The Modernist Party 9780748647323

Citation preview

The Modernist Party

Edited by Kate McLoughlin

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For John and Brenda Shipman

© in this edition Edinburgh University Press, 2013 © in the individual contributions is retained by the authors Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 pt Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4731 6 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 4732 3 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 8130 3 (epub) ISBN 978 0 7486 8131 0 (Amazon ebook) The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust for permission to reproduce material previously published elsewhere. Every effort has been made to trace other copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

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The Menu

A Note of Thanks The Guest List

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Introduction: A Welcome from the Host Kate McLoughlin

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1 ‘The dinner was indeed quiet’: Domestic Parties in the Work of Joseph Conrad Susan Jones

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2 Prufrock, Party-Goer: Tongue-Tied at Tea Kate McLoughlin

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3 Party Joyce: From the ‘Dead’ to When We ‘Wake’ Jean-Michel Rabaté

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4 ‘Looking at the party with you’: Pivotal Moments in Katherine Mansfield’s Party Stories Angela Smith 5 Virginia Woolf’s Idea of a Party Bryony Randall 6 Proustian Peristalsis: Parties Before, During and After David R. Ellison 7 ‘Ezra through the open door’: The Parties of Natalie Barney, Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach as Lesbian Modernist Cultural Production Joanne Winning 8 ‘Indeed everybody did come’: Parties, Publicity and Intimacy in Gertrude Stein’s Plays Alex Goody

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The Menu

9 The Interracial Party of Modernist Primitivism and the Black ‘After-Party’ Margo Natalie Crawford 10 The Party In Extremis in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love Margot Norris

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11 Bohemian Retrospects: Ford Madox Ford, Post-War Memory and the Cabaret Theatre Club 192 Nathan Waddell 12 ‘Pleasure too often repeated’: Aldous Huxley’s Modernity Morag Shiach

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Index

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A Note of Thanks

The Modernist Party began as a pedagogical idea. In the first meeting of a course on twentieth-century literature, I experimented with introducing the class to modernism through a discussion of parties (I have yet to meet a student who hasn’t been to one). After exploring how people might feel before, during and after attending a party, we moved on to discuss the parties in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’, investigating how these scenes work formally and thematically in the texts. The students had already each researched a modernist figure of their choice – a writer, artist, dancer, musician, philosopher – and I then asked them to role-play him or her at an imagined party taking place in the 1920s. (I played Ernest Hemingway and was asked why I’d written such a gloomy ending to A Farewell to Arms.) The students and I mingled, introduced ourselves and made small-talk (no refreshments were provided, alas, and costumes and accents were not required). At the end, we discussed what we’d learned about our modernist fellow guests and how the role-playing had felt. ‘Awkward’, ‘fun’, ‘embarrassing’, ‘hard to keep up the pretence’ were among the responses: useful things to have learned about modernist experiences. I would like to thank the students at the University of Glasgow and Birkbeck, University of London, who have played along with the modernist party experiment so sportingly. For their practical and intellectual help in delivering this volume, I am very grateful to Jackie Jones and the team at Edinburgh University Press, Anna Hartnell and Nick Trefethen. Finally, I owe major thanks to the contributors, with whom it has been a pleasure and a privilege to work. Kate McLoughlin Le Petit Pey, Périgord, 2012

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The Guest List

Margo Natalie Crawford is an Associate Professor of English Literature at Cornell University. She is the author of Dilution Anxiety and the Black Phallus (2008), a study of the body politics of lighter- and darkerskinned blackness, and the co-editor, with Lisa Gail Collins, of New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (2006). David R. Ellison is Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at the University of Miami, Florida. His publications include The Reading of Proust (1984), Understanding Albert Camus (1990), Of Words and the World: Referential Anxiety in Contemporary French Fiction (1993), Ethics and Aesthetics in European Modernist Literature: From the Sublime to the Uncanny (2001) and A Reader’s Guide to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (2010). Alex Goody is Reader in Twentieth-Century Literature at Oxford Brookes University. She is the author of Modernist Articulations: A Cultural Study of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein (2007) and Technology, Literature and Culture (2011), and the co-editor of American Modernism: Cultural Transactions (2009). Susan Jones is Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford. She has published widely on Joseph Conrad, including Conrad and Women (1999), and is editing Conrad’s Chance for the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad. She has also written articles on modernism and dance and her monograph Literature, Modernism and Dance is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Kate McLoughlin is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of Authoring War: The Literary

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Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq (2011) and Martha Gellhorn: The War Writer in the Field and in the Text (2007), editor of The Cambridge Companion to War Writing (2009) and co-editor of Memory, Mourning, Landscape: Interdisciplinary Essays (2010) and Tove Jansson Rediscovered (2007). Margot Norris is Chancellor’s Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. Her publications include Virgin and Veteran Readings of Ulysses (2011), Suspicious Readings of Joyce’s Dubliners (2003), Writing War in the Twentieth Century (2000), Joyce’s Web (1992), Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst and Lawrence (1985) and The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake (1976). Jean-Michel Rabaté is Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder and curator of Slought Foundation. He is an editor of the Journal of Modern Literature and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has authored or edited more than thirty books on modernism, psychoanalysis, art and philosophy. Recent titles include 1913: The Cradle of Modernism (2007), The Ethic of the Lie (2008) and Etant donnés: 1) l’art, 2) le crime (2010). Bryony Randall is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life (2007), co-editor of Virginia Woolf in Context (2012) and is coediting Woolf’s short fiction for the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf. Morag Shiach is Professor of Cultural History and Vice-Principal for Humanities and Social Sciences at Queen Mary, University of London. Her most recent books are Modernism, Labour and Selfhood in British Literature and Culture, 1890–1930 (2004) and, as editor, The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel (2007). Angela Smith is Emerita Professor of English Literature at the University of Stirling. She is the editor of Katherine Mansfield’s Selected Stories for the Oxford World’s Classics. Her other publications include East African Writing in English (1989), Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two (1999) and Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life (2000).

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The Guest List

Nathan Waddell is Advance Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of Modernist Nowheres: Politics and Utopia in Early Modernist Writing, 1900–1920 (2012) and Modern John Buchan: A Critical Introduction (2009). He is co-editor of Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity (2011). Joanne Winning is Senior Lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London. Her publications include The Pilgrimage of Dorothy Richardson (2000) and the edited Bryher: Two Novels (2000).

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Introduction: A Welcome from the Host Kate McLoughlin

Immanuel Kant’s dinner-party In Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), Immanuel Kant describes how to throw the perfect dinner-party. The company must not number fewer than the graces or more than the muses: a number from three to nine is ‘just enough to keep the conversation from slackening or the guests from dividing into separate small groups with those sitting next to them’.1 The conversation should proceed through three stages: ‘narration’ (which concerns the news of the day), ‘arguing’ (the exchange of opinions, which ‘stirs up the appetite for food and drink’) and ‘jesting’ (‘the mere play of wit’).2 Governing all three phases are further injunctions: ‘to choose topics for conversation that interest everyone’, ‘not to allow deadly silences to set in’, ‘not to change the topic unnecessarily’, ‘not to let dogmatism arise’ and, should a serious conflict occur, ‘carefully to maintain discipline over oneself and one’s affects’.3 These matters observed, a dinner-party will combine both physical good (‘good living’) and moral good (‘virtue’), the former derived from fine food and wine, the latter from sociability and enlightenment. But, Kant cautions, a balance must be maintained ‘whereby the inclination to good living is limited by the law of virtue’.4 Have fun, that is, but not too much fun. This recipe for an enjoyable evening out in late eighteenth-century Prussia provides a party paradigm. Kant presents his ideal dinner-party as a forum of enlightenment, culture, taste and progress, a notion of public–private5 social interaction that, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, has been associated, by Jürgen Habermas and others, with the emergence of modernity.6 In this model, the party itself becomes an art-form: the host a virtuoso conductor or choreographer (Kant refers to himself as managing his dinner-party7), the guests players or dancers. But haunting this event of intellectually stimulating discourse

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and gustatory pleasure is another version of the party, hinted at by Kant in his advice to maintain control over the self and its affects. This is the party as an occasion of excess, sensuous gratification, decadence, debauchery, violence and, ultimately, death. But the edifying gathering and the bacchanal are not necessarily separate events. Rather, they both inhere in every party’s potential. If preceding ages produced their own archetypal feasts – the Roman convivium, the Victorian dinner-party8 – the party of the modernist period (roughly the last years of the nineteenth century and the first few decades of the twentieth)9 fragments, like so many other phenomena, into diversity. In life and in literature, parties of the period range from tea-parties to cocktail-parties, from lunch- and dinner-parties to extended house-parties, from breakfast-parties to parties held in venues such as nightclubs, restaurants and artists’ studios, from at-homes to dinner-dances to soirées. No attempt is made in the present volume to impose a definition of ‘party’, though the collection’s emphasis is on individual, if recurrent, occasions rather than on more generalised salon culture or bohemian lifestyle. In these varying modernist parties, the twin propensities to constructive enlightenment and destructive excess (now with debts to Nietzsche, Freud and others) assume special resonance. The modernist equivalent of the Kantian dinner-party is the party – in real life and in text – which provides inspiration, food for thought and a model for creativity. This version of the party is often a forum for testing the relationship of the individual to other people, exploring the nature of the self and critiquing the state. But the party of the modernist period is also the party overshadowed by the first global, industrialised war: the vehicle for nihilistic experiences of despair and self-effacement leading to the debauchery of the death drive. In both its hypostasised ideal and its feared alternative, therefore, Kant’s dinner-party provides an entrée to the modernist party.

Plato’s drinks-party The mechanics and mores of Kant’s ideal dinner-party derive from Plato’s Symposium (c. 385–380 bce). The symposium proper – a drinks-party – takes place after dinner and entertainment. Host and guests having sated their appetites, they take turns to speak: each must deliver an encomium to the god Love. There is some hiccupping from Aristophanes10 but, in Kantian fashion, he manages to recover himself and the seven speeches proceed in lively and dialogic fashion, drawing on a variety of rhetorical styles and moving participants and reader to more nuanced understand-

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ing. The modernist descendant of the symposium is discernable, mutatis mutandis, in the description by Virginia Woolf of a party given by John Maynard Keynes and Lydia Lopokova in July 1924: It was great fun at the party, enchanting, lyrical, Shakespeare with not a coarse word; and chaste conversation everywhere; dancing; the Davidsons, three of them,11 hung with chandeliers and stately as caryatids [. . .] in a ballet designed by Duncan [Grant]. Lydia danced; we had a little fine champagne.12

The Keynes’ party offered both physical and moral good in Kant’s terms, and the contribution of hosts and guests to both is implicit in Woolf’s description. The successful symposium, it emerges, is the outcome of accomplished party-giving and party-going. The art of party-giving, as noted, requires considerable aptitude for choreography and orchestration. In January 1903, Joseph Conrad invited Ford Madox Ford and his wife Elsie to a birthday-party for the Conrad children; the description of the prospective party is reminiscent of a meticulously planned and scripted masque: Engulphing stops in the Natural course of things. Then The Young Lady Arises from her armchair and proceeding up the table on her right pulls a cracker with every feaster on that side. The Young Cavalier performs the same rite on his right side. Feasters don caps out of crackers. A Bell rings cheerfully!13

The didascalia underscores not only the theatrical quality of the party, with assigned roles and movements, but also the sense of occasion; the same technique – a scenic description in the present tense – is used by F. Scott Fitzgerald to evoke a party in ‘The Broken Lute’ section of The Beautiful and Damned (1922). Setting requires as much attention as words and actions: guest-lists and seating-plans, as well as table decorations and menus, showcase compositional flair. In Bohemia in London (1907), Arthur Ransome conjures up a party-setting resembling ‘a mad room out of a fairy tale’: The walls were dark green, and covered with brilliant coloured drawings, etchings and pastel sketches. A large round table stood near the window, spread with bottles of painting inks with differently tinted stoppers, china toys, paperweights of odd designs, ashtrays, cigarette boxes, and books; it was lit up by a silver lamp, and there was an urn in the middle of it, in

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Kate McLoughlin which incense was burning. A woolly monkey perched ridiculously on a pile of portfolios, and grinned at the cast of a woman’s head, that stood smiling austerely on the top of a black cupboard, in a medley of Eastern pottery and Indian goods.14

This might be a stage-set. In it, already visually and olfactorily stimulated, the guests drink ‘opal hush’ (a foamy, amethystine concoction of claret and lemonade) while the hostess croons ‘O the googoo bird is a giddy bird’.15 In her memoir/cookbook, Alice B. Toklas describes further sumptuous mises-en-scène: the symposiarch is now dramatist, now sculptor, now installationist. At a gouté (a lavish afternoon tea-party) in Beon, the dining room, exquisitely set for twenty or more, is ‘elaborately decorated with pink roses’. The châtelaine calls the valet-de-chambre to place the pièce de résistance in the centre of the table, but, in a stunning coup de théâtre, this turns out to have been eaten by Gertrude Stein’s poodle and must be replaced with a mere cake.16 The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook takes the art–food connection even further, offering recipes entitled ‘Bass for Picasso’ and ‘Oeufs Francis Picabia’.17 That the art of party-giving is related to the deepest sense of the creative self –particularly the female creative self – is made clear in Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To The Lighthouse (1927) (more is said on this in Bryony Randall’s chapter). In the former, Clarissa, taking her rest on the day of her party, is initially unable to work out why she is feeling ‘desperately unhappy’.18 Eventually, she locates the ‘unpleasant feeling’ in comments made earlier by Peter Walsh and her husband: ‘but what had he said? [. . .] Her parties! That was it! Her parties! Both of them criticised her very unfairly, laughed at her very unjustly, for her parties.’19 Clarissa’s hurt is that of the insulted artist, her art-form that of the living sculpture or installation, inspired by her sense of people’s separateness and her wish to bring them together: ‘anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think, write, even play the piano.’20 In the latter work, the same sense of anguished protectiveness towards her artistic creation is evident in Mrs Ramsay’s reaction when her dinner-party is in danger of foundering on a guest’s awkwardness: ‘Will you take me, Mr. Tansley?’ said Lily, quickly, kindly, for, of course, if Mrs. Ramsay said to her, as in effect she did, ‘I am drowning, my dear, in seas of fire. Unless you apply some balm to the anguish of this hour and say something nice to that young man there, life will run upon the rocks – indeed I hear the grating and the growling at this minute. My nerves are taut as fiddle strings. Another touch and they will snap.’21

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The fear of party failure expresses a sense of anxiety, widespread in modernist literature, relating to the viability and sustainability of the artistic work itself: an endemic textual tension. In another party scene – the Duchemins’ breakfast-party in Ford’s Some Do Not. . . (1924) – the fault-line shatters as the hostess’s boorish husband, explicitly associated with Petronius’ Trimalchio, disrupts the proceedings with lewd utterances. A guest blames the hostess for the collapse of the composition: ‘ “I think this party’s very badly arranged.” ’22 Mrs Duchemin is rescued in her agony by another guest who exhibits considerably greater talents as a party-goer. Party-going, as has been suggested, is as much an art-form as party-giving. Appearance is the first consideration in preparing the performance. In Douglas Goldring’s description, Mary Butts, ‘with her red-gold hair, white skin and glittering “boot button eyes” ’, was ‘a gorgeous apparition at a party’; indeed, ‘[i]f two or three people were sitting quietly at a café table and Mary turned up, the group immediately became a party’.23 Lady (Duff) Twyden (the inspiration for Ernest Hemingway’s Lady Brett Ashley in his 1926 novel of protracted, nihilistic partying, Fiesta/The Sun Also Rises), ‘dark, slanteyed, long-nosed and of slighter build’, made ‘a perfect foil’ for Butts.24 ‘I can see them now,’ writes Goldring, ‘entering together a crowded room [. . .] and “taking the floor” as duchesses ought to, but seldom do.’25 The double entrance is a show-stopper, but it also implies a certain nervousness about effecting a solo arrival. Making an entrance, in costume, to a party is a cause of anxiety for Mabel Waring, the protagonist of Woolf’s short story ‘The New Dress’ (?1925) (the author herself confided to her diary, ‘[t]he going into rooms properly dressed is alarming’).26 Aiming ‘to be like them, pluming herself in fact’, Mabel, as she glimpses herself in a mirror in her new dress, feels only ‘humiliation and agony and self-loathing’, convinced that the ‘odious, weak, vacillating character’ revealed by the party is her true self.27 Performance anxiety may not be a uniquely modernist feeling – who knows what caused Aristophanes’ pre-speech hiccups in Symposium? – but it has particular resonance in modernist literature, with its new, post-Freudian interest in interior states. The stakes of the performance have never been higher. Now that the crowds are larger, there are more witnesses of potential discomfort and the chances are greater of having to socialise with strangers (Nick Carraway, for example, meets his host for the first time during Gatsby’s great party). The networks of communication are more efficient, ensuring that gossip can travel faster; in the era of high capitalism, competition is fiercer than ever. My own chapter, outlined later in this Introduction, considers performance anxiety on the part of that most reluctant of modernist party-goers, T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock.

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The party as performance, as display, as do, becomes more than ever an ‘exercise in public relations’ in the modernist period, when that industry was invented.28 To give or go to a party is to signify information about wealth, class and status, to participate in a complex nexus of manufacture, commodification and advertising. Parties are marriage markets29 and networking opportunities (more on this later). In such intense and demanding situations, conflict, awkwardness and embarrassment – all feelings that modernist writers sought to convey – are ubiquitous. Such feelings lead quickly to a sense of alienation, which can also be induced by the sheer banality of party interaction. The speaker of Herbert Read’s ‘Garden Party’ (1919) confesses: I have assumed a conscious sociability, Pressed unresponding hands, Sipped tea, And chattered aimlessly All afternoon, Achieving spontaneity Only When my eyes lit at the sight Of a scarlet spider Running over the bright Green mould of an apple-tree.30

The need to assume ‘conscious sociability’ exposes the imposed and enervating artificiality of party conversation and behaviour which the poem conveys through the effect of inconsequentiality created by the shortness of the first seven lines. In a typical Readian gesture, the aimlessness is thrown into relief by an eye-catching natural detail and at this point colour vivifies the poem and enjambment speeds it up, dramatising the speaker’s aroused attention. There is only one thing worse than being invited to a party like this: not being invited to it. For Clarissa Dalloway, being excluded from a party is a personal catastrophe: [T]he shock of Lady Bruton asking Richard to lunch without her made the moment in which she had stood shiver, as a plant on the river-bed feels the shock of a passing oar and shivers: so she rocked: so she shivered.31

These examples confirm the party’s status as a sign rich in semantic content. ‘Reading’ a party yields a barrage of information about social position, means, leisure-time and gender roles; this semantic proliferation explains attempts at (excessive) control on the part of the symposiarch, whether in real life or in text. The party as a work-of-art leads to the idea of the work-of-art as

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a party. This notion informs the chapters by Bryony Randall, Morag Shiach and David R. Ellison (the party as formal device is also treated by Susan Jones). Randall’s chapter, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Idea of a Party’, proposes the party as a new model for understanding the intertextual functions of Woolf’s oeuvre. As Randall observes, Woolf wrote obsessively about parties and an ‘intimate relationship’ obtains between parties (or at least her ‘idea’ of a party, if not her actual experience of them) and her creative output. Taking what Woolf in The Years (1937) termed ‘inconsecutive conversations’ as a paradigm of interaction, Randall argues that the non-hierarchical party space constructed in Woolf’s works from The Voyage Out (1915) onwards reflects the non-hierarchical relationship between them. In Randall’s formulation, Woolf as writer/hostess throws a party in which her texts/guests ‘dance, in light-spirited steps’. In her chapter, ‘ “Pleasure too often repeated”: Aldous Huxley’s Modernity’, Shiach focuses on three kinds of Huxleyan repetition: quotation, circulating sexual energies and social rituals. Huxley’s ‘accumulating drops of allusion and quotation’ represent not only a literary style but also ‘the characteristic universe’ of his fictional parties, ‘where meaning emerges from the cumulative drops of fragmented conversation and quotation rather than presenting itself as continuous or coherent’. Serial sexual encounters at parties, together with the taking of narcotics, figure ‘paralysis and obsessive return’, while the ‘repetitions and rituals’ of ‘enforced sociability’ occasion psychic damage. Linking these symptoms in Crome Yellow (1921), Point Counter Point (1928) and Brave New World (1932) to Huxley’s vision of modernity, Shiach explores how Huxley’s textual strategies mimic party behaviours. In ‘Proustian Peristalsis: Parties Before, During and After’, Ellison offers a reading of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913–27) in which the movement of characters through the social hierarchy and their expulsion from it, as evidenced by their inclusion in or exclusion from parties, illuminate narratological method. Proustian narrative ‘flow’, Ellison argues, can aptly be characterised by the pressure exerted by a frame on the party scene it encloses. Demonstrating the phenomenon with reference to the dinner hosted by the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes in The Guermantes Way, the soirée hosted by the Princesse de Guermantes in Sodom and Gomorrah and the matinée hosted by the Princesse in Finding Time Again, Ellison provides a model of reading that links parties to ideas of excess and waste, a model which recognises the peristaltic tension and ease evoked in the reader consuming Proust’s narrative. Reading texts as parties opens up fresh ways of characterising both writing and reading: textuality as sociality; writer and reader as host and

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guest; intra- and extra-textual relations as social discourses (small-talk, talking over, conversation, interruption, miscommunication, quarrelling); narrative as the party arc from invitation to thank-you note; intertextuality as hospitality; rhythm as anticipation, fatigue and second wind; absorption as intoxication; authorial self-effacement and intrusion as shyness and showing-off; reader response as RSVP; and so on. This volume is itself susceptible to such a characterisation and more on this will be said at the end of this Introduction. But in addition to modelling works of literature, parties – real-life parties, that is – produce them. This is the subject of Joanne Winning’s chapter, ‘ “Ezra through the open door”: The Parties of Natalie Barney, Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach as Lesbian Modernist Cultural Production’. Winning explores the extent to which the Friday afternoon/evening parties given by Barney at the Temple de l’Amitié in her pavillon in the rue Jacob and the readings and gatherings hosted by Beach in her bookshop Shakespeare and Company and Monnier in her bookshop La Maison des Amis des Livres can be considered fora of intellectual work and literary productivity, as well as of levity and socialising (a Kantian combination). Drawing on the theories of Pierre Bourdieu, Winning suggests that, where cultural producers are rendered dissident by factors such as their gender or sexuality, the production of party space/time is a potential conduit via which they can define, establish and disseminate intellectual and aesthetic authority and hence shape literary output. For Alex Goody, however, considering Gertrude Stein in her chapter ‘ “Indeed everybody did come”: Parties, Publicity and Intimacy in Gertrude Stein’s Plays’, the conduciveness to creativity of the public/ private space of the party is ambiguous when the creativity in question is that of the host. As Goody recounts, Stein’s publishing success with The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) precipitated ‘a disturbing invasion of her inner sense of self’ in which her private interiority was ‘opened out to the external world’s values and definitions’. But this tension between publicity and private autonomy had already emerged as Stein and Toklas admitted the expatriate avant-garde to their domestic space at their parties in rue de Fleurus. Both parties and book success exposed Stein’s private life to a publicity that threatened the sense of linguistic singularity with which she was investing her writing. This threat is textually mapped out in the plays Stein wrote about parties at the beginning and end of her career: What Happened. A Play in Five Acts (1913) and A Play Called Not And Now (1936). The enormous intervention made by Barney, Monnier, Beach and Stein and Toklas in facilitating and developing the creativity of modernist writers and artists underscores the importance of parties to mod-

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ernist networking. Understanding the significance of such networking has led to exciting new directions in modernist studies in recent years. Modernist network studies have explored the little magazines32 and printing presses,33 the coteries and salons,34 the bookstores and publishing houses,35 the tea-shops and restaurants36 – but not the parties,37 though Suzanne Churchill and Adam McKible explicitly voice the need for ‘a “great party” model [of modernism], one that duly recognizes the era’s sense of urgency, mechanization, and conflict but also addresses modernism’s spirit of creativity, conviviality, and playfulness’.38 Rightly so, for parties were of huge significance in extending patronage, forging creative alliances (and mésalliances), sparking productive disagreements and enabling knowledge transfer. Some of the great modernist parties were dazzling one-off set-pieces. Among these were: the party thrown by Sydney and Violet Schiff at the Hôtel Majestic in Paris on 18 May 1922 for Joyce, Proust, Picasso and Stravinsky, with Diaghilev, fresh from Ballets Russes triumphs, as guest-of-honour and master-of-ceremonies;39 the party thrown on 1 June 1926 by Edith Sitwell in honour of Gertrude Stein, also attended by Woolf, E. M. Forster, Siegfried Sassoon, Tom Driberg and Arnold Bennett; and the two dinners held on 15 and 17 July 1914 at Dieudonné’s restaurant in London, the former to celebrate Vorticism (‘a great success, every one talked a great deal,’ commented Ezra Pound),40 the latter Imagism.41 The Imagist dinner given by Amy Lowell and attended by the Pounds, Richard Aldington and H. D., Allen Upward, John Cournos, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and John Gould Fletcher seems to have had a nasty, bullying note, as Upward read out a parody of Lowell’s poems and Pound declared the Imagist school at an end.42 ‘The silver on the table glittered, / And the red wine in the glasses / Seemed the blood I had wasted / In a foolish cause,’ wrote Lowell later in ‘The Dinner Party’ (1916).43 The creative energy deriving from the party is not necessarily founded upon harmoniousness and civility. The dark side of Kant’s ideal is beginning to make its presence felt. Modernist partying was not solely a matter of great set-pieces. A number of renowned hosts gave regular parties, and here the party starts to blur with the phenomenon of the salon and with more generalised bohemian behaviour. Regular gatherings were held by Ford and Violet Hunt at their Kensington home, South Lodge, until 1914; attendees included Wyndham Lewis, Jacob Epstein, May Sinclair, Phyllis Bottome, H. D. and Aldington, D. H. Lawrence and Jessie Chambers, and Rebecca West.44 Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, Augustus John, Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, Eliot and the Woolfs were regular guests at Philip and Lady Ottoline Morrell’s legendary

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house-parties at Garsington (the parties in Lawrence’s Women in Love, based on those at Garsington, are explored in the chapter by Margot Norris).45 W. B. Yeats held court on Mondays at 18 Woburn Buildings (Pound, Cournos and William Carlos Williams were among the courtiers)46 and T. E. Hulme did so on Tuesdays at Mrs Dolly Kibblewhite’s house in Frith Street (Rupert Brooke and the Georgian poets, Pound, Aldington, F. S. Flint, Cournos, Ford, Lewis and other luminaries attended).47 Emerald Cunard entertained the Sitwell brothers, Pound and Lewis in Cavendish Square, while Eva Fowler and Olivia Shakespear organised house-parties, teas and readings in Kensington.48 Then there was Bloomsbury: ‘noetic enclave’, ‘brand’ and lived example of G. E. Moore’s philosophy, expressed in Principia Ethica (1903), of ‘the importance of beautiful objects and personal relations’.49 Then there was the partying at restaurants – Pound at Pagani’s and then Belotti’s,50 almost everyone at the Eiffel Tower Restaurant in Percy Street51 – and at artists’ studios.52 In Paris were the great salons already mentioned – and more – while in New York the young avant-garde headed for Greenwich Village and the salons of Mabel Dodge on Fifth Avenue, depicted in Carl Van Vechten’s Peter Whiffle (1922) and Max Eastman’s Venture (1927),53 the Stettheimer sisters on West 58th Street, and Walter and Louise Arensberg on West 67th.54 Several points emerge from this dizzying array of social occasions. The first is that the party-host/party-guest relationship exemplifies par excellence Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the ‘field of restricted production’ in which is achieved ‘the truly cultural recognition accorded by the peer group whose members are both privileged clients and competitors’.55 Joanne Winning’s chapter explores this further. The second is that the creative stimulation provided by modernist parties is international and interdisciplinary. The third is that parties overlap, acquire subparties and side-parties, become composite (David R. Ellison and Margo Natalie Crawford both discuss the idea of ‘after-parties’): another suggestive model for literary texts. The fourth is that listing parties is in some way to create a party, to group together elements between which exist affinities and dissonances. The list or congeries reveals itself as another party-mimicking trope. As this party of parties also reveals, networking foregrounds the thorny question, of high interest to modernist writers, of the relationship of the individual to the group. The OED offers definitions for ‘party’ which, in their mutual near-exclusiveness, emphasise the commonly experienced dialectic of inclusion and exclusion: ‘an individual concerned in a proceeding’ (II) and ‘a company or a group of people’ (III). Parties both bring people together and keep them apart: indeed, as

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Christopher Ames observes, the ‘classic gesture’ of literary party scenes is of the individual stepping aside from the crowd for a moment.56 The ontological consequences of the party and the identity politics of partyhosting and party-going are explored in the chapters by Susan Jones and Angela Smith and in my own chapter. In ‘ “The dinner was indeed quiet”: Domestic Parties in the Work of Joseph Conrad’, Jones offers a reading which relates the gender and post-colonial politics of parties in three texts written in Conrad’s mid to late career – Under Western Eyes (1911), Chance (1913) and ‘The Planter of Malata’ (1914) – to the formal and thematic implications of their serial publication. In these works, tea-parties and dinner-parties explore the potentialities and limitations of women’s roles, and their stereotypical representations, in early twentieth-century societies (revolutionary Russia, Suffragist Britain and colonial Australasia) and act as narrative devices ironising the context of the texts’ first appearance as serialised romances. As Jones illustrates, in Under Western Eyes and Chance Conrad suggests that ‘a woman’s limited power might most successfully lie in the role of party convenor’ but this image of the hostess is overlaid with ‘considerable scepticism’. In ‘The Planter of Malata’, Conrad exploits the dinner-party as a means to ‘aestheticise the very disintegration of individual and social identities that prefigures the collapse of the colonial project itself’. For Smith in ‘ “Looking at the party with you”: Pivotal Moments in Katherine Mansfield’s Party Stories’, the numerous party-givers and party-goers in Mansfield’s short stories seek to project an image of themselves which is always undermined by ‘a moment of disruption when the picture is skewed’. At such moments, when Mansfield’s scrutiny reveals an aspect of the secret self, a protagonist approaches an often ultimately elusive epiphany. Smith locates these pivotal instants in ‘Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding’ (1911), ‘Sun and Moon’ (1920), ‘Bliss’ (1918), ‘Her First Ball’ (1921) and ‘The Garden Party’ (1922): a woman humiliated at a wedding; a child’s anguish at the destruction of an ice-pudding; the discovery of adultery; a girl insulted at a dance; the announcement of a death. Each disturbing moment erodes the protagonist’s faith in the self’s substantiality. My own chapter, ‘Prufrock, Party-Goer: Tongue-Tied at Tea’, investigates social performance in the context of Habermas’s theories of communicative action. The putative tea-party in Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (written 1910–11) is, in Habermasian terms, a less than ideal public sphere; Prufrock and his interlocutors lack the necessary ‘communicative competence’ with which to reach common understanding. Disclosing the affinities between Habermas’s ideas and

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the philosophies of Josiah Royce and F. H. Bradley (studied by Eliot at Harvard), the chapter explores why Eliot chose to locate communicative failure in an occasion so apparently benign as a tea-party. The party becomes ‘an alien ritual, possible formally to describe but not to enter into [. . .] unsusceptible both to external explanation and to internal communication’. Small wonder that Prufrock gets stage-fright. The party as a negative experience resonates with Lionel Trilling’s suggestion that modernity is characterised by the loss of the (Kantian) belief that pleasure is a good and its replacement by a cult of ‘unpleasure’.57 Catherine Belsey comments: Trilling aligned modernist pleasure with the death drive. Whether or not this is the best way of explaining it, he surely judges astutely when he observes that the motive here is an alternative form of ‘gratification’. In other words, unpleasure paradoxically offers its own forms of enjoyment.58

As Plato’s drinks-party ends in chaos (‘[e]verything went out of control; all there was left to do was to drink a great deal, and even that was completely unsystematic’),59 it is time to tip-toe away and prepare to gatecrash the other great forerunner of the modernist party – Trimalchio’s dinner-party – and experience the pleasure of unpleasure.

Trimalchio’s dinner-party The Cena Trimalchionis in Petronius’ novel The Satyricon (?63–5 ce), invoked in a number of works of modernist literature,60 is, to borrow Kant’s description of ‘feasts and great banquets’, ‘tasteless’.61 Hosted by the boorish former slave and now wealthy Trimalchio, it features over-eating, over-drinking, ill-informed boasting, casual cruelty, serious bullying, spiteful gossip, drunken insults, lewd singing, competitive story-telling, lechery, showing-off, dog-fighting and violence. (Readers are invited to consider whether they would rather attend this or Kant’s select gathering.) The courses arrive as ingeniously fashioned assemblages: in the entrée dish stands a donkey of Corinthian bronze bearing a double pannier crammed with olives; the pièce de résistance is a ‘massive boar’, baskets of date-filled vine-leaves hanging from its teeth, surrounded by ‘tiny piglets of pastry’, its flank sliced open to release thrushes.62 Sensuous excess is at its height. And unsurprisingly, in the midst of this extreme living, is death, in the guises of the ‘skeleton of silver’ brought into the party, the description of Chrysanthus’ funeral, the mock death-sentence pronounced on the slave-boy and Trimalchio reading out his will.63

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Modernist variations on Trimalchio’s dinner-party occur in real life and in texts. Douglas Goldring remembers Mary Butts as a ‘child of her period, gathering rosebuds, experimenting (I suspect cautiously) with the drugs in vogue, and throwing more or less continuous wild parties’.64 As the partying intensifies, inhibitions are lost, tongues loosened. Woolf told Roger Fry, ‘parties [. . .] have the effect of making one do what one would in no other circumstances do’65 and confessed to Jacques Raverat, ‘I go to parties [. . .] and there get rather random headed and say too much.’66 Edgell Rickword’s ‘Strange Party’ (1922), set on the ‘lawn’s most secret shade’ as ‘cascades of the moon descend / on shadowy dancers with false cheeks of gold’, captures the phantasmagorical effect of excessive party stimulation: Discreetly mocking in the gloom those masqueraders bow and twirl, feigning to exorcise the doom that seals the fountains of your heart, queer girl.67

The comatose melancholy recalls Keatsian negative capability: the ‘droop[ing]’, ‘overweighed’ girl is en route to oblivion. In contrast to this crepuscular moribundity, but sharing its nihilism, is the high-octane sleaze of perhaps the wildest party of all modernist wild parties, Joseph Moncure March’s epic The Wild Party (1928). The hosts are Queenie and Burrs: Queenie was a blonde, and her age stood still, And she danced twice a day in vaudeville. [. . .] And she liked her lovers violent, and vicious: Queenie was sexually ambitious. So: Now you know. A fascinating woman, as they go. She lived at present with a man named Burrs Whose act came on just after hers. A clown Of renown.68

After a routine bout of domestic violence, Queenie and Burrs throw a (bootlegged) alcohol-, drug- and adrenaline-fuelled party in which Queenie will have sex with her friend Kate’s date Black, and Burrs with Kate. The Wild Party is a syncopated medley of optical illusions (‘Enormous blurred hands kept stealing / Spider-like, across the ceiling’); sacrilegious behaviour (‘The way they drank was unholy’);

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sexual ambiguity (‘ambisextrous’); confusion (‘streamers of smoke’); noise (‘like great hosts at war / They shouted: they laughed: / They shrieked: they swore’); copulation (‘the party began to reek of sex’); grotesque physicality (‘White arms encircled swollen necks’); violence (‘They jostled: / Stepped on each other’s toes: / Elbowed: / Clawed’); and detritus (‘Bleared glasses stood / Half-empty, bottles stuck to wood. / Cigarette stubs: / Ashes / [. . .] A pink stocking: a corkscrew / [. . .] And a wet towel, with a stained border: / All stirred together in wild disorder’).69 Ultimately lethal, the party ends in a chaotic tableau of bodies invoking sex and death:70 The double bed was a tangled heap Of figures interlocked; asleep. Limp arms lay flung in all directions: Legs made fantastic intersections: White faces lay tossed back: Mouths gaped; hideous, black. Collars hung loose. White bosoms lay bared.71

And death will come again and again to the modernist party: to Mrs Dalloway’s evening-party (‘Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here’s death, she thought’),72 to Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’, to ‘The Broken Lute’ party in The Beautiful and Damned, to the Misses Morkan’s dinner-dance in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ (1914).73 The Trimalchian admixture of bodily excess and death offers itself almost irresistibly to a Bakhtinian reading. Bakhtin’s carnival is a ‘temporary liberation from [. . .] the established order’, ‘special condition [. . .] of the world’s revival and renewal’.74 The figure of this antiauthoritarian festivity is the eating, drinking, defecating, copulating, grotesque body. Bakhtin writes: The essence of the grotesque is precisely to present a contradictory and double-faced fullness of life. Negation and destruction [. . .] are included as an essential phase, inseparable from affirmation, from the birth of something new and better. The very material bodily lower stratum of the grotesque image (food, wine, the genital force, the organs of the body) bears a deeply positive character.75

In this vision, the party is a collective carpe diem; indeed, this eat-drinkand-be-merry outlook is owned several times in the Cena Trimalchionis.76 The Bakhtinian carnivalesque underpins Ames’s reading of parties in modern literature in The Life of the Party (1991), a work that informs this Introduction. For Ames (also drawing on Bede’s account of life

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resembling a sparrow’s flight through a banqueting-hall), the ‘festive vision’ derives its power from ‘its ability to convey both the richness of earthly joys and the contrasting iciness of mortal brevity’, offering in the process a religious-like consolation.77 Reinforcing his thesis, Ames cites: Roger Caillois’s argument that ‘destruction and waste, as forms of excess, are at the heart of the festival’; René Girard’s account of festive transgression, which ‘revitalizes the cultural order’ through a cathartic ritualised and symbolic encounter with death; and Friedrich Nietzsche’s assertion that ‘excess reveal[s] itself as truth’.78 Yet Bakhtinian carnival is an incomplete characterisation of the modernist party of excess, since it omits consideration of other theories of intense behaviour (such as those of Walter Pater and Freud), sexual and racial factors and the historical impact of the First World War. In his conclusion to The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873), highly influential in the modernist period, Pater, having described the ‘quickened sense of life’ occasioned by ‘great passions’, argues that ‘a quickened and multiplied consciousness’ is bestowed by ‘the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake’: ‘for art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake’.79 Valorising a combination of aesthetics and intense feeling, Pater opens the way for a reconfiguration of the real based on personal, sensuous and fleeting experience. This aspect of the modernist party is explored by Margot Norris in her chapter ‘The Party In Extremis in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love’. In the two parties in Lawrence’s 1920 novel, Norris finds ‘psychological and emotional drama operative under the surface of manners and personal interactions’. Comparing the elements of the Lawrentian party – colour, music, violence, death – with artistic Expressionism, Norris argues that the party’s theatrical character reveals ‘the extent to which the social is a kind of enactment that conceals and exacerbates an intense inner activity’. Characters are ‘ignited by conversations and interactions into feelings and impulses of which they might otherwise be unaware, and yet which are necessary for them to come to far more essential recognitions of their own being-in-the-world’. Jean-Michel Rabaté’s chapter, ‘Party Joyce: From the “Dead” to When We “Wake” ’, brings Freud to the party (Freud also makes an appearance in Shiach’s chapter). In Joyce’s ‘party vector’, which Rabaté traces from the Morkan sisters’ annual dinner-dance to the Christmas dinner of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) to the sexualised references to ‘picnic parties’ in Ulysses (1922) to the revelries in the Chapelizod pub where most of Finnegans Wake (1939) takes place, to the mythical ‘wake’ of Tim Finnegan, there is a movement

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‘from life to death and from death to life’. Further positioning these parties as ambivalent representations of traditional Irish hospitality, Rabaté argues that the ‘constant tension between the ecumenism of the “party” and the fractiousness of antagonistic political parties’ allows a politicised reading of Joyce’s oeuvre (the political sense of ‘party’ is also picked up in Nathan Waddell’s chapter). Accordingly, Rabaté links the ‘Aesopian language’ of Lenin, who was writing Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917) in Zurich at the same time as Joyce was working there on Ulysses, with the dream-language of Finnegans Wake. But Rabaté also underlines the affinities of the Irish funeral-party (wake) with Bakhtinian carnivalesque. The party that Joyce keeps rewriting entails an ‘embrace of death’ by a festive life on the brink of excess. This is Joyce’s means of approaching the drive of all drives, Freud’s death drive, which alone permits feeling fully alive. To these accounts of (near-)excessive behaviour, Margo Natalie Crawford adds racial nuance. In her chapter on parties in works of Harlem Renaissance writers, ‘The Interracial Party of Modernist Primitivism and the Black “After-Party” ’, Crawford describes the scene in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) in which Helga Crane dances, then regrets the dance and tells herself she is not a ‘jungle creature’. In Crawford’s argument, Larsen depicts ‘non-self-conscious dance as a higher state of consciousness that allows the black dancer to not think about the antiblack racism that makes the “jungle creature” such a demeaning position’. Exploring works by Larsen, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, Helene Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Anita Scott Coleman and Marita Bonner, Crawford rethinks the dance of modernist primitivism as a ‘difficult space’ in which a certain ‘controlled abandon’ was achieved by African American modernists, who did not fully internalise the ‘jungle creature’ ideology. The effect of the First World War was to exacerbate and then curtail Paterian intensity. ‘The period between 1907 and 1914 witnessed the last wild orgie [sic] in which the dying Victorian world indulged before its downfall’, remarked Goldring.80 After the war, there was a certain sense of release – Fitzgerald stated that the 1920s were inaugurated with ‘a general decision to be amused that began with the cocktail parties of 1921’81 – but if the pre-war ‘wild orgie’ was a last-gasp danse macabre, the post-war version was imbued with a very dark sense of nihilism and waste indeed. Nathan Waddell’s chapter, ‘Bohemian Retrospects: Ford Madox Ford, Post-War Memory and the Cabaret Theatre Club’, explores Ford’s post-war revisiting of the pre-war avant-garde party scene in his reconstruction in The Marsden Case (1923) of a staging of an ombres chinoises at the Cabaret Theatre Club. The Club’s perfor-

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mance space, the Cave of the Golden Calf, fostered part-public, partprivate activities away from a dismal ‘above-ground’ where ‘people were disagreeably odd and wearisome things had to be accounted for’. Ford’s return in The Marsden Case to an early modernist scene of revelry and hedonism is, in Waddell’s account, not so much a ‘frivolous avoidance of [. . .] political anxieties’ as the recalling of a cultural era ‘whose cosmopolitan and intellectual underpinnings might point the way for a directionless post-war modernity’. ‘As parties do, this one began to dwindle’, wrote Woolf in her diary of a party in January 1923.82 Trimalchio’s dinner-party ends rather more spectacularly: the host’s trumpeters play the dead march, the noise alerts the city sentinels, who kick in the door and wreak chaos with hoses and axes, and the guests take to their heels.83 It should be re-emphasised that the Cena Trimalchionis and the platonic symposium are not opposing or exclusive party models: indeed, Plato’s drinks-party also concludes chaotically and Trimalchio himself insists (ironically perhaps) that ‘even when we’re dining we must advance our learning’.84 Even in combined application, these precursors are insufficient to characterise the range of parties across modernist life and literature. In suitably modernist style, the party refuses to be pinned down. But before ordering carriages, more must be said about the party’s place in modernist studies.

The modernist party A number of indications have already been given of the affinities of parties with modernist preoccupations. On a technical level, the party as topos: enables authors to gather characters together; provides narratological anticipation, climax and aftermath; gives scope for descriptive detail; constitutes a natural venue for heteroglossia (often in antiphony with omniscient narrative);85 and allows minor genres such as gossip and anecdote a moment in the light. The relevance of parties to network studies has already been mentioned but parties are also pertinent to other current areas of investigation in modernist scholarship, such as materiality, the everyday and space/place. Early twentieth-century party formats were the products of material and ideological changes, phenomena of bourgeois, industrialised, urbanised, secular market economies.86 Developments in transport, architectural design, clothing fashions, food and drink production and preparation, and technology such as the gramophone and artificial illumination (‘[m]ankind and its supper parties were no longer at the mercy of a few miles of sea-fog,’ noted Robert Louis Stevenson)87 created a distinctly modern version of the party that

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both inspired modernist writers and chimed with their concerns. In particular, theories of modernist consumption support a characterisation of the party, as exemplified here by David R. Ellison, as producer of waste and as waste product. To read modernist parties is, therefore, to participate in the ‘material turn’ in modernist studies.88 And yet, the reader-ofparties might also be permitted to reflect on the immateriality of his or her object of study, its evanescence, its phantasmagoria, its sudden flare. As noted, the idea of modernism as an aesthetics of intensity goes back to Pater. Yet recent publications have emphasised modernist authors’ imaginative engagement with the everyday.89 The party fruitfully problematises this category. Parties are interruptions in routine, special occasions which cause participants’ speech, dress, consumption and sleeping patterns to diverge from daily practice, but they are also events at which quotidian trivialities are swapped in the form of smalltalk and banalities loom large. Indeed, the frequency of parties in the modernist period troubles even this dichotomy. Like the Mad Hatter’s tea-party, modernist parties continue indefinitely. In the 1930s, Ford discovered his engagement book for 1914: ‘[it] was an amazing, packed affair. From the middle of May to the end of June . . . – there were only six days on which I did not have at least three dinner and after-dinner dates. There would be a dinner, a theatre or a party, a dance.’90 The parties merge into a perpetual party, an every day but not an everyday occurrence. Hence the party as object of study has the potential to extend thinking about the modernist everyday, providing a new perspective on work, leisure and play. Overlapping concerns with the material conditions of modernism and the concept of the everyday is another rich seam in modernist studies: that devoted to space and place. In a 1998 article, Sara Blair described the principal insight of the then ‘new cultural geography’ deriving from the work of Edward Soja, Saskia Sassen, David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau: ‘the articulation of space as a social product, one that masks the conditions of its own formation’.91 Blair noted: [T]he historicist mode of cultural geography focuses on the production of spaces, simultaneously material and abstract, that have functioned as areas for the enactment of social relations: the penitentiary and the theater, the New England village, the Rover auto plant, the colony and the homeland.92

Cultural geography informs the ‘spatial turn’ in modernist studies described by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker in Geographies of Modernism (2005): the production of ‘spatial histories which seek to analyse the particular texts, forms, formations and practices of modernism by locating them within specific spaces and specific times’.93 In this

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vein, to examinations of the spaces mentioned by Blair, scholars have added explorations of metropolitan exteriors and domestic interiors, tea-shops, workplaces and the seaside.94 Products of cognitive and social transformations of space into place ranging across the globe, as provincial as they are metropolitan, small examples of ‘modernity at large’,95 chronotopes and heterotopes:96 parties lend themselves naturally to analysis with the tools of cultural geography. And yet, in another sense, they defy them. Occurring in actual physical locations, parties have no inherent or lasting connection with their locales. Consequently, they foster an understanding of space/place that is peripatetic, event-driven and impermanent. Crucially, they also reintroduce the coordinate of time – brief and fleeting time – which further complicates the space/ place axis with ephemerality and unrepeatability.97 Studying the modernist party, then, is an opportunity – taken in this volume by Winning and Waddell – to rethink space, place and time, to engage with micromodernisms (the single evening, the one-off lunch), to appreciate the potential of a phenomenon that is at once social and geographical experience and literary device. It was promised earlier that a final word would be said about the party-like qualities of this volume as a whole. It is hoped that the chapters assembled here, like party-guests, talk to and differ from each other and the reader in productive ways, contributing different approaches and viewpoints. Not everyone could be invited (a limited guest-list meant that there was no room for Mary Butts, Mina Loy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Green or Evelyn Waugh, for instance), but those present constitute a diverse and international gathering, demonstrating that the party was at the centre of modernist writing and intellectual activity. If the intention is to host something closer to Kant’s dinnerparty than to Trimalchio’s, this is not to underestimate the former’s capacity for exhilaration and discovery.

Notes 1. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View [Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798)], ed. and trans. Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 179. 2. Ibid., p. 181. 3. Ibid., pp. 181–2 (emphasis original). 4. Ibid., p. 178. 5. ‘[E]ven the largest dinner party is always only a private party, and only the state party as such is public in its idea,’ explains Kant (ibid., p. 180). 6. See, further, my chapter in this volume.

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7. Kant, Anthropology, p. 179. 8. Roy Strong, Feast: A History of Grand Eating (London: Pimlico, 2003), p. 7. 9. The application of the term ‘modernist’ to this period is fairly loose, and should be taken to include proto-modernist tendencies. 10. Plato, Symposium, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 20 §185d. 11. Angus and Douglas Davidson and George Rylands. 12. Virginia Woolf, A Change of Perspective: The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Volume III: 1923–1928, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (London: Hogarth Press, 1977), p. 120. 13. Joseph Conrad, The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Volume III: 1903–1907, ed. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 9. 14. Arthur Ransome, Bohemia in London (London: Chapman and Hall, 1907), p. 55. 15. Ibid., p. 58. 16. Alice B. Toklas, The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (1954) (London: Serif, 1994), pp. 32–3. 17. Ibid., pp. 29–30. 18. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925), ed. Morris Beja (Shakespeare’s Head Edition) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 90. 19. Ibid., pp. 90, 91. 20. Ibid., pp. 91–2. 21. Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse (1927), ed. Susan Dick (Shakespeare’s Head Edition) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 78. 22. Ford Madox Ford, Some Do Not. . . (1924), ed. Max Saunders (Manchester: Carcanet, 2010), p. 114. 23. Douglas Goldring, South Lodge. Reminiscences of Violet Hunt, Ford Madox Ford and the English Review Circle (London: Constable, 1943), p. 148. 24. Ibid., p. 148. 25. Ibid., p. 148. 26. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume II: 1920–1924, ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1978), p. 239. 27. Virginia Woolf, A Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction, ed. Susan Dick (London: Vintage, 2003), pp. 165, 168, 167, 166. 28. Strong, Feast, p. 293. 29. See Ford, Some Do Not. . ., p. 185: ‘They [the marriages] were the product usually of the more informal type of dance, of inexperience and champagne.’ 30. Herbert Read, Eclogues: A Book of Poems (London: Beaumont Press, 1919), p. 23. 31. Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, p. 24. 32. See Georgina Taylor, H. D. and the Public Sphere of Modernist Women Writers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Sean Latham and Robert Scholes, ‘The Rise of Periodical Studies’, PMLA 121.2 (2006), pp. 517–31; Jason Harding, The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in

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35. 36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

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Inter-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Adam McKible, The Space and Place of Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2002); Faith Binckes, Magazines, Modernism and the Avant-Garde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Suzanne Churchill, The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Suzanne Churchill and Adam McKible (eds), Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Cited in Helen Southworth (ed.), Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 13. See Southworth (ed.), Leonard and Virginia Woolf. See Kevin Dettmar and Ian Watt (eds), Marketing Modernism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); Wayne Chapman and Janet M. Manson, Women in the Milieu of Leonard and Virginia Woolf (New York: Pace University Press, 1998); Mary Ann Caws and Sarah Bird, Bloomsbury and France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Patricia Laurence, Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003); Sara Blair, ‘Local Modernity, Global Modernism: Bloomsbury and the Places of the Literary’, English Literary History 71.3 (2004), pp. 813–38; Peter Brooker, Bohemia in London: The Social Scene of Early Modernism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Cited in Southworth (ed.), Leonard and Virginia Woolf, p. 2. See Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); John Xiros Cooper, Modernism and the Culture of Market Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). See Brooker, Bohemia in London; Scott McCracken, ‘Voyages by Teashop: An Urban Geography of Modernism’, in Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (eds), Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 86–98. Parties in the literature of the period and beyond it are the subject of Christopher Ames’s The Life of the Party: Festive Vision in Modern Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), but this work is not about modernist networking. Suzanne Churchill and Adam McKible, ‘Introduction’, in Churchill and McKible (eds), Little Magazines and Modernism, pp. 1–18: p. 13. See Richard Davenport-Hines, A Night at the Majestic: Proust and the Great Modernist Dinner Party of 1922 (London: Faber, 2006), ch. 1. Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska. A Memoir (1932) (New York: New Directions, 1970), p. 52; quoted in Brooker, Bohemia in London, p. 118. See Brooker, Bohemia in London, pp. 114–23. Ibid., p. 115. Amy Lowell, Men, Women and Ghosts (New York: Macmillan, 1916), p. 338. See Goldring, South Lodge; Violet Hunt, I Have This To Say: The Story of My Flurried Years (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926); Brooker, Bohemia in London, pp. 56–7. Brooker, Bohemia in London, p. 137. Goldring, South Lodge, p. 48; Brooker, Bohemia in London, p. 59. Brooker, Bohemia in London, p. 98.

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48. Ibid., 105–6. 49. Cooper, Modernism and the Culture of Market Society, pp. 249, 245; the description of Moore’s philosophy is from Peter Stansky, On Or About December 1910: Early Bloomsbury and Its Intimate World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 9, quoted by Cooper on p. 245. 50. Brooker, Bohemia in London, pp. 106, 113. 51. Goldring, South Lodge, p. 161. 52. Ransome, Bohemia in London, p. 70. 53. Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 10, 12. 54. Cooper, Modernism and the Culture of Market Society, p. 244. See also Robert Morse Crunden, American Salons: Encounters with European Modernism, 1885–1917 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 55. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (Oxford: Polity Press, 2004), p. 115. 56. Ames, The Life of the Party, p. 96. 57. Lionel Trilling, ‘The Fate of Pleasure’, in Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1965), pp.  50–76; cited in Ames, The Life of the Party, p. 160. 58. Catherine Belsey, A Future for Criticism (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), p. 14. 59. Plato, Symposium, p. 71 §223b. 60. In addition to the quotation in Some Do Not. . ., already mentioned, the Cena Trimalchionis supplied the epigraph of Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and the original title of The Great Gatsby, Trimalchio in West Egg – see P. G. Walsh, ‘Introduction’, in Petronius, The Satyricon, trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. xiii–xliv: pp. xx, xxi, xli–xliii. 61. Kant, Anthropology, p. 179. 62. Petronius, Satyricon, pp. 23 §31; 26 §36; 30 §40. 63. Ibid., pp. 26 §26; 32 §42; 41 §52; 59 §71. 64. Goldring, South Lodge, p. 151. 65. Woolf, The Question of Things Happening: The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Volume II: 1912–1922, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (London: Hogarth Press, 1976), p. 438. 66. Woolf, Letters Volume III, p. 78 (emphasis original). 67. Edgell Rickword, Collected Poems, ed. Charles Hobday (Manchester: Carcanet, 1991), p. 66. 68. Joseph Moncure March, The Wild Party (London: Martin Secker, 1928), pp. 9–10. 69. Ibid, pp. 27, 28, 30, 42, 51, 64, 64, 57–8, 89–90. 70. Ibid., p. 89. 71. Ibid., p. 91. 72. Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, p. 156. 73. See Ames, The Life of the Party, Pt 1. 74. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 10, 7–8. 75. Bakhtin, Rabelais, p. 62. 76. Petronius, Satyricon, pp. 26 §34; 32 §43; 43 §55.

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77. Ames, The Life of the Party, p. 2. 78. Roger Caillois, Man and the Sacred, trans. Meyer Barash (Glencoe: Free Press, 1959), p. 98; René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 127; Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 46 (emphasis original); quoted in Ames, The Life of the Party, pp. 8, 9. 79. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. The 1893 Text, ed. Donald L. Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), p. 190. 80. Goldring, South Lodge, p. 71. 81. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up (1945) (New York: New Directions, 1956), p. 15. 82. Woolf, Diary Volume II, p. 224. 83. Petronius, Satyricon, p. 66 §78. 84. Ibid., p. 29 §39. 85. See Ames, The Life of the Party, pp. 19, 25, 29. 86. Ibid., p. 6; Strong, Feast, pp. 272–4, 305. 87. Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘A Plea for Gas Lamps’ (1881), in Works (New York: Scribner, 1910), vol. IX, p. 154. 88. Aaron Jaffe, ‘Modern Literature: General’, The Year’s Work in English Studies 88 (2009), pp. 867–78: p. 866. Jaffe includes in the material turn: Peter Kalliney, Cities of Affluence and Anger (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007); Eric Bulson, Novels, Maps, Modernity (London: Routledge, 2007); Nicholas Freeman, Conceiving the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); David Trotter, Cinema and Modernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007); and Scott McCracken, Masculinities, Modernist Fiction and the Urban Public Sphere (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). 89. Bryony Randall, Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, The Ecstatic Quotidian (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007); Liesl Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 90. Ford, Return to Yesterday (New York: Liveright, 1932), p. 410; quoted in Brooker, Bohemia in London, pp. 72–3. 91. Sara Blair, ‘Cultural Geography and the Place of the Literary’, American Literary History 10.3 (1998), pp. 544–67: p. 544. 92. Ibid., pp. 546–7. 93. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, ‘Introduction: Locating the Modern’, in Brooker and Thacker (eds), Geographies of Modernism, pp. 1–5: p. 2. 94. Andrew Thacker, Moving Through Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); McCracken, ‘Voyages by Teashop’; Catherine Clay, British Women Writers 1914–1945 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Lara Feigel and Alexandra Harris (eds), Modernism on Sea (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009). 95. Arjun Apparurai, Modernity at Large (Minnesota: University of Minneapolis Press, 1996). 96. On chronotopes, see Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination. Four

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Essays, ed. and trans. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 84; on heterotopes, see Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics 16.1 (1986), pp. 22–7: p. 24. 97. On heterochronies, see Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, p. 26.

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Chapter 1

‘The dinner was indeed quiet’: Domestic Parties in the Work of Joseph Conrad Susan Jones Joseph Conrad’s reputation predominantly rests on his proto-modernist exploration of the individual male consciousness. Throughout his fiction, protagonists such as Charlie Marlow, Lord Jim, Razumov and Axel Heyst are preoccupied with (frequently failed) quests for identity, isolated figures grappling with a troubled psychology, trying to make sense of their situation in a hostile or unwelcoming community. In this context, parties (other than political ones) do not immediately spring to mind as familiar locations or sources for Conrad’s narratives, and when they do occur they are not always markers of social harmony in his work.1 His emphasis on the relationship between individual and society in his narratives often means that parties subvert rather than confirm their conventional generic function as closure of comedy. Instead, Conrad is highly sceptical of the social gathering. Rather than presenting the party as a convenient setting for communal engagement, he uses the occasion of social interaction to comment on a number of moral anxieties, the concealment of hidden agendas, frequently showing the ways in which individuals are persuaded, incited or bullied into following interests not quite their own. Through the setting of the party he examines: the individual’s dominance over the group (Peter Ivanovitch’s revolutionary gatherings at the Château Borel in Under Western Eyes (1911)); political machinations (the pub gatherings of anarchists in The Secret Agent (1907)); or issues of female identity. Regarding the last, he frequently comments on, or undermines assumptions about, a woman’s performative role as hostess or entertainer – Mrs Gould’s colonial gatherings in Nostromo (1905); Mrs Fyne’s ‘feminist’ tea-parties in Chance (1913); the café culture of the opening of Victory (1915), where Lena performs as pianist; Tomassov’s lover as society hostess in ‘The Warrior’s Soul’ (1917). Just as Conrad critiques coercive political activity of the state in ‘Autocracy and War’ (1904–5), the Conradian ‘party’ shows the social equivalent of the state’s behaviour, the ‘gathering’,

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as the place where the protagonist’s bid for individual expression is undermined by the group, destabilised by the occasion, or coerced by the pressure to become ‘one of us’ (Lord Jim (1900)).2 As the above examples show, parties unexpectedly appear throughout Conrad’s work, nearly always concealing the conflicted motives of various protagonists rather than revealing a conventional expression of social solidarity. In this chapter I shall, however, specifically examine a new turn in Conradian narrative that appeared with his use of the party in the later fiction. I examine a group of ‘parties’ described in texts written in Conrad’s mid to late career (between 1911 and 1914) where the social gathering is used to examine gender politics in the modern world – revolutionary Russia, Suffragist Britain or the outposts of colonial Australasia; or where the party acts as a narrative device to signal the specific ironisation of the context of the publication of this work in journals exploiting the popularity of serialised romance as much as the relation between individual and society. In this respect, the occasion of a party assumes a formal significance in the organisation of the narrative strategy, or it takes on symbolic force in the construction of the spatial aspects of the text, where the emphasis on a generic shift in Conrad’s work towards the late romances becomes a self-consciously aesthetic consideration. While a number of ‘salon’ gatherings appear in Conrad’s final works – in The Arrow of Gold (1919) and Suspense (1925), for example – I shall focus on the domestic, or so-called domestic, parties of three texts published in the years immediately before the First World War, where domestic situations uneasily mirror political upheavals associated with the pre-war years. I initially compare two scenes depicting tea-parties to show the way in which Conrad reworked a scene of social ritual in Under Western Eyes in his next novel, Chance, to explore two related yet distinctive aspects of contemporary feminism and feminist critique. In the second half of the chapter I turn from ‘tea’ to ‘dinner’, to a neglected short story, ‘The Planter of Malata’ (first published in Metropolitan Magazine, June–July 1914; later collected in Within the Tides (1915)) to show how Conrad consolidated his critique of social gatherings as a contrivance of romance fiction by introducing the dinnerparty as a structural device underpinning the sceptical strategies of the entire story. In addition, Conrad’s scenes of dinner-parties in ‘Planter’ (which was also published, significantly, in Empire Magazine from September to November 1914) represent to some extent a swan-song to colonial confidence and privilege. As the final dinner-party reveals hidden ironies that have throughout been concealed by the ‘Planter’ in his carefully controlled mask of sociability, Conrad gestures in this story

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to the end of Empire in the psychological disintegration of the dominant figure of imperial romance. This chapter follows recent shifts in Conrad criticism that have drawn attention to the reductiveness of the ‘achievement and decline’ thesis solidified in the 1950s with Thomas Moser’s influential view.3 Emerging from a New Critical tradition that invested in value judgements about what constituted a ‘good’ piece of art, the model of achievement and decline in Conrad’s work tends to marginalise as inferior most of Conrad’s fiction published after Under Western Eyes. The formal aspects of Conrad’s earlier proto-modernist narrative strategies, with their destabilised narrative voices, temporal dislocations and explorations of subjective indeterminacy and dislocations of consciousness, were more conducive to assumptions about Conrad’s contribution to modernism. The work of Conrad’s later career, published after and including Chance, does not so easily fit the model of rigorous exploration of male identity. In his late phase, Conrad specifically courted the lucrative market for women readers of serial fiction and emphasised the romance plots and women characters of stories such as Chance, The Arrow of Gold, The Rover (1923) and Suspense (unfinished; published posthumously 1925); this late work fell into a category signalling, for some, a qualitative decline that coincided with an apparently cynical decision on Conrad’s part to accommodate popular forms. Yet by the end of the twentieth century, the burgeoning of textual studies of modernism and analyses of periodical publication, serialisation and the popularisation of the fiction market in the early part of that century had opened up the field for rereading Conrad’s late work in new critical contexts.4 With these critical models in mind, the later texts show the author’s engagement in a freshly ironic dialogue with his contexts of publication. In these late works we can identify Conrad’s appropriation of popular generic forms such as the romance, sensation fiction and melodrama, where Conrad frequently alludes to the visual lexicon of the paratextual material of the journals in which his texts are now appearing, and where illustration and advertising increasingly function as unsolicited and ‘accidental’ framing devices for the text. Far from losing interest in innovative narratorial modes, Conrad instead shifts focus. His greater emphasis on women in these stories owes much to his exploration of the way women are stereotypically presented not only in popular genres, but in a far wider sweep of European culture. He draws attention to the way the visual stereotyping of the serial market draws on classical and traditional images, producing a homogeneity and lack of ontological distinction in appearance and a widespread conformity to generic

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type. The publication of Conrad’s texts in the serial market causes the author implicitly to identify the disjunction between the textual and paratextual/visual material of serialisation, generating a subversive tone in these late texts that contributes to the predominantly sceptical treatment of the fabula itself. Whereas the protagonist of Lord Jim dreams of being ‘a hero in a book’ (p. 6), Conrad’s late fiction questions anew the ‘market’ for romance which now commodifies and popularises the heroic and the romantic in the distinctively materialistic contexts of modern magazine publication. But Conrad does not limit his critique to the presentation of women. In a move that is consolidated by his own success in publishing in this context, Conrad frequently assimilated the devices of the popular romance into the formal strategies of the text – only to undercut the expectations of a ‘popular’ readership in his delivery of a sceptical closure that aligns itself more closely with literary modernism. Conrad addresses the formal and social implications of romance by dissecting the interaction of individual and society in the context of the social gatherings most common to this fictional form in the early twentieth century – to the parties associated with domestic interaction, namely the tea-party and the dinner-party.

I Under Western Eyes and Chance follow each other in order of their publication, yet they belong to very different genres and have sometimes marked an artificial critical division of Conrad’s work into ‘major’ and ‘late’ (or ‘minor’) phases of his career. Under Western Eyes is a political novel, a story of revolutionary activity, of loyalty, betrayal and double agency, whose chief protagonist seems in one sense to be an entire society – the nation of Russia – rather than an individual character. It was first published in instalments in the English Review and the North American Review from December 1910 to October 1911 – both sober and serious literary journals. In Chance, whose main protagonist is a woman, Conrad turns to a modern readership for serialised fiction (Chance was first published, with illustrations, in the ‘women’s pages’ of the Sunday magazine of the New York Herald from January to June 1912) and enters into a new interrogation of the romance genre and its relationship to the presentation of gender roles. Both novels support a complex creative history, yet both belong to their contemporary political moment, and both intriguingly exploit a tea-party scene where we can trace continuities in Conrad’s thematic treatment of the issue of

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feminism. Conrad’s representation of the burgeoning area of contemporary feminist politics is far from straightforward, and while he promotes female autonomy in both novels, he is often sceptical of the potential for its achievement in existing social structures. Conrad produces an ironic, sceptical view of this movement, as he does of any political group or any rhetoric of political incitement. Under Western Eyes offers a parody of the ‘revolutionary’ figure in Peter Ivanovitch, who claims to support feminism yet treats women abominably, while in Chance Mrs Fyne, the feminist figure of the novel, advocates complete female liberation until it is her brother’s marital relationship that is at stake, at which time she behaves as the most conservative of critics of the female in question. In their distinctive representations of feminism, we nevertheless find some striking continuities in their exploitation of the formal device of a teaparty as a locus of social harmony. The first ironises feminism in the context of Russian revolutionary politics. The second, if read in the light of Conrad’s reassessment of the relationship between genre and gender as it is presented in the context of the serial market, produces a surprisingly new, modernist engagement with the feminist context. It is typical of Conrad’s grim sardonic humour that he uses the occasion of a tea-party – that most innocuous of social gatherings – to ironise the revolutionary activity of Ivanovitch, ‘the great European feminist’ character in Under Western Eyes.5 Ivanovitch, an exiled Russian, operates at the centre of a group of political agitators in Geneva that is recruiting personnel to incite a prospective ‘intrigue’ in the Balkans, which, ‘with some money [. . .] would set the Peninsula in a blaze and outrage the sentiment of the Russian people’ (p. 219). The group’s leaders include Ivanovitch, and the grotesque Madame de S—, a gothic caricature, or rather inversion, of Madame de Staël.6 Madame de S—, we are told, ‘was very far from resembling the gifted author of Corinne’ (p. 142), but de Staël’s Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractère de JeanJacques Rousseau (1788) are elsewhere part of the context of the novel’s themes (Razumov writes his ‘confessional’ journal under the statue of Rousseau in Geneva). The revolutionaries are residing temporarily at the Château Borel, a run-down mansion outside Geneva, formerly belonging to a banker’s widow. A bizarre tea-party takes place at this fading and disintegrated castle, which provides a gothic setting (Madame de S— is also described as ‘a galvanized corpse out of some Hoffman’s tale’ (p. 215)) for the headquarters of Russian revolutionary sympathisers, who are planning insurrection from outside the national borders. The occasion encapsulates the coldly disturbing irony and hypocrisy surrounding the group’s activities – at this point Ivanovitch and Madame de S— are

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‘sounding out’ the credentials of a new recruit, a Russian ‘exile’, Kirylo Sidorovitch Razumov, who has recently arrived from Russia. In an echo of Lord Jim, Ivanovitch characterises Razumov as ‘one of us’ (p. 208, emphasis original) – hoping he will be a good candidate for implementing the latest plot, a ‘man of energy and character, in view of a certain project’ (p. 210). The dramatic irony of the tea-party where Razumov meets Madame de S— for the first time at the Château Borel does not lie simply in the anti-democratic views of the so-called liberationists of Russia (Ivanovitch declares that Russia’s problems ‘can never be bridged by foreign liberalism’ (p. 211)). It is exacerbated by our knowledge of Razumov’s activity as a double agent sent by the Russian government to infiltrate the group. In fact the tea-party carries with it many additional ironies, not least in its ascription to Ivanovitch’s character the epithet of ‘the great feminist’ (p. 212), while he terrorises the ‘lady companion’, Tekla, who acts as his servant at the Château and follows him with unstinting devotion in spite of his patronising and brutal behaviour towards her. While she is trying to organise the tea-party, Razumov ascertains her fear of ‘the burly feminist’ (211). The scene is described with a note of black humour: But with a preliminary sound of bumping outside some door behind him, the lady companion, in a thread-bare black skirt and frayed blouse, came in rapidly, walking on her heels, and carrying in both hands a big Russian samovar, obviously too heavy for her. Razumov made an instinctive movement to help which startled her so much that she nearly dropped her hissing burden. She managed, however, to land it on the table, and looked so frightened that Razumov hastened to sit down. (p. 217)

Neither does Tekla find female solidarity in the presiding figure of Madame de S—, who is busy barking orders at Ivanovitch from her reclining position: ‘The rasping voice asked from the sofa abruptly – “Les gâteaux? Have you remembered to bring the cakes?” ’ (p. 217). As Madame de S— ‘talked in a hoarse tone of the political situation in the Balkans’, Ivanovitch fetched the parcel of cakes, ‘which he must have extracted from the interior of his hat’ (p. 217) and ‘with imperturbable gravity he undid the string and smoothed the paper open on a part of the table within reach of Madame de S—’s hand’, while she ‘extended a claw-like hand, glittering with costly rings [. . .] took up [a cake] and devoured it, displaying her big false teeth ghoulishly’ (p. 217). Meanwhile, ‘the lady companion poured out the tea, then retired into a distant corner out of everybody’s sight’ (p. 217). The fake gentility of the ‘revolutionary’ gathering underscores the descriptions of Ivanovitch’s

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oleaginous attention to his hostess’s needs (the suggestion that she may bankroll the plot prompts his behaviour). Madame de S—’s wolfish gluttony and Tekla’s attempts at servile invisibility add to the ironic presentation of the veneer of social politeness. Nothing more sharply defines the crumbling scenario into which the double agent Razumov appears in Geneva than the tea-party at the Château Borel, conducted in the manner of the de Staël salons, where the civilised niceties of sharing gâteaux, sipping tea and engaging in cultured conversation barely conceal the murky undercurrents of insurrectionary politics, the autocratic subtext of Ivanovitch’s so-called feminism and the double agency lying at the heart of the novel. Following Under Western Eyes, a series of deferrals caused delay to Conrad’s completion of Chance, yet the creation of this novel overlaps in many ways with the production of Under Western Eyes, and we can identify some of the thematic continuities between the two novels when Conrad again uses the scene of a tea-party to critique a form of ‘fake’ feminism. In this novel, aimed at the women readers of the New York Herald, he turns back to the use of his dramatised narrator, Marlow,7 framing Marlow’s comments on women in the context of a more sceptical discussion of the ‘woman question’.8 But he also achieves a tighter ironisation of romance by bringing into play his responses to a new form of serial fiction in which he now aimed to present his work.9 The following discussion refers to a section from Chapter 2 of the book version of Chance. The dramatised narrator, Marlow, a retired seaman, tells his interlocutor about his visits to the country home of a middle-class couple, Mr and Mrs Fyne, whom he has befriended while taking a vacation in the English home counties.10 It is through these visits that Marlow meets Mrs Fyne’s friend, the young abandoned heroine, Flora de Barral. On the surface, the Fynes’ is a highly conventional marriage, but Mrs Fyne is a feminist, writing a tract on women’s education. Marlow is often invited to join the Fynes at an afternoon tea-party: ‘I played chess with Fyne in the late afternoon, and sometimes came over to the cottage early enough to have tea with the whole family at a big round table’.11 Like the strange tea-party at the Château Borel, the Fyne family gathering is hardly conventional and Conrad’s narrator strikes a wry note, identifying a disjunctive tone to the social ritual: They sat about [the table], a smiling, sunburnt company of very few words indeed [. . .] Mrs Fyne smiled mechanically (she had splendid teeth)12 while distributing bread and butter. A something which was not coldness, nor yet indifference, but a sort of peculiar self-possession gave her the appearance [. . .] of an excellent governess; as if Fyne were a widower and the children

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not her own but only entrusted to her calm, efficient, unemotional care. (p. 37)

But others are present, in whom Mrs Fyne seems to show greater interest than in her own children: The atmosphere of that holiday cottage was – if I may put it so – brightly dull. Healthy faces, fair complexions, clear eyes, and never a frank smile in the whole lot, unless perhaps from a girl-friend. The girl-friend problem exercised me greatly. How and where The Fynes got all these pretty creatures to come and stay with them I can’t imagine. I had at first the wild suspicion that they were obtained to amuse Fyne. But I soon discovered that he could hardly tell one from the other, though obviously their presence met with his solemn approval. These girls in fact came for Mrs Fyne. They treated her with admiring deference. She answered to some need of theirs. They sat at her feet. They were like disciples. It was very curious. Of Fyne they took but scanty notice. As to myself I was made to feel that I did not exist. After tea we would sit down to chess and then Fyne’s everlasting gravity became faintly tinged by an attenuated gleam of something inward which resembled sly satisfaction. (pp. 37–8)

This episode sets the scene of Marlow’s visits to the Fynes. However, it is only in a later typescript with holograph emendations that Conrad adds the remarks about Mrs Fyne’s political and sexual persuasion that constitute the second paragraph of the above quotation. In the manuscript that corresponds to the serial text, we hear nothing of Mrs Fyne’s role as proselytising feminist, nor do we hear of the pointed lesbian subtext at this juncture in the narrative.13 Only after the serialisation of Chance, when Conrad was preparing his text for publication in book form, did he add the paragraph beginning ‘The girl-friend problem exercised me greatly’.14 This passage shows how Conrad emended his narrative strategy in two specific areas, both of which extend the role of feminist critique in the novel. The first applies to narratorial positioning. His additions contribute to the greater sense in the book version of Marlow’s possessiveness over the story. In Marlow’s somewhat dry and teasing tone there is nevertheless a hint of his increasing paranoia (developed elsewhere in the final book version), an anxiety about being marginalised from his own story – ‘As to myself I was made to feel that I did not exist.’ He also cuts Fyne’s role, which in an earlier version suggested Fyne’s attraction to the chief ‘girl-friend’, Flora. The book version shows Marlow’s textual and sexual appropriation of Flora unchallenged (he expresses an erotic attraction to her victimisation), so that Flora’s later rejection of Marlow’s chivalrous attitude to her and his misunderstanding of her

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actions are more acutely refined. Chance is also the last time Conrad uses his dramatised narrator, Marlow – we hear a hint of his sense of redundancy in this line. Conrad also draws on his familiarity with the social and political context of the narrative, particularly through allusion to a variety of popular contemporary texts. The ‘girl-friends’ resemble those popular or sensational, as well as controversial, fictional contexts like the New Woman novel, exemplified by Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893), and something of the characteristics of Hardy’s Sue Bridehead appear here in the combined presentations of Mrs Fyne and Flora. Conrad fleshed out Mrs Fyne’s role as an ardent feminist, interested in the careers of her ‘girl-friends’, advocating female autonomy and writing books on women’s education, although she apparently sustains a highly conventional marriage herself. This passage not only gestures to the political context. Consider the line ‘But I soon discovered that he could hardly tell one from the other’ (p. 37). Marlow hints at the homogeneity of all those ubiquitous images of women to be found in contemporary serial publications. The moment initiates an overall shaping of the critique of female representation throughout the book, where the text constantly refers us to the limited nature of existing representations of women (including Marlow’s). At this point it is important to remember that Chance was not Conrad’s first encounter with a popular market.15 As far back as 1901 ‘Amy Foster’ had appeared in the Illustrated London News, in which an illustration for the first instalment shows the heroine in a ‘picture hat’, seated at the table with the family in a conventional conversation piece depicting tea-time in the iconography of Victorian genre painting. The caption for the illustration reads: ‘She would help her mother to give tea to the younger children.’16 Conrad ironises Mrs Fyne’s conventional image as hostess of a teaparty in his added paragraph to the book version of Chance by drawing attention to her powers of authority over the girls – ‘She answered to some need of theirs’ – and she replaces, in Marlow’s view, the authoritative role of the husband or indeed himself as narrator. His presentation of Mrs Fyne’s ‘biblical’ authority, with her disciples at her feet, manipulates the conventional role of hostess into a reversal of the customarily patriarchal role. As she takes leadership of what looks like a Victorian reading group, Mrs Fyne is given the role of a Mrs Pankhurst rather than of a Carlylean figure. But more importantly, Marlow’s authority as narrator is also undermined – he is later challenged by his unnamed interlocutor, so that his presentation of feminism in the novel is shown up to be unreliable and driven principally by anxiety for his own role as convenor of the narrative.

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Conrad has shifted the critique of Peter Ivanovitch’s so-called Russian ‘feminism’ to the context of Suffragist politics in England, but essentially he does so by transposing the same ironic textual marker – a caricatured tea-party – from the debased ‘salon’ culture of European revolutionary gatherings to an English pastoral setting. In Chance, as Conrad revised his critique of romance in the light of the contexts of serial publication, he allowed for a wry perspective on the conventional marriage plot, where women preside over genteel conversation at tea-parties, and brought to bear on the text references forms of fiction associated with a female readership – the romance and the New Woman novel – and contemporary political references. But he also produced an astute reading of the representation of women in popular journals, with their highly visual component. He shows up the limitations upon women of the homogenising effect of syndication, of a dissemination of repetitious images to a wider public than ever before. Even the critique of patriarchy itself is open to the media’s conventionalising effects. Marlow is himself quick to point out that Mrs Fyne corresponds to the popular visual image of the New Woman. In the chapter discussed above he describes her dress, in white shirt, jacket, tie and culottes, in a way that matches, in fact, an illustration for a New York Herald magazine feature of 1912 on the ‘Joys of Women Walking’.17 The representation of the feminist solidifies into yet another popular convention, rather as Conrad repeats the trope of the woman as hostess of salon parties in Under Western Eyes, ‘The Warrior’s Soul’ and the Arrow of Gold, to suggest that a woman’s limited power might most successfully lie in the role of party convenor, only to overlay the delivery of the image with some considerable scepticism.

II Conrad sustained his critique of the popular market for fiction in his short story ‘The Planter of Malata’, which he finished in December 1913, soon after the completion of revisions to the serialised version of Chance. Here he also returned to the generic field of his first novels – Almayer’s Folly (1895) and An Outcast of the Islands (1896) – which had both been associated by critics such as H. G. Wells with the context of imperial romance.18 The ‘Planter’ of the story’s title, Geoffrey Renouard, lives and works in isolation on his now successful plantation, where he produces silk on a small island (Malata): ‘I see no one consciously. I take the plantation boys for granted.’19 But he has just arrived in Sydney to gather ‘information’ (of an unspecified nature) from the editor and

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part-owner ‘of the principal newspaper’ – Conrad self-consciously positions the tale in relation to modern journalism – situating their opening dialogue ‘in the Editorial office’ (p. 13), the place ‘where everything is known about everybody’ (p. 15). The editor engages in wheeling and dealing, as well as influencing various colonial transactions and projects in the area: ‘it was he who first helped Renouard in his plans of exploration [. . .] rewarded modestly with the lease of Malata island by the frugal colonial government’ (p. 15). During the conversation with the editor, Renouard speaks of his having hired an assistant, ‘only to stop your preaching about the evils of solitude’ (p. 15) – but little more is said about this man, and the story then evolves from accounts of Renouard’s visits to the home of a Mr Dunster, a former colonial statesman, who introduces Renouard to a travelling academic, Professor Moorsom, and his daughter Felicia, who are staying with Dunster and his sister and son during his tour of philosophy lectures. Renouard falls instantly in love with Miss Moorsom, but she is already engaged to a man of somewhat disreputable character, who has recently disappeared but to whom she is apparently devoted. The Professor entreats Renouard to help his daughter in the problem of the missing man, but the editor is ahead of the game and soon ascertains that Felicia’s fiancé is in fact Renouard’s mysterious assistant, a man formerly of good character who has ostensibly embezzled his employers and turned to a life of drug-taking. Renouard now faces a great moral dilemma. He knows that his assistant is actually dead from the consequences of his addiction, and has already buried him on Malata. But in his infatuation with Felicia, and in the hope of prolonging his relationship with her, Renouard withholds the information, instead inviting the whole Dunster/Moorsom party to return with him to Malata purportedly to enable Miss Moorsom to be reunited with her lover. When Renouard is finally forced to confess his deception to Felicia, he is rejected by her and he despairs – dismissing his servants and workers, closing up and abandoning the silk plantation, and committing suicide by swimming out to sea from the deserted island shortly thereafter. While the bare outline sounds highly melodramatic, the closure of the story is steeped in typical Conradian scepticism, with Renouard’s moral dilemma and ultimate cowardice driving him to self-destruction, while Felicia’s devotion to the ‘assistant’ is ambiguous. With the suggestion of her unexplained betrayal of her fiancé and her rejection of Renouard’s excessive idealisation, her inconclusive hints about her relationship with the mysterious ‘assistant’ add a degree of moral complexity incompatible with a ‘magazine’ presentation of unrequited love. Furthermore, we hear in the tone of the tale the subtext of a larger colonial story – the

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Empire’s production of unstable characters living in isolation from the ‘real’ world of domestic relations, giving in either to drugs or, in Renouard’s case, to excessive idealism. The ‘ghost’ of the assistant who hovers over the tale represents a modernist gap in the story, but it also gestures to the point at which the colonial endeavour, represented by the obsessively love-sick Renouard, is also ultimately unsustainable. Like Lord Jim’s excessive romanticism, which leads only to his selfdestruction, Renouard’s abandonment of his colonial prospects on the plantation anticipates the end of Empire in ways that will become familiar to us later in the century in Graham Greene’s work. There is no happy ending to this romance – a fact for which, as Conrad points out in his Author’s Note, he was criticised by early reviewers. But in many ways Conrad had delivered his tale for the market for romances. First published in Metropolitan Magazine in 1914, the story’s emphases on the love plot and on the presentation of a ‘hero’ and ‘heroine’, whose outward presentation exemplifies the limited taxonomy of female idealisation in magazine illustration, suggest Conrad’s indulgence in a deliberately aestheticist turn, but one that also accommodated the context of initial publication.20 The atmosphere of polite colonial society punctuated by dinner-parties and tea-time gatherings also goes a long way to accommodate the contemporary popular genres of imperial and exotic romance. But here Conrad exploits the social event of the dinner-party not as an organising principle around which to structure the social harmony associated with the closure of romance, but as a device through which to aestheticise the very disintegration of individual and social identities that prefigures the collapse of the colonial project itself. A series of these events punctuates the story at significant moments – operating in a way that is familiar in Conrad’s work from his use of prolepsis and analepsis in other tales (Heart of Darkness, for example, offers many such visual sequences or events that knit together Marlow’s retelling of his experiences in Africa). In this case, Conrad uses the dinner-party to aid the reader’s imaginative construction of the story’s spatialisation into its geographical and geopolitical divisions. The so-called ‘civilised’ spaces of the ‘great colonial centre’, looking out over Sydney harbour, are represented by the sense of privileged domestic existence in Dunster’s colonial home, where colonial authority is asserted as guests continually gather at the dinner table and on the terrace. On the other hand, the island of Malata – where the real work of colonial enterprise and colonial production takes place, carried out by the largely mute or obedient ‘boys’ – is seen only from a distant and imagined perspective for most of the tale. And when we as readers (with

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Renouard and the Dunster party) do finally ‘arrive’ on the island, the one dinner-party for the guests is notable for the absence of the host, Renouard, who does not attend. But the significance of Renouard’s abandonment of his guests is reinforced by our sense of the centrality of domestic sociability throughout the tale. Conrad’s spatial patterning of events relies not simply on the ‘telling’ of the tale, but on suggesting a kind of embodiment or ‘staging’ of the text, by mapping the movements of the characters and defining the patterning of events through a complex arrangement of visual and rhythmic reminders. Dinner-parties occur at intervals throughout the tale, at moments when we are made implicitly aware of a relationship between Renouard’s external adherence to the physical gestures of politeness and his disjunctive internalisation of events. The first reference to a dinner-party occurs as a conversational prompt at the opening of the story, when the editor surprises Renouard by exhibiting knowledge of his activities: ‘And so you were dining yesterday at old Dunster’s’ (p. 13). Renouard confirms his presence at the previous evening’s event, and thus the first dinnerparty at the ex-colonial’s home is given as a retrospective account, as Renouard first relates his experience with regret for the fact that his editor friend was not there. Then later, when on board his schooner, moored up in the harbour, he reflects on his meeting with Felicia Moorsom and her extraordinary effect on him – an effect he was unable to express at the party. Then in Part III, a few days later, in an ironic reversal, the editor announces that ‘he had made the acquaintance of the Moorsom party last night. At the Dunsters of course. Dinner’ (p. 28). Whereas initially Renouard expressed regret at the editor’s absence from the first dinner-party, the announcement of a party to which he was not invited (where Felicia Moorsom was present) prompts feelings of suppressed rage and jealousy on Renouard’s part. Renouard continues to visit Miss Moorsom, and is taken into her father’s confidence. But his next invitation – ‘You had better come back to-night and dine with us quietly’ (p. 42) – allows the reader to ‘attend’ the Dunsters’ third dinner-party along with Renouard, instead of hearing about it as he recounts it retrospectively. Although a thirdperson narrator delivers the story throughout, at this moment we gain a sense of the free indirect discourse that penetrates the interior experience of the protagonist. The reader is, as it were, ‘invited’ to experience the event from Renouard’s point of view, in the ‘present’ moment of the story. We are told, ‘The dinner was indeed quiet’ (p. 43) but shortly after dinner, while Renouard is alone with Miss Moorsom, struggling with the effort to keep his overwhelming desire in check and preserve the forms of gentility – ‘He fought down the impulse to seize her by the

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hand’ (p. 45) – another interruption breaks the flow of the conventional romance trajectory, with the editor’s melodramatic entrance to reveal the true identity of ‘the assistant’. Once again, Renouard’s ‘romance plot’ is ironically subverted by events occurring at the (after all, not so quiet) dinner-party. In the final reference to a dinner-party, this time on Malata, Renouard’s servant reminds him of his responsibilities as host. But Renouard’s social identity is breaking down; he is distressed by his knowledge that he will shortly have to confess the truth of the death of his assistant. He cannot bring himself to face his guests – ‘Eh? What? Dinner waiting? You must say I beg to be excused. I can’t come’ (p. 69). The dinner-party this time signals the collapse of ‘form’ – prefiguring the disintegration of his character, the collapse of his futile amatory involvement with Miss Moorsom, the end of the narrative, the break-up of forms of sociability – and anticipates Renouard’s abandonment of his position as the ‘Planter’. It also marks the end of colonial enterprise, in a way that Elleke Boehmer has remarked as characterising Conrad’s work when she suggests his belonging to ‘postcolonial’ criticism – ‘that which critically scrutinizes’ rather than merely ‘coming after’ Empire.21 Thus Conrad presents the physical dimension of the tale through the rhythmic alternation of scenes of outward politesse and the protagonist’s conflicted yet repressed reflection. The juxtaposition of these moments produces a kind of syncopation in the text, or perhaps what Gérard Genette would call ‘effects of rhythm’.22 But the narrative situation is constructed in such a way that the sceptical relationship between aesthetics and ethics arises out of the very relationship of the tale to the way in which it is told. Renouard’s moral collapse is conveyed to the reader through the tale’s spatial patterning of a series of events – the dinner-parties, which in themselves support the idea of continuity of formal domestic ritual. In this context, Paul Ricoeur’s well known study of the relationship between time and narrative offers a provocative framework for examining Conrad’s representation of the dinner-party in this work as an aestheticising device for structuring its sceptical reception. Ricoeur is helpful in the way he explores an interplay between Aristotle’s account of ‘narrative’ time in the Poetics and Augustine’s analysis of time in the Confessions.23 Ricoeur’s thesis focuses on a strong relationship between the ‘discordant concordance’ of both accounts.24 However, Ricoeur reads Aristotle’s idea of emplotment back through Augustine’s remarks on time. For Augustine, earthly time (as distinct from eternity) can be experienced only in the ‘threefold present’ – the past is experienced as an impression in the memory, the present as that of present things perceived and the future as expectation. Crucial for Ricoeur is Augustine’s account of distentio animi, the fact that the ‘impression is in the soul

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only as much as the mind acts, that is, expects, attends, remembers’.25 The emphasis falls on mental activity and, as Ricoeur puts it, Augustine uses the example of reciting a poem from memory in order to mark ‘the point at which the theory of distention is joined to that of the threefold present: Augustine’s distentio animi (extension of the mind) offers a “solution” to the aporia of the measurement of time’.26 Ricoeur’s most effective move is to view Augustine’s theory in the light of Aristotle’s silence about the relationship between temporal experience and poetic activity in the Poetics. However, drawing attention to the emphasis on activity in both accounts, and on the creative, the making new by the effort of the mind, he shows the potential for reading Augustine’s distentio in relation to the discordance or aporia inherent in narrative itself. In relation to Ricoeur’s account, Conrad’s symbolic configurations of a physical event – in this case, the dinner-party in ‘Planter’ – within the narrative movement unify, in an Aristotelian sense, the beginning, middle and end of the tale of ‘The Planter of Malata’, but they also suggest the discordance ‘inherent in narrative itself’ by building on the reader’s ironic association of each event (experienced each time anew by an effort of mental activity) both proleptically and analeptically. We read the event of the second dinner-party – the editor’s account – in relation to Renouard’s first attendance at the Dunsters’. We read the third party (a quiet dinner that turns into melodrama) in relation to the last two. And the final dinner on Malata in relation to all three previous events. The dinner-parties offer descriptive pauses, markers or discrete interludes that punctuate the narrative, but they also provide a chimeric overlaying, or Deleuzian repetition,27 symbolically synthesising Renouard’s journey of disillusionment and disintegration of identity. This structuring of the tale effectively metaphorises the mental activity suggested by Augustine’s distentio, which allows us to experience temporal reality by a movement of the mind forwards and backwards in the threefold present. Conrad’s presentation of the dinner-parties illustrates metaphorically and ironically the ‘discordant concordance’ that Ricoeur associates with the activity of the mind in relation to the experience of time and its recreation in poetic or narrative activity. The reader’s experience relies on her or his memory of the account of past events, attentiveness of the present and expectation of the future. But it also relies on a sense of imagined embodiment of these events (as in drama), in which the significance of each subsequent event, in this case a dinner-party, creates a dramatic irony that works on the reader to build a spatial pattern in the text requiring a highly sceptical reading. All subsequent dinner-parties described in the tale extend back in the reader’s mind towards Renouard’s recounting of his first meeting with

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Felicia Moorsom at the Dunster dinner-party and his anticipation of future romance. Thus the Planter’s absence at the final dinner, where he should be playing the role of host, anticipates the final dénouement, where Renouard joins the ‘ghost’ of the assistant in his own death. The assistant himself (and Conrad’s initial working title for this story was ‘The Assistant’) symbolises an ‘unhomely’ repetition of a haunting absence throughout the text – a representation of the very aporia inherent in narrative identified by Ricoeur. Conrad’s use of parties in the texts of his later fiction suggests that we could do well to incorporate a reading of his responses to the context of serialisation in analysing his work of this period. At the same time, his use of the party as an aesthetic marker of these late texts offers a way of recovering this work from the assumptions of an apparent decline following Under Western Eyes, and, in the light of formalist perspectives, embracing a distinctive kind of innovation in the later fiction. In Conrad’s words, his ‘primary intention’ in ‘The Planter of Malata’ ‘was mainly aesthetic’.28 In the context of this chapter, this argument needs to be placed in a wider setting of Conrad’s relationship to the serial publication of his late work and in relation to two types of criticism of modernism – one largely historicist, focusing on contextual pressures as constitutive of the production of the work itself, and the other, developed in the light of current ‘New Formalist’ perspectives on modernism, that revises our assumptions about privileging historicist and contextual readings and encourages us to reassess the aesthetic structures of the work as work. On the one hand, exploration of the historical context of serial publication of Conrad’s work has shifted the emphasis on more traditional forms of analysis of Conrad’s oeuvre. On the other, a recent focus on formalist criticism in modernist studies enables us to recover the aesthetic focus of the later works as a distinctive aspect of Conrad’s experimentalism that need not necessarily be eclipsed by his earlier, better known narratorial innovations. Marjorie Levinson’s 2007 article ‘What Is New Formalism?’ helpfully outlines the variations in approaches to radical transformations of literary study that recover the importance of form within (new) historicist perspectives.29 While modernist attention to New Formalist criticism often focuses on the reading of poetry, a critic such as Richard Strier nevertheless offers a way into thinking about Conrad’s late aesthetic practices by borrowing in large part from the theories of Peter Brooks, Erich Auerbach and Willard Van Orman Quine to emphasise how ‘formal features of a text, matters of style, can be indices to large intellectual and cultural matters’.30 Levinson believes that the strength of Strier’s argument for keeping in play the ‘value’ of the literary work

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as an object of study arises because ‘as a unit of analysis, a posit of significant form, [literature] so powerfully stages the tension between [. . .] two formalisms, the naïve and sentimental, the organic and artifactual, the necessary and contingent. It gives us unique access to the dynamic historical formation that inhabits the still form of form itself.’31 Paradoxically, both historicist and formalist approaches to criticism converge to illuminate the ‘modernist’ features of Conrad’s parties in his ostensibly revisionist later work.

Notes 1. Paradoxically, Conrad himself was renowned for his meticulous hospitality. Born in 1857 into the Polish landed gentry, he inherited the traditions of a host’s responsibilities through family custom and through his Polish literary forebears – Adam Mickiewicz’s national epic, Pan Tadeusz (1834), for example, is full of seigneurial feasting. In fact, Conrad sometimes transposes these inherited traditions into his fiction, such as the occasion of the feast in the compound at the end of section II of ‘Karain: A Memory’: ‘That obscure adventurer feasted like a king’ (Tales of Unrest [1898] (London: Dent Collected Edition, 1947), p. 17); or the captain’s breakfast on board ship in ‘A Smile of Fortune’, where the host displayed ‘a veritable feast of shore provisions’ (’Twixt Land and Sea (1912) (London: Dent Collected Edition, 1947), p. 8). My thanks to Laurence Davies for identifying the more convivial gatherings of Conrad’s work. 2. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 43. Hereafter page numbers are given in the text. 3. Thomas C. Moser, Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957). 4. See, for example, Ian Willison, Warwick Gould and Warren Chernaik (eds), Modernist Writers and the Marketplace (London: Macmillan, 1996); Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 5. Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (1911) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 205. Hereafter page numbers are given in the text. 6. Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein (1766–1817), known as Madame de Staël, was a Swiss (French-speaking) author who mainly lived in Paris. 7. Marlow is a dramatised narrator in both ‘Youth’ and Heart of Darkness, written in 1898 and 1899 respectively and published in Blackwood’s Magazine, but appearing together in book form in 1902; and Lord Jim. 8. For example, the militant phase of the Suffragist struggles in London had begun on ‘Black Friday’ on 18 November 1910. For an account of Suffragist history of this period, see Ray Strachey, The Cause (1928) (London: Virago, 1977). 9. See Susan Jones, ‘Modernism and the Marketplace: The Case of Conrad’s “Chance” ’, College Literature 34.3 (2007), pp. 101–19. 10. See Stephen Donovan, Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture (London:

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11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

Susan Jones Palgrave, 2005) for a discussion (in Chapter 2, on tourism) of the ‘holiday atmosphere’ as an organising principle of Chance, the intertextual resonances with popular contemporary texts on pedestrianism and the way in which the landscape as gendered space structures the novel. Joseph Conrad, Chance (1913) (London: Hogarth Press, 1984), p. 37. Hereafter page numbers are given in the text. Conrad has transformed the ghoulish ‘false teeth’ of Madame de S— into Mrs Fyne’s dazzling natural set. Joseph Conrad, MS Chance (holograph), Berg Collection, New York Public Library. In this manuscript, the second paragraph cited above has not yet been written. Joseph Conrad, Chance, typescript with holograph corrections, Harry Ransome Center, University of Texas at Austin. In this document the second paragraph cited above appears for the first time, in Conrad’s handwriting. I have identified this typescript as the text where Conrad made his most radical holograph changes to the serial version (between May and June 1913) before publication in book form (see Jones, ‘Modernism and the Marketplace’, pp. 108–12). Conrad experimented with serialisation in popular periodicals from a much earlier moment than is sometimes recognised, although his success with Chance in the New York Herald Sunday magazine consolidated this trend. ‘Amy Foster’ appeared in Illustrated London News in 1901; essays that contributed to The Mirror of the Sea: Memories and Impressions (1906) appeared initially in Pall Mall Magazine, Harper’s Weekly and the Daily Mail over 1904–6; all the stories from A Set of Six (1908) appeared variously in Pall Mall Magazine, Harper’s, the Daily Chronicle and Cassell’s between 1906 and 1908. Gunning King, illustration for Joseph Conrad, ‘Amy Foster’, in Illustrated London News (14 December 1901), p. 915. See Fanny Douglas’s fashion column, ‘Evolution in Dress: The Jacket’, National Observer (1 October 1892), pp. 502–3, for an amusing explanation of the ‘conventionalised’ costume of the New Woman: ‘It was as a riding-garment – as it were by strategy and under false pretences – that Woman won the Jacket for her own. She took Man’s Vest and Hat at the same time, but deferred the annexation of his Breeches’ (p. 502). H. G. Wells, Review, Saturday Review (18 May 1896), pp. 509–10. Joseph Conrad, ‘The Planter of Malata’, in Alexandre Fachard (ed.), Within the Tides, introduction by Laurence Davies and notes by Andrew Purssell and Alexandre Fachard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp.  13–73: p. 14. Hereafter page numbers are given in the text. For the sources and background to the tale see Davies’s Introduction (pp. lvi–lvii), including a discussion of the geographical sources for the fictional ‘Malata’ (pp. lii–liii). Frederic Dorr Steele’s illustration of Miss Moorsom and Renouard shows the couple seated stiffly on the terrace, with the caption, ‘She looked as though she were a being made of ivory and precious metals changed into living tissue’, Metropolitan Magazine (June 1914), p. 27. Classical allusions abound throughout the visual lexicon of the tale. Felicia Moorsom displays the sculptured ‘head of a statue’, whose ‘marble hair was done

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25. 26. 27. 28.

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in the bold lines of a helmet’ and on whose ‘lips the chisel had left a faint smile’ (p. 34). Renouard describes how ‘[Felicia’s] complexion was fairer than Parian marble’ (p. 34) and he has ‘such a profile as may be seen amongst the bronzes of classical museums, pure under a crested helmet – recalled vaguely a Minerva’s head’ (p. 39). Owen Knowles has observed the intertext with Prosper Merimée’s short story La Vénus d’Ille (1837) in ‘Conrad and Mérimée: The Legend of Venus in “The Planter of Malata” ’, Conradiana 11 (1979), pp. 177–84. As if to confirm the ‘staged’ and predominantly visual texture of this tale, see also Joseph Conrad, Letter to W. T. H. Howe, 20 April 1917, in Laurence Davies, Frederick R. Karl and Owen Knowles (eds), The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Volume VI: 1917–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 72. Conrad suggests that ‘the couple in “The Planter of Malata” ’ would make a good subject for a tableau vivant: ‘you’ll want a young man with a Minerva profile (white drill suit, Panama hat) and a society belle who would have some character in her face [. . .] and a rare lot of Titian red hair’ (p. 72). See also Jeremy Hawthorn, ‘Conrad and the Erotic: “A Smile of Fortune” and “The Planter of Malata” ’, The Conradian 28.2 (2003), pp. 111–41. Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 3. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 88. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), vol. 1/2, pp. 32–7, where he harnesses Aristotle’s dramatic theory to a notion of narrative in general. Ibid., p. 42. Ricoeur compares two sets of relationships – in Aristotle, that of the relationship of muthos/mimesis, and in Augustine, that of the relationship of distentio/intentio – opening up the possibility for an account of literary narrative that reflects our actual experience of time. Ricoeur observes that in Aristotle’s insistence on the unity of the drama (holos) he nevertheless identifies both muthos and mimesis with activity. Ricoeur translates muthos as ‘emplotment’ and, in its relation to mimesis, claims that ‘imitating or representing is a mimetic activity inasmuch as it produces something, namely the organization of events by emplotment’ (p. 34). Ricoeur’s most important statement here offers an interpretation of Aristotle’s use of the term mimesis, not in the Platonic sense of a ‘redoubling of presence’, but rather ‘the break that opens the space for fiction’ (p. 45). Note the distinction from Platonic mimesis, where, Ricoeur observes, ‘the metaphysical sense of mimesis [. . .] by which things imitate ideas, and works of art imitate things. Platonic mimesis thereby distances the work of art twice over from the ideal model which is its ultimate basis. Aristotle’s mimesis has just a single space wherein it is unfolded – human making [faire], the arts of composition’ (p. 34). Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 19. See J. Hillis Miller’s discussion in Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 5–6. Conrad, Author’s Note, Within the Tides, p. ix.

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29. Marjorie Levenson, ‘What Is New Formalism?’, PMLA 122.2 (2007), pp. 558–69: p. 559. 30. Richard Strier, ‘How Formalism Became a Dirty Word, and Why We Can’t Do Without It’, in Mark David Ramussen (ed.), Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 207–15: p. 211. 31. Levenson, ‘What Is New Formalism?’, p. 566.

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Chapter 2

Prufrock, Party-Goer: Tongue-Tied at Tea1 Kate McLoughlin

J. Alfred Prufrock would not rank highly on anyone’s list of partyguests. Distinctly lacking in conviviality, the protagonist of T. S. Eliot’s poem anticipates ‘the taking of a toast and tea’ as an excruciating occasion on which the ‘overwhelming question’ he wishes to pose will be, even if he can bring himself to pose it, painfully misunderstood.2 The work’s critics have attributed the problem to Prufrock (or Eliot) himself,3 analysing his internal wrestling in terms of fear of female (and male) sexuality,4 hysteria and other psychological disorders,5 Matthew Arnold’s ‘buried life’,6 Sigmund Freud’s notion of the uncanny7 and Henri Bergson’s ideas of anticipatory retrospection, inhibitory selfawareness and dédoublement.8 Without gainsaying the interpretative richness of these approaches, this chapter suggests another: a redirection of critical focus from the construction of Prufrock to the anxiogenic situation. Why does Eliot choose – of all things – a tea-party as the occasion of his protagonist’s logophobia? Why should an apparently benign prospect, the consumption of ‘tea and cakes and ices’ (l. 79), provoke such consternation? In pursuing these questions, which centre around the opportunities and limitations of the social sphere, Jürgen Habermas’s theories of communicative action are illuminating, particularly given their affinities with the thinking of Josiah Royce and F. H. Bradley, philosophers with whose work Eliot was intimately familiar. But Eliot’s poem also tests Habermas’s theories by introducing complicating factors of soma and psyche to communicative situations. In ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, the thought of going to a certain destination induces paralysis on the part of the speaker. That Prufrock is unwilling even to set out to this place is dramatised by a kind of poetic serialism: repetitions, variations and more repetitions. The ‘Let us go’ of the first line is repeated twice (ll. 4, 12), a dwindling first-person plural imperative that suggests that no movement to ‘go’ has been made. The dying echoes of ‘[there will be] time’ (ll. 23, 26, 28,

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29, 31, 32, 37, 39, 47) amount to an indefinitely prolongable period in which an array of displacement activities might take place and, indeed, the project as a whole might be aborted (‘Time to turn back and descend the stair’ (l. 39)). Preoccupation with time gives way to concern with initiative: how will the protagonist’s subject be broached? ‘How should I begin [. . .]?’ (ll. 59, 69) and ‘how should I presume [. . .]?’ (ll. 61, 68) begin an oscillation which effectively precludes further progress. Then, the conditional perfect ‘would it have been worth it [. . .]?’ (ll. 87, 90, 99, 100, 106) creates the illusion of a challenge having been declined, an important moment having slipped past. And the focus of all this incapacitating dread? A tea-party. A lamp-lit soirée at which ‘a toast and tea’ or ‘tea and cakes and ices’ will be taken (ll. 34, 79); at which the talk will turn to fine art (ll. 13–14, 35–6) and novels (l. 102); at which bracelets (l. 63), shawls (ll. 67, 107), ‘skirts that trail along the floor’ (l. 102) and perfume (l. 65) will be worn; at which music will be played (l. 53); at which guests will relax ‘After the cups, the marmalade, the tea, / Among the porcelain’ (ll. 88–9). An apparently benign – even pleasant, even highly enjoyable – event is presented as occasioning anxiety so inhibiting that it arrests decision and action. As the question might be put in non-scholarly parlance: what’s not to like? In answer, critics have often focused on ‘the women’ (ll. 13, 35). For Gabrielle McIntire, for example, the ‘perceived sordidity of the female body’ is a running theme in Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations (1917),9 while Colleen Lamos finds in Eliot’s ongoing death-by-water motif an expression of the ‘threat of female sexuality’.10 In such readings, what sickens and repels Prufrock from the gathering are the ‘Arms that are braceleted and white and bare / (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)’ (ll. 63–4), the prospect of proximity to a woman ‘settling a pillow’ (ll. 96, 107). Other scholars have located the source of Prufrock’s loathing in female sociality, a sublimated version of their physicality. Carol Christ discerns in ‘Prufrock’, as indeed in other poems from Prufrock and Other Observations (‘Portrait of a Lady’, ‘Hysteria’ and ‘La Figlia Che Piange’), ‘stilled and bounded images’ that ‘keep the speaker[s] from being engulfed by the woman – an engulfment that Eliot associates with absorption in her voice or her music’.11 Similarly, Rachel Potter writes that ‘Eliot appears to identify the cause of alienation with the cultural and sexual power of bourgeois women’.12 In readings of this kind, what chokes Prufrock are ‘the voices dying with a dying fall’ (l. 50), the ‘formulated phrase’ (l. 56) and the ‘Talking of Michelangelo’ (ll. 14, 36): instances in which female sexuality is manifested in the aggravations of quotidian discourse. Social banalities, small-talk: no doubt these did weary and repel the serious-minded, contemplative Eliot

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and his dislike of them may well be reflected in ‘Prufrock’. But there still seems to be a discrepancy between the perceived threat and the emotional response: is trivial party chit-chat really so repugnant? Prufrock’s fear is very specific. He is afraid that he will not be able to say a certain something in a certain situation. His sense of impending aphasia is formulated as a series of interweaved rhetorical questions: ‘Do I dare?’ (ll. 38, 45, 122); ‘So how should I presume?’ (ll. 54, 61, 68); ‘how should I begin [. . .] ?’ (ll. 59, 69); ‘Shall I say [. . .] ?’ (l. 70); ‘Should I [. . .] / Have the strength [. . .]?’ (ll. 79–80); ‘would it have been worth it [. . .]?’ (ll. 87, 90, 99, 100, 106). Numerous in their recurrences, the questions notoriously fail to identify the subject-matter of the intended utterance, reinforcing its absence and leaving it open to critical speculation (‘not a lover’s question but a metaphysical one,’ suggests Lyndall Gordon, for example13). But the problem is not Prufrock’s inarticulacy per se. Leaving aside for a moment the question of whether the poem represents its protagonist speaking aloud (and, if so, to whom), it is clear that he is capable of framing and phrasing his thoughts. His imminent aphasia is fluently, and therefore ironically, conveyed. To what extent can Habermasian theories illuminate his difficulties? For Habermas, ‘reaching understanding inhabits human speech as its telos’.14 Habermas’s philosophy, from The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit) (1962) to Europe: The Faltering Project (Ach, Europa) (2008), has stressed the role of reason in coordinating action through human speech exchanges. In his earlier work, Habermas focuses on characterising the ‘public sphere’ in which exemplary speech exchanges took place; his later approach is a more trans-historical attempt to identify the qualities of speech exchanges by which action has been coordinated.15 Throughout, his emphasis is on rational and productive communication, and the conditions which must obtain for it to be possible. Before applying his criteria to ‘Prufrock’, it is worth looking in a little more detail first at the ideal Habermasian venue for communicative action and then at the ideal speech situation. Habermas characterises the public sphere in the following terms: The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.16

Such conditions first emerged in the coffee-houses and salons of the seventeenth century (Habermas cites the Glorious Revolution as the

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turning-point in Britain):17 social venues in which a public made up of private citizens (albeit exclusively male) could engage in rationally based discussion and critique the state. Crucially, what rendered such venues ‘ideal speech situations’ was the fact that all those participating had an equal chance of having their say. Habermas continues: All speech exists in a context of actions and intentions. The mutual recognition of the subjects who communicate with one another includes the certainty that they can conduct themselves reciprocally towards one another’s expectations, i.e. act according to valid norms.18

Further to this, participants in an ideal speech situation must possess ‘communicative competence’: [I]n order to participate in normal discourse the speaker must have at his disposal, in addition to his linguistic competence, basic qualifications of speech and symbolic interaction (role-behaviour), which we may call communicative competence. Thus communicative competence means the mastery of an ideal speech situation.19

A person with communicative competence is able not only to follow the linguistic rules for utterances in social situations, but also to empathise with an interlocutor’s position. Specifically, a person with communicative competence is able to understand and judge ‘validity claims’, drawing upon a common fund of meanings and understanding that Habermas calls the ‘lifeworld’. According to Habermas: The goal of coming to an understanding is to bring about an agreement that terminates in the intersubjective mutuality of reciprocal understanding, shared knowledge, mutual trust, and accord with one another. Agreement is based on recognition of the corresponding validity-claims of comprehensibility, truth, truthfulness, and rightness.20

For present purposes (as will be explained below), the most important of these is the third kind of validity claim: that to ‘truthfulness’. In Habermas’s terms, a ‘speaker must want to express his intentions truthfully so that the hearer can believe the utterance of the speaker [can trust him]’.21 In making a subjective truth claim – a claim to authenticity and sincerity – a speaker assumes obligations ‘to prove trustworthy’.22 These conditions in place, ‘understanding’ between the participants in a speech situation emerges.23 In some contexts, this understanding is the foundation for coordinating action; in others, such as social conversation, it is the basis of non-purposive ‘communication’.24 In assessing the communicative potential in ‘Prufrock’ against these

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Habermasian criteria, it is important to note that the putative tea-party is not the only speech situation that obtains in the poem. Preparing the way for the party is a series of communicative instances in which Prufrock might potentially be engaged. In all of them, however, his participation is precluded. The voices he has known are obliterated ‘Beneath the music from a farther room’, and are ‘dying’ anyway (l. 53). The mermaids mentioned in the final lines sing exclusively ‘each to each’ (l. 124). The final line of the poem adverts, indeed, to the potentially lethal effects of intersubjective communication: ‘Till human voices wake us, and we drown’ (l. 131). Discourses are improperly (over)heard; content is inaudible; Prufrock’s projected walk is through a world of other people’s unintelligible conversations – ‘muttering retreats’ (l. 5), ‘children whimpering in corners’ (‘Pervigilium’, l. 5), streets where ‘evil houses’ ‘Pointed a ribald finger at me in the darkness / Whispering all together, chuckled at me in the darkness’ (‘Pervigilium’, ll. 16–17). Moreover, again temporarily leaving aside the identity of the interlocutors, in the dialogue between ‘You’ and ‘I’, ‘I’ closes down ‘You’s’ potential question: ‘Oh do not ask, “What is it?” ’ (l. 11). Prufrock’s experience, therefore, is of less-than-ideal speech situations; admittedly, these are not all located in the public sphere and so might not be expected to result in communicative action. (The closing-down of participation, however, might explain why ‘I’ and ‘You’ fail to make any movement to ‘go’.) In contrast, though the details are scanty, the projected tea-party does appear to constitute a public sphere. It is envisaged as taking place in a space – a ‘room’ (ll. 13, 35) – which, although ostensibly part of someone’s home and therefore private and domestic, is, for the life of the soirée, converted into a social venue. In this venue, conversation on non-personal subjects, if not explicit political critique, takes place. Nonetheless, an ideal speech situation still fails to obtain. Instead of rational interchange, there are ‘formulated phrase[s]’ (l. 56), digressions (l. 66), the desultory-sounding ‘some talk of you and me’ (l. 89), conversations to which interlocutors do not give their full attention but are distracted by ‘settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl, / And turning toward the window’ (ll. 107–8). Far from open, egalitarian speech situations, Prufrock anticipates only barriers to communicative exchanges: inaudibility, misunderstanding, exclusivity. ‘Talking of Michelangelo’ deserves special mention. The women, coming and going, appear to be engaged in open debate; the repetition of the lines suggests an easy, fluent conversation. Is an ideal speech situation in progress within Prufrock’s grasp? Habermas argues that the political public sphere was preceded by a ‘literary public sphere’, which was nonetheless ‘political’ because it was separate from the state;25 the

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case is therefore made for an ideal speech situation comprising aesthetic discussion. But this must be qualified by Habermas’s later comment that, in literary discourse: [T]he neutralization of the binding/bonding power frees the illocutionary acts (now robbed of their power) from the pressure to reach a decision which obtains in everyday communicative praxis; it removes them from the sphere of normal speech and reduces their role to that of the playful creation of new worlds – or, rather, to a pure demonstration of the world-disclosing power of innovative linguistic expressions.26

Discussion of literature – or works of art – might display the characteristics of ideal speech, but is released from the obligation of coordinating action. ‘The women’ may therefore be associated with an exclusive cultural elite of the type Habermas associates with the decline of the public sphere in late modernity. Faced with these obstacles, it is unsurprising that Prufrock, in Eliot’s construction, scarcely bothers to establish validity claims in support of his intended utterance. Given that the contents of this utterance are withheld in the poem, claims to truth and rightness do not offer themselves for analysis.27 (Their absence, which points to a sense in Prufrock that objectivity and social norms are not worth petitioning, is nonetheless telling.) But Prufrock is preoccupied with the third kind of validity claim – to truthfulness. The thrust of his accumulated questions is: how will I be understood, believed, taken seriously? Any attempt he makes to establish his sincerity or authenticity will, he anticipates, be quickly negated as appraisals of his personal appearance undermine his authority: ‘(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)’, ‘(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)’ (ll. 41, 44). Hence, at the heart of the poem, is Prufrock’s fear of communicative incompetence, both on his own part and on that of the ‘one’ whose response to rolling the universe towards ‘some overwhelming question’ (ll. 92–3) is, instead of ‘say[ing] “yes” or “no” to [a] validity claim’,28 likely to be reiterated misunderstanding and contradiction: ‘That is not what I meant at all. / That is not it, at all’; ‘That is not it at all, / That is not what I meant, at all’ (ll. 97–8, 109–10). The ability to make and judge validity claims is dependent upon what Habermas calls a ‘performative attitude’: [A] speaker can in a performative attitude address himself to a hearer only under the condition that he learns to see and understand himself – against the background of others who are potentially present – from the perspective of his opposite number, just as the addressee for his part adopts the speaker’s perspective for himself.29

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It is noticeable that, in Prufrock’s projection of his communicative failure at the party, the performative attitude is wholly absent: the ‘overwhelming question’ will not be posed to a person he thinks of as ‘you’ but as ‘one’ (ll. 96, 107) and (the word, among so many repetitions, appears only once) ‘her’ (l. 96).30 Habermas writes: The meaning of the ‘I’ that is employed performatively is a function of any illocutionary act. Here the expression relates to the speaker at the moment at which he performs an illocutionary act and encounters a second person as his alter ego. In this attitude toward a second person, the speaker can relate to himself as a speaker in actu only by taking up the perspective of the other and becoming visible to himself as the alter ego of his opposite number, as the second person of a second person.31

In Habermasian terms, there obtains in Prufrock an inability, or unwillingness, to enter into the other person’s point of view and so be in a position to regard his own self as that other’s ‘you’. Indeed, Prufrock associates social interaction with the necessity of preparing ‘a face to meet the faces that you meet’ (l. 27): viewing the self from another’s point of view will be a matter of gazing from behind and upon a mask. His putative interlocutor at the party will, he anticipates, be equally unable to adopt a performative attitude, responding to a question with what seems to be a pronominally inapt reply, ‘ “That is not what I meant, at all” ’ (ll. 97, 110, emphasis added). ‘ “That is not what I meant, at all” ’: according to Habermasian theory, for the neurotic, ‘[e]xpressions gain their motivating status from their roles in stabilizing personal identity rather than from their overt meanings or “validity claims” ’.32 In Prufrock’s projection, his interlocutor replies to his question with a remark aimed at clarifying her own meaning. Prufrock’s epistemological approach is the same. Habermas writes: If ego [. . .] views himself through the eyes of an arguing opponent and considers how he will answer to his critique, he gains a reflective relation to himself. By internalizing the role of a participant in argumentation, ego becomes capable of self-criticism.33

Though certainly self-critical (‘a bit obtuse; / Almost, at times, the Fool’ (ll. 118–19)), Prufrock’s introspection falls short of ‘internalizing the role of a participant in argumentation’: the rebuffs he imagines are not critiques of validity claims but personal slights. This is the point at which the poem complicates Habermas’s model, for Eliot gives Prufrock’s inability to achieve communicatively productive empathy physical form. Prufrock’s body becomes the site of his paralysing self-consciousness

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and embarrassment, emotions which coexist, oddly, painfully, with an attitude of condescension. An ideal speech situation might obtain with certain interlocutors – a kindred poetic spirit such as Eliot would later meet in Ezra Pound, for example – but is assumed to be impossible in this milieu. Incapable of conceptualising a communicatively competent external second person, the only internal ‘you’ that Prufrock is able to construct is the equivalent of his ‘I’, subsumed in the final line of the poem into ‘us’ and ‘we’ (l. 121). In his projection, the speech situation with the woman is aborted, and this is followed by immediate introspection, neurotic in Habermasian terms: ‘No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be’ (l. 111). Then comes another projection, to yet another speech situation from which he will definitively be excluded: ‘I do not think that they will speak to me’ (l. 125). That the proleptic structure of the poem places all these projections on a subjunctive level adds poignancy to Prufrock’s dilemma. The text leaves indeterminable whether the protagonist constitutionally lacks a performative attitude or dreads not being able to command one when the situation demands it, creating a deadlock in which Prufrock simultaneously wants to go to the party, and to perform at it, and yet is paralysingly inhibited from doing so. In Habermasian theory, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ marks the unavailability of ideal speech situations, the impossibility of reaching understanding and the psychical implications of these absences. Experience has taught Prufrock not to expect empathy but disconnection.34 The ensuing tone of sorrow is the product of a specific historical moment: a time in late modernity when it appears that the public sphere is fracturing into specialised elites and the positive attributes of Enlightenment rationality are disappearing. The Habermasian perspective brings these absences to light. What Eliot’s poetic rendition adds to this perspective is to hypothesise speech acts, not as the thought experiments of theoretical discourse, but as emotionally charged, physically based events. An objection to the Habermasian perspective might be its anachronism, the problems inherent in applying theories developed after the Second World War to a poem written in 1910–11 and first published in 1915. What is striking, and helps to justify and illuminate the application, are the affinities between Habermas’s philosophy and that of Josiah Royce and F. H. Bradley.35 Though Eliot took Royce’s course ‘A Comparative Study of Various Types of Scientific Method’ at Harvard in the academic year 1913–14, having completed ‘Prufrock’ in Munich in 1911, it is at least possible that he was aware in advance of this of the ideas of the thinker he called ‘the doyen of American philosophers’,36

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likely having encountered them in the course on the philosophy of history he took at Harvard in 1909–10.37 He read Bradley, whose works, he said, ‘affected me profoundly’,38 before entering Royce’s class,39 and began work on his doctoral dissertation – an analysis of Bradley’s philosophy – under Royce’s supervision. Like Habermas (and unlike Bergson, whose lectures at the Collège de France Eliot attended in the academic year 1910–11), Royce and Bradley both believed that knowledge is dialogical, rather than monological. Royce writes in The Problem of Christianity (1913): The psychological unity of many selves in one community is bound up, then, with the consciousness of some lengthy social process which has occurred, or is at least supposed to have occurred. And the wealthier the memory of a community is, and the vaster the historical processes which it regards as belonging to its life, the richer – other things being equal – is its consciousness that it is a community, that its members are somehow made one in and through and with its own life.40

This is suggestive of Habermas’s lifeworld, the common fund of memory and meaning which participants in an ideal speech situation draw upon in making and appraising validity claims.41 Developing his theories of ‘communities of memory’ and ‘communities of hope’, Royce continues: [T]he real or supposed identity of certain interesting features in the past which each one of two men or of many men regards as belonging to his own historically extended self, is a ground for saying that all these many, although now just as various and sundered as they are, constitute, with reference to this common past, a community.42

A ‘community of memory’ exists when two or more individuals accept a past event as part of their own, private memories; similarly, a ‘community of hope’ arises when two or more individuals strive towards the same anticipated future event.43 The interpretation of past and future events, mutually accepted, is the foundation of such communities: a mechanism that resembles Habermasian communicative rationality. Bradley echoes Royce’s concept of a temporal continuum in which the present ‘summarizes’ the past44 in his argument that ‘the past varies with the present, and can never do otherwise, since it is always the present upon which it rests’.45 In his doctoral thesis on Bradley, completed in 1916 and published in 1964 as Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, Eliot wrestles with the problem – common to both Royce and Bradley – of solipsism: how is it possible to arrive at the mutually acceptable and accepted interpretations on which communities of memory and hope are founded? He observes:

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The point of view (or finite centre) has for its object one consistent world, and accordingly no finite centre can be self-sufficient, for the life of a soul does not consist in the contemplation of one consistent world but in the painful task of unifying (to a greater or less extent) jarring and incompatible ones, and passing, when possible, from two or more discordant viewpoints to a higher which shall somehow include and transmute them.46

A few pages earlier, he formulates same difficulty in different words: ‘how do we yoke our divers worlds to draw together?’47 The verb ‘yoke’ is noteworthy. Five years later, in 1921, it features in ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, Eliot’s review of Herbert Grierson’s newly published anthology Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Johnson, who employed the term ‘metaphysical poets’, apparently having Donne, Cleveland, and Cowley chiefly in mind, remarks of them that ‘the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together’. The force of this impeachment lies in the failure of the conjunction, the fact that often the ideas are yoked but not united; and if we are to judge of styles of poetry by their abuse, enough examples may be found in Cleveland to justify Johnson’s condemnation. But a degree of heterogeneity of material compelled into unity by the operation of the poet’s mind is omnipresent in poetry.48

‘[Y]oked but not united’: the distinction expresses the same problem as that identified in the doctoral thesis. By 1919, Eliot has found the solution in poetry: ‘the poet’s mind’, the equivalent to the ‘higher’ viewpoint postulated in the thesis, is a unifying principle. Crucially, this mind must possess ‘the historical sense’ which Eliot describes in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) as ‘a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order’.49 As many critics have pointed out,50 a consensual epistemology, created, as it were, from heterogeneous or ‘jarring’ materials thrown together in a Large Poetic Collider, constitutes Eliot’s poetics from The Waste Land onwards. But ‘Prufrock’, coming earlier, is more tentative. In Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay (1897), Bradley writes: Because I cannot spread out my window until all is transparent, and all windows disappear, this does not justify me in insisting on my windowframe’s rigidity. For that frame has, as such, no existence in reality, but only in our impotence [. . .]. The one Reality is what comes directly to my feeling through this window for a moment; and this, also and again, is the only Reality. But we must not turn the first ‘is’ into ‘is nothing at all but,’ and the second ‘is’ into ‘is all of’. There is no objection against the disappearance of limited transparencies in an all-embracing clearness.51

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In ‘Prufrock’, the windows remain rigid, each one framing a lonely, shirt-sleeved individual (l. 72; ‘Pervigilium’, l. 28); the ‘smoke that rises from the pipes’ (l. 71) precludes any ‘all-embracing clearness’. The conversations about art and novels do not constitute ‘the historical sense’ but are representative of the sort of ‘knowledge’ that Eliot noted could be ‘put into a useful shape for examinations, drawing-rooms, or the still more pretentious modes of publicity’52 (Habermas’s exclusive and excluding cultural elites). Here are no communities of memory or hope, no consensual epistemology, but irredeemable inattention, misunderstanding and crossed purposes. But this still fails to answer the overwhelming question of why Eliot chose a tea-party as the venue for his early poetic expression of the impossibility of interpretative communities, the depletion of the lifeworld. What was it about this situation that lent itself to the representation of epistemological failure? Is there anything about the parties that the poet himself had experienced that might explain his choice of mise-en-scène? Gordon suggests that the adolescent and young adult Eliot imbibed what Henry James described in The Bostonians (1886) as ‘a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities’.53 Eliot’s experience of Boston began in the autumn of 1905, when he arrived to attend Milton Academy for a year, and continued through his years at Harvard (1906–10, 1911–14).54 He was personally connected with ‘the inner circle of Boston society’55 through his relatives Christopher Rhodes Eliot, a ‘prominent Unitarian minister’, and Charles W. Eliot, President of Harvard.56 ‘[H]e was shy,’ recalled his Harvard contemporary Conrad Aiken, ‘[n]ot that this by any means kept him out of social circulation’.57 Aiken encountered Eliot at ‘punches’ (events at which undergraduate societies chose their members), initiations, at the Buckingham and Brattle Hall dances, at the Signet literary club and ‘even at tea (with rum in it)’.58 But Aiken, in his reminiscences, adds a striking note: He [Eliot] was early explicit, too, about the necessity, if one was shy, of disciplining oneself, lest one miss certain varieties of experience which one did not naturally ‘take’ to. The dances, and the parties, were part of this discipline.59

This evokes a picture of a Prufrockish Eliot, steeling himself to set off to social occasions, treating such events in the spirit of an anthropologist forced, for professional reasons, to witness a rather unpleasant rite. He also attended the tea-parties given by Adeleine (or Madeleine) Moffat (identified as the subject of ‘Portrait of a Lady’ (1910–11))60 at her home

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behind Boston’s State House. Aiken, who sometimes accompanied him, recalled the ‘oh so precious the oh so exquisite, Madeleine, the Jamesian lady of ladies, the enchantress of the Beacon Hill drawingroom – who, like another Circe, had made strange shapes of Wild Michael and the Tsetse [Eliot]’.61 In Gordon’s assessment, Eliot ‘experienced little of the charms of enlightened companionship’ and ‘[to] most students [. . .] [he] was a bit of a recluse’.62 Writing on Henry James, Eliot himself comments that ‘the society of Boston was and is quite uncivilised but refined beyond the point of civilisation’, contrasting this state of affairs with the ‘leisure’, ‘dignity’, ‘literary aristocracy’ and ‘unique character of a society in which the men of letters were also the best people’ which all ‘cling’ to the expatriate James.63 His year in Paris, 1910–11, seems to have been no more socially successful. ‘I knew no-one whatever, in the literary and artistic world, as a companion,’ he later remarked, ‘knew them rather as spectacles, listened to, at rare occasions, but never spoken to.’64 In London, Ezra Pound gave him entrée to the group that included Harriet Shaw Weaver, Wyndham Lewis, H. D., Richard Aldington and Ford Madox Ford – he attended their Thursday night gatherings in Soho and Regent Street restaurants65 – and Bertrand Russell introduced him to Ottoline Morrell, so bringing about his attendance at her Garsington house-parties.66 Clive Bell found his ‘primness of manner and speech’ ‘deliciously comic’, remembering the poet’s ‘faultless dress, white waistcoat and all: whether at an evening party or in the country’.67 Virginia Woolf thought him ‘strange’: ‘infinitely considerate’ but also ‘perfectly detached’.68 Socially, he was noted for his cleverness: Bell recalls a birthday-party given by the short-story writer Mary Hutchinson to which she had invited ‘the ten cleverest men in London to meet the ten most beautiful women’. To put the guests’ wits to the test, the hostess read out riddles and ‘almost before the question was propounded pat came the answer from [. . .] Eliot and Maynard Keynes’. Eliot’s ‘primness’ of speech, which might have put him at a disadvantage in this cerebroverbal jousting, was balanced by Keynes’s slight stutter.69 The sketches by Eliot’s first wife, Vivienne, published in The Criterion under the pseudonym ‘F. M.’ or ‘Feiron Morris’, also provide an insight into the poet’s social demeanour. In a poem entitled ‘Necesse Est Perstare?’, Vivienne Eliot writes of the ‘unceasing clamour of inanities’ at a lunch-party.70 In ‘Fête Galante’ she paints a pen-portrait of an ‘American financier’, apparently based on her husband, who has a ‘heavy, slumbering white face, thickly powdered; [. . .] long hooded eyes, unseeing, leaden-heavy; [a] huge protuberant nose, and [a] somehow inadequate mouth, the lips a little reddened’ and who speaks in a ‘muffled, pedantic, and slightly drunken voice’.71 Though Eliot’s attendance at parties in England began

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in 1915,72 so coming after the experiences that fed into ‘Prufrock’, it is possible to discern a pattern in his social comportment: at social gatherings, he was clever, prim and artificial; something of a joke (‘Almost, at times, the Fool’); able and willing to amuse, but only within his own carefully constructed parameters; a made-up character with a made-up face. The ‘hollow phrases’ and ‘coddled sensibilities’ of this world of parties pervade the poems Eliot composed around the time of ‘Prufrock’. These poems were physically written in a notebook, the flyleaf of which bore the (cancelled) title ‘Inventions of the March Hare’.73 Eliot conceived these early pieces, then, as the confections of a party-guest – and a party-guest noted for his tardiness and eccentricity (the March Hare is famously late for the Mad Hatter’s tea-party in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865); the appellation ‘mad as a March hare’ dates from 1529 (OED 1b)). Eliot assumes the persona, that is, of a guest who is not fully integrated in the social group and fails completely to follow its rules: the shy undergraduate inheres in this persona, and it anticipates the émigré Eliot later became, an American attempting to find a way into European literary circles. The ‘March Hare’ poems detail the same misunderstandings and miscommunications as ‘Prufrock’. In ‘Interlude in London’ (April 1911), ‘marmalade and tea at six’ (l. 3) (a precursor of ‘Prufrock’s’ ‘the cups, the marmalade, the tea’ (l. 88)) are associated with hibernal indifference and apathy.74 ‘Mandarins 2’ (August 1910) shows the ladies’ taking of tea to be a stilted ceremony, an experience as ‘hard’ as the outlines of their gowns (l. 7) and as ‘thin’ as the ‘translucent porcelain’ they drink from (l. 16).75 In ‘Goldfish (Essence of Summer Magazines) 1’ (September 1910), the social event is a summer ball in which the endlessly revolving waltzes ‘Float and fall / like the cigarettes / Of our marionettes / Inconsequent, intolerable’ (ll. 14–17),76 while in ‘Goldfish (Essence of Summer Magazines) 3’ (September 1910), ‘cakes and tea’ on a ‘Verandah’ involve hopeless-sounding ‘guesses at eternal truths / Sounding the depths with a silver spoon’ (ll. 4, 2, 5–6).77 ‘The smoke that gathers blue and sinks’ (February 1911) depicts a torpidity of ‘rich cigars’ (l. 2) and ‘after-dinner drinks’ (l. 3) in which a desire for ‘action’ (l. 11) is met only with a singing performance by ‘A lady of almost any age’ (l. 16) and ‘a dance’ by a ‘negro’ (l. 20) ‘that’s quite worth while’ (l. 21).78 Smoke again obscures any clarity of social interchange. It is notable that in the majority of these poems, as in ‘Prufrock’ and other poems from Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) (‘Portrait of a Lady’, ‘Hysteria’ and ‘Mr. Apollinax’), the social event in question is tea. The encounters in ‘Portrait of a Lady’ and ‘Hysteria’ do not strictly

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count as parties because they take place between only two people, but the Jamesian echo of the former’s title is a clue to one factor which might account for the occasion’s perceived inaccessibility. James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1880–1) opens with the infinitely nuanced line, ‘There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea’,79 and a scene in which the as-yet-untested young American protagonist must approach from afar a group taking tea on the lawns of a great English country house. Afternoon tea is not an exclusively English phenomenon (vide Adeleine Moffat’s Boston teaparties) but it is used here to figure an English world of manners (with colonial overtones) to which Americans do not have automatic entry. At the time of writing ‘Prufrock’, Eliot had yet to become acquainted with the English habit of afternoon tea, but the Jamesian model is a precedent for the tea-party – not the lunch-party, not the dinner-party – as the locus of (here transatlantic) difference and distance. In ‘Mr. Apollinax’ (1916),80 the same divide obtains, albeit that taking tea has now been transatlantically transposed in a satiric depiction of Bertrand Russell’s attempts at socialising with the Boston elite while a visiting professor at Harvard.81 ‘[T]inkl[ing] among the teacups’ (l. 2), Mr. Apollinax’s laughter is that of ‘an irresponsible foetus’, ‘submarine and profound’ (ll. 7, 8); he leaves the other guests perplexed: ‘ “But after all what did he mean?” ’ (l. 18). In the account he kept of the 1913–14 session of Royce’s seminar, Eliot’s fellow student Harry T. Costello recalled a note that Eliot had presented to the class on the use of the term ‘interpretation’: The great question is as to what is the status of a supposed fact which includes as part of itself a belief or meaning? [. . .] Professor Royce’s ‘interpretations’ are interchanges of ideas by people more or less on a level, but the case is not so simple when the interplay is between vastly different levels of culture.82

Mrs Phlaccus and Professor and Mrs Channing-Cheetah might ostensibly be interchanging ideas with Mr Apollinax ‘more or less on a level’, but the latter’s ‘submarine and profound’ laughter suggests Eliot’s idea of more complex interplay. The note he presented to Royce’s seminar concerned the specific problem of alien worldviews – worldviews which cannot immediately be assimilated into a community of interpretation. His thinking about such alien worldviews may go some way to explaining why parties are, so often, the venues of mutual incomprehension in his poetry. In one of the papers he wrote for Royce’s seminar, ‘The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual’, Eliot concludes that the only fact to be found in any past social behaviour ‘is the actual fact’ extracted from ‘a complex

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which included the previous stage’s interpretations of the preceding stage, and so back on indefinitely’.83 The conviction that some outlooks, rituals and behaviours could not be interpreted led Eliot to commend the comparative anthropological approach of Sir James Frazer. ‘[W]ith every fresh volume of his stupendous compendium of human superstition and folly [The Golden Bough]’, he comments in ‘A Prediction in Regard to Three English Authors’ (1924), ‘Frazer has withdrawn in more and more cautious abstention from the attempt to explain’.84 Frazer, in this formulation, sounds like Prufrock: diffident, abstaining from elucidatory discourse. And Eliot’s endorsement of the descriptive, rather than explanatory, anthropological method85 provides an entry to the poem. The tea-party, far from constituting a Roycean interpretative community or Habermasian ideal speech situation, becomes an alien ritual, possible formally to describe but not to enter into; incapable of being synthesised into ‘the historical sense’; unsusceptible both to external explanation and to internal communication. Poor Prufrock’s tongue-tiedness therefore expresses a moment at which all threatens to fall apart. Eliot, sensing the limitations of ideas about interpretative communities, has yet to embark upon his experiments with synthesis. The bourgeois public sphere, in the context of early twentieth-century population growth and the continuing development of capitalism, is declining into impotence, fracturing into specialised elites who are increasingly unable to talk to each other. Discussion is vague and vapid, no basis for communicative action. To convey this moment, Eliot takes a ritual that is at once extremely familiar and wholly alien: a tea-party. Small wonder that Prufrock is reluctant to set forth into the fog.

Notes 1. I am grateful to Santanu Das for his immensely helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. 2. Quotations from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1915) are taken from T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber, 1969), pp.  13–17. Line numbers begin after the epigraph and are cited in the text. Quotations from ‘Prufrock’s Pervigilium’ are taken from T. S. Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare, ed. Christopher Ricks (San Diego: Harcourt Brace (Harvest), 1998), pp. 43–4. Line numbers are also cited in the text. 3. The array of Prufrock diagnoses are helpfully set out by Nancy K. Gish, ‘Discarnate Desire: T. S. Eliot and the Poetics of Dissociation’, in Cassandra Laity and Nancy K. Gish (eds), Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 107–29: p. 107. 4. For example, Carol Christ, ‘Gender, Voice, and Figuration in Eliot’s

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5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

Kate McLoughlin Early Poetry’, in Ronald Bush (ed.), T. S. Eliot: The Modernist in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp.  23–37; Colleen Lamos, ‘The Love Song of T. S. Eliot: Elegaic Homoeroticism’, in Laity and Gish (eds), Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot, pp. 23–42; Colin MacCabe, T. S. Eliot (London: Northcote House /British Council, 2006), p. 15; Gabrielle McIntire, Modernism, Memory, and Desire: T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp.  84, 90. For example, Wayne Kostenbaum, Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration (London: Routledge, 1989); Gish, ‘Discarnate Desire’. For example, J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 141–2, 152–3. For example, James Longenbach, ‘Uncanny Eliot’, in Laura Cowan (ed.), T. S. Eliot: Man and Poet (Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1990), pp. 47–70. For example, Piers Gray, T. S. Eliot’s Intellectual and Poetic Development 1909–1922 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), ch. 2; MacCabe, T. S. Eliot, pp. 13, 14. McIntire, Modernism, Memory, and Desire, p. 90. Lamos, ‘The Love Song of T. S. Eliot’, p. 30. Christ, ‘Gender, Voice, and Figuration in Eliot’s Early Poetry’, p. 28. Rachel Potter, ‘T. S. Eliot, Women, and Democracy’, in Laity and Gish (eds), Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot, pp. 215–34: p. 221. Lyndall Gordon, Eliot’s Early Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 46. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action. Volume I: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986), p. 287. See Craig Calhoun, ‘Introduction: Habermas and the Public Sphere’, in Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 31, 32. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), p. 27. Ibid., p. 32. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Towards a Theory of Communicative Competence’, Inquiry 13.1 (1970), pp. 360–75: p. 371. Ibid., p. 367 (emphasis original). Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (London: Heinemann, 1979), p. 3. Ibid., pp. 2–3. Ibid., p. 63. Ibid., p. 3. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action Volume I, p. 327. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 160. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), p. 201. For the same reason, it is not possible to discuss whether the putative

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35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

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utterance would be propositional, illocutionary or expressive in nature. See Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action. Volume II: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), pp. 62–3. Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, p. 63. Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), p. 24. The ‘you’ in line 95 is uttered by a hypostatised Lazarus. Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, p. 189. Mark E. Warren, ‘The Self in Discursive Democracy’, in Stephen K. White (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Habermas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 167–200: p. 182. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action Volume II, pp. 74–5. Prufrock’s inability or unwillingness to communicate may also be read as ‘a latently strategic attitude’ (Maeve Cooke, Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas’s Pragmatics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), p. 159), which aims to bring about a desired outcome by passive aggression rather than by rational persuasion. Habermasian strategic action is characterised by the ‘insidious intent’ mentioned in line 9 of the poem. For further analysis of Bradleian philosophy in Eliot’s poetry, see Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality, ch. 6, especially the remark ‘If each consciousness is an opaque sphere, then Prufrock has no hope of being understood by others’ (p. 139), and Jewel Spears Brooker, ‘F. H. Bradley’s Doctrine of Experience in T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and “Four Quartets” ’, Modern Philology 77.2 (1979), pp. 146–57. T. S. Eliot, Knowledge and Experience (London: Faber, 1964), p. 10. Manju Jain, T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 254; Gray, T. S. Eliot’s Intellectual and Poetic Development 1909–1922, p. 95. T. S. Eliot, To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings (London: Faber, 1965), p. 20. Jain, T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy, pp. 253–6; Gray, T. S. Eliot’s Intellectual and Poetic Development 1909–1922, p. 102. Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity (1913) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 243–4 (emphasis original). Jain makes the same connection while noting that Eliot would not have ‘granted that Habermas’s Peircean/Roycean community of unlimited and unconstrained communication could ever be affirmed to exist’ (T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy, p. 155). Royce, The Problem of Christianity, p. 247. See Gray, T. S. Eliot’s Intellectual and Poetic Development 1909–1922, p. 98. Royce, The Problem of Christianity, p. 347. F. H. Bradley, Collected Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), p. 7. Eliot, Knowledge and Experience, pp. 147–8. Ibid., p. 141. T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber, 1984), pp. 60–1. Ibid., p. 38.

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50. For example, Gray, T. S. Eliot’s Intellectual and Poetic Development 1909–1922, p. 169. 51. F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), pp. 223–4. 52. Eliot, Selected Prose, p. 40. 53. Quoted in Gordon, Eliot’s Early Years, p. 16. Gordon is referencing the same quotation in Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage, 1966), p. 191. 54. Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot (London: Abacus, 1985), p. 28. 55. Ackroyd suggests that the ‘fog of “Prufrock” is the St Louis fog’, while ‘the interior landscape [. . .] is that of Boston’. Ibid., p. 39. 56. Gordon, Eliot’s Early Years, p. 17. 57. Conrad Aiken, ‘King Bolo and Others’, in Richard March and Tambimuttu (eds), T. S. Eliot: A Symposium (London: Editions Poetry London, 1948), pp. 20–5: p. 20 (emphasis original). 58. Ibid., p. 20. On 24 March 1911, Eliot wrote from Paris to his cousin, Eleanor Hinkley, to inquire, ‘Is the Cambridge season agreeable this year?’. T. S. Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton, rev. ed. (London: Faber, 2009), vol. 1, p. 16. 59. Aiken, ‘King Bolo’, p. 20. 60. Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot, p. 44. 61. Quoted in Gordon, Eliot’s Early Years, p. 26. 62. Ibid., p. 20. 63. T. S. Eliot, ‘On Henry James’, in F. W. Dupee (ed.), The Question of Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays (London: Allen Wingate, 1947), pp. 123–33: p. 128. 64. Robert McAlmon, Being Geniuses Together 1920–30, ed. Kay Boyle (New York: Doubleday, 1968), pp. 8–9; quoted in Gordon, Eliot’s Early Years, p. 37. 65. Gordon, Eliot’s Early Years, p. 67. 66. Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot, p. 73. 67. Clive Bell, ‘How Pleasant to Know Mr. Eliot’, in March and Tambimuttu (eds), T. S. Eliot, pp. 15–19: pp. 16, 18. 68. Virginia Woolf, A Change of Perspective: The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Volume III: 1923–1928, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (London: Hogarth Press, 1977), p. 38. 69. Bell, ‘How Pleasant to Know Mr. Eliot’, pp. 18–19. 70. Vivienne Eliot [‘F. M.’], ‘Necesse Est Perstare?’, The Criterion 3 (April 1925), p. 364. 71. Vivienne Eliot, ‘Fête Galante’, The Criterion 3 (July 1925), pp.  557–63: pp. 558–9, 561. 72. On 24 April 1915, Eliot wrote to Eleanor Hinkley from Oxford with news that ‘[b]y being admitted to two dancing parties I have met several English girls, mostly about my own age, and especially two who are very good dancers.[. . .] As they are emancipated Londoners I have been out to tea or dinner with them several times, and find them quite different from anything I have known at home or here’ (Eliot, Letters, vol. 1, p. 105). 73. Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare, pp. xiii, xv. 74. Ibid., p. 16. The ‘window panes’ (l. 2), ‘street’ (l. 8) and ‘windows’ (l. 10) of

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76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

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this poem foreshadow Prufrockian panes (ll. 15, 16, 25), streets (ll. 4, 70) and windows (l. 72). Ibid., p. 20. Again, there are a number of Prufrockian foreshadowings in this poem: ‘gowns that fall from neck and knee’ (l. 8) anticipate ‘Arms that lie along a table’, ‘skirts that trail along the floor’ (ll. 67, 102); the ‘rich’ sunset (l. 13) foreruns the ‘necktie rich’ (l. 43); ‘And while one lifts her hand’ (l. 14) looks forward to ‘one, settling a pillow’ (ll. 96, 107); ‘porcelain, / Murmurs a word’ (ll. 16–17) heralds ‘Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me’ (l. 89). Ibid., p. 26. In this poem, ‘evenings [. . .] / That call, recall / So many nights and afternoons’ (ll. 1, 6–8) foreshadow ‘For I have known them all already, known them all / Have known the evenings’ of ‘Prufrock’ (ll. 49–50). Ibid., p. 28. Here, the ‘cakes and tea’ (l. 4) anticipate the ‘tea and cakes and ices’ in ‘Prufrock’ (l. 79); the ‘eternal truths’ the disturbance of the universe (l. 46); the ‘silver spoon’ (l. 6) the ‘coffee spoons’ (l. 51); the ‘means and ways’ (l. 19) the ‘works and days’ and ‘days and ways’ (ll. 29, 60). Ibid., p. 70. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1880–1), ed. Geoffrey Moore (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), p. 41. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, pp. 18–21, 31. In the spring of 1914, Eliot attended a Sunday garden party held in Russell’s honour by Professor Benjamin Fuller (MacCabe, T. S. Eliot, p. 24). Harry T. Costello, Josiah Royce’s Seminar, 1913–14: As Recorded in the Notebooks of Harry T. Costello, ed. Grover Smith (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1963), p. 85. Quoted in Gray, T. S. Eliot’s Intellectual and Poetic Development 1909– 1922, p. 128. T. S. Eliot, ‘A Prediction in Regard to Three English Authors’, Vanity Fair 21.6 (February 1924), pp. 29, 98: p. 29. Cf. Eliot’s comment in his introduction to the 1926 edition of Savonarola, a poem by his mother, Charlotte Eliot, referring to his earlier paper ‘The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual’: ‘the same ritual remaining practically unchanged may assume different meanings for different generations of performers; and the rite may have originated before “meaning” meant anything at all’. T. S. Eliot, ‘Introduction’, in Charlotte Eliot, Savonarola: A Dramatic Poem (London: R. Cobden-Sanderson, 1926), pp. vii–xii: p. viii.

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Chapter 3

Party Joyce: From the ‘Dead’ to When We ‘Wake’ Jean-Michel Rabaté

What is a ‘party’? (1) a partitioning, isolating one group from another, (2) an orgy, or partouze, as we say in French, wherein the participants are linked erotically, and (3) a hand, or partie, the regulated moment in a game, a collective diversion. In Sade, in Fourier, the party, the highest form of societary or Sadian happiness, has this threefold character: it is a worldly ceremony, an erotic practice, a social act. (Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola)1

In the Hades episode of Ulysses (1922), Bloom and a group of acquaintances are sitting in a horse-drawn carriage that will take them to Prospect cemetery in Glasnevin. They are travelling together to bring their friend Dignam to his final rest. After a short while, they notice disquieting details. Martin Cunningham brushes some crumbs from under his thighs, and Mr Power avers: ‘Someone seems to have been making a picnic party here lately.’2 What follows provides one of the numerous narrative ellipses of this section: All raised their thighs and eyed with disfavour the mildewed buttonless leather of the seats. Mr Dedalus, twisting his nose, frowned downward and said: —Unless I am greatly mistaken . . . What do you think, Martin? —It struck me too, Martin Cunningham said.[. . .] Mr Dedalus sighed resignedly. —After all, he said, it’s the most natural thing in the world. (U, p. 74)

Simon Dedalus’s unexpressed thought is developed by Bloom a few pages later: ‘Love among the tombstones. Romeo. Spice of pleasure. In the midst of death we are in life. Both ends meet. Tantalizing for the poor dead’ (U, p. 89). Immediately after, Bloom remembers ‘Molly wanting to do it at the window’ (U, p. 89), a thought that will recur throughout the day. The fact that the funeral carriage has been rented by party-goers intent upon sexual pleasure, that for them food leads to sex whose traces are visible or smelly enough to be detected, will provide

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a first context for the term of ‘party’ as used by Mr Power and also as I see it underpinning Joyce’s works. For Joyce, the term always connotes sexual satisfaction and also entails a consideration of the organic opposites, since it tends to move from life to death and from death to life. We understand why Bloom will be in mourning all day when he walks in the streets of Dublin on 16 June 1904. He has to be dressed in black because he would not want to ‘Make a picnic of it’ (U, pp. 46–7), yet this very ‘picnic’ (or ‘party’) redeems him for most readers at the end of novel. I am alluding to the last pages, in which Molly Bloom concludes her paean to life with a lyrical reenactment of their most meaningful kiss: she passed him seedcake through her lips during a picnic on the Howth promontory, and it was how she led him to propose to her. Thus, even if we discover no ‘party’ as such in Ulysses, except in ‘retrospective arrangements’, as in Molly’s fond memories of Bloom’s courtship, such networks allow us to gain a crucial perspective on Joyce’s entire works. Indeed, one can say that Joyce’s mature work stretches between two parties: the memorably epiphanic party that functions as the setting of ‘The Dead’ (1941), and the raunchy funeral wake that morphs and polymorphs in and out of Finnegans Wake (1939). The relative scarcity of party scenes in Ulysses should not detract from the fact that there is a ‘party’ vector in Joyce’s works. It would take us from the Christmas dinner-party of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) to the revelries of drinkers in a Chapelizod pub where most of Finnegans Wake takes place, from the annual dance party at the Morkans in ‘The Dead’ to the mythical ‘wake’ of Tim Finnegan. In all these, death lurks behind the scenes, which explains why the main ‘party’ presented in Ulysses is a group visit to a cemetery for a funeral. The Hades episode was to have a momentous impact on two fellow modernists, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, who both felt inspired by Joyce to similar juxtapositions of life and death via the theme of the ghost. But Joyce went on, weaving his way through the complex ambivalence he always attached to the idea of a ‘party’. I will first examine how this idea plays out in ‘The Dead’ before moving to Finnegans Wake. A ‘party’ implies a sense of communal gathering for the most various purposes, like birthdays, promotions, family visits, for the enjoyment of a group of people who share certain beliefs and follow the same rituals. One regular issue is: who can be invited to a party and who cannot? In that sense, a party presupposes some form of hospitality.3 This was a feature of Dublin that Joyce felt he had not adequately represented in his early stories, a ‘hospitality’ that led to a sense of communal festivity. By comparison with other cities like London, Paris, Trieste or Zurich, one can say that still today Dublin is defined by a rare openness to strangers.

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The pleasure in revelry is allied to mutual exchange without immediate exploitation. A ‘party’ should embody this freedom from seduction or obligation. In 1906, Joyce wrote an often quoted letter to his brother Stanislaus in order to express this: Sometimes thinking of Ireland it seems to me that I have been unnecessarily harsh. I have reproduced (in Dubliners at least) none of the attraction of the city for I have never felt at my ease in any city since I left it except in Paris. I have not reproduced its ingenuous insularity and its hospitality. The latter ‘virtue’ so far as I can see does not exist elsewhere in Europe.4

His publisher, Grant Richards, had reproached Joyce for his censorious attitude when dealing with Dublin and the Irish. His stories would tend to denounce, debunk, criticise but never praise the city, shown as the epitome of betrayal, paralysis and corruption. Most of the Dubliners survive by exploiting weaker people. Irish values are all tainted by economic and moral prostitution. Joyce’s letter was mailed to his brother from Rome, where he was completing the original plan for his collection of short stories. The same letter expresses admiration for Arthur Griffith’s nationalist political programme. The founder of Sinn Féin advocated then a total boycott of British goods, along with new educational schemes and a reformed national service; he planned the creation of a national banking system. There were only two attitudes that derived from the Sinn Féin nationalist programme to which Joyce objected – they had to do with race and language. Joyce refused anything that looked like sponsoring ‘racial hatred’, by which he meant the bigoted parochialism of the Irish, a provincialism that often veered into anti-Semitism, and he objected to the idea of using Gaelic as the national language of Ireland. The pervasive nostalgia detectable in this letter was due to a certain culture shock experienced by Joyce during his Rome stay. It was while in Rome that he drafted Exiles, whose preparatory notes contain interesting allusions to a marital crisis, and planned ‘The Dead’, a late addition to Dubliners and a real turning-point in his career as a writer. True, writing ‘The Dead’ only partly fulfilled the task of ‘making amends’ for the rest of the stories, as Richard Ellmann showed in his biography.5 The last story deals directly with the issue of hospitality in the context of a party. The plot hinges upon the speech that Gabriel is to deliver in order to thank his aunts for their annual dance and dinner. ‘Hospitality’ is the first of the headings reviewed when Gabriel rehearses his speech. ‘He ran over the headings of his speech: Irish hospitality, sad memories, the Three Graces, Paris, the quotation from Browning.’6 This outline is then modified after he has been taunted by Miss Ivors, whose brusque

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accusations upset his balance. Gabriel then decides to deflect the speech, so as to respond to her ironical remark that he is a ‘West Briton’: He would say, alluding to Aunt Kate and Aunt Julia: Ladies and Gentlemen, the generation which is now on the wane among us may have had its faults but for my part I think it had certain qualities of hospitality, of humour, of humanity, which the new and very serious and hypereducated generation that is growing up around us seems to me to lack. Very good: that was one for Miss Ivors. What did he care that his aunts were only two ignorant old women? (D, p. 193)

Among the multiple ironies that run parallel in these sentences, one can notice that it is the new militant tone that makes Gabriel change his quotation from Browning. Since he fears that it will sound too intellectual, he changes a ‘thought-tormented music’ into a ‘thought-tormented age’. Gabriel’s objective alliance with ‘ignorant old women’ he seems here to despise will be toned down during the actual performance: had he kept the phrase ‘on the wane’, he would have all too readily announced not only their disappearance but his own! The italicised paragraph expands into almost one page in the actual speech, in which Gabriel develops a contrast between what he perceives as the warm-hearted tradition needed by a true ‘party’ and a hyper-politicised and partisan attitude. Here, one can see how the ‘party’ is opposed to ‘partisanship’. Gabriel prefers a humanist tradition to a one-sided nationalism since, for him, ‘hospitality’ becomes synonymous with a notion of general inclusiveness. The ‘party’ in his eyes is indeed a ‘part for the whole’; this is the very synecdoche of this ancient ‘hospitality’. Yet, Gabriel’s quandary becomes more obvious when we are privy to his erotic reveries. The image of universal harmony is indeed a dream he cherishes, but what triggers his deepest wish is the imagination of a renewed tryst with Gretta. What allows him to perform his public duties as head of the table, as the only male person in charge, is the thought that he will be alone with his wife at the end of the party. In fact, he needs to dream of a party for two only, in order to play the game of the social world. Gabriel’s position will change considerably at the end of the story. Finally he will set out ‘on his journey westward’ (D, p. 225), if only metaphorically. He will try to understand better an unknown past linked with Irish values of which he had no notion, even when he was praising traditional values. Gabriel is too intelligent to be simply a smug ‘praiser of the past’, but his conservative humanism will not carry him very far. When he seems to be arguing for a truce between the warring factions, he leaves open the difficult question whether any ‘party’ – or literature, for that matter – can remain ‘above politics’ (D, p. 188).

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The annual party arranged by the Morkan sisters is divided into two separate moments: first music and dancing, then a formal dinner. This family gathering becomes a ‘party’ since it includes a majority of friends, along with pupils of the three musical hostesses. We suspect that the date is that of the Epiphany, which should unite everyone, although the only precise period mentioned in the text is ‘Christmas time’. ‘Hospitality’ functions not only as a synecdoche for the whole set of family values praised by Gabriel, but as a prompter for certain performances. A ‘party’ requires a performative, since the discourse of hospitality cannot be complete without its enactment. Gabriel will play the expected part, and provides the welcome or farewell speech that adds the ritual stamp. He will have then to harp on ancient values, confirming more than once that there are values that define the possibility of a ‘party’, and that they will endure. Thus, it is no wonder that Miss Ivors decides that she has to leave the house at once, in order to accept the dancing but not the dinner – and this puts Gabriel in an awkward position. Gabriel hesitated a moment and said: —If you will allow me, Miss Ivors, I’ll see you home if you really are obliged to go. But Miss Ivors broke away from them. —I won’t hear of it, she cried. For goodness sake go in to your suppers and don’t mind me. I’m quite well able to take care of myself. (D, p. 196)

Her last words seem to rephrase ironically the Gaelic slogan for which she fights: Sinn Féin amhain, or ‘ourselves alone’. Gabriel pretends to think that he is not the cause of her abrupt departure. At first, he had been anxious to find her among the audience but finds new confidence in the idea that he can berate her in her absence. All this suggests that Gabriel both wishes to exclude her from the gathering and to take her as an example of rudeness, of the brash new spirit he condemns. The hospitality of the party begins fissuring, since it needs an alien, a xenos, as a butt to satirise. The rejection of the other allows the party to rejoice in its fake universality. Gabriel is portrayed as the liberal intellectual who is caught up between values of the past that he cannot completely make his – there is a forced quality in his praise of tradition, which is visible in his use of pseudo-epic similes – and the growing militancy associated with a period of strife and impending trouble. Quite the Hegelian beautiful soul, Gabriel swoons too quickly, betraying his own alienation by recurrent sense of failure, his constant uneasiness. Thus we understand that the hospitable party is fraught with tension and ambivalence. This is why Gabriel begins his speech with a bold image playfully suggesting victimisation: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen. It is not

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the first time that we have gathered together under this hospitable roof, around this hospitable board. It is not the first time that we have been the recipients – or perhaps, I had better say, the victims – of the hospitality of certain good ladies’ (D, p. 203). As anthropologists and explorers concur, the host is never far from the role of the sacrificial victim. The host is also a victim since he cannot refuse the consequences of an opening of privacy to strangers. The consequences can be momentous, as the example of Paris shows. Gabriel presents himself as Paris unable to choose between three goddesses or three graces: ‘I will not attempt to play to-night the part that Paris played on another occasion. I will not attempt to choose between them. The task would be an invidious one and one beyond my poor powers’ (D, p. 205). Symptomatically, Gabriel projects in this fantasy the very part he has played so far: someone who refuses to choose. However, refusing to choose is also a choice, but a wrong choice. Hence we see how Gabriel fails three times in his dealings with women. He fails with Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, when he cursorily alludes to marriage and is ‘discomposed by the girl’s bitter and sudden retort’ (D, p. 178). He also fails with Miss Ivors, by being brutal when she seems to enjoy his company; she teases him more out of admiration than rejection – she was, after all, inviting him and Gretta to a friendly group ‘excursion’ to the Aran islands. Another ‘party’ could have been constituted, a group of friends gathered by common values and a political ideal this time, but Gabriel refuses this opportunity. Finally, he fails when he misreads his wife’s mood at the end. Thrilled by sexual desire, complacent about the possibility of a second honeymoon away from the children, he cannot imagine that she had experienced deeper love prior to their courtship. The regular discomfiture experienced by Gabriel can correspond to the goddesses among whom Paris had to choose. Hera, the goddess of marriage, could be invoked by Lily if only she had gone ‘to her wedding’ with a young man, instead of being betrayed (D, p. 177). Athena, the goddess of reason and also of politics, looks like Molly Ivors’s tutelary divinity. Aphrodite, the goddess of love, must have looked the other way when Gretta obeyed her family’s order and left Galway, thus condemning poor Michael Furey to an untimely death. Gabriel’s illusion of mastery is entirely destroyed when he senses that he appears pale and lame next to the image of a romantic youth who has braved death to say goodbye to a sweetheart. ‘While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness of joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another. A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him’ (D, p. 221). At last, he sees himself as a ‘nervous well-meaning sentimentalist’ who

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was merely ‘orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts’ (D, p. 221). As we know from Ulysses, a sentimentalist is defined by George Meredith, whom Stephen likes quoting, as someone who ‘would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done’ (U, pp. 550–1). This harsh definition is apt for Gabriel, who seems obsessed with tradition and pays homage to the rituals of old age. It captures the idealising mechanism that explains his attitude facing Gretta. In spite of his paralysing sense of secondariness, or perhaps because of it, Gabriel only pays lip-service to tradition. His escapism looks toward a modern Europe as a way out of his country’s archaic feuds, which explains his desire to flee to France, Belgium or Germany. Just as he longs to be outside in the park full of snow when he mentally rehearses his speech, although we know that he habitually dreads the proximity of the snow and fears colds, he praises Irish hospitality at the same time as he confesses a distaste for his own country: ‘O, to tell the truth, retorted Gabriel suddenly, I’m sick of my own country, sick of it!’ (D, p. 190). Indeed, Gabriel praises what he betrays in thought and deed, flying away from Irish politics to go vacationing in Europe and writing for British newspapers that have more prestige than the local ones. There is an added dramatic irony in the fact that he praises the past just before being engulfed by a darker past coming from his wife’s previous experiences with total strangers. Concepts like ‘party’, ‘hospitality’ and ‘exile’ are never simple for Joyce and in particular in Dubliners. Dubliners is full of failed exiles, like Little Chandler or Bob Doran, who because they never find the courage to ‘pay the price’ finally opt for a slow inner death, and aborted parties as we see in ‘Clay’, when Maria fails to bring the peace she was hoping for. ‘The Dead’ dramatises in an eloquent and symphonic manner an idea that is developed by the celebrated Christmas dinner scene in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. What the young Stephen Dedalus discovers is that a family party marked by repetitive rituals (it’s his first admission to the table of the adults) cannot impose unity where there is strife and political infighting. The clash between Dante, who believes that the Catholic hierarchy has been right to reject Parnell because of his adultery, and Simon Dedalus and Mr Casey, who hold that Parnell’s failure was due to the English, who cannily played up to religious prejudice, brings about an irreducible rift in the family’s union. The constant tension between the ecumenism of the ‘party’ and the fractiousness of antagonistic political parties is recurrent in Joyce, and it should lead to a politicised reading of his texts. Joyce was drafting ‘The Dead’ at a time when Lenin and his friends were promoting a different view of the party. This what brought Tom

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Stoppard to present a somewhat apolitical Joyce facing a hyper-politicised Lenin in his well known play Travesties (1974). They are both in Zurich during the First World War. In the second act, when his departure to Russia is imminent, one hears Lenin declaim: Today, literature must become party literature. Down with non-partisan literature! Down with literary supermen! Literature must become a part of the common cause of the proletariat, a cog in the Social Democratic mechanism. Publishing and distributing centres, bookshops and reading rooms, libraries and similar establishments must all be under party control. We want to establish and we shall establish a free press, free not simply from the police, but also from capital, from careerism, and what is more, free from bourgeois anarchist individualism!7

In case one thinks that Stoppard has caricatured Lenin in this political and literary farce based upon Richard Ellmann’s account of Joyce’s fight against British institutions represented by Henry Carr, a minor civil servant in the British consulate of Zurich, it suffices to look at Lenin’s 1905 essay ‘Party Organisation and Party Literature’ to verify that Stoppard has quoted literally. One may even add that he could have sounded more critical had he quoted other passages: [W]e are discussing party literature and its subordination to party control. Everyone is free to write and say whatever he likes, without any restrictions. But every voluntary association (including the party) is also free to expel members who use the name of the party to advocate anti-party views. [. . .] we must say to you bourgeois individualists that your talk about absolute freedom is sheer hypocrisy. There can be no real and effective ‘freedom’ in a society based on the power of money, in a society in which the masses of working people live in poverty and the handful of rich live like parasites. Are you free in relation to your bourgeois publisher, Mr. Writer, in relation to your bourgeois public, which demands that you provide it with pornography in frames and paintings, and prostitution as a ‘supplement’ to ‘sacred’ scenic art? This absolute freedom is a bourgeois or an anarchist phrase (since, as a world outlook, anarchism is bourgeois philosophy turned inside out). One cannot live in society and be free from society. The freedom of the bourgeois writer, artist or actress is simply masked (or hypocritically masked) dependence on the money-bag, on corruption, on prostitution. And we socialists expose this hypocrisy and rip off the false labels, not in order to arrive at a non-class literature and art (that will be possible only in a socialist extra-class society), but to contrast this hypocritically free literature, which is in reality linked to the bourgeoisie, with a really free one that will be openly linked to the proletariat. [. . .] To work, then, comrades! We are faced with a new and difficult task. But it is a noble and grateful one – to organise a broad, multiform and varied literature inseparably linked with the SocialDemocratic working-class movement. All Social-Democratic literature must become Party literature.8

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We understand why, in Stoppard’s witty play, Carr and Lenin finally unite against the Dadaist Tristan Tzara and Joyce; as Carr states it with the advantage of hindsight, there is no place for Dadaism in a Soviet regime.9 Carr concludes grandly with a Wildean epigram: ‘There was nothing wrong with Lenin except his politics.’10 Indeed, quite logically, Lenin saw the Communist party as the vanguard of the revolutionary movement; its main tenet was the idea that capitalism must be replaced by socialism. Only then would freedom be possible. The party’s unwavering aim would be to create social justice by a radical redistribution of wealth, and this would happen once the power of the proletariat was unleashed. Yet, the issue of consciousness remains: the majority of working-class people will not be conscious of its strength or even aware of the nature of its enemies. As Lenin says in Travesties, quoting Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest: ‘Really, if the lower orders don’t set us a good example what on earth is the use of them? They seem as a class to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility!’11 If it is not the party but the working class which makes the revolution, the party’s mission will be to instil responsibility, often by radicalising workers so as to heighten revolutionary consciousness. The party organises the revolutionary vanguard of the working class, and it is therefore forced to speak for the working class as a whole. Again, one is back to the same old synecdoche of any ‘party’. But in this Marxist context, a final ‘party’ should mark the beginning of a de-alienated humanity. In case you were to think that I have strayed from my original project to ride a political hobby-horse, let me reassure you: this is not political propaganda, merely a way of ushering in a reading of Finnegans Wake.12 In this last book, Joyce kept on staging a ‘party’, also by connecting the various levels of meanings brought together by Barthes: the political, the societal and the sexual. It is relatively easy, simply by using the Concordance to Finnegans Wake, to verify that the word ‘party’ recurs often in the book, but mostly with the political meaning. We find ‘nabour party’ (FW, p. 91 l. 15), ‘sociationist party’ (FW, p. 144 l. 6), ‘We shall not come to party at that lopp’s [. . .] for he is not on our social list’ (FW, p. 415 ll. 30–1). The last passage occurs in a context in which we also meet the Russian communist henchman of Stalin, Beria (‘Ba’ s berial . . .’, FW, p. 415 l. 31). This indicates the extent to which Joyce was attempting to politicise his text, having been stung by the reproaches of Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound that he could not deal with history or the political issues of the times. In a section devoted to the interpretation of the ‘Letter’ we discover that there is a whole political code to bring to bear on the text. This is a passage in which Bolshevism is suggested (‘Bulsklivism’, FW, p. 116 l. 6). There, we are told that the

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word ‘party’ belongs to a new type of political decoding: ‘Margaret is the social revolution while cakes means the party funds’ (FW, p. 116 ll. 8–9). Here, obviously, Joyce is referring to what Lenin had called ‘Aesopian language’ in the Preface to Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), a book (one of his most important) that Lenin was drafting while he was near Joyce, in Zurich, in 1916, while Joyce was half-way through Ulysses. Lenin explained why he had to change many words – whenever he wrote ‘Japan’, for instance, one would have to understand that he was referring to Russia. This was, he stated, the only way for him to avoid the Tsar’s censorship. This linguistic phenomenon is recurrent in Finnegans Wake and it is often interpreted as a Freudian allusion to the oblique means by which a dream will attempt to avoid censorship, by deploying opaque images that contain two or three meanings at once. But we should not forget that if the Wake is indeed a dream, it is also a ‘wake’, that is, a specific Irish funeral-party. The book’s eponymous ballad tells the story of the death and resurrection of Tim Finnegan, a Dublin hod-carrier working in construction whose only defect was that he was born ‘with a love for the liquor’. One day, having drunk too much, he falls from a ladder, seems to have broken his skull and is thought to be dead. A wake is organised by his wife as in the old times: the corpse is stretched upon a table; friends and family, neighbours and visitors come to eat and drink. They have to stay with the body for the entire night. In the ballad, the mourners become rowdy, they fight and then spill whiskey over the corpse. This wakes him up; he comes back to life and joins in the celebration. It is whiskey that causes Finnegan’s fall and also his resurrection, and Joyce alludes several times to the fact that whiskey derives from the Irish uisce beatha, meaning ‘water of life’, like the French eau de vie. Here is the middle section of the ballad: Well his friends assembled at the wake And Mrs. Finnegan called for brunch Well, first she brought them tea and cake Then pipes, tobacco, and whiskey punch Then the Widow Malone began to cry ‘Such a nice clean corpse did you ever see?’ ‘Tim, auvreen! Why did you die?’ ‘Will you hold yer gob?’ says Molly McGee. (Repeat Chorus) Well, Mary Murphy took up the job ‘Oh Biddy,’ says she, ‘you’re wrong, I’m sure.’ Well Biddy fetched her a belt in the gob And left her sprawling on the floor

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Then the war did then engage ’Twas woman to woman and man to man Shillelagh law was all the rage And a row and a ruction soon began (Repeat Chorus) Well Mickey Maloney ducked his head When a bottle of whiskey flew at him It missed, and landing on the bed The whiskey scattered over Tim Bedad revives, see how he rises! Timothy risin’ from the bed! Sayin’ ‘Throwin’ your whiskey around like blazes,’ ‘Thanum an Dhul! do ye think I’m dead?’

Those lines are literally quoted by Joyce: ‘Have you wines for my wedding, did you bring bridle and bedding, will you whoop for my deading is a ? Wake? Usqueadbaugham! / Anam muck an dhould! Did you drink me doornail?’ (FW, p. 24 ll. 12–16). The Irish phrase (thanam an dhul) means ‘Your souls from the devil’. As is well known, the refrain ‘Whack fol the dah now dance to yer partner around the flure yer trotters shake / Wasn’t it the truth I told you? Lots of fun at Finnegan’s Wake’ will turn into one of the most often repeated ‘motifs’ of Finnegans Wake. Thus, the whole of Chapter 1 can be seen as an extended commentary on the situation outlined by the ballad, with the ‘mourners’ trying alternatively to wake up Finnegan, or to persuade the old man not to wake up yet, since they are enjoying themselves so much at his wake. Recently, readers of Cabinet magazine have been reminded of the wide array of practices that are covered under the heading of the ‘Irish wake’. Cabinet has reprinted the section of Seán O’Súilleabháin’s 1961 book Caitheamh Aimsire ar Thórraimh,13 translated in 1967 as Irish Wake Amusements.14 The Cabinet selection highlights the most surprising, obscene and disruptive characters of the games performed at night during Irish wakes. Irish wakes had kept a pagan character, and may have been connected with earlier cannibalistic rituals during which the corpse of the dead king was consumed by participants. This ritual cannibalism had shocked the Greek historian Strabo, who had observed it.15 They had often a sexual content, and could be related to the custom of ‘building the ship’ that had been reported by Lady Wilde in her ‘Wake orgies’.16 The funeral boat, which metaphorically carries the dead person to the underworld, will have to be ‘built’ by several young men who become its ‘parts’, until the man who is the ‘keel’ needs to be sexually aroused by a young woman who completes ‘the erection of the mast’. This also reported by O’Súilleabháin.17 This dark ritual is

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evoked several times in Finnegans Wake, most obviously in the passage: ‘Now I suggest to you that ere there was this plagueburrow, as you seem to call it, there was a burialbattell, the boat of million years. Would you bear me out in that, relatively speaking, with her jackstaff jerking at her pennyladders, why not, and sizing a fair sail, knowest thou the kind?’ (FW, p. 479 ll. 24–8). As O’Súilleabháin notices, the old wakes were merry affairs, social gatherings with games, music, singing, story-telling, pranks and a lot of drink and food. He even adds: ‘They were far merrier than weddings.’18 Thus the section on the ‘night games’ in II, 1, is replete with games that were performed at Irish wakes (the bulk of O’Súilleabháin’s book is taken up by a long list of games).19 They included guessing games, as in that episode, but more often games of strength and dexterity. The penalties for the losers could be severe: they ran the gamut from slapping to being pulled around the room by the ear.20 Some participants ended up being maimed for life after a rough wake night. This explains why a whole section of O’Súilleabháin’s book is devoted to mischief-making, horse-play, rough games, unruly behaviour and even general fighting at funeral wakes; given the excessive consumption of strong alcohol and the proximity of so many young men and women who had to stay for a whole night together, all sorts of excesses were observed. In many instances, potatoes, broken pipes, pepper, ashes, water, drink or clods of turf were thrown at the participants. Injuries, at times severe, were common. Woe to older people who would fall asleep by the corpse! They would wake up with their coats tied to the table, or with their beards shaved, even with their faces blackened by soot or polish.21 The corpse was not spared from these sudden outbursts of communal violence. The table on which the body was displayed would often collapse, so that it would roll down to the floor. When the deceased had suffered from arthritis or rheumatism and the limbs had to be tied together for the presentation, it often happened that a trickster would cut the ropes, causing the corpse to sit up at once, which would terrify the other mourners. At times, the corpse itself was given a hand of cards so as to participate in various card games, a pipe was inserted into the mouth or it would be taken to the floor for a last posthumous dance.22 The wakes were also occasions for the settlement of political accounts. There are several accounts of how the Molly Maguires in the north of Ireland would go to wakes so as to make mischief and punish those who had refused to join them. The Fenians and the Cockades sought each other at wakes too.23 This is why the Catholic clergy did all it could to stop the wakes, less for fear of the usual indecency, than in a wish to curb the bad blood generated between factions. But on the other hand,

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a good wake had to include some fighting. ‘This is a sad day, when my father is put into the clay, and not even one blow struck at his funeral!’ was a common saying.24 On one level, no page of Finnegans Wake is without a reference to this ritualistic blending of farce and sorrow, of partying excessively and lugubriously keening for the dead. For instance, in one of the rare comments on his own text, Joyce explains in a letter to Harriett Weaver the multiple meanings of one title given to Anna Livia Plurabelle’s ‘manifesto’: ‘L’Arcs en His Ceiling Flee Chinx on the Flur’ (FW, p. 104 ll. 13–14). Joyce explains that this alludes to the rainbow, to Noah’s ark and to the old Irish king Roderick, but a fourth meaning is also provided: ‘There is merriment above (larks) why should there not be high jinks below stairs?’25 This alludes to the Chapelizod pub in which most of the action takes place. The term ‘high jinks’ captures well the noisy mix of childish merriment and pointed mischief-making that characterised the traditional Irish wake. The ‘party’ was a ritual and more than a ritual, since it provided the opportunity to settle bitter family or local feuds under the pretence of innocent gaming. In a similar manner, Joyce’s life in Paris was marked by the ritual of birthday parties, celebrations of book publications and family weddings, at the end of which the Irish writer would launch into his personal adaptation of the Italian tarantella, his ‘spider dance’. Those social ceremonies (to which one would be invited or not, as Samuel Beckett discovered when he was blamed for the incipient psychosis of Lucia Joyce) offered a fit accompaniment to the slow and painful birth of the Wake. The distant model was indeed the ‘wake’, the only ‘party’ that could not be ruined just because it had been planned as an anarchic event in advance. In all this, we verify that Finnegans Wake anticipates Mikhail Bakhtin’s vision of popular culture as harking back to a pagan pageant exhibiting an obscene body, a corpse coming alive so as to transcend the boundaries of life and death. Of course, by focusing on an Irish wake, Joyce implies all the mourners, and the ‘body politic’ of the mass of the Dubliners, are a great assemblage of drunk, fighting, slandering, copulating individuals. Even if this specific type of ‘party’ had long been judged too subversive by the Catholic Church, it has remained a defining feature of Ireland. When Joyce took the ballad of Finnegan as a point of departure, he not only went back to an archaic ritual specific to pre-Christian Celtic treatments of death, but jumped across centuries to present the modernity that lay there as well. He composed a polyphonic text made up of conflicting voices whose babelic din opposed any authoritative discourse. The party is called a ‘hubbub caused in Edenborough’ (FW, p. 29 ll. 35–6), which means more than a local allusion to the opposing quays of Eden and Burgh along the Liffey. This

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word is of Irish origin and means the ‘loud noise made by a crowd’. New England colonists would apply it to some rambunctious games played by Native Americans. The party opens itself to the colonial other, and in doing so destroys the propriety of high decorum. Bakhtin developed similar ideas in his monumental thesis devoted to Rabelais.26 This he completed in 1946, definitively inserting literature into the context of a history of popular culture. Its main feature is an anarchic laughter that stems from the lower parts, including the scatological and the obscene. Thus the carnivalesque inversion of ‘high’ values will lead to an irresistible movement of affirmation and resistance. Both Joyce and Bakhtin evoke ‘parties’ so as to link experimental writing to a history of popular culture. The ‘party’ that Joyce keeps rewriting with slight variations in all his major works entails an embrace of death captured by a festive life teetering on the brink of excess. Beginning, as it were, with mourning, Joyce shows that merriment subsists through testimonies of bereavement, whereas sadness and discordant strife interfere in the midst of family gatherings. This is his roundabout way of coming as close as possible to the drive of all drives, Freud’s death drive, a Thanatos without which one cannot be sure of feeling fully alive. Hence the sense that most readers have, that Finnegans Wake is a very sad book indeed. The mixture of moods ranges from the ‘jovial’ to the sad. Bruno’s famous motto ‘In tristitia hilaris, in hilaritate tristis’ (‘cheerful in the midst of sadness, sad in the midst of cheerfulness’) would thus remain fully valid for the later Joyce. All the while, he kept the notion that all his writing was just a game – to quote once more Barthes’s threefold subdivision in the meaning of a ‘party’. Didn’t Joyce write those quietly despairing words to his old friend Harriet Weaver, once she had finally agreed to ‘play’ with him by giving ‘orders’ for the writing of certain texts? Joyce wrote: ‘I know it is no more than a game but it is a game that I have learned to play in my own way. Children may just as well play as not. The ogre will come in any case.’27 Readers may just as well play as not in Joyce’s party – they won’t regret it.

Notes 1. Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 111. I note that the original text (Paris: Seuil Points, 1971) keeps ‘La party’ as a title for this section. It is rare to see English words in Barthes’s essays. The section begins with the question ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une party?’ (p. 116). Barthes seems to think that a ‘party’ is an untranslatable idiom. 2. James Joyce, Ulysses (1918–20), ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York:

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3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

Jean-Michel Rabaté Random House, 1986), p. 74. Hereafter page numbers are given in the text and denoted ‘U’. I have treated this topic in James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp.  153–60. I will cover some of the same ground in the following section, with a different emphasis. Letters of James Joyce, ed. Stuart Gilbert and Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1966), vol. 2, p. 166. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 245. James Joyce, Dubliners (1914), ed. Terence Brown (New York: Penguin, 1992), p. 192. Hereafter page numbers are given in the text and denoted ‘D’. Tom Stoppard, Travesties (New York: Grove Press, 1975), pp. 58–9. V. I. Lenin, ‘Party Organisation and Party Literature’ (1905), in Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), vol. 10, pp. 44–9. Stoppard, Travesties, p. 57. Ibid., p. 60. Ibid., p. 58. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber, 1939). Hereafter page numbers are given in the text and denoted ‘FW’. ‘Games Issue’, Cabinet 45 (spring 2012), pp. 100–3. Seán O’Súilleabháin, Irish Wake Amusements (Dublin: Mercier Press, 1967). See the section on ‘Irish Ritual Cannibalism’ in George Cinclair Gibson’s excellent Wake Rites: The Ancient Rituals of Finnegans Wake (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), pp. 155–6. See Lady Speranza Wilde, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland (New York: Lemma, 1973), pp.  122–3; Gibson, Wake Rites, pp. 153–4. O’Súilleabháin, Irish Wake Amusements, pp. 76–7. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., pp. 75–129. Ibid., pp. 49–52. Ibid., p. 67. Ibid., p. 67. Ibid., p. 71. Ibid., p. 72. James Joyce, Selected Letters, ed. Richard Ellmann (London: Faber, 1975), p. 326. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolksy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Letter of 16 October 1926 to Harriet Weaver, Letters of James Joyce, ed. Gilbert and Ellmann, vol. 3, p. 144.

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Chapter 4

‘Looking at the party with you’: Pivotal Moments in Katherine Mansfield’s Party Stories Angela Smith In a sketch called ‘Sunday Lunch’ (1912) written for the little magazine Rhythm, Katherine Mansfield seems to show her bohemian credentials. She knows her way around the avant-garde smart set, for this is no sedate British traditional roast followed by apple pie as its title might suggest. Here the party-guests smoke and flirt in an atmosphere ‘of agitating intimacy’.1 Their host manipulates his male guests: ‘ “Glad you came.” Takes guest aside. “I say, that French dancing woman’s here. Over there – on the leopard skin – with the Chinese fan. Pitch into her, there’s a good chap.” ’2 This evokes shades of the contemporary doggerel about the author of erotic novels Elinor Glyn: ‘Would you like to sin / With Elinor Glyn / On a tiger skin? / Or would you prefer / To err / With her / On some other fur?’ The aura of decadent and knowing malice in the sketch, implying that the author relishes her ironic control, is countered in her short stories focusing on parties. They are about ways of seeing rather than maintaining a consistently satirical stance. The party-givers and party-goers want to project an image of themselves which is always undermined by a moment of disruption when the picture is skewed, when Mansfield’s searching scrutiny reveals an aspect of the secret self, and a protagonist comes close to an epiphany which is often ultimately elusive. The focus of this chapter is on the complexity of this process in five stories from different stages of her career, ‘Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding’ (1911), ‘Sun and Moon’ (1920), ‘Bliss’ (1918), ‘Her First Ball’ (1921) and ‘The Garden Party’ (1922), first contextualising them by a brief account of Mansfield’s own party-going. She may have felt a frisson of recognition when she read of Prufrock, en route to a party, cautiously preparing ‘a face to meet the faces that you meet’.3 Prufrock’s wary sense that he is an outsider who will be misunderstood by the elegant women at the party must have chimed with Mansfield’s experience of, for instance, Ottoline Morrell’s houseparties at Garsington. At one of them Mansfield read ‘The Love Song

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of J. Alfred Prufrock’ aloud to the other guests.4 Though this suggests confidence, that self-assurance lay in her acting ability rather than in trust in the friendship of the Bloomsbury group. As a ‘woman, with the taint of the pioneer in my blood’,5 her assumptions about life and behaviour differed from theirs. They thought her common; Rupert Brooke wrote of her to Edward Marsh, a patron of the arts: ‘She really ought to remember she’s a lidy [sic].’6 Morrell compared Mansfield to her own preconceptions about the Japanese, writing that ‘she had their delicate, exotic vulgarity and sensitively showy bad taste’, though she also recognised that Mansfield’s identification with New Zealand ‘prevented her from mixing with ease and friendliness amongst us here, and to cover her sensitiveness and her antagonism to most people who were not her kin, she hid her real self behind a face that was as expressionless as a finely moulded mask’.7 She commented that Mansfield was secretly proud of being a New Zealander,8 as though the patriotism of a colonial subject were a furtive vice. Mansfield felt that even the geraniums in London gardens knew her as an impostor as they ‘burn with arrogance & pride. And I am the little colonial walking in the London garden patch – allowed to look, perhaps, but not to linger.’9 The geraniums see her as ‘a stranger – an alien’.10 Her advice to her second husband, John Middleton Murry, about his writing applied equally to her own work and life: ‘dont [sic] lower your mask until you have another mask prepared beneath – As terrible as you like – but a mask’.11 The rather neurotic caution implicit in this advice to Murry, whom she thought exposed himself to mockery by parading his feelings in his critical work, modifies Peter Brooker’s assumptions about Mansfield’s life in Europe: Becoming a bohemian was like undergoing a physical operation and stepping through a wardrobe all at once, generally accompanied by a magical journey from the English provinces and regions (or from New Zealand and Australia in the case of Katherine Mansfield and Stella Bowen) to the metropolis and the playgrounds of Europe.12

Though Mansfield certainly enjoyed the playgrounds of London, she dressed for them as for adopting a role rather than for an irruption into the promised land of sybaritic bohemianism. Her first husband, George Bowden, once met her at a musical party where she was dressed in ‘more or less Maori fashion’ and he thought that there was ‘something almost eerie about it, as though of a psychic transformation rather than a mere impersonation’.13 This astute observation is borne out by the fascination in Mansfield’s early notebooks with Maori sexuality and experience of the physical world; for instance, in the transgressive ‘Summer

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Idylle’, racial and homoerotic boundaries are crossed.14 The painter Dora Carrington was surprised by Mansfield’s relish for cross-dressing at Garsington: ‘Katherine and I wore trousers. It was wonderful being alone in the garden. Hearing the music inside, & lighted windows and feeling like two young boys – very eager.’15 These disguises extended to Mansfield’s writing: born Kathleen Beauchamp, she adopted pseudonyms including Julian Mark, Lili Heron, The Tiger, Boris Petrovsky, Matilda Berry, Elizabeth Stanley and, of course, Katherine Mansfield. When Mansfield and Murry spent Christmas at a house-party in Garsington in 1916 she wrote a skit called ‘The Laurels’ for the occasion. Aldous Huxley described it in a letter to his brother Julian: ‘We performed a superb play invented by Katherine, improvising as we went along. It was a huge success, with Murry as a Dostoevsky character and Lytton as an incredibly wicked old grandfather.’16 Part of the text, the first scene of Act I, exists in outline. Mansfield invites the actors to parody their own natures. Lytton Strachey, for whom Dora Carrington was a devoted companion, housekeeper, nurse and disciple, played the Grandfather, whose sentimental wish is for his grand-daughter Muriel, played by Carrington, to ‘warm her wings in the pretty garden & sit & read the newspaper to her grandfather – all about the bad wicked people & the bad world outside The Laurels’.17 The moody Murry, who had published a book on Dostoevsky that year and was interested in the work of Anton Chekhov, played Ivan Tchek. The script opens like this: (Act I Scene I. Breakfast room. Ivan enters, pours out a cup of coffee, lights a cigarette, stamps on the cigarette, says) IVAN. And so it goes on. (And walks out, wrapped in gloom.)18

Muriel discovers that the maid, Jane, played by Maria Nys, Aldous Huxley’s future wife, is a ‘love child’ and thinks this ‘too divine’ but Jane reproves her: ‘Don’t you know, Miss, that’s the reason what young girls like me jump off buses & in front of trains and eat rat poison & swoller acids & often murder themselves?’19 It is easy to imagine that the skit would have been entertaining for all concerned, but it is not without vitriol. By 1918 Mansfield was writing to Virginia Woolf of Garsington that ‘it is only too plain from all this that Johnny Murry and I are arrogant outcasts’ and imagining arriving in disguise, with significant class implications, at Woolf’s house in Sussex, ‘Murry en avance, with a knolled stick, fur cap, black eye, blue chin, me following with unbraided hair & a quilty shawl over my nonexisting bosom – a kind of Bill Sykes and Nancy’.20 When Mansfield gave a party herself, inviting close friends, the atmosphere could be unguarded and spontaneous. She was in London

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for Christmas in 1918 and described for Dorothy Brett the party she and Murry hosted: We gradually, under the influence of wine & Chinese mottoes gave a party – charades – Kot, Gertler, Campbell21 etc. Oh, I did love it so – loved everybody – They were all fluttering & twinkling like candles on the darkest, most mysterious Tree of all – I wanted to say to everybody – Let us stay forever just as we are.22

But when she and Murry gave a party in May 1919 after he had become editor of The Athenaeum, there was no spontaneity about it. She devises a slyly witty simile for Murry in a letter to Lytton Strachey: Poor Murry was rather like a porter who had got at last! his passengers into the railway carriage but couldn’t somehow leave them until the train went – the train would not go. Our kitten, full of deliberate malice tried to tear off Bertie’s23 trousers while Bertie talked of Spring in Sicily.24

Perhaps it was just as well that Virginia Woolf was unable to be present at this party. Mansfield wrote in response to Woolf’s letter declining the invitation, saying: ‘I wanted everybody to be there & you to be there. I wanted the small private satisfaction of looking at the party with you.’25 What they might have shared is indicated in Woolf’s letter about Mansfield to Jacques Raverat: ‘she possessed the most amazing senses of her generation so that she could actually reproduce this room for instance, with its fly, clock, dog, tortoise if need be, to the life’.26 The ability to see with a clarity that was unnerving to those she was looking at makes Mansfield’s stories about parties, where masquerading is part of the experience, particularly resonant. As her friend the painter Anne Estelle Rice wrote, long after her death, Mansfield’s eyes ‘seemed to send out a penetrating beam into the crannies and recesses of one’s nature and there was no escape from the searching scrutiny, often disconcerting and I’m sure not flattering’.27 Mansfield’s sensuous attention to detail as well as her interest in masks and disguises are evident in Wellington in the Turnbull Library’s collection of objects that belonged to her, providing an indication of her use of clothes. The depiction of parties in Mansfield’s stories always focuses on clothes, a focus that often informs those pivotal moments in the narrative. Koteliansky gave her a black Ukrainian tunic embroidered in silk with flowers which she wore feeling ‘that wonderful adventures might happen if only one is dressed and ready’.28 Also in the collection, a black woollen cape lined with black and gold damask patterned with stylised peacocks looks as if it might have been worn by a dashing highwayman’s moll, but perhaps the most interesting evidence of the dual

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consciousness of the colonial artist lies in Mansfield’s Maori and traditional artefacts, including woven flax bags, kete, which may have dated from her tour of the North Island of New Zealand in 1907, recorded in The Urewera Notebook. Her sister Vera wrote that a whalebone hei tiki (pendant) with paua shell eyes ‘was shown and worn by me and my sister K. M. when as school girls, in LONDON, we wished to be identified as New Zealanders’.29 Mansfield kept until her death a bowenite pendant that was sent to her with her brother Leslie’s military cap when he was killed in Belgium in 1915. The Maori word for bowenite is tangiwai, which means tear-water, from a legend about the petrified tears of grieving women; a passport photograph of Mansfield wearing the pendant in 1918 is symptomatic of her enduring sense of loss. The disguises in the collection rub shoulders with totemic objects that signal a sense of identification with a non-European landscape and way of life. These factors – a fascination with dress and masquerade, a sense of the complexities of belonging, an acute social awareness – are in play at the moments of disruption in Mansfield’s party stories, to which this essay now turns. One of her early stories, ‘Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding’, first published in The New Age in 1910 and revised and reprinted in her first collection of stories, In a German Pension, in 1911, is overtly feminist in its perspective and ironic in its depiction of the ‘party’. The trap that the bride will be snared in is evident from the beginning, as a wedding guest, the young Frau Brechenmacher, who is already the mother of five children, instructs her nine-year-old daughter Rosa about how to care for her siblings in her parents’ absence at the wedding. Rosa’s treat is to be allowed to wear her mother’s shawl, emblematic of her future role. Frau Brechenmacher has to dress in the dark passage so that her husband can make himself resplendent in his postman’s uniform; his shining official buttons and her ‘beautiful brooch that had four medals to the Virgin dangling from it’30 project the image of themselves that they want to convey. The Frau is beginning to enjoy herself, ‘assuming the air of dignity becoming to the wife of a postman and the mother of five children’ (p. 5), when she is humiliated by the butcher’s wife, who points out that she is a laughing stock because she failed to do up her skirt as she dressed in the dark, revealing her petticoat. A more sinister humiliation is in store for the bride, whose white dress is decorated with coloured ribbon, ‘giving her the appearance of an iced cake all ready to be cut and served in neat little pieces to the bridegroom beside her’ (p. 5). The virginal white dress is belied by the presence of ‘a little girl in a crumpled muslin dress with a wreath of forget-me-nots hanging over one ear’ (p. 5). The child cannot be forgotten; marriage to a man who ‘never changed his clothes once in two months’ (p. 7) is

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the price the bride has to pay for acquiring a respectable married status for herself, legitimising her ‘free-born’ daughter. Her brutal jailer of a mother watches her like a hawk as she dances with her guests; the mother’s manners are not alluring: ‘Her hands shook as she raised her beer mug, and when she had drunk she spat on the floor and savagely wiped her mouth with her sleeve’ (p. 6). Frau Brechenmacher longs to dance but is hemmed in by matrons, and is mortified by the suggestive crudity of her husband’s speech about the bride and groom. Feeling alienated, she follows her husband home on the ‘[w]hite and forsaken’ road (p. 7) and listens as he reminisces about their wedding night: ‘Such a clout on the ear as you gave me. . . But I soon taught you’ (p. 8). The memory of that tender occasion leads to the final sentence: ‘She lay down on the bed and put her arm across her face like a child who expected to be hurt as Herr Brechenmacher lurched in’ (p. 9). The interplay throughout between what the reader expects of a wedding party and what Frau Brechenmacher experiences is clearly ironic, but the use of her shifting perspective complicates the story. Herr Brechenmacher’s greed, and the relish he shows for fat meat, link to the picture of the bride as a cake ready to be eaten, implying that women are there to be consumed sexually and exploited as drudges. Frau Brechenmacher cannot articulate this but her shifting moods communicate her vulnerability. Hers is not a mask but an attempt to project an image that is undermined by her dawning awareness that her marriage is itself a charade. Mansfield was empowered by becoming part of the Rhythm group in April 1912. In the satire mentioned earlier, ‘Sunday Lunch’ (a jeu d’esprit rather than a story), written under the pseudonym The Tiger, she continued the motif of cannibalism. The Society for the Cultivation of Cannibalism is composed of London literati who gather in the homes of patrons to savage each other’s work. The party’s hostess greets her guest: Hostess glances rapidly over guest, narrows her eyes and nods. ‘Sweet!’ Raises her eyebrows. ‘New? From the little French shop?’ Takes the guest’s arm. ‘Now I want to introduce you to Kaila Scarrotski. He’s Hungarian. And he’s been doing those naked backs for that café. And I know you know all about Hungary, and those extraordinary places. He’s just read your ‘Pallors of Passion’ and he swears you’ve Slav blood.’ She presses the guest’s hand thereby conveying: ‘Prove you have. Remember I didn’t ask you to lunch to wait until the food was served and then eat it and go. Beat your tom-tom, dear.’31

The guests have been drawn together to impress each other with their exoticism and then metaphorically to carve up and consume their fellow writers. They begin with a novelist who is not present but the ‘obvious

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slaughter of the absentees is only a preliminary to a finer, more keen and difficult doing to death of each other’.32 Both Faith Binckes and Jenny McDonnell attribute a dialectic significance to this sketch that derives from the ongoing self-promotion of magazines of the period. In this case the antagonism is mainly between Rhythm and The New Age, little magazines competing for readers. Binckes compares ‘Sunday Lunch’ with Murry’s and Mansfield’s recent piece on ‘Seriousness in Art’: The attacks made by the ‘cannibals’ upon commercialism and the bourgeoisie were very similar to those they themselves had made upon the ‘serious and successful’ novelists and their dinner guests. In this sense, if these pieces function as manifestos then it is through their violent acts of differentiation and reinscription rather than any formulated aesthetic theory. They exist to create ‘enemies’.33

While Binckes reads Mansfield’s satire as a stimulus to controversy between little magazines which will generate audience interest, McDonnell interprets the cannibals’ contempt for their victim’s commercial success, their writing in the Daily Mail and their willingness to advertise, as symptomatic of Mansfield’s own ambition to reach a popular audience: Mansfield’s subsequent career was characterised by her development of her brand of modernist short story in publication contexts that saw her move beyond the ‘aristocratic’ mode which Rhythm had cultivated, towards a more active engagement with the commercial world of literary publishing.34

As Mansfield felt herself to be ‘a little colonial’, belonging neither in Wellington, called the Empire City by its inhabitants, nor in London, the centre of Empire, so McDonnell sees her as negotiating a position on the uneasy intersection of, or perhaps gulf between, the highbrow and the popular. The Rhythm group helped her to hone the structure of her stories, mainly through her friendship with the artists in the group. Binckes points out that contemporary critical theory’s concern with modernist gender boundaries ‘suggests the degree to which the masculinist model of modernism has conditioned how we expect to receive particular images, when in the context of Rhythm in 1911 and 1912, these were exactly the kind of issues under negotiation’.35 As she shows, the women artists working for Rhythm boldly created their own style, ignoring convention, for instance when Jessica Dismorr ‘playfully foregrounded a representational taboo by making pubic hair the main feature for the delineation of the nude female body’.36 Mansfield admired their boldness and stripped-down (in every sense) aesthetic. In 1913 she writes to

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Murry when he asks for alterations to a story for the Blue Review: ‘Im [sic] a powerful stickler for form in this style of work. I hate the sort of licence that English people give themselves – to spread over and flop and roll about. I feel as fastidious as though I wrote with acid.’37 At the same time she was looking for a literary agent, as McDonnell shows, in order to have access to a wider commercial audience than that of modernist little magazines. In 1918 she writes to Murry: ‘My serious stories wont ever bring me anything but my “child” stories ought to and my light ones, once I find a place.’38 One such story, ‘Sun and Moon’, was written in the burst of creative activity in February 1918 that also included one of Mansfield’s best-known stories, ‘Bliss’, both of them about dinner-parties. The interest in ‘Sun and Moon’ is that the perspective is that of a four- or five-year-old child who has an astute insight into his parents’ masks, donned for the party, without being aware of the implications of what he is seeing. He is mesmerised by the beauty of the dining-room and can’t stop looking at it; as the housemaid says, ‘It’s a picture’ (p. 169). What he particularly admires is the ice-pudding, which ‘was a little pink house with white snow on the roof and green windows and a brown door and stuck in the door there was a nut for a handle’ (p. 169). Sun’s sensibility is suggested when he asks whether people will eat the food; he is aware of the fragile beauty of the picture. He is told he is in his Russian costume – ‘ “Am I?” said Sun’ (p. 170) – and he and his sister have to make an appearance in front of the guests. Just as Mother has already done, they exclaim, ‘What a picture!’ (p. 171). Sun is aware of the masquerade; he is scornful of his sister’s affected insistence that her father must carry her up to bed, and intuitively conscious that he is part of his parents’ act, performed for their guests who are also in costume, ‘men in black with funny tails on their coats – like beetles’ (p. 171). Sun dreams of the ice house’s nut handle, and is woken by his parents. His father wants to ‘give ’em a bone’, ‘some pickings’ and at the same time pretends to bite his wife’s bare shoulder, a slight hint of cannibalism. What appals Sun is the reckless destruction of the formerly magical feast: There was even a bottle lying down with stuff coming out of it on to the cloth and nobody stood it up again. And the little pink house with the snow roof and the green windows was broken – broken – half melted away in the centre of the table. ‘Come on, Sun,’ said Father, pretending not to notice. (p. 173)

Father of course doesn’t notice, and doesn’t understand why Sun is shocked when Moon scrunches up the nut handle, she who always

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wants to touch everything rather than admire it. The sensuous beauty of the scene is wrecked by crass consumption, and Sun stumps off wailing. The recurrent image of the nut handle focuses both Sun’s attention and the reader’s awareness of his shifting impressions; after the party ‘Sun had never seen [his father] so jolly’ (p. 172) but when Sun howls his father is ‘no longer jolly’ (p. 173). Both parents seem tipsy to the adult reader. The moment of disruption, like that of Frau Brechenmacher, is deeply felt by the protagonist but neither Sun nor the Frau can articulate it into an epiphanic revelation. ‘Bliss’, focused around a smaller dinner-party than ‘Sun and Moon’, is one of Mansfield’s most enigmatic stories. The satirical element evident in ‘Sunday Lunch’ is in this story a thread within a subtly woven texture embracing ecstatic feeling, sensuous delight, erotic impulses and domestic detail. The playwright Eddie Warren, one of the guests, is a caricature: ‘I wonder if you have seen Bilks’ new poem called Table d’Hôte,’ said Eddie softly. ‘It’s so wonderful. In the last Anthology. Have you got a copy? I’d so like to show it to you. It begins with an incredibly beautiful line: “Why Must it Always be Tomato Soup?” ’ (p. 185)

The clothes of the first three guests to arrive are also caricatured. Mrs Norman Knight, who is wearing an orange coat with black monkeys round the hem and up the front, ‘did look like a very intelligent monkey – who had even made that yellow silk dress out of scraped banana skins. And her amber ear-rings; they were like little dangling nuts’ (p. 179). Warren’s white socks ‘seem to have got so much whiter since the moon rose’ (p. 179). The perceiving consciousness is that of the protagonist, Bertha, so she sees her baby as charming, not as grotesque, as do her guests: ‘The baby had on a white flannel gown and a blue woollen jacket’ (p. 175). A third register is quite different; while her guests gossip about sexual liaisons Bertha herself is on the edge of experiencing the life of her body for the first time. She is in a heightened state of expectation, possibly of the sexual liberation that is the subject of party gossip: ‘Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?’ (p. 174). She seems to be searching intuitively through domestic objects for transcendence. She has bought purple grapes to tone in with the dining-room carpet and becomes almost hysterical at the success of her arrangement of the fruit bowl: ‘For the dark table seemed to melt into the dusky light and the glass dish and the blue bowl to float in the air’ (p. 175). In the same elevated state she looks at the garden:

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The windows of the drawing-room opened on to a balcony overlooking the garden. At the far end, against the wall, there was a tall, slender pear tree in fullest, richest bloom; it stood perfect, as though becalmed against the jadegreen sky. Bertha couldn’t help feeling, even from this distance, that it had not a single bud or a faded petal. Down below, in the garden beds, the red and yellow tulips, heavy with flowers, seemed to lean upon the dusk. A grey cat, dragging its belly, crept across the lawn, and a black one, its shadow, trailed after. (p. 178)

She sees ‘the lovely pear tree with its wide open blossoms as a symbol of her own life’ (p. 178) but the furtive sexuality of the cats, and the heavily sensuous red and yellow tulips against the perfect white blossom of the pear tree and the chilly jade-green sky may leave the reader with a different interpretation of this powerful visual image. When Bertha puts on a white dress with jade beads and green shoes and stockings she is enacting the bliss she feels, though the language of her interior monologue is the abrupt expression of an adolescent materialist rather than of a romantic modernist: ‘Really – really – she had everything. She was young. Harry and she were as much in love as ever, and they got on splendidly and were really good pals’ (p. 178). Friends, a dressmaker and a new cook who can make omelettes are included in her review of marital satisfaction; though the register is not overtly satirical, there is a disjunction between it and her ecstatic view of the slender pear tree. When Pearl Fulton arrives, living up to her name in being ‘all in silver, with a silver fillet binding her pale blond hair’, her cool perfection regenerates Bertha’s sensuous intoxication: ‘What was there in the touch of that cool arm that could fan – fan – start blazing – blazing – the fire of bliss that Bertha did not know what to do with?’ (p. 180). We are reminded that when they met at the club, ‘Bertha had fallen in love with her, as she always did fall in love with beautiful women who had something strange about them’ (p. 177), but she has no language with which to meditate on these homoerotic sensations. Instead she regards her guests as a decorative group in a play by Chekhov, and the reader has the sense that, as in plays by Chekhov, something bizarre and unexpected may happen. When Harry salivates and begins ‘to glory in his “shameless passion for the white flesh of the lobster” and “the green of pistachio ices – green and cold like the eyelids of Egyptian dancers” ’ (p. 181), the reader wonders whether this is an oblique expression of desire for his wife, dressed as she is in white and green, or something closer to the physicality of the two cats. Bertha imagines that she has a moment of total rapport with Pearl Fulton as they gaze at the pear tree in the moonlight, reminiscent of Pearl’s silver dress and her ‘slender fingers that were so pale a light seemed to come from them’ (p. 182). Now the

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tree ‘seemed, like the flame of a candle, to stretch up, to point, to quiver in the bright air, to grow taller and taller as they gazed – almost to touch the rim of the round, silver moon’ (pp. 182–3). Her experience of bliss suddenly precipitates Bertha into feeling ardent desire for her husband for the first time, though they were ‘such good pals’ (p. 184) that Bertha thinks her coldness has not mattered. The reader may disagree in view of Harry’s lust for the white flesh of the lobster. When Bertha glimpses her husband confirming what is evidently a regular assignation with Pearl Fulton, we realise why they both arrived late and why he has made a show of being rude to her. This provides a different take on the vision of the phallic pear tree stretching up to the round moon. Bertha’s elevated discourse of the pear tree as a symbol of her life and of her affinity with Pearl disintegrates, and she seems to expect that her disillusionment will be mirrored in the tree: Bertha simply ran over to the long windows. ‘Oh, what is going to happen now?’ she cried. But the pear tree was as lovely as ever and as full of flower and as still. (p. 185)

Mansfield weaves her own tantalising cloth in this story, sustaining the satirical mode but intertwining it with conflicting registers. Again, the moment of disruption is clear to the reader as Bertha’s conception of her bond with her husband and with Pearl is revealed to be an illusion, but Bertha herself has no language with which to articulate her misapprehension of her relationships. The contrast in the final lines between Bertha’s restless longing for something momentous to happen and the tranquillity of the pear tree leaves the reader with a sharply etched but enigmatic image. Writing to Woolf, Mansfield referred to a letter from Chekhov in which he said that ‘what the writer does is not so much to solve the question but to put the question. There must be the question put. That seems to me a very nice dividing line between the true & the false writer’.39 ‘Bliss’ is evidence of Mansfield’s subtle ability to put the question of whether Bertha has moved beyond her child-like bliss at the opening of the story to a more profound awareness of the pleasures and dangers inherent in sexual attraction. All the stories discussed so far have a European setting. The last two parties to be considered are set in New Zealand and add a different dimension to Mansfield’s ambition as a writer. She wrote in her journal in 1916: ‘Oh, I want for one moment to make our undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the old world. It must be mysterious, as though floating – it must take the breath.’40 The undiscovered country in these stories relates to hierarchies in a new world. Both focus on particular

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social situations and both use the perspective of a young girl; as always with Mansfield’s stories, the reader is invited to guess the age of the protagonist. In ‘Her First Ball’, Leila’s interior monologue swoops the readers in a cab with her Sheridan cousins towards her first dance, sharing her observations about their magical appearance: ‘Meg’s tuberoses, Jose’s long loop of amber, Laura’s little dark head, pushing above her white fur like a flower through snow’ (p. 265). The text itself seems to be in movement as Leila registers details in passing: ‘on the pavement gay couples seemed to float through the air; little satin shoes chased each other like birds’ (p. 265). She may be too excited to notice a paradoxical appeal in the ladies’ room: ‘ “Aren’t there any invisible hair-pins?” cried a voice. “How most extraordinary! I can’t see a single invisible hair-pin” ’ (p. 266). It is clear from the beginning of the story that Leila is from an isolated and remote country home, and had tried to get out of coming to the ball but now ‘the rush of longing she had had to be sitting on the verandah of their forsaken up-country home, listening to the baby owls crying “More Pork” in the moonlight, was changed to a rush of joy so sweet that it was hard to bear alone’ (pp. 266–7). The story is rooted in its setting. When Leila dances with ‘quite an old man – fat, with a big bald patch on his head’ (p. 267), whose ‘waistcoat was creased, there was a button off his glove, his coat looked as if it was dusty with French chalk’ (p. 269), her astute sartorial assessment of him does not prepare her for his ability to shatter the magic of the moment. She has pitied his age and he retaliates by saying that before long she will be one of the chaperones ‘sitting up there on the stage, looking on, in your nice black velvet. And these pretty arms will have turned into little short fat ones’ (p. 269). Leila stops dancing because she ‘wanted to be at home, or sitting on the verandah listening to those baby owls’ (p. 270). Another partner comes along and once again the ‘lights, the azaleas, the dresses, the pink faces, the velvet chairs, all became one beautiful flying wheel’ (p. 270). On this occasion the moment of disturbance may register more decisively with the reader than with the character. Leila doesn’t recognise the fat man when she bumps into him with a new partner, but he punctures the reader’s image of the ball. The deft depiction of New Zealand life, with its respectable chaperones and narrow social round (‘Were you at the Neaves’ on Tuesday?’ (p. 269)), also sketches in a different, non-European landscape with its own wildlife in which the young, like Leila, come to consciousness. That issue is of particular relevance to the final story in the sequence, ‘The Garden Party’. The story was first published over three weeks in the Westminster Gazette and, as McDonnell explains, significant passages were deleted:

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The passage following Laura’s debate with the workmen about where best to place the marquee for the garden party was omitted, eliminating the main indication of the story’s New Zealand setting (the karaka trees) and, perhaps more importantly, Laura’s romantic and idealised notions of class camaraderie with the workmen.41

The link between the setting and class consciousness is crucial to an understanding of the subtlety of the story. As Vincent O’Sullivan argues: ‘The almost innate belief in most New Zealanders that theirs is a classless community, that the social hierarchies of an older world, if not quite shucked off, are certainly less constraining, has perhaps led to odd distortions of interpretation.’42 The major one, as he sees it, is that ‘The Garden Party’ is read as a tale of colonial charm and of winsome adolescence rather than as a recognition of the Sheridans as ‘pampered, conventional, smugly riddled with the certainties of a class for whom the rest of society exists in a tributary role’.43 A converse distortion appears in David James’s reading: ‘Mansfield adapted the subjectivism of free indirect discourse, mimicking vanities and pleasantries to arrive at satirical indictments.’44 To see the story simply as satirical is to undermine its complexity. As O’Sullivan says, Laura’s ‘is a genuine moment of fulfilment, even as it does not alter in the least the limiting rigidity of her class. The reader is directed to acknowledge both.’45 Clothes signal gender and class dividing lines: Jose, on the morning of the party, is ‘in a silk petticoat and a kimono jacket’ (p. 336) and her father and brother are ‘brushing their hats ready to go to the office’ (p. 338), whereas the workmen are already in their shirt-sleeves in the garden erecting a marquee and the rustle of the print skirt of the maid, Sadie, is heard. The elusive, polyphonic voice of ‘The Garden Party’ is unobtrusive in its manoeuvring of the reader. That narrative voice, opening the story in medias res, modulates between the affected register of Mrs Sheridan (‘They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden party if they had ordered it’ (p. 336)) and Laura’s view of ‘these absurd class distinctions. Well, for her part she didn’t feel them. Not a bit, not an atom’ (p. 338). Yet she has just been taken aback by the fact that a workman picked and smelt a sprig of lavender. This is adolescent and contradictory but it is gestured towards rather than satirised. The evocation of excitement in the house is a reminder of Woolf’s comment about Mansfield’s senses: ‘All the doors in the house seemed to be open. The house was alive with soft, quick steps and running voices’ (p. 339). The florist’s canna lilies have ‘big pink flowers, wide open, radiant, almost frighteningly alive on bright crimson stems’ (p. 339). Only with the news of the accidental death of a carter does the tone of the narrative voice become supercilious; the cottages where the carter lived ‘were the

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greatest possible eyesore, and they had no right to be in that neighbourhood at all. They were mean little dwellings’ (p. 343). Mrs Sheridan’s voice is audible here, in the brief sentence ‘Children swarmed’ (p. 343). Laura is astounded and puzzled that her mother, who is trying on a new hat, will not cancel the party. She gives the hat to Laura using the significant manipulating phrase, ‘I have never seen you look such a picture’ (p. 344). Laura goes to her own room, where she sees the picture: ‘There, quite by chance, the first thing she saw was this charming girl in the mirror, in her black hat trimmed with gold daisies, and a long black velvet ribbon’ (p. 345). She decides to masquerade, putting aside the suffering of the carter’s family: ‘I’ll remember it again after the party’s over, she decided. And somehow that seemed quite the best plan. . .’ (p. 345). Again, her mother’s voice is heard as a strand within her consciousness. The party itself is described in two paragraphs, and then Laura is dispatched with its left-overs to the mourning family. Her fancy dress is out of place among the shawls and tweed caps of the cottages, and she is self-conscious about her shining frock and big hat. She is expected to see the corpse, which, ironically, ‘looks a picture’ (p. 349) according to his sister-in-law. The two pictures meet each other and Laura gets it wrong again, seeing the dead face as an image of beautiful dreaming contentment. But she sobs and says ‘Forgive my hat’, an indication that she knows she has been seduced by vanity into betraying him. In the final lines of the story she fails to articulate what she has learnt, and the interior monologue reveals her mistaken trust in her brother: But what life was she couldn’t explain. No matter. He quite understood. ‘Isn’t it, darling?’ said Laurie. (p. 349)

Since he sounds so much like Mrs Sheridan he clearly has not quite understood. For the reader, the pleasure of the party coexists with the dark knowledge of the carter’s death: ‘the perfect afternoon slowly ripened, slowly faded, slowly its petals closed’ (p. 346). What Mansfield does is to offer both versions of the event, disrupting fictional conventions. She writes in a letter that Laura: feels things ought to happen differently. First one and then another. But life isn’t like that. We haven’t the ordering of it. Laura says, ‘But all these things must not happen at once’ and Life answers ‘Why not? How are they divided from each other.’ And they do all happen, it is inevitable.46

What is revealed by the dualistic story is the disruptive moment that is the pivot of all the stories discussed here. Though Mansfield advised

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Murry always to have a mask ready under the mask, what she revealed in her stories about parties was the moment when the mask slipped and the reader could see behind it: ‘one tries to go deep – to speak to the secret self we all have – to acknowledge that’.47

Notes 1. Katherine Mansfield, ‘Sunday Lunch’, Rhythm 2.9 (1912), pp.  223–5: p. 223. 2. Ibid., p. 224. 3. T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber, 1969), p. 14. 4. Antony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (New York: Viking, 1980), p. 239. 5. Katherine Mansfield, Poems of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 30. 6. Christopher Hassall, Edward Marsh: Patron of the Arts (London: Longmans, 1959), p. 226. 7. Helen Shaw (ed.), Dear Lady Ginger: An Exchange of Letters Between Lady Ottoline Morrell and D’Arcy Cresswell (London: Century, 1984), p. 118. 8. Hassall, Edward Marsh, p. 118. 9. Katherine Mansfield, The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, ed. Margaret Scott (Canterbury: Lincoln University and Daphne Brasell Associates, 1997), vol. 2, p. 166. 10. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 166. 11. Mansfield, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984– 2008), vol. 1, p. 318. Punctuation and spelling are erratic in the letters and journals; I quote them as they appear in the text. All emphases are original. 12. Peter Brooker, Bohemia in London: The Social Scene of Early Modernism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 107–8. 13. Alpers, Life, p. 87. 14. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 1, pp. 75–7. 15. Gretchen Gerzina, Carrington: A Life of Dora Carrington 1893–1932 (London: Pimlico, 1995), p. 93. 16. Quoted in Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 76. 17. Ibid., p. 77. 18. Ibid., p. 76. 19. Ibid., p. 77. 20. Mansfield, Letters vol. 2, pp. 257–8. 21. The Russian emigré S. S. Koteliansky; the painter Mark Gertler; Gordon Campbell (Lord Glenavy). 22. Mansfield, Letters, vol. 2, pp. 298–9. 23 The philosopher Bertrand Russell. 24. Mansfield, Letters, vol. 2, pp. 321–2. 25. Ibid., p. 320. 26. Virginia Woolf, A Change of Perspective: The Letters of Virginia Woolf.

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27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

Angela Smith Volume III: 1923–1928, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (London: Chatto and Windus, 1981), p. 59. Anon., Katherine Mansfield in Her Letters and Works: Exhibition 25 April–16 May 1958 (London: New Zealand House, 1958), p. 5. Mansfield, Letters, vol. 1, p. 151. Laurel Harris, Mary Morris and Joanna Woods (eds), The Material Mansfield: Traces of a Writer’s Life (Auckland: Random House, 2008), p. 43. Katherine Mansfield, Katherine Mansfield Selected Stories, ed. Angela Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 4. Unless otherwise indicated, all future references to the stories will be taken from this edition. Page references are given in the text. Mansfield, ‘Sunday Lunch’, p. 224. Ibid., p. 225. Faith Binckes, Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde Reading Rhythm, 1910–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 117. Jenny McDonnell, Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace: At the Mercy of the Public (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 73. Binckes, Modernism, Magazines, p. 161. Ibid., p. 159. Mansfield, Letters, vol. 1, p. 124. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 75. Ibid., p. 320. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 32. McDonnell, Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace, p. 146. Katherine Mansfield, Katherine Mansfield New Zealand Stories, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 8. Ibid., p. 9. David James, ‘Modernist Narratives: Revisions and Re-readings’, in Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth and Andrew Thacker (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 85–107: p. 95. Mansfield, New Zealand Stories, pp. 10–11. Mansfield, Letters, vol. 5, p. 101. Ibid., vol. 4, p. 278.

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Chapter 5

Virginia Woolf’s Idea of a Party Bryony Randall

The rhythm of Virginia Woolf’s daily existence in early adulthood was largely dictated by the social obligations of a young English woman of her class, a round of activities including regular attendance at, and hosting of, a variety of different parties. Lunch- and tea-parties she often found simply dull; evening-parties, however, were much more difficult for both Woolf and her sister Vanessa. It was not only that the young women frequently felt awkward and out of place at such events (in a diary entry for 15 July 1903, Virginia claims that she and Vanessa frequently spoke to no-one for an entire evening).1 Their chaperoning by their half-brother George, and his proprietorial attitude towards them (inspecting and criticising their choice of clothes, berating them for perceived failures to behave appropriately), made the whole experience of party-going fraught with potential distress – and, ultimately, danger. Woolf’s memoir ‘22 Hyde Park Gate’ is largely taken up with the description of her first evening-party escorted by George; not only did she return home weary and disappointed, but once she had retired to bed, George entered her room, ‘flung himself on my bed, and took me in his arms’ – he was, she records, both her and Vanessa’s ‘lover’.2 ‘Old Bloomsbury’ picks up where ‘22 Hyde Park Gate’ leaves off, and here there is a significant slippage in narrative tense, for while Woolf begins by recalling the specific party described in the previous piece, she then states that ‘There would be a tap at the door; the light would be turned out and George would fling himself on my bed, cuddling and kissing and otherwise embracing me.’3 The verb form confirms that sexual abuse at the hands of her half-brother following attendance at a party was not an exceptional event. In sum, it is not surprising that there is little in the record of Woolf’s early years evincing enthusiasm for parties of any hue. In later years, Woolf displayed at least a more ambivalent attitude towards parties, as her husband recalled (reflecting here on the period 1920–23 in particular):

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Virginia loved ‘Society’, its functions and parties, the bigger the better; but she also liked – at any rate in prospect – any party. Her attitude to this, as to most things, was by no means simple. The idea of a party always excited her, and in practice she was very sensitive to the actual mental and physical excitement of the party itself, the rise of temperature of mind and body, the ferment and fountain of noise. Sometimes she enjoyed it as much in the event as in anticipation, and sometimes, of course, owing to her peculiar vulnerability to the slings and arrows of (not very) outrageous fortune, she would leave a boring party in despair as if it were the last scene of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung with Hogarth House and the universe falling in flames and ruin about her ears. [. . .] She not only enjoyed society, the kaleidoscope of human beings, conversation, and the excitement of parties, she was through and through a professional novelist, and all this was the raw material of her trade.4

The diaries and letters of Woolf’s mature years certainly record frequent and sometimes rapid shifts in attitude towards parties, between enjoyment and temporary, or supposedly permanent, avowals of renunciation. Indeed, they suggest a rather more negative attitude to parties than Leonard’s recollection offers. For example, in a letter to Marjorie Joad (the Woolfs’ assistant at the Hogarth Press) dated July 1924, Woolf insists that, while ‘it was great fun at the party [held by John Maynard Keynes], enchanting, lyrical, Shakespeare with not a coarse word, and chaste conversations everywhere’, she now ‘do[esn’t] want any more parties for an age, but to live like a caterpillar on a leaf’.5 Six months later, however, she agreed to co-host a party with her sister-in-law Karin Stephen but, rather than anticipating it with pleasure, her letters of invitation record nothing but dread, referring to it as ‘an awful, awful, awful party’ and ‘an appalling party’.6 In the event, illness meant that she was unable to attend; or, as the case may be, ‘illness gave her the excuse to miss [. . .] the party’.7 An oscillating pattern of sociability and withdrawal was in part informed over the years by her physical movement between London, Richmond and Sussex, as well as the state of her health. But it was also connected to the pattern of her writing. And it is here that we can start to detect a more intimate relationship between parties and Woolf’s creative output; namely, one very productive way of seeing the relationship between her texts is as that between guests at a party. My aim here is gradually to move towards this suggestion, through analyses of the ways in which Woolf represents parties and talks about them in her diaries and letters. An apparent incompatibility between parties, or at least certain kinds of parties, and Woolf’s ability to write is vividly expressed in her diary entry for 22 October 1935, composed while Woolf was in the closing stages of working on The Years (1937):

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I think I shall refuse all invitations to chatter parties till I’m done. Could it only be by Christmas! For instance, if I go to Edith Sitwell’s cocktail this evening I shall only pick up some exacerbating picture: I shall froth myself into sparklets; and there’ll be the whole smoothing and freshening to begin again. But after The Years is done then I shall go everywhere, and expose every cranny to the light.8

Here, while presenting an appealing picture of the short-term effects of the party – ‘froth myself into sparklets’ – Woolf clearly feels that the corollary of her attendance would be severe disruption to her focus on writing The Years. Yet the relationship between parties and writing is, for Woolf, far from entirely negative. While, as Leonard Woolf observes, parties provided some of the ‘raw material’ for her work, this is not the only way in which parties fed her creativity. What is vividly apparent at a number of moments in the Woolf archive is precisely that the idea of a party excited her – understood differently from the phrase as used by Leonard Woolf as a ‘real’, anticipated party, but rather as an imagined one. The idea of a party manifests itself in various different fictional parties in her work. But one can also detect a relationship between this ‘idea’ and her conceptualisation of what new forms her writing might take.

‘I lay in bed and imagined it’: the idea of a party There is a wide variety of parties to be found in Woolf’s fiction. The Voyage Out (1915) features picnic and river parties, which provide the opportunity not only for the central characters, Rachel and Terence, to plight their troth, albeit in an ambivalent manner, but also for the homoerotic grass-rolling scene between Rachel and her aunt Helen. Woolf’s first novel also presents the most boisterous party scene in all her work; nowhere else in her oeuvre does dancing feature so explicitly, for example, and in such a celebratory fashion.9 The contrast between the tea-parties of Katharine Hilbery’s own social circle and the one she attends at the Denham family home, in Night and Day (1919), is a crucial indicator of the social gulf Katharine negotiates in her liaison with Ralph Denham.10 In both To The Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931), dinner-parties – or at least dinner-gatherings – carry highly significant thematic and structural weight; these opportunities to bring together all the major characters in each novel have been given extensive critical attention.11 In Mrs Dalloway (1925), there is a lunchparty orchestrated by Lady Bruton so as to exercise her political will in this feminine, domestic frame.12 And of course there is Mrs Dalloway’s

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own famous evening-party. But there are also evening-parties in Jacob’s Room (1922) and The Years, parties which take place largely inside, but where there are opportunities for people to mingle freely around one or more rooms. This combination of restriction and freedom allows for a particularly productive exploration of connections and configurations between characters; just such a combination also characterises the most appropriate critical frameworks for exploring Woolf’s oeuvre as a whole, which acknowledge the remarkably extensive interconnections between her texts, while also recognising the integrity of each. It is to that kind of party this chapter will now turn. The parties of this kind which Woolf liked best appear, despite Leonard’s assertions, to have been those she hadn’t been to. For example, her journal entry for 30 June 1903 begins ‘Last night, I leant out of my window & took part in a dance which was being carried on with great vigour in Queen’s Gate. I have just come back from a real dance – in which I joined in the orthodox fashion. Honestly, I enjoyed my window dance the most.’13 More than twenty years later, Woolf describes similar delight in a party in which she ‘took part’ only vicariously, namely the party she had been supposed to co-host with Karin Stephen, but from which ill-health saved her. She says, in a letter to Marjorie Joad on 15 February 1925: ‘My party was absolutely heavenly. I lay in bed and imagined it. Never shall I go to a party any other way. One is so brilliant; so happy; so beautiful. What really happened was a solid mix of incompatibles.’14 Notably, in the weeks following this event, Woolf began work on a series of short stories set at a party – specifically at Mrs Dalloway’s party. She had in fact originally conceived what was to become Mrs Dalloway as ‘a short book consisting of six or seven short stories’, called At Home: or The Party. While these were not, apparently, all to be set at a party, ‘all must converge upon the party at the end’.15 In the event, Mrs Dalloway was published as a novel in May 1925, but Woolf had already begun drafting a set of party-based short stories in March of that year. She imagined a book made up of ‘the stories of people at Mrs D’s party’, each of which would be published separately, though the book would also be ‘complete in itself’.16 If her feelings about actually attending parties were highly ambivalent, the ‘party consciousness’, as she put it in a diary entry for 27 April 1925, clearly still absorbed her.17 Yet what sounds as if it might produce texts characterised by glamour, even frivolity (Woolf expands on what she means by the ‘party consciousness’: ‘the frock consciousness &c. The fashion world at the Becks’), actually prompts a series of texts riven by conflict, tension and anxiety. Nena Skrbic observes that the stories ‘cumulatively convey a

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sense of suffocation by way of a buildup of anguish and isolation’18 – hardly representing Woolf’s fantasy of the ‘brilliant [. . .] happy [. . .] beautiful’ party-goer. This cumulative effect is important. While each story stands alone, certain effects are amplified when they are read as a collection. For example, the stories mainly consist of descriptions of interactions between two individuals, some introduced to each other for the first time (‘Ancestors’, ‘The Introduction’, ‘Together and Apart’, ‘The Man Who Loved His Kind’), some who are already friends (‘Happiness’, ‘A Simple Melody’, ‘A Summing Up’). ‘The New Dress’ is the only story of the seven in which interaction is not the central focus. The diffidence of its protagonist, Mabel Waring, is catastrophically amplified by her distress at realising, too late, that the dress she has spent weeks working on with her dressmaker specially for this event is ‘not right’; it is, indeed, a ‘horror’, and in her tortured self-consciousness she finds herself ‘left alone on the blue sofa, punching the cushion to look occupied’.19 Thus, and although some of the other stories are no less uncomfortable, the fact that they are all structured around or framed by interaction, however desultory or unsuccessful, means that, when read in the context of the group of stories as a whole, the mood of isolation and awkwardness in ‘The New Dress’ is further amplified. In turn, this reminds the reader of the ultimate solitude of each individual in these stories, despite, or indeed thrown into relief by, their attempts at communication. There is indeed a complex web of interconnections not only between these stories, but between them and the novels which preceded and followed them in Woolf’s oeuvre. Characters mentioned in one story appear in another (though none actually interact across stories), and some appear in slightly altered guises in the novels; images, phrases and themes resonate across all ten texts. I will return to the specifics of some of these interactions below. For the moment, I want to turn to some other relatively neglected party scenes in Woolf, and propose that a phrase Woolf coins in one of her imagined parties offers a helpful way of understanding not only her representations of parties in her texts, but also the relationships between her texts.

‘Inconsecutive conversations’ Mrs Dalloway’s party is certainly the best known, and most critically scrutinised, of Woolf’s parties; it is the focus of the novel from its very first pages. It also takes up a considerable proportion of the novel as a whole – around 15%. However, a similar and similarly extensive party also forms the bulk of the final part of The Years. This party gathers

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together various members of the central Pargiter family, and is focalised mainly through Peggy, a representative of the younger generation of Pargiters and, as a doctor, also the embodiment of feminist progress. Peggy’s feelings about the party vacillate; mostly, she does not appear to be enjoying it. For example, she finds herself ‘marooned when the dance started, over by the bookcase’ and resorts to appearing to admire the binding on a book, though she then opens it at random and, as she has predicted (presumably because she knows the book, Sur l’eau by Maupassant), finds a quotation which will ‘say what [she’s] thinking’.20 Beckoned back across the room by her aunt Eleanor, and seating herself on the floor, she not only has ‘a queer view of people’s feet’, but ‘[o]dd little gusts of inconsecutive conversations reached her . . . down in Norfolk where my brother-in-law has a boat . . . Oh, a complete washout, yes I agree. . . . People talked nonsense at parties.’21 For Peggy, these ‘inconsecutive conversations’ appear, on the whole, irritating, contributing to the misanthropic frame of mind in which she already finds herself (and confirmed by the quotation from Maupassant she happened upon). Her mood contrasts strongly with, and is indeed amplified by, her aunt Eleanor’s existential joy, ‘happy in this world [. . .] happy with living people’.22 Woolf’s decision to make Peggy the focaliser of this party, rather than, for example, Eleanor, is both symptomatic and generative of an oblique perspective. Literally, Peggy has an unusual point of view on the party; in this sequence, for example, from being ‘marooned’ and isolated at an event whose whole aim is interaction, she then sits on the floor, giving her a shoe’s-eye view of her fellow guests. Her disdain for the dancing which is taking place is amplified by this focus on feet, depersonalising the dancers, who become reduced specifically to their shoes – to externals. Thus when Renny, a relation by marriage, appears, it is from the feet up: ‘a pair of pumps crossed Peggy’s field of vision and stopped in front of her’.23 By contrast, ‘the voices went on over her head [. . .] the little group on the chairs above her were talking; they were laughing’.24 Peggy’s semi-detachment from the conversation, which would normally be assumed to be at the heart of the party experience, draws attention to the extent to which the interactions described are interrupted, halted, peter out. The ellipses which structure Peggy’s experience of the scraps of ‘inconsecutive conversations’ continue to be scattered through the somewhat more coherent conversation between Eleanor and Renny which ensues. Further, the terms used to describe this interaction continue the sense of the ‘inconsecutive’: Eleanor forgets what they were saying; they are ‘interrupted’ (by ‘a voice from a skirt with a pink bow on the hem’ – again, Peggy’s perspective reduces people

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to the clothes they have, presumably, carefully selected for this event); Eleanor ‘stopped’; ‘[a]gain the music interrupted’; she ‘stopped’ again; and eventually ‘[t]he music stopped [. . .] the couples broke apart’.25 The stratification brought into play by Peggy’s position on the floor, as she experiences the physical layers of the party, resonates with the concept of ‘inconsecutive conversations’ to encourage us to read the party vertically as well as horizontally, as the meaning of conversations proceeds not just, or even not at all, in a linear, consecutive fashion. There is critical precedent for viewing conversation as a significant theoretical tool through which to examine Woolf’s texts, and her party texts in particular. Anne Besnault-Levita has described Woolf’s party stories of 1925 as ‘built around the idea of conversation as a form of social exchange’.26 She clarifies, however, that here it is the failure of communication, as much as, indeed more than, its success, with which Woolf is particularly concerned. At the same time, conversation has, for Woolf, ‘a political as well as an ethical value’, understood not just to mean that it bears ideological weight, as it clearly does, but also to mean that conversation can be valuable; it can act as a positive model of interaction.27 I want to explore the possibilities that the representation specifically of those ‘inconsecutive conversations’ generated by the party space, which disrupt social, narrative or formal expectations, offers, both in readings of specific texts by Woolf and, ultimately, to inform an understanding of the relationships between her texts. The idea of the inconsecutive conversation appears at a significant moment in one of Woolf’s earliest fictional writings, the short story ‘Phyllis and Rosamond’ (1906). This text describes the experience of the two sisters Hibbert, closely resembling Woolf and Vanessa as young women, whose stifling social lives and attitudes are, briefly, challenged by their attendance, unchaperoned, at a party given by the Tristrams, who live in a ‘distant and unfashionable quarter of London’ – namely Bloomsbury (where the Stephen siblings had in fact moved from Kensington two years previously).28 The Tristrams are clearly modern in a way that Phyllis and Rosamond are not, in their attitudes to religion, love, marriage and art. The intensity of the conversations that take place at this party are highly disconcerting to the sisters, and at one point Rosamond is ‘surprised to find that her most profound discoveries were taken as the starting point of further investigations, and represented no conclusions’.29 It is useful here to note that the OED defines ‘inconsecutive’ as ‘characterized by want of sequence’.30 Here, what the sisters assume to be the normal sequence of conversation, including what marks the beginning, middle and end of these social interactions, is disrupted. Thus, while the conversations recorded are, by comparison with

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those at the party in The Years, entirely coherent, to this extent they are ‘inconsecutive’ to the Hibberts; they do not follow the familiar sequence of remarks, governed by conservative social norms, which hitherto constituted, for these young women, party conversation. Woolf’s later texts move, however, from a description of the disruption of expected sequences generated by a clash of social expectations, to formal evocations of inconsecutive party conversation. The years 1918–22 saw Woolf produce some of the most formally experimental of all her texts, mainly in the form of short stories, but where this experimentation found its way into her novels it was not, apparently, universally acclaimed. So, for example, Woolf’s diary entry for 26 July 1922 records Leonard’s rapturous reception of Jacob’s Room – ‘[h]e calls it a work of genius’ and ‘without lapse (save perhaps the party)’.31 This tantalising caveat is not explained; we do not know what it is about the party which Leonard sees as falling short of the otherwise ‘interesting [. . .] beautiful [. . .] quite intelligible’ novel. But perhaps it is in this last regard that Leonard identified the ‘lapse’. The party chapter of Jacob’s Room (chapter 7) is approached particularly obliquely, even in this novel of oblique approaches, via a description of the vogue for paper flowers used to decorate finger-bowls. The main part of the chapter is made up of a series of interrupted dialogues, or rather fragments of speech, only some of which appear to describe successful communication. Characters frequently interrupt themselves, and each other; and the narrative also interrupts one dialogue to launch with no explanation into a conversation between other characters, some of whom are already familiar to the reader, some of whom appear only this once.32 The fragmentary nature of the conversations is emphasised by the use of white space to separate short pieces of text from each other. If, as Julia Eliot says, ‘ “the amusing thing about a party is to watch the people – coming and going, coming and going” ’,33 then there is certainly plenty of opportunity for this pastime at this particular party; indeed, there is little other than ‘coming and going’. The form of this party scene puts the reader in Julia’s position; the lack of sequence or explanation between the snippets of conversation offers the reader a sense of both excitement and confusion. Both these qualities, evoked by ‘inconsecutive conversations’, are particularly prominent in the experience of reading Woolf’s apparently unfinished short story ‘The Evening Party’. Woolf toyed with the idea of calling this piece ‘A Conversation Party’, drawing yet further attention to its defining characteristic. It was apparently first drafted in 1918, revisited in 1921 (when Woolf was working on both Jacob’s Room and what was to become the short story collection Monday or Tuesday), and possibly also revisited in 1925, around the time the later party

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short stories were drafted.34 It is at this later date that she described an idea for a story made up of ‘an exciting conversation all, or almost all, in dialogue’, which, as Susan Dick speculates, ‘may also refer to this story’, eventually published in Dick’s collection as ‘The Evening Party’.35 Save the first two paragraphs, the story is indeed made up entirely of dialogue. It is similar in this respect to the party scene in Jacob’s Room, which is also made up mostly of direct speech but which, unlike ‘The Evening Party’, contains some connective commentary.36 ‘The Evening Party’ begins by setting the kind of glamorous, inviting scene that might be expected with ‘the idea of a party’: ‘sweet is the night air’ in the street, we are told by the first-person narrator as he or she approaches ‘the house of the party’; ‘the tree droops its dark shower of blossom’; inside the house, ‘[o]n every chair there is a little soft mound; pale whisps of gauze are curled upon bright silks’; and ‘in [the] faces [of the other guests] the stars seem to shine through rose coloured flesh’.37 There is none of the awkwardness, anxiety or disillusionment that pervades the later party stories; while one of the speaking voices observes that the other party guests ‘don’t exist’,38 this is mild condemnation, and apparently of no concern (the narrator and his or her companion continue their poetic exchange with reflections on Shelley and Blake), in contrast to the disapproval, confusion or outright hostility generated in protagonists by their fellow guests in the later party stories. The atmosphere of elegance and decorousness pervades the story throughout, to the final lines: ‘The lights rise and fall; the water’s thin as air; the moon’s behind it. D’you sink? D’you rise? D’you see the islands? Alone with me.’39 The conversations which take place here do not have the selfcensoring, halting aspect of the conversation in The Years, nor are they physically disjointed from each other (in terms of both space on the page and space within the imagined party) as in Jacob’s Room. Indeed, in some parts they appear just as ‘consecutive’ as the conversations in, for example, ‘Phyllis and Rosamund’. Rather, they are ‘inconsecutive’ insofar as they either lack logical sequence, frequently following an aesthetic and/or intimately personal line, which the reader can only infer rather than having it explained by any narrative description of interiority (as in the later party stories); or because, when a new speaker joins the two central voices, there is none of the usual narrative paraphernalia alerting us to this shift in dynamic – that is, we are not told who is speaking. Therefore, when Dominic Head asserts that ‘the exploration by the narrator of impressions received is interrupted by other guests at the party whose collective conversation betrays a restricted outlook’,40 the word ‘interrupted’ is to some extent inaccurate. The central conversation between narrator and companion might indeed have continued

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along different lines if, for example, one of them had not spotted the professor ‘loom[ing] upon us’, or at another moment if the hostess had not overheard ‘talk of melancholy at my party?’41 (surely prefiguring Mrs Dalloway’s distress that ‘in the middle of my party, here’s death’).42 Head’s reading of the text identifies a tension between the inclusivity proposed by the main speaker and the hierarchising approach of the professor of literature with whom (s)he discusses the merits of both the ‘moderns’ and the ‘ancients’. Such a ‘restricted outlook’ could also be imputed to the party guest who admires the main speaker’s writing; and the other who remembers him or her as a child. Yet the extent to which these interactions can be read as interruptions is almost entirely mitigated by the smooth textual surface of the story, eschewing entirely any indirect discourse, regardless of who is speaking. The opening utterances of new characters are not at all, to this extent, experienced by the reader as ‘interruptions’ – the already ‘inconsecutive’ conversation continues, paradoxically without stylistic break or rupture. Head’s reading ultimately relies on an interpretation of the content of these interactions, failing to give significant weight to the formal qualities of this text in this regard. The form of this text raises the question of what counts as, and who defines, ‘consecutive’ conversation. Head’s reading insists that the other party guests disrupt the sequence of the conversation between the two main voices. But is it not precisely the point of a party that interactions occur which may challenge or distract – and in so doing may indeed offer otherwise unforeseen opportunities (as when, for example, we hear more about the narrator’s views on literary history in his or her interaction with the professor)? This is the risk one takes when attending a party. The fact that, in this story, it is often difficult even to identify which of the supposedly separate characters is speaking, on the one hand, evokes the mingling of voices at a noisy party, but, on the other, implies a welcoming of all voices at the same level of narrative discourse. These interactions are as much a part of the narrator’s experience of this party as his or her ‘poetic flight’.43 The party space, in principle at least, is a non-hierarchical one, where bodies can move and voices interact freely, and with the same level of authority. In practice, the power imbalances of the wider social world – based on gender, class, education, or wealth – do infiltrate the party space (as critics such as BesnaultLevita, Skrbic, Christine Reynier and Beth Rigel Daugherty argue). But the flattening of hierarchy in the consistently inconsecutive form of ‘The Evening Party’ reminds the reader of the different-but-equal premise of the very ‘idea of a party’. Inconsecutive conversations, then, while not necessarily offered by

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Woolf in every instance as ideal models of interaction, at least have the great advantage of reflecting the non-hierarchical party space, which in turn provides a model for the non-hierarchical relationship I am proposing between Woolf’s texts. What is more, if they are ‘characterized by want of sequence’, then they clearly resonate with her celebrated programme for a progressive woman’s writing in A Room of One’s Own (1929).44 The profitability of a broken sequence, yet one in productive tension with the search for, or ‘want of’, such continuity or cohesion, takes us to my proposition that the party might offer us a model for the relationship between Woolf’s texts. In the period between Woolf’s first draft of ‘The Evening Party’ and her return to it, she made a now well known diary entry (dated 26 January 1920) which explicitly points towards a party model for the relationship between her texts: ‘[C]onceive [?],’ she suggests, ‘mark on the wall, K[ew]. G[ardens]. & unwritten novel taking hands & dancing in unity’.45 Once again, this image of a literary form made up of a collection of otherwise discrete texts (‘The Mark on the Wall’ and ‘Kew Gardens’ are names of short stories Woolf had recently written) led her towards her next novel, Jacob’s Room. But the terms she uses here explicitly evoke the image of the party (albeit a dance-party, a type of which she herself seemed not particularly fond). Critics have tended to focus here on Woolf’s search for ‘a “unity” in this form’,46 both in terms of its being a particular feature of the short story (Head’s Bakhtinian analysis, positing the short-story genre as participating more closely in poetic discourse than the novel and the form thus pulling in the direction of a ‘unitary’ poetic language)47 and in analyses of the short-story cycle (Skrbic’s use of short-story theory to emphasise the ‘harmony [. . .] the unalterable and permanent’ informing ‘the Mrs Dalloway grouping’).48 Certainly Woolf envisages an eventual ‘unity’, but excessive critical emphasis on this aspect means that the ‘dancing’ here gets lost. What Woolf seems to imagine is a space where (textual) bodies move together and apart, constantly, creating different configurations as they come into contact with each other at different moments. This offers a highly productive model for reading not only Woolf’s party texts, but her works as a whole. A powerful means of guarding against hierarchisation is movement – hence the semi-paradox of ‘dancing’ in ‘unity’. The party space, though potentially oppressive, at least offers in principle the opportunity to move, change perspective. One can see this in, for example, Daugherty’s ample – one can never say comprehensive – mapping of the links both between these party short stories, and with Mrs Dalloway and To The Lighthouse. Daugherty comes to no final conclusions about the relationship between these texts, but emphasises the different light shed on them when viewed in

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different configurations, offering the suggestion that these short stories in particular appear as a place of ‘process’, with all the connotations of ongoing movement and dynamism that this term involves.49 But there are further connections that can be read between, in this case, the party short stories and other texts from other periods in Woolf’s career. So, for example, the scene discussed above from the party in The Years where Peggy contemplates a book in solitude resonates strongly with ‘The New Dress’, where Mabel, alone at Mrs Dalloway’s party, berates herself for looking at a picture ‘from shame, from humiliation’: ‘As if one went to a party to look at a picture!’50 Compare also Peggy’s later assertion that ‘I do not love my kind’51 with the party story ‘The Man Who Loved His Kind’, featuring two individuals who both assert that they ‘love their kind’ yet conclude their conversation ‘[h]ating each other, hating the whole houseful of people’.52 Peggy’s self-scrutiny here – ‘Was she not seeing herself in the becoming attitude of one who points to his bleeding heart?’53 – casts her as a more self-aware, thus more modest and sympathetic, version of Prickett Ellis of ‘The Man Who Loved His Kind’; the re-gendered pronoun amplifies this connection. These ‘dances’ between texts, imagining them as party-guests mingling in a space which offers both structure and freedom, open onto new possible readings of each, without proffering either as a definitive gloss on the other. The idea of Woolf as hostess of a textual party is given further weight by the fact that she wonders whether she is ‘sufficiently mistress of things’ to achieve the new literary form she envisages. The locution could point in a number of directions but, read in context, emerging from reference to ‘a gaiety – an inconsequence – a light spirited stepping at my sweet will’,54 which resolves into the image of ‘dancing’ texts, one cannot help but imagine Woolf here as mistress of a house, hosting a party where these texts will dance, in light-spirited steps. It is with this image, of the writer as hostess (and the hostess as creative force), that this discussion will conclude.

The writer as hostess Woolf’s genuine admiration of the successful hostess is implied in her description of her lover, Vita Sackville-West: ‘I rather marvel at her skill, & sensibility, for is she not mother, wife, great lady, hostess, as well as scribbling?’55 Woolf’s feeling about hosting parties was, as we have seen, apt to ‘weigh [. . . her] down with horror’,56 but, perhaps particularly for this reason, she admired, as well as satirised, the successful hostess. For example, Woolf’s 1936 memoir ‘Am I a Snob?’ focuses on her friend-

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ship with Sybil Colefax, the celebrated hostess of literary parties. Woolf describes their ‘intimacy’ as being founded on mutual admiration of the other’s particular qualities: ‘She would exclaim, “Oh how I long to be a writer!” And I would reply, “Oh Sibyl, if only I could be [a] great hostess like you”.’57 We should not underestimate an ironic reading of this moment, particularly given the fond, but gently mocking, tone which Woolf takes towards both Colefax and herself in this text. But neither can we discount a seriousness coexisting with this mockery. In the diary entry in which Woolf expresses her fascination with the ‘party consciousness’, she further defines it as ‘Sibyl’s consciousness. You must not break it. It is something real.’58 This expresses genuine curiosity, even respect, and lends weight to the analogy explicitly proposed in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ and implied in ‘Am I a Snob?’ (encouraged by the parallel exclamations) between writer and hostess.59 Another hostess of whom Woolf appeared to be fond, as well as sceptical, is her own creation, Mrs Dalloway. Woolf admitted that she ‘found Clarissa in some way tinselly’, and that despite filling her out with her memories, ‘some distaste for her persisted’.60 Peter Walsh’s accusation that Clarissa is ‘the perfect hostess’ may have made the character cry as a young woman,61 but this disdain for the role is juxtaposed with the more positive evocation of Clarissa’s party-giving in the present time of the novel. What is more, of all Woolf’s hostesses, it is Mrs Dalloway who is most deeply implicated in, and potentially fulfilled by, her own creative act.62 We know that Mrs Dalloway is possessed of intellectual curiosity;63 we also know that women of her class and education were often deprived of the opportunity to express their creativity in fields with greater social capital. These factors shed further light on her investment in this social obligation. Adam Barrows’ commentary on this text offers a direct analogy between Clarissa’s creativity and Woolf’s own: Clarissa’s party is a metaphor for Woolf’s narrative project in that it attempts to create linkages between people across space and time that are not ‘superficial’ and ‘fragmentary’ [. . .] Clarissa’s social project to ‘combine’ and ‘create’ meaningful patterns of temporal organization across social divides arguably mirrors modernism’s larger narrative project of forging alternative networks of temporal connection.64

Barrows’ larger concern with temporality reminds us of the particular focus on the here and now which is effected by a party – as Bernard observes of the first dinner-party in The Waves, ‘ “We have come together, at a particular time, to this particular spot.” ’65 This intense focus on the present moment is expressed in the opening pages of Mrs

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Dalloway – ‘life; London; this moment of June’66 – specifically in relation to Clarissa’s creative party project. The fifth paragraph of the novel is mostly taken up with a long sentence describing the varied, kaleidoscopic activity both seen and imagined in and around London in June – there is ‘beating [. . .] stirring [. . .] galloping [. . .] tapping [. . .] whirling [. . .] laughing [. . .] dancing [. . .] shooting [. . .] fidgeting’. Some of these are present participles, some are adjectives; their use in close proximity brings together change, in the verb form, with the more stable identity implied by an adjective. It is at the very end of this sentence that the word ‘party’ first appears in the novel, thus: laughing girls in their transparent muslins who, even now, after dancing all night, were taking their absurd woolly dogs for a run; and even now, at this hour, discreet old dowagers were shooting out in their motor cars on errands of mystery [. . .] and she, too, loving it as she did with an absurd and faithful passion, being part of it, since her people were courtiers once in the time of the Georges, she, too, was going that very night to kindle and illuminate; to give her party.67

The refrains ‘even now’ and ‘she, too’ have the effect of focusing attention on the present moment – ‘at this hour’ – and on Clarissa’s insistence on her participation in the frenzy of activity just described. The refrains, and the breathless syntax, intensify the climactic release of the final clause – ‘to give her party’. This, from now on, is the dynamic which drives the novel; it is set up, from the very beginning, as an activity which puts Clarissa on a par with dancing boys and girls, dowagers, shopkeepers, even ponies and cricket-players, with all those who ‘kindle and illuminate’ London. Her party will be her creative contribution to the life of the city, as Woolf’s writing was hers. The variation in readings of Woolf’s oeuvre as a whole resonate with the idea of Woolf as analogous to Clarissa; of Woolf’s works relating to each other as guests at a party. ‘Although essays, novels or short stories are all distinct, they all belong to the same work, an immense text, a “whole made of fragments” ’, insists Reynier,68 while Anna Snaith refutes just such a reading.69 The difference in position here can be mapped onto a relative emphasis on ‘unity’ (Reynier) or ‘dancing’ (Snaith) in Woolf’s own vision of her texts as party-guests. There is conversation between guests, and texts, no doubt; there are connections and comings-together. But there is always the inconsecutive, the shifting, the ‘dance’ to consider, which Woolf, our hostess, is always so concerned to keep alive in her ‘idea of a party’.

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Notes 1. Virginia Woolf, A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897–1909, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), pp. 167, 168. 2. Virginia Woolf, ‘22 Hyde Park Gate’, in Moments of Being, 2nd edn (Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1985), pp. 164–77: p. 177; see p. 162 for the probable date of this text. 3. Woolf, ‘Old Bloomsbury’, in Moments of Being, pp. 181–201: p. 182. 4. Leonard Woolf, Downhill All The Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919 to 1939 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967), pp. 98–9. 5. Virginia Woolf, A Change of Perspective: The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Volume III: 1923–1928, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), p. 120. 6. Ibid., p. 160. 7. Ibid., p. 153 (editorial comment). 8. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1982), vol. 4, p. 348 (emphasis original). 9. Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (1915) (London: Penguin, 1992), pp. 257, 269, 137–55. 10. Virginia Woolf, Night and Day (1919) (London: Penguin, 1992), pp. 316–21. 11. For recent treatments of these dinners see, for example: Janine Utell, ‘Meals and Mourning in Woolf’s The Waves’, College Literature 35.2 (2008), pp. 1–19; Teresa Prudente, A Specially Tender Piece of Eternity (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009), pp. 16–18. 12. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925) (London: Penguin, 1992), pp. 112–23. 13. Woolf, A Passionate Apprentice, p. 169. Queen’s Gate is the thoroughfare onto which 22 Hyde Park Gate, Woolf’s family home, backs. 14. Woolf, Letters Vol. III, p. 168. 15. Virginia Woolf, ‘The Hours’: The British Museum Manuscript of Mrs Dalloway, ed. Helen Wussow (New York: Pace University Press, 1996), Appendix 2, p. 131. 16. Virginia Woolf, ‘Notes for Stories’, in Susan Dick (ed.), To The Lighthouse: The Original Holograph Draft (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), Appendix A, pp. 44–7: pp. 44, 45. For the likely chronology of the composition of these pieces, see Virginia Woolf, The Complete Shorter Fiction, ed. Susan Dick, 2nd edn (Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1989), pp. 302, 303–5. 17. Woolf, Diary, vol. 3, p. 12. 18. Nena Skrbic, Wild Outbursts of Freedom: Reading Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction (Westport: Praeger, 2004), p. 148. 19. Woolf, ‘The New Dress’, in The Complete Shorter Fiction, pp.  170–7: pp. 170, 171, 175. 20. Virginia Woolf, The Years (1937) (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 308. 21. Ibid., pp. 309, 310. 22. Ibid., p. 311. 23. Ibid., p. 310.

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24. Ibid., p. 310. 25. Ibid., pp. 310–12. 26. Anne Besnault-Levita, ‘Speech-Acts, Represented Thoughts and Human Intercourse in “The Introduction” and “Together and Apart” ’, Journal of the Short Story in English 50 (2008), pp. 67–83: p. 69. 27. Ibid., p. 73. For further work on the value of conversation in Woolf’s work, see Christine Reynier, Virginia Woolf’s Ethics of the Short Story (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp.  60–89; Christine Reynier (ed.), Conversation in Virginia Woolf’s Works (Montpellier: Publications de l’Université Paul Valéry-Montpellier, 2004); and Melba Cuddy-Keane on conversation as ‘the informing trope of [Woolf’s] critical prose’ in ‘The Rhetoric of Feminist Conversation: Virginia Woolf and the Trope of the Twist’, in Kathy Mezei (ed.), Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 137–61: p. 138. 28. Woolf, ‘Phyllis and Rosamond’, in The Complete Shorter Fiction, pp. 17–29: p. 24. 29. Ibid., p. 25. 30. ‘Inconsecutive’, Oxford English Dictionary. http://www.oed.com/viewdic tionaryentry/Entry/93838, accessed 5 April 2012. 31. Woolf, Diary, vol. 2, p. 186. 32. Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (1922) (London: Penguin, 1992). See for example Julia Eliot’s self-interrupting speech (p. 75), Charlotte Wilding’s interruption of Timothy Durrant and Jacob (p. 74), and the abrupt shift from the conversation between Mr Calthorp and Miss Edwards, to that between Mr Crosby and Mr Burley, itself immediately interrupted by Mrs Stretton (p. 73). 33. Ibid., p. 72. 34. For the likely chronology of the composition of this story, see Woolf, The Complete Shorter Fiction, pp. 298, 314. 35. Woolf, ‘Notes for Stories’, p. 46; for Dick’s commentary see Woolf, The Complete Shorter Fiction, p. 298. 36. To this extent, ‘The Evening Party’ contrasts significantly with Woolf’s later party short stories, in which, as Besnault-Levita observes, there is a relative paucity of direct discourse, Woolf instead conveying a ‘sense of failure’ of communication, which ‘comes from the reader’s recognition that the characters’ inner thoughts, the thoughts that define who they really are, are not shared but kept secret’. Besnault-Levita, ‘Speech-Acts’, pp. 70, 77. 37. Woolf, ‘The Evening Party’, in The Complete Shorter Fiction, pp. 96–101: p. 96. 38. Ibid., p. 97. 39. Ibid., p. 101. 40. Dominic Head, The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 90. 41. Woolf, ‘The Evening Party’, pp. 97, 99. 42. Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, p. 201. 43. Head, The Modernist Short Story, p. 95. 44. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929) (London: Penguin, 1945), p. 67. 45. Woolf, Diary, vol. 2, p. 14.

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46. Clare Hanson, Short Stories and Short Fiction, 1880–1980 (London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 66. 47. Head, The Modernist Short Story, p. 96. 48. Skrbic, Wild Outbursts of Freedom, p. 152. 49. Beth Rigel Daugherty, ‘ “A corridor leading from Mrs. Dalloway to a new book”: Transforming Stories, Bending Genres’, in Kathryn N. Benzel and Ruth Hoberman (eds), Trespassing Boundaries: Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 101–24: p. 109. 50. Woolf, The Complete Shorter Fiction, p. 173. 51. Woolf, The Years, p. 312. 52. Woolf, The Complete Shorter Fiction, p. 200. 53. Woolf, The Years, p. 312. 54. Woolf, Diary, vol. 2, p. 14. 55. Ibid., p. 313. 56. Woolf, Letters Vol. III, p. 159. 57. Virginia Woolf, ‘Am I a Snob?’, in Moments of Being, pp. 204–20: p. 212. 58. Woolf, Diary, vol. 3, p. 12. 59. Indeed, in her 1923 essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, Woolf explicitly draws an analogy between hostess and writer: ‘Both in life and in literature it is necessary to have some means of bridging the gulf between the hostess and her unknown guest on the one hand, the writer and his [sic] unknown reader on the other’. Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1966), vol. 1, pp. 319–37: pp. 330–1. Lorraine Sim argues that ‘ “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” presents the ordinary as the basis for an ethics of intimacy’, and this intimacy is effected through Woolf’s ‘play[ing] the part of “hostess” to her reader’. Lorraine Sim, Virginia Woolf: The Patterns of Ordinary Experience (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), p. 185. 60. Woolf, Diary, vol. 3, p. 32. 61. Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, pp. 8, 67. 62. Other of Woolf’s hostesses are also aware of their creative role – see for example Mrs Ramsay’s aesthetic appreciation of the arrangement of the fruit bowl on the dinner table, which is both part of, and a metaphor for, the dinner she hosts. Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse (1927) (London: Penguin, 1992), pp. 105–6. 63. She quotes frequently to herself from Cymbeline, and her bedtime reading is the far from low-brow ‘Baron Marbot’s Memoirs’. Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, pp. 10, 32, 43, 204; 34–5. 64. Adam Barrows, The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), pp. 126–7. 65. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931) (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 95. 66. Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, p. 4. 67. Ibid., p. 5. 68. Reynier, Virginia Woolf’s Ethics of the Short Story, pp. 14–15. 69. Anna Snaith, Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p. 4.

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Chapter 6

Proustian Peristalsis: Parties Before, During and After David R. Ellison

The nature of parties has been imperfectly studied. It is, however, generally understood that a party has a pathology, that it is a kind of an individual and that it is likely to be a very perverse individual. And it is also generally understood that a party hardly ever goes the way it is planned or intended. This last, of course, excludes those dismal slave parties whipped and controlled and dominated, given by ogreish professional hostesses. These are not parties at all but acts and demonstrations, about as spontaneous as peristalsis and as interesting as its end product. (John Steinbeck, Cannery Row)1

The reader might wonder whether John Steinbeck’s amusing statement on ‘the nature of parties’ applies exclusively to the novel in which it appears, or whether it has a broader applicability. Cannery Row (1945), set in Monterey, California, during the Great Depression, is a concatenation of short scenes tied together by two parties – one which takes place about halfway through the book, and which is disastrous in its results, and a second one, which is planned as an act of atonement for the first one. A group of unemployed or underemployed men usually referred to as ‘The Boys’ by the narrator decide to throw a party for one of the book’s main characters, a marine biologist called Doc, who has been good to them over the years. The first party’s origin has an ethical dimension. The idea is to redeem, in one grand gesture, a debt that has been incurred over time. In the eyes of the party’s organisers, the surprise element, or, in Steinbeck’s language, its ‘spontaneous’ character, is crucial (though, in the novel, spontaneity leads to chaos and to destruction, much to Doc’s chagrin). In fact, according to the theory expressed in the quoted passage, the authentic party is spontaneous, whereas the inauthentic party is put together by ‘ogreish professional hostesses’ who whip and control and dominate the cast of characters they have invited. This kind of event is really not a party at all, Steinbeck writes, but an ‘act’ or a ‘demonstration’ resembling nothing so much as peristalsis. A humorous comparison indeed, but could it be that Steinbeck’s humour,

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like that of Marcel Proust, says much more than it appears to say? And could it be that, despite the obvious differences between Steinbeck’s concise Depression-era story and Proust’s epic set in the upper echelons of Third Republic French high society, the American writer’s theory of parties might have a certain strong, albeit covert, applicability to Proust’s imaginary universe? I should like to examine this possibility; but to do so, it is first necessary to dwell a little longer with Steinbeck and with the peculiar use of the digestive metaphor with which he concludes his remarks. The dictionary definition of peristalsis (a medical term which derives from the Greek peri, around, and stellein, to place) is: ‘the rhythmic, wavelike motion of the walls of the alimentary canal and certain other hollow organs, consisting of alternate muscular contractions and dilations that move the contents of the tube onward’.2 The conflation of the controlled, non-spontaneous party with the regularity of the digestive process culminating in a bowel movement provides the passage with a fine ‘evacuative’ terminus, but it is also perhaps more Proustian, more seriously Proustian, than it initially appears. The reader of À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913–27)3 knows that most of the parties staged in the novel are far from spontaneous. In fact, the quintessential Proustian hostess, Mme Verdurin, who presides over the petit clan (little clan, little group) to which Swann gains access in his pursuit of Odette, could easily be described as ‘ogreish’, dominating and controlling. The psychological paradigm of sado-masochism functions throughout the Recherche, and is especially evident in the social scenes, even those scenes which seem frivolous and based upon snobbism and verbal jousting. The one over-riding law of human social intercourse in Proust is the rigid dichotomy of inclusion versus exclusion. Indeed, if there is a narrative rhythm in the intercalated novella ‘A Love of Swann’s’ (a 300-page third-person narrative which Proust inserted into the middle of the novel’s first volume, The Way by Swann’s), it is provided by this dichotomy. Initially indifferent to the charms of Odette de Crécy, Swann meets her in the Verdurin salon, falls in love with her as he becomes included in the salon, becomes jealous of her as she begins an affair with another man, is excluded from the salon, then falls out of love. The initial Stendhalian crystallisation4 and final disenchantment of the love experience are conveyed, narratively, by the alternating rhythms of inclusion and exclusion. Exclusion is a kind of elimination; Proustian peristalsis occurs as individual characters in the novel move through the gradations of the social structure and are expelled from it.5 Like Steinbeck, Proust is not averse to alluding to, and developing at

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some length, the metaphor of digestion/elimination, in some cases with comic brio. In one ironically turned scene, Proust depicts one of the novel’s most ambitious society matrons, Mme de Saint-Euverte (a lady who uses the parties of others to recruit for her own social functions), as the butt of a scatological diatribe by the Baron de Charlus. Here, a person whose function it is to include and exclude people from her salon is herself ‘expelled’ by Charlus, one of the novel’s best-developed and most outrageous characters. In his conversation with the young narrator, Charlus opens the floodgates: Would you believe that this impertinent young man, he [Charlus] said, indicating me to Mme de Surgis, has just asked me, with none of the care one ought to take to hide these sorts of needs, whether I was going to Mme de Saint-Euverte’s, that is, I fancy, whether I had the colic. I should attempt in any case to relieve myself in some more comfortable spot than at the house of someone who, if memory serves, was celebrating her centenary when I was making my entry into society, i.e., not chez elle. Yet who would be more interesting to listen to than her? So many historical memories, seen or lived through, from the days of the First Empire and the Restoration, so many intimate stories, too, with nothing ‘Saint-ly’ about them for sure but must have been very ‘vertes’,6 to judge by how she still frisks about on those venerable hams! What would stop me from interrogating her about those exciting times is the sensitivity of my olfactory apparatus. Mere proximity to the lady is enough. I suddenly say to myself: ‘Oh, good God, someone’s burst my cesspit’, but it’s simply that the Marquise, with the aim of getting some invitation, has just opened her mouth. (In Search of Lost Time, vol. 4, pp. 104–5)

Beyond Proust’s more than occasional resorting to scatological wordplay, there is another sense in which the metaphorical use of peristalsis may be of help to the reader of the Recherche in his or her efforts to grasp the novel’s narrative organisation. If we return to the etymological origins of the term (peri, around, and stellein, to place), I shall be suggesting, in the following development, that the Proustian narrative ‘flow’ can be aptly characterised by the pressure exerted by a narrative frame on the scene (here, the party scene) it encloses. Although it is true that a number of the minutely detailed party scenes in the novel appear as self-contained set-pieces, several of them are either preceded or followed by shorter episodes of quite extraordinary significance to the overall thematic arsenal of the Recherche. These shorter episodes exert pressure on the party scenes and tend to overshadow or undercut them in various ways. A curious feature of Proust’s parties, a feature that has been under-examined in the critical literature, is that the party itself is very carefully contextualised. Just as important as the party itself and what occurs during the party are its ‘before’ and its ‘after’. Characters

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come to parties with considerable emotional baggage, and they depart from parties with specific projects in mind. Sometimes the principal effect of the party is to change a given character’s course of action from what he or she had previously imagined; sometimes what happens prior to the party contradicts or undermines his or her projected actions. In what follows, I shall examine three scenes in the Recherche with special attention to their narrative concatenation. In two cases, I shall analyse the discrepancies between what the party scene seems to signify for the narrator’s progress as writer-to-be and the party’s immediate textual aftermath: firstly, the 130-page dinner hosted by the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes, followed by the narrator’s disconcerting visit to the apartment of the Baron de Charlus in The Guermantes Way; and secondly, the 90-page soirée hosted by the Princesse de Guermantes, followed by the mysterious rendezvous of the narrator with his beloved, Albertine, in Sodom and Gomorrah. In the third instance, I shall examine the ironic contrast between the scene portraying Charlus’s sado-masochistic propensities, in the early stages of Finding Time Again, and the more extensive section on aesthetic theory which follows it – a peroration of aesthetic declarations which provides the novel with its theoretical frame.

1. The dinner with the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes (vol. 3, pp. 414–551) and the visit to M. de Charlus (vol. 3, pp. 552–65) One of the longest party scenes in the Recherche, the dinner with the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes in The Guermantes Way, occupies an important space in the overall narrative design. Situated close to the halfway point in the novel, the scene illustrates the inanity of social discourse, the fundamental silliness of the self-involved nobility, along with the comical seriousness with which the aristocracy displays what it considers to be its wit. Topics that could, in a different context, call forth earnest discussion – the aesthetic value of modern painters’ works such as those of Proust’s fictional Elstir (a composite figure based in no small measure on Turner), or the artistic genius of figures such as Wagner, Balzac and Victor Hugo – receive superficial treatment, and are used as mere pretexts for the display of momentary brilliance. One example of the purported ‘wit’ (esprit) of the Guermantes family is recounted by the Duc in this scene, who describes, with overt admiration, the verbal finesse of his wife. The origin of the anecdote is the Baron de Charlus’s

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wish to give to his sister the beautiful château de Brézé – a magnificent edifice surrounded by some of the most spectacular forests in France, but which his sister did not appreciate and did not wish to accept. The Duc de Guermantes (Charlus’s brother) goes on to say: ‘Well, someone told my sister it wasn’t so much to please her as to tease her [ce n’était pas pour lui faire plaisir, mais pour la taquiner]. What this person actually said was that Charlus was such a tease’ (vol. 3, p. 462; vol. II, p. 756). Having heard all this, playing on the proximity in sound between taquin (‘teaser’) and Tarquin, and alluding to the seventh king of Rome, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, the Duchesse then utters the famous phrase, descriptive of Charlus’s fabled arrogance (in Latin: superbia) and considered by her aristocratic audience to be the summit of wit: ‘Taquin le Superbe’ (which the Penguin translator does a remarkable job of transposing, while keeping the Roman context, as ‘Teaser Augustus’). This, then, is the esprit de Guermantes, the ‘elevated’ form of intelligence possessed by the happy few of the French nobility, and distilled into its purest form by the Duchesse. We cannot accuse Proust of believing that this play on words constitutes something elevated. Rather, the narrator’s witnessing of moments such as this one leads to the conclusion that his youthful mythologising of the name ‘Guermantes’ and his admiration of the nobility were based upon nothing real. The long party scene as a whole contributes to the grand theme of disillusionment which runs like Goethe’s proverbial ‘red thread’ throughout The Guermantes Way. Indeed, at the conclusion of the party scene, the narrator retrieves an image he had used at the very beginning of the volume – that of the doormat in front of the Guermantes’ Paris apartment, which he had originally viewed as a ‘line of demarcation’ between his world and the fantastical domain of Parisian nobility, the Faubourg Saint-Germain – and subjects it to a demystified reading. Following are the two textual moments of The Guermantes Way that can be said to provide its structural underpinning and its thematic emphasis on the movement from illusion to disillusion. In the beginning, we have: It is true that my mind was hampered by certain difficulties, and the presence of Jesus Christ in the sacrament seemed to me no more obscure a mystery than this leading salon of the Faubourg Saint-Germain [. . .]. But the line of demarcation that separated me from the Faubourg Saint-Germain seemed to me all the more real because it was purely ideal; I had a strong sense of it already being the Faubourg when I saw, spread out on the other side of this Equator, the Guermantes door-mat. (vol. 3, p. 28)

And in the end:

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The names I had heard uttered [at the party] had a disembodying effect on the Duchesse’s guests [. . .] whose masks of flesh and absent or vulgar intelligence had transformed them into rather ordinary specimens, to the point that I ended up feeling that I had landed on the Guermantes door-mat not as upon the supposed threshold but at the terminus of the magic world of names. (vol. 3, p. 542)

As important as the Guermantes dinner is for the development of the overarching theme of social disillusionment, it is itself framed by a quite different scene, whose importance for the novel is arguably even greater, and which takes place not in the illuminated extensive space of the Parisian salon, but in the intimate darkness of the Baron de Charlus’s mysterious dwelling. The episode as a whole could be described as a seduction scene manquée, in which the naïve and sexually inexperienced narrator appears blind to the numerous signals Charlus sends his way about his strong interest in the young man. Earlier in the novel, Charlus had exhibited signs of hyper-virility, which, as we later learn, mask the reality of a far more complex sexual identity. When the narrator visits his apartment after the Guermantes dinner, Charlus submits him to a maniacal exercise in accusation, diatribe and insult. The two major accusations brought against the narrator by his host are that he is incapable of reading and that he is guilty of calumny. On the first point, Charlus comments ironically on the narrator’s incapacity to recognise the symbolism of a morocco-bound novel he had given him hundreds of pages earlier (the forget-me-not embossed upon the cover should have signified quite clearly the desire of the donor not to be forgotten). The second point, far more obscure and never substantiated by the accuser, is that the narrator has supposedly slandered his host in polite society. Throughout the scene, the narrator is, quite literally, at a loss for words: there is nothing he can say to rectify retroactively his weakness as a reader of symbols of affection; and there is nothing he can do to staunch the flow of vituperation issuing from the Baron’s serpent-like mouth. The following passage, which I am excerpting from a much longer stream of abuse, stands as one of the more remarkable moments of verbal pyrotechnics in the Recherche: ‘And who says that I’m offended?’ he [Charlus] broke out furiously, starting up with a jerk on the sofa on which he had so far been reclining motionless, while, as the pallid, frothing snakes in his face stiffened tensely, his voice became alternately shrill or deep like the deafening uproar unleashed by a storm [. . .]. ‘Do you imagine you have the power to offend me? Have you no idea to whom you are speaking? Do you imagine that the poisonous spittle of five hundred little men of your sort, hoisted on to each other’s shoulders, could even drool on to the tips of my august toes?’ (vol. 3, pp. 557–8)

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As outrageous as Charlus’s discourse and demeanour may be, the point he makes through his comparison of the Lilliputian narrator and his friends to his own ‘august’ Brobdingnagian person is a serious one: everything in the scene hinges on the power differential between the would-be Socratic mentor and his disarmed disciple. In a very real sense, the narrator does not have the power to offend Charlus. The only thing he can do is to flail about in a comical way, directing his anger at the Baron’s top hat: I was seized with a compulsion to hit something, and, with the little discernment I had left, not wanting to show bodily disrespect to a man so much older than myself [. . .] I grabbed hold of the Baron’s new top hat, threw it to the ground, trampled on it, and, bent on pulling it to pieces, I ripped out the lining, tore the crown in two, heedless of the continuing vociferations of M. de Charlus. (vol. 3, p. 558)

The episode is an important one because of its very incongruity, its strangeness – a strangeness that is due not just, or not essentially, to the Baron’s erratic behaviour, but to the highly unusual defensive posture in which the narrator finds himself. The fact that this is one of the very few moments in the novel in which the narrator succumbs to uncontrollable anger must be seen in the light of the subject-matter of the scene: namely, the question of homosexual seduction. The narrator, unlike Proust, is heterosexual. But could it be that he is heterosexual because he is a bad reader of signs? Could it be that the best possible defence mechanism against the power of homosexual seduction, for this narrator, is ignorance, a certain form of literal-mindedness (neglecting or forgetting to read the forget-me-not)? All of these signs remain unread, and this for a strategic narrative reason. Proust is waiting until the beginning of the subsequent volume, Sodom and Gomorrah, to reveal to the reader, in a passage of extraordinary figural density, the emergence of homosexuality as explicit grand theme. To do so, he needs the narrator to be an unobtrusive observer unaffected by the phenomenon he is observing – that is, a heterosexual observing homosexual mating rites. The nocturnal episode with the Baron de Charlus in The Guermantes Way, following close upon a long scene devoted to exposing the emptiness of social discourse, reveals to the reader adept in deciphering signs, but not to the blind narrator, the powerful emotional valance of human sexual conduct – its linguistic and behavioural excesses, its potential to slide into anger, insult and violence. This episode, which needs to be considered in counterpoint to the Guermantes’ dinner scene, represents a path not taken in the novel. If it is a succumbing to seduction, a ‘Happy Fall’, that made possible

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the redemptive power of Christianity, it is a ‘Happy Ignorance’, an imperviousness to seduction, that saves the narrator from homosexual otherness and that makes possible the emergence of homosexuality, as a magnificently complex but finally decipherable code, in the second half of the Recherche.

2. The soirée at the Princesse de Guermantes’ (vol. 4, pp. 39–128) and the subsequent visit from Albertine (vol. 4, pp. 128–41) As the narrative flow of the novel continues its course, as the reader passes from a minute description of social mores in The Guermantes Way to a dramatic plunge into the labyrinth of human sexuality in Sodom and Gomorrah, the tone of the novel becomes at the same time more comical and more serious: comical because Proust’s descriptions of homosexual behaviour are far from politically correct (the Baron de Charlus is arguably Proust’s funniest, most outrageous character), and serious because the social stigmas attached to homosexuality in Third Republic France are everywhere evident in the novel’s fictional transpositions. The central social event of Sodom and Gomorrah, the soirée at the Princesse de Guermantes’, is framed on both sides by short but highly concentrated episodes dealing with sexuality: before, it is the famous scene of ‘conjunction’ between Charlus and Jupien, in which the Baron’s inclinations first become evident to the narrator; and after, it is an assignation between the narrator and his beloved, Albertine, in which Proust lays out his theory of love with great explicitness. Framing the soirée proper, therefore, we find, once again, pressure exerted by the surrounding narrative, a pressure whereby the desires and sufferings of individuals in intimate settings are set against the broader structures and laws governing social interaction. The narrator’s purpose in attending the soirée is quite simple: he wishes to be introduced to the Prince de Guermantes. The first part of the scene is constructed on a series of comical sketches which depict the evasiveness of various aristocratic figures who decide, for one reason or another, that they do not wish to make this introduction. Finally, a certain Monsieur de Bréauté accedes to the narrator’s wish, which causes the narrator (a bourgeois circulating among the nobility) to compare the Duc and the Prince de Guermantes and reflect upon the notion of ‘simplicity’ in a setting which accentuates social distinctions and difference:

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Just as the Duc de Guermantes’s greeting was, when he wanted, friendly, imbued with camaraderie, cordial and familiar, so I found that of the Prince stiff, solemn and haughty. He barely smiled at me, and addressed me gravely as ‘Monsieur’ [. . .]. But from the first words he spoke to me, which, in their coldness and seriousness, formed the most complete contrast with Basin’s [the Duc’s] way of speaking, I realised at once that the fundamentally disdainful man was the Duc, who spoke to you from your first visit ‘as an equal’, and that, of the two cousins, the truly simple one was the Prince. (vol. 4, p. 60)

Throughout the scene, the narrator is continuing a social apprenticeship, a Bildung whereby he is learning, with ever greater precision, to ‘read’ the gestures and language of the aristocracy. Beginning in a state of naïve admiration of all the glitter that surrounds him, the narrator gradually deciphers the code of the strange beings who inhabit the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and this deciphering is based upon a capacity to see behind masks, to differentiate between the real or authentic and the fictitious. At a crucial crossroads of the scene, the narrator remarks: I was beginning to know the precise value of the spoken or silent language of aristocratic amiability, an amiability happy to pour balm on the sense of inferiority of those in respect of whom it is exercised, but not, however, to the extent of dispelling it, in which event it would no longer have any raison d’être. ‘But you are our equal, if not better,’ the Guermantes seemed, by all their actions, to be saying; and they said it in the nicest way imaginable, so as to be liked and admired, but not so as to be believed; to tease out the fictitious nature of this amiability was to have been what they called well brought up; to believe that amiability to be real was to lack breeding [qu’on démêlât le caractère fictif de cette amabilité, c’est ce qu’ils appelaient être bien élevés; croire l’amabilité réelle, c’était la mauvaise éducation]. (vol. 4, pp. 67–8; vol. III, p. 62)

Viewed as a whole, the soirée is built upon a mixed mode of discourse. It contains one of the most prolonged developments on the Dreyfus Affair to be found in the novel – an ‘affair’ which divided France as profoundly as many a war or coup d’état, and in which Proust himself was quite involved as a young man (as a dreyfusard, or proponent of Dreyfus’s innocence). But even in this case, where the reader might expect a certain seriousness of tone, the Affair is treated by most of the novel’s characters with frivolity. The soirée is also the place in which Charlus pronounces the scatological diatribe against Mme de SaintEuverte quoted earlier; and it is during this scene that the narrator begins developing what will later become one of the Recherche’s major themes: that of sexual inversion – a coherent if highly debatable theory which describes homosexuals as men containing women, or women containing men (the ‘truth’ of the gay man would be the woman constantly

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wishing to emerge from him; and that of the lesbian, the man wishing to escape imprisonment within her false femininity). Yet however profound the thematic potential of either the Dreyfus Affair or the matter of sexual inversion might be, they are touched upon only lightly here, possibly because they have been engaged in only superficially by a narrator who is in a rush to see Albertine. As we move from the open spaces of the soirée to the confines of the narrator’s apartment, the shrinkage of space corresponds to a concentration of narrative focus. We pass from the extensive to the intensive, from a deciphering of social signs to the reading of a sexual hieroglyphics – a reading which sets forth Proust’s complex views on love. Proustian love is based as much on absence as it is on presence. In the thirteen-page scene immediately following the Guermantes soirée, only four pages are devoted to the intimate episode in which the narrator and Albertine are together physically in the same space. Framing the encounter is a reflection on the sufferings felt by the lover as he attempts, through his anxious imagination, to visualise the woman he desires. Proust renders the complex dialectic of presence and absence by a meditation on a recent technical invention: the telephone. When speaking to one’s interlocutor using this device, one gains a strong impression of that person’s proximity; but, by sensing the ambient background noises, by conjuring up imaginatively the place that person occupies, one is also aware of his or her actual inaccessibility. Because a sociable young woman like Albertine circulates seemingly endlessly from place to place, from friend to friend, it is as if she were many people at once, a multitude of persons scattered across space and time, impossible to situate and to distinguish from other people the narrator has loved in his life. This realisation causes the narrator to superimpose a haunting image from his past onto his current desire for Albertine, an image he retrieves from the earliest pages of the novel, when he had coerced his mother into ascending the stairs of the family home in Combray to grant him the good-night kiss he had pleaded for at first in vain, but in the end successfully. When Albertine announces to him over the telephone that she may not visit him in his apartment after all, the narrator traverses several geographical strata of time, moving from the present moment backwards, first to his seaside idyll at the Norman resort of Balbec with Albertine and the other ‘young girls in flower’ of the novel’s second volume, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, then to the scene of the good-night kiss in The Way by Swann’s: Hearing these words of excuse, uttered as if she were not going to come, I felt that a very different element was attempting painfully to unite itself with

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the desire to set eyes once again on that velvet face which already, at Balbec, had directed all my days towards the moment when, in front of the mauve September sea, I would be beside that pink flower. I had learned to recognise this terrible need for another human being in Combray, in connection with my mother [. . .]. This effort of the old feeling to combine and form but a single element with the other, more recent one, whose voluptuous object was nothing more than the coloured surface, the carnation pink of a flower of the sea-shore, such an effort often eventuates only in the formation (in the chemical sense) of a new body, which may endure for a few moments only. On that evening, at least, and for a long time to come, the two elements remained dissociated. (vol. 4, p. 136)

Although it may be true that, at this point in the narrative, the images of Albertine and of the narrator’s mother coalesce only momentarily and remain ‘dissociated’, as the novel progresses and as the narrator continues his initiation into the mysteries of love, it becomes increasingly obvious that the original anxious wish to have the mother’s kiss at all costs informs all the young man’s further relationships, which will be imbued by the jealous impulse to control and imprison the object of his affections. Because the narrator imagines that his beloved cannot be situated or controlled, except by duress, he cannot envisage love as a relationship of trust or easy reciprocity. He imagines that Albertine, dispersed across a Parisian landscape unknown to him, will always evade him; and these evasions will often take the form of lies. Mendacity becomes the fundamental mode of Proustian love, as the narrator states it starkly, using a military metaphor in his description of his frustrated efforts to immobilise Albertine’s multiple shapes and modes of being: [You can discern] existences disposed across five or six lines of retreat, so that when you try to visit, or find out about, this woman, you strike too far to the right, or too far to the left, or too far in front or too far behind, and you may, for months or years on end, learn nothing. With Albertine, I felt that I would never learn anything, would never succeed in unraveling this tangled multiplicity of authentic details and untruthful facts. And that it would always be thus, unless I were to put her in prison (but people escape) up until the end. (vol. 4, pp. 136–7)

As was the case in the juxtaposition of the dinner with the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes to the visit with Monsieur de Charlus which followed it, a comparison of the soirée with the Prince and Princesse de Guermantes and the much shorter rendezvous between the narrator and Albertine reveals the degree to which parties in Proust, despite their value in the development of the large theme of deception or disillusionment, precisely because their rhetorical mode is that of superficial verbal brilliance, do not convey within their extended space what can

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be learned (through suffering) in those closer spheres wherein human beings seek, but often do not find, each other’s affections and desires. The ‘after-parties’ I have analysed serve to cast a shadow over the luminosity of the parties themselves, and to underline that the individual, despite his or her efforts to join and climb the strata of social hierarchies, remains fundamentally vulnerable and, finally, alone.

3. The Princesse de Guermantes’ afternoon party: perpetual adoration (vol. 6, pp. 162–225) and Jupien’s hotel (vol. 6, pp. 118–42) The culminating party scene in the Recherche is hosted, once again, by the Princesse de Guermantes: it is an afternoon party or matinée which the narrator attends after leaving a sanatorium at the conclusion of the First World War. The party is divided into two distinct sections. During the first of these, designated by Proust as a ‘Perpetual Adoration’ (vol. 6, pp. 162–225) (L’adoration perpétuelle, vol. IV, pp. 433–96), the narrator, obliged to wait while a musical performance comes to an end in the Guermantes’ hôtel particulier, pauses in their library to meditate upon literature and his own artistic vocation. It is here, in a liminal situation (the narrator is at the party, but alone, not truly in the party), that the narrator comes to the realisation that he is, in fact, the protagonist of a novel-to-come, and that the experiences of his life will form the substance of his future work. This first section is replete with theoretical statements about the nature of literature which are by now so well known as to be modernist common currency. In the second section (the ‘Bal de têtes’ or Masked Ball) (vol. IV, pp. 496–625; vol. 6, pp. 226–358), which I shall not be analysing here, the narrator’s literary project, based as it is upon the recuperative and redemptive power of memory, comes up against a major stumbling block: the ageing of the cast of characters with whom we readers have now become familiar (the nobility as a group – Odette de Crécy, Charles Swann, Charlus, etc.). Mortality is everywhere present and seems to take possession of the party. In the end, the narrator manages a fragile reconciliation of his literary project with this existential pathos, and the novel closes on a final evocation of the dimension of time as that horizon within which all human endeavour is situated. In the first section of the scene, the ‘Perpetual Adoration’, one of the most important theoretical statements sets forth the fundamental role of metaphorical discourse in Proust’s novel. The following declaration can stand as the clearest and most concise description of Proust’s art poétique:

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An hour is not just an hour, it is a vessel full of perfumes, sounds, plans and atmospheres. What we call reality is a certain relationship between these sensations and the memories which surround us simultaneously – a relationship which is suppressed in a simple cinematographic vision, which actually moves further away from truth the more it professes to be confined to it – a unique relationship which the writer has to rediscover in order to bring its two different terms together permanently in his sentence [rapport unique que l’écrivain doit retrouver pour en enchaîner à jamais dans sa phrase les deux termes différents]. One can list indefinitely in a description all the objects that figured in the place described, but the truth will begin only when the writer takes two different objects, establishes their relationship, the analogue in the world of art of the unique relation created in the world of science by the laws of causality, and encloses them within the necessary armature of a beautiful style [et les enfermera dans les anneaux nécessaires d’un beau style]. (vol. 6, pp. 197–8; vol. IV, pp. 467–8)

Few modernist definitions of the relationship of literary art to the ‘truth’ can rival this one in its assertive certainty. The narrator conveys the notion of art’s ‘necessity’ as it manifests itself in a metaphorical style through his own use of a particular metaphor, which the reader would do well to examine with some care. He refers to the notions of enclosure, ‘armature’ and even ‘chains’ in the original French (the translator’s rendition of ‘enchaîner’ by the rather weak ‘bring together’ does not do justice to the coherence of Proust’s metaphorical scheme). But it is here that the reader of the Recherche can perceive the faint but important echo of a scene that occurred earlier (but only sixty pages earlier) in Finding Time Again, and which would seem at first to bear no resemblance whatever in its rhetorical mode to the triumphant aesthetic tone which permeates the ‘Perpetual Adoration’: I refer to the scene that takes place in the bordello of Charlus’s occasional lover, Jupien, in wartime Paris (some two years earlier than the Guermantes’ matinée). In this memorable episode, the narrator, seeking a place to refresh himself, enters a place he discovers to be Jupien’s bordello and, in a highly implausible manner, witnesses the Baron de Charlus being flagellated by a male prostitute called Maurice. The description bears quoting: I heard the sound of a whip, probably one with nails to give it extra sharpness, for it was followed by cries of pain. Then I noticed that the room [in which I had been placed] had a small round side-window and that somebody had forgotten to draw the curtain behind it; advancing stealthily through the darkness, I slid up to the window and there, chained to a bed like Prometheus to his rock [enchaîné sur un lit comme Prométhée sur son rocher], receiving the blows which Maurice was delivering with a whip which was indeed studded with nails, I saw, already running with blood, and covered with bruises which proved that the flogging was not happening for the first time, right in front of me, I saw M. de Charlus. (vol. 6, p. 123; vol. IV, p. 394)

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The principal effect of what I have been calling Proustian peristalsis – the pressure exerted by one scene upon its neighbouring scene in the narrative flow – is the creation, for the reader, of an interpretive quandary. What is more important, what is more significant: social scenes with their coded language and nugatory content; a missed seduction; a theory of love as jealous imprisonment; theoretically formulated artistic revelations leading to the discovery of a vocation; or a masochistic ritual? In the latter two cases, the very same metaphorical vocabulary based upon control, domination and what the narrator calls enchaînement in both contexts (the ‘chains’ of a beautiful style and the very real chains with which Charlus is attached) is used to evoke, on the one hand, aesthetic beauty and, on the other, ethical complexity (including the association of homosexual practices with violence, as well as the distance from and non-participation in the masochistic ritual of a narrator presumed to be heterosexual). Could it be that the episode of Jupien’s bordello is just as much a party scene as the Princesse de Guermantes’ matinée? Are we, as readers, meant to grant the bordello scene the same truth value as the noble expression of an artistic credo which occurs just a few pages later? It is as if Proust were reminding us of the etymology of the word style, derived from the Latin stilus, which designates the pointed object made of iron or bone with which the Romans wrote on their wax tablets. And stilus, in its turn, comes from the Greek stitzo, meaning to prick, to puncture, to burn or to brand.7 In conclusion, I would like to suggest that the peculiar concatenation of scenes in the Recherche, with its brusque alternations between social détente and intimate probing of the mind and of the heart, conveys narratively a peri-stellein, or placing-around, which brings together in a particular dissonant unity the domains of the aesthetic and the ethical, in what the narrator at one point memorably calls the ‘apparent contrast and profound unity between genius (talent too, and virtue) and the sheath of vices within which [. . .] it is so often contained and protected’ (vol. 5, p. 242).

Notes 1. John Steinbeck, Cannery Row (1945), in Novels 1942–1952 (New York: Library of America, 2001), p. 218. 2. Webster’s New Unabridged Dictionary, 2nd edn, under the supervision of Jean L. McKechnie (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), p. 1335. 3. Since this chapter is intended for an Anglophone readership, I shall be quoting Proust’s novel in English, with occasional parenthetical references to the original French. My two sources are: In Search of Lost Time, general

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5.

6.

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ed. Christopher Prendergast, 6 vols (London: Penguin, 2002–3) (Penguin Classics); and À la recherche du temps perdu, general ed. Jean-Yves Tadié, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1987–89) (Collection ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’). References (volume and page numbers) are given in the text, with both editions cited where appropriate: volume numbers of the Penguin Classics edition are in arabic numerals, those of the Pléiade edition in roman numerals. Originally rendered into English with the Shakespearean title Remembrance of Things Past, the novel’s French title is best captured with the literal translation In Search of Lost Time. This title carries with it the double temporal thrust Proust had intended: the novel is not merely constructed on the recuperation of the past through memory, but depicts the active forward movement of a search for that which appears to have been lost, but which can be recovered through art. In this chapter, references to the English titles of individual volumes are to those of the Penguin Classics edition. In the second chapter of his treatise entitled De l’amour [On Love] (1822), Stendhal describes the birth of love as beginning in a ‘crystallisation’. Alluding to the way in which branches thrown into the salt mines of Salzburg are eventually covered with crystals, taking on a beautiful new form and becoming unrecognisable as branches, Stendhal calls ‘crystallisation the operation of the mind which, from everything which is presented to it, draws the conclusion that there are new perfections in the object of its love’. Henry Beyle Stendhal, On Love, trans. Philip Sidney Woolf and Cecil N. Sidney Woolf (New York: Brentano’s, 1915), p. 23. It is this continual finding of ‘new perfections in the object’ of love that also characterises the narrative rhythm of ‘A Love of Swann’s’. Social expulsion is a major theme of the Recherche. A character named Forcheville, Odette de Crécy’s new lover (the one who replaces the unhappy Swann), drives his brother-in-law, Saniette, out of the Verdurin clan in what is described as an ‘execution’ in the first volume of the Recherche (Du côté de chez Swann, vol. I, p. 272; The Way by Swann’s, vol. 1, p. 279). Much later in the novel, Monsieur and Madame de Verdurin occasion a quarrel between the Baron de Charlus and his protégé, the violinist Morel, which results in the Baron’s expulsion from the petit clan (La Prisonnière, vol. III, pp. 824–5; The Prisoner, vol. 5, pp. 296–7). In his endnotes, John Sturrock, the translator of Sodom and Gomorrah for Penguin Classics, indicates that the adjective ‘vertes’, with its play on Mme de Saint Euverte, does not mean ‘green’ but rather ‘spicy’ (vol. 4, p. 530n). Charlus is stating, with no great subtlety, that Mme de Saint-Euverte has had many a gallant adventure. For stilus, see Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. W. Glare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 1820. For stitzo, see A Greek–English Lexicon, ed. Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 1645.

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Chapter 7

‘Ezra through the open door’: The Parties of Natalie Barney, Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach as Lesbian Modernist Cultural Production Joanne Winning In her discussion of the so-called ‘Lost Generation’ of the 1920s, Noel Riley Fitch cites F. Scott Fitzgerald’s laconic description of the summer of 1925 as the summer of ‘1,000 parties and no work’.1 Yet the summer of 1925, as she rightly notes, occurs in ‘a year of great literary productivity’, which includes, among other things, the publication of Fitzgerald’s own The Great Gatsby in the April and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway in the May.2 Contra to Fitzgerald’s account of the division between party-going and literary production, this chapter will explore the extent to which the modernist party might be considered a site of intellectual work and literary productivity, as well as a place of levity and socialising. Moreover, it will suggest that, particularly where the cultural producers are rendered dissident by either their gender or their sexuality, the production of party space might be the necessary conduit by which they can make a cultural intervention. For the purpose of examining a phenomenon we might call the lesbian modernist party, this chapter will examine two such cultural interventions which took place in Paris during the years of intense modernist production: the Friday afternoon gatherings held by Natalie Barney at her pavillon in the rue Jacob and the radical use of bookshop spaces in the rue de l’Odéon for gatherings and readings by Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach. In his theorisation of the fields which structure cultural production, Pierre Bourdieu uses terms that resonate particularly strongly with the modernist period. Bourdieu makes a distinction between the field of large-scale cultural production and the field of restricted production.3 Modernism, with its protean attempts at innovation, its experimental emphasis on form and its reliance on network and coterie culture for dissemination, represents just such a field of restricted production, which ‘develop[s] its own criteria for the evaluation of its products, thus achieving the truly cultural recognition accorded by the peer group whose

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members are both privileged clients and competitors’.4 The defining feature of the field of restricted production is that the art objects produced for consumption – objects defined as ‘ “pure”, “abstract” and “esoteric” ’ – rely upon an audience – a peer group – capable, intellectually and critically, of their consumption.5 The active participation of the peer group in production speaks especially to the nuances of the modernist period, in which lines of connection and influence are clearly identifiable and instrumental. Bourdieu notes the way in which art objects are given their aesthetic status and value via the ‘legitimizing authority’ of the ‘agents of consecration’ within the field, which, he notes, ‘may be organizations which are not fully institutionalized: literary circles, critical circles, salons, and small groups surrounding a famous author or associating with a publisher, a review or a literary or artistic magazine’.6 We might well add the modernist party to Bourdieu’s list of the groups and practices which form the restricted field of production. Bourdieu’s attempts to theorise the way in which all social practice is constructed via temporal and spatial coordinates is also productive for understanding the way in which the party – as a construction of time and space – contributes profoundly to a sense of identity within modernist networks. In his Outline of a Theory of Practice, Bourdieu writes, ‘the reason why submission to the collective rhythms is so rigorously demanded is that the temporal forms or the spatial structures structure not only the group’s representation of the world but the group itself, which orders itself in accordance with this representation’.7 Following Bourdieu, David Harvey argues that ‘symbolic orderings of space and time provide a framework for experience through which we learn who or what we are in society’.8 As such, given its demarcation of time and space, we can see the ways in which the modernist party might function as a generative site in which intellectual and literary authority is defined and disseminated and in which cultural influence and intervention take place.

The party as cultural intervention For a party to take place, there has to be the creation of a spatial and temporal frame. Historically, control of either of these coordinates has not been in the gift of women, much less lesbians. In examining the Castro district of San Francisco in the 1980s, Manuel Castells makes the following assertions about lesbians and urban space: ‘Lesbians, unlike gay men, tend not to concentrate in a given territory, but establish social and interpersonal networks.’9 Castells draws this conclusion in his analysis of what he calls the ‘San Francisco Experience’, in which gay men exhibit

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‘territorial aspirations’ in their endeavour to create a gay community within the spaces of the city. In order ‘to liberate themselves from cultural and sexual oppression’, Castells argues, ‘they need a physical space from which to strike out’.10 By contrast, lesbians are ‘placeless’ and ‘tend not to require a geographical basis for their political organization’.11 Castells asserts that, as a consequence of this unrooted, disenfranchised mode of existence, ‘there is little influence by lesbians on the space of the city’.12 While Castells is writing within and about a late twentieth-century context, his argument is indicative of the masculinist paradigms through which lesbian participation in the formation of the city and its spaces is consistently read. Not least, such a position would seem very much at odds with the historical example of lesbian modernist appropriation of urban space to create sites of social and intellectual gathering in the early decades of the twentieth century in Paris. One example of a deeply rooted and autonomous lesbian articulation of space in urban Paris is the salon begun by the modernist patron Natalie Barney in 1909. Barney institutes a regular time-frame – Friday afternoons – and space – her pavillon in the rue Jacob – and the famous parties which result become one of the most important sites of modernist connection and production in Paris in the early twentieth century. Barney, an avowed lesbian who sought to create a twentieth-century Sapphic community, was extremely familiar with the expansive possibilities of turning material space into cultural space. In her retrospective Souvenirs indiscrets (1960), she argues for the singular freedoms of the city in which she creates lesbian space: ‘Paris m’a toujours semblé la seule ville où l’on puisse s’exprimer et vivre à sa guise’ (‘Paris has always seemed the only city where one can express oneself and live in one’s own way’).13 At the beginning of Aventures de l’esprit, published in 1929 as something of an extended modernist manifesto, Barney places a kind of ‘master’ sketch of her salon and the space she named the Temple de l’Amitié (Figure 7.1).14 When Romaine Brooks failed to respond to Barney’s request to create a pictorial representation of the salon, Barney constructed what Diana Souhami calls her own ‘rough doodle’.15 In her sketch of her regular Friday afternoon gatherings, Barney effectively collapses temporal and spatial frames in on one another, drawing the material space, complete with table of refreshments and physical markers such as exits, hallway and garden, and filling it with a roll-call of all the intellectuals and practitioners who came to talk, read and connect with each other at the allotted time, week after week. The sketch inscribes an act of enclosure or possession. It is a cultural register of the members of Barney’s coterie. Through the centre of the salon there is the linear route of l’amazone, the lesbian. She weaves her circuitous way, following

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Figure 7.1 Natalie Barney’s sketch of the Temple de l’Amitié.

different paths through the assembled modernist and avant-garde population. Barney’s sketch of course refers to a real material space – her pavillon at 20 rue Jacob and the small Doric building which stood in its grounds – and a real time – Fridays between 4.30 p.m. and 8 p.m. – but here, in this sketch, the party becomes a cultural institution. The inscription on the temple, a l’amitié, evokes the guiding principle behind the acts of congregation and, to use Bourdieu’s term, ‘consecration’ that take place within it.16

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Elspeth Probyn writes that ‘lesbian desires and manners of being can restructure space’.17 What are the fantasies of restructuring that lie beneath Barney’s recording of her party space? Barney’s use of time and space recalibrates the domestic interior, turning parts of the house into a site of cultural production that functions along lines similar to public, cultural venues. In his analysis of the space of the pavillon – the detached house – Henri Lefebvre argues that the specific terms of this space offer particular potential for overwriting material space with cultural space: The pavillon involves different levels, namely the appropriation of space and a utopia, which is both fiction and reality. [. . .] what people want is to be able to hold onto and combine oppositions, such as inside/outside, intimacy and environment, and thereby reinvent a symbolic dimension.18

Interviewed in 1969, Barney explained: I was an international person myself [. . .] and as I had a nice house I thought I should help other international people meet. The other literary salons weren’t international. Newcomers who didn’t know what to do with themselves could come here. Americans found translators for their work. I gave afternoons to French or American poets so others could get to know them.19

Thus Barney uses the party to make her own interventions in the cultural production of modernism and lesbian identity. In considering the relationship between spatiality and queerness, Elizabeth Grosz has argued that ‘space is the ongoing possibility of a different inhabitation’.20 Yet heterosexual hegemonic culture might be characterised by its repudiation of the relationship between the body and space: ‘The more one disinvests one’s own body from that space, the less able one is to effectively inhabit that space as one’s own.’21 By contrast, Grosz argues, lesbians and gay men, through their experience of an urban lesbian and gay culture, create and use space very differently. Grosz argues that an examination of queer use and production of space teaches us that ‘space, or spaces, is the product of a community, as much as it is the product of a designer’.22 She goes on to argue that a queer sense of spatiality is heightened precisely because, in the creation and use of clubs, bars, cafés and shops, there is a more ‘explicitly sexualized and eroticized use of space’.23 Lesbians and gay men, in other words, are especially sensitised to the importance of physical space, and the way in which, out of the colonisation of physical and material subcultural times and spaces, cultural identity can be fashioned. Grosz’s account of a lesbian and gay understanding of the nuanced possibilities of space, and the way in which this arises out of a more

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embodied experience of subjective, erotic and identificatory practices within urban space, is of course written in and of a later twentiethcentury context. At first glance such a theoretical analysis may seem unhelpfully proleptic as a frame through which to consider Barney’s social acts in her construction of party space/time. Grosz’s delineation of the spaces of modern urban queer culture – clubs, bars, cafés and shops – refers to a late twentieth-century Western cultural and commercial context which is markedly different from the subcultural forms of early twentieth-century Paris. Yet the inferences we can draw from instances of the lesbian modernist appropriation and creation of space suggest the emergence, even at this early stage, of a nascent knowledge about the lines of identification – affective, intellectual, erotic and socially dissident – which can be created through spatial and temporal practice. In her memoir Shakespeare and Company (1956), the bookseller Sylvia Beach writes: At Miss Barney’s one met the ladies with high collars and monocles, though Miss Barney herself was so feminine. Unfortunately I missed the chance to make the acquaintance at her salon of the authoress of The Well of Loneliness, in which she concluded that if inverted couples could be united at the altar, all their problems would be solved.24

Of course, Radclyffe Hall’s experience of visiting Barney’s salon is represented within the fictional frame of The Well of Loneliness (1928). The material space of Barney’s salon is recorded in the text as a site of marked difference: The first thing that struck Stephen about Valérie’s flat was its large and rather splendid disorder. There was something blissfully unkempt about it, as though its mistress were too much engrossed in other affairs to control its behaviour. Nothing was quite where it ought to have been, and much was where it ought not to have been, while over the whole lay a faint layer of dust – even over the spacious salon. The odour of somebody’s Oriental scent was mingling with the odour of tuberoses in a sixteenth century chalice. On a divan, whose truly regal proportions occupied the best part of a shadowy alcove, lay a box of Fuller’s peppermint creams and a lute, but the strings of the lute were broken.25

The flat appeals to Stephen Gordon, despite her English reserve and respect for traditional domestic space, in its blissful disorder. It is a space marked by decadence (the scent, the flowers, the lute), but also by degeneration (the strings of the instrument are broken and unplayable). The representation of Barney in this space, in the characterisation of Valérie Seymour, notably records her as someone who functions as a kind of

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centre for the lesbian and gay community. Seymour immediately recognises Stephen’s inversion and sets about offering her social and spatial coordinates to help her function within the city. She immediately finds a house for Stephen, ‘a tumble down place’ with ‘a fine garden’, near her own house in the rue Jacob.26 She then busies herself writing a list of addresses that will be ‘useful’ for Stephen. When Jonathan Brockett tells Seymour that Stephen fences, she immediately provides the address of one of the best fencing masters in Paris. Stephen, who has by this point in the narrative lost her own space – the ancestral home of Morton – tells her mentor Puddle: There’s no country for me away from Morton. But in Paris I might make some sort of home, I could work here – and then of course there are people. . . . Something started to hammer in Puddle’s brain: ‘Like to like! Like to like! Like to like!’ it hammered.27

Here, Stephen’s articulation of the benefits of Paris shows the imbrication of cultural space within material space and time. Paris can provide a home because of the people, the milieu, in which she can move. While the enunciation of these identificatory practices – ‘Like to like’ – ‘hammered’ in Puddle’s consciousness and inscribed an ambivalence about the subcultural world, nonetheless the narrative demonstrates the importance of being with one’s own ‘kind’, in both intellectual and sexual terms. Barney herself always articulated the sense that her role was simply to provide a centre around which people could congregate. She is quoted as stating: ‘I didn’t create a Salon; a Salon was created around me’, yet her actions betray a far more interventionist approach and behind that a rigorous and deeply serious cultural agenda.28 In 1927, Barney inaugurated her Académie des Femmes, which was, to quote Suzanne Rodriguez, ‘a none-too subtle reproach to the all-male Académie Française’.29 Barney’s desire to challenge the male intellectual establishment in France is reflected in the bipartite structure of the book Aventures de l’esprit. The ‘première partie’ (first part) introduces major male cultural figures such as Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, Gabriele d’Annunzio and Max Jacob, while the ‘deuxième partie’ (second part) introduces the twelve female members of Barney’s Académie, ‘ces quelques femmes representatives, et ces adventures de l’esprit’ (‘these few representative women and these adventures of the mind’), who include Anna Wickham, Mina Loy, Romaine Brooks and Gertrude Stein.30 Barney recognised the powerful ways in which cultural exclusion is effected through spatial exclusion and in her championing of female and lesbian modernist cultural production alongside male modernist cultural production worked hard to create a different, and indeed

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dissident, intellectual context. In this respect, Barney’s demarcation of time and space in the creation of the party is neither flippantly conceived nor insubstantial in its cultural importance. Conveying something of this hard-headed insight, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus describes the figure of Barney in the salon as a ‘nuage vaporeaux derrière lequel se cache un solide roc’ (a ‘vaporous cloud behind which hides a solid rock’).31 Delarue-Mardrus goes on to detail the dominant cultural denigration of the salon and yet the profound seriousness of it as an intellectual environment: Vous voyez donc tout de suite que son salon, comme on dit, constitue le lieu de reunion de toutes les originalités de Paris. Il ne faudrait pas s’y tromper, pourtant. Il n’y a pas aux vendredis de Miss Barney que des phénomènes. On ne va pas chez elle comme au jardin d’acclimatation, pour y voir une collection de numéros hors série. On y va aussi pour y recontrer des valeurs. You immediately see that her salon, as they say, constitutes the meeting place for all the eccentrics of Paris. However, one should not be mistaken about this. There are not only freaks at Miss Barney’s Fridays. One does not go to her house as to a zoo, in order to see a collection of one-of-a-kind characters. One goes there to encounter values.32

Delarue-Maldrus notes that in addition to paying a visit to the salon to encounter ‘la littérature et l’art’ (‘literature and art’), one also goes to find ‘des maîtres de la science, des médecins, des professeurs, tout un monde inattendu’ (‘masters in the sciences, physicians, professors, a complete and unexpected world’).33 Here, then, Barney creates a rival Academy, in all its disciplinary complexity. Her fantasy, as it is articulated in her sketch of the salon, is a cultural fantasy, designed to challenge dominant patriarchal intellectual culture by creating an alternative space/time in which the full range of aesthetic and cerebral endeavour, undertaken by women as well as men, can take place during the assigned hours of the party. Barney seems to depreciate the cultural weight of her salon, describing it in seemingly domestic terms as ‘cette grande famille d’esprits’ (‘this large family of minds’).34 Yet her irony and her counter-cultural intellectual desires are aimed at the dominant intellectual culture in France, whose restriction she notably describes in spatial terms: ‘L’amazone qui n’aime à juste titre que le trait, se trouve surtout gênée devant ces pages touffues, sans espace’ (‘The amazon, who rightly loves only the arrow, finds herself especially cramped in the presence of these dense pages, with no room’).35 Here, Barney’s formulation of the figure of ‘the amazon’ is instructive for the way in which it collates both sexual identity and intellectual desire; the amazon is a lover of women, at the same

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time as being an intellectual outsider, with an agenda and ideas, within patriarchal culture. For the purposes of my analysis it articulates something of the multiple desires of the lesbian modernists as a whole. Here, in the discussion of the use of party space/time, Barney’s primary act of creating a cultural centre to which like-minded practitioners might gravitate and congregate socially is a crucially important coordinate within lesbian modernism, and indeed modernism as a whole. Barney’s creation of cultural space/time through the social practice of party-making is not unique. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas of course created a similar space/time in their Saturday night gatherings in their pavillon in the rue de Fleurus. Moreover, as we shall see in the following section, on the use of bookshop space by Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach, lesbian modernists were inventive in their radical reshaping of time and space to create social gatherings in which intellectual endeavour was the main agenda.

The bookshop as party space A bookshop, traditionally, is not a space one would associate with party-going. However, neither Adrienne Monnier nor Sylvia Beach undertook their respective bookselling projects in the spirit of tradition or history: both were determined to create spaces in which modernist cultural production could flourish. In order to ensure this they designed their bookshops to be sites of social gathering, rather than straightforward commercial enterprises. Monnier, who was much influenced by Jules Romains and the avant-garde discourses of Unanimism, with its central tenets of community, space and creativity, had a particularly strong sense of the potential for shaping intellectual and literary appetite and value through the creation of cultural space. As she writes in her essay ‘La Maison des Amis des Livres’ (1920), the bookshop is a ‘true magic chamber’. She figures its magic in both temporal and spatial terms, demonstrating nuances sensitive to the psychodynamics of the bookshop-goer’s experience: At that instant when the passer-by crosses the threshold of the door that everyone can open, when he penetrates into that apparently impersonal place, nothing disguises the look on his face, the tone of his words; he accomplishes with a feeling of complete freedom an act that he believes to be without unforeseen consequences; there is a perfect correspondence between his external attitude and his profound self, and if we know how to observe him at that instant when he is only a stranger, we are able, now and forever, to know him in his truth.36

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Implicitly, Monnier demonstrates a subtle understanding of the ways in which cultural identity and identification are formed out of space and location. In his analysis of the body in the city, Steve Pile argues for two primary concepts: the ‘psychoanalysis of space’ and the ‘psychodynamics of place’.37 Looking at the work of behavioural geographers such as Roger M. Downs and David Stea, and D. J. Warmsley and G. J. Lewis,38 Pile rehearses the concept of cognitive mapping, describing the practical need for it: ‘people after all need to know where the things they need are, what the area is like and how to get there’.39 As Pile notes, the concept of cognitive mapping, in its inception within the discipline of behavioural geography, fails to ‘grasp people’s emotional dynamism’. Nevertheless, a more nuanced analysis of the psychic processes by which people ‘map’ their own space within the city – a psychodynamics – allows crucial elements of the use of space to emerge. A modernist example of this might be seen in the case of Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman), one of the most influential of the lesbian modernists, who hated city spaces and the texture and speed of the modern life lived within them. As Sylvia Beach notes, ‘Bryher disliked cities – those “rows of shops” as she called them. She shunned crowds, was no frequenter of cafés, and was very retiring.’40 Bryher’s repudiation of the city underlines the fact that one of the definitive experiences of modern urban life is alienation, which is countered only by the creation of an internal map of the modern urban environment as a way of ‘controlling’ this potentially overwhelming space. Such a map is a way of actively appropriating city space to make it one’s own. As Pile argues, ‘the cognitive map is not a replica of the external world, it is a means of taking control of the world and making the world anew’.41 It is thus important to note that Bryher’s Paris had one focal point: There was only one street in Paris for me, the rue de l’Odeon. It is association, I suppose, but I have always considered it one of the most beautiful streets in the world. It meant naturally Sylvia and Adrienne and the happy hours that I spent in their libraries. Has there ever been another bookshop like Shakespeare and Company? [. . .] Number seven, on the opposite side of the rue de l’Odeon, was also a cave of treasures.42

Writing after Beach’s death, Bryher ponders too the importance of the physical location of the bookshop as a place of shelter for the artefacts of modernism and modernity that Beach amassed during her career: ‘What will their future be now? However well librarians or friends may care for them, what will they be but wood, canvas or paper, away from these three rooms?’43 Notably, Bryher’s other coordinate in Paris is Stein and Toklas’s salon: ‘Apart from Shakespeare and Company, it

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is the long room in the rue de Fleurus that I remember most from my Paris visits.’44 As such, Bryher’s cognitive map records both affective and intellectual coordinates. In her memoir of modernist Paris, Janet Flanner writes: ‘The heart and home of the Left Bank American literary colony after 1920 turned out to be Shakespeare and Company, the extraordinary rue de l’Odéon bookstore founded by the American Sylvia Beach.’45 Like Bryher, Flanner argues that Beach’s bookshop cannot be defined without its counterpart on the other side of the street, Adrienne Monnier’s La Maison des Amis des Livres. The placing of these two institutions turns the street space itself into something which belongs to the two booksellers and, moreover, which they transform from physical space to intellectual space, creating a ‘Franco-English language stream’ which ‘[flows] down their street, visibly adding to the picturesque quality’.46 Here again, Flanner constructs a map that locates the bookshops at the heart of the communities to which she belongs. Adding to these accounts in a typically hyperbolic and spatially expansive way, Gertrude Stein’s record of Beach’s bookshop, in the poem ‘Rich and Poor in English’ (1920), states: ‘I have almost a country there.’47 In the minds of many of the lesbian modernists, a map could be drawn in which lines of connection ran from the rue de l’Odéon to the rue de Fleurus (Stein/Toklas’s salon) to the rue Jacob (Barney’s salon). Walking the route is clearly a common occurrence, as Beach herself notes: I saw Gertrude and Alice often. Either they dropped in to observe my bookselling business or I went around to their pavillon in the rue de Fleurus near the Luxembourg Gardens. It was at the back of the court. [. . .] The pavillon was as fascinating as its occupants. On its walls were all those wonderful Picassos of the ‘Blue Period’.48

If what emerges from these memoirs and memorialisations of La Maison des Amis des Livres and Shakespeare and Company is a strong sense of these venues as sites of modernist identification and then production, the question remains how Monnier and Beach were able to cultivate the affective investment of their modernist patrons. One way was to promote a slippage between social interaction and intellectual connection, which is to say to transform the commercial venue into a space for social gathering. If we consider the instrumental relationship between Beach and James Joyce, we might note that it begins with a party and an open door. In his analysis of the divisions between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ space, Gaston Bachelard asks: ‘how many daydreams we should have to analyse under the simple heading of Doors!’49 What is evinced by the symbol of the door, he argues, is ‘an entire cosmos of the Half-open’. Doors, he continues, ‘[schematise] two strong possibilities’

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in the human imaginary. On the one hand, the door is ‘closed, bolted padlocked’; on the other, it is ‘open, that is to say, wide open’.50 For Bachelard, the resonance of the door in the imagination emerges precisely because it is imagined as an act with agency, a kind of doing. The subject, confronted by a door, imagines passing through it. Bachelard asks, ‘Onto what, toward what do doors open?’ In her account of her first meeting with Joyce, Beach records the symbolic function of the open door in the fateful encounter: It was in the summer of 1920, when my bookshop was in its first year, that I met James Joyce. One sultry afternoon, Adrienne was going to a party at André Spire’s. [. . .] They had an apartment on the second floor of a house at 34 rue du Bois de Boulogne; I remember the shady trees around it. [. . .] I worshipped James Joyce, and on hearing the unexpected news that he was present, I was so frightened I wanted to run away, but Spire told me it was the Pounds who had brought the Joyces – we could see Ezra through the open door. I knew the Pounds, so I went in.51

Pound functions as the conduit by which Beach can summon up the courage to pass through the open door, to join the party and so enter into the enactment of literary history. Here we can see the modernist party as instrumental in the formation of the modernist network, the place in which introductions and relationships are generated. The story of how Ulysses would not have been published without Sylvia Beach and her financial backing has become a commonplace modernist narrative, yet it is important here to see how her bookshop, in the same way as Barney’s salon, functions as a site in which the multiple and complex lines of connection which lead to translation and publication are drawn. Beach comes to describe her bookshop as Joyce’s ‘headquarters’,52 and it is certainly in the bookshop that the question of the translation of Ulysses is resolved: The date set for the Joyce reading at Adrienne’s bookshop was December 7, 1921 – a little less than two months before Ulysses appeared. Larbaud, fearing his translations of extracts from Penelope wouldn’t be ready in time, asked Adrienne to look around for someone to help him. Among those who frequented the rue de l’Odéon was a young composer of music, Jacques Benoist-Méchin. He and George Antheil had struck up a friendship after meeting in my bookshop.53

Beach’s modernist aspirations go beyond the project of Joyce’s Ulysses and she constructs her space not just as a focal point for incoming connections but also as a centre for outgoing dissemination. In an otherwise hostile literary and cultural environment, Shakespeare and Company

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became the only place from which little magazines could be distributed. At its height, Shakespeare and Company was one of the only distribution points for all the major titles, including Eliot’s The Criterion, Monroe’s Poetry, Weaver’s Egoist, Thayer’s Dial and Anderson’s Little Review. This intellectual distribution was not the only function for which the bookshop had a name; Beach saw her bookshop space as intrinsically social. In this sense, both Beach and Monnier take the model of the party and translate it into the bookshop setting; Beach herself describes Shakespeare and Company as a kind of ‘community centre’ for the many exiled modernists: Shakespeare and Company was the American Express of the artists of the Left bank. We did banking, too, sometimes, and I used to call the shop ‘The Left Bank.’ Bryher thought our important postal service should have its box, and thenceforth a fine, large sort of case, with pigeonholes marked with the letters of the alphabet, made distribution of all that mail a pleasure.54

Most profoundly, however, the complex merging of intellectual, literary and social endeavour – the formulation of bookshop space as party space – is demonstrated in the practice of readings, screenings, exhibitions and other gatherings which Beach and Monnier ran regularly. The importance of being and belonging within the social space/time of the bookshop is evidenced most symbolically by the party that takes place ‘one Sunday afternoon in March 1939’ in La Maison des Amis des Livres.55 In this event, the prominent modernists and avant-gardists in Paris, their friends and their families gathered to watch the ‘grand premiere’ of the full collection of colour portrait photographs taken by Gisèle Freund. The exhibition comprised a collection of portrait photographs of many of the key figures of Parisian Left Bank culture in the 1920s and 1930s. Monnier invited all to witness what Christian Caujolle calls ‘this bringing together of mirror and image’.56 As Caujolle notes, the physical environment of the exhibition is important. For the event, the ‘most truly literary bookstore in Paris’ was temporarily redesigned as a viewing space; its bookshelves were covered in brown paper and a large white sheet was hung as a screen so that the photographs might be projected.57 Thus the group watched these projected images of themselves within a physical space that had both housed their art and ideas and nurtured their collective creativity and without which the modernist and intellectual production of the Left Bank would have been homeless. This vignette, the image of these artists and writers collected together to spectate their own images, evokes notions of network and portraiture. It is also compelling for the articulation of cultural and material space that is embedded within it.

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What are the processes by which these two lesbian modernists claim and construct this relatively small slice of urban space, in Paris’ sixth arrondissement, so that it comes to appear so significantly within a modernist topography of Paris? It is important to recognise that the bookshop functions as a conduit by which Monnier can make her modernist contribution. It is clear from Monnier’s extensive intellectual work, for example her critical essays, her editorial work on Marguerite Caetani’s Commerce and the journal Mesures, as well her own publications Le navire d’argent and Gazette des amis des livres, that Monnier wanted to participate and exert an intellectual influence in her cultural practice. In his seminal text The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre restructures our understanding of space, moving away from the dominant geometrical and mathematical model to one which becomes properly seen as inherently ‘social’.58 Lefebvre’s analysis of space locates the effects of modernity in our spatial practices and conceptualisations of space. For Lefebvre, the torsions and pressures of capitalism and consumerism have cut us forever adrift from what he calls ‘absolute space’, that is to say, natural, emotionally and materially connected living within our environment. As a result, space within modernity is ‘flattened’. To define this effect, Lefebvre delineates his ‘perceived–conceived–lived triad’.59 ‘Perceived space’ (le perçu) constitutes the space of the everyday and common-sense, the space in which we think we live. ‘Conceived space’ (le conçu) is the space of architects, urban planners and property developers. The third element of the triad is ‘lived space’ (le vécu), the conceptualisation of space within the human imagination and an experience of space which incorporates but transcends the other two. Within the socio-cultural context of a capitalist economy, space becomes ‘abstract space’; it is defined and articulated only through its exchange value. By contrast, Lefebvre defines and celebrates the possibilities of ‘lived space’, space which is constructed and understood through its use value. Lefebvre’s radical theoretical and political agenda is to foreground ‘lived space’ – to return to thinking of space in terms of its use value rather than the exchange value imposed upon it within capitalist structures. The Monnier/Beach model of the bookshop would seem to be a compelling test case for Lefebvre’s notion of lived space since, ostensibly, as business enterprise, it would seem to articulate space through its exchange value – as commercial enterprise constructed to entice consumers and their money. Yet, as their own explications demonstrate below, the value of the space of the bookshop for both – and here the shaping of bookshop space as space for congregation and social connection is the epitome of Lefebvrean le vécu – is clearly defined by its use value. As lesbians striving to participate in cultural creation,

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Monnier and Beach go some considerable way towards a Lefebvrean ideal. If ‘lived space’ envelopes and modulates both the ‘perceived space’ of common-sense and the ‘conceived space’ enforced upon the modern subject through urban planning and architecture, what sense might we make of the following description of rue de l’Odéon by Beach? Except for our two bookshops, where things were always happening, our rue de l’Odéon, a few steps down from the Boulevard Saint Germain, was as restful as a little street in a provincial town. The only time there was any traffic was when the audiences on their way to or from the Odéon Theatre at the upper end of the street streamed past. [. . .] The Théâtre de l’Odéon fulfilled Adrienne’s dream of living in a street ‘with a public building at one end’.60

Notably, this quarter of Paris is relatively quiet, at times resembling a ‘provincial town’; it is their space within the microcosm of the street which most resembles the typical urban space of modernity: ‘things’ are ‘always happening’ (the temporal dimension is important), there is speed and stimulation, there is social congregation and party-going, as well as commercial and intellectual endeavour. The real example of Lefebvrean ‘lived space’ is articulated here in Monnier’s desire, recounted by Beach, as a dream of having a ‘public building at one end’. Here the ‘perceived space’ of the everyday street and the ‘conceived space’ represented by the architectural icon of culture – the theatre – amalgamate in Monnier’s imagination. As Lefebvre argues, ‘lived space’ is that which has both use value and is imbued with lived meaning. If we might extract the psychic resonances of the desire in the dream here, we might say that Monnier seeks to utilise the signifier of theatre to validate her own cultural enterprise and, perhaps more importantly, to create her own cultural ‘centre’ to undermine traditional urban space and create something modern. When Shakespeare and Company leaves its first location in rue Dupuytren to take up residence opposite La Maison des Amis des Livres, Monnier and Beach are able to accomplish their dream of creating their own cultural quarter. In reformulating the street, attracting to the rue de l’Odéon both the avant-garde producers and those readers willing to encounter their work, they are able to create a new and modern state of being. Monnier has her own term for such a state, ‘Odéonia’. Monnier’s ‘bookselling’, like Beach’s, is far from being about the simple act of selling books; both strongly desire to partake fully in the avant-garde literary and aesthetic movements they disseminate to the public. Monnier’s active engagement in cultural production is evident: ‘for every intelligent bookshop based upon the principle of lending and selling there is a public whose taste it is easy to form’.61 For Monnier and

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Beach, the material space of the bookshop can be rearticulated in such a way that dissident sexual identity, dissident commercial practice and an aesthetic agenda may (e)merge. Instructively, this is done by creating a space/time that amalgamates the domestic, the social and the intellectual, just as Barney does with her Friday afternoon gatherings. Monnier gave the bookshop its final and lasting name in 1919 – La Maison des Amis des Livres. In her biography of the bookshop she writes: ‘we founded our house in November 1915’.62 The architectural model of the house is important, not least because, in the context of my discussion here, it inflects the social events held within the bookshop, transforming them into the more intimate kinds of social events held within the home. In his phenomenological study The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard argues for a technique of spatial analysis that he calls ‘topoanalysis’ and describes as ‘the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives’.63 Topoanalysis seeks to interpret the psychic investments we make in the primary spaces of our existences. Bachelard analyses the house, reading its importance in the formulation of our psyches and our imaginative potential. Monnier notably describes her bookshop as ‘a place of transition between street and house’.64 Not least, her construction of the bookshop becomes a mode of enacting the fantasy of cultural creation. It is a space that transgresses and reformulates ordinary spatial boundaries; it is both house and street, inside and outside. The house, Bachelard argues, ‘constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability’.65 In this sense, Monnier’s symbolic formulation of the bookshop as ‘almost house’ through the creation of social space in readings and gatherings serves to concretise – to make solid – her own cultural practice as well as the aesthetic endeavours of writers and readers. In a manner that might have resonated for Monnier, Bachelard argues that the physical structure that ‘houses’ us externally also moulds our internal landscapes: ‘Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated.’66 In this respect it is telling that this kind of bookshop, which also functions as party space and community centre, features so prominently in the modernist imaginary. If we consider the question of use value in relation to the fabricated spaces of Odéonia, an analysis of lesbian modernist spatial acts must undergo another careful modulation. These spaces function in such a way that Beach and Monnier can both participate within and actively control cultural production. Beach symbolically uses the architectural structure of the tunnel in the following statement: ‘Adrienne was as

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interested as I was in the American writers who were in and out of my bookshop, and we shared them all. There should have been a tunnel under the rue de l’Odéon.’67 The symbol of the connecting tunnel is instructive; Beach articulates a strong sense of possession of both the street and the modernists frequenting it. Yet such possession is also subterranean, a subcultural appropriation of urban space which defines it by literally undermining it. The connecting structure is neither a footbridge nor a corridor. Undoubtedly, it is through the interventions of Beach and Monnier that the rue de l’Odéon becomes such a site of intense intellectual and literary endeavour and debate, as well as social connection. Their particular articulation of space allows them the opportunity to party: that is, to take part, act, generate and create. In 1936, writing in La Nouvelle Revue Française, Adrienne Monnier records a conversation which had taken place between Sylvia Beach and André Gide eighteen months previously. The financial crisis in which the French bookselling industry found itself during the 1930s had hit Beach particularly hard and she was contemplating closing Shakespeare and Company. Gide reacted to this news with horror and, in his reply to Beach, articulates the central importance of this created space: ‘ “But that is impossible,” he said sharply. “You play a role among us that we could not do without now. You give us invaluable help.” ’68 The continuing project of modernism and its production is here inconceivable without the socio-intellectual space/time created by these lesbian modernists and their intervention – their ‘role’ – within the production of the field, to return to Bourdieu. What I have argued for as the careful and strikingly successful transformation of urban space into cultural space – party space – by Barney, Beach and Monnier, in the service of lesbian modernist cultural production, is here revealed as inseparable from all modernism. In this sense, it stands not alone or separate but as a fundamental constituent of the landscape of the modernism which arises out of the early twentieth-century city.

Notes 1. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ledger (1973), quoted in Noel Riley Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties (New York: Norton, 1985), p. 183. 2. Ibid., p. 183. 3. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (Oxford: Polity Press, 2004), p. 115. 4. Ibid., p. 115. 5. Ibid., p. 121.

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6. Ibid., p. 121. 7. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 163. 8. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), p. 214. 9. Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 140. 10. Ibid., p. 140. 11. Ibid., p. 140. 12. Ibid., p. 140. 13. Natalie Clifford Barney, Souvenirs indiscrets (Paris: Flammarion, 1960), p. 21 (my translation). 14. See Natalie Clifford Barney, Aventures de l’esprit (Paris: Éditions ÉmilePaul Frères, 1929), frontispiece pullout. 15. Diana Souhami, Wild Girls, Paris, Sappho and Art: The Love Life of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks (London: Phoenix, 2005), p. 72. Souhami wrongly cites the salon map as being printed at the beginning of Barney’s Pensées d’une Amazone (1920). In fact it was printed much later, as a pullout frontispiece in Aventures de l’esprit (1929). 16. Bourdieu describes the way in which the restricted field of production contains within it ‘agents of consecration’ – publishers, editors, booksellers, other practitioners, who confer the status of aesthetic value upon chosen art objects. See Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, p. 121. 17. Elspeth Probyn, ‘Lesbians in Space: Gender, Sex and the Structure of Missing’, Gender, Place and Culture 2.1 (1995), pp. 77–84: p. 81. 18. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, ‘Lost in Transposition – Time, Space and the City’, in Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, trans. and ed. Kofman and Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 3–60: p. 18. 19. Barney, quoted in New York Times Book Review (28 September 1969), quoted in Suzanne Rodriguez, Wild Heart: A Life (New York: Harper Collins, 2002), p. 180. 20. Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), p. 9. 21. Ibid., p. 9. 22. Ibid., p. 8. 23. Ibid., p. 9. 24. Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company (1956) (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), p. 115. 25. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (1928) (London: Virago, 1990), p. 246. 26. Ibid., p. 248. 27. Ibid., p. 250. 28. Quoted in Rodriguez, Wild Heart, p. 180. 29. Ibid., p. 252. 30. Barney, Aventures de l’esprit, p. 273. 31. Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, in Barney, Aventures de l’esprit, p. 182; translation by John Spalding Gatton, in Natalie Barney, Adventures of the Mind (New York: New York University Press, 1992), p. 138.

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39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

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Ibid., pp. 182–3; translation p. 138. Ibid., p. 183; translation p. 138. Ibid., p. 274; translation p. 198. Ibid., p. 274; translation p. 198. Adrienne Monnier, ‘La Maison des Amis des Livres’ (1920), in The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier, trans. Richard McDougall (New York: Scribner, 1976), p. 69. See Steve Pile, The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 15ff. See Roger M. Downs and David Stea (eds), Image and Environment: Cognitive Mapping and Spatial Behaviour (Chicago: Aldine, 1973); D. J. Warmsley and G. J. Lewis, Human Geography: Behavioural Approaches (London: Longman, 1984). Pile, The Body and the City, p. 27. Beach, Shakespeare and Company, p. 99. Pile, The Body and the City, p. 247. Bryher, The Heart to Artemis (London: Collins, 1963), p. 211. Bryher, ‘For Sylvia’, Mercure de France 349 (August–September 1963), p. 17 (emphasis added). Bryher, The Heart to Artemis, pp. 213–14. Janet Flanner, Paris Was Yesterday, ed. Irving Drutman (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), pp. viii–ix (emphasis added). Ibid., p. ix (emphasis added). Gertrude Stein, ‘Rich and Poor in English’, in The Yale Edition of the Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein. Volume V: Painted Lace, and Other Writings (1914–1937) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), p. 95. Beach, Shakespeare and Company, p. 28. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon, 1994), p. 222. Ibid., p. 222. Beach, Shakespeare and Company, p. 34. Ibid., p. 92. Ibid., p. 73. Ibid., p. 102. Christian Caujolle, ‘Foreword’, in Gisèle Freund, Photographer, trans. John Shepley (New York: Harry Abrams, 1985), pp. 9–15: p. 9. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 9. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 1. Ibid., p. 40. Beach, Shakespeare and Company, p. 61. Monnier, ‘La Maison des Amis des Livres’, p. 75 (emphasis added). Ibid., p. 71. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 8. Monnier, ‘La Maison des Amis des Livres’, p. 69. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 17. Ibid., p. 8.

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67. Beach, Shakespeare and Company, p. 117. This ‘sharing’ spans out into a larger lesbian network. Fitch writes: ‘The writers who accompanied Sylvia to meet Gertrude, most of them Americans, enriched the life of the rue de Fleurus’ (Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, p. 57). 68. Monnier, ‘La Maison des Amis des Livres’, p. 135.

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Chapter 8

‘Indeed everybody did come’: Parties, Publicity and Intimacy in Gertrude Stein’s Plays Alex Goody This chapter is concerned with Gertrude Stein’s response to two modernist parties, one a dinner-party given by the English painter Harry Phelan Gibb and his wife Bridget in Paris in April 1913 to which Gertrude Stein and her companion Alice Toklas were invited by the host, and one a cocktail-party in Hollywood given by Lillian May Ehrman in Stein’s honour in April 1935. These parties span the period of modernism, taking us from the expatriate, avant-garde fervour of 1910s Paris to the popular American culture of the 1930s and, crucially, they provide a means through which to approach the more overlooked area of Stein’s oeuvre: her dramatic writing. Stein’s drama begins in 1913 with the play she composed in response to the dinner-party at the Gibbs’ and, for at least one critic, develops into ‘much more sharply focused and much more theatrical’ work in the 1920s and after,1 including her play written about the 1935 Hollywood gathering. The two parties also illustrate Stein’s own trajectory as a modernist: in 1913, a patron and friend of artists such as Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris and Gibb himself, with relatively little of her own work in print;2 by 1935, a major American celebrity, with her arrival in New York for a lecture tour announced in lights on Times Square and her Four Saints in Three Acts broadcast nationally over Columbia Radio and the longest-running opera in Broadway history.3 Stein’s response to the parties in her plays exemplifies much of her own ambivalence over the public personality that she achieved through the success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), an issue that is negotiated in her second ‘autobiographical’ outing, Everybody’s Autobiography (1936).4 That both parties inspire Stein to write plays which proclaim their theatrical status in their titles but which are ostensibly unstageable – What Happened: A Play in Five Acts (1913) and A Play Called Not And Now (1936) – suggests a very resonant conjunction between Stein’s reticently public play-texts and the intimate publicity of parties. This conjunction will serve to configure

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the argument that follows here, which explores the tensions between the everyday and the private, and the exhibitionist and public in Stein’s prose and drama and examines how What Happened and Not And Now negotiate, respectively, the ordinariness of the theatre and the party, and the ambiguous privacy of the celebrity soirée. In these two plays Stein uses the modernist party to pose larger questions about identity, meaning and (literary) success. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas presents a litany of the famous, infamous, unknown and upstart modernist figures who visited Gertrude and Alice at 27 rue de Fleurus from the 1910s to the 1930s. Attending one of the Saturday evening parties at Stein’s salon served as an admission to the expatriate avant-garde of Paris, and figures as diverse as Ernest Hemingway, Edith Sitwell and Charles Demuth were ‘invited to dine on Saturday evening which was the evening when everybody came, and indeed everybody did come’.5 But The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas does not just relate a series of modernist parties: as the text that brought Stein to international recognition – the first printing, of 5,400 copies, sold out nine days before publication – it led to a crisis in her writing. For Stein, it made apparent the insuperable tension between a desire for literary fame and a desire for textual freedom. Stein had claimed in her monumental study of the ‘bottom nature’ of ‘every one’, The Making of Americans (1925), ‘I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it.’6 But the success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was succeeded by a writer’s block, lasting for some months, which Stein retrospectively blamed on the impact of this success. Reflecting on the difficulties she experienced, in Everybody’s Autobiography Stein describes the effect that ‘having a commercial value’ and a paying audience had on her writing; she relates that ‘slowly everything changed inside me [. . .] because suddenly it was all different, what I did had a value that made people ready to pay, up to that time everything I did had a value because nobody was ready to pay’.7 Stein is more than willing to admit to the pleasure of having money – ‘there is no doubt about it there is no pleasure like it, the sudden splendid spending of money and we spent it’ – but expresses deep concern about the effect on her sense of self: The thing is like this, it is all the question of identity, it is all a question of the outside being outside and the inside being inside. As long as the outside does not put a value on you it remains outside but when it does put a value on you then all your inside gets to be outside.8

Stein’s publishing success with The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas thus precipitates a disturbing invasion of her inner sense of self in which

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her private interiority is opened out to the external world’s values and definitions. However, this tension between exteriority and interiority, or publicity and private autonomy, was already played out in the opening up of the domestic space, the space of Gertrude and Alice’s intimate life, to the public of the expatriate avant-garde at the rue de Fleurus gatherings. What Mark Goble describes as ‘opening up a private space to anyone who might stop by [. . .] private life revealed for public view’ applies to both The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and to Gertrude and Alice’s home.9 The domestic is crucial for Stein’s writing, not just as the material for her popular Autobiography but also as providing the quotidian incidents, locations, personalities and pet-names that generate pieces such as Tender Buttons (1914). The personal and domestic – what could be termed, with caution, the autobiographical – are also a central feature of Stein’s play-writing and her critical essays.10 But this does not mean that Stein’s writing is confessional; nor does she seek to transfigure the personal and everyday into a revelatory epiphany or intensity. As Bryony Randall describes, it is possible to identify ‘at least three levels of everydayness’ in a text such as Tender Buttons: ‘the everydayness of Stein’s choice of object [. . .] the everydayness of her attention to an object’ and her textual method as ‘examples of everyday meaningmaking’.11 Both Liesl Olson and Randall distinguish Stein’s writing as exemplary of a specific strain of modernist engagement with the ordinary and everyday, an engagement with ‘ongoing daily time’12 and ‘representation of the ordinary as ordinary’.13 For Olson, Stein demonstrates an investment in ‘habit as the essential basis of writing’; and for Randall, Stein’s writing typifies the kind of ‘distracted attention’ that characterises our everyday mode of engagement with the world.14 So the use of the personal and domestic across Stein’s writing – her choice of textual object and the kind of attention that her texts enact and require – can be seen as part of her engagement with the everyday rather than a seeking of publicity for that personal and domestic life. In a similar way, Stein and Toklas’s Saturday evening parties at the rue de Fleurus opened up personal space to an external public, but involved domesticating that public and maintaining the everydayness of the parties, rather than creating a spectacular lesbian salon on the lines of Nathalie Barney’s rue Jacob gatherings. But when the everyday specialness of Stein’s ordinary life becomes special in a monetary way, as it does with the success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, this exposes that ordinary life to the kind of publicity that threatens the sense of linguistic singularity that Stein invests her writing with. Stein wanted to be recognised and read, she enjoyed the money that her bestseller earned, but she also sought to

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remain faithful to the haecceity of her subject-matter and not translate it into an easy language of communication and exchange. Anxieties about audience and communication, never a problematic issue when Stein invited people into her home, came potentially to contaminate both Stein’s attempt to elicit the everyday in her writing and her refusal to fix it in language, a refusal that extended also to her resistance to naming and fixing identity. Stein continued to write of the personal and the everyday, but what she ultimately attempted, in response to the threat of publicity, was to maintain what Goble terms a ‘zone of privacy within the language of identity, a way of showing who you are without saying what you are’.15 The tension between revelation and publicity, and a linguistic singularity that refuses to conform or typify, underpin Stein’s public persona, as epitomised at her rue de Fleurus parties, and characterise her ambivalence about her fame in the 1930s. This ambivalence is textually mapped out in her plays. Drama is fundamentally concerned with disclosure, with presenting and communicating a text to an audience which experiences that text visibly and publicly. Stein’s own reservations about drama are articulated in her 1935 lecture ‘Plays’ and rest substantially on the realisation, which came to her as an adolescent theatre-goer in Oakland and San Francisco, of the asynchronicity between the observer and the action on stage: ‘the great difficulty of having my emotion accompany the scene’.16 Stein characterises her own play-writing, in this essay, in two distinct phases: her early plays, concerned with immediate perception and the continuous present, rejecting ‘story’ in favour of ‘what could be told if one did not tell anything’; and subsequent plays, in which the ‘formation’ and ‘relation’ of the play exist ‘exactly like a landscape’, with no problems of having ‘to make acquaintance’.17 In both the phases that Stein identifies, her emphasis is on writing plays that express entity over temporality and reject the requirements of explication or identification of character and narrative in favour of being, presence and space. In this, the presence of language in the plays is just as central as the presence of a character or characters, but this is language that is visible, embodied and there, rather than language as an asynchronous experience of hearing. As Stein comments in Everybody’s Autobiography in relation to listening and seeing, ‘my eyes have always told me more than my ears’:18 not a comment on a painterly approach to words but a statement that the unity of the ‘complete and actual present’19 which concerns Stein across her writing can be lost when ‘everybody hears too much with their ears and it never makes anything come together’.20 In ‘Plays’, Stein highlights the, for her, problematic dichotomy of the theatre, which presents a ‘seeing’ and a ‘hearing’ very

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different from that experienced either in real life or while reading a book. Stein asks, ‘is the thing seen or is the thing heard the thing that makes most of its impression upon you at the theatre’, and confesses to ‘constantly think[ing] about the theatre from the standpoint of sight and sound and its relation to emotion and time’.21 This suggests that her concern with telling without telling anything and with formation and relation in her plays is at bottom a concern with preventing the discontinuity between experience and perception that occurs when a (performed) text requires the audience-member simultaneously to comprehend diegetic causality and character continuity, while encountering immediate events and language happening before him or her. Stein’s drama is resolutely resistant to the unfolding of plot and acutely aware of the questions she was asking about the revelatory and demonstratory aspects of this genre. For Jane Palatini Bowers, this makes Stein’s plays ‘adamantly and self-consciously “literary” ’,22 and Martin Puchner sees them as evidence of a modernist ‘anti-theatrical drama’ and, like the rest of Stein’s writing, ‘based on the high modernist values of engulfment and solitary reading’.23 As discussed above, although anxious about what an enlarged readership might mean for the linguistic singularity of her writing and its attendant impact on her sense of self, Stein does not enact in her texts the kind of solitary withdrawal that Puchner suggests. Indeed, Stein’s writing actively asks for attention: just consider the titles of the plays A Curtain Raiser (1913), Look At Us (1916), Listen To Me. A Play (1936). Her drama in particular is based in a liminal site, similar to the site that the party inhabits, located somewhere between private isolation and the general public, opening up to guests but not leaving the privacy of the personal space. This makes Stein’s plays ‘closet dramas’ in the sense discussed by Nick Salvato in Uncloseting Drama rather than in Puchner’s definition of the genre. For Salvato, ‘closet drama’s most fundamental or constant feature is, ironically, its contingency as the mode at the threshold between writing and performance – a threshold that is always, or at least always in danger of, moving’.24 Closet drama such as Stein’s does, therefore, as Salvato points out, straddle the ambiguous verge between the questions about staging and meaning explored in a range of modernist dramas, highlighting the increasing importance of textual materiality in the period. Saint Therese, ‘half in and half out of doors’ in Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts (1927–28),25 epitomises the position of Stein’s drama, poised on the margin between intimacy, the domestic and privacy (of reading), and disclosure, the civic and publicity (of performance). And when Stein writes plays about parties, this margin becomes central to both the form and the theme of her plays.

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What Happened: A Play in Five Acts consists of five short acts, as the title proclaims, coming in Act V to ‘A regret a single regret makes a door way’.26 As her first foray into drama, What Happened is itself a doorway into the concerns and strategies of Stein’s play-writing. Stein relates her coming to drama with What Happened in both The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and in her lecture ‘Plays’: [A]ll of a sudden I began to write Plays [. . .] I had just come home from a pleasant dinner party and I realized then as anybody can know that something is always happening. Something is always happening, anybody knows a quantity of stories of people’s lives that are always happening [. . .] So naturally what I wanted to do in my play was what everybody did not always know nor always tell.27

In ‘Plays’, Stein makes it clear that, by eschewing story and exploring instead the continuous present, she was attempting ‘to make a play the essence of what happened’.28 What Happened has no identifiable characters or location, and its direct references to the dinner-party that was its inspiration seem to be solely located in the mentions of food (‘cake’, ‘turkey’, ‘a slice’, ‘bread’) and the dining table (‘A wide oak a wide enough oak’, ‘the perfect central table’). As with the majority of her plays, What Happened appears resistant to the conventions of the performable text, but this means it is asking questions of the theatre rather than apotheosising itself as unperformable.29 Instead of an unfolding temporality and narrative, What Happened explores repetitions and increments, most obviously with the comparative and superlative forms of the adjectives ‘more’ and ‘most’: ‘What is the commonest exchange between more laughing and most’ (p. 205). The word ‘more’ appears fourteen times in various explorations of the being of objects and states, as the play presents the ambient noise – both visual and aural – of a dinner-party; it is concerned with the quotidian rather than the exceptional. Throughout the five acts the play persistently returns to the question of ‘what is’ and ‘is it’; the present indicative verb ‘is’, appearing eighty times in What Happened, encapsulates Stein’s textual concern here with identifying the complete and actual present. In her lecture ‘Plays’, Stein also demonstrates a concern with the ‘excitement’ of the theatre that contributes further to the noncoincidence of emotions and the ‘nervousness’ that results.30 She contrasts the felt excitement of ‘real life’ with the exciting scene ‘on the stage a thing over which you have no real control’:31 in real life ‘there has to be the moment of it all being abreast the emotion, the excitement and the action’, whereas in the theatre ‘the thing causing your emotion and the excitement in connection with it’ are not in step.32 This means

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that temporality, discontinuity and ‘a relief from excitement’ enter into the happening of theatre, which is incompatible with the ‘completion of excitement’ that is there in ‘the real thing’.33 Writing a play about a party, a special occasion and the scene of unusual interactions, might seem incompatible with Stein’s reflections on the theatre and her determination in her play-writing to present the ‘moment of it all’ rather than the excitement of event and climax. But What Happened explicitly reflects on the nature of the ‘occasion’, calling on other special occasions – ‘Christmas, quite Christmas’ (p. 205) and ‘A birthday, what is a birthday’ (p. 208) – to contrast it with. The excitement here is not the excitement of an extraordinary, climactic event such as a birthday or Christmas; it is the unique but nevertheless everyday stimulation of real life. Stein uses the word ‘occasion’ four times in What Happened, with repetitions emptying the term of its sense of culmination: with these references, she is playing out just that tension between special gathering and trivial small-talk which actually characterises the party. Stein refuses to mark the specialness of the party through the excitement of dramatic narrative structure, multiplying instead the occasions and even modifying the word itself into its adjectival form: ‘It is more than one time when the occasion which shows an occasional sharp separation is unanimous’ (p. 208). The occasion is ‘more than one time’; it is manifold and incidental; it is also an occasion which itself manifests occasional features, such as the sudden breaking of the communal experience of the moment into the ‘unanimous’ ‘separation’ into individuals. The occasion for this play is both unique in the celebration of the individual moments that make up the whole of What Happened, and completely lacking in the heightened, nervous excitation that Stein deplores in the theatre. The contrasts that Stein offers to this incidental special occasion are marked by their artificial performance; the birthday party involves specially staged speeches – ‘a birthday is a speech’ (p. 208) – and the special event of Christmas involves staged photographs: A shutter and only shutter and Christmas, quite Christmas, an only shutter and a target a whole color in every center and shooting real shooting and what can hear, that can hear that which makes such an establishment provided with what is provisionary. (p. 205)

The attempt to capture the essence of Christmas, ‘quite Christmas’, in a photograph is represented as a violent closure, with the repetition and half rhyme of ‘shutter’ and ‘shooting’. The ‘only shutter’ is deterministic and solitary, and the ‘real shooting’ is both an actual threat and a

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killing of the real as it is trapped in the static image. This seen image is contrasted with the heard, which, here, is connected with ‘what is provisionary’ rather than fixed. This is not, of course, evidence for a general resistance in Stein’s writing, or life, to photography: it is simply that, within What Happened, the Christmas photograph figures forth a staged, fixed moment of excitement, in contrast to the continuous, vibrant present of the party-play. Photography features again in the final act, connected here to the ‘door way’ which itself suggests the ambivalent position of the play, poised between text and stage: A regret a single regret makes a door way. What is a door way, a door way is a photograph. What is a photograph a photograph is a sight and a sight is always a sight of something. Very likely there is a photograph that gives color if there is then there is that color that does not change any more than it did when there was much more use for photography. (p. 209)

For Ulla Dydo, this is a reasonably straightforward evocation of the conclusion of the party: at the end, after a photograph of the party, we move with regrets into the doorway that narrows the view to departure. We leave with a picture of what happened framed in the mind. Long before color photography, it is a permanent, vivid image filled with the color that fills the play.34

But ambivalence about the fixity of the photograph persists here in the ‘regret’, the ‘color that does not change’ and the past tense ‘was’ of the final clause. The leave-taking is a narrowing, as Dydo suggests, but its transformation into a permanent photograph is in stark contrast to the vivid noise of the party. Crucially, the photograph is ‘always a sight of something’, an identified fixed object or thing emptied of its potential entity. The frame of the ‘door way’ which could offer possibility, which could be that liminal space of action, is converted into the enclosed border of the photograph and the static proscenium of the stage, dividing the staged (photograph/play) from the real. A more resonant conclusion to What Happened is offered at the close of the preceding act, where Stein essays what will become a characteristic refusal in her drama to accept the conventions of form; in What Happened there is a finishing before the supposedly conclusive fifth act. Act IV ends: . . . one hat in a curtain that is rising higher, one landing and many many more, and many more many more many many more. (p. 209)

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Instead of the wooden proscenium or frame, here we have the fabric curtain and it is ‘rising’, not separating staged from real, but offering a stage or ‘landing’ that is a place of arrival and also the act of arrival. The ‘landing’ is, moreover, multiplied incrementally and infinitely, opening out What Happened into the boundless possibilities of ordinary occurrence. In this play, therefore, both the theatrical ‘event’ and the party are subsumed into Stein’s iteration of the everyday. A Play Called Not And Now is immediately striking, not for the ordinary possibilities it poses, but for the manifold recurrences of the verb ‘to look’, most often in variations of the phrases ‘look like’/‘looked like’ and ‘look at’/‘looked at’. The extremes of repetition in this play lead Richard Bridgeman to conclude that ‘the play as a whole is very dull’,35 but Stein’s emphasis on looking and looking like are key to Not And Now’s presentation of a celebrity-filled Hollywood party.36 Structurally, the play comprises four acts, including two Act IIIs,37 and it begins with an opening section that lists five Characters, six Women and a further figure, ‘Doctor Gidon’: Characters A man who looks like Dashiell Hammett A man who looks like Picasso A man who looks like Charlie Chaplin A man who looks like Lord Berners A man who looks like David Green. Women A woman who looks like Anita Loos A woman who looks like Gertrude Atherton A woman who looks like Lady Diana Grey A woman who looks like Katherine Cornell A woman who looks like Daisy Fellowes A woman who looks like Mrs. Andrew Greene These are the characters and this is what they do. A man who looks like Doctor Gidon and some one who looks like each one of the other characters. The play will now begin. The difference between not and now. That is what makes any one look like some one. All the characters are there and the one that looks like Doctor Gidon is the one that says what has just been said only it is not what Doctor Gidon would say but is said by the one that is like him. The characters are now all in order. They move and speak.38

This opening section blends what might be didascalia, paratext and dialogue (is it Doctor Gidon who ‘says what has just been said’, that is, the two sentences preceding this statement?), with an ironic character list that opens up a gap between appearance and self, or between

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‘public self (character)’ and ‘private self (real person)’ for Jane Bowers, or between ‘projected self’ or ‘identity’ and ‘self hidden from view’ or ‘entity’ for Julia Fawcett.39 The figures in the play are always referred to as ‘the one who looked like . . .’, the past participle taking over from the present tense ‘looks’ near the beginning of the first act. This means that at every instance of a figure’s mention we are reminded of the visibility of that figure and our own act, as reader/audience, of looking at them.40 Not And Now offers a very different presentation of a party in comparison to What Happened: with so much of the text reporting on the ‘Characters’ and ‘Women’, it is peopled in a way the earlier play about a party simply is not. For many critics the celebrity names are key to understanding Not And Now: Bowers argues that the play dramatises the fact that a celebrity or public self ‘is not a real self’,41 and Salvato sees the play’s ‘obsessive theme’ as ‘self-alienation’.42 There is indeed a clear sense that Not And Now investigates the functioning of celebrity culture and its dislocation of individual identity and, given the Hollywood setting of the party, interrogates the role of the gaze in constructing celebrity-as-commodity. But the play is not a wholly negative response to either fame or the theatre and the complex delegation of character identity is not a refusal of public identity. Not And Now plays with the obvious (in a theatrical production) fact that there are people playing characters in a play, attempting to be ‘like’ these characters in their performance before an audience, rather than actually being these characters. But Stein confounds even this easy meaning for the ‘ones who look like’ in Not And Now, explaining that ‘The one who was like the one who was like Charlie Chaplin that would make two and there was only one came in as he came in that is he was all alone as he came in’ (p. 428). If ‘the one who looked like Charlie Chaplin’ in this play is ‘one’ (a word repeated 473 times in Not And Now) then we do not have identities multiplied by performativity. Rather, we have ‘one’ constructed by the act of looking and, implicitly, liking. Not And Now has some direct dialogue (though not necessarily marked as such) alongside reported speech, and the play consists of this speech and of descriptions of the movements and interactions of the figures. However, though there is detail on the interaction there is often little detail of what is spoken: The one that looked like Anita Loos did not say anything the one that looked like Dashiell Hammett did not say anything to her. The one that looked like Gertrude Atherton said something, the one that looked like Picasso did not say anything to her. The one that looked like Lady Diane Grey said a great deal. (p. 425)

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Thus, while there are instances of direct speech in Not And Now, the greater part of the play is reported speech and description and this forces the attention onto ‘looking’, both the looking repeated within the text and the looking which is what the text mostly consists of. Instead of a disjunction of hearing and seeing, producing asynchronicity and nervousness, the emphasis is on seeing, but in a way which forces the audience/reader of Not And Now to an acute consciousness of her/his own actions of looking in the process of meaning-making, whether this is the act of looking at words, looking at actors on stage or looking at the glamorous celebrities of popular culture (Hollywood stars, popular writers, eccentric peers, avant-garde icons). Moreover, as Fawcett points out, the play highlights the ‘unarticulated subject of “to look” ’ and ‘Stein refuses to clarify whether the unmarked looker implied in her insistent verb watches the events and narrates the play as a character on stage [. . .] as a director or playwright [. . .] or as an audience member’.43 Acknowledging, as Fawcett does, that Stein’s writing in Not And Now causes the subject to disappear even as her/his presence is grammatically invoked makes it clear how Stein maintains her/a privacy in this public text about an intimately public event: it is her way of showing without saying and fixing. Stein’s privacy was breached, as she saw it, in the 1930s by the money her audience was willing to pay. Not And Now, as part of its exploration of celebrity, publicity and identity as these feature at a party full of famous people, considers money in detail. The majority of Act III1, scene iv is a disquisition on money, a topic that is introduced in the first act with the reflection that ‘They knew that money was a bother’ (p. 426). Whereas this first mention of money is followed by various figures looking to see if, or looking like, they have money, III1, iv presents declarative statements on money itself, attributed to ‘the one who is like Dr. Gidon’: The only difference between man and monkey Is what money makes. If there is no money then like anything They eat what they have. But money is not so. It is kept That is what it is. And nothing is kept except what money is. (p. 432)

There are close parallels here with statements Stein makes in Everybody’s Autobiography that money is ‘really the difference between men and animals [. . .] money is purely a human conception’ (p. 28), but in Not

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And Now this idea is made concrete through the verbal play where ‘money’ and the ‘k’ of ‘makes’ is literally the difference between the words ‘man’ and ‘monkey’. Emphasised here, with the repetition of ‘k’, is the keeping of money, its accumulation, the human abstraction of money as a mode of exchange into money as an essence or ‘what it is’. The essence of money as ‘purely a human conception’ is exemplified in further instances of verbal play in this scene in the sequence involving what ‘the one who is like Picasso’ ‘is to do when he see money’: ‘Hold it and hoe it’, ‘Money can not go and say so’ (p. 432). The horticultural references ‘hoe’ and ‘so[w]’, which gesture towards fertile abundance and the natural world, are contrasted with the ideas of stasis and dry accumulation expressed by ‘hold’ and ‘not go’. Money cannot move or express itself; it has no becoming: There is no no in seen. There is no in money. There is so in seen. There is no so in money. (p. 433)

The seen/scene, the action of looking/the action of the play, does not involve a denial (‘no’) but it remains open to possibilities (‘so’). The problem arises when that looking/text becomes a financial transaction, when the ‘no’ substitutes for the ‘so’. Nevertheless, Stein emphasises the inevitability of money in human society in Everybody’s Autobiography: ‘after all money is money if you live together and as the world is now all covered over everybody has to live together and if you live together call it what you like it has to be money, and that is the way it is’,44 or, as she puts it more playfully in Not And Now, ‘without money there is no butter’ (p. 432). The problem arises, as Stein shows in Everybody’s Autobiography, when money completely erases and replaces identity. This is the case when ‘The one who looks like Charlie Chaplin arranges neatly that he is not there. Where is he. He is not there. And where is money. Money is there’ (p. 432). Not And Now is necessarily aware of money and fame in its account of the Hollywood party, but these are only problematic concepts when they converge to replace identity with a celebrity-commodity. For both Salvato and Fawcett, the key to understanding Not And Now lies in one of the celebrities who wasn’t actually at the Hollywood party. Lord Berners, listed as one of the ‘Characters’ of Not And Now, was a friend of Stein but was not in attendance and Salvato sees the inclusion of this openly gay man as the ‘solution to the riddle’ of Not And Now, reading ‘the mysterious assemblage of women’ in Act III1 as ‘really an assemblage of queer men’ and part of the play’s ‘implicit valuation

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[. . .] of a queer sensibility’.45 Picasso was not at the party either and Fawcett takes this ‘Character’ as a reference instead to ‘a Picasso’, that is, Picasso’s famous 1905–6 portrait of Stein, leading her to conclude that the ‘one who looked like [a] Picasso’ figures as a form of ‘appropriation of Stein’s identity’ that is interrogated in the play.46 But it is just as easy to use some celebrities who were actually at the party – the famous popular writers Anita Loos and Dashiell Hammett – as the catalyst for a reading of the play. Both Loos and Hammett had had their most successful novels adapted for cinema (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in 1928 and The Thin Man in 1934, respectively) and their presence in Not And Now could signal an anxiety, not about celebrity or success, but about representation and translation into popular media forms. Hammett’s presence is particularly resonant: Stein specifically requested that Hammett be invited to the party, as she relates on the opening pages of Everybody’s Autobiography, and her mention of Hammett there triggers Stein to reflect that ‘It is very nice being a celebrity a real celebrity who can decide who they want to meet and say so and they come or do not come as you want them.’47 Her enjoyment of detective fiction is well documented and it was the genre she adopted to write herself out of her block after the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Stein’s interest in detective fiction, which she described as ‘the only real modern novel form’, lay in the fact that it ‘gets rid of human nature by having the man dead to be begin with the hero is dead to begin with and so you have so to speak got rid of the event before the book begins’.48 Hammett’s The Thin Man (1934) epitomises this completely as the ‘Thin Man’ of the title, who turns out to have been the murder victim, is present in the novel only in the representations (forged letters and telegrams, false sightings, faked encounters) that various other characters fabricate. The absolute absence of the eponymous hero, whose body has been reduced to a skeleton, and the epistemological uncertainty of the detective Nick Charles’s solution to the mystery – the final phrase of the novel is ‘but it’s all pretty unsatisfactory’ – have significant consequences for Not And Now. The play is Stein’s own way of getting rid of the event, refusing plot, climax and celebrity heroes in her play about a party, to allow her writing to turn a distracted attention instead to the incremental and quotidian. What Salvato registers as a critique of the ‘triviality and tedium of party conversation’49 is actually the fully realised and celebrated essence of what Stein intends with Not And Now. Not And Now ends with the statement ‘that was what was happening’, an interesting verbal echo of Stein’s first play, but for Bowers this directly indicates the failure Stein is acknowledging with her play, that

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the ‘not and now [. . .] cannot be merged’ and so ‘[t]he written play is a record of what is “not”, no matter how closely it registered the “now” of its composition’.50 But Stein’s use of the past progressive actually suggests a continuity, indicating that something was going on, something persisted; it is a deliberate denial of climax and an articulation of the quotidian. Not And Now is not exciting: ‘it might have been exciting’ (p. 424) we are told, but it deliberately is not. The play inhabits the ongoing ordinariness of the party, rather than glamorising its celebrity guests and their conversation; ‘what did they say. They said everything’ (p. 427). What is fundamental here is the rejection of a plot or anything that would seek to transform the ordinariness of being into artificial excitement. We are instead simply in the ‘middle’: ‘in the middle of looking like him he went on looking like him that is what the one did who looked like him’ (p. 434). It is not just this ‘one’ who ‘went on looking like’: we are told that the Characters and Women look like themselves ‘one Sunday morning’, ‘one Sunday’, ‘every Sunday’, ‘Sunday morning afternoon and evening’, ‘and every week day’ (p. 434). This moment, the party, is no different, not because there is no difference, but because every moment, every day, is singular, just as every person is unique in his or her own ordinary sameness: ‘there is one and he looks like each one not the same each one but each one as is the one which is that one’ (p. 438). The 473 instances of the word ‘one’ in the play are, every one, singular expressions of singularity. What Not And Now presents is a Hollywood party that, extraordinarily enough, epitomises the exceptional essence of everyday being. Stein’s dramatic writing in What Happened, Not And Now and elsewhere fundamentally reveals how ‘something is always happening’, making everything special and not singling out an exceptional moment or entity. What Happened refuses to stage the party/play as an occasion and replaces the climax of the theatre event with an incremental exploration of the quotidian. The play is notable particularly for its lack of the obvious markers of a dramatic text – characters, speeches, stage directions – but its orientation, as displayed in the full title What Happened: A Play, is towards the public space of the theatre. Not And Now shows a marked alteration in Stein’s play-writing, responding not least to the change in her status as a writer. Now that she is herself a celebrity, her play is acutely conscious of its own potential visibility, enacted through the central concern with highly visible characters. The Hollywood party of Not And Now is much more readily a spectacular event and so, perhaps more adamantly than Stein’s first play, it insists on the commonplace and refuses to stabilise the nature of public identity. Grammatically creating a zone of privacy, where the ‘real’ speaker of the

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text and the ‘essential’ identity of the celebrities can persist, the play presents a showing that does not dictate but resolutely inhabits the uncertain, liminal space that Stein’s drama delineates. In What Happened and Not And Now the forum of the party embodies an ambiguous combination of intimacy and publicity, privacy and display, which directly mirrors the ‘closet’ status of Stein’s drama and is also fundamental to her more accessible, popular ‘autobiographical’ writing.

Notes 1. Sarah Bay-Cheng, Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein’s Avant-Garde Theater (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 35. 2. Stein’s only publications to this date had been Three Lives, published, at her own expense, in New York by the Grafton Press in 1909, and ‘A Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia’, privately printed by Dodge in Florence in 1912. Gibb had taken a couple of copies of ‘A Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia’ with him to Dublin during a show of his pictures and ‘it was then that the Dublin writers in the cafés heard Gertrude Stein read aloud. Doctor Gogarty, Harry Gibb’s host and admirer, loved to read it aloud himself and have others read it aloud’. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) (London: Penguin, 1966), p. 128. 3. Steven Watson, Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 4–5; see this study for a full account of the development and staging of Four Saints in Three Acts in America in 1934. 4. Bay-Cheng, Mama Dada, p. 35. 5. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, pp. 10–11. 6. Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (1925) (Normal: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995), pp. 292, 289. 7. Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (1936) (London: Virago, 1985), pp. 27, 32. 8. Ibid., p. 34. 9. Mark Goble, Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) p. 99. 10. Marc Robinson notes how ‘Stein’s love of company, the comings and goings at Fleurus, and even the travails of life with Alice work their way into the plays’. Marc Robinson, The Other American Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 20. Martin Puchner comments on ‘Stein’s characteristic combination of autobiography and theory’ in her essay writing. Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 102. 11. Bryony Randall, Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 118. 12. Ibid., p. 7. 13. Liesl Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 5. 14. Ibid., p. 97; Randall, Modernism, Daily Time, p. 121.

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15. Goble, Beautiful Circuits, p. 144. 16. Stein, ‘Plays’ (1935), in Lectures in America (New York: Random House, 1935), pp. 93–131: p. 114. 17. Ibid., pp. 119, 125, 122. 18. Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography, p. 69. 19. Stein, ‘Plays’, p. 105. 20. Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography, p. 69. 21. Stein, ‘Plays’, pp. 103, 104. 22. Jane Palatini Bowers, ‘They Watch Me as They Watch This’: Gertrude Stein’s Metadrama (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), p. 2. 23. Puchner, Stage Fright, pp. 105, 103. 24. Nick Salvato, Uncloseting Drama: American Modernism and Queer Performance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 5. 25. Gertrude Stein, Four Saints in Three Acts, in Last Operas and Plays (New York: Rhinehart: 1949), p. 445. 26. Stein, What Happened: A Play in Five Acts (1913), in Geography and Plays (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1999), pp. 205–9: p. 209; subsequent page references are given in the text. 27. Stein ‘Plays’, pp. 118–19. 28. Stein ‘Plays’, p. 119. ‘It was during that winter that Gertrude Stein began to write plays. They began with one entitled, It Happened a Play. This was written about a dinner party given by Harry and Bridget Gibb’. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, p. 145. 29. For details of professional performances of What Happened, see BayCheng, Mama Dada, Appendix B. 30. Stein, ‘Plays’, p. 95. 31. Ibid., p. 98. 32. Ibid., pp. 100, 101. 33. Ibid., p. 96. 34. Ulla E. Dydo, A Stein Reader (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 268–9. 35. Richard Bridgeman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 285. 36. The party is described by Toklas in her memoir: ‘Conversation at dinner was fairly lively. Mr Chaplin had brought with him Paulette Goddard, who was an enfant terrible. There was also a Spanish diplomat and our hostess’ brother, who was a film director. After dinner there were some guests who came, amongst them Anita Loos, to whom I took an immediate fancy. The film directors gathered around Miss Stein and said, We would like to know how you came to have your enormous popularity, and she said, By having a small audience, whereupon they shoved their chairs away from her, discouraged with what she had to advise.’ Alice B. Toklas, What Is Remembered (1963) (London: Abacus, 1989), p. 152. 37. When these two Act IIIs are referred to here, they will be distinguished as Act III1 (the first Act III) and Act III2 (the second Act III). 38. Gertrude Stein, A Play Called Not And Now (1936), in Last Operas and Plays, pp. 422–39: p. 422. Hereafter page numbers are given in the text. 39. Bowers, ‘They Watch Me’, p. 88; Julia Fawcett, ‘Looking For The One

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41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

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Who Looks Like Someone: The Unmarked Subject(s) in Gertrude Stein’s A Play Called Not and Now’, Modern Drama 53:2 (2010), pp. 137–58: p. 142. Although Not And Now foregrounds the ‘looking’ of an audience, the only professional production of this play has been as a puppet play at the Heston International Festival of Puppet Theater in New York in 1994; see Bay-Cheng, Mama Dada, p. 162. Bowers, ‘They Watch Me’, p. 88. Salvato, Uncloseting Drama, pp. 116, 118. Fawcett, ‘Looking For The One Who Looks Like Someone’, pp. 145, 152. Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography, p. 269. Salvato, Uncloseting Drama, p. 122. Fawcett, ‘Looking For The One Who Looks Like Someone’, p. 148. Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography, p. xxi. Gertrude Stein, ‘What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them’, in Patricia Meyerowitz (ed.), Gertrude Stein: Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures 1911–1945 (London: Peter Owen, 2004), p. 149. Salvato, Uncloseting Drama, p. 117. Bowers, ‘They Watch Me’, p. 90.

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Chapter 9

The Interracial Party of Modernist Primitivism and the Black ‘After-Party’ Margo Natalie Crawford

At these times, the Negro drags his captors captive. On occasions, I have been amazed and amused watching white people dancing to a Negro band in a Harlem cabaret; attempting to throw off the crusts and layers of inhibitions laid on by sophisticated civilization; striving to yield to the feel and experience of abandon; seeking to recapture a taste of primitive joy in life and living; trying to work their way back into that jungle which was the original Garden of Eden; in a word, doing their best to pass for colored. (James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way)1 She wasn’t, she told herself, a jungle creature. She cloaked herself in a faint disgust as she watched the entertainers throw themselves about to the bursts of syncopated jangle, and when the time came again for the patrons to dance, she declined. (Nella Larsen, Quicksand)2

The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, in some of the 1960s and 1970s Black Arts Movement critiques, was an artistic movement of African Americans frolicking with the oppressors. Whereas the salons and sociability of Gertrude Stein, Muriel Draper and other modernists have been celebrated as the gathering of kindred spirits, the Black Arts Movement’s assessments of the Harlem Renaissance set it up as an interracial party or spectacle of assimilation, in which the self-determination of the Negro was constantly jeopardised. Black Arts Movement writers critiqued the role of white patrons in the Harlem Renaissance and an alleged desire, on the part of the African American writers, to assimilate into a dominant (white) aesthetic. Amiri Baraka, in ‘The Myth of a “Negro Literature” ’ (1963), for example, argues that the majority of Harlem Renaissance literature remained mediocre art, due to the imitation of white ‘high art’.3 In studies of the Harlem Renaissance, the iconic party is the 1920s or 1930s rent-party: the house-parties, with small fees for entry, that enabled tenants to pay rent. A focus on a wider modernist party dynamic, however, deepens the key inquiries that have shaped Harlem Renaissance

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scholarship. Our understanding of the cultural appropriations, the performances of race and the complexity of modernist primitivism expands when we focus on the literal and symbolic interracial party dynamic of the Harlem Renaissance. But the complexity of this larger party dynamic is embedded in some of the depictions of the rent-party. Wallace Thurman describes the rent-party of the Harlem Renaissance as a ‘commercialization of spontaneous pleasure in order to pay the landlord’ and ‘a joyful intimate party, open to the public yet held in a private home’.4 This language signals that the phenomenon of people hosting parties (with strangers and family and friends) in their homes produced a certain intertwining of the public and private. People gained access to other people’s private space and experienced it as public space. Thurman’s emphasis on the joyful nature of entering into other people’s privacy and making one’s private space public is very different from the depiction, in one of his unpublished essays, of the sadness that suffused the rent-party. Thurman writes, ‘[d]espite the freedom and frenzy of these parties they are seldom joyous affairs. On the contrary they are rather sad and depressing. A tragic undercurrent runs through the music and is reflected in the eyes and faces of the dancers’ (pp. 73–4). The notion of an ‘undercurrent’ of a party can be extended into a way of thinking about the undercurrents of the Harlem Renaissance. Just as the music and dance of jazz and blues had this note of melancholy underneath the ‘frenzy’, the literature of the movement contains this sense of a party that has stopped being pleasurable. The final scene of Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) epitomises this sense of the end of the party. Clare, the now iconic figure, in African American literature, of passing for white, dies. John Bellew, the white person who intrudes on this party and confronts his wife with his knowledge that she has been passing for white, is the same person who, in an earlier scene in the novel, revels in his wife’s amazingly seductive ability to darken, during the summer, to the extent that she almost looks like a Negro. He uses the term ‘nigger’ (not ‘Negro’) and fully performs antiblack racism as he conveys his affection for his wife, whom he believes is a white woman who gets an unusually dark tan during the summer. Bellew approaches the gaze of classic racialised modernist primitivism when he enjoys seeing ‘white’ as dark but still ‘white’. The darkness that seduced the modernist primitivists who elevated the raw as the highest value was a darkness that was most appealing when it was collected, rearranged and interpreted through the white modernist lens. I will argue that, when primitivism became white modernists’ playful experiment with escaping white privilege, it gained a performative space that had the shape of an interracial party, hosted by white people, who invite black people to join in the fun.

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The complexity of performances of modernist primitivism surfaces when the interracial party of primitivism is compared with the images of the black party within the larger party of primitivism. Larsen’s image of the party in Quicksand is one of the most telling depictions of African American responses to racialised primitivism. After the dinner-party in Chapter 11, there is an ‘after-party’, with riotous dancing. This party is a core example of the black parties in which black people process the modernist primitivism that has been projected onto black bodies. Helga initially dances with pure joy as she feels that the ‘essence of life seemed bodily motion’. Once the music ends, she regrets the dance and tells herself that she is not a ‘jungle creature’. 5 Larsen captures the everyday dance through the racial primitivist trap that equated the ‘jungle’ and black bodies. Helga cannot seize the aesthetic of ‘bodily motion’ without feeling stuck in a demeaning racial position. In the ‘jungle creature’ party scene in Quicksand, the release that dance produces is the release produced when a group of black people dance without the presence of a white gaze. Nonetheless, when the music ends, Helga feels the power of the gaze that conflates black people dancing with ‘jungle creatures’. Larsen depicts non-self-conscious dance as a higher state of consciousness that allows the black dancer not to think about the antiblack racism that makes the ‘jungle creature’ such a demeaning position. The role of dance in African American entanglements with primitivism is illuminating. The powerful, beautiful and tormented dances in the modernist primitivist party are ways in which people animated a discourse that was written on their bodies. Langston Hughes’s short story ‘Rejuvenation Through Joy’ (1933) sheds light on black modernist dancers’ nitty-gritty wrestling with the straitjacket that primitivism could have become. Lesche, who is pretending to be a knowledgeable spiritualist in order to get his wealthy white women clients to pay for sessions at his ‘colony’, is revealed, at the very end of the story, as possibly being a black man passing for white. Lesche makes dance a key feature of his ‘rejuvenation’ classes. As he teaches his white women clients that they must discover their ‘life-center, the balancing point’, he advises, ‘Look at the Negroes. They know how to move from the feet up, from the head down. Their centers live.’6 But when Lesche guides the rehearsal for one of the performative classes, the black woman dancer, Tulane Lucas, is depicted as ‘gliding’, not gyrating in the manner that we might expect when we hear the idea of the centre that ‘lives’. The gliding is depicted in the following manner: ‘The jazz band began to cry Mood Indigo in the best manner of the immortal Duke Ellington. Lesche began to speak in his great soft voice. Bushy-

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haired Tulane Lucas began to glide across the floor’ (p. 87). Gliding is a delightful way of rethinking the black modernist dancers’ navigation of the potential straitjacket of primitivism. Hughes, in this same short story, offers images of bowing as yet another way of visualising the erotic, primitivised centre as a gesture, not a racial essence. The images of Lesche’s bowing are a stunning interpretation of the black modernists’ after-party, as the bending of the body that is supposed to shake and wiggle into a hard, frozen, mechanical reproduction of grace. Hughes writes: ‘They (the Negroes) walk, they stand, they dance to their drum beats, their earth rhythms. They squat, they kneel, they lie – but they never, in their natural states, never sit in chairs. They do not mood and brood. No! They live through motion, through movement, through music, through joy! (Remember my lecture, ‘Negroes and Joy’?) Ladies, and gentlemen, I offer you today – rejuvenation through joy.’ Lesche bowed and bowed as he left the platform. With the greatest of grace he returned to bow again to applause, that was thunderous. To a ballroom that was full of well-dressed women and cultured men, he bowed and bowed. (p. 72, emphasis added)

Some bows can make the person being honoured seem submissive. Hughes shows that the grace dancers express is different from the ‘jungle dance’ that worries Helga. We can rethink the dance of modernist primitivism as the difficult space where a certain grace was achieved, in the black after-party, by African American modernists who did not fully internalise the jungle creature ideology. Countering an external gaze that imagined a jungle while watching black bodies dancing, black modernists may have gained a renewed sense of the difference between jungle movements and controlled movements. The sense of control is what is lost when white subjects perform a stereotype of black dance. In the film The Jerk (1979), as Steve Martin’s character searches for the beat (saying, ‘I can feel it. I can feel it’), the jerkiness of his movements dramatises the difference between rhythm and flow and the uncontrolled wildness that looks like a jolt. The angles and bending that shaped the black after-party of primitivism look even more pronounced when Hughes’s depiction of the repeated bow is compared to the angles and bends in the art of Aaron Douglas. Years after the Harlem Renaissance, Douglas explained that he deliberately decided, after his initial reluctance, to do ‘this primitive thing’.7 Douglas decided that primitivism was not necessarily a trap that made black artists produce ‘naïve’ art for a patronising audience. In a letter to Langston Hughes, Douglas writes:

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Plunge [. . .] into the very depths of the soul of our people, and drag forth material, crude, rough, neglected. Then let’s sing it, dance it, write it, paint it. Let’s do the impossible. Let’s create something transcendentally material, mystically objective. Earthy. Spiritually earthy. Dynamic.8

The bending of figures in his semi-abstract woodcuts shows that doing ‘the impossible’ was the controlled movement in the midst of the full plunging. Douglas, in his images of the black dance-party, makes room for the African American enjoyment of the primitive plunge. The controlled movement of this pleasurable plunge into primitivism can be seen in the lines in Douglas’s woodcuts. When Douglas evokes the minstrel images, he sometimes places the full lips and other signs of black-face minstrelsy in the context of a dance-party. These are the images that open up my argument about the party, the pleasure and the fantasy of white primitivism. Racialised primitivism may indeed, as Anne Cheng argues in Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (2011), make Picasso and others experience a certain ‘shattering’, but it also produces a type of entertainment and comfort that is often rewritten as self-alienation and traumatic dislocation.9 Cheng’s sense that Picasso was surely appropriating the African masks as objects but also ‘shattered’ by them does not make room for the power tied to the type of shattering that allows the white primitivist to be possessed by the other in a manner that makes being possessed by coterminous with collecting that which possesses you. The tone of a party changes when there is a collection process happening that makes white uncontrolled self-abandon, for some white partygoers, also a state of a certain type of control of the other. But many Harlem Renaissance texts show that African Americans used images of controlled abandon as a way of thinking about an aesthetic that was set apart from whiteness. Elmer A. Carter, for example, in his analysis of Billy Pierce’s tap-dancing across the colour-line and his teaching others to tap-dance, writes: The stamp of the Billy Pierce studio is unmistakably imprinted on every one of his pupils. He gives them something other teachers cannot give. It is something of Negro abandon, enhanced and yet partially concealed by exquisite grace and a perfect sense of rhythm.10

‘Negro abandon’ is depicted in Carter’s essay as a staccato ‘tap tap tap tap’. The acoustics of Negro abandon (sounds such as Carter’s depiction of the staccato beat) are not the same as the visual images that continue to make the ‘jungle creature’ the centre of analyses of the role of blackness in white modernist primitivism. The sound of controlled

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abandon may be the sound of black chant. Scholars such as Aldon Lynn Nielsen have identified the role of chant in black postmodern poetics. Chant has a primitive aura.11 Consider Lafcadio Hearn’s depiction of chant in the 1878 text Two Years in the French West Indies: ‘His chant is cavernous, abysmal – booms from his chest like the sound of a drum beaten in the bottom of a well [. . .] and all chant after him, in a chanting like the rushing of many waters, and with triple clapping of hands.’12 Chant’s seeming primitiveness is its ability, through repetition of the same sounds, to create an inner space, like a ‘bottom of a well’, that is an altered state of consciousness (a state of trance) and controlled abandon. In the midst of the modernist primitivist party, this inner space of controlled abandon may have been achieved by many involuntary black party-goers. In Cane (1923), Jean Toomer uses chant and trance to call for an understanding of African American controlled abandon as beautiful, not degrading. The final story in Cane, ‘Kabnis’, ends with an underground party (a party in a basement) that is haunted by the presence of Father John, the elderly man whose controlled abandon and primitiveness greatly frustrate the young Kabnis. Kabnis parties and moves with wild abandon while Father John actually embodies that other state of abandonment – the state of being left behind. After Kabnis’s drunken stupor and sexual abandon, he cannot bear to see the bust-like, immobile nature of Father John and he cannot bear Father John’s blindness and initial muteness. When Father John speaks, he begins to talk about sin and the ‘white folks’ who made the Bible lie. Kabnis simply wants to continue partying; he does not want to hear this heavy reminder, presumably from a man who was actually formerly enslaved, about the larger current and historical context of the modernist party. Father John speaks as if he is in a state of trance (or the shock tied to post-slavery trauma). Toomer ends Cane with this tension between Kabnis’s desire for the ‘new and up to date’ and Father John’s embodiment of the old. The circular nature of Cane, the final image of the sun rising, makes the tension of Kabnis’s uncontrolled abandon and Father John’s controlled abandon connect to the opening section’s use of a chant about the sun setting and the need to see the ephemeral and evanescent before it disappears. Toomer makes chant’s production of inner space (‘O cant you see it, O cant you see it / Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon / [. . .] When the sun goes down’) pivot on skin’s interiority.13 Cheng argues that modernism often plays with the inner and outer dimensions of skin. Kabnis, unlike the dark-skinned Father John, is ‘lemon colored’. Throughout Cane, Toomer makes light skin a sign of becoming and evanescence, whereas the dark skin of characters such as King Barlo and

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Father John is tied to rootedness. The final conflict, in the underground party, is the conflict between the aesthetic of becoming and uncontrolled abandon and the aesthetic of righteous rootedness and controlled abandon. This tension between becoming and rootedness is embedded in black responses to modernist primitivism. Instead of being the primitive, how did black subjects gain access to the freedom of becoming the primitive, the freedom of liminality that made primitivism consciously or unconsciously enjoyable for white subjects? On the other hand, how did African Americans claim their right to be a spectator of the primitivist party (not an entertainer within it)? Watching the show (not always being in the show) generated the poetics of black modernist controlled abandon. Consider Claude McKay’s poem ‘Negro Dancers’ (1925). The speaker states, ‘’Tis best to sit and gaze; my heart then dances / To the lithe bodies gliding slowly by.’14 This sonnet is in full conversation with Helene Johnson’s ‘Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem’ (1927). Johnson violates the rules of rhyme of the sonnet form as she connects the modernist play with the sonnet to the play with the typical primitivist relation between the patronising spectator and the humble object of study. The most pronounced image of primitivism in the poem is: ‘Your head thrown back in rich, barbaric song, / Palm trees and mangoes stretched before your eyes.’ The pronounced defiance of the primitivist script is the woman’s ‘arrogant’ laughter and ‘supercilious feet’: ‘Why urge ahead your supercilious feet? / [. . .] ‘I love your laughter arrogant and bold’.15 Once the primitive attitude gains this haughty texture, the overall feel of the party changes, and the overall texture of black modernist literature changes. The ‘feet’ in the sonnet (the meter itself) gain a ‘supercilious’ edge; Harlem Renaissance writers begin to experiment with new forms, new ways of expressing the grace of controlled movement and the delight of abandon. Zora Neale Hurston, undoubtedly, epitomises the haughty African American approach to primitivism. Her famous words ‘No, I do not weep at the world – I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife’ and the iconic photographs of her with the haughty hat twisted to the side are as telling as her deep interest in recording and aestheticising the folk and the primitive.16 In the play Mr. Frog (1930), Hurston uses an Aristophanic ‘frog chorus’ as she depicts a wedding-party set in the time ‘when animals talked’. This wedding-party is as primitive as animals are in the human imagination and as refined and sophisticated as the modern dance is at the beginning of the play. The temporal and spatial dimensions of modernist primitivism could be described in the way that Hurston describes this opening dance – a ‘violent wind dance’.17 The old becomes

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new and modern; the modern is the primitive. The use of wind in the play shows how Hurston revised high modernism’s use of the infantile primitive. The wind dance and the child-like play in Mr. Frog push against T. S. Eliot’s images of wind and children’s songs in ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925). Hurston’s dignified primitive differs greatly from Eliot’s poignant images of the hollowed out sensibilities that can only circle around the ‘prickly pear’.18 The circling in the play is the repetition of the chorus ‘unh hunh, unh hunh’ (pp. 95–9). The communion achieved by the chorus is the opposite of the ‘hollowing out’ depicted in Eliot’s poem. The chorus creates an interiority that seems pre-human and posttrauma. The sheer pleasure of this play is the song-like effect of the dialogue and the chorus’s creation of a chant that performs unity in spite of fragmentation. This party of talking animals is a shift from the dancing ‘jungle creature’ that worries Helga Crane in Quicksand. Hurston was envisioning the most progressive response to primitivism – a removal of the human/animal distinction. If all of the characters in the modernist primitivist party viewed themselves as animals, the party would have ended very quickly. Mr. Frog is a part of a fuller range of short plays, collected as Cold Keener (1930), that were meant to be staged together. The next play in this sequence, Lenox Avenue, pivots on gestures. The tension in the play becomes the still moments when gestures such as ‘arms akimbo’ allow actors to make their bodies become a visual sign. Hurston creates a Lenox Avenue full of signifying bodies. In contrast to the setting of Mr. Frog (‘when animals talked’), this play presents the time when ‘bodies talked’. The foregrounding of sign-making is a key feature of African American responses to modernist primitivism. In Characteristics of Negro Expression (1934), Hurston develops a script of the signifying differences between the Negro and the white subject. Hurston, in this manifesto, seizes the right to theorise about Negro primitiveness; she fully accepts the sign ‘primitive’ but she revels in her ability to explain and control the exact characteristics of this primitiveness. As her lists of examples of Negro expression show the excess and the playfulness, her ethnography merges with the poetics of controlled abandon. The Negro, she insists, speaks through word pictures, through hieroglyphics. The communication through visual signs that are still recognised as word pictures and not treated as abstract words shaped the interracial party of modernism. Ezra Pound’s use of Chinese ideograms is not simply different from Hurston’s Negro hieroglyphics. But Hurston’s dramatising of the role of visual signifying, in African American modernism, is overdetermined, in a way that Ezra Pound’s ideograms are not, by the modernist racialising of primitiveness. In Characteristics of Negro

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Expression, Hurston calls the signs that are no longer recognised as signs ‘cheque words’. To be a Negro, on the other hand, was to be a sign, in the modernist gaze, of the primitive. Like Characteristics of Negro Expression, Anita Scott Coleman’s short story ‘Cross Crossings Cautiously’ (1930) is a stunning example of the theorising about signs and race embedded in the Harlem Renaissance depiction of controlled abandon. The story gives a new twist to the seduction narratives tied to the transgression of the colourline and the embrace of the modernist interracial party. A young white child asks an African American man to escort her to a circus, assuring him that her mother asked her to ask for assistance. He lets go of his fears and helps her, but is then treated as a black male predator aiming to hurt the child. The short story pivots on the signs that he sees as he walks, before meeting the child: ‘CROSS CROSSINGS CAUTIOUSLY’ and a movie billboard image of a lion waiting to attack ‘a flashy blond lady’.19 He sees these signs, the first one merely a ‘railroad crossing sign’, but as he enters into the child-oriented state of full abandon, he loses control and becomes entirely vulnerable in the white power structure. He, who ‘rarely thought in the abstract’ (the opening note of the story), forgets that these signs have concrete meanings.20 Coleman’s depiction of the dangerous circus event connects with Nella Larsen’s image, in Quicksand, of the circus in Denmark that Helga repeatedly visits. Helga returns to this circus as she attempts to process her own enjoyment of and frustration with the Scandinavians’ exoticising of her racial identity. Helga’s obsession with a minstrel performer in the circus connects with the repeated references to Helga as a peacock (and, in one passage, a ‘curio’).21 The parties in Denmark are not entirely different from the actual Danish circus, with the overt gaze of racial exoticism and objectification. As white modernists crossed boundaries between black and white subjects, they also created new obstacles as they depicted black subjectivity in ways that sometimes enclosed black subjects and prevented real movement. African American modernists’ use of controlled abandon ‘crossed the crossings’ of the white modernists when they subverted the enclosed spaces and exposed the lingering white privilege power dynamics in spite of the productive, innovative nature of the modernist play with categories and borders. When the interracial modernist party gained the aura of an interracial circus, African Americans’ performance of their racial identity gained a different dimension. The circus party can make someone not only pause like Helga Crane and assert ‘I am not a jungle creature’; it can also make someone pause and think, ‘These spectators must envy jungleness.’ This

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recognition of envy of the jungle translated into the performance, in Harlem Renaissance discourse, of black jazz. The music of the modernist party is analysed as the Harlem Renaissance unfolds, not after the party ends. J. A. Rogers, in the essay ‘Jazz at Home’ (1925), paused as the Harlem Renaissance party was beginning and mused on the significance of the music in this party. He decided that jazz is specifically ‘Negro American’, even though (echoing Thurman’s description of the rent-party) it is a private space made public. Rogers’ image of jazz as starting at ‘home’ before it travels is as intriguing as his anecdote about the paid entertainers who discover jazz during their after-party, after their paid labour and entertaining ends. Rogers tells this origin story of jazz in the following manner: The story is told of the clever group of ‘jazz-specialists’ who, originating dear knows in what scattered places, had found themselves and the frills of the art in New York and had been drawn to the gay Bohemias of Paris. In a little cabaret of Montmartre they had just ‘entertained’ into the wee small hours fascinated society and royalty; and, of course, had been paid royally for it. Then, the entertainment over and the guests away, the ‘entertainers’ entertained themselves with their very best, which is always impromptu, for the sheer joy of it. That is jazz.22

When Rogers shapes the party and the after-party into an origin story of jazz (and what he views as its African American ‘home’), the afterparty is the zone of aesthetic freedom and collective and empowering controlled improvisation. When the Harlem Renaissance is viewed as a cultural movement that was limited and confined by the involvement of white patrons and the lack of enough black self-determination, the Black Arts Movement becomes the after-party that allowed for fuller artistic freedom. In the framing of movements in the tradition of African American literature, the slave narratives, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement and the 1980s explosion of African American women’s literature remain the only literary movements named and clearly identified on this literary map. The 1960s and 1970s Black Arts Movement is easily viewed as the antithesis of the Harlem Renaissance party. The anti-white rhetoric asks white people not to attend the Black Arts party. The Black Arts Movement also critiques the very notion that the ‘revolution will be televised’, that a cultural revolution can gain the texture of a gathering for entertainment.23 But we must uncover the rebellious after-party that occurred during the Harlem Renaissance. Self-determination sounds different in Harlem Renaissance texts from how it sounds in Black Arts Movement cultural nationalist performances. The different sound (the

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relative lack of rage focused on whiteness) matters, since it may offer one of the most innovative ways of thinking about an in-between space of sounding, gesturing and process that is often difficult to locate in the standard comparisons of the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. Modernism and postmodernism, looked at through the lens of African American cultural productions, are part of a vector that can sway in either direction. The modernism of the Harlem Renaissance may have been more tied to presence as opposed to the postmodern absence performed in Ed Bullins’ very short, experimental play The Theme is Blackness (1966), in which blackness is asked to appear but nothing happens. This experimental Black Arts Movement play is as pivotal as Marita Bonner’s experimental Harlem Renaissance play The Purple Flower (1928). In The Purple Flower, Bonner fully anticipates the Black Art Movement’s focus on ‘white devils’. The experimental set and movement of the actors also make this modernist play quite postmodern. The set has a horizontal division of the stage into an upper and lower level. The most innovative part of the play is the description of how the actors on the upper level sometimes fall through the boards and become ‘twisted’ and ‘curled’ mounds. Bonner writes, ‘The Skin-of-Civilization must be very thin. A thought can drop you through it.’24 These characters who can fall through the cracks and become these almost posthuman (or pre-human) shapes are a part of the ‘Us’s’ who are set apart, in their valley, from the ‘white devils’, who live on hills. This notion that the boards of the upper level represent the ‘skin-of-civilization’ makes ‘civilization’ seem tenuous. The Us’s cannot move too ‘vigorously’ or ‘violently’ or they will fall to the lower level. They also cannot think in a manner that will rock the status quo; thoughts that unsettle the order of things will literally unsettle the Us’s as they fall downward and become the pre-interpellation mound. This depiction of the fall from one fragile layer that is supposed to be civilisation to the twisting and curling mounds is a striking image of African Americans’ after-party response to racial primitivism. ‘You’re not civilized’ is translated into ‘you can fall into the primitive (everyone can) at any moment’. Bonner expands the motif of controlled abandon and proposes the possibility of white controlled abandon. She complicates the standard depictions of primitivism. During the uncivilised modernist, interracial party, few people paused, as Bonner did, to depict whiteness as devilish, and few artists captured the sheer absurdity of racial understandings of civilisation. Her interest in writing about both the reality of white power and the absurdity of this static reality may account for her emphasis, in the very detailed opening character descrip-

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tions, on the dance and art of the white devils. The full opening passage shows how Bonner denaturalises the role of white spectatorship (and objectified, racialised others) in the modernist party. She writes: Sundry White Devils (They must be artful little things with soft wide eyes such as you would expect to find in an angel. Soft hair that flops around their horns. Their horns glow red all the time – now with blood—now with eternal fire – now with deceit – now with unholy desire. They have bones tied carefully across their tails to make them seem less like tails and more like mere decorations. They are artful little things full of artful movements and artful tricks. They are artful dancers too. You are amazed at their adroitness. Their steps are intricate. You almost lose your head following them. Sometimes they dance as if they were men – with dignity – erect. Sometimes they dance as if they were snakes. They are artful dancers on the Thin-Side-of-Civilization.)25

This atypical imaging of white dance matters because Bonner looks at the modernist interracial party from the lens of someone who has not internalised the notion that ‘white’ and ‘primitive’ are antithetical. When whiteness becomes an ‘artful dance’ (when controlled abandon is depicted as the universal state), African Americans are able to stop seeing themselves as the consummate dancers. This pause is what makes the party of modernist primitivism so intriguing. People danced and stopped dancing and discovered the art of ‘almost losing your head’, the art of almost breaking out of the racial scripts. In spite of the white devil imagery, The Purple Flower is about ‘somewhere and nowhere’, the words Bonner repeats in the play. When we use the idea of the party and after-party to analyse modernist primitivism, we are always analysing a cultural movement that was artful and tricky – a cultural movement that was ‘somewhere’ and ‘nowhere’. The African American after-party (the full African American response to racialised primitivism) is difficult to locate. We begin to piece together the most useful fragments when we make images of dance our starting point. When we decentre the iconic visual images of Josephine Baker dancing with the banana skirt and remember these literary images of dance (ranging from Larsen’s images of suspended motion, Hughes’s images of controlled movement and Bonner’s images of cracking through the skin of civilisation), we may find that Prentiss Taylor’s iconic 1935 photographs of Zora Neale Hurston performing the crow dance allow us to visualise the African American after-party of primitivism.26 In these photographs, we see Hurston’s stiff arm gestures as she simulates a crow. The photographs attest that African Americans, in this after-party of primitivism, stretched out and stiffened, posed for each other and got ready to leap into a new space of pleasure and agency.

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Notes 1. James Weldon Johnson, Along this Way (Selected Episodes), in Abraham Chapman (ed.), Black Voices: An Anthology of African American Literature (New York: Signet, 2001), pp. 270–87: p. 286. 2. Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing, ed. Deborah McDowell (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986), p. 59. 3. LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) writes, ‘The most persistent and aggravating reason for the absence of achievement among serious Negro artists is that generally the Negroes who have found themselves in a position to pursue some art, especially the art of literature, have been members of the Negro middle class, a group that has always gone out of its way to cultivate any mediocrity, as long as that mediocrity was guaranteed to prove to America, and recently to the world at large, that they were not really who they were, i.e., Negroes’. Amiri Baraka, ‘The Myth of a “Negro Literature” ’, Saturday Review (20 April 1963), pp. 20–2, 40: p. 20. 4. Amritjit Singh and Daniel M. Scott (eds), The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: A Harlem Renaissance Reader (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), p. 53. Hereafter page numbers are given in the text. 5. Larsen, Quicksand and Passing, p. 59. The full passage is as follows: ‘She was drugged, lifted, sustained, by the extraordinary music, blown out, ripped out, beaten out, by the joyous, wild, murky orchestra. The essence of life seemed bodily motion. And when suddenly the music died, she dragged herself back to the present with a conscious effort; and a shameful certainty that not only had she been in the jungle, but that she had enjoyed it, began to taunt her. She hardened her determination to get away. She wasn’t, she told herself, a jungle creature.’ 6. Langston Hughes, The Ways of White Folks (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 72. Hereafter page numbers are given in the text. 7. He states, ‘I wanted to do something else, but gradually, they insisted so vehemently that I finally thought that maybe there is something to this thing. This primitive thing.’ Quoted in Amy Helene Kirschke, Aaron Douglas: Art, Race, and the Harlem Renaissance (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), p. 46. 8. Quoted in Kirschke, Aaron Douglas, pp. 78–9. 9. Anne Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 20. 10. Elmer Carter, ‘He Smashed the Color Line: A Sketch of Billy Pierce’, in Sondra Kathryn Wilson (ed.), The Opportunity Reader (New York: Modern Library, 1999), p. 389. 11. See Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 12. Quoted in Robert Goffin, Jazz from the Congo to the Metropolitan (New York: Doubleday, 1946), p. 16. 13. Jean Toomer, Cane (1923) (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), p. 1. 14. Alain Locke (ed.), The New Negro (1925) (New York: Touchstone, 1992), p. 214.

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15. David Levering Lewis (ed.), The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader (New York: Penguin, 1994), p. 277. 16. Zora Neale Hurston, ‘How It Feels To Be Colored Me’ (1928), in Alice Walker (ed.), I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1971), p. 153. 17. Jean Lee Cole and Charles Mitchell (eds), Zora Neale Hurston: Collected Plays (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008), p. 94. Hereafter page numbers are given in the text. 18. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber, 1963), p. 88. 19. Wilson (ed.), The Opportunity Reader, p. 58. 20. Ibid., p. 57. 21. Larsen, Quicksand and Passing, p. 73. 22. J. A. Rogers, ‘Jazz at Home’, Survey Graphic 6.6 (1925), special issue: ‘Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro’, ed. Alain Locke, p. 665. 23. Gil Scott-Heron’s song/performance poem ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’ (1970) makes its title words a mantra of the Black Power Movement. 24. Kathy Perkins (ed.), Black Female Playwrights: An Anthology of Plays Before 1950 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 192. 25. Ibid., p. 191. 26. These photographs, held by the Beinecke Library, Yale University, may be viewed at http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/brbldl_getrec. asp?fld=img&id=1248784, accessed 10 October 2012.

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Chapter 10

The Party In Extremis in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love Margot Norris

In Women in Love,1 D. H. Lawrence created some of the most intense representations of early twentieth-century English parties to be found. Published in 1920, the novel had been completed in 1917, and it was difficult for contemporaries not to read the party sequences as recreations of the author’s interactions with Lady Ottoline Morrell and her circle at her Oxfordshire country home, Garsington Manor.2 Lawrence and his wife Frieda were among the very first guests invited to Garsington – to attend a small birthday-party for Morrell on 16 June 1915 – and they were frequent and sometimes contentious guests there in the ensuing year. Garsington was flamboyantly decorated and beautifully landscaped and Lady Morrell had ‘created a magic reflection of her visitors’ dreams and illusions’ with the place, Michael Holroyd notes.3 But Holroyd goes on to say that ‘[w]henever these dreams and illusions vanished, her guests would take their revenge on her’.4 Lawrence belonged to this disillusioned cohort and even before the publication of Women in Love, his friendship with Morrell was already ‘in retreat’.5 When the novel was published, her portrayal as Hermione Roddice in the book struck her as a shocking betrayal and the friendship ended in grief and bitterness.6 But the ‘Breadalby’ and ‘Water-Party’ chapters in the novel offer much more than a satirical memoir, although they do explore the social dimensions of class differences, public aesthetics and power relations. They also cut much deeper into what we might call the metaphysical underpinnings of the social world in extreme states of emotional and ontological turmoil. Lawrence’s focus here, as elsewhere in his work, is on the intimate workings of inner states and perceptions, and ‘the party’ in his work has to be seen from the inside, from deep within the private conditions of guests and hosts engaged in what might otherwise be construed as a shallow social phenomenon. From this vantage-point, any aura of realism is dispelled as theatrical conventions heighten and intensify effects to transform the party into an experience in extremis.

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The thematic function of the two major parties in Women in Love – ‘Breadalby’ and ‘Water-Party’ – is to ground the relationship between the four protagonists in the novel: the sisters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, and the friends, Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich. The four figures are introduced in the first chapter, ‘Sisters’, at the wedding of one of Gerald’s sisters, with Birkin acting as the groom’s best man, and Hermione Roddice in attendance as a guest. The sisters are observers only at this event, which is held in the country church at which their father serves as the organist, although they know the principals there from a variety of connections. Gudrun has met Hermione, and Hermione and Birkin, we learn, have a complex and somewhat troubled relationship, although ‘they had been lovers now, for years’ (p. 17). There is no party or reception in this introductory wedding chapter, but the focus right at the beginning is on the curiously dynamic responses of various figures to one another, even before any significant social interactions have been established between and among them. Gudrun, catching sight of Gerald, ‘light[s] on him at once’ (p. 20), and her attraction to his ‘northern flesh’, making him seem to her ‘pure as an arctic thing’ (p. 14), is unabashedly prophetic of the ending of the novel, when Gerald will die alone on a snow-covered Alpine slope. Ursula is ‘left thinking about Birkin’ (p. 20), whom she has met once or twice in his capacity as an inspector at the school where she is a teacher. But she is merely curious – ‘she wanted to know him’ (p. 20) – while Gudrun is shaken by her reaction to Gerald, which is described at the chapter’s end as a ‘strange, sharp inoculation that had changed the whole temper of her blood’ (p. 22). The first chapter immediately foregrounds the relationship between outer and inner, between the social event, which is backgrounded and de-signified, and the largely unspoken internal reactions and responses which are emphasised. This introduction serves as a model for the parties to come. Like ‘Sisters’, ‘Breadalby’ begins with the Brangwen women approaching a social setting, though this time it is one to which they have been invited. Breadalby, Hermione Roddice’s country home, is described by Gudrun Brangwen as ‘complete’ and ‘as final as an old aquatint’ (p. 82).7 She says this ‘with some resentment in her voice [. . .] as if she must admire against her will’ (p. 82). From the first, Breadalby arouses resistance in the Brangwen sisters. The setting itself is described in idyllic terms: ‘There seemed a magic circle drawn about the place, shutting out the present, enclosing the delightful, precious past, trees and deer and silence, like a dream’ (p. 84). The initial resistance hardly makes sense, even to Gudrun, but it is soon exacerbated for both sisters by the conversation at the first luncheon with its ‘sententiousness’ and ‘continual spatter of verbal jest’ (p. 84) and the spirit of flippancy and ridicule

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offered as entertainment by both the hostess and her guests. The social scene that unfolds before the sisters is charged by jostling for power, and it is Hermione herself who is determined to exercise control. Her invitation to the guests to accompany her for a walk after tea in the grounds leaves them ‘feeling somehow like prisoners marshalled for exercise’ (p. 87). Birkin’s resistance to her directorship of social conventions cuts deep into Hermione’s being, making her feel ‘sick’, draining her vitality until she feels ‘pallid and preyed-upon like a ghost’, like a corpse ‘that has no presence, no connection’ (p. 89). The outcome of this battle of wills between Hermione and Birkin comes the next day and takes the form of violence. After an exchange of words, a contrite Birkin goes to Hermione’s boudoir to read. His mere presence enrages her to a state that Lawrence describes as an orgasmic murderousness: ‘she was going to know her voluptuous consummation’ (p. 105). Picking up a beautiful blue paper-weight made of lapis lazuli, she crashes it down on Birkin’s head. Only by quickly covering himself with the copy of Thucydides he is reading does he keep his neck from being broken by her second ecstatic and smashing blow. The party, taken as the entire programme of breakfasts, luncheons, dinners, bathing and walks, is here turned inside out, offered not as a social event capable of transformation into a realist representation, but as psychological and emotional drama operative under the surface of manners and personal interactions.8 Lawrence deliberately exaggerates the emotional responses of the guests to Hermione and of Hermione to the guests in ways that make the culminating eruption of violence not a realistic outcome to plausible events but an Expressionistic symbol of extreme feeling. I invoke the avant-garde art of Expressionism to describe Lawrence’s strategy because it suggests distortions in perception produced by extreme emotional states and moods, particularly those of anxiety. Birkin’s response, too, is Expressionistic in this sense.9 Instead of summoning help or reproaching Hermione, who inexplicably goes heavily to sleep almost immediately after her action, he wanders outdoors onto the grounds, where he encounters ‘thickets of hazel, many flowers, tufts of heather, and little clumps of young fir-trees’ (p. 106). There ‘he [takes] off his clothes, and [sits] down naked among the primroses’ (p. 106). Birkin immerses himself in the primroses and surrenders to the intensity of vital sensation in an ecstatic counterpart to Hermione’s ecstasy of violence at the instance of her strike. The moment clarifies for Birkin an aspect of his own ontology, his own being-in-the-world. His centre is not social but organic. ‘Why should he pretend to have anything to do with human beings at all? Here was his world, he wanted nobody and nothing but the lovely, subtle, responsive

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vegetation, and himself, his own living self’ (p. 107). Lawrence seems less concerned to produce a satire or a social critique of aristocratic country house activities in ‘Breadalby’ than to use the setting and its characteristics to put larger modes of ontological orientation into conflict. He therefore focuses not only on the economic and symbolic resonances of the country estate and its upper-class residents and visitors but also on the land, the plants and trees, not for their picturesque value but for their inherent vitality, their living vigour and organic character. Hermione Roddice and Rupert Birkin are fundamental spiritual opposites, and one of the challenges confronting the Brangwen sisters will be to negotiate the different worlds they represent. Between the arrival luncheon and Hermione’s attack on Birkin, the party proper – a formal dinner followed by entertainment, music and dancing – takes place. The event is thoroughly theatricalised. The women’s clothing takes on the character of costumes, with dresses of ‘brilliant colours’ (p. 90) and complex textures. Gudrun’s is emerald green ‘with strange networks of grey’, Miss Bradley’s is ‘crimson and jet’, the Contessa’s is described as ‘tissue of orange and gold and black’, and Ursula’s is ‘yellow with dull silver veiling’ (p. 90). As they assemble at table, they are pictured as ‘the women lurid with colour’ (p. 90). After dinner, Hermione commandeers the guests to perform a ballet, and now actual costumes are produced – ‘armfuls of silk robes and shawls and scarves, mostly oriental’ (p. 91) – for the women to wear.10 The performance will enact a scene of Naomi, Ruth and Orpah, with the idea of making ‘a little ballet, in the style of the Russian Ballet of Pavlova and Nijinsky’ (p. 91). Discussing the music and dance in Lawrence’s work, Elgin W. Mellown makes the case that Lawrence’s aim with this particular scene in ‘Breadalby’ is to signify the high social status of his characters.11 The exaggerated visual and emotional effects of the entertainment arguably have an opposite effect, however, making the guests appear overly dramatic and garish rather than classy.12 Lawrence reinforces this effect with two allusions to witches: first, when Ursula thinks of the group at table as ‘all witches, helping the pot to bubble’ (p. 90) and again later, when the Fräulein suggests that they perform ‘the three witches from Macbeth’ for their dance (p. 91). Paul Poplawski emphasises the effect of the ‘carnivalesque’ in Lawrence’s work, although he finds this element serving chiefly a comedic function in the novel.13 I would argue that the function of the theatrical character of the party is rather to focus our attention on the separation between outer and inner appearances, on the extent to which the social is a kind of enactment that conceals and exacerbates an intense inner activity. The silent ballet sets up the complicated romantic and sexual dynamic

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that will unfold between Gerald Crich, Rupert Birkin and the Brangwen sisters in the rest of the novel. Ursula takes the role of Naomi and Gudrun the role of Ruth, and they play out their silent relationship with dramatic gestures conveying ‘heavy, desperate passion’ and its ‘dangerous and indomitable’ acceptance (p. 91). It is Hermione who interprets the sororal undercurrent of the drama, Gudrun’s ‘treacherous cleaving to the woman in her sister’ and ‘Ursula’s dangerous helplessness’ in the face of it (pp. 91, 92). But while looking at them makes Hermione ‘writhe’ in her soul, the same scene excites and fascinates Gerald and Birkin and ignites in them strong feelings for the women. Gerald is entranced by Gudrun: ‘The essence of that female, subterranean recklessness and mockery penetrated his blood’ (p. 92). Birkin is described as watching Ursula ‘like a hermit crab from its hole’, and although he too is captivated by a similar perception of female essence – ‘She was like a strange unconscious bud of powerful womanhood’ (p. 92) – his own response is described as equally unconscious: ‘He was unconsciously drawn to her. She was his future’ (p. 92). The dramatic enactment of a biblical scene offered for entertainment to guests at a country house has triggered an entirely independent emotional development below the surface of the action. Hermione’s conflict is that she is able both to perceive and to decipher what is going on beneath the scene, but is unable to participate or share in the dynamic. Her reaction, asking Ursula to come to her bedroom to look at some exotic Indian silk shirts, creates a moment of silent aggression that prefigures the later moment of silent violence she will act out with Birkin. At Hermione’s approach, Ursula is filled with panic and, seeing her fear, Hermione experiences ‘again a sort of crash, a crashing down’ (p. 93). The evening ends with Gerald and Birkin holding a conversation about women in the privacy of a bedroom. Here the topic is indeed the social, particularly the matter of class, as Gerald tries to learn how the school-teaching Brangwen sisters came to be invited to Breadalby, and as he agonises over how fairly to conclude an affair with his declassée mistress. But when this extended country house party continues at breakfast the next morning, Birkin’s perspective configures the social interactions as a game ‘with the figures set out, the same figures, the Queen of chess, the knights, the pawns’ (p. 99). The reactions of Gerald and Gudrun to this societal gaming prefigures the incompatibility that will eventually doom their relationship. ‘[T]he game pleased him’, we learn of Gerald, while Gudrun’s reaction is more complicated – ‘the game fascinated her and she loathed it’ (p. 99). Ursula, in contrast, merely looks ‘as if she were hurt, and the pain were just outside her consciousness’ (p. 99). Ursula’s and Birkin’s responses are therefore aligned,

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only Birkin’s figuration of the observed social interactions is conscious and aware, while Ursula’s is unconscious and inchoate. After breakfast the players of the game have an opportunity to act out their responses. Both Ursula and Gudrun refuse Hermione’s suggestion that they ‘bathe’, that is, go swimming in one of the ponds. Ursula makes it clear that she simply doesn’t like it. When Gerald, an avid diver, asks Gudrun about her avoidance of the swimming, she lets him know that she likes the water, that she is able to swim, but that she didn’t join in ‘[b]ecause I didn’t like the crowd’ (p. 102). Watching the swimmers, Gudrun describes them as ‘saurian’, reminding her of ‘great lizards’, ‘slithering sea lions’ and ‘shoals of seals’ (p. 101). For Birkin, organic evocations are generally a sign of pleasure and approval; for Gudrun they are not. Gerald will struggle to meet Gudrun’s standard or criterion ‘to fulfil her idea of a man or a human-being’ (p. 102). Later that evening, the conversation of the party turns explicitly to the question of social relations. One could certainly read this as Lawrence’s opportunity to ventriloquise his political attitudes and theories, but the conversation also plays a specific role in the plot of the novel, insofar as it makes parties a ground of emotional volatility and conflict. Four principal views are expressed on this occasion. Sir Joshua argues for ‘the social equality of man’, while Gerald Crich argues for free agency with respect to choice of work (p. 102). Hermione weighs in with the apolitical argument that ‘in the spirit we are all one, all equal in the spirit, all brothers there’ – a view whose ‘mathematical abstraction’ (p. 103), as he characterises it, irks Birkin. He acknowledges the fundamental generic equality of human beings – ‘[e]very man has hunger and thirst, two eyes, one nose and two legs’ – but he maintains that ‘spiritually, there is pure difference and neither equality nor inequality counts’ (p. 103). His own argument is also apolitical and also focuses on ontology, but for Birkin human beings are spiritually intrinsically other, with no basis of comparison between them. Although Birkin offers this vehement rebuttal to Hermione’s views after the group has departed, leaving only Gerald and himself in conversation with her, his response to her views nonetheless enrages her and leads to her violent attack on him later, when they are alone in her boudoir together. And so the Breadalby party comes to the end described earlier, with Hermione vindicated in her own mind, while Birkin’s naked epiphany amid the primroses and the vegetation of the grounds clarifies his sense of his own being. ‘Here was his world, he wanted nobody and nothing but the lovely, subtle, responsive vegetation, and himself, his own living self’ (p. 107). The novelistic episode may indeed have been inspired by Ottoline Morrell’s hospitality to an assortment of distinguished guests and

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quirky personalities at her country home of Garsington Manor, but Lawrence’s treatment is clearly much more than a critical, satirical or parodic reflection on their social interactions. Rather, the party’s course and development offer an opportunity to critique the social per se, the relationships and conversations of men and women as failing to address and enact inner states, feelings and conditions that have an impact on them and their behaviour, even if they never rise to consciousness. Making this point requires Lawrence to resort to literary techniques of exaggeration and over-dramatisation by intensifying the garish visual impact of colours, fabrics and appearances and by inflaming emotional states and outbursts. Insofar as Expressionism produces just such effects of turning realism inside out in order to configure dramatic pictures and scenes of inner life, ‘Breadalby’ can be read as an exemplar of its avant-garde strategy. The social is certainly not negated in ‘Breadalby’ – nor in ‘Water-Party’. But it is not the primary focus either of character development or of the novel’s action and plot. One could rather view the social aspect of the party as the essential background of interior life, the set of conditions to which the persons that comprise the social party must adjust their thoughts, feelings and inner beings. This is the sense in which Lawrence has turned the party inside out. The second major party in Women in Love is the event on the Shortlands estate of Gerald Crich’s father presented in the chapter titled ‘Water-Party’.14 This party differs from the one at Breadalby in several respects. It is described as an annual ‘more-or-less-public’ affair to which both officials of the Crich firm and the staff of the grammar school are invited. As a result it is much larger, much more diverse and more dispersed than the smaller, more focused and more intimate event at Breadalby in the earlier chapter, notwithstanding that its duration is only a single afternoon and evening. However, from the beginning many similar themes and issues are addressed in ‘Water-Party’, and the ending, with the shocking death-by-drowning of Gerald’s sister Diana, echoes the equally shocking, if less lethal, violence at the end of ‘Breadalby’. We are therefore given not a satirical reflection on the social life of England’s upper classes,15 but once again a carnivalesque over-dramatisation of internal ontological responses to conditions created by the party. But turning the party inside out is accomplished with a somewhat unusual spatial technique in this instance. This is the result of the Brangwen sisters’ request to separate themselves from the party, allowing them to traverse to a different part of the estate by boat. This offers them not only the luxury of isolation but also a different ontological venue that I will describe as a kind of Eden for their being. Outer and inner are thereby translated into ‘here’ and ‘there’, with the ‘there’ offering

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a site where one can be totally in touch and in tune with one’s inner nature. Gerald, who had wondered why the female school teachers were invited to Breadalby, is revealed at the outset as uncomfortable with the diverse group of guests invited by his generous, or possibly patronising, father. He does not care for this annual event because he and the other Crich siblings ‘preferred the company of their own equals in wealth’ (p. 155). The issue of class is raised at once, and when we see the Brangwen sisters approach the party with their parents, it is brought up from the other side of the class divide. While the young women are giddy and in a joyful mood, their father is ‘unnerved and irritable as a boy, finding himself on the brink of this social function’ (p. 158). He feels ‘uncouth’, irritated by his daughter’s gaudy dress, and generally unhappy: ‘He did not feel a gentleman, he did not feel anything except pure exasperation’ (p. 158). Although we at first hear that the sisters are wearing ‘dresses of white cotton crepe, and hats of soft grass’, we soon learn that their vividly coloured accessories of sashes, hat decorations, pink stockings and red shoes remind their father of a ‘Christmas cracker’ (p. 156). Their serene mother, on the other hand, remains untroubled by the issue of clothing or anything else, ‘such an aristocrat she was by instinct’ (p. 156). Indeed, the sisters tell her she looks like a ‘country Baroness’ (p. 157). After the Brangwens offer their tickets to the policeman at the gate and are admitted to the grounds, they are approached by their Breadalby hostess, Hermione Roddice, who looks over the Brangwen parents. ‘Hermione was really so strongly entrenched in her class superiority, she could come up and know people out of simple curiosity, as if they were creatures on exhibition’ (p. 159). The class divide is here figured as though it were a divide between species. Gudrun’s dislike of ‘the crowd’, as she called it at Breadalby, is just as strong at Shortlands, where she refuses Gerald’s invitation to board the steam launch for a ride to a picnic site for tea. Her objection is based on an earlier ‘vile’ (p. 161) pleasure-boat trip which she describes with details resonant of the ferry-boat in Hermann Melville’s The Confidence Man (1857).16 But after the sisters insist on their ability to row a boat and to swim, Gerald equips them with a canoe that allows them to take off on their own private picnic. The sisters are instantly happy. ‘ “It’s lovely” ’, Gudrun shouts to Gerald as they get on their way, ‘ “like sitting in a leaf” ’ (p. 164). And so their magical getaway begins as they row down Willy Water to a ‘forsaken little stream-mouth’ (p. 164) where they can be quite alone. As soon as they have disembarked they remove all of their clothes, and swim ‘silently and blissfully for a few minutes’ before slipping ashore into the grove, ‘like nymphs’ (p. 164). ‘ “How

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lovely it is to be free,” Ursula said, running swiftly here and there between the tree trunks, quite naked, her hair blowing loose’ (p. 165). As they settle down for their tea, they are described as ‘alone in a little wild world of their own’, as though they had found a private Eden: ‘[w] hen they were together, doing the things they enjoyed, the two sisters were quite complete in a perfect world of their own’ (p. 165). The differences in their condition notwithstanding, the sisters’ immersion in the natural organic surroundings of place is reminiscent of Birkin’s healing wallowing in primroses and vegetation in Breadalby after his attack. Ironically, the sisters’ idyll will end with another blow, a slap in the face delivered by Gudrun to Gerald after he interferes with her strange engagement with his cattle: ‘[a]nd she felt in her soul an unconquerable desire for deep violence against him’ (p. 170). These assorted echoes of ‘Breadalby’ in ‘Water-Party’ include also music and dance, although here they are offered not as performances for audience consumption but as intimate private expressions and exercises of non-social art. Ursula begins this by singing ‘to herself’, singing almost unconsciously in such total self-absorption that Gudrun is made to feel ‘outside of life’, as though she were an ‘onlooker’ rather than a ‘partaker’ (p. 165). To remedy this separation of the sisters, Gudrun asks Ursula to sing, while she performs the eurhythmic dance exercises of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze. Mellown explains that the Jaques-Dalcroze movements were based ‘on natural gestures rather than the artificial positions of the balletic vocabulary’, and argues that their performance by Gudrun ‘captures the contradictions in her character: she is at the same time a sophisticated creature of society and a creature of primitive instincts’.17 Gudrun’s movements are interrupted by the approach of the cattle, which frighten Ursula but not her sister. Instead, Gudrun – her voice now described as ‘high’ and ‘strident’ – insists that Ursula keep singing while she makes reaching and heaving moves toward the animals in a ‘strange, palpitating dance’ that risks agitating them, as Gerald will tell her when he approaches with Birkin and ends the dance (p. 167). The men’s approach is motivated by a concern for the sisters’ safety – not illogical for a responsible party host and his friend – as is Gerald’s intervention in Gudrun’s possible excitation of the cattle. But their arrival reintroduces the social into the Edenic scene, and instead of enlivening the women’s solitary party it brings its innocence to an end. Does the sisters’ Edenic idyll function as a negation of the party – as a kind of ‘anti-party’? I believe it does, in the sense that it represents a simultaneous solitude and communion, a way of feeling alone and untroubled by the world while at the same time sharing that experience with a soul mate. This situation becomes a model for the possibility of

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romantic and even marital union, a version of which has been prefigured in Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915), and which foreshadows the future relationship between Ursula and Birkin. But the outcome of ‘WaterParty’ does not fulfil such possibilities. Although Gerald surprisingly blurts out ‘ “I’m not angry with you. I’m in love with you” ’ (p. 171) after Gudrun’s slap, the admission leaves him feeling nearly unconscious and suffering badly. And when the pair find Ursula and Birkin by the boat, Birkin is propounding his theory of ontological dissolution and corruption couched in flower imagery that Ursula seems to interpret as an allusion to Baudelaire. ‘ “You mean we are flowers of dissolution – fleurs du mal?” ’, she asks Birkin, who replies, ‘ “I don’t feel as if we were, altogether” ’ (p. 173). Ursula takes this loophole to assert ‘ “I think I am a rose of happiness” ’ (p. 173) but her innocence fails to charm Birkin. He stays with his argument, causing Ursula in exasperation to call him a ‘devil’ and charge that ‘ “[y]ou want to destroy our hope. You want us to be deathly” ’ (p. 173). Gerald ends the conversation by interrupting with the words ‘ “You’re quite right” ’ (p. 173), although it is unclear whether he agrees with Birkin’s vision of deathliness as realism, or with Ursula’s protest. Death has, of course, already engulfed Gerald, who, suffering after his conversation with Gudrun, appears to remind himself that ‘[h]e had killed his brother, when a boy, and was set apart, like Cain’ (p. 172). And death will engulf Gerald again and again until he dies alone in the snowy Alps before the end of the novel, dying spiritually as well as physically, we are given to believe: ‘But he wandered on unconsciously, till he slipped and fell down, and as he fell something broke in his soul, and immediately he went to sleep’ (p. 474). Gerald’s brother died in childhood, his father ‘Thomas Crich died slowly, terribly slowly’ (p. 321) some time after the water-party and his sister Diana dies before the end of it. The event wrenches the increasingly complicated relationships between the two couples in twisted and contradictory ways. The foursome had enjoyed a strange moment of aesthetic pleasure at the water-party: just a moment after Birkin lights a beautiful lantern for Ursula, Gudrun reacts most ecstatically to the sight in a way that touches Gerald, and in turn touches her and produces a magical moment for the two: ‘And she turned her face to his, that was faintly bright in the light of the lantern, and they stood together in one luminous union, close together and ringed round with light, all the rest excluded’ (p. 175). The moment is repeated when Gudrun and Gerald get into the boat together, and she feels ‘magically aware of their being balanced in separation, in the boat. She swooned with acute comprehension and pleasure’ (p. 177). But before long it is ‘as if the night smashed’ (p. 178), with distressed cries that someone is in the water, and that someone is Gerald’s sister.

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He dives in to find her, his injured hand notwithstanding, and Gudrun becomes strangely sexually excited by his body when he returns, overcome by ‘[t]he beauty of his dim and luminous loins as he climbed into the boat’ (p. 181). Along with this sensation, she experiences a prophetic epiphany: ‘And she knew it was all no good, and that she would never go beyond him, he was the final approximation of life to her’ (p. 181). If the party at Breadalby ends in a barely averted death, the party at Shortlands ends in the actual death of two young persons. This outcome is made less implausible by the inherent danger of water surrounding the activities of a party of young people and by its occurrence in the dark, the magical lanterns and lights illuminating the party notwithstanding. It remains unclear precisely what happened that night, although the ‘colliery people’ in town produce a version that has Diana ‘dancing on the cabin roof of the launch, wilful young madam’ (p. 190) and presumably falling into the water. The young doctor who dives in to save her also drowns. ‘Diana had her arms tight round the neck of the young man, choking him. “She killed him,” said Gerald’ (p. 189). The narrative account of that agonising night of effort, Gerald’s diving until he is exhausted, the draining of the pond, the heart-breaking vigil of the young doctor’s father, ensures that the weight of the event is not negated by the unconventional and arguably perverse responses of Birkin, Ursula and Gudrun. Birkin’s response is particularly brutal. ‘ “What does it matter if Diana Crich is alive or dead?” ’ he asks Ursula. ‘ “She’ll be positive in death. In life she was a fretting, negated thing” ’ (p. 185). Birkin is still harping on his preoccupation with the deathliness of life, it seems, and Diana Crich functions for him not as a human being but as a trope or metaphor. Later he will concede to Ursula that ‘ “[o]ne Hamletises” ’ (p. 187). Gerald, too, focuses less on his sister than on the ontological implications of her drowning, telling his friends ‘ “[t]here’s room under that water there for thousands” ’ (p. 184). Shivering violently, his jaw shaking as he speaks, he talks as if he had just experienced death himself under the water. ‘ “But it’s curious how much room there seems, a whole universe under there; and as cold as hell, you’re as helpless as if your head was cut off” ’ (p. 184). Gudrun simply goes home after this and spends the next day excited by trying to formulate how she will ‘act her part’ with Gerald in the aftermath (p. 190). Ursula is described as ‘perfectly callous about all the talk about the accident’ (p. 190), presumably because she is now ‘deeply and passionately in love with Birkin’ and ‘capable of nothing’ (p. 190). And so ends the second great party in Women in Love. The chief thematic significance of the parties lies in their setting as the ground of the relationships between Birkin and Ursula and between Gerald and

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Gudrun. These relationships will continue to intensify in the ensuing chapters in a series of turbulent ups and downs, with both histrionic and quiet moments that often echo the party episodes. When Rupert offers Ursula the gift of three second-hand rings, a strident argument ensues that revisits the relationship with Hermione. ‘ “You belong to Hermione and her dead show” ’ (p. 306), Ursula shouts at him, and Birkin later insists ‘ “Hermione is my enemy – to her last breath. That’s why I must bow her off the field” ’ (p. 308). And yet the couple emerges on the other side of understanding and intimacy as a result of what they have gone through. Gudrun and Gerald similarly go on to experience intimacies related to earlier events, although with far more dysfunctional outcomes. In the aptly named chapter ‘Death and Love’, the strange sensuality hovering over Diana’s tragedy at the water-party resurfaces. Gerald, traumatised by the death of his father, seeks comfort by stealing into the Brangwen home and into Gudrun’s bedroom at night to cling to her. ‘Like a child at the breast, he cleaved intensely to her, and she could not put him away’ (p. 345). The figuration of this intimacy fails to mature and in the approach to Gerald’s end at the novel’s end, Gudrun remains haunted by Gerald’s need. ‘Had she asked for a child, whom she must nurse through the nights, for her lover? She despised him, she despised him, she hardened her heart’ (p. 466). By grounding these later developments in the larger social canvas of the party, Lawrence endows the social itself with an immeasurably greater depth that shows human beings ignited by conversations and interactions into feelings and impulses of which they might otherwise be unaware, and yet which are necessary for them to come to far more essential recognitions of their own being-in-the-world. Their experience at the parties points the way to other possibilities, like the ones Birkin voices to Ursula upon their reconciliation after the ring skirmish. Following her lament that ‘ “we’ve got to take the world that’s given – because there isn’t any other” ’, Birkin insists, ‘ “Yes, there is. [. . .] There’s somewhere where we can be free – somewhere where we needn’t wear much clothes – none even – where one meets a few people who have gone through enough, and can take things for granted – where you be yourself without bothering” ’ (pp. 315–16). The Edenic moments of the alternative space, removed from the water-party, will continue to beckon them until the end.

Notes 1. The edition of the novel used in this chapter is D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, with an

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2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

Margot Norris introduction and notes by Mark Kincaid-Weekes (London: Penguin, 1994). Page numbers from this edition are cited parenthetically in the text. There are two possible prototypes for ‘Breadalby’ in the novel: Garsington Manor and a Derbyshire estate called Kedleston Hall (Lawrence, Women in Love, p. 535n). Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: The New Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), p. 333. Ibid., p. 330. Ibid., p. 333. Sandra Jobson Darroch discusses Ottoline Morrell’s response to Women in Love in considerable detail in her biography, Ottoline: The Life of Lady Ottoline Morrell (London: Cassell, 1976). ‘Ottoline could hardly have avoided seeing herself in Lawrence’s portrait’, she writes (p. 189). In her own memoirs, Morrell described her reaction in the following terms: ‘I read it and found myself going pale with horror, for nothing could have been more vile and obviously spiteful and contemptuous’. Ottoline Morrell, Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell, ed. Robert Gathorne-Hardy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), vol. 1, p. 128; quoted in Darroch, Ottoline, p. 191. However, Darroch goes on to suggest that Lawrence may not have deliberately intended to offend Morrell, and notes that the novel’s early drafts indicate that he may also have had other women, including Jessie Chambers, in mind as possible models for Hermione (pp.  191–2). But John Worthen writes, ‘[p]eople (including Ottoline Morrell) naturally took Hermione Roddice in Women in Love to be some kind of a portrait of Ottoline, even though many details were different. The offensiveness was not thereby diminished; it might well be increased’. John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider (New York: Counterpoint, 2005), p. 215. Darroch describes Garsington in prose not unlike Lawrence’s description of Breadalby: ‘[i]t could almost have been a Constable landscape – tall elms, drowsy cows munching the spring grass, fields dotted with wildflowers, and a hill around which a small village and a church clusters.’ Darroch, Ottoline, p. 157. Stephen Rowley writes: ‘Breadalby is a deadened centre of conventional attitudes and conservative values which belong to the past and are meticulously preserved in an effort to stave off the threat of the changing present’. Stephen Rowley, ‘The Matrix of Women in Love’, Études Lawrenciennes 26/27 (2002), pp. 19–36: p. 25. By contrast, Debra Journet relates Lawrence’s technique to symbolism: ‘[t]hrough memory and imagination, the symbolist tries to create another world, more real than the world outside, and in so doing, seeks to diminish the physical reference in words’. Debra Journet, ‘Symbol and Allegory in Women in Love’, South Atlantic Review 49.2 (1984), pp. 42–60: p. 43. ‘Entertainment at Garsington often took the form of elaborate charades and dances, using her [Ottoline’s] collection of exotic materials to dress up.’ Kincaid-Weekes in Lawrence, Women in Love, p. 536n. Elgin W. Mellown, ‘Music and Dance in D. H. Lawrence’, Journal of Modern Literature 21.1 (1997), pp. 49–60: p. 56. Some of the Garsington entertainments appear nearly as garish, however,

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17.

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including a version of Othello designed by Lawrence himself. Darroch writes, ‘Lawrence, decked out in an Arabian coat and large straw hat, took the part of the Moor’. Darroch, Ottoline, p. 164. Paul Poplawski, ‘Comic Elements in Women in Love: Laughter, Parodic Skaz and the Music-Hall “Turn” ’, Études Lawrenciennes 26/27 (2002), pp. 183–203. Shortlands was modelled on Lamb Close House, ‘the home of Thomas Barber (1843–93), a coal-owner noted for his benevolence and charity’. Kincaid-Weekes in Lawrence, Women in Love, p. 534n. This is not to say that Garsington did not have its share of shocking events, among them the suicide attempt by Ottoline’s overly devoted servant Maria, who drank a nearly lethal dose of mercuric poison when she realised she would not be taken to Garsington with the other staff. Darroch, Ottoline, p. 152. Although Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature was published six years after the writing of Women in Love, Lawrence might already have had Melville in mind while finishing the novel. John Worthen actually finds Lawrence echoing Birkin’s ideas in his discussion of Melville. Worthen, D. H. Lawrence, p. 182. Mellown, ‘Music and Dance in D. H. Lawrence’, pp. 56–7.

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Chapter 11

Bohemian Retrospects: Ford Madox Ford, Post-War Memory and the Cabaret Theatre Club1 Nathan Waddell The English dramatist Ashley Dukes wrote in The Scene Is Changed (1942) that immediately before the First World War he frequented the Café Royal on Regent Street in London, where, with such artists as Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Christopher Nevinson and Robert Bevan, among others, he would talk ‘about the world, the inevitability of war, Marinetti’s futurism or Ezra Pound’s verse, or the paper that Wyndham Lewis was bringing out called Blast’.2 This ‘lucky’ time, as Dukes put it, of intermingling artists and impresarios sharply contrasted with the world to come after 1918, a world ambivalently characterised by ‘deliverance and freedom’ but also by ‘unrest’, with the years of 1919–20 in particular being ‘a time of impatience, of protest, [and] of action that threatened many abrupt and even violent issues’.3 Like Ford Madox Ford, who claimed in Return to Yesterday (1931) that those ‘who cannot remember London’ in 1914 ‘do not know what life holds’, and who in 1921 wrote about ‘the groans of the Body-Politic’ and marvelled at the rifeness of despair in a ‘State not immediately menaced by Fire, Famine, Pestilence or Strife in Arms’,4 Dukes remembered this collective cultural life as something that would never again be recaptured. This was so not least because many of its central personalities (Gaudier-Brzeska and T. E. Hulme among them) would be killed in the First World War, but also because the socio-cultural conditions which allowed that collective life to emerge would never again materialise in quite the same fashion. In Peter Brooker’s words, by 1920 ‘many of modernism’s leading innovators were dead, traduced, or in self-exile, or separated from the unifying base of a literary or artistic grouping’, and the enthusiastic public those pioneers had created for their art ‘had been unsettled by the trauma of historical events, partly because of internal changes, some all too obvious, in personnel and circumstances’.5 The emotionally charged dynamic between post-war memory and the avant-garde potential of pre-war London’s complex and internally

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contradictory collective cultural life plays a central role in Ford’s novel The Marsden Case (1923), which looks back across the years of the First World War to a ‘gay midsummer day’ in 1914 that ‘was getting on to being the last gay day of any London season for God knows how long’.6 In this chapter I want, among other things, to read this text as signalling a complex Fordian affirmation of the social and artistic vitality of pre-war London’s avant-garde energies from the vantage-point of post-war modernity. As a retrospective account of the ‘Great London Vortex’, that moment of emergent modernist rivalry, and avant-garde overlappings and alliances, in which Ford played such key parts during, and after, his editorship of The English Review (1908–10), The Marsden Case is peculiarly bound up with the past of its author, who is lightly dramatised in the text as its first-person narrator, the neurasthenic Ernest Jessop.7 Moreover, the novel charts the cultural meanings of one of the twentieth century’s most important nightspots, the Cabaret Theatre Club. Ford frequented this venue, which was situated in a basement just off Heddon Street, near Regent Street in Mayfair, London, after it was opened in late June 1912 by the Austrian Frida Strindberg (née Frida Uhl), second wife of the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg. The Club received its most focused novelistic treatment in Ford’s The Marsden Case, whose relevance to the present volume lies in its fictionalised account of an avant-garde space that fostered part-public, part-private activities away from a dismal ‘above-ground’ where ‘people were disagreeably odd and wearisome things had to be accounted for’ – a line that indicates a resistance to the rationalisations of everyday life that is at the very heart of modernist party-going more widely conceived. The part of the novel upon which I will focus reimagines the circumstances of Ford’s composition, and staging at the Cabaret Theatre Club, of an ombres chinoises (a Chinese shadow play, which tells a story using puppets to cast shadows on a back-lit screen), which he showed at the venue in November 1913, and which was illustrated by Wyndham Lewis and performed by Ezra Pound.8 In The Marsden Case, this event is fictionalised as occurring one evening with all the hallmarks of a festive gathering, and is thus situated symbolically as part of a discourse of revelry. Early in the novel Jessop recalls being telephoned by ‘the gracious, indefinitely foreign lady’ who runs the Night Club, Ford’s fictional version of Strindberg’s venue, who reminds him that, later that evening, he is due to perform his shadow play ‘in order to brighten London’, and that he should bring ‘sixteen or seventeen’ friends to the performance (pp.  42, 43, 44). This get-together, at which ‘hardly a soul in London Town’ would ‘not have jumped’ (p. 44), contrasts with another party from the previous week to which Jessop ‘hadn’t gone’

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(p. 114) and, more importantly, endows the bohemian pre-war context with the magnitude of a cherished, but now ended, cultural moment, casting its shadow over what Ford saw as a very different kind of, and in certain respects less sanguine, post-war cultural moment.9 What I want to argue here, then, is that The Marsden Case might be described, at least in the context of its relation to the artistic avant-gardism and social cultures associated with the Cabaret Theatre Club, as an impassioned, nostalgic reconstruction of a pre-war climate that Ford still clearly viewed as desirable in an early 1920s moment marked by bad ‘omens’ and ‘groans’.10 This retrospective outlook was not, to adapt a later Fordian statement, the attitude ‘of a meditative gentleman who stands before ruined temples and pours mournful soliloquies on old unhappy things’, but the active signalling of a kind of life – which he rediscovered, for a time, in Paris in the early 1920s – that Ford thought might resist the ‘immediate menaces’ of the post-war world.11

A ‘super-heated Vorticist garden’ One important marker of the Cabaret Theatre Club’s significance for early modernism comes from the fact that Strindberg was ‘blessed’ in the inaugural volume of the Vorticist journal BLAST, whose layout has been read as courting a cabaret ‘aesthetic’, and whose very name evokes the gaiety Strindberg’s venue encouraged (as in the later idiom ‘to have a blast’).12 Less well known is the fact that Strindberg briefly intended to reopen the Cabaret Theatre Club as a ‘Blast Club’ after its demise in February 1914, when financial difficulties forced its closure.13 An account in The Times on 27 June 1912 observed that the Club had ‘to be entered by a sort of man-hole’; when visitors descended into this subterranean space they had to pass Eric Gill’s bas-relief of a golden calf and, for a time, Wyndham Lewis’s painting Creation, which hung above the Club’s entrance stairs between 1912 and 1913 (before he reworked it into the now-lost painting Kermesse).14 Entry to the Club required membership, which was valued at five guineas, or a single guinea for those, such as Ford and Violet Hunt, who supported the arts.15 Once inside, visitors would be greeted by another calf designed by Gill, this time a gold-plated, six-feet sculpture, before they reached the Club’s interior performance space, known as the Cave of the Golden Calf. The Cave featured columns designed by Jacob Epstein and several murals by Lewis, Charles Ginner and Spencer Gore. Lewis also designed the Club’s posters, menus and envelopes, and provided the drop-curtain for the Cave’s stage. Edgar Jepson remarked in the 1930s that the Club’s

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avant-garde credentials made it an expensive place ‘frequented by the intelligent wealthy’, but he insisted that ‘the food and wines were good and served in a civilized fashion’.16 Ford echoed this view in his memoir Return to Yesterday, in which he enthusiastically recalled being hauled by Pound, following ‘at least three dinner and after-dinner dates’, to the club ‘kept by Mme. Strindberg, decorated by Epstein and situate underground’.17 Moreover, to an extent the Club had already achieved the abstraction of ‘everyday’ space and objects called for by Lewis in ‘A Review of Contemporary Art’ in BLAST in 1915, and then again in The Caliph’s Design (1919), by way of its murals and ornamentations, a point reinforced by Osbert Sitwell’s recollection of the venue as a ‘superheated Vorticist garden of gesticulating figures’.18 The Cabaret Theatre Club was visited by patrons from urban bohemia and the demi-monde, as well as guardsmen and members of the British Establishment. However, from the outset it was clearly a strategic focal point for early modernist creative talent and sociality. Influenced in its design by the underground bohemian individualism of the Cabaret Fledermaus in Vienna, which in turn was influenced by Rodolphe Salis’s Parisian nightclub Le Chat Noir, Strindberg’s Club emerged as a stylish rival to the old-fashioned charms of the Café Royal, which at this point was associated with the earlier period of Arthur Symons and Oscar Wilde, but was still used by A. R. Orage, Pound and such figures as Nina Hamnett and Nancy Cunard, if only to create a sensation.19 To others in 1912 the Café Royal appeared distinctly archaic. The Cabaret Theatre Club, that is to say, emerged as part of a living and evolving network of recreative spaces and establishments in pre-First World War London. The Musical Standard of 22 June 1912 quoted a statement proclaiming that the Club was ‘practically the first serious attempt to open a real artistic “cabaret” in London, on a fitting scale’, and that it was ‘the first time that any theatre or restaurant in London [had] been decorated solely by real live painters of the first rank and of the latest modernity’.20 The Club was a place where early modernist luminaries – among them Ford, Gaudier-Brzeska, Lewis, Katherine Mansfield, Pound and Rebecca West – gathered under the direction of their Austrian ‘hostess’, whereas other attendees, to quote Ronald Blythe, included ‘the demi-monde and guardsmen who went there, so they said, to listen to the accordions of Galician gypsies and hear [the music-hall singer] Lilian Shelley singing “Popsie-wopsie” ’, a Victorian music-hall staple.21 This varied mixture of pleasure-seekers enjoyed a festive nocturnal atmosphere in an exotic and anti-bourgeois subterranean space that welcomed a new crowd of individuals every night. Revellers came to Heddon Street for the Bacchanalian pleasures denoted by the name of its performance space,

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and by the sculptures and carvings which enhanced it, all of which resonated with the story told in Exodus of Aaron’s creation of a golden calf to placate the Israelites during the absence of Moses.22 It was, that is to say, a place to party after hours and past midnight, to enjoy a ‘libertarian pleasure-principle’ fostered by Strindberg to call into question the apparent stuffiness of such institutions as the Café Royal, the Chelsea Arts Club and the Studio Club.23 Several invitation-only gatherings were held at the Cabaret Theatre Club, including a 1914 event reuniting its founding members, but in effect each night there amounted to a kind of party, its attendees being branded with a collective identity by virtue of the members’ cards, emblazoned with a golden calf, that they received when they enrolled.24 During its brief existence Strindberg’s Club established itself as one of London’s premier nightspots. A significant part of this success came from Strindberg’s readiness to book diverse entertainments. For instance, on its opening night (26 June 1912) the Cabaret featured the Norwegian singer Bokken Lasson, dances to Edvard Grieg and, to quote Monica Strauss, ‘more torrid fare by a Spanish dancer’.25 The Sunday Times announced before the opening that the Club would feature the debut of ‘Ramona, the beautiful Hindu dancing girl, whose jewelled costume represent[ed] a fortune of over £2,000’, and on 30 June the newspaper reported that Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s comic opera La Serva Padrona would be staged with the American baritone Vernon d’Arnalle in the lead role.26 In July it was announced that the Dutch film-maker Lou Tellegen would read verses by his countryman Emile Verhaeren, and in September the paper advised that the Club had reopened after a summer refurbishment as ‘a place of refuge after closing hours in an atmosphere of vivid colours, music, and motion’.27 Between late 1912 and early 1914 Strindberg’s Club hosted varied performances by, among others: the British poet Lascelles Abercrombie; the American Pound; the New Zealand actress Eve Balfour Hulston; the Spanish pianist Rafael Romero Spínola; the Spanish dancer Carmen Tortola Valencia; the British-American writer Frank Harris; the New Zealand short-story writer Katherine Mansfield; the French actress Rachel Berendt; the Russian baritone Genia d’Agarioff; and the Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.28 In 1913 the Club instituted a ‘Cours de danse Tango’, which was exhibited ‘with the assistance of prominent Cabaret artistes’; Joseph Conrad’s one-act play One Day More, written in 1904, was performed; and Ford’s shadow play was staged.29 Before Strindberg closed the venue in early 1914 (and rather indicatively, given subsequent events), a charity concert was arranged at the end of January for the widows of the submarine A7,

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which had sunk earlier that month on exercises in Whitsand Bay in Cornwall.30 The Cabaret Theatre Club’s mixture of British, American and European art styles and performers, which included African American bands playing the earliest forms of what we now call jazz, indicated an increasingly cosmopolitan London art scene.31 This was no doubt one of the primary draws of the Club for Ford, who by this point had for many years been defending European cultural influence upon English art and complaining about the tendency for ‘places of popular entertainment’ to attract ‘the pulse of the unthinking’.32 Such a broadside was inapplicable to Strindberg’s Club, which promoted in the ‘Aims and Programme of the Cabaret Theatre Club’, a document published in May 1912 featuring a header design by Lewis (Figure 11.1), ‘a gaiety stimulating thought, rather than crushing it’.33 As part of this effort, the Club embraced advanced European cultural forms alongside more traditional offerings, such as the music of Pergolesi or Mozart, to create a node of challenging, intelligent creativity in London’s heart, where a certain kind of cultured party-seeker could be guaranteed cerebral entertainment. The point was not to ‘Continentalise’, but only ‘to do away, to some degree, with the distinction that the word “Continental” implies, and with the necessity of crossing the Channel to laugh freely, and to sit up after nursery hours’.34 To an extent, as already noted, this involved recreating the ambiance of the Cabaret Fledermaus, whose interior had been designed by the Wiener Werkstätte to bring art into the textures of everyday life. Indeed, The Times told its readers in July 1912 that it ‘look[ed] as if the cabaret habit were taking root in London’, and recorded a night at Strindberg’s Club, ‘where the paulo-post-futurist paintings grin from the walls, and the club’s patronal beast [. . .] gleams above the piano’, when it was ‘full of people and smoke and void of any trace of British stiffness’.35 A year later, reporting that ‘dancing was continued until a late hour’ at the Club in mid-June 1913, John Playford noted that Ford had attended the venue to see a performance of Mozart’s comic opera Bastien und Bastienne (1768), whose youthful exuberance no doubt echoed the bonhomie of the space in which it was staged.36

Underground haunts These artistic juxtapositions established the Cabaret Theatre Club’s avant-gardism by bringing old and new cultural forms into dialogue. It was stipulated in the ‘Aims and Programme of the Cabaret Theatre

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Figure 11.1 Wyndham Lewis, ‘Aims and Programme of the Cabaret Theatre Club’ (May 1912). © by kind permission of the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust (a registered charity). Image supplied by the Museum of London.

Club’ that all varieties of art were welcomed there, provided they brought with them, from ‘whatever milieu’ they came, ‘either life or beauty’, and the varied programmes featured at the venue bore out its objective to be ‘a place given up to gaiety’ that would nurture intelligent

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revelry.37 Nina Hamnett implied the success of this goal when she wrote in Laughing Torso (1932) that the Club was a ‘really gay and cheerful place’, while the intellectual content of the various artworks exhibited and performed at the Club insinuated that it made a substantial contribution to the regenerative energies with which Lewis retrospectively bracketed pre-war avant-gardism in ‘Super-Nature versus Super-Real’ (1939) and Rude Assignment (1950).38 Although Strindberg’s Club was a place to socialise and to be entertained, it was also an avant-garde hub of artistic transactions based on carefully defined creative principles, a setting where reverence for the ‘essential’ and ‘scorn for the accidental’ were its guiding doctrines ‘in all matters grave and gay’.39 Lewis described the venue, presumably with his own background in mind, as a place that ‘must have provided a kick or two for the young man about town’.40 However, his claim that the achievements of such movements as Vorticism, Cubism and Expressionism ‘presupposed a new human ethos, which undoubtedly must have superseded, in some measure, modes of feeling of a merely national order’ – a claim that echoes the view of these movements in Rude Assignment as ‘manufacturing fresh eyes for people, and fresh souls to go with the eyes’ – brings to mind Strindberg’s efforts to create an innovative spatial, recreative and performative setting, a place distinguished by an experimental spirit unrestrained by specific national allegiances.41 Not only was the Club decorated, and often visited, by several of these movements’ ambassadors, but its announced intention ‘to harm nobody’ apart from such ‘ “outré-mer” purveyors of entertainment’ who flourished ‘not necessarily on their merits’ so much as on ‘the drastic dullness of [England’s] home-life’ marked the Club in its own right as an avant-garde creation opposed to what its patrons and proprietors saw as the orthodoxies of Edwardian modernity.42 Ford first wrote about the Club – or, at least, first made reference to a setting with certain similarities to Strindberg’s venue – in the post-war period in No Enemy: A Tale of Reconstruction, a hybrid text of reminiscences and self-reinvention published in 1929 but mostly written in 1919. In this book, which represents the first of many Fordian attempts to deal with his front-line wartime experiences, Ford introduces the semi-autobiographical narrator Gringoire, a ‘Gallophile’ who ‘went to the war’ but spent his pre-war years as ‘an ordinary poet, such as you might see in Soho or in various foreign underground haunts by the baker’s dozen, eating nasty meats, drinking nasty wines, usually in nasty company’.43 At one point Gringoire recalls attending a ‘function’, organised by ‘a disagreeably obese Neutral whom [he] much disliked’, that ‘comes back to [him] as a disagreeable occasion of evil passions, evil people, of bad, flashy cooking in an underground haunt of pre-war

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smartness’.44 However, this unsympathetic recollection is immediately qualified: I daresay it was not really as bad as all that – but when I am forced to receive the hospitality of persons whom I dislike, the food seems to go bad, and there is a bad taste in the mouth [. . .] So the band played in that cave and the head ached and there were nasty foreign waiters and bad, very expensive, champagne.45

Gringoire’s reference to a ‘cave’, and to the expensive champagne later noticed by Jepson, suggests a link to the Cabaret Theatre Club, and the description resonates, moreover, with the following passage from The Marsden Case, which describes the venue of a Strindbergian patronne: ‘At the Night Club, in the small hours, stockbrokers and Guards’ officers were said not infrequently to bathe in iced champagne. For that ice-pails were needed; and the waiters were all foreign’ (p. 41). The differences in tone between these passages can perhaps best be explained with reference to Ford’s changing personal circumstances (the first written in a time of acute psychological disarticulation, the second composed from a more measured distance). Indeed, in the latter text Ford ensured that the Night Club accurately evoked the nightspot Strindberg had put so much effort into establishing. Like the Cave of the Golden Calf, the Night Club has a ‘foreign’ and ‘oriental’ space of ‘orgies’, whose vol-auvents, like the sculptures at Heddon Street, are ‘gilded’, whose walls are ornamented, like the columns designed for the Cave by Epstein, with ‘Caryatids’ and whose interior, a ‘vast cellar’ and ‘cavern’, is accessed by a flight of ‘yawning, black stairs’ (pp. 90, 88, 91, 92, 42, 87), just like the ‘certainly cavernous’ basement of the Cabaret Theatre Club announced in The Times.46 Such details, along with the evident specificities of No Enemy, attest Ford’s investment in, his need to explore the post-war present with recourse to, the pre-war past, and with regard to the place he frequented with ‘a number of members of [the] advanced school[s]’ of the early modernist social scene.47 Ford revisited the Cabaret Theatre Club in The Marsden Case through the retrospective scrutiny of Jessop, whose narrative ‘moves with a compelling, elegiac dramatic irony and sense of destiny’.48 The elegiac overtones of Jessop’s recollections are primarily a consequence of his status as a recovering participant in the First World War, but they are also a product of his longing for a moment of social and cultural import when ‘to be in London’, in his words, ‘was to be in the centre of the world’ (p. 36). Even though the text is ‘not a war novel’, it is narrated by an individual who ‘saw something of that struggle’, who would ‘willingly wipe out of [his] mind every sight that [he] saw’ and

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‘every sound that [he] heard’, in it and who, like Gringoire, has been left ‘profoundly seared by those dreadful wickednesses of embattled humanity’ (pp.  143–4). From this perspective, Jessop speaks about a pre-war moment that is necessarily irrecoverable (because it exists on the other side of what Lewis called ‘a sealed and obstructed past’), even though Jessop’s reconstruction of that moment imbues it with a liveliness which contrasts suggestively with the post-war present from which it is viewed.49 Moreover, the fact that Jessop is perceiving that past during a moment when certain members of the intelligentsia are trying to drill England ‘into another war’ (p. 304) aligns his narrative with the peace-loving mindset Ford disclosed in his preliminary notice for the transatlantic review (about which I have to more to say below). Jessop’s hatred of the intelligentsia materialises when he notes that the intellectuals of his period ‘would not seek with light hearts to drive poor fellows again into such pain in the mind’ if they knew ‘how long a strain on the mind war really was’, an impassioned protest which stands out against his generally acclamatory commemorations of ‘the spirited and nonsensical youth all over the world’, but especially in London, ‘in the days just before the war’ (pp. 305, 4). The success of these commemorations derives from their detailed, but far from idealised, account of the period in question. The ‘Great London Vortex’ acts in such Fordian memoirs as Thus to Revisit (1921), Return to Yesterday and It Was the Nightingale (1934) as a catalyst for creative reminiscence precisely because it is an ended past (and thus a past to a certain extent cordoned off from the reflective present), even though Ford’s plangent tones evoke a need to reaffirm the vitality of that past in a radically changed post-war modernity. The Marsden Case suggestively encapsulates this ambivalence by ‘dwelling’, in the novel’s terms, on a ‘sensitive spot in [Ford’s] consciousness’ (p. 23), on a memory of a sociocultural landscape to which he was still drawn after the First World War. The sheer joie de vivre with which the Cabaret Theatre Club, and the London cultural life to which it was bound, is re-imagined by Ford in this text bears out the extent to which he saw it as part of a past worth remembering. The pre-war years, and 1914 in particular, come back to Jessop ‘as a period of outcries’ and ‘smashings’, descriptions which most likely evoke the ‘the noises of broken glass falling to the ground and physical violences’ of Mary Richardson’s vandalising of Velázquez’s The Rokeby Venus in March of that year (p. 13). However, the pre-war period is also recalled as a moment of unparalleled social and artistic vibrancy. The ‘celebrated Cabaret’ that plays such a key part in the novel focalises this high-spiritedness, its ‘fantastic vista’ and ‘extraordinarily soothing’ atmosphere, creating a pleasurably ambiguous ‘grey’ space of

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party-goers and revellers, in contrast to the monochrome dullness of the world beyond its doors (pp. 19–20, 88, 90, 88). In these respects The Marsden Case reiterates the ‘blessing’ of Strindberg in BLAST, the novel portraying her as a ‘desultory’ but tremendous figure, a ‘Circassian magician’ whose Aladdin’s cave maintains the vitality of London’s art world despite ‘losing hundreds of pounds every night’ (pp. 88, 91, 97). And yet, the Madame of The Marsden Case is far from being an idealisation of her real-world counterpart, for the novel carefully qualifies her character in ways which uphold the faintly judgemental account of Strindberg Ford offered in Return to Yesterday. Madame speaks in ‘seductively soothing’ tones which echo the Night Club’s ‘extraordinarily soothing’ ambience; is ‘benevolent to innumerable young men with steeple-crowned hats and black side whiskers, and to many young women with gifts’; and is fragranced with a violet perfume that suggests an exotic otherness matched by ‘her rounded oriental features’ (pp. 43, 96, 94). However, she is also presented as being ‘dreamy’ and ‘not eminently reliable’, as dithering and ‘moving desultorily’, and as working ‘languorously’ and eating in a ‘languid’ manner (pp.  89, 88, 94, 95), details which suggest that although Ford, like Lewis, generally praised Strindberg’s efforts as a bohemian hostess and impresario, he nevertheless maintained an undecided relationship with her which spilled over into his fiction. To take the example of Lewis for a moment, it is suggestive that he wrote in Rude Assignment that Strindberg was a ‘very adventurous woman’, but admitted that very often he ‘had to try, and as best [he] could, to cope with a patroness forever au bout de forces [sic] [i.e. running out of steam]’.50 Moreover, Lewis was sufficiently irritated by Strindberg’s financial forgetfulness to describe her as ‘a hard and godless old ape’, a description which makes her seem less like an avantgarde benefactor and more akin to the bourgeois bohemians satirised by Lewis in Tarr (1918) and The Apes of God (1930).51 Lewis no doubt would have been interested in the ‘Nuit Apache’ organised at Heddon Street on 2 March 1913, especially as the succession of drawings and studies which became Kermesse drew so heavily on the ‘apache’ subcultures of turn-of-the-century Paris.52 However, he would have been less taken with the ragtime bands booked at Strindberg’s Club, which advertised a performance by ‘Nigger minstrels’ shortly after the apache evening.53 In Lewis’s The Apes of God, during the party scene which occupies almost the entirety of the novel’s second half, the ‘sluggish rhythm[s]’ of a jazz band stir up the ‘dense mass’ of the assembled revellers, ‘driven about, in an eccentric vortex’.54 The similarities between these descriptions and those of the vortex-like ‘maelstrom’ of mindless dancers in Tarr are striking. And yet, it is

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tempting to speculate that when in Tarr the failed artist Kreisler begins ‘stamping a little bit, as though he [mistakes] the waltz’ played at the Bonnington Club dance ‘for a more primitive music’, it is not just Kreisler who is being lampooned but, moreover, what Lewis might have felt were the occasionally questionable musical offerings of Strindberg’s Club.55 In Rude Assignment Lewis praised the orchestra ‘with a frenzied Hungarian gypsy fiddler to lead it’ that Strindberg hired to entertain her guests, but Lewis’s seemingly double-minded attitude towards her makes it far from implausible to interpret the Bonnington Club dance in Tarr as at least partly a send-up of the kinds of music and dancing which occurred in the carnivalesque atmosphere of the Cabaret Theatre Club.56 Lewis’s antipathy to jazz was complicated, though largely based on a simplistic understanding of ‘light’ jazz taken from the watereddown forms associated with such composers as Irving Berlin. However, he was provisionally joined in that antipathy by Ford, who would write ironically in No Enemy of the ‘progress towards sweetness and light’ embodied by jazz (and funded by the ‘sufferings’ of soldiers), and in The Marsden Case of a ‘negroid orchestra’ playing the sweetly light-hearted ‘All night long he calls her’ (p. 111), which is most likely a reference to Berlin’s ‘Snookey Ookums’ (a song composed in 1913).57 The mixed-race orchestra employed by the Madame of The Marsden Case is composed of ‘South American mulattos, Barbadoes quadroons, and Cuban octoroons’, as well as ‘Bowery Buck negroes’ (p. 111), a portrayal which evokes the ‘Bowery Buck’ ragtime written by the African American composer Thomas Million John Turpin in 1899. The jazz played by this ‘braying’ and ‘violently’ functioning ensemble, which is at one point referred to as ‘infernal’, lets at least one dancer wear ‘an expression of bliss’ (pp. 112, 115, 120, 117), and it was the forms of almost ritualistic mindlessness apparently enabled by jazz that so troubled another literary analyst of London’s cabaret cultures, Aldous Huxley, in his 1923 novel Antic Hay. In Huxley’s text, listening to jazz amounts to an almost funereal worshipping of nothingness, and jazz in The Marsden Case implies a similarly macabre range of symbolic meanings, with the ‘purgatory’ and ‘morbid nonsense’ of conversation taking place in the Night Club echoing the ‘lugubrious triangle player’ of its ‘negroid’ orchestra, whose members look ‘like undertakers’ (pp. 98, 110,115, 102). Another writer of the period, John Buchan, made use of similar associations between jazz, mechanisation, ritualism and deathliness in the 1920s, presenting jazz dancers in The Three Hostages (1924) as ‘all alike in having dead eyes and masks for faces’, a ‘macabre procession’ moving ‘like automata to [a] niggers’ rhythm’.58 All three writers employ these associations to exoticise, and thereby accentuate

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the supposedly degenerative influence of, jazz. However, in Ford’s The Marsden Case, jazz also serves the contrary purpose of signalling the Night Club’s cultural avant-gardism, which is confirmed when Jessop notes admiringly that to speak of jazz in the pre-war climate is not ‘an anachronism’ because Madame, like Strindberg, had Black jazz musicians ‘in her orchestra already in July, 1914’ (p. 111, emphasis added).

Shadows of the past The Night Club of The Marsden Case, then, is a space in certain respects satirised by Ford on the grounds of its expensiveness, profligacy and questionable musical bookings. However, the gesture of representing the venue in such detail (across almost a sixth of the text) indicates that something else is at work here. For instance, shadows take on a peculiar value in the ambiguous space of the Night Club not only because of the Fordian ombres chinoises performed there, but also because of the ways in which Ford gives the whole bohemian, pre-war context the magnitude of a moment casting its ‘shadow’ over the post-war period. Moreover, the phantoms of the war dead are cast over The Marsden Case like ‘shadows flicker[ing] up on to [a] ceiling’ (p. 143), and the elegiac overtones of the novel, which are linked to the retrospections of its neurasthenic narrator, infuse it with a plaintive resonance that echoes the languages of Ford’s post-war memoirs. This melancholic aspect of the text is in accordance with its commemorations of those who died between 1914 and 1918. As Jenny Plastow rightly notes, ‘The Marsden Case is pervasively attentive to shadows, in ways which turn them, and the shadow-play, into powerful metaphors for perception, displacement, and death, especially the war dead, whom Ford often thought of in terms of a shadow.’59 However, shadows are not simply memorials in The Marsden Case, and the Night Club in which the narrative’s most noticeable shadows appear is more than a faded echo of a now-superseded pre-war past. Indeed, Ford’s fictional reconstruction of the Cabaret Theatre Club, and of the kinds of cultural activity which happened there, emerges not just as a wistful commemoration of an avant-garde environment in which diverse forms of artistry flourished, but as a decisive signalling of the desirability of such an environment in the scarred landscapes of the post-war present. That is to say, the attention Ford lavishes on detailing the Night Club and the cultures it fosters in The Marsden Case registers and promotes a certain kind of avant-garde social scene that had been rendered irrecoverable by the First World War (as Brooker indicates).60 Jessop notes in the

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novel that ‘it has never been really settled whether, if you have a sensitive spot in your consciousness, it is better to avoid dwelling on it so that it may heal, or to dwell on it so that, as it were, you may efface it by the friction – as you may rub spots out of clothing’ (pp. 23–4). Conversely, in detailing so carefully, warts and all, one of the primary haunts of the social scene of early modernism in The Marsden Case, Ford is neither avoiding the pre-war past so that his memory of it may heal nor attempting to efface it through literary ‘friction’. Instead, he is evoking that past as a moment from which a disordered and culturally weakened postwar modernity might take some sort of bearing. Moreover, what The Marsden Case does in returning to that moment at the level of ‘content’ is to enable Ford once again to promote and extend in fictional form, as he had already done in Thus to Revisit and the unpublished segments of No Enemy, Impressionism as a sustainable post-war literary aesthetic. When he makes Jessop stipulate that he does not tell stories ‘straightforwardly, as stories are usually told’, or when he makes him insist that in ‘plain[ly]’ rendering a ‘complicated’ story one must ‘emphasize points in advance, go back to others, advance’ and ‘go back again’ (pp. 18, 261), Ford is signalling the continuity of The Marsden Case with the literary Impressionism he had, ten years previously, defended from within the ‘Great London Vortex’. Jessop’s remembrance of that cultural climate comes to him in ‘spots’ like the spots on an immense canvas, as they do for Dowell in Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915), but Jessop’s account also takes shape as an impressionistic tale of the sort defended by Ford in such texts as ‘On Impressionism’ (1914), The Good Soldier and Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924).61 All of these elements align The Marsden Case with Ford’s ongoing promotion of Impressionism in the post-war period, but I want to conclude by suggesting that the text is more significantly aligned with the utopian potential Ford assigned to culture in his preliminary announcement for the transatlantic review in 1923. In The Critical Attitude Ford wrote that ‘only from the arts can any safety for the future of the State be found’.62 He reiterated this claim when he established the transatlantic review, which was founded on the principle that a cosmopolitan conception of culture, in which ‘there will be only Literature, as to-day there are Music and the Plastic Arts, each having Schools Russian, Persian, sixteenth century German, as the case may be’, would create ‘a league of nations no diplomatists shall destroy, for into its comity no representatives of commercial interests or delimitators of frontiers can break’.63 But of course a cosmopolitan conception of culture was exactly what was promoted by Strindberg’s Cabaret Theatre Club, with its cosmopolitan line-up and ‘non-Continentalized’ approach to social

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and artistic interactions. What Ford’s The Marsden Case appears to do, then, is to restate in changed form his earlier claim ‘that only from the arts can any safety for the future of the State be found’ by emphasising an avant-garde space which helped arts of just that sort to flourish. Jessop’s antipathy to the ‘old heart-breaks’ and ‘old cruelties’ he sees ‘unceasingly at work’ (p. 305) in his surroundings is thus offset by the text’s implied attention to the Night Club as a place where such alienations might be counterbalanced. It is not pushing a point too far to say that The Marsden Case, when viewed in the cosmopolitan context I have sketched out, contributed to Ford’s promotions in the early 1920s of culture as a means of healing rifts between beleaguered European nations. At this time Ford had become, like many other intellectuals of the period, dubious about the effectiveness of the League of Nations and especially about the integrity of David Lloyd George, one of the League’s main architects, whom Ford suggested in It Was the Nightingale might be taken as ‘responsible for all the sorrows’ that tormented his ‘poor civilisation’ throughout the inter-war period.64 Against the overtly political League of Nations, Ford arranged, through his editorship of the transatlantic review, a more subtle ‘league’ of culture, which would work in opposition to the legal and political agreements that in time proved so ‘disastrous for humanity’.65 Ford’s return in The Marsden Case to an early modernist scene of revelry and hedonism ought not, then, to be understood as a frivolous avoidance of such political anxieties, but as a focused, though typically Fordian and indirect, revisitation of a pre-war cultural scene whose cosmopolitan and intellectual underpinnings might point the way for a directionless post-war modernity. The modernist party Ford had in mind, in other words, was rather different in scope to the political parties clamouring for attention in this period. Though Ford by this point was, as Douglas Goldring noted, ‘often bored by the riotous behaviour of the young avant-gardists who surrounded him’ in the 1920s, nevertheless he returned to a space where young avant-gardists had behaved riotously before the First World War out-blasted their cultural and social innovations.66 Indeed, so strongly did Ford feel about the significance of the Cabaret Theatre Club, and about Strindberg’s role as a hostess of avant-garde experiment, that he returned to the vibrancy of the early modernist social scene not only in Thus to Revisit and The Marsden Case, but also in Return to Yesterday, in which he stated that in the early hours of the morning after a visit to London’s bohemian haunts one might witness the city in a kind of ‘symphonic’ unity, which was disclosed by the birdsong working like ‘an immense choir with the fuller notes of the merle family making obligatos over the chattering

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counterpoint of the sparrows’.67 Such a vision made for a stark contrast with what Ford saw as a rather less unified post-war period of despairing groans, which prompted his melancholy claim that those ‘who cannot remember London then do not know what life holds. Alas. . .’.68

Notes 1. My thanks to Peter Brooker and Andrzej Ga˛siorek for reading over, and offering suggestive improvements to, this chapter as it was being developed. 2. Ashley Dukes, The Scene Is Changed (London: Macmillan, 1942), p. 41. 3. Ibid., pp. 39, 59. 4. Ford Madox Ford, Return to Yesterday (1931), ed. Bill Hutchings (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999), p. 320; Ford Madox Hueffer [Ford], Thus to Revisit: Some Reminiscences (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1921), pp. 18–19. 5. Peter Brooker, Bohemia in London: The Social Scene of Early Modernism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 8–9. 6. Ford Madox Ford, The Marsden Case (London: Duckworth, 1923), p. 36. Hereafter page numbers are given in the text. 7. Andrzej Ga˛siorek gives a suggestive account of Ford’s roles in early modernist London in ‘ “Content to be Superseded”?: Ford in the Great London Vortex’, in Andrzej Ga˛siorek and Daniel Moore (eds), Ford Madox Ford: Literary Networks and Cultural Transformations (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), pp. 81–104. 8. For Ford’s shadow play see Ford, Return to Yesterday, p. 320, and ‘Plays and Players’, Sunday Times, 2 November 1913, p. 8. 9. Ford, Return to Yesterday, p. 320. 10. Hueffer [Ford], Thus to Revisit, pp. 18–19. 11. Ford Madox Ford, Letters of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Richard M. Ludwig (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 264. 12. See BLAST 1 (June 1914) (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1981), p. 28. See also Laura Winkiel, Modernism, Race and Manifestos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), ch. 4. 13. See Paul O’Keeffe, Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis (London: Pimlico, 2001), pp. 143–4. 14. ‘The Cabaret Theatre Club’, The Times, 27 June 1912, p. 10. 15. Brooker, Bohemia in London, p. 74. 16. Edgar Jepson, Memories of an Edwardian and Neo-Georgian (London: Richards, 1937), p. 155. 17. Ford, Return to Yesterday, p. 320. 18. Osbert Sitwell, Great Morning: Being the Third Volume of Left Hand, Right Hand! (1948) (London: Reprint Society, 1949), p. 207. 19. I owe this clarification to Peter Brooker. 20. ‘Notes and News’, Musical Standard, 22 June 1912, p. 395. 21. Ronald Blythe, The Age of Illusion: England in the Twenties and Thirties, 1919–1940 (1963) (London: Faber, 2011), p. 19. Blythe’s account draws on Nina Hamnett’s Laughing Torso (1932).

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22. See Urmila Seshagiri, Race and the Modernist Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), pp. 82–3. 23. Richard Cork, Art Beyond the Gallery in Early 20th Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 61. 24. O’Keeffe, Some Sort of Genius, p. 144. 25. Monica Strauss, Cruel Banquet: The Life and Loves of Frida Strindberg (New York: Harcourt, 2000), p. 179. 26. ‘Plays and Players’, Sunday Times, 23 June 1912, p. 6; ‘Plays and Players’, Sunday Times, 30 June 1912, p. 6. 27. ‘Plays and Players’, Sunday Times, 14 July 1912, p. 6; ‘Plays and Players’, Sunday Times, 29 September 1912, p. 4. 28. ‘Plays and Players’, Sunday Times, 27 October 1912, p. 6; ‘Plays and Players’, Sunday Times, 10 November 1912, p. 4; Multiple classified advertising items, Sunday Times, 17 November 1912, p. 10; ‘May Revels at Letchworth’, Sunday Times, 1 June 1913, p. 8; ‘Cabaret Club’, Sunday Times, 21 September 1913, p. 5; ‘The Cabaret Theatre’, Sunday Times, 28 September 1913, p. 6; ‘Plays and Players’, Sunday Times, 12 October 1913, p. 6; ‘Plays and Players’, Sunday Times, 9 November 1913, p. 8. 29. ‘Plays and Players’, Sunday Times, 27 April 1913, p. 6; ‘The Cabaret Theatre’, Sunday Times, 28 September 1913, p. 6. 30. ‘To-Day’s Programme’, Sunday Times, 25 January 1914, p. 11. 31. See Helen Carr, The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H.D. and the Imagists (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009), pp. 468–9. The history of early jazz performances in London is extremely complex, and in this chapter I can only gesture towards some of its intricacies. For fuller treatments see: Catherine Parsonage, The Evolution of Jazz in Britain, 1880–1935 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Howard Rye, ‘Fearsome Means of Discord: Early Encounters with Black Jazz’, in Paul Oliver (ed.), Black Music in Britain: Essays on the Afro-Asian Contribution to Popular Music (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990), pp.  45–57; Ronald Schleifer, Modernism and Popular Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 32. Ford Madox Hueffer [Ford], The Critical Attitude (London: Duckworth, 1911), p. 113. 33. ‘Aims and Programme of the Cabaret Theatre Club’ (n.p., 1912), unpaginated. 34. Ibid. 35. ‘The Cabaret Theatre Club’, The Times (18 July 1912), p. 3. 36. John Playford, ‘Music and Musicians’, New Age, 3 July 1913, p. 274. 37. ‘Aims and Programme’. 38. Nina Hamnett, Laughing Torso (1932) (London: Virago, 1984), p. 47; Jepson, Memories of an Edwardian and Neo-Georgian, p. 155. 39. ‘Notes and News’, Musical Standard, 22 June 1912, p. 395. 40. Wyndham Lewis, Rude Assignment (1950), ed. Toby Foshay (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1984), p. 135. 41. Wyndham Lewis, ‘Super-Nature versus Super-Real’ (1939), in Walter Michel and C. J. Fox (eds), Wyndham Lewis on Art (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1969), pp. 303–33: p. 306; Lewis, Rude Assignment, p. 135. 42. ‘Aims and Programme’.

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43. Ford Madox Ford, No Enemy: A Tale of Reconstruction (1929), ed. Paul Skinner (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002), pp. 7, 11. 44. Ibid., p. 105. 45. Ibid., p. 105. 46. ‘The Cabaret Theatre Club’, The Times, 27 June 1912, p. 10. 47. Ford, No Enemy, p. 105. 48. John Meixner, Ford Madox Ford’s Novels: A Critical Study (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962), p. 195. 49. Wyndham Lewis, ‘The Children of the New Epoch’ (1921), in Michel and Fox (eds), Wyndham Lewis on Art, pp. 194–5: p. 195. 50. Lewis, Rude Assignment, p. 135. My thanks to Luke Reeve-Tucker, my brother-in-law, for help with the nuances of this translation. The point is complicated by the fact that Lewis also writes that he never saw Strindberg ‘in that condition, her “forces” being at all times triumphantly intact’ (p. 134). 51. Lewis, quoted in O’Keeffe, Some Sort of Genius, p. 138. 52. Multiple classified advertising items, Sunday Times, 23 February 1913, p. 10. See also Lisa Tickner, ‘The Popular Culture of Kermesse: Lewis, Painting, and Performance, 1912–13’, in Terry Smith (ed.), In Visible Touch: Modernism and Masculinity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 139–72. 53. Multiple classified advertising items, Sunday Times, 23 February 1913, p. 10. 54. Wyndham Lewis, The Apes of God (1930), ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1981), p. 460. 55. Wyndham Lewis, Tarr (1918), ed. Paul O’Keeffe (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1990), p. 148, emphasis added. 56. Lewis, Rude Assignment, pp. 134–5. 57. Ford, No Enemy, p. 50; Laurence Bergreen, As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin (New York: Viking, 1990), pp. 87–8. 58. John Buchan, The Three Hostages (1924), ed. Karl Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 101. See also Buchan’s The Dancing Floor (1926), ed. Marilyn Deegan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 49. 59. Jenny Plastow, ‘ “If We Shadows Have Offended”: The Metaphor of Shadow in The Marsden Case’, in Laura Colombino (ed.), Ford Madox Ford and Visual Culture (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), pp. 159–73: p. 165. 60. Brooker, Bohemia in London, pp. 8–9. 61. See Ford Madox Hueffer [Ford], The Good Soldier (1915), ed. David Bradshaw (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 21. 62. Ford, The Critical Attitude, p. 29. 63. Ford, quoted in Douglas Goldring, South Lodge: Reminiscences of Violet Hunt, Ford Madox Ford and the English Review Circle (London: Constable, 1943), p. 144. 64. Ford, It Was the Nightingale (London: William Heinemann, 1934), p. 238. 65. Ibid., p. 318. 66. Goldring, South Lodge, p. 151. 67. Ford, Return to Yesterday, p. 320. 68. Ibid., p. 320.

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Chapter 12

‘Pleasure too often repeated’:1 Aldous Huxley’s Modernity Morag Shiach

In an essay published in 1923, Aldous Huxley suggested that ‘of all the various poisons which modern civilization, by a process of autointoxication, brews quietly up within its own bowels, few are more deadly [. . .] than that curious and appalling thing that is technically known as “pleasure”.’2 By ‘pleasure’, Huxley here clearly meant something other than simple enjoyment. His use of inverted commas around the word and his description of pleasure as ‘curious and appalling’ signal a profound and significant unease, which I will argue can be fully understood only when considered in relation to Huxley’s sense of the corruption of ‘pleasure’ by the forces of modernity as he perceived them in the early 1920s. Huxley goes on to argue in this same essay that pleasure has become something other than the ‘real thing’, has become ‘organized distraction’, and to bemoan the emergence of ‘vast organizations that provide us with ready-made distractions’.3 Pleasure thus appears to have become for Huxley not simply negative, but something other than itself (not real), and an experience that is both inauthentic and slightly sinister (‘organized’ and ‘ready-made’). Huxley’s profound suspicion about the nature of pleasure in the modern world means that an analysis of the structural and thematic role of the party in his fiction offers a particularly rich opportunity for a reconsideration of the broader arguments within his novels about the defining characteristics of modernity. These broader arguments, I will suggest, can themselves be more fully and productively understood only when put into dialogue with the literary and cultural project we have come to call ‘modernism’, represented (necessarily only partially) in this chapter through discussions of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Sigmund Freud.4 Huxley was not alone in expressing a certain scepticism about the psychic and social meanings of ‘pleasure’ in the early 1920s. One might, for example, reflect on the historical coincidence of Huxley’s essay and

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Freud’s innovative and disturbing essay of 1920, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’.5 Freud’s essay, by his own admission an exercise in ‘speculation, often far-fetched speculation’, developed a radical critique of the inadequacy of psychoanalytic assumptions that ‘the course taken by mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle’.6 Using a variety of conceptual frameworks, from biology to clinical practice, Freud developed within this very influential essay a compelling argument for the importance of forces and energies that lay ‘beyond’ the pleasure principle, including not only the reality principle, but also the compulsion to repeat and the death instinct as fundamental aspects of the human psyche. Huxley was, as one of his biographers makes clear, ‘never an admirer of Freud’,7 but the coincidence of their separate critiques of ‘pleasure’ in the early 1920s is not without significance. Both were responding to the need for new concepts and new forms of representation to enable an understanding of the social and individual traumas and legacies of the First World War. Freud’s fascination with the role of the ‘perpetual recurrence of the same thing’8 within the psychic life of the traumatised individual finds its echo in Huxley’s literary fascination with repetition, whether in the form of his literary deployment of obsessive citation, his fictional exploration of addictive and repetitive sexual behaviours, or his critique of the psychic damage caused by coercive repetitive social rituals. In examining the role of the party in Huxley’s fiction, from Crome Yellow (1921) via Point Counter Point (1928) to Brave New World (1932), each of these aspects of his fascination with the compulsion to repeat will be explored, and the relation of these to the possibilities of pleasure the novels represent will be analysed. Huxley’s fictional parties take many forms, from the house-party, where all the characters within a novel are tested by their confinement within a specific and often oppressive time and space, to the dinner-party and the drinks-party, where the meeting and mingling of characters is both more staged and more transient. But in each case the party becomes a kind of fictional laboratory, where relationships, identities and desires are tested against Huxley’s narrators’ probing sense of imminent social crisis and personal collapse. Parties in each of these three novels are fictionally enabling events, providing a narrative device to highlight the tensions and conflicts that emerge from the interactions of their characters with the modern world. Parties are moments of intensity and also of profound instability, generating a mood and an affect that Huxley elsewhere describes as a kind of ‘whizzing’: ‘What a life! I have been ceaselessly whizzing. [. . .] What a queer thing it is. This whizzing is a mere mania, a sort of intoxicant, exciting and begetting oblivion. I shall be glad when it stops.’9

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‘Oh, these rags and tags of other people’s making!’10 The ‘whizzing’ that so affects Huxley in his experience of the rhythms and intoxications of the modern world can be connected to the various forms of compulsion to repeat that can be found in his novels. One key aspect of this repetition is Huxley’s use of literary quotation, which allows phrases and texts to circulate between and among his characters. In Huxley’s novels, parties serve not simply to enable an interaction and mingling of people, but also to provide the conditions for repeated circulation and mingling of words, often in the form of quotations from or broader allusions to literary texts. In Crome Yellow, for example, quotations are deployed at parties extensively by a number of the key characters to express their fears, fascinations and desires, while they also serve to situate the action of the novel within a much larger historical and literary canvas: ‘Under the spreading ilex tree. . .’ He tried to remember who the poem was by, but couldn’t. ‘The smith a brawny man is he With arms like rubber bands.’ [. . .] Oh, these rags and tags of other people’s making! Would he ever be able to call his brain his own? Was there, indeed, anything in it that was truly his own, or was it simply an education? (p. 135)

Crome Yellow meticulously presents and dissects the interactions between guests at a house-party in a large country house, closely modelled on Garsington Hall, the home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, patron and supporter of a wide range of modernist artists and writers including Huxley, Lawrence, Dorothy Brett and Mark Gertler.11 Crome Yellow is often read simply as a roman à clef, and it is certainly not difficult to perceive the resonances of Huxley’s contemporaries, including Bertrand Russell, Dorothy Brett and indeed Ottoline Morrell herself, within the key characters in the novel. Crome Yellow is in that sense resonant with its contemporary post-war moment, reanimated through the process of fictionalisation and generating a series of echoes of contemporary attitudes and voices.12 These contemporary echoes certainly generate one aspect of the experience of repetition that is key both to the form and to the thematic concerns of this novel. But the novel is also profoundly and importantly interested in the echoes of history, embodied in the plethora of (mostly literary) quotations and allusions that litter the text, and constitute the discursive matter of its parties. Huxley was not the only writer fascinated by the literary potential of citation in the early years of the twentieth century. Indeed, for many lit-

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erary critics and historians a tendency to citation is the hallmark, much more generally, of modernist writing itself. The critic Leonard Diepeveen argued in the 1990s, for example, that ‘appropriation of previously existing material will be the aesthetic of this century’.13 Diepeveen’s particular interest was in the poetic writing of modernism, and a poetic commitment to the productive power of citation can clearly be found throughout the period of high modernism, particularly in the years just before and after the First World War, when Huxley was developing his own aesthetic practice. Think, for example, of The Waste Land, published by T. S. Eliot (another regular visitor to Garsington Hall) in 1922. Early critical reception of The Waste Land foregrounded, and expressed a distinct unease with, its complex collage of disparate voices and quotations from literary texts. Edgell Rickword, for example, noted in 1923 that Eliot’s ‘emotions hardly ever reach us without traversing a zig-zag of allusion. In the course of his four hundred lines he quotes from a score of authors [. . .] To help us elucidate the poem Mr Eliot has provided some notes which will be of more interest to the pedantic than the poetic critic’,14 while Edmund Wilson, in a broadly positive review of the poem published in 1922, nonetheless referred to a risk that it would be seen as ‘a puzzle rather than a poem’ that ‘depends too much on books and borrows too much from other men’.15 But such deployment of citation as a central literary device was an integral aspect of Eliot’s overall poetic project, and intersected in important ways with his understanding of literary innovation and its relation to literary tradition. In his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), Eliot had argued for the importance of a modern poet writing ‘with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order’, suggesting further that the modern poet’s ‘significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.’16 Such haunting of poetry by the literary texts of the past, and the palimpsestic presence within poetry of a rich array of earlier literary texts, were fundamental to Eliot’s understanding of what was important about modern poetry. The point is developed further in Eliot’s essay on ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, published in 1921 (the same year as Crome Yellow), where Eliot argued that ‘the poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning’.17 Citation, allusion and repetition were not only driving innovation in modern poetry: they were fundamental to some of the most important innovations within modern fiction in the same period. The circulation of different voices and texts and the presentation of ‘multiple simultaneous

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perspectives’18 are, for example, fundamental components of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), a novel that renders the emotional, cultural and physical landscape of contemporary Dublin within a framework shaped by quotation from a dizzying number of texts, including the literary and the popular as well as the historical and the ephemeral. Joyce’s polyphonic novel is both stylistically and formally radically different, of course, from Huxley’s fiction and his literary seriousness is of quite a different order. But Joyce’s literary borrowings and repetitions do, nonetheless, provide a context for the consideration of the deployment of citation within Huxley’s novels, the more so because for each writer the works of Shakespeare are a particularly rich and recurrent source. As one critic writing in the 1950s noted, ‘Joyce in Ulysses refers or alludes to Shakespeare or his works, or quotes from the latter, 321 times.’19 No such forensic analysis of the frequency of allusions to Shakespeare within Huxley’s writing has been undertaken.20 But it is nonetheless clear that Shakespeare has a privileged status within Huxley’s novels, providing a counterpoint to their account of modernity and offering resources for an alternative moral universe (most explicitly in Brave New World). What is at stake for Huxley, across all three of the novels discussed in this chapter, is whether the texts of Shakespeare can be made to circulate in the modern world without becoming empty ciphers of hopeless anachronism, whether in fact things are ‘more real and vivid when one can apply someone else’s ready-made phrase about them’ (Crome Yellow, p. 17). The perpetual recurrence of Shakespeare in Huxley’s novels in the form of allusion and direct quotation is fundamental both to their intellectual arguments and their literary style. As Mr Barbecue-Smith puts it in Crome Yellow: ‘turning over the pages of any Dictionary of Quotations or Shakespeare Calendar that comes to hand [. . .] ensures that the Universe shall come flowing in, not in a continuous rush, but in aphorismic drops’ (p. 29). These accumulating drops of allusion and quotation conjure not simply a specific style of literary creation but also the characteristic universe of Huxley’s fictional parties, where meaning emerges from the cumulative drops of fragmented conversation and quotation rather than presenting itself as continuous or coherent. The habit of quotation that is found in so many characters in Huxley’s novels is explicitly linked to the complex legacy of forms of education (public school and Oxbridge) that we are told provide extensive knowledge of the past without, however, enabling effective engagement in the present. Denis Stone, an aspiring writer in Crome Yellow, feels the weight of this:

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‘You have a bad habit of quoting,’ said Anne. ‘As I never know the context or author, I find it humiliating.’ Denis apologized. ‘It’s the fault of one’s education. Things somehow seem more real and vivid when one can apply someone else’s ready-made phrases about them. And then there are lots of lovely names and words [. . .] you bring them out triumphantly, and feel you’ve clinched the argument with the mere magical sound of them. That’s what comes of the higher education.’ (p. 17)

This legacy does not simply produce characters who are no fun at parties (who humiliate their interlocutors), but also creates a habit of selfdelusion that for many of Huxley’s characters leads to an inability to understand the motivation for or meanings of their own actions. Walter Bidlake, in Point Counter Point, finds himself in a very unhappy and destructive relationship because, as he muses, ‘he had deliberately tried to model his feelings and their life together on Shelley’s poetry’ (p. 9). Walter had been warned against the folly of this by Philip Quarles, another writer, who cited Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 (‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’) to demonstrate to Walter the dangers of taking literary texts ‘too literally’ (p. 10). But Walter was ‘just down from Oxford and stuffed with poetry and the lucubrations of philosophers and mystics’ (p. 11), and thus prey to delusion. Walter’s lover, Marjorie, is also a victim of quotation, having imbibed knowledge from a wide range of texts without acquiring any significant understanding: And then, he went on to reflect, she was really rather a bore with her heavy, insensitive earnestness. Really rather stupid in spite of her culture – because of it perhaps. The culture was genuine all right; she had read the books, she remembered them. But did she understand them? [. . .] when she did break her silence, half her utterances were quotations. [. . .] It had taken Walter some time to discover the heavy, pathetically uncomprehending stupidity that underlay the silence and the quotations. (p. 13)

The relations between culture and stupidity intrigue many characters in Huxley’s fiction, including those who mingle and chatter while ‘Lady Edward Tantamount was giving one of her musical parties’ (p. 24). This party functions in Point Counter Point as a kind of biological or anthropological experiment. This experimental aspect is explicitly flagged up by the fact that while the large and noisy musical party is going on in the lower floors of Tantamount House, ‘two flights up – Lord Edward Tantamount was busy in his laboratory’ (p. 35). Edward Tantamount is totally absorbed by ‘the real task of his life – the great theoretical treatise on physical biology’ (p. 39), whose profound significance came to him as a sort of revelation in his youth, overturning the lethargic and

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pointless state to which he had been condemned by ‘All those years at Eton. Latin verses. What the devil was the good?’ (p. 38). Lord Edward is overwhelmed by a moment of insight into the fundamental structures that underpin all life, and restlessly pursues the abstract and theoretical basis of such vitalism for the rest of his life. His laboratory assistant, Illidge, who had ‘certainly not been formed in any of the ancient and expensive seats of learning’ (p. 4) (and is later revealed to be both a communist and a murderer), is busily engaged in a kind of primitive stem cell research on a newt while the party goes on below. But Illidge is then hurled precipitously into the party (after falling down stairs). Here his and Lord Edward’s scientific endeavours are mocked through frivolous citation from Shakespeare: ‘Eye of newt and toe of frog Wool of bat and tongue of dog. . .’ She recited with gusto, intoxicated by the words. ‘And he takes guinea pigs and makes them breed with serpents. Can you imagine it – a cross between a cobra and a guinea pig?’ (p. 47)

The voice of Shakespeare’s witch here suggests the dangerous and unnatural quality of Lord Edward’s experimentation, with its troubling mingling of species, but this passage also points up the intellectual limitations of the young party-guests, who can see nothing but absurdity in such scientific endeavour and are so readily intoxicated by words. Both foolishness and an appetite for destructive forms of intoxication are found repeatedly in Huxley’s novels, manifested with particular intensity at their many parties. Lucy Tantamount in Point Counter Point, for example, is represented as frivolous, morally vacuous and constantly searching for the momentary annihilation she derives from the intoxication of repeated but unsatisfactory sexual encounters: ‘she had only to relax her will [. . .] she would cease to be herself. She would become nothing but a skin of fluttering pleasure enclosing a void, a warm abysmal darkness’ (p. 225). The lure of intoxication as a response to the traumas of the post-war world was indeed noted by many writers of the 1920s, including Freud, who argued in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’ in 1929 that ‘Life, as we find it, is too hard to bear. It brings us too many pains. [. . .] In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures’, including ‘intoxicating substances, which make us insensitive to it’.21 In Brave New World, published a few years after Freud’s essay, Huxley will insist on the central role of intoxicating substances in deadening the existential suffering that is implicit in the human condition, showing in the novel a world in which a narcotic substance, ‘soma’, is routinely administered to overcome the sense of loss or the desire for

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freedom that might otherwise emerge within the minds of its citizens: ‘Lenina and Henry were yet dancing in another world – the warm, the richly coloured, the infinitely friendly world of soma-holiday.’22 In Point Counter Point, Lucy Tantamount is used by Huxley to provide narrative coherence to his account of the party with which the novel begins: she links diverse characters through her many and varied conversations while also acting as the central focus of Walter Bidlake’s (at this stage frustrated) erotic desire. At one point Lucy confesses to an elderly guest, Mrs Betterton, that she began going to the theatre at the age of six. Mrs Betterton is appalled by the negative consequences of such early exposure to theatrical pleasure: She quoted Shakespeare. ‘Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare, Since seldom coming in the long year set, Like stones of worth they thinly placed are. . .’ ‘They’re a row of pearls nowadays.’ ‘And false ones at that,’ said Lucy. Mrs Betterton was triumphant. ‘False ones – you see? But for us they were genuine, because they were rare. We didn’t “blunt the fine point of seldom pleasure” by daily wear. [. . .] A pleasure too often repeated produces numbness; it’s no more felt as a pleasure.’ (p. 62)

The disjunction between Victorians and moderns, Mrs Betterton suggests, can be found in their different experiences of pleasure: too many feasts and parties, she argues, leads to a kind of ‘numbness’ and a pleasure that is false, that is ‘no more felt’. Mrs Betterton’s remedy would be fewer parties, but Lucy disagrees, suggesting rather that pleasurable diversions must become stronger to maintain their power. Where, Mrs Betterton asks, would that end? ‘ “In bull fighting? [. . .] Or the amusements of the Marquis de Sade? Where?” ’ Lucy shrugged her shoulders. “Who knows?” ’ (p. 63). Such a drive towards excess as the inescapable consequence of false and palliative pleasures, or the result of too many parties, is fully embodied in the structure of Point Counter Point as a whole. Its search for the resources of adequate aesthetic expression becomes increasingly desperate as the novel progresses, driving it to its unsettlingly melodramatic conclusions in murder and the prolonged death of a child: ‘and then suddenly there was no more music; only the scratching of the needle on the revolving disc’ (p. 568). As an image of painful repetition, the technologies of modern world and the impossibility of the aesthetic, this is compelling: the compulsion to repeat finds its apotheosis here in the scratching of a needle.

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‘Aldous Huxley held a group of listeners spellbound as he elucidated the history of sexual tastes over the last thousand years’23 Sexual energies circulate throughout Huxley’s parties, as indeed they do throughout his novels. For Huxley, as for many of his modernist contemporaries, sexual mores and behaviours were key indicators of the state of health of their contemporary culture. Thus, for example, in Eliot’s The Waste Land the bleakness of the social and cultural landscape is expressed partly through a series of narratives and images of failed or degraded sexual coupling. In lines such as ‘The time is now propitious, as he guesses / The meal is ended, she is bored and tired, / Endeavours to engage her in caresses / Which still are unreproved, if undesired’,24 Eliot represents the spiritual emptiness of the lives of the inhabitants of his waste land through their emotionally unsatisfying sexual couplings. Such failures to connect sexual behaviour and sexual desire will also be found in many of Huxley’s characters, and the representation of sexual desire and behaviour within his novels forms part of a developing argument about the defining qualities of modernity, which Huxley increasingly associates with a growing chasm between the profound needs of the human individual and the manufactured distractions and pastimes of a modern commercial and industrialised society. Huxley presents within several of his novels an explicit history of changing sexual behaviours and attitudes. In Crome Yellow, for example, a discussion of sexual mores takes place, led by Mr Scogan (a character often read as based on Bertrand Russell).25 Mr Scogan speaks with enthusiasm of the sexual manners of earlier periods, ‘the customs [. . .] of every other century, from the time of Hammurabi onwards, were equally genial and equally frank’ (p. 78). Scogan argues that only in the nineteenth century did reticence about sexuality become part of European culture, when ‘the frankness of the previous fifteen or twenty thousand years was considered abnormal and perverse’ (p. 78). One of the group enthusiastically agrees with his condemnation of the tendency towards reticence and repression in the nineteenth century, and invokes with enthusiasm the impact on contemporary culture of the work of Havelock Ellis.26 But Scogan argues that Ellis’s scientific discourses on sexuality constitute part of the very problem of sexuality in the modern world: ‘the reaction when it came [. . .] was to openness, but not to the same openness as had reigned in earlier ages. It was to a scientific frankness, not to the jovial frankness of the past’ (p. 79). This ‘scientific frankness’, with the accompanying sense that sex is serious, and something that needs to be analysed, is exactly what Scogan is objecting to.

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Excessive discourse about sex (especially if accompanied by seriousness) is always treated with suspicion in Huxley’s novels, though they are themselves saturated with representations of and arguments about sex. Such a dialectic between the aspiration towards a ‘jovial’ understanding of sex in ‘the spirit of Rabelais and Chaucer’ (Point Counter Point, p. 79) and the simultaneous compulsion to produce analyses and scientific accounts of human sexuality is, it would later be argued by the French historian Michel Foucault, a fundamental characteristic of modernity.27 Foucault’s very influential history of sexuality engages closely both with the desire to historicise we find in Huxley and with his sense of the ambiguous legacies for individual subjects of the development of scientific discourses on human sexuality. Foucault would not agree with Scogan’s account of the reticence of the nineteenth century in relation to sexuality, but his extensive inquiry into the history of sexuality does offer a framework for understanding Huxley’s suspicion of the modern desire to know and to control human sexual behaviours: ‘what is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they confined sex to a shadowy existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum’.28 Huxley’s sense of how much is at stake in the nature of modern sexual mores and behaviours is, however, profound, and the impact of his friend and contemporary D. H. Lawrence on the way this is represented in his fiction is significant. Lawrence’s own novels, essays and poems stage a series of conflicts between different understandings and manifestations of the nature of human sexuality, associating modernity consistently with failures in and aberrations of the basic human need for sexual passion and fulfilment. For Lawrence, the damage that is done by an overly self-conscious modern kind of sexuality is profound, and requires vigorous challenge. As he was to express this in an essay published in 1922, ‘drive her back into her own true mode. Rip all her nice superimposed modern-woman and wonderful-creature garb off her, reduce her once more to a naked Eve.’29 Huxley articulates within his novels many ideas and arguments about the distortions of human sexuality within the modern world derived from Lawrence’s work, for example creating in the character of Mark Rampion in Point Counter Point a representation of ‘some of Lawrence’s notions on legs’.30 Rampion repeatedly polemicises against what the novel represents as sterile, aberrant or destructive forms of modern sexual behaviour: Rampion brought his hands together with a clap and, leaning back in his chair, turned up his eyes. ‘Oh, my sacred aunt!’ he said. ‘So it’s come to that, has it? Mystical experience and asceticism. The fornicator’s hatred of life in a new form.

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[. . .] But I don’t want to be three-quarters dead. I prefer to be alive, entirely alive. It’s time there was a revolt in favour of life and wholeness.’ (pp. 154–5)

Throughout Point Counter Point there are many examples of behaviour that embodies the distortions of modernity Rampion so energetically condemns. Lucy Tantamount, for example, is an enthusiastic partygoer, ‘the more the merrier was her principle; or if “merrier” were too strong a word, at least the noisier and more tumultuously distracting’ (p. 159). This urgent need for distraction drives her repeated sexual encounters, where she seeks to seduce only then rapidly to reject a whole series of lovers: ‘There was nothing of the victim about Lucy; not much even, he had often reflected, of the ordinary woman. She could pursue her pleasures as a man pursues his, remorselessly, single-mindedly, without allowing her thoughts and feelings to be in the least involved’ (p. 199). The need to conquer and reject a series of sexual partners becomes Lucy’s way of not feeling, of distracting herself from anything other than physical sensations that are momentarily pleasurable. The novel contains many other examples of sexual behaviours that are represented as unhealthy, from obsession to frigidity to infantilism. Maurice Spandrell, for example, displays both obsession and infantilism in his energetic pursuit of vice. He displays a desperate need for sexual conquests, despite his basic distaste for sex, as a way to fill the void in his life that seems to have begun at the point that his widowed mother remarried. Spandrell says of sex that ‘I found it disappointing – but attractive all the same. The heart’s a curious sort of manure heap; dung calls to dung’ (p. 373), a sentiment that is both caustically understood and explicitly challenged by Mark Rampion: ‘that’s the trouble with you, Spandrell. You like stewing in your disgusting suppurating juice, you don’t want to be made healthy’ (p. 124). Rampion’s language of disgust and suppuration here seems to mirror the very emotions by which Spandrell finds himself paralysed, underlining the fact that while Huxley is adept at laying out symptoms of the disease of modern sexuality as he perceives it, he cannot find a narrative space outside the framework of modernity from which to offer another sustainable vision. The most compelling and complex writing about Maurice Spandrell in the novel is found in the passages where his childhood is remembered: He went on sipping, meditatively, remembering and analysing those quite incredible felicities of his boyhood. [. . .] He had gone ahead. At the outskirts of the wood he halted to wait for his mother. Looking back, he watched her coming through the woods. A strong, tall figure, still young and agile [. . .] she was the most beautiful and at the same time the most homely and comforting and familiar of things. (pp. 232–3)

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This grasping after the apparent security of the ‘homely and comforting’, triggered by a rather disturbing memory of the momentary loss and eroticised recovery of his mother, resonates interestingly with another text by Freud. His 1919 essay on ‘The Uncanny’ opens with a philosophical and etymological exploration of the significance of the ‘heimlich’ (or homely) and its semantic relations to the word ‘unheimlich’ (or uncanny). Freud concludes that the root word, ‘heimlich’, ‘is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed’.31 This kind of dialectic movement between the familiar and the hidden, which seems to be at the core of Spandrell’s intense, moving and yet disturbing childhood memory, is for Freud the driving energy behind the experience of the uncanny. The uncanny is the psychological state generated by experiences of liminality and repetition, exemplified for Freud in the literary figure of the double, or in the encounter with technological innovations such as automata. The uncanny here becomes an affective state with a peculiarly modern character, with particular significance for the experience of its parties. The dialectic between ‘home’ and ‘not-home’, the experience of disturbing and unsettling repetitions, and the recurrence of the familiar that had been repressed are all part of the uncanny experience of the modernist party: ‘Bidlake turned and saw Mrs Betterton [. . .] Bidlake had to pretend he was pleased to see her after all these years. It was extraordinary, he reflected as he took her hand, how completely he had succeeded in avoiding her’ (Point Counter Point, p. 60). The return of the repressed indeed. Spandrell’s uncanny memories recur later in the novel, becoming associated with his teenage reading of pornography focused on young girls – ‘what shame he had felt, and what remorse!’ (p. 371) – and his attempt to ward off these feelings of desire and shame by thinking about his mother, and indeed praying to her to help him resist temptation. This subtle and painful psychological battle with himself is cut short by his mother’s remarriage: she is no longer available to him and he is left damaged and disgusted with himself and the world. The uncanny gives way to the obsessive and the destructive as the defining qualities of his psychological and sexual being. Mark Rampion makes it clear that such a psychological state can ultimately lead to nothing other than death. Rampion makes the metaphorical statement ‘He refuses to be a man. Not a man – either a demon or a dead angel. Now he’s dead’ (p. 567) just moments before Spandrell does in fact suffer a sudden and violent death. Spandrell’s death does at least offer some kind of dramatic conclusion

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to the destructive paralysis of his character. Huxley creates a much more sobering end both for the novel as a whole and for the sexual passion of Denis Burlap, editor of The Literary World. Burlap is represented as believing in abstractions, and as absorbed in a rather solipsistic attempt to give expression to ‘the necessity of believing in Life’ (p. 206). Such striving for abstraction and the infinite is not kindly treated by Huxley in his novels of this period. Burlap’s intimate relationship with Beatrice Gilray is unconsummated for much of the novel, and when they do make love it is ‘as it were dis-embodiedly’, since ‘to make love as if from the Great Beyond – that was Burlap’s talent’ (p. 538). The novel ends with a distinctly infantile erotic moment between them: That night he and Beatrice pretended to be two little children and had their bath together. Two little children sitting at opposite ends of the big oldfashioned bath. And what a romp they had! The bathroom was drenched with their splashings. Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. (p. 569)

Huxley’s choice to end the novel with such an ironic Kingdom of Heaven gave no comfort to D. H. Lawrence. On reading Point Counter Point soon after its publication in 1928 Lawrence said that it ‘made him ill – not for the caricature of himself and Frieda as Mark and Mary Rampion – but for its brittle sex, rape and murder’.32 Lawrence’s point here is that Huxley exemplifies the power of the modern world to corrupt sexual desire all too well, and his novels thus risk becoming a symptom rather than a critique of modernity, embodying as they do the very brittleness and alienation Lawrence sees as so characteristically modern. Huxley reflected in 1922 that ‘we live today in a world that is socially and morally wrecked. Between them, the war and the new psychology have smashed most of the institutions, traditions, creeds and spiritual values that supported us in the past’,33 and the wreckage is clearly perceptible in Huxley’s parties, where ‘people want to drown their realization of the difficulties of living properly in this grotesque contemporary world . . . try to forget themselves in fornication, dancing, movies’ (Point Counter Point, p. 419). Brave New World continues Huxley’s critique of the social and psychological impacts of modernity, suggesting that it is in the experience of desire and the nature of pleasure that these will be most profoundly experienced. As Huxley expressed this a number of years after publishing the novel, ‘within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons’.34 Brave New World presents a society in which individuals are spared (or

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denied) the complexities of human sexual relationships and the responsibilities of freedom through the imposition of conditioning and narcotic regimes that require regimented forms of sexual and social behaviour. In this brave new world, ‘home’ has been dismantled as a social and affective space, because it has come to be seen as a place of psychological oppression and perversion: ‘Our Freud had been the first to reveal the appalling dangers of family life’ (p. 33). The novel’s world of frequent and organised sexual coupling and the systematic consumption of narcotics relies substantially on parties, where the values and rules of the society are enacted and reinforced. Once every two weeks, all citizens are required to attend a ‘Solidarity Service’, where ‘synthetic music’ and compulsory consumption of the narcotic ‘soma’ lead on to a collective singing of a ‘Solidarity Hymn’: ‘Ford, we are twelve; oh make us one / Like drops within the Social River’ (p. 70). The point is clearly made here that Fordism, as an economic and social system of mass production developed in the early twentieth century, underpins the development of these modern forms of power that stress conformity and require intoxication to make them bearable.35 Fordism as a social system is explicitly linked in Brave New World to anxieties about the messiness and unpredictability of human sexuality, anxieties associated explicitly with the legacy of Freud: ‘Our Ford – or our Freud, as, for some inscrutable reason, he chose to call himself whenever he spoke of psychological matters’ (p. 33). Freud and Ford are both represented as agents of modernity, contributing to the dehumanisation of the individual by seeking to remove the unpredictable and the inefficient from their lives. The Solidarity Service moves from singing to increasingly frenetic dancing and culminates in the ritual performance of the ‘Orgy Porgy’ song: Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun Kiss the girls and make them One. Boys at one with girls at peace; Orgy-porgy gives release. (p. 73)

Frequent and impersonal sexual coupling is apparently undertaken as a tribute to Ford, who is represented as an enabler of conformity and social stability, and it offers both ‘fun’ and a kind of peace: ‘ “Yes, everybody’s happy now,” echoed Lenina. They had heard the words repeated a hundred and fifty times every night for twelve years’ (p. 65). The compulsion to repeat has here become socialised and deployed on an industrial scale. The name of ‘Lenina’ is, of course, not innocent in this

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context: Huxley suggests at various stages in the novel some possible parallels between the ambitions and techniques of the Soviet Union and the radical aspirations of the ideology of his brave new world, expressed so systematically by Mustapha Mond with his confident belief that ‘our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness’ (p. 207). Choosing machinery, medicine and happiness leads to a regimentation of human behaviour and relationships, and renders them both brittle and synthetic. Parties in this world are simulacra of the parties represented in Huxley’s earlier novels, but even the food and drink are synthetic: ‘he moved among his guests [. . .] begging them to sit down and take a carotene sandwich, a slice of vitamin A pâté, a glass of champagne surrogate’ (p. 152). There is a grotesque quality to this synthetic party, rendered more acute by the humiliation of its host when his key guest fails to turn up, leaving him ‘pale, distraught, abject and agitated’ (p. 152). This capacity of parties to humiliate and to distress is repeatedly acknowledged by a range of characters in Huxley’s novels. For example, Henry Wimbush, in Crome Yellow, says that ‘I shall be glad [. . .] when this function comes at last to an end [. . .] the spectacle of numbers of my fellow-creatures in a state of agitation moves in me a certain weariness’ (p. 157), while Denis Burlap announces his desire to leave a party early in Point Counter Point thus: ‘ “It’s the crowd,” he explained. “After a time, I get into a panic. I feel they’re crushing my soul to death. I should begin to scream if I stayed.” He took his leave’ (p. 82). Parties here seem to generate exhaustion, panic and a visceral urge to scream. They have become a coercive social ritual that threatens to crush the ‘soul to death’. A similar sense of the psychological dangers of enforced sociability can be found also in Lawrence’s writings. For example, in The Rainbow (1915), Will Brangwen is represented as traumatised by the potential impact of social rituals on himself and his idea of marriage: ‘She was going to give a tea party. It made him frightened and furious and miserable. He was afraid that all would be lost that he had so newly come into.’36 The party for Lawrence, as for Huxley, has become a place where the alienation of the individual from the social is experienced most acutely and the very fabric of the party is thus transformed into a kind of threat. Walter Bidlake captures this perception in the following passage from Point Counter Point: A jungle of innumerable trees and dangling creepers – it was in this form that parties always presented themselves to Walter Bidlake’s imagination. A jungle of noise; and he was lost in the jungle, he was trying to clear a path for himself through its tangled luxuriance.

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[. . .] And all those voices (what were they saying? ‘. . . made an excellent speech. . .’; ‘. . . no idea how comfortable those rubber reducing belts are till you’ve tried them . . .’; ‘. . . such a bore . . .’; ‘. . . eloped with the chauffeur . . .’), all those voices [. . .] Oh, loud, stupid vulgar and fatuous. (pp. 65–6)

Lost, overwhelmed by quotations that are stupid and fatuous: Bidlake’s imagining of this party coincides very precisely with Huxley’s overall vision of modernity and its highly compromised pleasures. The party in Huxley’s novels provides, as we have seen, a privileged narrative space for the exploration of key aspects of modernity as perceived by him in the 1920s and 1930s. In this chapter I have analysed the fictional treatment within three novels of a series of social and aesthetic questions that are to some extent peculiar to Huxley, yet which also resonate with a much broader series of cultural engagements with the possibilities of pleasure in a modern world profoundly marked by the experience of the First World War. Huxley’s parties are marked by the compulsion to repeat, as texts circulate and recirculate through quotation and allusion, sexual energies encounter various forms of paralysis and obsessive return, and the repetitions and rituals that enable and constrain social relations achieve particularly visible and significant expression. Parties in this version of the modern world are both profoundly unsatisfactory and completely unavoidable, expressing as they do both the contradictions and the seductions of modernity. As Walter Bidlake, speaking for many of Huxley’s characters, finally observes: ‘There was a part of his mind that [. . .] wanted him to give up the party and stay at home. But the other part was stronger’ (p. 6).

Notes 1. Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (1928) (London: Vintage Books, 2004), p. 62. Hereafter page numbers are given in the text. 2. Aldous Huxley, ‘Pleasures’ (1923), in Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (eds), Aldous Huxley: Complete Essays. Volume I, 1920–1925 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), pp. 354–7: p. 355. 3. Ibid., pp. 355, 356. 4. For interesting mappings of the current critical significance of ‘modernism’, see: Geoff Gilbert, Before Modernism Was (London: Palgrave, 2004); Tim Armstrong, Modernism: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005). 5. Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920), in James Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume XVIII (1920–1922) (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), pp. 7–64.

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6. Ibid., pp. 4, 7. 7. Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual (London: Abacus, 2003), p. 435. 8. Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, p. 22. 9. Aldous Huxley, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 21 June 1917, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, University of Texas at Austin. 10. Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow (1921) (London: Vintage, 2004), p. 134. Hereafter page numbers are given in the text. 11. See Miranda Seymour, Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale (London: Faber, 2008). 12. For discussion of some of the discomfort generated by these echoes of contemporary voices, see Sean Latham, The Art of Scandal: Modernism, Libel Law and the Roman à Clef (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 13. Leonard Diepeveen, Changing Voices: The Modern Quoting Poem (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), p. viii (emphasis original). 14. Edgell Rickword, ‘A Fragmentary Poem’, Times Literary Supplement no. 1131 (20 September 1923), p. 616. 15. Edmund Wilson, Jr, ‘The Poetry of Drouth’, The Dial 73 (December 1922), pp. 611–16: p. 613. 16. T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), in Frank Kermode (ed.), Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1975), pp. 37–44: p. 38. 17. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921), in Kermode (ed.), Selected Prose, pp. 59–67: p. 65. 18. Hugh Kenner, ‘Joyce’s Ulysses: Homer and Hamlet’, Essays in Criticism 2 (1952), pp. 85–104: p. 93. 19. William Peery, ‘The Hamlet of Stephen Dedalus’, University of Texas Studies in English 31 (1952), pp. 109–19: p. 109. 20. Wikipedia does provide an account of the quotations from Shakespeare that can be found in Brave New World, which apparently number fortyfive. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_quotes_from_Shakespeare_ in_Brave_New_World, accessed 15 July 2012. 21. Sigmund Freud, ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’ (1929), in James Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume XXI (1927–1931) (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), pp. 59–148: p. 75. 22. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932) (London: Vintage, 2007), p. 66. Hereafter page numbers are given in the text. 23. Virginia Nicholson, Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900– 1939 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003). 24. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’, ll. 235–8, in The Waste Land and Other Poems (London: Faber, 2002). 25. Margaret Moran, ‘Bertrand Russell as Scogan in Crome Yellow’, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 12:3 (1984), pp. 120–7. 26. Havelock Ellis published a series of influential studies of human sexuality between the 1890s and the 1930s. 27. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Volume I (1976), trans. Robert Hurley (London: Vintage Books, 1990). 28. Ibid., p. 35.

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29. D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1922), p. 284. 30. Aldous Huxley, Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. Grover Smith (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969), p. 340. 31. Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny” ’ (1919), in James Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume XVII (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), pp. 217–56: p. 223. 32. Brenda Maddox, The Married Man: A Life of D. H. Lawrence (London: Sinclair Stevenson, 1994), p. 466. 33. Huxley, Complete Essays, p. 33. Emphasis original. 34. Aldous Huxley, Letter to George Orwell, 21 October 1949, in Letters, p. 605. 35. For an interesting theoretical account of the psychological impacts of Fordism, see Bernard Doray, From Taylorism to Fordism: A Rational Madness (London: Free Association Books, 1988). 36. D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (1915) (London: Vintage Classics, 2011), p. 139.

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Index

Index

Abercrombie, Lascelles, 196 Aiken, Conrad, 55, 56 alcohol, 1, 9, 13, 14, 74, 75, 82, 195, 199; see also drunkenness Aldington, Richard, 9, 10, 56 Arensberg, Walter and Louise, 10 Aristotle, 38–9, 43n Arnold, Matthew, 45 Augustine, 38–9, 43n Bachelard, Gaston, 137–8, 142 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 14–15, 16, 76–7, 105 ballet, 3, 181 Baraka, Amiri, 165, 176n Barney, Natalie, 8, 127, 129–35, 137, 138, 142, 143, 149 Aventures de l’esprit, 129–30, 133 Barthes, Roland, 64, 72, 77 Baudelaire, Charles, 187 Beach, Sylvia, 8, 127, 132, 135–43 Bede, the Venerable, 14–15 Bell, Clive, 56 Bell, Vanessa, 95, 101 Bennett, Arnold, 9 Bergson, Henri, 45, 53 Berlin, Irving, 203 Berners, Lord, 158 Bevan, Robert, 191 Black Arts Movement, 164, 173–4 Bloomsbury Group, 10, 80 Bonner, Marita, The Purple Flower, 174–5 Bottome, Phyllis, 9 Bourdieu, Pierre, 8, 10, 127–8, 130, 143 Bradley, F. H., 12, 45, 52–3, 54, 61n Brett, Dorothy, 82, 212 Brooke, Rupert, 10, 80 Brooks, Romaine, 129, 133 Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman), 136–7, 139 Buchan, John, The Three Hostages, 203 Butts, Mary, 5, 13, 19

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Cabaret Theatre Club, 16–17, 193–201, 204, 205, 206 Carrington, Dora, 81 Carroll, Lewis, 18, 57 Chambers, Jessie, 9, 190n Chaplin, Charlie, 155, 156, 158, 162n charades, 82, 190n Colefax, Sybil, 107 Coleman, Anita Scott, ‘Cross Crossings Cautiously’, 172 Conrad, Joseph, 3, 11, 24–44, 196 novels Almayer’s Folly, 34 An Outcast of the Islands, 34 Chance, 11, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31–4, 41–2n, 42n Heart of Darkness, 36, 41n Lord Jim, 25, 26, 28, 30, 36 Nostromo, 25 One Day More, 196 Suspense, 26, 27 The Arrow of Gold, 26, 27, 34 The Rover, 27 The Secret Agent, 25 Under Western Eyes, 11, 24, 27, 28–31, 40 Victory, 25 short stories ‘Amy Foster’, 33, 42n ‘A Smile of Fortune’, 41n ‘Karain: A Memory’, 41n ‘The Planter of Malata’, 11, 26, 34–40, 42–3n ‘The Warrior’s Soul’, 25, 34 conversation, 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 15, 31, 33, 34, 48, 49, 55, 96, 99–106, 108, 110n, 159, 160, 162n, 183, 184, 189, 214; see also small-talk costume, 5, 86, 181 Cournos, John, 9, 10 Cubism, 199 Cunard, Emerald, 10 Cunard, Nancy, 195

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Index dance, 1, 2, 3, 7, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 20n, 55, 57, 62n, 65, 66, 75, 76, 84, 90, 98, 100, 105, 106, 108, 164, 165, 166–8, 170–1, 175, 181, 186, 190n, 196, 202–3; see also ballet; eurhythmics; parties: dance-parties d’Annunzio, Gabriele, 133 death, 2, 12, 14, 15, 16, 40, 64, 65, 69, 70, 73, 76, 77, 91, 92, 104, 187, 188, 189, 204, 221 death drive, 2, 12, 16, 77, 211; see also Freud, Sigmund Demuth, Charles, 148 Diaghilev, Sergei, 9 Dismorr, Jessica, 85 Dodge, Mabel, 10, 161 Doolittle, Hilda see H. D. Douglas, Aaron, 167–8, 176n Draper, Muriel, 164 Dreyfus Affair, 120–1 Driberg, Tom, 9 drugs see narcotics drunkenness, 12, 56, 73, 76, 169; see also alcohol Dukes, Ashley, 192 Eastman, Max, 10 Eliot, T. S., 9, 65, 139, 209, 213, 218 poetry ‘Hysteria’, 46, 57 Inventions of the March Hare, 57 ‘La Figlia Che Piange’, 46 ‘Mr. Apollinax’, 57, 58 ‘Portrait of a Lady’, 46, 55, 57 Prufrock and Other Observations, 46, 57 ‘Prufrock’s Pervigilium’, 49, 55 ‘The Hollow Men’, 171 ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, 5, 11–12, 45–63, 79–80 The Waste Land, 22n, 54, 213, 218 prose ‘A Prediction in Regard to Three English Authors’, 59 Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, 53–4 ‘The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual’, 58 ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, 54, 213 ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, 54, 213 Eliot, Vivienne, 56 Ellerman, Annie Winifred see Bryher Ellis, Havelock, 218, 226n Epstein, Jacob, 9, 192, 194, 195, 200 eurhythmics, 186 everyday, the, 17, 18, 140, 141, 148, 149–50, 153, 155, 160, 166, 193, 195, 197 Expressionism, 15, 180, 184, 199

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First World War, 2, 15, 16, 71, 123, 192, 193, 200, 204, 206, 211, 213, 225 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 16, 19, 126 The Beautiful and Damned, 3, 14 The Great Gatsby, 5, 22n, 127 Flanner, Janet, 137 Fletcher, John Gould, 9 Flint, F. S., 10 food, 1, 4, 12, 14, 17, 64, 75, 84, 86, 152, 195, 200, 224 Ford, Ford Madox, 3, 9, 10, 16, 17, 18, 56, 191–209 memoir It Was The Nightingale, 201, 206 Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, 205 Return to Yesterday, 192, 195, 201, 202, 206–7 Thus To Revisit, 201, 205, 206 novels No Enemy, 199–200, 203, 205 Some Do Not, 5, 22n The Good Soldier, 205 The Marsden Case, 16–17, 193–4, 200–7 Fordism, 223, 227n Forster, E. M., 9 Foucault, Michel, 219 Frazer, Sir James, 59 Freud, Sigmund, 2, 5, 15, 16, 45, 73, 77, 210, 211, 221, 223 ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, 211 ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, 216 ‘The Uncanny’, 221 see also death drive Freund, Gisèle, 139 Fry, Roger, 13 Futurism, 192 Garsington Manor, 10, 56, 79, 81, 178, 184, 190n, 191n, 212, 213; see also Morrell, Lady Ottoline Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, 9, 192, 195 Gertler, Mark, 82, 212 Gibb, Harry Phelan, 147, 161n, 162n Gide, André, 143 Gill, Eric, 194 Ginner, Charles, 194 Goldring, Douglas, 13, 16, 206 Gore, Spencer, 194 Grand, Sarah, 33 Grant, Duncan, 3 Gris, Juan, 148 Habermas, Jürgen, 1, 11, 45, 47–53, 55, 59, 61n Hall, Radclyffe, The Well of Loneliness, 132–3 Hammett, Dashiell, 155, 156, 159 Hamnett, Nina, 195, 199

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Hardy, Thomas, 33 H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), 9, 56 Hemingway, Ernest, 148 Fiesta/The Sun Also Rises, 5 homosexuality (female) see lesbianism homosexuality (male), 117–19, 120–1, 124–5, 128–9, 131, 133, 158 hospitality, 8, 16, 41n, 65–9, 70, 183, 200 Hueffer, Ford Madox see Ford, Ford Madox Hughes, Langston, 167, 175 ‘Rejuvenation Through Joy’, 166–7 Hulme, T. E., 10, 192 Hunt, Violet, 9, 194 Hurston, Zora Neale, 170–2 Characteristics of Negro Expression, 171–2, 175 Lenox Avenue, 171 Mr. Frog, 170–1 Hutchinson, Mary, 56 Huxley, Aldous, 81, 209–27 Antic Hay, 203 Brave New World, 7, 214, 216–17, 222–4 Crome Yellow, 7, 212, 213, 214–15, 218, 224 Point Counter Point, 7, 211, 215–16, 217, 219–22, 224–5 Imagism, 9 Impressionism, 205 intimacy, 8, 78, 103, 107, 111n, 117, 119, 121, 131, 142, 147, 149, 151, 157, 161, 165, 184, 186, 189, 222 Jacob, Max, 133 James, Henry, 56 The Bostonians, 55 The Portrait of a Lady, 58 jazz, 165, 166, 173, 197, 202–4, 208n Jepson, Edgar, 194–5, 200 John, Augustus, 9 Johnson, Helene, ‘Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem’, 170 Johnson, James Weldon, 164 Joyce, James, 9, 15–16, 64–78, 137, 138, 210 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 15, 65, 70 Dubliners, 66, 70 Exiles, 66 Finnegans Wake, 15–16, 65, 72–7 ‘The Dead’, 14, 15, 65, 66–70 Ulysses, 15, 16, 64–5, 70, 73, 138, 214 Kant, Immanuel, 1–2, 3, 8, 9, 12, 19 Keats, John, 13 Keynes, John Maynard, 3, 56, 96

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Koteliansky, Samuel Solomonovich, 82, 93n La Maison des Amis des Livres see Monnier, Adrienne Larsen, Nella, 175 Passing, 165 Quicksand, 16, 164, 166, 172 Lasson, Caroline “Bokken”, 196 Lawrence, D. H., 9, 210, 212, 219, 222, 224 The Rainbow, 187, 224 Women in Love, 10, 15, 177–91 Lefebvre, Henri, 18, 131, 140–1 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 16, 70–2, 73, 223–4 lesbianism, 8, 32, 120–1, 127–46, 149 Lewis, Wyndham, 9, 10, 56, 72, 192, 193, 194–5, 197, 198, 199, 201, 202–3, 209n BLAST, 192, 194, 195, 202 Rude Assignment, 199, 202, 203 Tarr, 202–3 The Apes of God, 202 see also Vorticism Lloyd George, David, 206 London, 9, 56, 65, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 96, 101, 108, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 200, 201, 202, 203, 206, 207 Loos, Anita, 155, 156, 159, 162n Lopokova, Lydia, 3 Lowell, Amy, 9 ‘The Dinner Party’, 9 Loy, Mina, 133 McKay, Claude, ‘Negro Dancers’, 170 Mansfield, Katherine, 9, 11, 14, 79–94, 195, 196 ‘Bliss’, 11, 80, 86, 87–9 ‘Frau Brechenmacher Attends A Wedding’, 11, 83–4, 87 ‘Her First Ball’, 11, 79, 90 ‘Sun and Moon’, 11, 79, 86–7 ‘Sunday Lunch’, 79, 84, 85, 87 ‘The Garden Party’, 11, 14, 79, 90–3 March, Joseph Moncure, ‘The Wild Party’, 13–14 Marinetti, Filippo, 192, 196 Mickiewicz, Adam, 41 Monnier, Adrienne, 8, 128, 135–43 Moore, G. E., 10 Morrell, Lady Ottoline, 9, 56, 80, 178, 183–4, 190n, 212; see also Garsington Manor Murry, John Middleton, 9, 80, 81, 82, 85, 86, 93 music, 15, 46, 49, 68, 75, 80, 81, 101, 123, 165, 166, 167, 173, 176n, 181, 186, 195, 196, 197, 203, 215, 217, 223; see also jazz

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Index narcotics, 7, 13, 216, 223 networking, 6, 8–9, 10, 17, 127–8, 138, 139, 146n, 195 Nevinson, Christopher, 193 New Formalism, 40–1 New York, 10, 147, 173 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 2, 15 Orage, A. R., 195 Paris, 9, 10, 56, 65, 66, 76, 116, 117, 122, 124, 127–46, 147, 148, 173, 194, 195, 202 parties after-parties, 10, 16, 123, 164–77 as performances, 5–6, 11–12, 68, 151, 153, 166, 172–3, 181, 193, 223; see also theatricality as topoi, 17 as works of art, 1, 3–6, 106–8 balls, 57, 90, 123 birthday-parties, 3, 56, 65, 76, 153, 177 breakfast-parties, 5, 41n, 180, 182 Christmas parties, 15, 65, 68, 70, 81 cocktail parties, 16, 97, 147 dance-parties, 65, 105, 168; see also dance dinner-parties, 1–2, 4, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 26, 28, 36–40, 65, 66–70, 87–9, 107, 147, 152, 166, 211 drinks-parties, 2–3, 12, 17, 211 evening parties see parties: soirées garden-parties, 6, 11, 14, 63n, 79, 90–3 house-parties, 2, 10–11, 56, 81, 164, 211, 212 lunch-parties, 56, 97 matinées, 123 picnics, 15, 64–5, 97, 185–6 political parties, 16, 25, 66, 68, 70–3, 206 rent-parties, 164–5, 173 soirées, 2, 7, 46, 49, 115, 119–23, 148 tea-parties, 4, 11–12, 18, 28, 29–32, 33, 34, 45–63 wakes, 15, 16, 65, 73–7 wedding-parties, 11, 76, 83–4, 170–1, 179 party-clothes see costume party-games, 74, 75, 77; see also charades party-guests, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 17, 19, 36, 37, 38, 45, 57, 58, 79, 83–5, 86, 87, 88, 96, 99, 100, 103, 104, 106, 108, 111n, 117, 151, 160, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 185, 212, 216, 224 party-hosts, 1, 2, 3–5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 26, 31, 33, 34, 37, 38, 40, 41n, 56, 69, 79, 82, 84, 95, 96, 106–8, 111n, 112, 113, 117, 165, 178, 185, 186, 195, 202, 206, 224

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party-space see space/place Pater, Walter, 15, 16, 18 Petronius, The Satyricon, 5, 12–13, 14, 17, 19, 22n Picasso, Pablo, 9, 147, 159, 168 Plato, 43n Symposium, 2–3, 5, 12, 17 Pound, Ezra, 9, 10, 52, 56, 65, 72, 138, 171, 192, 193, 195, 196 Proust, Marcel, 7, 9, 111–26, 133 Finding Time Again, 7, 123–5 In Search of Lost Time, 7, 111–26 In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, 121 Sodom and Gomorrah, 7, 115, 118, 119–23, 126n The Guermantes Way, 7, 115–19 The Way By Swann’s, 113, 121, 126n public/private, 1, 8, 17, 19n, 47–9, 69, 131, 141, 148, 149, 150, 151, 156, 157, 160, 161, 165, 173, 178, 184, 193 public sphere, 11, 47–8, 49, 52, 59; see also Habermas, Jürgen Ransome, Arthur, Bohemia in London, 3–4 Raverat, Jacques, 13, 82 Read, Herbert, ‘The Garden Party’, 6 restaurants, 9, 10, 56, 195 Rhythm, 79, 84, 85 Richardson, Mary, 201 Rickword, Edgell, 213 ‘Strange Party’, 13 Ricoeur, Paul, 38–40, 43n Romains, Jules, 135 Royce, Josiah, 12, 45, 52–3, 58, 59, 61n Russell, Bertrand, 9, 56, 58, 63n, 212, 218 Sackville-West, Vita, 106 Sassoon, Siegfried, 9 Schiff, Sydney and Violet, 9 self, the, 2, 4, 5, 8, 11, 16, 32, 35, 36, 45, 50–2, 53, 54, 79, 80, 93, 99, 106, 135, 148, 151, 155–6, 166, 168, 181, 183, 186, 189, 215, 216 sexual intercourse, 7, 13, 14, 64, 65, 74, 216, 218–20, 222, 223 sexuality, 45, 46, 80, 88, 117, 119, 127, 218–20, 223, 226n; see also homosexuality (male); lesbianism Shakespear, Olivia, 10 Shakespeare, William, 3, 96, 214, 215, 216, 217, 226n Shakespeare and Company see Beach, Sylvia shyness, 8, 55, 57 Sinclair, May, 9 Sitwell, Edith, 9, 97, 148 Sitwell, Osbert, 10, 195

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Sitwell, Sacheverell, 10 small-talk, 8, 46, 153; see also conversation space/place, 7, 18–19, 49, 101, 103, 104–5, 106, 121, 122, 127–46, 149, 150, 151, 154, 160, 161, 165, 167, 169, 172, 173, 174, 175, 189, 193, 195, 200, 201, 204, 206, 211, 223, 225 Staël, Madame de, 29, 31, 41n Stein, Gertrude, 4, 8, 9, 133, 135, 136, 137, 147–63, 164 plays A Play Called Not and Now, 8, 147, 148, 155–61 Four Saints in Three Acts, 148, 151, 161n What Happened. A Play in Five Acts, 8, 147, 148, 152–5, 156, 160, 161, 163n poetry ‘Rich and Poor in English’, 137 prose Everybody’s Autobiography, 147, 148, 150, 157, 158, 159 ‘Plays’, 150, 152 Tender Buttons, 149 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 8, 147, 148, 149 The Making of Americans, 148 Steinbeck, John, Cannery Row, 112–13 Stettheimer, Florine and Ettie, 10 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 17 Stoppard, Tom, Travesties, 71–2 Strachey, Lytton, 81, 82 Stravinsky, Igor, 9 Strindberg, Frida (née Uhl), 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 199, 200, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 209n Suffragism, 34, 41n Symons, Arthur, 195 Taylor, Prentiss, 175 tea-shops, 9, 19 Tellegen, Lou, 196 theatricality, 3–4, 15, 147, 155, 178, 181, 217; see also parties: as performances Trilling, Lionel, 12 Trimalchio see Petronius: The Satyricon Toklas, Alice B., 8, 135, 136, 137, 147, 149 The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, 4 What Is Remembered, 162n

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Toomer, Jean, Cane, 169–70 Twyden, Lady Duff, 5 Unanimism, 135 Upward, Allen, 9 Valencia, Carmen Tortola, 196 Vechten, Carl van, 10 Verhaeren, Emile, 196 Vienna, 195, 197 violence, 12, 13, 14, 15, 75, 118, 125, 180, 182, 184, 186, 201 Vorticism, 9, 193, 199, 201, 205 waste, 7, 15, 16, 18 Weaver, Harriet Shaw, 56, 76, 77, 139 Wells, H. G., 34 West, Rebecca, 9, 195 Wickham, Anna, 133 Wilde, Oscar, 72, 133, 195 Williams, William Carlos, 10 women, 11, 25, 27–8, 29, 30, 31–4, 46, 49–50, 69, 83, 84, 85, 100, 101, 107, 134, 182 Woolf, Leonard, 95–6, 97, 98, 102 Woolf, Virginia, 3, 4, 7, 9, 13, 17, 56, 81, 82, 89, 91, 95–111 essays ‘22 Hyde Park Gate’, 95 ‘Am I A Snob?’, 106–7 ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, 107, 111n novels Jacob’s Room, 98, 102, 103, 105, 110n Mrs Dalloway, 4, 6, 14, 97–8, 99, 104, 105, 107–8, 127 Night and Day, 97 The Voyage Out, 7 The Waves, 97, 107 The Years, 7, 96–7, 98, 99–101, 103, 106 To The Lighthouse, 4–5, 97, 111n short stories ‘Phyllis and Rosamond’, 101–2, 103 ‘The Evening Party’, 102–4, 105 ‘The Man Who Loved His Kind’, 106 ‘The New Dress’, 5, 99, 106 Yeats, W. B., 10

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