 Radford, Jean  123.1; 123.2; 124.3 Rattigan, Terence  12.1; 12.2 Ravel, Maurice  73.10 Read, Sir Herbert  61.3; 68.1; 68.4; 68.6; 76.2; 77.3; 128.3; 176.2 Read, William Henry  73.4 Reade, Charles  2.3; 28.3; 88.3  117.1 Reed, Henry  176.2 Reeves, Amber  14.1 Reeves, William Pember  14.1 Remus 151.3 Renan, Ernest  136.4 Richards, Grant  129.5; 133.1 Richards, Ivor Armstrong  96.3 Richardson, Dorothy  49.4; 75.3; 89.1; 123–124 Richardson, Samuel  50.2; 175.1 Riding, Laura  69.1; 69.2; 75.1 Ridley, Nicholas  41.2 Rilke, Rainer Maria  75.1 Rimbaud, Arthur  60.3; 75.1; 86.1; 131.3 Robbins, Amy Catherine  14.1 Robertson, A. J.  169.3 Robin Hood  42.1; 119.1 Robinson, H. M.  148.3; 148.4 Roden, Noel  73.9 Rodin, Auguste  2.1 Rogers, Timothy  64.1; 64.2; 64.3; 97.2 Romains, Jules  62.1 Ronsard, Pierre de  92.2 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano  74.2; 74.4

Index of names Rose, Phillis  114.6; 157.1; 157.4 Rosenberg, Alfred  74.3 Rosenberg, Isaac  10.1; 61.2; 63.1; 67; 176.1 Ross, Robbie  62.2 Rossetti, Christina  20.5; 25.2; 71.4; 86.3; 88.3; 125.1; 157.1; 157.4; 158.3 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel  43.1; 50.2; 50.3; 64.5; 67.1; 71.2; 80.2; 81.4; 82.3; 88.1; 88.3; 89.2; 92.1; 94.8; 98.4; 123.2; 125.1; 125.2; 132.4; 157.1 Rossetti, William Michael  125.1 Roth, Philip  128.5 Rougemont, Denis de  69.2 Rousseau, Jean Jacques  85.7; 92.1 Roussel, Raymond  128.3 Ruddock, Margot  77.1; 84.3 Ruggieri, Franca  142.1 Rushdie, Salman  128.5 Ruskin, John  10.5; 14.4; 14.7; 15.4; 16.6; 36.1; 37.1; 45.1; 48.2; 48.3; 65.2; 68.4; 71.1; 73.1; 78.10; 84.2; 90.4; 93.3; 95.8; 103.3; 105.4; 109.4; 113.1; 113.2; 114.3; 119.1; 122.2; 122.3; 122.4; 155.2; 158.6; 164.2; 169.1; 169.2 Russell, Bertrand  15.1; 42.2; 49.4; 90.2; 92.1; 94.9; 105.1; 109.4; 164.1; 169.3 Russell, George (AE)  78.7; 129.3; 131.1; 131.2; 133.1; 152.1 Russell, Ken  73.3; 114.4; 114.5; 114.7 Russolo, Luigi  75.2 Rutherford, Mark (William Hale White)  21.3; 53.3; 122.4 Sabbadini, Silvano  94.8; 103.1; 103.2 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold  142.1 Sackville-West, Vita  159.3; 165.1 St Anthony the Abbot, or Hermit  80.5 St Augustine  97.4; 100.3; 101.3; 128.3 St Bernadette Soubirous  88.3

Index of names St Catherine  3.2; 3.3 St Clare  42.1 St Dorothy  86.3 St Francis  41.1; 41.4; 42.1; 49.3; 51.2; 109.4 St George  43.2; 64.2; 80.2 St Ignatius Loyola  57.1 St John of the Cross  94.2; 100.1 St John the Baptist  41.4; 88.3; 94.2; 94.7; 118.7; 122.4 St John the Evangelist  32.3; 80.6; 121.5; 122.4 St Joseph 116.2 121.3 St Mark  121.5 St Matthew  121.5; 122.6 St Patrick  83.1; 148.2 St Paul  5.1; 26.2; 64.1; 100.3; 109.4; 137.3; 158.7 St Peter  97.5; 99.2; 118.5 St Thomas Aquinas  42.1; 46.1; 128.3; 128.5; 136.3; 138.2; 148.1 St Stephen  102.3 St Winefred  102.3 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustine de  169.3 Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)  14.7; 59.4; 88.1 Salome  3.1; 39.1; 41.2; 41.4; 85.1; 85.8; 88.1; 88.3; 118.7 Salomon, King  25.5; 80.1; 80.2 Sampietro, Luigi  88.3 Sanna, Vittoria  160.1 Sarraute, Nathalie  170.2 Sassoon, Siegfried  10.1; 61.2; 61.3; 62.1; 62.2; 63; 67.2; 68.2; 68.5; 69.1; 70.2; 176.1 Satan  41.4; 53.3; 91.3; 100.3; 103.6; 105.3; 121.2; 136.4; 137.4; 145.2 Satie, Erik  86.2 Saul 67.4 Saussure, Ferdinand de  40.2; 130.2 Savonarola, Girolamo  10.6; 33.3; 41.4 Scarlatti, Domenico  73.1; 106.2 Schelling, Friedrich  103.6

763/II Schiller, Friedrich  3.2 Schneider, Elizabeth  94.9; 97.2 Scholes, R.  131.1 Schönberg, Arnold  86.3; 88.5; 92.2 Schopenhauer, Arthur  23.1; 47.1; 53.3; 92.2; 110.3; 125.1 Schubert, Franz  18.2; 73.4 Scott, Ridley  13.5 Scott, Walter  111.4; 164.3 Scotus, John Duns  78.5; 122.5 Seiden, Melvin  127.3 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus  95.1; 103.1; 103.2 Serpieri, Alessandro  93.2; 93.4; 94.2; 94.9; 95.2; 96.2; 96.3; 97.2; 97.3; 97.5; 98.4; 100.5 Shakespeare, William  2.4; 3.1; 9.1; 9.5; 10.5; 10.6; 22.3; 40.2; 41.3; 42.1; 48.3; 49.1; 49.3; 57.2; 64.2; 67.2; 69.2; 69.3; 71.2; 79.2; 80.3; 82.3; 86.3; 88.1; 88.4; 89.2; 90.4; 92.1; 94.3; 94.9; 95.1; 95.2; 95.6; 95.8; 97.1; 97.3; 97.5; 98.2; 98.3; 98.5; 102.1; 103.2; 103.4; 103.5; 103.6; 104.1; 107.1; 114.5; 124.2; 126.2; 127.1; 128.4; 130.3; 131.1; 135.5; 136.3; 138.2; 139.3; 140.2; 141.1; 144.6; 148.1; 152.1; 161.1; 164.3; 165.2; 168.2; 169.3; 170.1; 170.2; 170.3; 171.1; 173.1; 174.2; 176.3 Shattuck, Charles  134.4 Shaw, George Bernard  1.4; 2–7; 8.1; 10.2; 10.4; 13.3; 15.1; 15.4; 15.5; 16.2; 16.6; 26.4; 28.1; 42.2; 44.1; 48.1; 55.2; 60.3; 62.2; 73.1; 85.7; 102.1; 102.2; 102.3; 102.5; 102.6; 117.3; 120.1; 142.2; 144.3; 168.2 Sheba, Queen of  80.1 Sheehy, Mary  132.2 Shelley, Mary  14.4; 78.7 Shelley, Percy Bysshe  26.2; 31.1; 62.2; 62.3; 67.1; 67.2; 77.4; 79.3; 81.2; 86.5; 87.2; 92.2; 103.1; 104.1; 131.4; 133.5; 153.1

764/II Shorthouse, Joseph Henry  165.2 Sibelius, Jean  73.9 Sickert, Walter  89.2; 160.1; 162.1 Sidney, Sir Philip  61.1; 79.1; 158.2 Siegfried  29.1; 167.1 Silkin, Jon  68.1; 68.2; 68.4; 68.5 Sinclair, May  123.3 Sitwell, Edith  73.1; 75.4; 76.4; 86; 87.2; 89.2; 90.3; 106.3 Sitwell, Osbert  86.1; 87; 88.2; 90.3 Sitwell, Sacheverell  86.1; 87; 90.3 Skeat, W. W.  136.4 Skelton, John  69.4 Skinner, John  158.1 Slocum, J. J.  136.2 Smidt, Kristian  94.2 Smith, Alexander  65.5 Smith, James Cruickshank  60.2; 87.2; 159.3 Smith, Reggie  176.4 Smith, Stan  65.1 Smith, Stevie  72; 176.4 Smollett, Tobias George  111.1 Snowden, Philip  74.2 Socrates  2.3; 69.4 Sommavilla, Guido  44.3; 46.1; 48.5 Sontag, Susan  88.2; 88.5 Sophocles 81.1 Sorel, Georges Eugène  74.1; 76.2 Sorley, Charles  64.1; 68.4 Soupault, Philippe  128.1 Southam, B. C.  95.1; 95.2; 96.1; 98.2; 98.5 Spencer, T.  136.2 Spender, Emily  32.3 Spender, Stephen  23.3; 32.3; 63.3; 74.4; 75.3; 106.2; 128.1; 176.2 Spengler, Oswald  78.2; 93.1; 96.2; 148.2 Spenser, Edmund  48.4; 81.4; 97.4 Spinoza, Baruch  53.1; 146.3 Spurling, Hilary  170.2; 171.1 Squire, John Collins  60.2 Staley, Thomas F.  123.2; 134.3

Index of names Stalin, Joseph (Iosif Vissarionovič Džugašvili)  2.1; 2.3; 13.3; 74.4 Stallworthy, Jon  62.1; 62.2 Stanford, Charles Villiers  68.5; 73.1 Stanford, Derek  107.3 Stein, Gertrude  29.2; 90.2; 128.1; 170.2 Steinberg, Erwin Ray  75.3 Stendhal (Henry Beyle)  79.3 Stephen, Adrian  159.1 Stephen, Julia  159.1; 164.1 Stephen, Laura  158.3; 159.1 Stephen, Leslie  157.2; 158.3; 159.1; 159.2; 164.1 Stephen, Thoby  159.1; 159.3; 162.1; 169.1 Stephens, James  29.4; 148.4; 152.1 Stephens, Vanessa, see Bell, Vanessa Sterne, Lawrence  16.5; 41.2; 48.2; 71.2; 88.1; 111.1; 115.3; 122.2; 143.2; 149.2; 158.4; 165.2 Stevens, Wallace  75.4; 76.3 Stevenson, Robert Louis  2.4; 14.2; 14.5; 24.1; 47.1; 57.2; 64.2; 94.2; 133.3; 135.3 Stewart, J. I. M.  85.1; 114.5; 128.5; 137.3 Stoker, Bram  69.5 Stone, W.  29.5; 38.2 Stoppard, Tom  12.1; 48.4; 129.4 Storer, Edward  75.3; 76.2 Strachey, Lytton  37.1; 64.2; 87.1; 158.2; 159.2; 159.3; 169.3 Strauss, Richard  73.4; 73.5; 88.5 Stravinsky, Igor  73.1; 73.6; 73.10; 76.1; 95.2; 96.1; 96.3; 100.5; 128.3; 128.4 Stuart, Royal House of Scotland and England 127.1 Sullivan, Arthur  73.2; 73.3; 88.4; 88.5 Sutherland, John  169.3 Svevo Italo  150.1 Swift, Jonathan  7.2; 14.2; 14.3; 14.4; 14.5; 14.9; 14.10; 21.4; 49.2; 71.2; 82.1; 82.2; 85.7; 86.1; 91.1; 91.2; 94.6; 95.2; 95.3; 95.6; 95.8, 118.8; 119.5; 121.6;

Index of names 122.2; 132.1; 149.2; 154.2; 158.4; 159.1; 165.2; 170.3; 171.2 Swinburne, Algernon Charles  8.3; 40.3; 41.2; 43.1; 48.3; 62.3; 63.1; 67.1; 67.2; 67.3; 69.3; 69.4; 85.6; 86.5; 88.3; 103.1; 103.2; 103.3; 103.5; 107.1; 110.3; 121.4; 125.2; 134.3; 146.1 Swinnerton, F.  22.5 Sydney-Turner, Saxon  169.3 Symons, Arthur  76.4; 92.2; 103.3; 132.4 Symons, J.  89.1; 89.3 Synge, John Millington  9.2; 9.3; 9.5; 60.3; 70.2; 78.7; 85.5; 85.7; 107.3; 111.3; 132.1; 152.1 Tailhade, Laurent  62.1 Tancred, Francis Willoughby  75.3 Tannhäuser 88.1 Tate, John Orley Allen  69.2 Taylor, John Russell  12.2 Taylor, Richard  75.3; 85.1; 85.2; 85.5; 85.8 Tchelitchew, Pavel,  86.3 Teilhard, Pierre de Chardin  2.4 Tennyson, Alfred  14.7; 15.4; 31.1; 60.2; 64.2; 70.1; 70.2; 71.4; 73.2; 73.5; 81.4; 92.1; 94.2; 94.3; 95.4; 100.1; 100.7; 103.1; 125.2; 128.1; 158.6; 169.2; 169.3; 172.4 Tennyson Turner, Charles  49.1 Tennyson, Frederick  49.1 Terence 128.2 Thackeray, William Makepeace  15.2; 15.6; 17.2; 17.3; 19.3; 20.1; 20.2; 20.3; 20.5; 20.6; 25.3; 39.1; 40.1; 40.2; 41.3; 41.4; 65.5; 71.3; 88.5; 126.2; 154.1; 154.2; 157.3; 158.1; 158.3; 159.1; 164.3; 165.1; 165.2; 173.2 Theseus 95.9 Thomas, Dylan  49.3; 60.1; 62.1; 62.2; 62.3; 76.4; 77.4; 85.6; 86.3; 89.2; 107.2; 121.2; 122.2; 128.5; 132.5; 148.4; 154.1

765/II Thomas, Edward  60.1; 60.3; 61.1; 61.2; 63.3; 65–66; 67.1; 67.2; 68.3; 71.1; 176.1; 176.2 Thomas, Helen  65.4 Thompson, Francis  43.1; 60.3; 67.2; 86.1; 86.5; 123.2 Thomson, James (B. V.)  34.1; 65.2; 65.5; 75.1; 86.3; 92.3; 94.2 Thornton, Henry  29.5 Thorpe, Michael  63.2; 63.3 Thrale, Mrs, see Piozzi, Hester Tindall, William York  132.4; 134.3; 137.3; 138.3; 142.4; 148.2; 148.4; 149.2; 150.1; 151.1 Tiresias  92.1; 92.3; 94.2; 94.5; 96.1; 97.1; 97.2; 97.4 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio)  95.5 Tolkien, Sir John Ronald Reuel  48.4; 48.5 Toller, Ernst  10.1 Tolstoy, Leo  16.4; 17.2; 20.1; 20.2; 25.5; 61.1; 119.1; 130.1 Tomlin, Eric Walter Frederick  89.1; 91.1 Tomlinson, Charles  63.4 Toynbee, Arnold J.  13.3 Toynbee, Philip  61.2 Traherne, Thomas  153.3 Trebitsch, Siegfried  2.1 Trefusis, Violet  159.3 Trench, Herbert  82.3 Tristram  110.3; 110.4; 114.6; 149.3; 151.3 Trollope, Anthony  12.2; 13.1; 15.5; 15.6; 17.1; 17.3; 18.4; 19.1; 20.1; 20.2; 22.2; 25.7; 26.3; 88.2; 88.4; 112.1; 113.2; 115.1; 115.2; 117.1; 123.3; 160.3; 168.1; 170.1; 170.2; 173.2; 174.1; 174.3 Truffaut, François  14.2 Truman, Harry  74.4 Tudor, Royal Family  10.4; 119.1 Tura, Cosmè  80.2 Turgenev, Ivan  17.3; 24.2; 25.5

766/II Turner, Joseph Mallord William  17.3; 39.1; 63.4; 123.2 Tussaud, Marie  22.3 Twain, Mark  30.2; 126.1 Utrillo, Maurice  87.1 Valency, Maurice J.  4.1 Valéry, Paul  75.1; 77.2; 78.9 Van Ghent, Dorothy  111.4 Vaughan Williams, Ralph  61.1; 62.1; 63.3; 68.5 Vedrenne, John Eugene  28.1 Vendler, Helen  85.1 Venus  32.3; 50.3; 52.2; 88.3; 97.3 Verdenal, Jean  64.2 Verdi, Giuseppe  3.2; 116.3 Verdone, Mario  75.2; 89.2 Verga, Giovanni  113.1 Verlaine, Paul  66.3; 73.9; 92.2; 97.4; 130.4 Vernon Lee (Violet Paget)  50; 87.1 Veronese (Paolo Caliari)  80.2 Vico, Giambattista  25.8; 96.2; 128.1; 128.5; 148.1; 148.2; 149.2; 150.1 Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom  23.1; 25.6; 25.7; 32.3; 123.1 Villon, François  48.3; 92.2 Virgil  14.3; 32.3; 62.2; 69.4; 89.2; 97.1; 101.7; 102.2; 104.1 Virgin Mary  20.7; 30.4; 32.3; 37.1; 43.2; 47.1; 48.2; 57.4; 60.3; 78.2; 81.4; 88.3; 98.3; 98.4; 100.4; 101.5; 101.8; 107.3; 114.7; 118.5; 121.3; 122.5; 136.5 Visconti, Luchino  159.3 Vittorini, Elio  23.3; 51.1 Vittoz, Roger  96.1 Vivas, Eliseo  118.1 Vlad, Roman  96.3 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)  2.3; 21.4; 42.1; 90.3; 169.3 Von Richthofen, Frieda  109.3; 111.5; 112.1; 113.2; 114.8; 115.3; 117.2; 118.2; 121.3

Index of names Vonnegut, Kurt  152.2 Wagner, Richard  15.1; 15.4; 18.5; 23.1; 25.4; 48.5; 49.5; 53.3; 55.3; 63.1; 73.1; 73.2; 73.3; 73.4; 73.10; 85.1; 87.1; 96.3; 97.1; 97.2; 97.4; 97.5; 107.3; 109.2; 110.3; 110.4; 111.1; 113.1; 115.1; 116.1; 125.1; 130.3; 143.1; 151.1; 167.1 Wallace, Alfred Russel  153.4 Walpole, Hugh  56.1 Walton, William  73.1; 86.3; 87.1 Ward, Alfred Charles  14.2; 16.5; 63.3; 64.2; 68.3; 70.2; 125.4; 159.3; 169.3 Ward, Mrs Humphry, Mary Augusta, nee Arnold 16.2 Ward, Maisie  42.2; 45.1; 125.4 Watts-Dunton, Theodore  40.3 Waugh, Evelyn  1.4; 46.1; 48.5; 55.1; 56.1; 57.3; 88.2; 89.3; 123.1; 170.2; 171.2 Weaver, Harriet Shaw  75.4; 129.4; 129.5; 137.1; 142.1; 148.4; 149.2 Webb, Beatrice  2.3; 15.1 Webb, Sidney  2.3; 15.1 Webern, Anton  88.5 Webster, John  92.2; 97.2 Weintraub, Stanley  2.2; 2.3; 7.1 Welland, Dennis Sydney Reginald  62.1; 62.2 Wellek, René  29.2; 88.2; 92.1; 169.3 Weller, Sam  9.1 Wellesley, Dorothy  77.1; 84.3 Wellington (Arthur Wellesley), 1st Earl of 135.5 Wells, Herbert George  1.2; 1.3; 1.4; 12.1; 13–16; 17.1; 17.2; 17.3; 17.4; 18.1; 18.3; 22.1; 23.1; 23.2; 24.2; 27.2; 28.3; 40.3; 41.4; 42.2; 44.1; 44.3; 45.1; 51.2; 59.1; 73.1; 74.3; 88.4; 91.2; 116.2; 123.1; 125.1; 125.3; 126.2; 148.4; 154.1; 158.1; 158.4; 171.1; 175 Wesley, John  21.3; 22.4 West, Anthony  109.4

Index of names West, Anthony  14.1 West, Rebecca  14.1 Weston, Jessie  96.2; 143.1 Whibley, Charles  103.3 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill  40.2; 54.1 Whistler, Theresa  71.1 Whitehead, Alfred North  90.2 Whitehead, John  53.4; 57.2; 58.1 Whiting, John  108 Whitman, Walt  38.1; 60.3; 78.6; 78.7; 121.4; 122.1 Wilcock, Juan Rodolfo  152.2 Wilde, Oscar  2.1; 29.3; 33.1; 37.1; 40.1; 41.1; 41.2; 50.3; 52.2; 59.4; 62.2; 79.3; 85.6; 85.8; 86.4; 87.1; 88.1; 88.3; 89.3; 94.7; 99.1; 102.5; 103.3; 107.1; 110.1; 117.3; 122.1; 123.2; 124.2; 125.1; 139.3; 153.3; 153.4; 159.3; 165.2 William the Conqueror  2.3 William III of Orange, King of England 135.5 William IV of Orange-Nassau  127.1 Williams, Charles  48.4 Williams, Helen  12.2 Williams, Orlo  164.1 Williams, Raymond  8.1; 109.5 Williams, William Carlos  75.2; 75.4; 76.3 Williamson, George  94.2 Wilson, Angus  71.4 Wilson, Edmund  75.1; 92.2; 93.4; 103.1; 128.5; 142.2; 142.4 Wilson, Francis Alexander Charles  81.4; 85.5; 85.7; 85.8 Wilson, Thomas Woodrow  74.2 Wilson Knight, George  49.1 Wollstonecraft, Mary  158.4 Woodbridge, Homer E.  3.2 Woodforde, Alexander John  158.2 Woolf, Leonard  159.3; 164.1; 169.1; 169.3 Woolf, Stuart J.  74.3

767/II Woolf, Virginia  1.5; 13.3; 15.4; 16.5; 17.1; 17.3; 22.1; 22.2; 23.3; 24.2; 25.1; 26.4; 29.1; 29.4; 30.1; 35.1; 37.1; 38.1; 39.1; 61.3; 63.3; 64.2; 68.4; 73.1; 75.1; 75.2; 75.3; 75.4; 77.4; 86.1; 87.1; 89.1; 90.2; 97.4; 103.1; 105.3; 109.1; 109.5; 114.6; 123.1; 123.2; 123.3; 124.1; 124.2; 127.2; 127.4; 128.5; 130.1; 148.4; 153.1; 153.2; 154.1; 154.2; 155.3; 157–168; 169.1; 169.2; 169.3; 170.1 Woolner, Thomas  152.1 Woolrich, Cornell  14.2 Wordsworth, Dorothy  158.4 Wordsworth, William  60.2; 61.2; 62.3; 64.4; 65.2; 66.1; 66.2; 71.4; 124.3; 126.2; 134.3; 153.3; 158.4 Worringer, Wilhelm  76.2; 89.2 Wright, David  61.1; 65.2; 65.5 Wycherley, William  26.3 Yeats, William Butler  1.4; 2.1; 8.1; 8.2; 8.3; 9.1; 10.1; 11.1; 12.1; 29.4; 49.4; 60.1; 60.2; 61.3; 62.1; 62.2; 62.3; 64.5; 67.3; 67.4; 68.4; 68.5; 69.1; 69.3; 69.4; 70.1; 71.1; 74.3; 75.2; 75.3; 77–85; 89.1; 92.3; 93.3; 94.2; 95.2; 96.1; 96.2; 100.7; 101.3; 102.1; 105.3; 109.4; 114.2; 114.4; 114.8; 118.6; 118.7; 121.2; 121.6; 123.1; 124.2; 129.3; 129.4; 130.1; 130.4; 132.1; 132.4; 135.4; 142.2; 148.1; 149.2; 152.1; 153.2; 158.4; 159.3; 176.3 Young, Kenneth  17.3; 17.4 Zachary, prophet  127.5 Zarathustra  24.3; 152.1 Zola, Émile  20.7 Zukofsky, Louis  106.1 Zwerdling, Alex  158.6; 159.2; 159.3; 160.3; 162.1; 163.2

Thematic index

aestheticism  1.4; 15.4; 17.2; 17.4; 21.4; 33.1; 39.1; 41.4; 44.1; 45.2; 50.2; 53.3; 53.4; 54; 60.2; 62.1; 86.1; 86.2; 87.1; 88.1; 88.2; 89.4; 90.2; 90.3; 92.1; 103.3; 109.2; 110.3–4; 111.1; 111.2; 111.4; 128.3; 134.3; 145.2; 153.5; 157.4 Africa: 15.6; 24.2; 28.3; 59.4; 74.1; 88.1; 88.5; 119.4 South Africa  2.1; 25.6; 48.5; 59.2; 67.1 agnosticism  16.6; 27.2; 44.3; 48.4–5; 123.1; 159.1 algolagnia  41.2; 69.3; 107.2 America: 2.1; 3.1; 4.1; 14.10; 16.3; 18.1; 21.5; 24.2; 26.4; 46.2; 55.2; 57.4; 68.4; 70.2; 73.2; 74.2; 75.1; 77.2; 89.4; 95.2; 101.5; 105.3; 118.3; 129.5; 142.2; 158.3 American literature  51.1; 76.2; 76.3; 92.1; 122.1 American Revolution  117.3 anti-Americanism  43.2; 45.1 differences between America and England 16.3 English representations of  55.2 influences of American culture and literature 69.2 South America  6.6; 27.1; 46.2; 88.5; 95.9; 102.7; 106.1; 118.8; 160.1 anarchism  16.7; 45.2; 46.1; 48.5; 116.3 ancient gods exiled to the north  31.2; 50.3; 118.5; 118.8; 152.1

Anderstreben of arts  73.1; 106.2 androgynous writers  87.1; 157.1; 158.5 Anglo-Saxon epic  43.2 ‘angry young men’  12.2; 102.7; 107.1; 114.3 anthropology  16.7; 40.2; 40.3; 69.3; 69.4; 93.1; 96.2; 97.4; 101.5; 118.1; 118.4; 118.5; 122.4 anti-Semitism  2.3; 6.6; 28.4; 48.3; 48.5; 64.5; 67.4; 90.2; 92.4; 93.2; 93.4; 95.2; 145.1 Apocalypse: apocalyptic anxieties  12.1; 26.2; 59.1; 69.2; 93.2 apocalyptic parodies  163.3 apocalyptic writers 49.4; 106.3; 109.4 biblical book  6.4; 79.4; 98.4; 122.4–5; 148.3; 149.4 apologies: of Christianity  42.1 of faith  48.3 of intolerance  106.3 of marriage  127.5 of slaughter  102.3 archetypical, method  93.4; 143.4 Art Nouveau 88.2 arts (visual) and references to artists and movements  7.1; 48.1; 48.2; 50.3; 61.1; 66.2; 67.1; 68.6; 72; 73; 75.3; 76.2; 78.1; 78.10; 87.1; 88.1; 89.2; 91.2; 96.3; 99.1; 104; 126.2; 128.3; 128.4; 169.1; 169.2; 169.3 (see also literature and visual arts)

770/II atomic bomb and H-bomb: 13.1; 14.8; 74.4; 175.1 atomic danger  7.2; 48.5; 86.5 Australia  24.1; 26.3; 117.1–2; 118.1 autobiographies  8.2; 9.1; 11; 13.1; 13.3; 13.4; 16.2; 16.6; 48.4; 49.1; 49.5; 51.1; 51.2; 57.1; 86.1; 87.1; 137.3 avant-gardes  39.1  64.2; 75.2; 75.4; 75.5; 76.1; 76.2; 89.2; 89.3; 90.1; 90.4; 92.1; 92.2; 96.3; 106.1; 106.3; 109.2; 119.4; 123.1; 126.1; 128.3; 153.1 Baroque and neo-Baroque  20.2; 43.1; 44.1; 44.2; 48.5; 64.4; 67.2; 67.4; 73.8; 86.5; 87.2; 91.1; 97.3; 107.2 beats and beatniks  49.1; 109.5 biblical criticism  2.4; 13.3; 16.6; 47.3; 105.3; 122.4 Biedermeier  13.2; 40.2; 41.1; 60.1; 60.2; 63.2; 64.3; 64.5; 65.1; 73.2; 128.3 Bildungsroman  15.2; 15.6; 29.3; 31.1; 53.2–3; 111.1; 123.3; 128.3; 145.1 Blitz (German bombings on London)  74.1; 74.4 Bloomsbury  1.3; 2.2; 29.2; 63.3; 64.2; 70.2; 75.5; 86.1; 89.2; 90.3; 123.1; 159.2; 164.1; 169; 174 bohème and bohémiens  20.6; 49.4; 53.3; 73.10; 92.2; 106.1; 123.1 Bolshevism: 4.2; 57.3; 74.3; 75.2; 90.2; 109.4; 121.6; 127.5 Salonbolschewisten 116.3 bourgeoisie: 28.4; 109.4; 115.1 bourgeois conventions  114.6 critique of  20.3; 30.1; 34.1; 77.1; 138.1 representations of  20.2; 23.1; 23.3; 127.1 Brahmanism 96.2

Thematic index ‘bright young things’  55.1; 89.3 Buddhism  9.3; 79.4; 84.4; 92.2; 96.2; 97.4; 100.4 Calvinism  20.9; 21.2–3; 22.4; 48.3; 49.2; 92.1; 93.1; 93.4; 95.2; 95.5; 100.3; 101.1; 101.5; 102.4; 125.1; 126.3; 153.5; 170.1; 172.1 Cambridge: Cambridge ‘Apostles’ 29.5; 31.1; 169.2 university  29.2; 29.4; 31.1; 48.4; 63.1; 76.2; 85.7; 88.1; 119.2; 127.5; 158.5; 159.2; 169.1; 169.2; 169.3 camp  41.2; 88.2; 88.5 Catholicism: 1.4; 2.4; 8.3; 10–11; 39.1; 42.1; 42.2; 48; 57.1; 63.1; 68.6; 69.5; 88.1; 88.5; 91.3; 92.1; 105.5; 118.6; 125.1; 126.3; 127.1; 127.2; 128.1; 143.6; 153.4 anti-Catholicism  14.2; 30.2; 42.1; 129.2; 136.5; 137.4 English  7.1; 20.7; 48.4; 88.1; 118.6; 126.2; 127.1 and/or vs Protestantism  8.3; 42.2; 48.4; 105.5; 125.1 Christian Europe  48.2; 105.4; 125.1 chronotopes  19.3; 22.2; 88.2 cinema: 2.1; 13.5; 14.2; 96.3; 97.1; 107.1; 146.5; 159.3; 162.1 literary technique  28.4; 96.3; 155.2 and literature (film transpositions)  12.2; 23.3; 28.4; 48.4; 59.3; 73.3; 109.5; 114.4; 114.5; 114.6; 114.7; 159.3 soundtracks 73.9 classicism  62.1; 76.2; 89.2; 127.3; 158.1 cloning  13.1; 14.5 colonialism  105.5; 117.4 comedies: classical 2.2

Thematic index family 174.1 home 29.1 humorous  18.4; 59.3 Molière-like  9.3; 9.4 provincial 21.1 social  1.5; 13.2; 160.3 Victorian  14.6; 17.3; 23.2; 115.3; 174.2 Commune of Paris (1870–1871)  17.4; 20.7–8; 59.1 communism: 2.1; 2.2; 2.3; 2.4; 6.6; 8.2; 10.3; 10.4; 16.7; 22.2; 42.2; 48.5; 57.3; 74.1; 90.2; 90.4; 91.2; 92.4; 105.1; 105.5; 109.4; 114.3; 121.6; 175.4 English Communist Party  74.3 conscientious objection  107.1; 169.3; 174 ‘conversation pieces’ 1.4; 10.6; 16.3; 47.3; 88.2; 109.2; 117.1; 123.1; 137.2; 170.2 Cubism  67.1; 75.5; 78.1; 89.2; 89.3; 90.1; 96.3; 128.3; 128.4; 169.3 cyclical philosophy and organization  10.2; 14.7; 25.1; 53.1; 65.2; 73.5; 73.6; 73.9; 75.2; 77.3; 78.1; 78.8; 81.4; 83; 84.2; 84.3; 93.1; 93.3; 96.2; 101.3; 105.4; 133.3; 135.2; 142.2; 143.2; 143.3; 148.1; 148.2–3; 149; 150.4; 151.3 cynghanedd  62.1 Dada  75.2; 75.5 dandy  24.1; 39.1; 40.1; 41; 88.1 Dantism  14.3; 78.7; 96.2; 98.3; 103.6; 105.4; 163.2 Darwinism (see also Darwin in Index of Names)  14.3; 20.2; 65.4; 94.6; 122.2; 170.1; 172.4; 174 Decadence  17.4; 20.6; 39.1; 40.1; 41.1; 42.2; 43.1; 44.1; 50.2; 51.2; 53.3; 59.3; 71.1; 75.1; 88.1; 88.3; 92.2; 106.1; 109.2; 114.6; 128.1; 128.3; 130.1; 131.3; 136.6; 142.2; 169.3

771/II deconstruction  46.2; 72; 122.1; 122.4 degeneration  25.1; 25.2; 81.3; 93.3; 114.5; 119.3 democracy, debate on  2.3; 3.1; 4.2; 6.2; 6.6; 12.1; 13.3; 44.1; 85.7 determinism  94.8; 100.4; 133.2 diaries  91.3; 157.3–4 Doppelgänger  92.1; 94.2; 94.8; 110.4; 135.3 drama: Elizabethan  20.5; 103.2; 103.6 experimental 28.4 historical  102.3; 102.4 period 12.2 poetical 103.2 theological 55.1 twentieth-century 28.1 durée (Bergson)  78.3; 100.4; 127.4; 157.4 dystopia  1.3; 4.1; 14.5; 14.9; 16.7; 59.1; 96.1; 105.5 école du regard  162.1 ekphrasis  80.2; 81.4; 83; 88.3 emigration: to America  8.3; 49.4; 92.1 to Australia  19.2 Enlightenment  2.3; 46.1; 48.4; 99.2 epiphany  16.5; 65.4; 86.3; 101.1; 119.4; 124.3; 129.2; 130.1; 131; 133.1; 133.2; 135; 136.2; 137.5; 138.1; 153.2; 154.1; 156.1; 162.1; 167.2 epistemology  46.1; 48.5; 75.2; 93.4; 127.3; 168.2; 169.1 epistolary collections  1.2; 86.2; 153.1; 158.2; 158.4; 159.3 Eros  10.6; 13.2; 15.2; 16.2; 16.3; 18.1; 20.7; 29.1; 29.4; 37.1; 48.3; 48.4; 51.1; 53.2; 55.3; 69.5; 82.1; 94.2; 94.8; 97.2; 109.3; 109.5; 113.1; 113.4; 116.1; 116.2; 119.2; 119.4; 125.2; 134.3; 147.2; 159.3; 172.2

772/II essay writing  90.3; 103.1; 103.6; 105.1; 122.1; 130.1; 158.1–4 estrangement  2.2; 14.2; 18.5; 20.3; 47.3; 72.2; 102.2; 102.3; 102.4; 107.4; 168.3; 174 ethnic diversities  13.3; 38 evolutionism (see also Darwinism, and Darwin in Index of Names)  2.4; 10.5; 13.5; 14.5; 15.1; 16.6; 44.2; 48.4; 71.4; 78.8; 93.1; 95.9; 100.3 existentialism  42.1; 47.1; 73.2; 89.3; 93.1; 94.2 exotericism  69.5; 77.3; 79.2 exoticism  38.2; 88.5 experimentalism  13.1; 14.6; 68.5; 115.3; 127.4; 144.3; 170.1; 170.2 Expressionism  10.1; 67.1 Fabians and Fabianism  2.3; 13.3; 14.1; 15.1; 15.4; 23.1; 64.2; 125.1 fairy-tales  41; 48.4; 48.5; 49.2; 49.3; 68.4; 71.1; 72; 86.3; 88.3; 115.2; 152.1; 152.2 ‘fallen woman’  9.4; 10.2; 20.7; 23.2; 24.1; 49.2; 52.1 fantastic, genre  12.1; 15.6; 29.4; 36.2; 41.2; 45.1; 48.5; 49.2; 49.4; 50; 71.1; 71.3; 72; 88; 90.3; 152.1; 174 fantasy politics  4.1; 6.4; 117.1; 118.1 fascism: 2.2; 2.3; 6.6; 10.3; 63.3; 74.2; 74.3; 74.4; 75.2; 81.1; 90.1; 90.2; 90.4; 91.2; 91.3; 92.4; 93.4; 105.1; 109.4; 116.1; 117.1; 117.2; 117.3; 118.3; 118.6; 119.1 English  2.3; 74.2 Irish  74.3; 77.1; 83 Italian  74.3; 117.2; 122.3 Faustian literature  3.2; 78.9; 91.2; 94.2; 94.7 feminism  15.1; 15.4; 19.2; 50.2; 50.5; 52.2; 72.2; 75.5; 78.7; 86.3; 88.4; 93.4; 109.5; 111.2; 113.4; 116.1; 123.1; 123.2;

Thematic index 124.2; 147.2; 153.3; 154.2; 157.4; 158; 159.1; 160.1; 161; 162.1; 163.2; 164.1; 171.1 femme fatale  41.3; 43.1; 53.4; 70.2; 72.2; 88.1; 93.4; 98.4; 110.2; 125.2 flower children  49.1; 109.5 formalism  86.1; 86.2; 93.1; 93.4; 103.1; 170.3 fragmentism  76.4; 106.2 France: 3.2; 15.6; 20.8; 51.1; 68.4; 73.9; 88.3; 169.2 French literature  68.2 French Revolution  25.5; 85.7; 117.3 future city, representations of  13.1; 13.5; 14.3–4; 14.7; 14.10 Futurism: 39.1; 47.3; 75.2; 75.5; 89.2; 106.1; 109.2; 114.6; 128.3 Cubo-Futurism 89.2 Futurist dynamism  89.2 Futurist Manifesto  89.2 Gaelic, language and literature  8.3; 128.2; 135.4; 138.1; 145.1; 152.1 gender and gender criticism  39.2; 93.4; 123.2 genetic engineering  6.4; 14.2; 14.8; 14.10 genius loci  50.1; 66.2; 73.10; 118.2; 160.1 Georgian poets and poetry  1.1; 1.4; 60; 61.3; 62.1; 63.4; 64.2; 65.1; 66.1; 67.1; 68.1; 68.4; 68.5; 69.1; 75.4; 76.1; 76.2; 76.3; 76.4; 86.2; 92.2; 106.1; 121.1; 159.3; 175.3 Germany  34.1; 34.2; 35.1; 51.2; 52.1; 57.4; 59.1; 59.2; 66.1; 68.4; 74.1; 74.2; 74.3; 74.4; 88.3; 92.1; 104.1; 112.1; 115.3; 124.1; 125.1; 126.2; 154.1; 154.2; 155.1 globalization  45.1; 105.5 Greece: 33.1; 64.2; 162.2; 175.4

Thematic index ancient  68.2; 69.3; 76.1; 78.9; 78.10; 84.4; 85.6 grotesque  3.2; 6.5; 48.2; 49.2; 72.1; 73.6; 85.5; 89.3; 127.3; 154.1 Hebraism  39.1; 39.2; 63.1; 67; 95.2; 146.2 Holocaust 62.3 homme moyen sensuel  94.8; 146.2; 155.1 homosexuality  1.4; 12.2; 13.1; 17.4; 29.3; 29.4; 29.5; 31.1; 37; 39.2; 41.2; 50.2; 52.2; 53.4; 59.3; 62.2; 63.3; 64.2; 88.1; 88.2; 88.5; 89.2; 90.2; 93.4; 97.4; 109.3; 109.5; 110.1; 110.3; 112.1; 113.4; 114.6; 114.7; 116.3; 123.1; 134.1; 147.2; 153.1; 153.3; 159.3; 160.3; 165.3; 166.1; 169.1; 169.3; 175.4 imaginary portrait  41.4; 127.5; 165.1; 169.3 Imagism  61.3; 63.1; 67.3; 68.1; 68.2; 75.3; 75.4; 75.5; 76; 77.3–4; 86–4; 89.1; 89.2; 94.1; 94.3; 106.1; 106.3; 121.6; 122.5; 123.2 imperialism: critique of  8.2; 105.5 fall of  74.1 Impressionism  50.1; 88.2; 103.3; 125.3; 162.1; 162.1 India: British imperialism  16.2; 38; 74.3; 113.4; 163.2 Hinduism  51.2; 57.4; 151.1 Indian philosophies  57.2; 57.4; 73.10; 78.9; 97.5; 100.3 industrialization  29.5; 34.1; 36.2; 48.5; 74.3; 109.4; 110.1; 121.6; 125.1 Inklings 48.4 intelligent artisan  10.5 interstitial literature  1; 13.1; 17.1; 23.2; 39.1; 48.4; 61.3; 70.1; 123.1; 126.1 Ireland: Black and Tans  9.2; 10.6

773/II Easter Rising  9.1; 9.3; 9.5; 16.3; 74.3; 80.1; 80.3–4; 82.2; 84.4; 85.4; 85.5; 118.6 English prejudices against  8.1–2; 10.4 IRA  77.1; 139.2 Irish autonomy  9.3; 21.4; 146.2; 163.2 Irish Catholicism  8.3; 9.1; 10.5; 77.1; 83; 114.3; 128.2; 133.1; 134.1; 134.3; 134.4; 137.2; 138.2 Irish civil war  10.6 Irish history  139 Irish legends  80.2; 84.3 Irish literature  2.1; 8.3; 9.1; 9.5; 10.1; 11; 29.4; 128.1; 129.3; 130.2; 130.4; 132.3; 145.1; 148.5; 152.1 Irish nationalism  8.2; 16.3; 74.3; 118.6; 135.4 Irish Protestantism  8.3; 9.1; 10.5; 77.1; 77.5; 82.1; 82.2; 83; 85.7; 134.3; 134.4; 135.4 Northern Ireland  74.3 partition 74.3 Sinn Féin  74.3 ‘stage Irishman’ 9.4 Islam  27.2; 42.1; 47.3 -isms  42; 44.2; 75.2 Israel  67.4; 143.5 Italianate English  86.1 Italy: English representations of  33.3; 46.2; 48.2; 50.2; 50.4–5; 73.5 Italian imperialism  74.3 Italian literature  68.2 Risorgimento  61.1; 114.5 southern 42.2 travels  88.1; 114.8; 115.3 Japonism 124.2 Jesuits and Society of Jesus  88.5; 129.2; 129.3; 132.2; 134.4; 137.2; 137.4 jingoism  61.2; 63.1; 70.1; 75.5

774/II kitsch  88.2 Künstlerromane  51.2; 110.3; 128.3 Labour party  13.3; 63.3; 74.2; 74.3; 74.4; 159.3 League of Nations  6.6; 13.3; 16.8; 74.2 least read and most discussed books  69.4 Lehrstücke  8.3; 10.3 liberalism  2.1; 16.2; 16.3; 16.8; 23.1; 76.3; 82.1; 90.2; 105.3; 105.4 liberalism (economic) 25.8; 35.3 limerick  88.4 literature: children  71.1; 88.3; 92.4; 157.1 of the diaspora  67.3 popular 46.1 scientific 13.1 topographic  65.3; 65.5; 134.2 travel  48.2; 49.1; 117.2; 122.3 and visual arts  1.4; 13.1; 40.1; 43.1; 68.4; 75.5; 76.1; 88.1; 90.4; 113.2; 123.2; 125.4; 169.1 macaronic tradition and praxis  3.1; 4.1; 88.4; 92.3; 130.1; 143.2; 150.3; 165.2 maîtres à penser  44.1; 92.4; 118.6 Mannerism  64.5; 88.2; 107.2 Marxism: 6.2; 8.3; 13.3; 14.3; 16.7; 28.3; 71.4; 80.6; 91.3 Marxist art, criticism, publishing, aesthe­ tics  17.4; 23.3; 25.1; 90.4; 142.2 masculinity  50.4; 50.5; 158.6 materialism  34.1–2; 48.4; 105.1 maudits  88.1; 92.2 May 1968 in Paris  109.5 media  90.2 metafiction, metaliterature, metapoetry metatheatre  16.5; 41.2; 45.1; 48.2; 69.5; 75.2; 101.3; 143.2; 148.5; 150.3

Thematic index Metaphysical poetry (seventeenth-­century) 61.3; 64.2–3; 64.5; 64.6; 65.2; 69.5; 82.3; 92.1; 92.2; 103.6; 175.3 Methodism  19.1; 21.3; 92.1 Mexico  46.2; 109.4; 118; 120.1; 120.2 Middle Ages and medievalism  1.4; 42.1; 43.1; 45.1; 47.3; 48.2; 48.3; 48.4; 88.3; 92.4; 99.2; 105.1; 125.1; 126.1; 126.3; 149.1 minimalism 2.2 mock-heroic tradition  15.6; 19.3; 128.4; 143.2; 148.5; 165.1 Modernism: 1.3; 1.4; 1.5; 2.2; 12.1; 13.3; 16.5; 17.1; 17.3; 17.4; 22.1; 23.2; 23.3; 25.3; 29.1; 39.1; 51.1; 51.2; 60.1; 60.2; 61.3; 62.1; 63.3; 63.4; 64.2–3; 66.1; 67.2; 68.6; 69.1; 69.2; 69.3; 72.1; 75; 77.4; 86.2; 88.1; 88.2; 89.1; 90.1; 92.2; 92.4; 93.4; 94.1; 94.2; 96.3; 100.5; 103.1; 106.1; 106.3; 107.1; 109.1; 109.2; 115.1; 117.1; 119.4; 123.1; 123.3; 125; 126.2; 127.1; 144.3; 153.2; 156.2; 157.1; 165.3; 170.2; 175.1 anti-Modernism  1.3; 13.1; 48.3; 49.1 modernist obscurity  17.4; 75.3; 142.2 monologue, types of: dramatic  127.1; 153.2 interior, see stream of consciousness in prose  16.5 ‘Movement’ 175.3 music: jazz  73.9; 96.3 librettos  3.2; 73.1; 87.1; 88.5; 96.3 melodrama  41.2; 73.1; 87.1; 144.2; 166.1 musical and music-hall  59.3; 102.1 musical literary technique  73.1; 96.3; 100.5; 106.2; 113.1; 125.4; 132.2; 143.2–4; 144.2; 164.1; 166.1; 170.3 musical transpositions of literary works 52.1

Thematic index references to  3.2; 12.1; 15.4; 17.3; 17.4; 29.1; 36.1; 48.5; 50.3; 57.2; 61.1; 63.4; 65.4; 68.5; 71.1; 73; 75.1; 76.1; 82.3; 85.2; 85.8; 86.2; 86.3; 87.1; 88.5; 89.2; 92.2; 94.8; 95.2; 96.1; 96.3; 100.5; 109.2; 110.3–4; 114.7; 116.1; 116.3; 128.3; 128.4; 146.3; 153.2; 167.1; 175.3 rhapsodies  81.1; 100.5; 162.1; 162.3 songs  68.5; 73.1; 81.4 myth: classical, Greek and Roman  48.4; 60.2; 82.3; 95.9; 97.3; 97.4; 120.2; 137.3; 137.5; 143.4; 152.1 of the dead young girl  73.8 Irish  77.2; 77.3; 77.4; 84.5; 85.1; 85.3–5; 85.8; 109.4; 152.1 mythical method  68.6; 77.4; 92.4; 93.3; 93.4; 95.1; 96.1; 96.2; 100.1–2; 102.2 Nordic and Norse  48.4 personal  75.2; 86.1; 106.1 of secular cities  69.2 of war  61.2; 75.2 narratology  56; 75.3; 125.4; 126.2; 127.1 naturalism  28.1; 48.4; 52.1; 85.7; 107.3; 113.1; 128.3; 130.1; 131.2; 133.1; 142.3; 148.2; 150.1 Nazism  6.6; 74.4 neo-apocalyptic poets  106.1; 175.2 New Critics  85.1; 103.1; 125.4 nonsense  43.1; 69.5; 71.4; 72.1; 86.3; 92.2; 92.3; 92.4; 94.9; 99.1; 107.4; 150.4; 152.2; 154.1; 171.2; 175.2 novel: aesthetics of  13.3; 15.2; 16.5; 17.3; 29.2; 51.2; 56; 158.1–4 entertainment  51.1; 69.3 feuilleton  20.7; 21.1; 21.5; 25.5; 25.6 mass 17.3

775/II thesis  15.3; 15.4; 23.2; 27.2; 45.1; 68.2; 91.3; 136.3 novel, genres and forms: autobiographical  13.1; 13.4; 14.2; 15–16; 24.2; 31.1; 37; 49.2; 51.2; 53; 56; 91.3; 109.2; 110.1; 117.1; 117.3; 123.3; 131.4; 133.1; 136–138; 151.1; 151.3; 155.1; 164.1; 166.1; 170.1–2 Bildungsroman, see Bildungsroman demonic or satanic  50; 71.2; 71.4; 94.2 detective  17.2; 18.4; 21.1; 21.4; 42.1; 46.1; 170.2; 172.2 early Victorian  52.2 fictional biography  169.3 Gothic and neo-Gothic  14.2; 26.4; 29.4; 46.2; 50; 69.5; 71.1; 86.3; 87.1; 88.3; 94.2; 115.3; 172.1 historical  49.5; 69.3; 126.1 Newgate 46.1 picaresque  14.6; 15.3; 15.6; 18.3; 48.2; 49.3; 53.1; 89.2; 91.1; 143.2; 152.1 psychological 143.1 regional 113.1 of the Risorgimento  61.1 Ruritanian  18.4; 18.5; 85.5; 88.3 sensational  17.3; 20.6; 21.1; 21.5; 50.5; 87.1; 89.3; 102.6; 116.3; 170.1; 170.2; 172.1; 173.2 ‘silver fork’  25.4 theological  46; 49.1 verist 70.1 Victorian  53.3; 170.2; 164.2; 172.3; 123.1 novel, techniques: bi- and multifocal  23.2; 25.4; 26.2; 88.5; 111.1; 143.2 choral  110.3; 162.3 conversational, see ‘conversation pieces’ dialogic 170.2 essayistic  13.4; 16.5; 109.2; 117.1; 137.2 of ideas  1.4; 13.4; 16; 123.1; 124.2; 127.2; 170.2

776/II judicial  27.1; 38.2 poetical  123.1; 148.1 reportage  109.2; 118.1 serial  3.1; 12.2; 13.1; 19–21; 23.2; 88.2; 109.2; 111.1; 172.4 in verse  103.1 novel, types of: anti-Victorian 13.3 of the artist’s life  51.1; 51.2; 54; 56; 89.4 of Bennett’s five towns  17.1; 19–21; 171.1 of the estate  170.2 of hotels and guesthouses  18.4; 22.5 mass 30.2 of the mines  111.2 Oxford  41.2; 137.3; 170.2 scholastic  15.2; 53.1; 137.3 of sea and islands  14.5 seafaring 125.3 spy  45.2; 56; 59.2; 90.4; 116.2 of the threat of invasion, see Zukunftskriegroman Victorian long novel  20.1; 20.4; 49.5; 153.2; 160.1 of war  16.3 objective correlative  76.3; 94.2; 94.4; 94.9; 99.1; 103.5; 110.1; 117.2; 121.1; 124.1 onomastics  14.3; 20.5; 50.2; 50.5; 87.1; 94.2; 95.2; 95.5; 95.6; 97.2; 97.3; 110.4; 111.1; 111.4; 113.1; 114.6; 115.3; 116.1; 120.2; 126.2; 135.3; 146.3; 146.4; 162.2; 163.2; 170.2; 170.3 operetta  41.2; 73.2; 87.1; 88.5 ‘outcast of the islands’  6.3; 46.2; 57.2; 58 Oxford: Oxford Movement  48.1 university  1.4; 13.1; 24.1; 24.3; 25.5; 41.2; 48.1; 48.4; 68.3; 69.1; 77.2; 87.2; 92.1; 158.5; 169.3; 176.3

Thematic index pacifism  14.10; 16.3; 16.4; 28.3; 42.2; 59.1; 62.2; 91.3; 107.1; 125.1; 132.4; 158.1; 158.6–7 paganism  96.2; 101.5; 122.5 pararhyme  61.3; 62.1; 62.3; 67.3 parody  10.2; 35.1; 39.1; 41.2; 41.4; 45.1; 50.5; 56.1; 63.1; 164.2 parsonage: novels of  53.2; 53.3; 112.1; 170.2; 171.1 writers born in  49.1; 49.4; 159.1 patriarchy: 93.4; 109.5; 158.7 critique of  158.5 Pentecost: Pentecostal faith  5.1; 107.3 Pentecostal fire  100.7; 101.7; 101.8 periodicals: Athenaeum  92.1; 104 Blast  89.1–2; 126.2 Criterion  68.2; 92.1; 96.1 The Dial 96.1 The Egoist  75.4; 89.3; 92.1; 104; 137.1 The Enemy 89.2 The English Review  75.4; 89.3; 121.1; 126.1; 127.5 Fortnightly Review 130.2 Little Review 142.1 Mercury and The London Mercury  48.3; 60.2 The New Age  75.4, 153.1 News Chronicler 42.2 Poetry  67.3; 75.4; 76.1; 76.3; 94.2; 106.1 Rhythm  75.4; 153.1 Scrutiny  129.5; 157.4 Signatures 153.1 Speaker 44.1 Transatlantic 126.1 The Tyro 89.2 Wheels  75.4; 86.1; 86.2

Thematic index Yellow Book  17.4; 40.1; 41.1; 41.4 Plato, Platonism and neo-Platonism  79.4; 80.2; 81.4; 82.1; 82.3; 100.3; 100.7; 113.2; 114.4 Poets Laureate  70.1; 73.2; 77.2 pornography 119.1 postcolonial literature  153.2; 153.3 postmodern  88.1; 88.2; 101.3; 144.3; 165.1; 170.2; 170.3 poststructuralism  106.3; 144.3; 157.4 potboilers  17.4 Pre-Raphaelitism in painting and literature  1.4; 19.1; 43.1; 45.2; 50.2; 53.2; 54; 63.1; 64.5; 67.1; 68.6; 88.1; 88.3; 89.2; 110.1; 123.2; 125.1; 125.2; 142.2; 159.2 pre-Socratic philosophers  78.2; 78.3; 78.4; 100.2 primitivism  13.2; 49.4; 74.3; 88.5; 89.2; 92.4; 117.3; 119.2; 122.1; 122.5; 169.2 progressivism  13.1; 15.4; 21.3: 22.3; 23.2; 51.2; 68.4; 93.1; 106.1; 109.4; 114.3; 123.1; 138.2 prostitution  23.3; 25.2; 160.3 Protestant Reformation: 42.1; 43.2; 48.2; 103.6; 125.1 Counter-Reformation 43.2 Protestantism  3.2; 3.3; 10.2; 93.1; 105.5 Prussia  3.1; 16.3; 20.7; 48.2; 59.4; 112.1; 118.8; 154.2 psychoanalysis: Freudian  26.2; 93.4; 94.9; 111.5; 113.4; 114.6; 122.2; 150.1; 150.2; 164.1 Jungian  93.4; 122.5 pulp 172.2 Puritanism and Puritan heritage  3.2; 7.1; 8.3; 17.2; 30.2; 43.2; 46.1; 48.3; 49.3; 50.2; 56; 62.1; 69.2; 91.2; 92.1; 93.4; 94.3; 94.9; 95.5; 100.3; 100.7; 101.5; 109.3; 110.1; 114.1; 119.1; 119.3; 126.2; 126.3; 172.1; 172.2

777/II Quakers  3.2; 7.1; 107.1; 124.3; 124.4; 169.2 racism  28.4; 38.1; 70.1; 71.3 radicalism  1.3; 2.3 radio  2.1; 12.1; 39.2; 75.2 realism  1.3; 17.3; 18.4; 24.3; 29.2; 49.2; 49.3; 53.4; 58.1; 69.6; 75.2; 79.3; 85.7; 91.3; 107.3; 112.1; 114.8; 119.1; 127.1; 130.2; 136.3; 137.1; 139.3; 142.2; 162.3; 164.1; 170.2 relativism  14.2; 14.7; 21.5; 44.1; 105.1 remakes  3.2; 12.1; 17.4; 22.4; 50.5; 78.9; 102.7; 110.3; 126.1 Renaissance 40.1; 48.4; 50.3; 79.1; 80.2; 84.1; 84.5; 105.1; 113.2; 114.8; 152.1 reviews and reviewers  16.2; 17.4; 21.5; 24.2; 25.5; 28.1; 28.4; 29.5; 45.1; 48.5; 52.1; 64.3; 95.1; 109.1 bibl.; 128.5; 130.4; 136.6; 148.4 rites: of fertility and vegetative 95.2; 96.1–2; 96.3; 97.2; 97.5; 98.2; 142.4; 149.3; 151.1 Medieval and Grail  96.2 of passage  61.2; 67.1; 88.3; 124.1; 156.2 Rococo  86.3; 87.1; 88.2 Romanticism  41.4; 48.2; 60.1; 60.3; 61.2; 62.1–2; 64.2; 64.3; 65.2; 66.1; 66.2; 67.1; 67.2; 69.3; 71.1; 71.4; 75.1; 75.2; 76.1; 77.4; 84.5; 86.4; 88.3; 90.2; 92.2; 94.2; 103.1; 103.3; 103.6; 109.2; 110.4; 125.1; 128.3; 131.3; 136.6; 137.4 Rome: 32.3; 33.1; 43.2; 48.4; 78.10; 102.3; 122.4 ancient 69.3 Russia  2.1; 6.4; 6.5; 13.3; 14.7; 16.7; 24.1; 61.3; 67.1; 74.1; 74.4; 121.6

778/II sadomasochism  41.2; 69.3; 114.7; 146.1 saga: 1.2; 1.3; 20–21; 23.1; 24.2; 25–27; 49.4; 53.1; 88.2; 113; 123.1; 123.3; 127; 154.1; 155.1; 163.1; 175.4 Victorian sagas  20.1; 72.1; 88.4 Salvation Army  15.1 satire  41.4; 50.4; 50.5; 106.3; 120.2; 132.3 science: 7.1; 7.2; 13.1; 13.3; 13.4; 14; 15.3; 15.6; 17.3; 122.2; 152.2; 174 and faith  2.4; 16.6; 48.4 science fiction  13.1; 13.2; 13.4; 13.5; 14; 15.2; 15.3; 86.5 science, literature and art  128.4 scientism  2.4; 5.1; 13.2; 16.6; 44.3; 82.2; 109.4; 121.1 Scottish ethnicity and literature  93.2 semiotics: 106.3 arbitrariness of the sign  40.2 of arts  73.1 criticism  93.1; 93.4 of literary communication  92.3; 92.4 semiotic space  146.4 seriality, aesthetics of  92.4; 96.1; 123.2; 170.3; 171.1; 172.3; 174.3 shamanism 69.3 shell-shock and shell-shocked veterans  22.2; 55.3; 62.2; 63.1; 68.4; 68.5; 69.1; 125.2; 127.2; 127.3; 163.2 strikes of factory workers  10.5; 26.2; 26.3; 26.4; 28.3; 74.2 socialism: 1.4; 2.1; 2.2; 2.3; 2.4; 4.2; 5.1; 6.2; 8.2; 9.5; 12.1; 13.3; 15.1; 15.2; 15.3; 15.4; 15.6; 16.2; 16.7; 22.2; 23.1; 28.2; 34.2; 40.3; 42.2; 46.1; 47.3; 48.3; 50.4; 74.1; 81.1; 110.2; 111.2; 116.1; 116.3; 117.1; 117.2; 117.3; 117.4; 118.3; 119.1; 121.5; 123.1; 124.3; 134.3; 142.2; 157.4

Thematic index Christian socialists  24.2; 25.5; 114.3 Spain  6.6; 57.4; 74.3; 74.4; 88.1; 88.5; 90.4; 91.3; 91.4; 92.4; 156.3; 159.3; 164.3; 175.1 stock market crash of 1929 57.4; 74.1 stream of consciousness: 1.3; 8.2; 16.5; 17.3; 22.1; 23.2; 26.2; 75.1; 75.3; 81.1; 88.4; 90.2; 92.2; 92.3; 94.2; 95.3; 106.2; 123.1; 123.2; 123.3; 124.3; 125.3; 126.2; 127; 128.1; 128.4; 128.5; 135.6; 143.1; 144.2; 145.1; 145.2; 147.1; 148.6; 150.1; 152.2; 153.2; 157.3; 162.3; 163.1; 166; 170.2 definitions and applications of  75.3; 143.1 structuralism  89.2; 93.1; 93.4; 103.1; 106.3; 170.3 suffragettes  3.1; 15.1; 15.4; 17.3; 111.5; 127.2; 153.3 surrealism and surrealists  10.2; 15.8; 72.1; 75.2; 75.5; 86.3; 96.3; 106.1; 150.2 symbiosis of the arts, see Anderstreben of arts symbolism  25.5; 33.1; 75.1; 78.2; 86.2; 92.2; 101.7; 116.1; 118.5; 121.1; 121.5; 133.1; 134.4; 145.1; 151.2; 156.1; 164.2 technology  13.2; 14.2; 16.2; 29.4; 48.2; 48.5; 71.4; 101.2; 109.2; 121.6 technopaegnion  77.3 television  23.3; 75.2; 88.2; 97.1 ‘terrible sonnets’ (Hopkins)  68.2; 68.5; 89.2; 95.6; 98.4; 106.2; 137.4; 153.3 theatre: of the absurd  2.2; 3.1; 3.2; 8.1; 9.2; 11; 15.7; 28.1; 58.2; 88.5; 89.2; 107.1; 167.2; 170.2 ‘angry young men’, see ‘angry young men’ cabaret 88.4 Caroline 67.2

Thematic index censorship  2.1; 3.1; 10.6 commercial 85.1 divisionist  28.1–2; 76.4 drawing room comedy  32.1; 102.5 experimental 28.1 Greek  102.3; 103.2 Jacobean  67.2; 95.1; 103.2; 103.6 Kammerspiel 85.2 militant 28.2 mythical 102.6 Noh or Nō  70.1; 75.3; 85.1; 85.2; 102.1 political  8.1; 8.2; 28.1 realistic 85.5 Restoration  32.1; 52.2; 88.1; 168.3 Traumspiele  5.1; 10.2; 164.3 in verse  41.4; 102.1; 103.1; 103.2; 106.1; 107 Victorian 50.2 of voices  107.1; 174.3 workers’ 28.3 theosophy  48.4; 73.10 Third World  16.8 Thomism and neo-Thomism  42.1; 46.1; 75.3; 76.3; 92.4; 101.2; 128.3; 131; 136.6; 143.2; 148.3 time: concept and theory of  14.4; 93.3; 94.8; 96.2; 99.2; 100–101; 110.4; 157.1–2; 157.4; 163; 165; 168.1; 170.2 linear and non-linear  12.1; 14.3; 29.2; 94.2; 94.5; 100.3; 101.2; 101.5; 145.2; 170.2 treatment of  127.4 Tories, Toryism and new Toryism  7.1; 16.2; 74.2; 90.2; 91.3; 127.2 tramp  11; 14.6; 15.7; 24.3; 91.1 typology: biblical  48.5; 137.1; 143.6 Lotman’s, of culture  77.5; 78.10

779/II university: London  14.1; 17.4; 62.1 (see also Cambridge, Oxford, university) university laws  41.2; 159.2 utopia  26.3; 45.1 Vedanta 57.4 vegetarianism  2.4; 42.1 Victorianism  42.2; 169.3 crisis of  51.2 critique of  76.2; 170.1; 167.1 Victorian essay writing  104.1 Victorian hypocrisy  52.2 Victorian poetry  64.4; 100.1 Victorian utopias  158.6 Vorticism  75.5; 76.2; 77.4; 78.2; 89; 90.1; 90.4; 106.1 Wales and Welsh literature  49; 60.3; 62.1; 65.1; 65.2; 65.5; 65.6; 68.6; 69.4; 93.2; 105.5; 175.2 wars: appeasement  3.1; 74.4 Boer War  15.2; 23.1; 25.6; 28.3; 42.2; 59.2; 62.1; 113.1 Irish civil war, see Ireland Napoleonic 61.1 Spanish Civil War  61.1; 74.3; 74.4; 90.4; 91.3; 92.4; 175.1 world wars: First World War  3.3; 14.10; 42.2; 59.2; 62.1 bibl.; 67.1; 67.3; 68.2; 70.1; 74.1; 74.3; 77.2; 87.2; 90.1; 113.1; 114.3; 117.2; 119.2; 123.1; 127.1; 164.3; 175.2; 175.3 First World War poetry  61.1; 61.2; 61.3; 62.1; 63.1–2; 63.4; 64.1; 64.6; 65.1; 66.3; 67.3; 68.1–6; 69.1; 176.1 literary representations  61.1; 61.2; 62.1; 62.3; 65.1; 95.4; 112.2; 127.3; 175.1–4

780/II Second World War  12.1; 14.10; 33.1; 42.2; 48.3; 49.1; 51.2; 63.3; 66.1; 68.2; 68.4; 72.1; 73.8; 74.1; 74.4; 90.1; 95.2; 105.3; 106.1; 157.4; 158.7; 159.3; 168.2; 175.1; 176. 1–4 ‘waste land’ 26.4; 51.2; 57.4; 61.1; 62.2; 90.2; 94.2; 95.4; 95.7; 96–97; 100.1; 125.1; 156.3; 164.3

Thematic index Web 16.7 Welfare State  4.1 Whigs 7.1 white man’s burden  6.3; 14.9; 20.8; 27.1; 160.2; 160.3 Zukunftskrieg roman  3.1; 14 .7–8; 14.10; 59