All posts tagged 1938

Murphy by Samuel Beckett (1938)

‘Unless you want me to call a policewoman,’ said Murphy, ‘cease your clumsy genustuprations.’
(Murphy page 56)

This is Beckett’s first published novel. I expected it to be an improvement on his first published book, the collection of linked short stories, More Pricks Than Kicks, but the essential feel, the worldview and style are very much the same.

Hard to read

It’s a very difficult book to read. Though only 170 pages long it took three days because I was so reluctant to pick it up and quick to put it down to do almost anything else.

The prose is mannered, stilted and extremely repetitive. Quite quickly I realised that its paragraphs rarely move the story along or analyse character: they almost exclusively consist of repetitions, iterated phrases spinning out a handful of ideas or words, sometimes driving you mad with frustration, irritation and boredom.

Take this passage where the lead figure, Murphy, has moved into a garret which he discovers has no form of heating. ‘No heating!!’ he exclaims to the friend, August Ticklepenny, who has fixed him up with a new job and the garret. ‘Why couldn’t someone just extend the electricity or gas up there to fuel a heater?’

He went on to speak of tubes and wires. Was it not just the beauty of tubes and wires, that they could be extended? Was it not their chief characteristic, the ease with which they could be extended? What was the point of going in for tubes and wires at all, if you did not extend them without compunction whenever necessary? Did they not cry out for extension? Ticklepenny thought he would never stop, saying feverishly the same thing in slightly different ways. (p.103)

Repetition

‘Saying feverishly the same thing in slightly different ways’. Now arguably this was to be Beckett’s central contribution to 20th century literature, Repetition, the depiction of characters absolutely paralysed in their physical activities or thought processes and doomed to endless repetition.

In this respect Beckett is obviously undertaking quite radical experiments with the form of the novel, largely throwing out traditional notions of ‘plot’ or ‘character’ or ‘character development’ in order to focus on ‘saying feverishly the same thing in slightly different ways’ to such an extent as to create a new sort of poetic.

But so even the most trivial aspects of the lead character’s life are described with a pedantic thoroughness which are surely on the obsessive-compulsive spectrum.

  • When he stops in a tea room for a cup of tea, Murphy spends at least a page working through a series of ploys he could use to get the reluctant waitress, Vera, to top up his cup for free.
  • When Murphy takes the six biscuits he bought at the tearooms to Hyde Park, he lays them out on their paper bag on the grass, and then elaborately works through all the possible permutations of eating them in different orders, 120 ways, apparently, though it all depends whether he keeps the ginger biscuit fixed as the first choice, or mixes it in with the rest.
  • When Murphy starts work at the lunatic asylum, we are given a grindingly precise description of the layout of the building in every detail, which lacks any warmth or sympathy, is completely irrelevant to the ‘plot’, but pursues the description with obsessive pendantry.

I am probably using the term incorrectly, but it seems to me the narrative has a kind of autistic quality. It doesn’t bother much to describe other people or relationships between people – the ‘dialogue’ mostly just reveals misunderstanding and the ‘characters’ inability to communicate.

Comic?

Now, from some angles this obsession with the most trivial details could be made to seem comic – that a grown man puts so very much thought into how to arrange his six biscuits sounds, in principle, like it could be handled comically. The trouble is that, in practice, I found it grindingly boring, but more than that, brain-inflamingly frustrating.

For page after page the text maintains its obsessive and repetitive focus on the inner workings of the over-educated, under-motivated slob of an antihero as he shuffles round London, not really trying to get a job and surviving on a pittance while he does the only thing he enjoys, which is pore and pick over his own interminable mental lucubrations at gigantic length.

He distinguished between the actual and the virtual of his mind, not as between form and the formless yearning for form, but as between that of which he had both mental and physical experience and that of which he had mental experience only. Thus the form of the kick was actual; that of caress virtual. The mind felt its actual part to be above and bright, its virtual beneath and fading into dark, without however connecting this with the ethical yoyo. The mental experience was cut off from the physical experience, its criteria were not those of the physical experience, the agreement of part of its content with physical fact did not confer worth on that part. It did not function and could not be disposed according to a principle of worth. It was made up of light fading into dark, of above and beneath, but not of good and bad. It contained forms with parallel in another mode and forms without, but not right forms and wrong forms. It felt no issue between its light and dark, no need for its light to devour its dark. The need was now to be in the light, now in the half light, now in the dark. That was all. (p.70)

1. To be fair, this is not a completely characteristic passage, it comes from the four pages of chapter 6 in which the narrative comes to a dead stop while the narrator undertakes to explain to us the nature of ‘Murphy’s mind’. But the basic ‘ideas’ expressed in it underpin the whole book, and the obsession with the inner workings of Murphy’s self-absorbed consciousness is very much the book’s real subject.

2. Spending this much time on the experience of consciousness reminds us that Murphy was published in the late 1930s, when Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology was one of the dominating intellectual themes on the continent, picked up and refracted through the heavyweight existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger.

The phenomenological approach of examining and describing the inner workings of the mind is important to the writings of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. In fact, Sartre’s first novel, Nausea, was published in this same year as Murphy, 1938, and is also about an aimlessly unhappy man (a post-graduate researcher in Sartre’s case), so obsessed with his own thoughts and feelings that the real world becomes intolerably alien and threatening to him, filling him with the nausea of the book’s title.

The plot

Murphy is a shiftless layabout, a ‘seedy solipsist’ (p.53) (much like Belacqua, the male protagonist of Beckett’s previous (and first) book, More Pricks Than Kicks).

He’s living in London. He’s met a streetwalker named Celia on the corner of Stadium Street and Cremorne Road in Chelsea (which nowadays looks like this). Celia is now haplessly trying to look after weird Murphy. His favourite hobby is tying himself to an armchair in dingy flats (in this he foreshadows the various trapped protagonists of Beckett’s later plays) and rocking rocking rocking back and forth, a process described several times in numbing detail.

As with Belacqua, it struck me that Murphy is a glaring epitome of the clever young would-be writer who is full of fluent sentences and feel for language, but has no real subject to write about. He wanders the streets not really looking for a job and feeling mighty superior about it.

For what was all working for a living but a procuring and a pimping for the money-bags, one’s lecherous tyrants the money-bags, so that they might breed. (p.49)

(This vaunting superiority to the bourgeoisie with their regular jobs and pay packets reminds me of the intellectually superior but wretchedly poor protagonist of George Orwell’s 1936 novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying. A common delusion among young layabouts of all ages, that being poor but ‘free’ is superior to having a job, money and a life.)

Celia reports all this to her paternal grandfather, Mr Willoughby Kelly, who suggests she chucks him.

Meanwhile, in faraway Dublin (288 miles as the crow flies), Professor Neary smashes his head against the statue of Cuchulain inside the General Post Office building because he is in love with Celia, how or why, I never understood. He is rescued by one of his students, Needle Wylie who promises to track her down for him, by employing a private detective, Cooper. They meet the very beautiful Miss Counihan. It emerges that Murphy was till recently a student of Prof Neary’s and made all sorts of promises of love to Miss Counihan before leaving for London, after which no-one has heard from him.

Murphy goes to a tea rooms and spends a lot of time finagling to get a free top-up of tea from the reluctant waitress Vera. This process takes a long time. I could quote the several pages it stretches on for. Everything happens with a teeth-pulling slowness.

He is approached by an impecunious Irish poet, Austin Ticklepenny, who bewails his job at a mental home, the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat. ‘Mental Mercyseat’ made me laugh, though it’s more Irish than English-sounding, and is obviously one of the many aspects of the book which are intended to be funny, like most of the characters’ names.

Murphy escapes from Ticklepenny, having dumped him with paying for the tea and biscuits ha ha! much to the frustration of Vera the waitress, and takes a bus to Hyde Park, where he is debating in what order to eat his biscuits when he is asked by a clairvoyant to mind her dachshund while she feeds the sheep (which apparently lived in Hyde Park back in those days) lettuce which she’s brought for them.

After the immense thoroughness of Murphy’s calculations about the biscuit, the dog eats them while he’s not looking! The sheep refuse the lettuce. Murphy falls asleep.

Murphy awakes in the park. It’s night. When he gets back to the flat he shares with Celia he discovers her spread-eagled, face-down on the bed. Why? Well, first we have to read chapter six describing in great detail the tripartite character of Murphy’s cerebellum and sensorium, and then the narrative moves on to more distractions so that we never, in fact, find out.

The old man in the room above is found having slashed his throat with a razor. Celia negotiates with the hard-bitten old landlady, the virgin Miss Carridge, for her and Murphy to move into the dead man’s smaller room and so pay less rent. With his usual punning obscurity, Murphy says to Celia:

‘A decayed valet severs the connexion and you set up a niobaloo as though he were your fourteen children.’

This is typical of the ‘dialogue’ which is not really intended to be communication between human beings in the way you and I are used to. Instead it is a laborious literary in-joke.

Niobe is a figure from Greek legend whose children were slain by the gods and lay unburied while she wept for them. This figure of weeping Niobe is a commonplace classical reference in Elizabethan literature i.e. Shakespeare. Beckett has made it into a very James Joycean joke/pun by combining the words Niobe and hullabaloo into niobaloo. So this apparently gibberish sentence can be explicated as Murphy criticising Celia for weeping for some dead old servant as extravagantly as Niobe did for her children. ‘Severs the connexion’ being a fancy phrase for ‘dying’ which obviously references the severing of the old man’s artery.

Whether you enjoy this book, and a lot of Beckett in general, will come down to whether you found pleasure in that sentence, whether you were able to decode its literary references, and whether you think it was worth the effort.

I can see what he’s trying to do, I can see how he is making his hero into a kind of linguistic car crash and that he is highlighting the absurdity of all communication, and the absurdity of language as a whole, and the ridiculousness of texts themselves.

I think I understand the intention, and appreciate a lot of his strategies of repetition and numbingly detailed analysis of language and thought. And if you read short passages, it has a gladsome liberating effect. But if you try to read it as a novel i.e. to read extended sections at one go, it becomes very wearing.

Murphy goes off to see about starting the job he had discussed with Ticklepenny at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat (chuckle).

Celia takes the Tube to Hyde Park to see if she can find her wheelchair-bound protector, Mr Kelly, flying his kite, because this is his hobby. Unbeknownst to her, Celia is followed by a man named Cooper who is acting as a private detective for Wylie so as to find Celia so as to reconcile her with his revered Professor Neary.

Maybe I slept through the paragraphs where it was explained but I never did understand why Neary was so besotted with Celia. Anyway, Celia doesn’t find Kelly in the park. Cooper doesn’t speak to Celia, but follows her home to the flat she shares with Murphy in Holloway.

Meanwhile, Murphy is introduced to the head nurse at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat, Mr Thomas (‘Bim’) Clinch who, it turns out, has staffed the place with his family, including his twin brother Mr Timothy (‘Bom’) Clinch and an aged uncle, ‘Bum’ – obviously humorous names. It is obviously intended at some level as a comedy.

Murphy is enraptured by the place and especially the offer of a garret room on the premises, instantly moving into it and pulling up the ladder up to it in order to prevent anyone else ever entering it. Solipsist heaven! He forgets all about Celia.

Chapter 10 is long. The private eye Cooper joins Neary, Wylie and Miss Counihan (who is convinced she is in love with Murphy) to discuss their plans, and then they all proceed to meet Celia in her flat. The dialogue throughout this chapter is, I think, some kind of satire on all the normal dialogue ever written by novelists and playwrights. It applies Beckett’s overlocution and vocabularical exuberance to every single statement… for twenty pages!

‘One of the innumerable small retail redeemers,’ sneered Miss Counihan, ‘lodging her pennyworth of pique in the post-golgothan kitty.’
But for Murphy’s horror of the mental belch, Celia would have recognised this phrase, if she had heard it. (p.144)

If you recall, Wylie has paid Cooper to find Celia so as to bring her together with his infatuated patron, Professor Neary.

But they all behave so incomprehensibly that I just read the words and sentences for their verbal quality, ignoring the dialogue and so-called ‘plot’ because I suspect both are made complex and/or impenetrable, deliberately to frustrate and provoke the ‘conventional’ reader.

I think the characters all agree to spend the night in Celia’s flat while they wait for Murphy to return there.

But Murphy doesn’t return. He does a night shift at the mental home. Some paragraphs describe his closeness to the dwarfish psychotic Mr Endon. On this night shift Mr Endon somehow gets out of his cell and releases some other inmates but any reader hoping for mayhem or some kind of romantic climax is disappointed, for all the inmates are all locked safely back up – though not without a compulsive-obsessive description of the home’s elaborate security systems and the schedule according to which warders are meant to visit each cell throughout the night.

Murphy plays a game of chess with Mr Endon. The game is laid out in standard chess notation in the text so we can follow it. In fact it includes po-faced comments on particular moves, as if it was annotating a fiendishly clever game between grand masters. But in fact, if you play it out, as I did on my own chess set, you quickly realise it’s gibberish, not played with any serious intent.

In fact there’s a useful video on YouTube which works through the entire chess game in Murphy. After just two moves you can see it’s unorthodox and after four or five you realise it’s a nonsense game, a mockery of a game. On the YouTube video you can hear the (Russian?) guy who made it laughing at the ridiculousness of the moves.

For me this epitomises the book, as Beckett may well have intended it to. In every respect – in terms of narrative, plot, style, dialogue, character and setting, Murphy is – deliberately – a travesty of a mockery of a sham.

From small puns to larger pratfalls to the inconsequence of most of the dialogue, to the silliness of the plot, the entire text is a ‘joke’, or a series of interlocking ‘jokes’, clever, witty and, in some passages actually quite funny – but taken as a whole a very heavy and demanding read.

After the night shift ends Murphy heads back to his garret, stripping off his clothes as he walks through the dark grounds, till he’s naked. He lies in the wet grass trying to remember Celia, his mother, his father, anyone, and failing. He goes up to his garret, sits naked in his beloved rocking chair, rocking rocking rocking back and forth, as usual described in autistic detail. I use this word because several friends have autistic sons and this kind of rocking back and forth, sometimes accompanied by moaning, is a big feature of their behaviour as I have personally witnessed it.

Then the gas heater Murphy’s rigged up explodes and kills him. Oh. That was unexpected.

In the next chapter Celia, Miss Conihoun, Neary, Wylie and Cooper are summoned from Celia’s flat by the head of the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat  Dr Angus Killiecrankie, to learn that Murphy is dead.

They are taken to see his scorched corpse in the refrigerator room. They confirm Murphy’s identity, Celia pointing out the birth mark on his thigh, which gives rise to the bad taste joke that, by being important to the identification, it is also a kind death mark. Birth mark, death mark, I see the play on words, indeed the play on ideas. Maybe someone with a different sense of humour from mine would find this very witty.

One by one the various characters drift off, some pairing off on the way.

In the short final chapter Celia takes her grandad to Hyde Park to fly his kite. She is absent for a while during which she has sex with someone for money. She needs money, after all. Old Mr Kelly dozes off and his kite string falls out of his hand, snaps and the kite flies off into the sky, lost forever. He clambers out of his wheelchair and totters after it yelling in despair till Celia catches him up, with help from passersby restores him to the wheelchair, and pushes him home.

The End.

Superelaborate style

There are far fewer really arcane and obscure words in Murphy than in Pricks, which is a shame because I enjoyed looking them up. But Murphy‘s basic approach is still one of exorbitant super-pedantry and arch contrivance for its own sake.

The blue glitter of Mr Kelly’s eyes in the uttermost depths of their orbits became fixed, then veiled by the classic pythonic glaze. He raised his left hand, where Celia’s tears had not yet dried, and seated it pronate on the crown of his skull – that was the position. In vain. He raised his right hand and laid the forefinger along his nose. He then returned both hands to their points of departure with Celia’s on the counterpane, the glitter came back into his eyes and he pronounced:
‘Chuck him.’ (p.17)

I suppose this might be funny if you have the right sense of humour. Sometimes I do. I found some of it funny, the insistence on a madly pedantic precisionism, the more trivial the gesture or thought the more extreme description is devoted to it. Thus the text is worried and nagged by an obsessive attention to the characters’ precise physical positions and movements. Often it is more modern ballet than fiction.

(This obsession with characters’ precise positions and movements would become central to Beckett’s plays of the 1950s and 60s, where every gesture of the stricken protagonists becomes charged with hypertrophic punctilio.)

And intellectual tricksiness. The adjective ‘pythonic’ in the quote above refers to the oracle at Delphi in ancient Greece, where the supernatural pythia supposedly spoke its prophecies through the mouth of a woman put into a demonic trance. So that one phrase ‘classic pythonic’ is enough to indicate – to those in on the joke – that the text is (absurdly) comparing Grandad Kelly to an ancient Greek oracle – an absurdly mock heroic comparison.

This fact goes some way to explaining the glitter of his eyes and his generally unnatural gestures, notably placing his left hand ‘pronate’ on his skull, pronate meaning “to turn into a prone position; to rotate (the hand or forearm) so that the surface of the palm is downward or toward the back”.

And once you’ve grasped this fact you realise that the whole paragraph is, in its arch, contrived way, an elaborate joke. The joke is in the contrast between the classical epitome and its degraded modern-day embodiment. It is in other words, the classic Modernist trope of holding up the classical world as perfect, as a model of dignity and decorum (implicitly in Eliot’s The Waste Land, more overtly in Joyce’s Ulysses) and contrasting it with the sorry sordid shambles of the modern world.

This is why many critical studies of Beckett describe him as the last of the Modernists, a Johnny-come-lately to the game of contrasting the marmoreal perfection of the classics with the squalid spit and sawdust de nos jours.

The same structural disjunction underlies the boom-boom ending when, after a paragraph making this calculated intellectual parallel, which is leading the (informed) reader to expect a declaration of potency and magnificence – all Grandad Kelly comes out with is the bathetically commonplace output, the pub slang expression: ‘Chuck him’.

Bathos refers to rhetorical anticlimax – an abrupt transition from a lofty style or grand topic to a common or vulgar one (Wikipedia)

I happened to ‘get’ this joke because I had the opportunity of a very literary education, so I spotted the python allusion and thus grasped the overall dynamic of the paragraph and the mock comic intention. But I doubt whether anyone who studied more worthwhile subjects than ancient and modern literature would get the reference or realise the humour.

So is it funny? Yes, to the correct audience.

Humourless humour

Is a joke which isn’t really funny still a joke? Does a joke need humour to be a joke? Can you have an utterly humourless joke, which has the structure of a joke, the shape of a joke, a build-up and a pay-off – but none of the warmth and collusion required for humour? These are some of the questions Murphy raised in my mind.

The modern introduction to the edition I read is by a Beckett scholar who talks breezily about Murphy being a great comic novel but, perhaps wisely, doesn’t give any actual examples of its comedy.

Is there comedy in the sustained mock-heroic tone, the use throughout of ridiculously highfalutin’ language to describe what are in fact very humdrum activities?

At this moment Murphy would willingly have waived his expectation of Antepurgatory for five minutes in his chair, renounced the lee of Belacqua’s rock and his embryonal repose, looking down at dawn across the reeds to the trembling of the austral sea and the sun obliquing to the north as it rose, immune from expiation until he should have dreamed it all through again, with the downright dreaming of an infant, from the spermarium to the crematorium. (p.51)

It’s a very distinct and striking style of writing. But is it funny? Is it meant to be?

Neary arrived the following morning, Cooper threw himself on his mercy, abated not one tittle of the truth and was turned off with contumely. (p.77)

For me this is the central question in reading early Beckett: I can see that much of it is intended to be arch, contrived, dry, bookish, intellectual, rarefied, allusive and ultra-clever humour – but I wonder if many other people do, and I wonder whether any of us should give a damn.

This was a joke that did not amuse Celia, at the best of times and places it could not have amused her. That did not matter. So far from being adapted to her, it was not addressed to her. It amused Murphy, that was all that mattered. (p.88)

‘It amused Murphy, that was all that mattered.’

Since Murphy is transparently another avatar of frustrated, impoverished, unpublished, would-be highbrow writer Beckett, maybe we can simply say, ‘It amused Beckett, that was all that mattered’. Beckett and his tiny number of pre-war readers. The introduction is very long on the book’s textual history, and very short on actual analysis, but it does include its sales figure.

1938 – 568 copies
1939 – 23
1940 – 20
1941 – 7

The remaining stock was destroyed in an air raid. In all, Beckett made £20 out of this book – before income tax. Not Harry Potter, is it?

It was only after Waiting For Godot completely transformed his fortunes in 1953, that publishers rereleased Beckett’s early novels and they quickly found a place in a retrospectively-created canon of his works, now used as evidence to interpret the difficult post-war plays, and to argue for his mock heroic, comedic roots.

Leslie Fiedler

Leslie Fiedler (1917 – 2003) was an American literary critic whose writings about American novelists I really enjoyed as a student. About Beckett, and Murphy in particular, he wrote in the New York Times:

Too much of the merely mannered is present, too much evidence of a desire to twit the bourgeoisie, too many asides, too many heavy-handed cryptic remarks, too much clumsy surrealist horseplay.

Which I agree with. But I can also see that amidst the mechanical verbiage of this over-erudite novel is the core Beckett which will emerge after the Second World War; that once he had abandoned the attempt to have realistic characters or plots or dialogue, he would arrive at grim scenarios where human puppets, trapped in repetitive plights, repeat the same meaningless gestures over and again and speak a speech composed of the inane repetition of shreds and tatters of clichéd, stereotyped, worn-out language.

As Fiedler also points out:

But the eerie deadpan humour is already at work: the gravely mathematical working out of all the possibilities of the most trivial situation, the savage eagerness to find in the disgusting occasions for laughs. It is as vaudevillian of the avant-garde that Beckett especially tickles us, converting its most solemn devices into quite serious gags.

‘Serious gags’. Maybe that phrase encapsulates the difficulty I’m having coming to terms with this book.

Astride the grave

Typical of the stretched humour is a paragraph describing how Murphy’s problems go right back to his vagitus. I had to look up ‘vagitus’ to find out that it means ‘a new-born baby’s first cry’ – and then read on to process the extended ‘joke’ that Murphy’s vagitus was not on the international agreed standard of A (on the musical scale) but a woeful double flat of A, thus missing the correct note by two semi-tones.

Never mind, writes the author – ‘His rattle will make amends’ (p.47), obviously meaning his death rattle. Birth-cry, death-cry. Everything comedic is here, a kind of structural symmetry, a neatness of vision and phrasing – everything except the warmth or the unexpected jolt which characterises a good joke.

Instead, this paragraph’s flat, obvious nihilism reminds me of one of the most famous quotes from the 1953 play which made Beckett’s name, Waiting For Godot:

They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.

This kind of self-pitying, maudlin, depressiveness strikes me as very male. Having been present at the birth of both my children I know that no-one gives birth astride the grave, they give birth in a cluttered operating theatre surrounded by surgeons and nurses, in a welter of blood and other substances. And – contrary to Beckett – it is actually quite a happy moment for all concerned.

Believing in Beckett’s words involves a kind of wilful denial of the world as we know it to be. The focus on the grim and pointless is contrived. I.e. it is not necessary. I.e. it is a choice whether to enter his artificial and gloomy worldview or not. Ditto the style.

Irish

About half way through I had a kind of breakthrough. To keep myself going in what seemed a never-ending slog, I read chapter 9 – the long description of Murphy’s arrival at, and work duties in, the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat (I grant you the name is quite funny) – out loud and in an Irish accent.

Suddenly, it all made a lot more sense. Read – perceived and processed – in a received English, BBC accent, lots of the text seems pretentious and flat. You can hear this in the impeccably English pronunciation of actor Ronald Pickup, reading a clip from Murphy on YouTube. The prose falls dead from his lips.

Read, however, in the accent of a Dublin chancer, with a bit of a brogue and touch of the blarney and comic inappropriateness, as of two peasants discussing the finer points of your man St Augustine, I realised that quite a lot of the time the text is winking at you slyly, out of the corner of its eye.

Here is Murphy reflecting on the notion that the mental cases in the sanatorium are in fact correct to despise the worldly chaos of the scientists and psychiatrists. They are in fact happy to be locked up in their little worlds – as indeed Murphy would love to be completely sealed in his, but keeps falling afoul of the horrible quotidien.

(It’s a separate issue that this is a dangerously childish, misinformed and romantically adolescent view of mental illness which isn’t – as I have witnessed it in my own family – much of a seraphic, Buddhist self-containment.)

Anyway, Murphy thinks:

The melancholic’s melancholy, the manic’s fits of fury, the paranoid’s despair, were no doubt as little autonomous as the long fat face of a mute. Left in peace [by the authorities] they would have been as happy as Larry, short for Lazarus, whose raising seemed to Murphy perhaps the one occasion on which the Messiah had overstepped the mark. (p.113)

‘The Messiah overstepped the mark’. Saying it out loud in a cod Irish accent suddenly recalled the tone of all those characters in James Joyce who discuss religion and politics in floods of high-flown language which are liable at any time to give way to a sly crack or gutter phrase, all the better to puncture the mood.

‘Ah, sweet Jaysus, he was a good man, I’ll grant you that, but not always strictly following the orders of Him Upstairs, if you know what I mean. Ahr, that raising of Lazarus from the dead, sure I think that was overstepping the mark a bit, what do you say, Seamus?’

Maybe as an Englishman I’m not allowed to try on this accent, but it is the mocking sacrilegious tone found in Joyce’s early stories, the Joyce who gave us ‘The Ballad of Joking Jesus’.

From this point onwards it struck me that the prose ought to be declaimed in a larger-than-life Irish accent, as of a Dublin pub politician declaiming with the gift on him of a divine afflatus, giving maximum weight to every rare and toothsome topic, rolling and relishing his fine array of grandee locutions but keen to avoid the accusation of being a preening gobshite by occasionally ducking into street slang for the humour it gives the audience of his erogatory ejaculations.

Murphy meets the improvident drunken Irish poet Augustus Ticklepenny who had been prescribed work at the mental home in a bid by an estimable German doctor to cure him of his alcoholism. Being relieved of the stressful burden of writing poetic epics for the Ole Country turns out to work surprisingly well.

This view of the matter will not seem strange to anyone familiar with the class of pentameter that Ticklepenny felt it his duty to Erin to compose, as free as a canary in the fifth foot (a cruel sacrifice, for Ticklepenny hiccuped in end rimes) and at the caesura as hard and fast as his own divine flatus and otherwise bulging with  as many minor beauties from the gaelic prosodoturfy as could be sucked out of a mug of porter. No wonder he felt a new man washing the bottles and emptying the slops of the better-class mentally deranged. (p.57)

Only in the scenes in the mental home did the book make total sense to me. Here is the appropriate subject for Murphy’s spavined consciousness and it is no coincidence that Murphy surprises Bim, Bom and Ticklepenny by turning out to have a wonderful empathy with the closed-in mental cases, shut up in their own worlds. For that is how he would devoutly love to be, himself.

The fully at home feel of the asylum scenes tend to show up the earlier scenes of being pointless in London for the rather shabby contrivances they are (counting biscuits in Hyde Park!) and when we return to what has now become the travelling gang of Neary, Wylie, Counihan, Cooper and Celia the narrative falls apart, and the dialogue becomes dismayingly divagatory – as presumably intended.

The text – like the lead ‘character’ – is only really at home amid a certain kind of utterly fictional mental illness. Which also points forward to the bleak post-war plays, much shorter, much more focused, than his earlier palaverously periphrastic prose.

Contraptions and contrivances

1. Astrology

The first half of the book is threaded with an elaborate concern for astrology, with Murphy very aware of the position of planets rising and falling in the various star signs and so on, and the narrator similarly concerned to pin down the precise dates, times, and positions of the planets when various events occur. Thus Celia meets Murphy ‘on midsummer’s night, the sun being then in the Crab’ (p.10).

In chapter three Murphy opens a long analysis of his star signs, lucky numbers, days, colours, years and so on that has been generated for him by ‘Ramaswami Krishnasawmi Narayanaswami Suk’.

Is this meant to be a satire on the post-Great War fad for all things spiritual, of the kind that snared W.B. Yeats or Conan Doyle? Murphy periodically relates Suk’s predictions to all the subsequent happenings in the book.

For Chaucer in the 1300s, astrology is a sign of his intellectual delight in the beautiful complexity of God’s wonderful creation. It closely counterpoises lots of events in The Canterbury Tales, notably the long Knight’s Tale which is awash with astrological symbolism.

In Beckett, this transient interest in astrology feels very like a) another elaborate but somehow contentless scaffold, a machine to help generate more reams of prose b) an affectless piss-take.

It is indicative that the astrology theme disappears in the book’s second half. In my opinion this is because the reality of the mental home eclipses it i.e. the text finds its proper subject matter.

2. Timeframe

Much is made in commentary and introduction of the elaborate timeframe of the novel, with characters and narrator carefully referring to specific days, weeks, months in which events occur, referring back to them, calculating the time past or to go before further meetings or activities.

Fine. I can see this generating innumerable PhDs, but, again, it doesn’t really add to any enjoyment of the narrative, unless you accept that the needless becluttering of the text with bootless incunabula is the point of the text. The divagations are the purpose.

Sex

Surprisingly for such an alienated, disconnected narrative, there are regular references to sex. I think that some, maybe all of them, are at least partly there to cause controversy and fuss in the faraway 1930s, the decade when Joyce’s Ulysses and Lady Chatterly’s Lover were still banned.

For example, it is broadly hinted that Celia, the streetwalker enjoys being tied up and ravished, what we might nowadays call BDSM.

She could not go where livings were being made without feeling that they were being made away. She could not sit for long in the chair without the impulse stirring, tremulously, as for an exquisite depravity, to be naked and bound. (p.44)

And it is strongly hinted that Ticklepenny has his job at the sanatorium – and wangles a job for Murphy – because he is the gay boyfriend of the head man there, ‘Bim’ Clinch.

Earlier in the book there is a not-so-subtle reference to kissing and not of the kind which removes the clapper from the bell i.e. French kissing.

In the final stages Miss Counihan emerges as a Baywatch babe:

Miss Counihan rose, gathered her things together, walked to the door and unlocked it with the key that she exiled for that purpose from her bosom. Standing in profile against the blazing corridor, with her high buttocks and her low breasts, she looked not merely queenly, but on for anything. (p.136)

‘On for anything’ another example of bathos, of ending a mock heroic description with a crude, pub locution.

Maybe these deliberately close to the knuckle references are what Fiedler meant by ‘twitting the bourgeoisie’.

The Beckett vision

There may or may not be an absurdist, nihilist, existential, phenomenological, post-Christian or whatever philosophy behind the novel. One thing that is certain is that phrases periodically pop out which certainly do anticipate the monocular and above all repetitive vision of the post-war plays.

So all things hobble together for the only possible (p.141)

So all things limp together for the only possible. (p.146)

Buried amid the textual tapenade, are ripe examples of the tone, the phraseology and the crippled worldview of the plays which made Beckett famous.

Kneeling at the bedside, the hand starting in thick black ridges between his fingers, his lips, his nose and forehead almost touching Mr Endon’s, seeing himself stigmatised in those eyes that did not see him, Murphy heard words demanding so strongly to be spoken that he spoke them, right into Mr Endon’s face, Murphy who did not speak at all in an ordinary way unless spoken to, and not always even then.

‘the last at last seen of him
himself unseen by him
and of himself.’

A rest.
‘The last Mr Murphy saw of Mr Endon was Mr Murphy unseen by Mr Endon. This was also the last Murphy saw of Murphy.’
A rest.
‘The relation between Mr Murphy and Mr Endon could not have been better summed up than by the former’s sorrow at seeing himself in the latter’s immunity from seeing anything but himself.’
A long rest.
‘Mr Murphy is a speck in Mr Endon’s unseen.’
That was the whole extent of the little afflatulence. (p.156)

The poetry of paucity, the prosody of impoverishment.

Credit

Murphy by Samuel Beckett was published in 1938 by G. Routledge and Company. All page references are to the 2009 Faber paperback edition.

Samuel Beckett’s works

An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

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by Simon on November 2, 2020  •  Permalink
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Max Brod’s book on Kafka and some of my own reflections by Walter Benjamin (1938)

Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and literary executor, published a biography of Kafka in 1937. The German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin gave his thoughts on the book in a letter to his friend, the Jewish scholar Gerhard Scholem, in June 1938. His comments were then extracted from the letter and published as one of the essays collected in a selection of Benjamin’s essays titled Illuminations and published in English translation in 1970.

Benjamin criticises Brod

Benjamin takes strong issue with Brod’s claim that Kafka was a deeply religious man who was well on the road to holiness. And objects to the offensively cheery bonhomie of Brod’s tone, his affable claim to be on the best possible terms with a man set apart from common humanity. It is ‘the most irreverent attitude imaginable’.

Brod thinks Kafka’s works only make sense under the category of religion and holiness, but Benjamin objects that ‘holiness’ is a category used to describe a life not works, and that ‘holiness’ anyway only makes sense within the framework of an established religion, whereas Kafka practiced no faith.

Benjamin is cross at Brod’s use of journalistic clichés, his ‘inability to do justice to his subject’, his inability to do any soul searching about his decision not to burn Kafka’s manuscripts, his inability ‘to gauge the tensions which permeated Kafka’s life’. In discussing Kafka’s work Brod doesn’t get beyond ‘diletanttish rudiments’. When he says Kafka’s thought is in line with the Jewish theologian Martin Buber, Benjamin thinks that Kafka is by far the bigger figure.

He ridicules Brod’s exploration of Kafka’s world of symbols via Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale The Tin Soldier. And he deprecates Brod’s implication that his and his alone is the correct interpretation of Kafka while all others (of which there already thousands) were unnecessary.

Brod’s book combines immoderate claims for Kafka’s holiness, with immoderate claims for the uniqueness of his (Brod’s) knowledge of his friend. Benjamin says it is typical of Brod’s obtuseness that he laments the way critics have criticised the way he (Brod) used extensive passages from a novel he wrote about his friendship with Kafka (Magic Realm of Love, 1928) in this biography. Brod cannot see why anyone would object to this questionable tactic.

There are, in summary, lapses of taste and judgement everywhere.

Benjamin’s own reflections

Having got that off his chest, Benjamin spends the last three pages of this short text giving his own view.

Benjamin posits that there are two poles to Kafka’s works, which contain sub-sets. At one extreme is ‘mystical experience (in particular, the experience of tradition)’; at the other ‘the experience of the modern big-city dweller’, which encompasses a variety of things, including:

the modern citizen who knows that he is at the mercy of a vast machinery of officialdom whose functioning is directed by authorities that remain nebulous to the executive organs, let alone to the people they deal with.

And which also includes knowledge of the new and weird world which has been opened up by the discoveries of contemporary physics (Einstein, relativity, Bohr and quantum physics).

Benjamin goes on to say (I think) that the paradoxical thing about Kafka is the way his conceptualisation of the ultra-modern individual is the result of, stems from, draws its power from, an engagement with the mystical tradition which delves right back into human prehistory.

(This immediately reminds me of the way the works of T.S. Eliot and James Joyce yoked together the absolutely up to date with ancient myths and legends, that the panoramic portrait of contemporary anarchy depicted in The Waste Land is underpinned by tribal myths of the Fisher King, or the way Joyce used Bronze Age legend [of Odysseus] to give structure to his astonishing portrait of contemporary Dublin in Ulysses.)

Kafka listened hard to ‘the tradition’ and somehow this made him more up to date than his modish contemporaries, than the novelists in his Prague literary circle who were much more ‘successful’ in their day and now are completely forgotten.

At which pint Benjamin says something I don’t quite understand, in fact I hover on the edge of not really ‘getting’ quite a bit in this short text. He writes:

Kafka’s work presents a sickness of tradition.

I expected him to say something like Kafka’s work presents a kind of distilling of tradition which is so timeless that it goes way deeper than the world Kafka actually lived in, and which explains why it has lasted, seems, in fact, to be timeless. But that’s not what he says, and I don’t really understand the sense of this sentence.

He goes on in the same vein to explain that the tradition can be defined as the truth which has been handed down, which has been transmitted. According to Brod, Kafka’s genius was that he abandoned truth and focused on the element of transmissibility.

Kafka’s real genius was that he tried something entirely new: he sacrificed truth for the sake of clinging to its transmissibility, its haggadic element. Kafka’s writings are by their nature parables. But it is their misery and their beauty that they had to become more than parables. They do not modestly lie at the feet of the doctrine, as the Haggadah lies at the feet of the Halakah. Though apparently reduced to submission, they unexpectedly raise a mighty paw against it.

I think this passage would be challenging to construe even if you knew what the Haggadah and the Halakah are but, not knowing what they are, it becomes all but impenetrable. On the other hand, immediately following this obscure premise, are two much more accessible conclusions.

This is why, in regard to Kafka, we can no longer speak of wisdom. Only the products of its decay remain. There are two: one is the rumour about the true things (a sort of theological whispered intelligence dealing with matters discredited and obsolete); the other product of this diathesis is folly – which, to be sure, has utterly squandered the substance of wisdom, but preserves its attractiveness and assurance, which rumor invariably lacks.

A thought which leads Benjamin up to his conclusion which is a) compressed b) highly mystical.

Some Benjamin you can understand straight away, but some is complicatedly mixed up with the learnèd references and allusions he makes, and you have to have read the works or authors he’s referring to in order to really understand his point. And then there are some thoughts which are just too mystical and abstruse to grasp; at moments he moves a few inches out of reach, and then is on the other side of the road or half way up a hill, and you wonder how he got there.

Folly lies at the heart of Kafka’s favorites from Don Quixote via the assistants [in The Castle] to the animals… This much Kafka was absolutely sure of: first, that someone must be a fool if he is to help; second, that only a fool’s help is real help. The only uncertain thing is whether such help can still do a human being any good. It is more likely to help the angels… who could do without help. Thus, as Kafka puts it, there is an infinite amount of hope, but not for us. This statement really contains Kafka’s hope; it is the source of his radiant serenity.

You could confidently say that as soon as a critic starts invoking angels and their likes and capacities in a critical essay, you know they have passed over from dispassionate analysis into a realm which is more subjective and itself artistically minded.

Part of Benjamin’s appeal is the way he hovers either side of that borderline – wavering between objective analysis and something which is closer to artistic invocation – meaning that when you can grasp hold of his insights, they are often very, very powerful indeed.

(You can make your own mind up by clicking the Illuminations Online link below, then scrolling down to search for the essay.)

Related links

Related reviews

Dates are dates of composition.

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by Simon on September 30, 2019  •  Permalink
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The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury (1951)

The unnamed narrator is on a walking holiday in Wisconsin. Over the brow of a hill comes a stranger. The narrator invites him to share his simple dinner. Relaxing in the sun, the stranger takes off his shirt to reveal that his body is absolutely covered in wonderful tattoos, lurid El Greco designs painted in sulphurous colours, inked into him by a crazy old woman who, he claims, was a traveller from the future. The illustrated man has tried every way he can to remove them – scraping them, using acid – nothing works. Not only this, but after sundown the tattoos start moving, each one telling a wondrous story.

This is the rather wonderful framing device which loosely introduces this collection of eighteen science fiction short stories. There are two editions. The America edition has the following stories:

  1. The Veldt
  2. Kaleidoscope
  3. The Other Foot
  4. The Highway
  5. The Man
  6. The Long Rain
  7. The Rocket Man
  8. The Fire Balloons
  9. The Last Night of the World
  10. The Exiles
  11. No Particular Night or Morning
  12. The Fox and the Forest
  13. The Visitor
  14. The Concrete Mixer
  15. Marionettes, Inc.
  16. The City
  17. Zero Hour
  18. The Rocket

The British edition – which I own – omits ‘The Rocket Man’, ‘The Fire Balloons’, ‘The Exiles’ and ‘The Concrete Mixer’, and adds ‘Usher II’ from The Martian Chronicles and ‘The Playground’, to produce this running order:

  1. Prologue: The Illustrated Man
  2. The Veldt
  3. Kaleidoscope
  4. The Other Foot
  5. The Highway
  6. The Man
  7. The Long Rain
  8. Usher II
  9. The Last Night of the World
  10. The Rocket
  11. No Particular Night or Morning
  12. The Fox and the Forest
  13. The Visitor
  14. Marionettes, Inc.
  15. The City
  16. Zero Hour
  17. The Playground
  18. Epilogue: Leaving the Illustrated Man

The stories

1. The Veldt – setting: earth in the future

Mr and Mrs George Hadley live in a soundproofed Happylife Home, which is staffed with gadgets and machinery which does their living for them – baths which run on command, shoelace tiers, food which appears on the table when commanded, and a state-of-the-art nursery where their two children, Peter (10) and Wendy spend hours conjuring up three dimensional scenes from fairy tales and children’s stories.

Recently they’ve been recreating the same scene from the African veldt over and gain, complete with lions feasting on something in the distance. Slowly George realises how spoilt and addicted to the nursery the children have become, and announces he is going to turn off the electric house and take them all on holiday to a real home where they’ll have to cook and manage for themselves.

As he turns things off the children go mental with anger and horror and tears and beg for just a last few minutes in the nursery. George relents as he and his wife go upstairs to pack. Then they hear screams from the nursery, run down and into it only for… the children to slam and lock the door behind them. Only then do they look around and see the lions advancing towards them, jaws slavering, under the hot African sun.

2. Kaleidoscope – setting: space

A rocket explodes and the half dozen astronauts inside are scattered in all directions. For a while they keep in radio contact, bitching, crying, lamenting, recounting their lives, as one heads towards the moon, one gets snared in the Myrmidon meteor shower which circles earth endlessly and the main character, Hollis, is pulled towards earth, burning up on entry into the atmosphere, the cause of wonder as a little boy out for a walk with his mom points up at a shooting star streaking across the sky.

Hollis looked to see, but saw nothing. There were only the great diamonds and sapphires and emerald
mists and velvet inks of space, with God’s voice mingling among the crystal fires. There was a kind of
wonder and imagination in the thought of Stone going off in the meteor swarm, out past Mars for years
and coming in toward Earth every five years, passing in and out of the planet’s ken for the next million
centuries, Stone and the Myrmidone cluster eternal and unending, shifting and shaping like the
kaleidoscope colors when you were a child and held the long tube to the sun and gave it a twirl…

3. The Other Foot – Mars

A striking if simplistic story set in 1985. In 1965 black people were sent in spaceships to colonise Mars. This they have done and now live under blue skies, in townships identical to those they left in the American South. Twenty years later, rumour spreads that the first spaceship from earth is due to arrive. One black man, Willie, rouses a mob, making them remember all the humiliations, discrimination, violence and murder black people suffered on earth. He prepares a noose for whichever white men step off the spaceship, and gets fellow citizens to begin marking out reservations for ‘whites only’ in cinemas, public parks, on trams.

But when the spaceship finally lands in front of a mob of angry vengeful blacks, the knackered old white man who emerges in the door announces that earth has suffered a prolonged atomic war in which every country, city and town has been obliterated. The survivors patched together the spaceship he’s come in and now are begging the Martian settlers to use their old unused rockets, to come and rescue the survivors, to ferry them to Mars where mankind can start again.

The white man begs and slowly the noose falls from Willie Johnson’s hand, and he tells the crowd that this is an opportunity to restart the relationship between the races again, from a clean slate.

4. The Highway – earth in the future

Hernando is a poor peasant living next to a highway which runs through his country from America. Over the years scraps from rich cars have flown off into his property – a hub cap he and his wife use as a bowl, the wheel from a car which crashed into the river, but whose rubber he cut into shoes. He is dirt poor. One day there is a flood of cars heading north, which reduces to a trickle and then… the last car. Young pleasure seekers are in it, a man and five women, in a topless convertible. It is pouring with rain, but they are all crying.

They ask him for water for the radiator, which he fetches and pours in, asking what’s up, why the flood of cars north? It is the nuclear war, the young man cries. The nuclear war has come, it is the end of the world. And they offer him some money and drive off north… Hernando goes back to his wife in their hut.

It becomes ever clearer that Bradbury is not so interested in ‘plot’ or ‘character’ as in poetic description, playing with fanciful similes and metaphors.

He returned with a hub lid full of water. This, too, had been a gift from the highway. One afternoon it had sailed like a flung coin into his field, round and glittering. The car to which it belonged had slid on, oblivious to the fact that it had lost a silver eye…

5. The Man – strange planet

The first earth rocket expedition to Planet Forty-three in Star System Three lands and tired Captain Hart is pissed off that the natives just continue going about their work without coming to see them. He sends Lieutenant Martin into town to find out why and Martin returns a few hours later with news that this civilisation has just had a massive experience: the Holy Man whose return they have been awaiting for thousands of years just appeared, walking among them, preaching pace and healing the sick.

Captain Hart is at first completely dismissive, accusing his rival space captains, Burton or Ashley, of having arrived earlier and spreading this ridiculous story in order to pre-empt commercial contracts. But then the two other spaceships turn up badly damaged with most of their crews killed by a solar storm. So… it must be true! It must be him!!

Captain Hart, now persuaded that it is him, returns to the city, but when the mayor can’t tell him where He is, Hart turns nasty, threatening, then shooting the Mayor in the arm. Convinced that ‘He’ has moved on, Hart vows to travel on across the universe to find Him. He blasts off, leaving Lieutenant Martin and some other crew members behind. The mayor turns to them and says: Now, I can take you to meet Him.

6. The Long Rain – Venus

A spaceship lands on Venus. The four survivors struggle through the incessant torrential rain to find a ‘sun dome’, where there’ll be warmth, shelter and food.

I get it now that Bradbury likes stories (cheesy, teenage, boom-boom stories) but what really gets him going is descriptions. The setups and stories may be laughable, but you can’t help reacting to the vividness of his imagining.

The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men’s hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.

At one point a monstrous electrical storm passes overhead and burns one of the men to a crisp. The description of his burned corpse really leaped out at me.

The body was twisted steel, wrapped in burned leather. It looked like a wax dummy that had been
thrown into an incinerator and pulled out after the wax had sunk to the charcoal skeleton. Only the teeth were white, and they shone like a strange white bracelet dropped half through a clenched black fist.

Like John Donne. Or photos of Iraqis incinerated on the Highway of Death. The spacemen stagger on, mentally disintegrating, first going round in a big circle to find the spaceship again, then stumbling for miles in search of a Sun Dome only to find one that has been attacked and ransacked by Venusians (who come from the vast sea, apparently, kidnap all the men and elaborately drown them), one man goes mad and sits face up in the rain to drown, another refuses to go any further and shoots himself, the last survivor walks on, going slowly mad, until he does arrive at a Sun Dome and is saved.

7. Usher II – Mars

This is one of the two stories which look ahead to Fahrenheit 451 in that they describe a future earth (in the year 2005) in which a repressive culture is burning all books, wiping out all traces of imaginative literature (and even children’s books) in the name of Moral Purity.

Literary-minded William Stendahl has fled to Mars where, with the help of a sidekick Pike, he commissions an architect to build a replica of the grim Gothic house which features in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, using robots to recreate bats, vampires and so on, using radiation to blast the landscape around it, and machines to even block out the sunlight to create an environment of menacing gloom.

Within hours of building it an Inspector of Moral Climates named Garrett turns up to demand it be torn down. Pike and Stendhal murder Garrett and quickly build a robot to replace him. But it turns out the thing called Garrett was already a robot, so they’ve simply replaced one robot with another.

Stendhal requests to hold a party in the house before it is demolished and, with wild improbability, Garrett accepts. So that evening Garrett and half a dozen other Moral Cleansers (including a number of earnest young lady reformers) attend the part – at which Pike and Stendhal arrange for them one by one to be killed in re-enactments of grim murders from Poe’s most lurid tales.

Finally Stendhal reduces Garrett to begging for his life as – bound and chained to the wall – Stendhal bricks him up into a vault, to be buried alive. As the helicopter carrying Stendhal and Pike takes off, the house of Usher (II) cracks and collapses, just like the house in the Poe story.

Like a Hammer horror story – but on Mars!

8. The Last Night of the World – earth in the future

This is one of a handful of stories where Bradbury almost completely neglects plot in order to create a strangely empty, hollowed-out piece of dialogue. We overhear the disembodied voices of a married couple who have both woken from a dream in which they knew that the world was going to end. So did everyone else at their workplaces. The go about their day, eat a meal, lock up the house and go to bed to wait.

9. The Rocket – earth in the future

Reminiscent of the deceptively simple stories about Mr Palomar written by Italo Calvino in the 1970s. In the future space travel becomes more and more accessible. Fiorello Bodoni, a poor junkyard owner, has saved $3,000 to enable one member of his family to take a rocket trip into outer space. Trouble is the family can’t agree who should go – they draw straws but whoever wins immediately attracts the resentment of the rest of the family.

One day an industrialist offers him the shell of a superannuated rocket, to melt down for scrap. Instead Bodoni uses his money to rig up car motors to the bottom of the rocket, and cine projection screens across the portholes then invites his children on board, makes them sit in the chairs, fires up the car motors and then plays the films of moon and stars and planets passing by, thus tricking them into believing they really have had a trip in space.

10. No Particular Night or Morning

Like The Last Night of the World this one is about psychology with little real plot, and feels strangely empty and disturbing.

On a space ship heading out from earth, there’s a full crew which includes Clemens and a guy named Hitchcock. Over the next 36 hours or so Hitchcock slowly goes to pieces. He becomes convinced nobody exists if he is not looking at them. He becomes convinced there is no space, no stars, no earth. He confides all these paranoid delusions to Clemens who he also thinks ceases to exist when he, Hitchcock, isn’t looking at him.

Hitchcock explains that he was a wannabe author who finally got a short story published but when he saw his name on the cover – Joseph Hitchcock – he realised it wasn’t him. It was someone else. There was no him.

These delusions are exacerbated when a meteor crashes through the skin of the rocket, killing one spaceman and injuring Hitchcock before the ship’s autorepairs seal up the hole. Hitchcock is convinced the meteor was out to get him.

Twelve hours later the alarm bells ring and one of the crew tells Clemens that Hitchcock put on a spacesuit and exited the ship. Now he’s left a million miles behind. For a while they hear him coming through on the spacesuit radio.

‘No more space ship now. Never was any. No people. No people in all the universe. Never were any. No planets. No stars.’ That’s what he said. And then he said something about his hands and feet and legs. ‘No hands,’ he said. ‘I haven’t any hands any more. Never had any. No feet. Never had any. Can’t prove it. No body. Never had any. No lips. No face. No head. Nothing. Only space. Only space. Only the gap.’

11. The Fox and the Forest – earth in the future and past

It is 2155 and the world is at war. New, hydrogen-plus bombs are being constructed, as well as germ warfare bombs involving leprosy. The future culture doing this is intensely militarised and repressive. At the same time, time travel machines and holidays are becoming common (don’t ask me about the logic of both happening at once).

Roger Kristen is deeply involved in building the nuclear bomb and his wife Ann, in building leprosy bombs. They sign up for one of the Time Travel holidays and select 1938 as a good year. But once they have been transported back to 1938 New York, they change their clothes, appearance and papers and high tail it to Mexico.

Only trouble is they have been followed. As the story opens one of the Searchers, Simms, confronts them in a bar. It is futile trying to run. He or a colleague will find them. Roger agrees to return on condition his wife can stay. Deal, says Simms. But next morning, instead of keeping his promise to Simms, Roger runs him down and kills him in the hire car.

Released pending further investigation, Roger and Ann fall in with a rambunctious American film crew who are down in Mexico on a recce to make a movie. The brash, fast-talking director Joe Melton invites them to join in with the crew, eat meals, maybe Ann can have a role in the movie, she’s pretty good-looking.

Right up to the moment when Melton reveals… that he and the entire crew are also Searchers. Roger’s work is simply too valuable to let him go. Roger pulls out a gun and shoots some of the crew before he’s overpowered. The hotel management come banging on the door at which point Melton reveals that the camera is a time travel device: one of the crew turns it on and all the people from the future vanish, leaving the hotel room completely bare.

This is the second story to reference the notion that in the future, the authorities will destroy culture and, in particular, burn books.

We don’t like this world of 2155. We want to run away from his work at the bomb factory, I from my position with disease-culture units. Perhaps there is a chance for us to escape, to run for centuries into a wild country of years where they will never find and bring us back to burn our books, censor our thoughts, scald our minds with fear, march us, scream at us with radios . . .

12. The Visitor – Mars

Saul Williams is suffering from the incurable disease of ‘blood rust’, and so like all its other victims he is shipped up to Mars in a space rocket, left with survival rations and abandoned. All along the shore of the barren Martian ocean he sees other people like him, coughing up blood, abandoned, solitary, anti-social.

Along the shores of the dead sea, like so many emptied bottles flung up by some long-gone wave, were the huddled bodies of sleeping men.

Then a rocket arrives (carrying the usual regular rations) and a new young man, Leonard Mark. Turns out Leonard is a telepath and can create a kind of cyber-reality for people. For Saul he creates the impressions that a) Saul is in the middle of hustling bustling New York City and then b) that he is swimming in a rural stream, as he did when a boy back in Illinois.

Trouble is some of the other men have been affected by the disturbances and seen images of New York, too. They all want a piece of Leonard. Saul fights them off and carries Leonard up to a cave. There follow various trick moments – like when Leonard makes himself invisible to Saul – moments out of an episode of the Twilight Zone or Star Trek.

While they’re arguing about fantasies, the other men find the cave and threaten Saul. They want to share Leonard and his amazing ability. Eventually they end up fighting over him, one of them pulls a gun and shoots a couple of the rivals before Saul jumps on him, they wrestle with the gun and – like in a thousand hokey TV episodes – the gun goes off, killing… yes, you’ve guessed it! – Leonard, the man they all wanted to save. Golly, Isn’t life ironic! Aren’t humans their own worst enemies!

13. Marionettes, Inc. – earth now

A surprising anticipation of The Stepford Wives (which I’ve reviewed elsewhere). It’s based on the conversation of two men who suffer from henpecking wives. Usually Braling’s wife keeps him where she can see him so his friend Smith is surprised when he is allowed out for an evening.

Braling tells Smith there is a secret new company named Marionettes, Inc.  which will make a robot duplicate of you. A month ago he had a duplicate made of himself, keeps it in a trunk in the cellar, but brings it out now and then, prepares it to play him for the evening, while he slips out. It’s such a perfect replica his wife suspects nothing. Braling excitedly tells his friend he’s planning to go to Rio de Janeiro for a month while the robot duplicate robot covers for him at home. The only way to detect the difference is that, if you get up really close, you can hear the tick-tick-tick of the internal machinery.

Smith also has problems with his wife who, for some reason, has become extremely affectionate over the past month, petting and pinching and sitting on his lap and tiring him out. Braling gives him Marionettes, Inc.’s card and Smith goes home determined to get a copy made of himself, so he also can slip away from his wife.

But when Smith gets home and looks at his bank statement he is shocked to find $10,000 is missing from their account. He has an awful thought, bends over the sleeping form of his voluptuous wife, Nettie and… hears the fateful ticking… His wife has beaten him to it, and had a duplicate made of herself! God knows where the real Nettie is off gallyvanting!

Meanwhile Braling gets home and takes over from the duplicate Braling only for a classic ‘horror’ scenario to play out, namely when Braling I gets Braling II down into the cellar, the robot refuses to get into the trunk. He’s taken a fancy to Braling’s wife. In fact he likes being out and about in the air and hates being locked up. In fact…. he grabs Braling and stuffs him into the trunk, locks it, climbs up out of the cellar and locks the cellar door. Goes upstairs to the bedroom, slips into bed next to sleeping Mrs. Braling and gives her an affectionate kiss. Who’s to say the robot won’t make a better husband 🙂

14. The City – another planet, the future

This is another sci-fi horror story, the SF equivalent of a shilling shocker. A spaceship lands on an unexplored planet, and comes upon an abandoned city.

What makes the story novel and impressive is that it is told from the point of view of the city, which in fact is more like a live organism, with hearing devices, smelling devices, a central brain and a big mouth.

It turns out that (somehow) the inhabitants were all wiped out thousands of years ago by humans using biological weapons (don’t think about the logic of this too much; all that matters is that the reader submits themselves to the vehemence of the city’s hatred for humans).

So now it entices in the spacemen, who are tentatively exploring it in their spacesuit. Then it captures them – explains just what it is going to do – tips them down a chute into an abattoir-cum-torture chamber where they are eviscerated, disembowelled, and bled dry, and then…

In the kind of cheapjack, catchpenny but very effective way of these kind of horror stories, the city rebuilds them as perfect robot replicas of their original selves. Sends them robotically back to their ship, carrying with them a clutch of germ warfare bombs. They will return to earth and drop them over the entire globe… thus wiping out mankind!!

15. Zero Hour – earth now

This is a genuinely creepy story, the only one in the collection which genuinely gave me the shivers.

It’s told from the point of view of stereotypical 1950s American suburban mum, Mrs Morris, whose little girl Mink is playing out in the yard with a bunch of kids who have developed a new game, which they are calling ‘the invasion’. Bradbury spookily conveys effective facts like the way that kids going through puberty are excluded from the game, and how the game involves placing metal household objects, knives and forks etc, in particular positions, while drawing geometrical shapes in the dust and incanting chants or spells.

In casual phone calls Mrs Morris discovers that all the other prepubescent kids are playing the same game, even in cities a long way away (a call from a friend who’s moved to the other side of America). Mink tells Mrs Morris it’s all being done at the behest of someone called ‘Drill’. All the children talk about ‘Zero Hour’ being five o’clock.

At which hour there is an eerie silence across the city. Mrs Morris’s husband comes home from work (‘Hi, honey, I’m home’) and, in a sudden panic, she forces him inside, and then pelts him up into the attic, slamming and locking the door.

All the little revelations and knowledges and sense that had bothered her all day and which she had logically and carefully and sensibly rejected and censored. Now it exploded in her and shook her to bits.

They hear voices downstairs in the house. Lots of voices. The clumping of heavy feet. Her husband shouts out ‘Who’s there?’ but his wife begs him to be quiet. Up the stairs come the clumping steps.

Heavy footsteps, heavy, heavy,very heavy footsteps, came up the stairs. Mink leading them.
‘Mom?’ A hesitation. ‘Dad?’ A waiting, a silence.
Humming. Footsteps toward the attic. Mink’s first.
They trembled together in silence in the attic, Mr. and Mrs. Morris. For some reason the electric  humming, the queer cold light suddenly visible under the door crack, the strange odor and the alien sound of eagerness in Mink’s voice finally got through to Henry Morris too. He stood, shivering, in the dark silence, his wife beside him.
‘Mom! Dad!’
Footsteps. A little humming sound. The attic lock melted. The door opened. Mink peered inside, tall
blue shadows behind her.
‘Peekaboo,’ said Mink.

Wow. This story sent a genuine thrill of fear through me.

16. The Playground – earth now

A similar effect is created by The Playground. This is pretty much a pure horror story. A middle-aged man, Charles Underhill, used to be mercilessly bullied as a boy. Now he’s married with a son of his own. He and his son regularly walk past the neighbourhood playground.

Charles sees it as a place of incredible violence, with kids smacking, stamping and beating each other. It can’t be that bad can it?

There were creams, sharp visions, children dashing, children fighting, pummeling, bleeding, screaming!

I think this is a sort of hallucination he has, which a) reflects his own neuroses, his own extreme fears but also b) sets the tone of exaggeration and extremity which artfully prepares the reader for what comes next.

His wife, Carol, thinks little Jim should be encouraged to play there with the other kids. If it’s a bit violent, well, that’s all part of growing up.

One particular kid keeps mocking him and calling him whenever he walks past, as if he has a secret, as if he knows something.

Eventually it comes out that this kid has the body of a boy but it contains the mind of an adult neighbour, Marshall. When Charles goes with Jim and his wife next go to the playground, in a terrifying moment, Charles’s soul or whatever it is that lives and perceives inside our bodies, is exchanged with his son’s.

Suddenly he finds himself on top of the slide – where his son had climbed – terrified of the height and of the taunting children around him – and looking over at the playground fence he sees two adults, his wife and himself!! And then he sees them turning and walking away, leaving him, abandoning him to a world of taunts and bullying.

He screamed. He looked at his hands, in a panic of realisation. The small hands, the thin hands…
‘Hi,’ cried the Marshall boy, and bashed him in the mouth. ‘Only twelve years here!’
Twelve years! thought Mr Underhill, trapped. And time is different to children. A year is like ten years. No, not twelve years of childhood ahead of him, but a century, a century of this!

I don’t think it has any sci-fi element at all. It is an ‘astounding’ tale, an ‘astonishing’ tale, but surely a horror story more than science fiction.

Fairly obvious but these last two stories – which are possibly the creepiest – are so in part because they’re about children – those creatures we think we know but who are often so alien, with their own worlds and mindsets – so often the subject of horror stories, books, movies, from The Midwich Cuckoos to The Exorcist.

The American stories

The Rocket Man – earth in the future

14-year-old Doug narrates the three-monthly return visits of his father, a Rocket Man, and the troubled relationship of his parents, his father always vowing to give up flying to Mars or Venus but always, after a week or so at home, getting twitchy and looking at the stars, his mother for the past ten years imagining he is already dead, because the opposite – actually loving him in the here and now – is too risky, risks the terrible pain of losing him on his next mission.

This account of a troubled marriage through the eyes of a wide-eyed teenager is remarkably effective. And has moments of really vivid writing. Doug asks to see his dad in his uniform.

It was glossy black with silver buttons and silver rims to the heels of the black boots, and it looked as if someone had cut the arms and legs and body from a dark nebula, with little faint stars glowing through it. It fit as close as a glove fits to a slender long hand, and it smelled like cool air and metal and space. It smelled of fire and time.

Unlike Isaac Asimov, Bradbury can write.

The Fire Balloons – Mars in the future

Some priests are the first to make the flight to Mars. As usual an alien world turns out remarkably like America, everyone can breathe fine, the sky is blue and the mayor complains about all the Irish navvies who have turned up to do the heavy labour and turned the place into the Wild West with saloons and loose women.

But it is the native Martians who interest Father Peregrine. These are floating blue globes, with no bodies or limbs, who don’t speak or communicate. But the look of them transports him back to childhood memories of his grandfather letting of big red, white and blue balloons to celebrate 4th July.

Father Peregrine makes his colleagues climb up into the mountains in pursuit of the blue globe Martians, and are saved by them when there’s an avalanche. Convinced they are intelligent beings with free will, and therefore capable of right and wrong, and therefore in need of ‘saving’, he gets his grumbling colleagues to build a chapel for the blue globes up in the mountains.

But at the climax of the story the blue globs come to Father Peregrine and, using telepathy, explain very simply that they are peaceful and virtuous and have no need of saving.

Obviously there’s a SF component to the setting and story, but the imaginative force of the story really comes from Peregrine’s poignant memories of being a boy and watching his his grandfather letting beautiful coloured balloons fly into the sky over small town America.

The Exiles – Mars

This a weird story which starts strange and then gets weirder. It is 2120. A shiny spaceship is en route to Mars crewed by shiny white American jock spacemen. But they are all having florid hallucinations – bats in space, arms turning into snakes, imagining they are wolves – and dying, of shock, of heart failure.

‘Bats, needles, dreams, men dying for no reason. I’d call it witchcraft in another day. But this is the year 2120!’

Since the story opens with three witches on Mars reciting spells familiar to any literate person as being quotes from Shakespeare’s Macbeth the reader knows these affects are caused by witches. So far, so SF shocker. What’s interesting is it’s the third of the stories to refer to the idea that in the future, books are banned.

‘Our whole crew dreamed of witch-things and were-things, vampires and phantoms, things they couldn’t know anything about. Why? Because books on such ghastly subjects were destroyed a century ago. By law. Forbidden for anyone to own the grisly volumes. These books you see here are the last copies, kept for historical purposes in the locked museum vaults…  All burned in the same year that Halloween was outlawed and Christmas was banned!’

OK, this much I can accept. But the story then goes to an entirely new, delirious level, when it is revealed that the witches from Macbeth are there because Shakespeare is there! Shakespeare and Edgar Allen Poe and Ambrose Bierce and H.P. Lovecraft and all the other writers of horror and the supernatural whose books were burned back on earth – somehow, they are gods, they are immortal, and they fled earth when their creations were burned by a moralising puritanical civilisation, they fled to Mars to escape… and now the earthmen are coming to Mars.

So the core of the story is Edgar Allen Poe and Ambrose Bierce trying to recruit Charles Dickens for their army to oppose the invaders (he refuses, being in the midst of the Christmas celebrations in A Christmas Carol) along with Machen and Blackwood and all the other authors of the mysterious.

So when the spaceship lands, they summon up a vast army of snakes and monsters and fire to attack it. But then we switch to the spacemen’s point of view and they see… nothing at all. A bare uninhabited plain. And to mark their arrival the squeaky-clean-cut all-American captain decides they will burn the last copies of all those nonsense books, the last copies which he had brought on the ship.

And as they make a funeral pyre of The Wind In the Willows and The Outsider and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Wizard of Oz, and Pellucidar and The Land That Time Forgot and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, they hear thin distant screams… which are the screams of the souls of the authors perishing one by one.

What comes over is Bradbury’s investment in reading, in the imagination, in the wildest reaches of fantasy and horror – and his instinctive opposition to all those forces in Puritanical American society which are constantly trying to stamp it out.

The Concrete Mixer – Mars

The Martian Ettil Vrye refuses to join the Martian army preparing to go and invade earth. His wife, Tylla, is ashamed, his father-in-law is furious. (You can see how this isn’t really science fiction, it is human beings being described.)

It’s a would-be comic story in which Ettil is arrested, and charged with possessing earth science fiction comics, which are what have persuaded him the invasion is a bad idea. When the army threaten to throw him into a ditch of flaming oil he gives up and joins the army and flies through space in the fleet to invade earth.

But as they approach they get a radio message welcoming them. Earth is a peaceful federation now, has abolished all its atom bombs and has no weapons. There is a comic scene as the mayor of a California town makes a big welcome speech to the Martians as they emerge from their shiny spaceships, Miss California 1965 promises to give them all a big kiss and  Mr. Biggest Grapefruit in San Fernando Valley 1956 gives them all baskets of fresh fruit.

The Martians fraternise. Most of them love it and pair off with earth women to visit the movies and sit in the back row smooching. Ettil doesn’t fit in. He delivers satire about women in beauty parlours apparently being tortured by their hairdo headsets. He sits on a park bench and is propositioned by a young woman. When he won’t go to the movies with her she accuses him of being a communist. Then an old lady rattles a tambourine at him and asks whether he has been saved by the Lord.

Then he meets a movie producer, van Plank, who whisks him off to a bar, buys him cocktails, promises him a percentage of the take and some ‘peaches’ on the side, if he’ll be an adviser to his new movie project, MARTIAN INVASION OF EARTH. The Martians will be tall and handsome. All their women will be blonde. In a terrific scene a strong woman will save the spaceship when it’s holed by a meteor. there’ll be merchandising, obviously, a special martian doll at thirty bucks a throw.

Not to mention the brand new markets opening up on Mars for perfume, ladies hats, Dick Tracey comics and so on. The producer leads him back out onto the pavement, shakes hands, gets him to promise to be at the studio at 9 prompt tomorrow morning and disappears.

Ettil is left to realise that the invasion will fail because all the Martians will get drunk, be fed cocktails and hot dogs till they’re sick or got cirrhosis, gone blind from watching movies or squashed flat by elephant-sized American women. He walks towards the spaceship field, fantasising about taking the next ship back home and living out his days in his quiet house by a dignified canal sipping fine wine and reading peaceful books when… he hears the tooting of a horn and turns to find a car driven by a bunch of Californian kids, none older than 16, has spotted him and is driving full pelt to run him over, now that’s entertainment.

(And reminiscent, of course, of the classic scene in Fahrenheit 451 when the joyriders try to kill the protagonist, Montag – having already, apparently, run over and killed the book’s female lead, Clarissa.)

Epilogue

The epilogue is short enough to quote in its entirety and gives you a good sense of the simple style and vocabulary of most of the tales

IT WAS almost midnight. The moon was high in the sky now. The Illustrated Man lay motionless. I had seen what there was to see. The stories were told; they were over and done. There remained only that empty space upon the Illustrated Man’s back, that area of jumbled colors and shapes.

Now, as I watched, the vague patch began to assemble itself, in slow dissolvings from one shape to another and still another. And at last a face formed itself there, a face that gazed out at me from the colored flesh, a face with a familiar nose and mouth, familiar eyes.

It was very hazy. I saw only enough of the Illustration to make me leap up. I stood therein the moonlight, afraid that the wind or the stars might move and wake the monstrous gallery at my
feet. But he slept on, quietly.

The picture on his back showed the Illustrated Man himself, with his fingers about my neck, choking me to death. I didn’t wait for it to become clear and sharp and a definite picture.

I ran down the road in the moonlight. I didn’t look back. A small town lay ahead, dark and asleep. I knew that, long before morning, I would reach the town. . . .

Thoughts

1. Many of his stories use science fiction tropes – most obviously the use of space ships to other worlds and  encounters with aliens. But Bradbury’s heart is really here on earth . And his stories’ deep roots are more in the horror and horror-fantasy tradition than in sci-fi, as such.

2. The stories are all told in amostly flat, spare prose – flat and plain like fairy stories.

The rocket men leaped out of their ship, guns ready. They stalked about, sniffing the air like hounds.
They saw nothing. They relaxed. The captain stepped forth last. He gave sharp commands. Wood was gathered, kindled, and a fire leapt up in an instant. The captain beckoned his men into a half circle about him.

… from whose white flatness occasionally burst vivid similes, or entire paragraphs of poetic prose.

And as if he had commanded a violent sea to change its course, to suck itself free from primeval beds,
the whirls and savage gouts of fire spread and ran like wind and rain and stark lightning over the sea
sands, down empty river deltas, shadowing and screaming, whistling and whining, sputtering and
coalescing toward the rocket which, extinguished, lay like a clean metal torch in the farthest hollow.

Sometimes he uses repetition of phrases and grammatical structures to intensify the moment or to create dream-like hallucinations. But for the most part it is a verbally, grammatically and lexically simplified style, well suited, in its simple-mindedness, to conveying the spooky, spine-chilling impact of his simple and sometimes terrifying horror stories.

Related links

Ray Bradbury reviews

1950 The Martian Chronicles
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1953 Fahrenheit 451
1955 The October Country
1957 Dandelion Wine
1959 The Day It Rained Forever
1962 Something Wicked This Way Comes

Other science fiction reviews

1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade earth
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same London of the future described in the Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth fall in love, then descend into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – two scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, leading to a giants’ rebellion against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a passing comet trails gasses through earth’s atmosphere which bring about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Bun Hill in Kent, is eye-witness to the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ – until one of them rebels

1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 awakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, there to discover…

1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years
1932 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra aka Mars,

1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces down attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria

1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic

1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – in an England of the future which has been invaded and conquered by the Russians, a hopeless attempt to overthrow the occupiers is easily crushed
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the Golden Era of the genre, namely the 1950s

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Posted by Simon on December 18, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/12/18/the-illustrated-man-ray-bradbury/

Out of The Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis (1938)

His mind, like so many minds of his generation, was richly furnished with bogies. He had read his H. G. Wells and others. His universe was peopled with horrors such as ancient and medieval mythology could hardly rival. No insect-like, vermiculate or crustacean Abominable, no twitching feelers – rasping wings, slimy coils, curling tentacles, no monstrous union of superhuman intelligence and insatiable cruelty seemed to him anything but likely on an alien world.

The plot

The set-up

Ransom (we never learn his first name) is a harmless Cambridge professor of philology on a walking tour of the Midlands during the university holidays. It’s getting dark and when he asks an old lady at a little cottage for the nearest accommodation, she suggests a nearby house, home of another ‘professor’.

It’s now night-time and Ransom, when there’s no reply to his calls, cheekily pushes through the hedge and wanders round the back of the building where he a) comes across a surprising array of outhouses and chimneys, at least one showing the wild flames of a forge, and with some huge object looming over the buildings, and b) discovers two men struggling with a young lad.

Quickly the two chaps introduce themselves as Weston (a physics professor) and Devine (a businessman) who, to his annoyance, Ransom realises he knew at school, and disliked for his slimeyness. The pair explain that the boy is backward, and they only employ him out of charity and he was just fighting against a chore they’d asked him to do.

Now they let the boy go, to return to the old lady in the cottage, and take Ransom into the house and pour him a nice whiskey. But the whiskey is drugged. Ransom falls asleep. When he wakes, before he can even stir he hears the two men discussing their plans to ‘sacrifice’ him to someone or something. Alarmed, Ransom tries to make a bolt for it, but has barely got to the kitchen door before they’re on him and one of them coshes him.

He regains consciousness in a spaceship. Lewis is a good describer and paints a vivid picture of coming to consciousness in a weirdly shaped metal box, hot on one wall (facing the sun), cool on the other – and being almost weightless. He blunders out of the small metal room into a sort of communal space where he finds Weston and Devine. Ransom’s mind reels as they explain to him that they are going back to Mars in a spaceship.

Back? Yes, they’ve been once already and Devine darkly hints that a) there’s a lot in it for him, wealth or riches or fame etc, and b) that the things – the creatures – they met requested they bring another human back, with implications that this person would be a gift or, as Ransom fears, a ‘sacrifice’. My God, he’s been kidnapped and flown to another planet against his will!

Fantasy

The description of the journey is full of the thoughtful kinds of details of the H.G. Wells type (the continual pattering of small meteorites on the shell of the ship, the way the ship is shaped like a big sphere) – all of which we now know to be completely impractical and unrealistic.

As unrealistic as the way the ‘ship’ mysteriously ‘lands’ quite peacefully on the surface of Mars and, when they open the circular hatch (much like a manhole cover) it turns out the air of Mars is perfectly breathable (just like the atmosphere of H.G. wells’s Moon was perfectly breathable). All of this is almost too silly to be ‘science’ fantasy, is more like a medieval romance, where the sleeper awakes in a strange land full of new creatures.

Same here. They have landed near a ‘lake’ of phosphorescent blue water. Tall willowy things seem to approach from the other shore and gesture towards Weston and Devine. With a shock, Ransom realises these are the creatures his kidnappers spoke about and they are gesturing to him. He is going to be handed over and then sacrificed!

At that moment a water-based creature slip through the ‘water’ and appears to snap at Weston and Devine, who step back in a hurry, slip over and… Ransom takes the opportunity to turn and run, run, run, without looking back, across the spit of sand, up the sides of a hill or whatever it is, never looking back, into a ‘forest’ of tall swaying trunks, amid alien flora, driven by panic fear.

Meeting the Malacandrans

Forced by thirst to eventually risk drinking from a pool of Martian ‘water’, Ransom is terrified when a sleek black animal a bit like an otter arises from it. The creature barks and he is astonished to realise it is making logical, sequential sounds. It is talking. Ransom approaches, it backs away, it gestures, he backs away. Then driven by curiosity, they move closer to each other.

Now we realise why Lewis made Ransom a philologist – it gives a plausibility (well, a sort of plausibility) – to his ability to grasp key words, to separate nouns from verbs, and to quickly begin to talk to this creature.

(The idea that any of this could happen is the wildest fantasy – Mars’s gravity not very different from ours, sunshine and breathable air, drinkable water, creatures with a sort of recognisable form and who can talk. It is Middle Earth, it is Narnia, it is not our solar system.)

To cut a long story short, this creature turns out to be a hross named Hyoi. Ransom is taken to their village where he learns the plural of hross is hrossa (not very difficult, really).

The peaceful hrossa like making poetry, their young frolic around Ransom’s feet, and he goes on a village hunt for one of the few violent creatures on the planet, a hnakra, which live in the ‘rivers’. Ransom is given pride of place in the ‘canoe’ which the hrossa paddle out to find the hnakra, armed with hrossa ‘spears’ and feeling a tremendous sense of comradeship with his fellow ‘bloods’ – at which point I realised that, despite looking like otters, everything else about the hrossa is reminiscent of native Americans: they live close to the soil, in teepee-like houses, have campfires, their young running free. It is a vision of innocence.

Ransom learns that there are two other ‘intelligent’ species on the planet which, by now, he has learned the natives call ‘Malacandra’ – short creatures who love building things and are known as pfifltriggi, and tall, willowy creatures known as sorns or séroni, to give them their grammatically correct plural.

There is something wonderfully innocent about the notion of a Cambridge philologist, magically transported to Mars, then spending his time fussing and fretting about plurals and tenses. And even about placing accents over the correct vowel sounds. Sweet.

Anyway, all three of these species long ago agreed to share one common language and live in peace together, each of their skills complementing the other species – in this, as in so much else, making Ransom reflect sadly on the violence and rapacity of our human species.

Once you get past the hot lakes and phosphorescent water, past the way the waterways have carved deep dead-straight canyons across the red surface of the planet (Lewis’s explanation of Mars’s canals) past the way the vegetation, the hills and the creatures are all tall and willowy due to Mars’s weaker gravity – past, in other words, the Amazing Tales and Astounding Stories level of the setting – then the story reveals its very traditional roots, going back at least as far as Gulliver’s Travels, if not to Pilgrim’s Progress and beyond, in the sense that it is a highly moralised story.

The fundamental purpose of the narrative is to teach and instruct. And what is being taught is a very traditional antidote to human arrogance and ignorance. Initially Ransom judges the Malacandrans by all-too-human standards, expecting them to be rapacious, violent, competitive – and is continually being brought up short and reproved for his cynicism.

With everything he learns about Malacandra he is reminded that there is something ‘crook’, as the Aussies say, about mankind, something bent and broken.

Special insight comes in (maybe predictably) a conversation about sex – the hrossa breed only once in their lifetimes, which Ranson can’t understand since our own species, of course, has a great deal of trouble restraining itself from all kinds of wanton promiscuity.

At last it dawned upon him that it was not they, but his own species, that were the puzzle. That the hrossa should have such instincts was mildly surprising; but how came it that the instincts of the hrossa so closely resembled the unattained ideals of that far-divided species Man whose instincts were so deplorably different? What was the history of Man?

The ultimate message of the book is that all the universe is a dance of beauty created by a loving God but that earth alone has brought upon itself ruin and silence. By man’s Original Sin.

Back to the plot: Ransom is informed that there is a fourth ‘species’, the almost invisible eldil (plural eldila), spirits which shimmer through the world as prisms of light, as breaths of air and which, he also learns, live in space, at least what humans call ‘space’. Because now he learns that what humans take to be the big black void of ‘space’ is in fact thronged with life and life-giving energy. He learns to think of it not as black and negative empty ‘space’, but as rich and full ‘deep Heaven’.

On the hunting trip an eldil appears to the hrossa (Ransom can barely see it) and tells them to take the man (hman) to Oyarsa. Oyarsa, they explain, is the eldil who is ruler of the planet. The hrossa says they will, just as soon as they finish the hunt. They successfully capture the hnakra but, once the canoes have been pulled up on shore, Hyoi, Ransom’s friend and guide, is shot by a rifle, Devine and Weston’s rifle fired from way up in the hills – and expires in Ransom’s arms.

This really brings home to Ransom just how ‘crook’ and ‘bent’ his species really is. To the hrossa it conveys a different message: that they should have obeyed the eldil straightaway. They tell Ransom how to get to the valley of Oyarsa, which requires crossing a kind of range of Martian Alps. Ransom sets off alone.

Up and up he climbs, becoming breathless, cold and observing the sky getting blacker. Eventually he realises he is climbing out of Mars’s atmosphere altogether, up to the level of the surface of the planet. He realises that all the lush life he’s been living among exists down in the ‘canals’ which are cut across Mars’s surface. Up on the ‘surface’, there is no atmosphere at all.

Before he asphyxiates he arrives at a cave where lives an ancient and wise sorn. It is one of the same creatures who had terrified him all those weeks ago, when he had first arrived, on the shore of the ‘lake’. Now he realises this species are the lofty ‘philosophers’ of Malacandra. They know about astronomy and about the planet’s history in a way which doesn’t interest the happy, hunting, singing hrossa.

The sorn (named Augray) gives Ransom a flower to press to his face, which exudes oxygen (handy), places him up on its shoulder, and then sets off across the mountains towards the valley of Oyarsa, all the way telling Ransom more about the history and life of Malacandra.

This journey on the shoulder of a wise and noble old alien creature reminds me very much of the hobbits’ encounters with the Ents in Lord of The Rings by Lewis’s lifelong friend, J.R.R. Tolkien.

Augray and Ransom descend into the beautiful valley of Meldilorn, the home of Oyarsa. Here he first sees pfifltriggi who build houses, make works of art and carve stones.

Oyarsa and the meaning of the solar system

Ransom is then led through a throng of Malacandrans, up a ‘tree’-lined avenue towards a circle of pillars like a temple, where he finally meets Oyarsa who proceeds, of course, to explain everything to him. For this is a format as old as writing – the quest, the journey, the odyssey to meet the Old Man of the Hills or guru or Master or god.

Oyarsa explains that:

  • each of the planets of the solar system has a tutelary spirit or oyarsa (plural Oyéresu)
  • on the four inner planets, which contain life, the local Oyarsa is responsible for that life
  • but the ruler of Earth (known as Thulcandra or the ‘silent planet’ hence – we now realise – the title of the book), has turned evil (become ‘bent’) and after some kind of great battle has been restricted to Thulcandra

Quite naturally, as in any allegory or romance or fantasy of this type, Ransom (and by extension the reader) is made to feel small and humble and ashamed of humanity and its greed and wars and so on. A bit like a schoolboy getting a telling off from the headmaster.

During this Great Explanation, there is a fuss back at the edge of the crowd and Ransom turns to see Devine and Weston being manhandled into Oyarsa’s presence by a group of hrossa, along with the corpses of Hyoi and two other hrossa who they have shot. God, is he ashamed to be human.

But it gets worse. Weston and Devine cannot in fact ‘see’ Oyarsa, having not developed the sensitivity to perceive eldila. They think the voice they can hear is being ‘thrown’ by a ventriloquist and decide a particularly sleepy old hross at the edge of the crowd must be throwing his voice. They talk to this old creature in patronising baby language, and offer him beads and cheap trinkets – exactly like the stereotypical white man encountering a new ‘tribe’.

Ransom could sink through the floor in embarrassment and mortification. Are these stupid, blundering, clumsy, patronising idiots his fellow ‘men’?

Oyarsa thinks Weston and Devine are behaving so irrationally they must be ill and orders them to be taken away and have their heads dunked in cold water to sober them up. They, with human cynicism, fear they are being dragged off to be executed and call on Ransom for help.

Then Oyarsa orders a pfifltriggi to use some kind of small crystal device, at the touch of which the bodies of the three dead hrossa disappear in a flash of light. That is their funeral ceremony.

Weston is brought back, head dripping with cold water, into the presence of Oyarsa where he makes a long speech justifying themselves. This is couched in a mix of imperial and capitalist rhetoric, and rises to a great vision Weston has, of Mankind colonising the other planets of the solar system and then Reaching Out To The Stars.

Ransom is called on to translate this lecture which he (and Lewis) not only regard as clumsy, crude, greedy, egocentric and completely contrary to the spirit of the peaceful ordered heavens – which we have by now learned so much about. But, on a telling linguistic level, Ransom finds that he cannot in fact translate portions of the speech, because a lot of the pompous abstract phraseology of imperialism and capitalism has no counterpart in the hrossa’s admirably practical and poetic language.

Oyarsa listens to what Ransom translates and concedes that Weston is acting out of an (admittedly misplaced) sense of duty to his species, and so decides not to evaporate him and Devine on the spot, but to allow them to proceed back to earth. Ransom must decide whether to stay or go back with them.

Reluctantly, Ransom realises he must go. Oyarsa orders the spaceship to be supplied with ninety days of oxygen, food and water, and warns that soon after that time it will be evaporated. Weston doesn’t understand, but Ransom by now realises that the entire solar system teems with life, with eldila, who can easily follow the ship’s progress and obey Oyarsa’s command, no matter where they go.

In fact the journey turns out to be pretty perilous because the earth is not in alignment with Mars and so the ship has to pass much closer to the sun than on the outward journey, becoming dangerously over-heated.

Then they discover that the moon in its orbit is between the ship and the earth. But the earthmen navigate all these perils and, after losing consciousness, Ransom eventually wakens to the most wonderful sound in the world – the sound of rain falling on the outside of the ship.

Realising the others have already left it, Ransom clambers up to the manhole cover, falls out and stumbles across fields. There is a flash behind him and he realises the spaceship has been vaporised as Oyarsa pledged. The lane becomes a road into a village and then – joy of joys – he beholds an English pub, stumbles inside, elbows his way through the crowd to the bar and orders… a pint of good old English beer!

Postscript

To my great surprise the postscript reveals that the author of this whole narrative is a man named ‘Lewis’, a friend of Ransom’s who the latter has told his story to, and who has agreed to write it up and publish it as a fiction.

To give this a plausible feel the postscript quotes a letter from Ransom to ‘Lewis’ pointing out various inaccuracies or places where Lewis has simplified the story.

It also tells that Ransom suspects Weston is going to do more mischief and has come to realise it is his mission to stop him. the struggle may take place on earth which is why Ransom has been keen to get the book published, since it will familiarise readers with key ideas which might help in the coming battle.

Key terms

Maleldil, god of all

hnau – generic for creature

Thulcandra – earth, Perelandra – Venus, Malacandra – Mars

Oyarsa, a spirit set to rule each of the inner planets

sorn, seroni

hman their name for humans

handramit the sunken canyons with breathable air where the hrossa live

Surprised by joy

Lewis was raised an Anglican but didn’t bother much about religion as an undergraduate, until he underwent a profound Christian conversion experience in 1931.

Over the next twenty years he turned himself into one of the most popular and successful writers of Christian apologetics – i.e. books and essays arguing in favour of Christianity – in the English-speaking world. These works included classics such as Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain and Miracles.

Throughout these works Lewis makes the same central key points:

  • that the world is the product of a loving, caring God who instituted a sane and rational Moral Law for us to follow
  • that something in the world is wrong or crooked, something to do with man’s disobedience to this higher Moral Law and his ignorant pursuit of his own selfish, egotistical aims
  • and that one man greater than all men sacrificed himself in order to redeem us, in body and imagination, from imprisonment in our own petty selves – to show us a higher realm of values – and to reunite us with the creator

and he set out to convey them through all the means at his disposal.

Thus Lewis not only wrote straightforward books of Christian argumentation but also came up with some wonderfully inventive formats or fictional frames. One example is the famous Screwtape Letters (1942), supposedly written from a wily old devil to a young apprentice, listing all the ways to entrap and ensnare humans, which sheds light on the psychology of evil or selfishness or badness.

Also famous – mega-famous since they began to be made into Hollywood movies in the early 2000s – are the Chronicles of Narnia series of seven children’s books, published in quick succession between 1950 and 1956.

So Out of the Silent Planet, published in 1938, could be said to stand at the start, not only of the specific science fiction trilogy, but also of Lewis’s realisation that he could convey his Christian message in a range of fictional ways.

This background goes to explain the reader’s feeling throughout the book that it is describing not just an adventurous sequence of thrilling incidents, but is promoting a very strong point of view.

From the moment Ransom meets Hyoi onwards, the book becomes steadily more laden with hints and suggestions that life can be beautiful but something about humanity spoils it.

This is perhaps the distinctive thing about Lewis’s Christianity. It is drenched in happiness. It is not a baleful Victorian Christianity morbidly banning all pleasure of body or mind. On the contrary, Lewis sees human beings created by God to be happy – but they have fallen into narrow, egotistical ways of thinking which act against their own best interests.

As soon as Ransom is outside earth’s tainted atmosphere, he feels happy and, at various moments throughout the story, the recurrent feeling is of immense happiness.

He was on the very frontier of that heaven he had known in the space-ship, and rays that the air-enveloped words cannot taste were once more at work upon his body. He felt the old lift of the heart, the soaring solemnity, the sense, at once sober and ecstatic, of life and power offered in unasked and unmeasured abundance. If there had been air enough in his lungs he would have laughed aloud.

Lewis is a surprisingly sensuous writer. He gives unashamedly sensuous descriptions of things. Not sexual. Sensual.

Stretched naked on his bed, a second Dana, he found it night by night more difficult to disbelieve in old astrology: almost he felt, wholly he imagined, ‘sweet influence’ pouring or even stabbing into his surrendered body.

Wells, anti-Wells, beyond Wells

When it needs to be, Out of the Silent Planet is a science fantasy adventure story in the absolutely traditional mode of the day. Lewis credits H.G. Wells as an influence in his short preface and Wells is referenced throughout the book, since he was by far the most dominant imaginative influence on the genre.

For example, the very shape of the space ‘ship’ they travel in, a metal sphere, is borrowed from Wells’s First Men In The Moon. And when the hrossa quiz Ransom about earth, Ransom is very careful not to tell them about the constant warfare and lethal weaponry which characterise mankind, because:

He remembered how H. G. Wells’s Cavor had met his end on the Moon… (Chapter 11)

(In Wells’s novel, Cavor tells the moon’s inhabitants, the Selenites, all about mankind’s cruel and destructive wars, with the result that theSelenites curtail his broadcasts back to earth and – it is heavily implied – curtail him, in order not to have the vile Homo sapiens come invading their planet.)

But the actual Mars that Ransom discovers is as remote as possible from Wells’s visions of cities and steel. It is a rural, albeit alien, idyll.

The old dreams which he had brought from earth of some more than American complexity of offices or some engineers’ paradise of vast machines had indeed been long laid aside. But he had not looked for anything quite so classic, so virginal, as this bright grove.

It’s only looking back that I realise that the Wellsian paraphernalia of the opening chapters is invoked in order to draw the science fiction fan into a narrative which then goes on to shed, plate by plate, its Wellsian shell and turn into something completely different – science fiction theology – a fully Christianised view of what life on other planets might be like, and a theological interpretation of how they got that way, which takes full cognizance of the Christian story on earth – the Fall and Christ’s incarnation and redeeming crucifixion – but which, imaginatively, goes way beyond that frame to imagine the forces of good and evil battling right across the solar system.

It is the beauty – of the planet, and of its inhabitants, and then of the eldila and then of Oyarsa – the transcendent sense of beauty and happiness and joy and bliss which the book radiates, which makes it so memorable and which gives Lewis’s Christian belief its distinctively optimistic and inspirational character.

Related links

Other science fiction reviews

1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade earth
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same future London as The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth defy her wealthy family in order to marry, fall into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, prompting giant humans to rebel against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet passes through earth’s atmosphere and brings about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Kent, gets caught up in the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, there to discover…

1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra aka Mars,

1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence powered by spindizzy technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke a thrilling narrative involving the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention – in the near future – of the anti-death drugs and the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1957 The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle – a vast cloud of gas heads into the solar system, blocking out heat and light from the sun with cataclysmic consequences on earth, until a small band of astronomers discovers the cloud contains intelligence and can be communicated with
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding story of Blish’s Okie tetralogy in which Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe

1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard New York
1962 The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns a Japanese official about a looming surprise German attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War
1963 Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle French journalist Ulysse Mérou accompanies Professor Antelle on a two-year space flight to the star Betelgeuse, where they land on an earth-like plane to discover that humans and apes have evolved here, but the apes are the intelligent, technology-controlling species while the humans are mute beasts
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into galactic consciousness
1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick In 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and ‘retire’ escaped andys
1969 Ubik by Philip K. Dick In 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by ‘inertials’. The novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after a catastrophe on the moon

1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – in 2031 a 50-kilometre long object of alien origin enters the solar system, so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it
1974 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – America after the Second World War has become an authoritarian state. The story concerns popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world in which he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the ‘ordinaries’ and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?
1974 The Forever War by Joe Haldeman The story of William Mandella who is recruited into special forces fighting the Taurans, a hostile species who attack Earth outposts, successive tours of duty requiring interstellar journeys during which centuries pass on Earth, so that each of his return visits to the home planet show us society’s massive transformations over the course of the thousand years the war lasts.

1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the Golden Era of the genre, namely the 1950s
1982 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke – Heywood Floyd joins a Russian spaceship on a two-year journey to Jupiter to a) reclaim the abandoned Discovery and b) investigate the monolith on Japetus
1987 2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke – Spaceship Galaxy is hijacked and forced to land on Europa, moon of the former Jupiter, in a ‘thriller’ notable for Clarke’s descriptions of the bizarre landscapes of Halley’s Comet and Europa

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Posted by Simon on November 24, 2018

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The Reprieve by Jean-Paul Sartre (1945)

Charles felt dirty, he was aware inside himself of a mass of damp and sticky innards. (p.202)

The Reprieve is the second novel in Sartre’s Roads To Freedom trilogy. It is a long, panoramic account of the lives of some 130 characters during the fateful week in September 1938 when all Europe held its breath as Germany threatened to invade Czechoslovakia and spark a continent-wide war in order to ‘liberate’ the Sudeten Germans.

At the last minute, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Premier Édouard Daladier persuaded the Czech government to cede to Nazi Germany Czechoslovakia’s western border regions, containing not only many ethnic Germans, but all her defences and much of her industry. Hitler accepted this deal, the threat of an armed confrontation disappeared, and all Europe breathed a sigh of relief.

Hence the book’s title – The Reprieve. This epic betrayal bought the western democracies exactly one year’s remission, until Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 began the Second World War in Europe.

The Reprieve is drastically different from its predecessor, The Age of Reason. That book had a cast of seven or eight characters but essentially rotated around the plight of one central figure – the depressive philosophy professor, Mathieu Delarue, who was trying to find the money to pay for his mistress’s abortion. It covered just two days and was divided into chapters, 18 to be precise, each of which began in a new scene or setting, in the conventional manner. The Reprieve, by contrast, is much longer and divided into seven very long sections, one covering each day from Friday 23 September to Friday 30 September.

But The Reprieve is massively different from a traditional novel – indeed it is a form of experimental novel – in two key respects:

  1. It has an enormous cast of characters, some from its predecessor, The Age of Reason, but most entirely new. And they are in locations all across France, as well as Germany, England and Spain. There are even scenes depicting the leading politicians of the day as they handled the negotiations about Czechoslovakia – Daladier, Chamberlain and even Hitler himself (we even get to see some of Hitler’s dreams!) So there is an astonishingly large number and wide breadth of characterisation.
  2. And, most distinctively, it jumps between the settings of the different characters, between conversations between characters, and even between characters’ thoughts – with no warning, sometimes in successive paragraphs (easy enough to grasp), sometimes in successive sentences (you need your wits about you) and sometimes in the same sentence. The same sentence can begin describing the thoughts of a character in Morocco and end by describing another in Paris, or Munich or a Czech village. Some sentences jump between multiple consciousnesses.

I found this technique absolutely riveting. It makes reading into a parlour game, a Where’s Wally challenge, a test of the reader’s alertness. I suppose it is also meant to give a panoramic impression of the age, and of the very weird intense atmosphere which united the inhabitants of the entire population of Europe as probably never before, with everyone huddled round their radios or snapped up the latest editions of newspapers to find out whether we were going to war. Thus, again and again throughout the long dense text, characters’ thoughts and feelings and impressions overlap and intermingle.

Sartre sometimes uses James Joyce’s technique of associating certain phrases with certain settings or characters, to evoke their mood or consciousness – but mostly you have to be very alert throughout as it is often only one word which reveals that the text has now jumped from one character to a completely different one – is now in the desert, on the beach, in the city streets, on a plane – and which of its huge cast of characters we are now following.

Generally, all these new characters have one or a few longish (a page, maybe) sections in which to establish their situation and character – after which brief introduction the text freely switches to them at a moment’s notice, for a paragraph, for a few sentences, or even for a few words embedded in a sentence about other characters. Occasionally, what have been established as key words or phrases are blended together in kind of poetic rhapsodies, in fugues which counterpoint a whole host of characters and destinies into webs of words.

Chamberlain was asleep, Mathieu was asleep, the Kabyle put the ladder against the charabanc, hoisted the trunk onto his shoulder, and scrambled up without holding onto the rungs. Ivich was asleep, Daniel swung his legs out of bed, a bell echoed in his head, Pierre looked at the pink and black soles of the Kabyle’s feet.

I found this ‘simultaneous method’ quite spellbinding.

Lunch-time! they had entered the blinding tunnel of mid-day: outside – the sky, white with heat; outside – the dead, white roads, no man’s land, and war: behind the closed shutters, they sat stifling in the heat, Daniel put his napkin on his knees, Hannequin tied his napkin round his neck, Brunet took the paper napkin from the table, Jeannine wheeled Charles into the large and almost empty dining-room with its smudgy windows… (p.101)

I like its profusion, its variety and its sense of the diversity of life!

A happy side-effect of this approach is that the lengthy – the really, really long passages in The Age of Reason in which Mathieu or Daniel or Boris dwelt on the emptiness of their lives, the meaningless of existence and in which they obsessed about the ugliness of their bodies and of everyone else’s bodies, and generally marinaded in disgust and revulsion at life — these are all a lot less in evidence and, when they do occur, are pared back to the bone. Some such passages are still attached to Mathieu, Brunet and a few others, but the overall effect it is far less self-indulgently solipsistic and self-pitying than in the first novel.

Instead of focusing in to create a stickily claustrophobic effect, the text is continually exploding out in multiple directions, jumping across numerous locations, invoking a big cast, creating a sense of openness, breadth, fecundity.

This greater objectivity is indicated in a small but telling moment when Mathieu (35) is telling Odette about the ugly sister of a student of his, Ivich (18), who he’s snogged a few times and might be in a relationship with, is detailing her list of psychological quirks (hates being touched, hates summer, hates her own appearance etc) and, having heard all about it, Odette briskly thinks, ‘A good spanking is what she wants’ (p.23).

And I couldn’t help thinking that a good spanking and being told to grow up is what most of the characters in The Age of Reason wanted.

The characters in order of appearance

I set off imagining it would be a relatively straightforward task to name and give brief thumbnail descriptions of the characters, but soon ran into problems.

Should I include characters who aren’t named or make only fleeting entrances, like the unnamed Arab who puts Maud’s suitcase on the bus roof, or the unnamed steward on the liner, or the unnamed lady sitting next to Hannequin on the train or the unnamed lady who gets Zézette’s signature for a feminist peace petition in the street etc?

Or should I go to the other extreme and only include characters who have substantial speaking parts and whose lives we get to know a bit? I compromised by listing every named character, no matter how brief their appearance.

  • Godesberg, Germany The old gentleman, key to the negotiations, who is revealed to be Neville Chamberlain. Nevile Henderson (British Ambassador to Berlin), Sir Horace Wilson (special emissary from Chamberlain to Hitler). Later attended by Woodhouse.
  • Pravnitz, Czechoslovakia Milan Hlinka, former woodcutter, now schoolteacher of a Sudeten town which is being taken over by the Czech Nazis, is sheltering in his house with his pregnant schoolteacher wife, Anna, and a child, Marikka, sent there by their concerned parents. In the house opposite live the Jägerschmitts, a German family who had fled a few days earlier as a result of Czech persecution, but now return in triumph, knowing that Hitler is about to triumph and that their – the Gis the cermans’ – day has come.
  • South of France Mathieu Delarue is on holiday at Juans-les-Pins with his brother, Jacques, and his comely wife, Odette. In The Age of Reason Jacques gave Mathieu a common-sense lecture about it being time he grew up and assumed his responsibilities, so now Jacques is the mouthpiece for the bourgeois view that the whole crisis is the fault of the Czechs, who are refusing to see reason and must bow down to Herr Hitler’s very reasonable demands (p.92, 95, 96, 178).
  • Paris Maurice is a young, strong working class member of the Communist Party, walking the streets with his shallow girlfriend, Zézette. They bump into Brunet, the tall, strong, mature Communist, one-time friend of Mathieu and inspiration to younger party members (who we know from The Age of Reason). (Brunet bumps into Joseph Mercier, Professor of Natural History, a momentary encounter seen by both.) Later Maurice makes love to Zézette in a hotel bedroom next to Philippe’s room. Next day he leads a protest at the Gare de l’Est, talks to Simon, and Dubech and Laurent. Maurice is mobilised along with Dornier and Bébert. 
  • Paris Stephen Hartley, New York journalist, getting his secretary/wife Sylvia to organise a berth on the last boat leaving France.
  • A sanatorium at Berck-sur-Mer in the Pas-de-Calais Charles is crippled by some disease, has to lie prone on a trolley, refers to able people as ‘the stand-ups’, is cared for by sentimental nurse Jeannine, resents ‘the little Dorliac woman’ who gives the nurses generous tips. On the day of the move he is attended by Madame Louise and finds himself in the transport train next to the irritating practical joker Blanchard.
  • Marseilles Sheep farmer Gros-Louis has come to Marseilles looking for a job. He hitches up with an unnamed Negro for a spell. He meets Mario and Starace, the sailors, they take him to a bar to meet prostitute Daisy, get him drunk, and beat him up down a back alley. Next morning, still bloody, he tries to get work at a depot, but Ribadeau the foreman points out to him that he’s been called up.
  • Rural France Daniel (the suave homosexual from The Age of Reason) is on holiday with his new wife, heavily pregnant Marcelle, one-time lover of Mathieu. He hates the countryside. He despises Marcelle. He is longing for a war to break out and rescue him from his predicament.

‘Oh God, if only war would come!’ A thunderbolt which would shatter this smooth-faced world, plough the countryside into a quagmire, dig shell-holes in the fields, and fashion these flat monotonous lands into the likeness of a storm-tossed sea.’ (p.42)

  • Staying at their hotel is a retired colonel, M. de Lestrange. The hotel-keeper’s son, Émile.
  • Marrakesh, Morocco Supercilious Pierre is on holiday having an affair with Maud Dassignies, a member of Baby’s Lady Orchestra. He despises her. On the boat home, she shares a cramped 3rd class cabin with other band members France, Ruby and Doucette and two unnamed women.
  • Paris Pitteaux is editor of a review named The Pacifist (p.125). His secretary, Irène, lets a young tearaway, Philippe Grésigne into his office to see him. The suggestion is that the boy is a rent boy and Pitteaux had some kind of sex with him, now the boy wants more money. Later Pitteaux is called to the house of General Lacaze, who is Philippe’s step-father, husband of Mme Lacaze, where he meets M. Jardies a mental specialist. Philippe has left a note, stolen 10,000 Francs and run away to make some grand pacifist gesture. The General holds Pitteaux responsible. Philippe goes to see a forger to forge him a passport, stays the night in a cheap hotel and hears Maurice making love to Zézette next door. — Irène lectures her kid brother René who is being mobilised. — Philippe falls asleep in a cafe owned by M. and Mme Cazin. The waiter is Felix.
  • Paris Armand Viguier, 80 years old, is dead. He lies stretched out on his bed among his luxury belongings while Sartre speculates poetically about his life dissipating into the objects around him, into an infinite future etc. He body is attended by a nurse, until an elderly relative, Madame Verchoux, arrives. Mme Lieutier asks the butcher in the shop opposite, M. Désiré, about M. Viguier, joined by Mme Bonnetain. –55
  • Marseilles Sarah, the plump placid friend of Mathieu’s from The Age of Reason, has come south to see her husband, Gomez, with their small son, Pablo who glamorises his father’s warriorhood. For a year earlier Gomez had simply walked out of their Paris apartment, headed to Spain and joined the Republican army. Now he has a week’s leave. Sarah she calls to them to come and hear the Negro singing in the street, the same one Gros-Louis had hung out with for a while earlier.
  • Crévilly, France Daddy Croulard, the old soldier, is instructed by the gendarmerie lieutenant to stick up posters round town calling for the mobilisation of all French adult men. Maublanc, a peasant, along with Chapin, Tournus, Cauchios, Simeon, Poulaille, Fraigneau drive their oxen and carts to the nearest barracks as a result of the mobilisation notices they’d read. Louisa Corneille, sister of the level-crossing guard, fiancée of Jean Matrat, watches them pass. Conversation between Madame Reboulier, Marie, Stephanie the tobacconist’s wife, Jeanne Fraigneau. Later Mother Tremblin, Jeanne, Ursule, the Clapot sisters, Little Rose… — 79
  • Paris A Jewish exile from Austria, Schalom, asks help from Georges Levy, then has a long interview with M. Birnenschatz, who we see wave off his pretty daughter, Ella. Then M. Birnenschatz’s talks to one of his staff, Weiss, who has been called up. Weiss says he is sticking up for Jews but Birnenschatz, although he is a Jewish refugee from Cracow, refuses to acknowledge his Jewishness, insists he is a Frenchman first and foremost.
  • Paris One-eyed Pascal is selling irises and buttercups at the Quai de Passy and watches the stream of cars packed with household goods, of families fleeing Paris.
  • Saint-Flour, France François Hannequin, pharmacist, tells his wife, Espérance Dieulafoy, that he is being mobilised and she fusses about the shirts and socks and boots he’ll need to pack. They meet Madame Calvé and Marie, Charlot the ticket collector and M. Pineau the notary.
  • France Jean Servier is a worker reading the sports page of the newspaper. Lucien Rénier finishes his lunch. François Destutt is a laboratory assistant at the Institut Derrien. René Malleville. Pierre Charnier.— 96
  • England Dawburn, journalist for the Morning Post attends a press conference given by an exhausted Chamberlain.
  • France Georges, a particularly feeble, ill, weak man, puts up with his querulous wife, goes in to see his baby daughter and – with typically Sartrean gloom – foresees her futile life, growing up weak and sickly like him, scorned by his schoolmates, feebly suffering, pointlessly struggling through her wretched existence.
  • Paris Maubert and Thérèse have fun tearing down mobilisation posters from the walls. –101
  • A hotel lobby in Paris Boris and Lola, who we know from The Age of Reason, watch numerous guests packing up and fleeing Paris e.g. Madame Delarive and overhear the conversation of a widow and a beribboned old man blaming the Popular Front and the ‘reds’ for arming Spain in 1936 instead of preparing to confront Herr Hitler.
  • A Paris brothel Philippe, determined to be a pacifist hero and do something significant, gets drunk and ends up in a brothel, where he is tended by kindly Negro prostitute, Flossie, who shows him to her friend,
  • The French government Daladier, Sarrault, Bonnet, Champetier de Ribes, Reynaud, 
  • London Fred watches Mr Chamberlain walk by and feels cheered.
  • Berlin Sportpalast The centrepiece of the Monday 26 September chapter is Hitler giving his speech about Czechoslovakia in which we are shown lots of characters across Europe tuning in, listening and reacting, including Karl, a devoted Nazi.
  • Round a radio are Germaine Chabrol and his wife.
  • Barcelona Gomez listens to the broadcast with comrades Herrera and Tilquin.
  • A bar in Paris where Bruno translates Hitler’s speech to the landlord, the Marseillais, the man from the north, Chomis, Charlier.
  • Mathieu’s flat in Paris His concierge, Madame Garinet.
  • Laon, France Ivich, back in her bourgeois home realises she rather likes her father, the Russian exile M. Serguine. –126
  • A nightclub in Paris Irène is being pestered to have sex by boyfriend Marc, who has been called up. Suddenly she sees Philippe, the boy everyone is looking for, being tended by a handsome Negress. When he leaves, Irène pursues him. Philippe shouts ‘Down with the war,’ is promptly beaten up, and is rescued by Mathieu. Irène begs him to help her take the half-conscious Philippe back to her flat. Being French, they go to bed. Being French, Mathieu has a long soliloquy about being, being in the flesh, being inside someone, being inside another person’s body, mind, memory. And so on.
  • Munich Jan Masaryk, Czech government representative at Munich, is left no option by Daladier and Chamberlain but to hand over the Sudetenland to Hitler. This scene is intercut with a completely different scene in which Ivich is angrily losing her virginity to an unnamed man, and hating every second of it – effectively being raped. So that a woman being raped is counterpointed with Czechoslovakia being betrayed and handed over to Hitler.

The interplay of characters, phrases and perceptions overlapping one character into another, is never totally incomprehensible (as it often is in the grand-daddy of this kind of experimentalism, James Joyce) and gives a wonderfully musical sense of counterpoint, of melodies or rhythms interweaving and interplaying. I found it immensely enjoyable.

Aloneness, freedom and decision

Sartre’s more thoughtful characters are oppressed by their self-awareness. They are always horrifyingly aware of themselves looking at themselves, barely able to keep up the pretence of existence, always at risk of drowning in an oppressive flood of impressions, of things.

I come upon nothing but my own self. Scarcely that: a succession of small impulses, darting centrifugally here and there, but no focus. And yet there is a focus: that focus is my self, and the horror lies there. (p.114)

Being a self is horrific in Sartre’s worldview.

And what prompts this nauseous sense of existing in the various characters, is the oppressive extent to which, at so many points, they feel utterly abandoned, adrift, alone.

Mathieu stopped and gazed up at it. A quite ordinary and unprivileged sky. And myself a nondescript entity beneath that vast indifferent arc. (p.296)

This is a key psychological basis of Sartre’s existentialist philosophy. Every adult human is completely alone and completely free – no ties bind us, only what we choose. Everyone must decide for themselves, without ‘bad faith’ i.e. without blaming circumstances or upbringing or this or that political or cultural situation. Our decisions make us who we are, but we can only fully grasp this, and the crushing responsibility it brings, once we have psychologically experienced our terrible aloneness.

  • ‘We are now alone.’ (p.6) Milan
  • He felt alone (p.9) Milan
  • ‘Now we are quite alone.’ (p.10) Milan
  • A man felt isolated (p.13) Maurice
  • Daniel thought: ‘I am alone’. (p.43) Daniel
  • At the moment he was alone. (p.96) Maurice
  • … they are alone upon the earth.. (p.99) Pierre on the Arabs
  • Gros-Louis was glad of their company, but he still felt solitary. (p.135)
  • … she was quite alone… (p.140) Maud, as she masturbates the captain of the liner
  • He was no longer alone (p.159) Philippe in the boarding house
  • For the moment he was there, an innocent, ugly little boy with a diminutive shadow at his feet, alone in the world… (p.196)
  • So you are quite alone?’ ‘Quite.’ He repeated: ‘Quite alone in the world.’ (p.209) Charles talking to Catherine in the evacuation train
  • The Moroccan climbed over the cracked soil of Spain, he thought of Tangier, and he felt alone. (p.220) Soon afterwards the Moroccan is shot dead by a Belgian
  • He was alone in the night, so small and solitary, he knew and understood nothing, like a man about to die. (p.250) Gros-Louis, the illiterate peasant
  • There was no longer anyone in the world but Karl and his Führer. The Führer was speaking in front of a large swastika’d standard, he was speaking to Karl, and to him alone. (p.271)
  • She turned to her mother, to Ivy: but they had receded. She could still see them but not touch them. Paris also had drifted out of reach, the light from the windows fell dead upon the carpet. Contacts between things and people were imperceptibly disintegrating, she was alone in the world with that voice. (p.273) [Ella]
  • He was alone on this bridge, alone in the world, accountable to no man. (p.308) [Mathieu]
  • I’m alone in the street, surrounded by sleeping people, ignored by everyone. (p.310)  [Irene]
  • She felt utterly alone. (p.360) [Maud after peace is declared]

At some point or other, all the characters realise their solitude, alone on the surface of a friendless planet, confronting their futures, their destinies completely unaided.

A man alone, forgotten, devoured by darkness, confronted that fragile eternity. (p.297)

In Sartre’s philosophy, we are each of us completely free, utterly free to make decisions according to our own sense of values – and our decisions therefore define us. And the responsibility, the implications of this radical, total freedom, is crushing.

  • ‘I am free,’ he said suddenly. And his joy shrivelled into horror. (p.299)
  • I am free, he said to himself, and his mouth was dry… Freedom is exile, and I cam condemned to be free. (p.308)
  • I shall be my own witness, I am accountable to no one but myself. (p.337)

If there are any character developments (and for the most part there aren’t: Boris hates Lola, Ivich hates Mathieu, Daniel hates Mathieu etc) the two main ones are:

  1. Mathieu with a start realises he is free, but realises that the nature of that ‘freedom’ is completely unlike what he expected: he expected a sense of deliverance and joy, but instead he experiences terror and physical anxiety. He is free to do anything. (In fact, of course, he doesn’t do much; he sleeps with Irène and volunteers for the army. Big deal.)
  2. Daniel has a religious conversion. Being French, and so Catholic, this is expressed in the same language of extremity, the same hysterical exaggeration, as the other characters’ ‘existential’ musings. To be precise, Daniel becomes aware of being seen, not by a human, but by some unknown see-er who can see right into his soul. And that fixes his mobile tremulous over-intelligent personality. It fixes and transfixes him. It objectifies him. He experiences a massive relief.

Sarte Bullshit bingo

As with The Age of Reason, I began chuckling every time I read characteristic Sartrean key words – despair, anguish etc – and burst out laughing whenever one of his stricken characters had another outbreak of Weltschmerz and nausea – like the numerous episodes where Mathieu and Daniel, in particular, are likely to completely lose their sense of themselves and become pure looks, observing but empty consciousnesses, at one with the surrounding objects, their futures foreknown, foretold, suspended, empty, futile etc etc.

Key terms in Sartre Bullshit Bingo would have to include:

  • nauseam, vomit, slime, sick, disgust, contempt, revulsion, anguish, hate, despise, horror, dismal, white (as in the blinding white glare of the noonday sun), insect (people routinely feel like one; Hitler is described as having an insect face)

Prose poetry

You might not expect it from his reputation, but Sartre is a surprisingly poetic writer. A lot of the rhapsody is negative (slime and vomit and bodily functions) or describes rather esoteric psychological insights into the nature of death, destiny, and his persistent hallucination that the objects around us are watching us, respond to our thoughts, embody our moods.

But in other places, especially in the many descriptions of the sea associated with the Mathieu sections, Sartre is a swift and vivid writer of pure prose poetry.

Odette returned with a smile. It wasn’t the conventional smile that he expected, but a special smile just for him; in one instant the sea had reappeared, the lightly heaving sea, the Chinese shadows speeding across the water, the green aloes and the green pine-needles that carpeted the ground, the stippled shadows of the tall pines, the dense white heat, the smell of resin, all the richness of a September morning at Juan-les-Pins. (p.94)

Summary

Le Sursis is well worth reading:

  1. As a vivid picture of the atmosphere of France, and to some extent the rest of Europe, during that turbulent week in September 1938.
  2. As a fiction in its own right, especially the experimental use of a vast cast of characters whose thoughts and actions blend into each other in such an arresting challenging way.
  3. As an insight into the psychological basis of existentialism, which comes across as the codification of the very peculiar psychological states experienced by its inventor, M. Jean-Paul Sartre who suffers an oppressive sense of self-consciousness, which veers from feeling so emptied-out that he becomes simply a seeing object, a stone which perceives, through to the other extreme of becoming so exquisitely over-sensitive to the suffocating existence of the world around him, and of his own strangling self-consciousness, that he wants to stop it, to cease being so self-conscious, to become as senseless as a stone. Hence the passage where Mathieu looks over the parapet of the Pont-Neuf in Paris and wants to jump into the Seine (pp.308-309), to cease, imagining himself already dead, imagining himself in the past tense (and so on and so on).

Above all, though, it is a good indicator of the wretchedly demoralised state of French culture in the late 1930s which goes a long way to explaining why France surrendered so easily when she was finally attacked by the Nazis in June 1940 – surrendered and quickly set up the Vichy regime which enthusiastically collaborated with the Germans.

Mathieu, Boris, Daniel, Ivich, Philippe – they all lack backbone, spine, a real sense of purpose. When the test came, they all collapsed like a pack of cards. The book is a powerful portrait of a demoralised nation.

Credit

Le Sursis by Jean-Paul Sartre was published by Editions Gallimard in 1945. This translation by Eric Sutton was published as The Reprieve by Hamish Hamilton in 1947. The Reprieve was issued as a Penguin paperback in 1961. All references are to the 1976 Penguin paperback reprint, which I bought 40 years ago for 85p.

Related links

Reviews of other books by Jean-Paul Sartre

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Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (1938)

Potted biography

Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair to a civil servant in India in 1903. The family moved back to England in 1907 and sent young Eric, first to prep school near Eastbourne, then to Eton, where he met other boys who were to be among the literary luminaries of his generation. In other words he was brought up to be the toffiest of the toffs. However, unlike most of his literary contemporaries, Eric decided not to go on to Oxford or Cambridge but instead enlisted in the Indian Imperial Police and returned to Burma. Here he served from 1922 until 1927, wielding great responsibility for large provinces and huge numbers of ‘natives’.

Slowly he lost his faith in the Imperial mission, and came to dislike his role. One contemporary said he had an unusual sympathy for the natives and went to the unprecedented lengths of learning their language. He had a taste for the underdog and a dislike of power.

So he quit the Imperial Police and moved back to Europe, staying with friends and family and trying to make a living as a writer. In the late 1920s he spent two years in Paris, struggling to write and working in the kitchen of a big hotel; and he developed a taste for dressing in rags and going on the tramp, sleeping in the roughest parts of London and investigating the capital’s poorest doss houses and hostels. He converted these experiences into his first book, a long work of reportage, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). There followed a novel based on his time in Burma – Burmese Days (1934) and another which recycled his experiences sleeping rough in London and working in the hop fields of Kent – A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935). Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) exaggerates Orwell’s own taste for slumming it into the caricature of the alienated intellectual, Gordon Comstock, a failed poet consumed by bilious hatred of the modern world.

By the mid-1930s Orwell was established as a novelist, an essayist and a writer of reportage, a presence, a name, contributing overtly political left-wing articles to a variety of magazines and journals. No sooner had he delivered the manuscript of Keep the Aspidistra Flying in January 1936, than his publisher, Victor Gollancz, suggested he write a book on the social conditions in the north of England, badly affected by the international Depression.

Orwell readily agreed and set off to live among working class people in Wigan, Barnsley and Sheffield from January to March 1936. He spent the summer working up his diary and notes of the trip into the first part of Wigan Pier, which consists of documentary reportage of the conditions he saw, the wretched housing and the unbelievably tough life of a coal miner. Then he turned to writing part two of the book,ich is an odd autobiographical account of his own personal development as a Socialist followed by a quirky set of ‘arguments’ in favour of ‘Socialism’. I recently reviewed this and made clear, I hope, that, as contemporary critics pointed out, Orwell nowhere in his hundred-page defence of Socialism actually defines what socialism is – a major Fail – beyond some high-sounding truisms about it representing Justice and Decency.

So Orwell brought with him to Spain:

  • the self-confidence of the Eton-educated Englishman
  • the hard-headed experience gained from being an officer in the British Imperial police for five years – which meant a familiarity with weapons, drill, commanding men, and swift decision-making
  • his abilities as a writer, in particular his talent for detailed factual description and for vivid pen portraits of individuals
  • his passionate support of Socialism which was, however, ideologically and politically naive and undeveloped

The Spanish Civil War

While he was working on the manuscript of Wigan Pier there was a military coup in Spain against the left-wing democratically elected government. On 18 July 1936 generals in the Spanish army co-ordinated military risings in Spain’s African colony of Morocco and throughout barracks on the mainland. However, not all the risings worked, some were repressed or didn’t take place, so after a confusing few days the generals were left in control of Morocco and the western half of Spain, leaving the capital, Madrid, the second city, Barcelona up in Catalonia, and most of the south and east of the country in government or ‘republican’ hands. Both sides thought the thing would be over in days, either the coup would be suppressed or it would succeed, but in the event it did neither. In both parts of the country there began to be reprisals against the ‘opponents’: in the parts controlled by the ‘nationalist’ generals, trade unionists, communists, writers and subversives were rounded up and executed; in ‘republican’ zones rumours soon abounded of churches being burned down, priests executed and nuns raped (though the raped nuns stories have to this day never been proved).

Both sides hardened their positions, with the generals leading military assaults designed to expand their territory. But the government was hampered from the start by fear of their own supporters; they delayed handing out arms and ammunition to whatever forces remained loyal. It was the anarchist and socialist trade unions which immediately rallied their members, and armed them with whatever was to hand.

The generals had risen because they were terrified that the republican government was going to push through socialist and even communist reforms. They mounted the coup against the leftists and in the name of the Catholic Church and a mystical idea of an older, nobler Spain. But their coup had the unintended consequence of triggering the very revolution they feared: in republican areas workers rose up, seized their farms and factories, implemented workers’ council and collectivisation. In the cities bourgeois dress and even forms of speech disappeared, socialist, communist and anarchist flags appeared everywhere. Young men and women dressed like revolutionaries and addressed each other as comrade.

Almost immediately the conflict was internationalised when fascist Italy and Nazi Germany spotted the potential of having an authoritarian ally in the western Mediterranean and the Germans, in particular, with their methodical approach, saw the opportunity for testing out the military hardware they had been developing – tanks and planes. For their part the two western democracies, France and Britain, shied away from involvement. I’ve recently read Antony Beevor’s outstanding history of the Spanish Civil War where Beevor he makes it shamefully clear that many in the highest political circles in England supported the military coup. Thus it was that England led the democracies (including America) in imposing a ban on arms exports to the Spanish government. In the long run this lack of foreign support for the elected government was to guarantee the success of the military coup – but it turned out to be an extremely long-drawn-out conflict, a bitterly fought civil war which lasted three long bloody years, until April 1939, costing upwards of a million civilian and military lives.

The international brigades

Quite quickly the Left in England responded to the outbreak of the war. They lobbied the government to intervene (futilely, as it turned out), but many left-wing organisations also called on volunteers to go out to Spain and ‘fight fascism’. In fact, volunteers streamed in from all across Europe and by just a month into the war, had begun to be organised into what became known as the International Brigades.

While he was finishing the manuscript of Wigan Pier Orwell was also making enquiries about volunteering. The main conduit for volunteers, the British Communist Party, was doubtful about his party loyalty, so Orwell secured a letter of recommendation from the Independent Labour Party to their representative in Spain, John McNair, who was co-ordinating British volunteers in Barcelona. Thus it was that, instead of being channelled into one of the communist-backed International Brigades, Orwell found himself being steered towards the Spanish militia associated with the British Independent Labour Party – the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (in Spanish the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista or POUM).

This was to be decisive in Orwell’s experience of the war, in his subsequent account of it, and in all his subsequent writings. For although the generals’ rising had triggered a revolutionary situation in the cities of republican Spain, what nobody knew at the time was that Stalin’s Communist International had instructed the communist party in Spain to suppress the genuine workers’ revolution which had happened on the streets.

The reason is simple. By 1936 Stalin was very concerned at the rise of Hitler and the formation across central Europe of the Fascist axis of Germany and Italy. He was scared of being attacked. He needed allies. Stalin had been assiduously cultivating the French with a view to making an alliance and was also feeling out to the more reluctant British. It was true he wanted the proto-Fascist Spanish generals to be defeated, but he was just as concerned that a true Bolshevik revolution in Spain would scare France and Britain further to the right, forcing them to come to some kind of understanding with the Fascist powers, and thus effectively setting all of Europe against him.

It was vital to Stalin not to scare France and Britain. Thus from the first the communist machine put out the message that a limited and bourgeois revolution was to be supported, but that all genuinely revolutionary elements should be suppressed. In the context of Spain this largely meant the very large political and social movement of Anarchism. In Spain Anarchism meant, in practice, that workers controlled loose federations of farms or industries which they organised individually. It was form of socialism but completely and proudly without the idea of one, authoritarian, central control: which was, of course, the form Stalin’s totalitarian regime took in the USSR.

Orwell in Spain

This was the complex and cynical political situation Orwell found himself in when he crossed the French border and arrived in Barcelona, introduced himself to McNair and was inducted into the POUM militia. His book describes the astonishing atmosphere in revolutionary Barcelona, the lack of beggars, prostitutes or ostentatious luxury in the streets. A whole host of issues around poverty and decency, which readers of his novels and reportage would have been familiar with, had here come true. He was dazzled.

It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ‘Senior’ or ‘Don’ or even ‘Usted’; everyone called everyone else ‘Comrade’ and ‘Thou’, and said ‘Salud!’ instead of ‘Buenos dias’. Tipping was forbidden by law; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and all the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loudspeakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no ‘well-dressed’ people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving.

Orwell describes conditions in the militia barracks (which had been renamed the Lenin Barracks), the pathetic training and almost complete lack of arms. Then the journey up to the ‘front’ near Zaragosa, and the squalor, cold and boredom of life in a trench zigzagging along ridges about a mile away from the fascist trenches.

Orwell was at the Aragon front for 115 days without break during which there was little or no fighting and certainly no campaigns by either side. His eye for the filth and squalor (human excrement everywhere) and descriptions of everyone’s attempts to keep warm would ring bells with anyone who’s read Down and Out or Clergyman’s Daughter.

We were near the front line now, near enough to smell the characteristic smell of war – in my experience a smell of excrement and decaying food.

In February Orwell was sent with other POUM militiamen 50 miles to join the army besieging Huesca. The main struggle is with the cold and, once Spring arrives, with the infestation of lice. Throughout the book there are those characteristic sparkles of Orwell’s grim humour.

I have had a big experience of body vermin of various kinds, and for sheer beastliness the louse beats everything I have encountered. Other insects, mosquitoes for instance, make you suffer more, but at least they aren’t resident vermin. The human louse somewhat resembles a tiny lobster, and he lives chiefly in your trousers. Short of burning all your clothes there is no known way of getting rid of him. Down the seams of your trousers he lays his glittering white eggs, like tiny grains of rice, which hatch out and breed families of their own at horrible speed. I think the pacifists might find it helpful to illustrate their pamphlets with enlarged photographs of lice. Glory of war, indeed! In war all soldiers are lousy, at least when it is warm enough. The men who fought at Verdun, at Waterloo, at Flodden, at Senlac, at Thermopylae – every one of them had lice crawling over his testicles.

There is one sizeable military manoeuvre, when his troop were ordered into a ‘holding attack’ on Huesca, designed to draw the Fascist troops away from an Anarchist attack on the Jaca road. Orwell vividly describes the tension and confusion as his group of fifteen captured a Fascist position, are disappointed to find no guns or much-needed ammunition but stumble across a beautiful telescope, when the fascists counter-attack and Orwell and his men are forced to pull back to their own lines in such confusion that they leave the telescope behind.

Afterwards we learned that the action had been a success, as such things go. It was merely a raid to make the Fascists divert troops from the other side of Huesca, where the Anarchists were attacking again. I had judged that the Fascists had thrown a hundred or two hundred men into the counter-attack, but a deserter told us later on that it was six hundred. I dare say he was lying – deserters, for obvious reasons, often try to curry favour. It was a great pity about the telescope. The thought of losing that beautiful bit of loot worries me even now.

Finally, in April 1937, he was granted leave to return to Barcelona where he rendezvoused with his still-new wife (they’d only got married in June of the previous year) on the 27th April. Orwell was horrified by the change that had come over the city. Gone was the revolutionary zeal, back were top hats and fur coats and bootblacks and tipping. On a superficial street level, the revolution seemed already to be defeated.

The street fighting of May 1937

Also there was a poisonously tense atmosphere. The political rivalry between the anarchists, including the related group of the POUM, and the steadily power-grabbing communists was coming to a head. On 3 May 1937 Orwell was crossing the foyer of his wife’s hotel when a friend told him that ‘it’ had started.

‘It’ was a week or so of street fighting that broke out between the various left-wing factions when a contingent of Civil Guards tried to storm the Barcelona telephone exchange, which was held by the anarcho-syndicalist CNT union. Shots were fired and suddenly barricades went up all over town and communists, anarchists, socialists and Civil Guards all started shooting at each other.

From a journalistic point of view, Orwell was extraordinarily lucky to be in the right place at the right time. He hurried down the Rampla, the central avenue on Barcelona, to POUM headquarters and was handed one of the handful of rifles available, and then took his place on the barricades. He describes how the cafe next door to POUM headquarters had been occupied by Civil Guards who build their own barricade and how, after an exchange of fire, Orwell’s respected superior, Georges Kopp, negotiated a ceasefire. Later Orwell was posted to the cinematograph opposite POUM headquarters, a building which had two ornamental domes on its roof which commanded a good view up and down the Rambla. Rumours fly around, and at night there is the sound of gunfire and distant explosions. Eventually, a ceasefire of sorts is negotiated and the barricades begin to come down. Orwell’s eye witness account is a priceless piece of social history, not only of events, but of mood and atmosphere.

No one who was in Barcelona then, or for months later, will forget the horrible atmosphere produced by fear, suspicion, hatred, censored newspapers, crammed jails, enormous food queues, and prowling gangs of armed men.

Being shot

With a tense semblance of normality restored, Orwell is ordered to return to the front. Here, just a week or so later, on 20 May, Orwell, back in the republican trenches, was shot through the neck by a nationalist sniper. He gives the most extraordinarily vivid account of being shot.

Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion. There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all round me, and I felt a tremendous shock — no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shrivelled up to nothing. The sand-bags in front of me receded into immense distance. I fancy you would feel much the same if you were struck by lightning. I knew immediately that I was hit, but because of the seeming bang and flash I thought it was a rifle nearby that had gone off accidentally and shot me. All this happened in a space of time much less than a second. The next moment my knees crumpled up and I was falling, my head hitting the ground with a violent bang which, to my relief, did not hurt. I had a numb, dazed feeling, a consciousness of being very badly hurt, but no pain in the ordinary sense.

There is a long, sober and fascinating description of what happens to you as a casualty in war: the panic of friends and colleagues; the scrabbled medic doing what he can; being carried  by sweating men down terrible paths to the field hospital. All the time he was convinced he was going to die. But he doesn’t. The wound is cleaned and dressed and he is transferred on to several hospitals before arriving back at Barcelona.

But God, all the politics apart, Orwell has such an eye for detail and such a vivid forceful way of expressing himself.

At Monzon Hospital the doctor did the usual tongue-pulling and mirror — thrusting business, assured me in the same cheerful manner as the others that I should never have a voice again, and signed my certificate. While I waited to be examined there was going on inside the surgery some dreadful operation without anaesthetics – why without anaesthetics I do not know. It went on and on, scream after scream, and when I went in there were chairs flung about and on the floor were pools of blood and urine.

On the run

Here he arrived in a town transformed out of recognition. In his absence, on 16 June 1937, the POUM had been declared an illegal organisation. Its leaders had been arrested and, though Orwell didn’t know this when he wrote, taken off by the Soviet NKVD to a newly established prison, and tortured before being executed. His wife tells him all this in a hurried sotto voce conversation in the hotel foyer before hustling him out and Orwell has to go on the run. They make an attempt to free his former commander, Georges Kopp, from prison where he is now confined, Orwell going to the lengths of personally tracking down and pleading with the colonel commanding engineering operations in the Army of the East in his office – but with no success. Anyone connected with the POUM is condemned. They have to look for their own safety.

After a week or so hiding with other fugitives, his wife manages to get the help they need to smuggle them both onto a train, on 23 June 1937, and straight to the border with France, where, mercifully, they are allowed to cross and are free.

Back to sleepy England

And so slowly back to England, recuperating from the physical and mental exertions of his 6-month trip. And there to face the biggest challenge of all when the orthodox communist party of Great Britain, along with all its allied writers and editors and magazines, refuses to believe his eye-witness account about the communist suppression of revolution in Spain. He saw at first hand, the lying and deceit practiced by numerous left-wing magazines and intellectuals and realised how totalitarian regimes don’t just lie, the systematically control reality – and, worse, many educated people who should know better, go along with their systematic distortions.

This was the seed, the germ, from which the horrifying total mind control depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four was to grow.

The lasting impact

Soon after arriving home Orwell’s health broke down and he wrote part of Homage to Catalonia in a sanatorium in Kent, some in Morocco where he was advised to go to escape the damp English climate. It was here that he followed the classic Stalinist show trial held for the POUM leaders (and himself and his wife) in Barcelona, all of whom were accused of Trotskyism, sabotage, treason and so on.

Victor Gollancz, founded of New Left Books, refused to publish Catalonia thus damning him in Orwell’s eyes as a member of the Stalinist intelligentsia. It was published by Warburgs in April 1938. The Spanish Civil War still had one long bloody year left to run but already it was clear to informed opinion that the republicans would lose. Like most of Orwell’s books Catalonia didn’t sell well, shifting only 900 copies by the time the Second World War broke out.

From now onwards his writing would have a much more informed sense of what socialism could mean in practice, but also of the terrifying reality of a totalitarian society, the reality of repression, torture and execution and of pitiless political struggle, which threatened all the common decencies he held so sacred.

This sense of fighting for what was good and decent in English society and culture was to underpin many of the essays he subsequently wrote, especially once the great European war everyone had been fearing finally broke out in September 1939.

And Spain…

After describing his perilous mission to meet the senior army officer who might be able to release his friend Georges Kopp from prison, Orwell recalls how, when he finally admits that both men served in the POUM, the officer stepped back with alarm on his face. Absolutely everyone was being brainwashed by communist propaganda that the POUM were traitors, Trotskyites and fascist spies. However, right at the end of the interview, though he has visibly failed in  his mission to get Kopp released there is a slight pause… and then the Spanish officer shakes his hand. It is a small but moving gesture. And it reminds Orwell of the many acts of generosity and nobility he has seen among the Spanish and Catalans.

I record this, trivial though it may sound, because it is somehow typical of Spain – of the flashes of magnanimity that you get from Spaniards in the worst of circumstances. I have the most evil memories of Spain, but I have very few bad memories of Spaniards. I only twice remember even being seriously angry with a Spaniard, and on each occasion, when I look back, I believe I was in the wrong myself. They have, there is no doubt, a generosity, a species of nobility, that do not really belong to the twentieth century. It is this that makes one hope that in Spain even Fascism may take a comparatively loose and bearable form. Few Spaniards possess the damnable efficiency and consistency that a modern totalitarian state needs.

General Franco’s regime was to endure until the dictator’s death in 1975, but although conservative and repressive in the extreme, Orwell was right in that it never approached anything like the genocidal horrors of Hitler’s Germany.

George Orwell in Catalonia with POUM militia

George Orwell (the tall one) in Catalonia with POUM militia

Related links

All Orwell’s major works are available online on a range of websites. Although it’s not completely comprehensive, I like the layout of the texts provided by the University of Adelaide Orwell website.

George Orwell’s books

1933 – Down and Out in Paris and London
1934 – Burmese Days
1935 – A Clergyman’s Daughter
1936 – Keep the Aspidistra Flying
1937 – The Road to Wigan Pier
1938 – Homage to Catalonia
1939 – Coming Up for Air
1941 – The Lion and the Unicorn
1945 – Animal Farm
1949 – Nineteen Eighty-Four

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by Simon on August 8, 2017  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on August 8, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/08/08/homage-to-catalonia-george-orwell/

Cause For Alarm by Eric Ambler (1938)

It seemed to me that the train had started to make a curious thumping noise. I tried to separate the noise, identify it, and realised that it was the sound of the blood pumping in my head. I knew suddenly that I was scared, scared stiff. (p.208)

I like this best of the four Ambler thrillers I’ve read so far. It’s longer and takes longer to get going but the time is well spent slowly establishing the character of the first-person narrator, Nick Marlow (no relation to Philip – popular surname!). He is engaged to career-woman girlfriend, Claire, has difficulties finding a job after he’s made redundant, and it is with relief that he accepts a job with a Wolverhampton engineering company – the Spartacus Machine Tool Company – to run their Milan office, simply on the basis that he happens to speak Italian.

According to his autobiography, Here Lies, Ambler completed Cause For Alarm in an out-of-season hotel in the French Alps which was so cold that the owners heated up bricks on the hotel stove, wrapped them in newspaper and distributed them to guests. Ambler wrote the final parts of the novel with a hot brick in his lap and another on his feet. (Here Lies, p.133)

Everyman

It isn’t that this slow run-up establishes a character of any interest or depth – he comes over as similar to the hot-headed, impetuous and rather dim narrator of Epitaph for a Spy – he isn’t as interesting as the narrator of Ashenden nor painted as well as the lead characters in that finely observant book – no, it’s more that his boring conversations with people in the Birmingham office and the banal letters to and from his girlfriend, Claire, establish him as normal, his values as normal, our values, humdrum English values: completely honest, respecting the authorities, hassled by anxieties about a job and career, worried about his relationship – the everyday stuff of the man on the Clapham omnibus.

Trouble in Italy

As soon as he arrives in Milan he finds himself surrounded by mysteries: why has business correspondence been ignored and stuffed in a drawer? why is the office manager Bellinetti so scornful of him and tailing him at night? why is the pretty secretary in the office an idiot who can’t even type? how could his predecessor, Ferning, afford to live in a vast luxurious apartment? was Ferning’s death really a road accident? when he visits a client in Genoa it is made clear that he will have to bribe him to keep the contract – is that acceptable? what are the motives of the American-speaking Russian, Zaleshoff, whose office is on the floor below? what are the motives for the creepy Colonel Vagas who wears make-up and claims to be working for the Yugoslav government and who offers him a bribe to let him know what machines are being supplied to the Italian government? why do the police confiscate then ‘lose’ his passport?

An innocent man

Abroad turns out to be full of dodgy foreigners. Marlow tries to navigate these murky waters by the light of his plain, common-sense values, values he shares with plucky Claire, as revealed in their letters to each other. But the skill of this novel more than its predecessors is the in-depth way it shows you how these lights and values are not enough. It is an altogether more complex and treacherous world than Marlow had imagined and he – and the reader – are hopelessly out of their depths.

Some plot

For example,

  • Colonel Vagas offers him a bribe to send him copies of Spartacus’s monthly orders – the same bribe he was paying his murdered predecessor, Ferning.
  • But Zaleshoff accurately predicts this is only bait for, once Marlow has sent a report or two, Vagas will have enough evidence to blackmail him into doing significantly more work, namely writing additional reports about everything he sees and overhears as he goes about his legitimate visits to Italian munitions factories.Turning him into a spy.
  • And Vagas is able to ‘persuade’ Marlow to do this because he has influence over Italian businessmen including one Commendatore Bernabò who can sign contracts with Spartacus – for a fee ie bribe.
  • But this level of corruption isn’t all, as Zaleshoff explains that Vagas isn’t Yugoslav at all, but a German spy, one of many making sure Mussolini’s Italy is keeping up its part of the Rome-Berlin Axis.
  • And so Zaleshoff makes Marlow a counter-offer ie Marlow should take Vagas’s bribe, accept the money (and thus find the way made easy to lucrative contracts for his firm) but also accept payment from Zaleshoof for passing on to Vagas carefully faked reports from Italian munitions factories, reports Zaleshoff has carefully tailored to ring alarm bells among Vagas’s bosses in Berlin that the Italians have secret plans they’re concealing from the Nazis.
  • And this level isn’t everything, or hasn’t captured the full picture, since even Zaleshoff is taken by surprise when Vagas’s own wife ends up betraying Vagas to the OVRA, the Italian version of the Gestapo who are, of course, on the lookout for any anti-Italian activity.

And thus, barely has Marlow begun his life as a double-agent, reluctantly browbeaten into agreeing to all these deals and counter-deals, all the time planning to send his letter of resignation and simply return home, before OVRA raid Vagas’s home, the Spartacus offices and Marlow’s hotel room, and he finds himself a wanted man, on the run, a price on his head!

Zaleshoff

The most sympathetic characters Marlow encounters are Andreas Zaleshoff and his sister, Tamara, the KGB agents. They are more or less the only sane, honest, reliable people in the book. This is an extraordinary imaginative position to take at the end of the 1930s which had seen Stalin’s consolidation of power and the gruesome Moscow Show Trials. Then again, he’s meant to be a Russian brought up in America thus giving him better cover but making him an odd character to listen to, a KGB agent overflowing with 1930s slang; he took it on the lam, he’s darned luck, you’re the mug, don’t be a sap, nice work pal.

The last third of the book is an extended flight across north Italy to the border with Yugoslavia , the story of Marlow on the run and led every step of the way by a superhumanly strong, cunning and, above all, decent, honest and kind, Zaleshoff. It climaxes in the strange encounter with the deranged mathematician Beronelli in a mountain cottage blocked in with snow. Turns out Marlow studied engineering using the textbook written by this famous mathematician but when Beronelli denounced Fascist intimidation and bullying he was thrown out of the university, banned from teaching anywhere, and ended up having a nervous breakdown. He is taken to a mountain retreat by his loving daughter to get away from the craziness of the world and this is where Zaleshoff and Marlow stumble across them, exhausted and freezing high in the mountains, only a few kilometers from the border and freedom.

Zaleshoff says Beronelli’s retreat into madness is the only escape for a hyper-rational man faced with a world which has itself gone mad. In fact…

Politics

Confirming that Ambler’s deployment of a sympathetic KGB agent as the saviour in not one but two novels is no accident, Alarm contains several passages of ripe anti-capitalist editorialising.

I said, ‘someone’s got to do the job.’
[Zaleshoff] laughed, but without good humour. ‘The stock reply according to the gospel of King Profit. Industry has no other end or purpose than the satisfaction of the business man engaged in it. Demand is sacred. It may be a demand for high explosives to slaughter civilians with or one for chemical fertilisers, it may be for shells or it may be for saucepans, it may be for jute machinery for an Indian sweat-shop or it may be for prams, it’s all one. There’s no difference. Your business man has no other responsibility but to make profits for himself and his shareholders.’
‘And that’s nothing to do with me.’
‘Of course it isn’t,’ he rejoined sarcastically, ‘you’re only the guy that makes it possible. But you also may be the guy that gets squashed to a paste when those shells and high explosives start going off – you and your wife and kids.’  (1984 Hodder & Stoughton hardback, page 183)

There are three page-long screeds against Big Business and in favour of changing human nature by changing the system people are raised in from one of exploitation to one of justice (pp.  183, 215, 304). All put into the communist Zaleshoff’s mouth, of course. I wonder if the über-Imperialist John Buchan read any of Ambler’s books before his death in 1940 and whether his comments are recorded.

Movie

MGM paid Ambler $3,000 for the movie rights but the book was never filmed (Here Lies, p.137). There is a 1951 noir film titled Cause For Alarm, but it is nothing to do with the Ambler novel.

Related lnks

Cover of the first US edition of Cause For Alarm

Cover of the first US edition of Cause For Alarm

Eric Ambler’s novels

  • The Dark Frontier (1936) British scientist gets caught up in a revolution in an East European country while trying to find and destroy the secret of the first atomic bomb. Over-the-top parody.
  • Uncommon Danger (1937) British journalist Kenton gets mixed up with the smuggling of Russian plans to invade Romania and seize its oil, in which the Russian or KGB agent Zaleshoff is the good guy against a freelance agent, Saridza, working for an unscrupulous western oil company. Cartoony.
  • Epitaph for a Spy (1938) Hungarian refugee and language teacher Josef Vadassy, on holiday in the south of France, is wrongfully accused of being a spy and is given three days by the police to help them find the real agent among a small group of eccentric hotel guests. Country house murder.
  • Cause for Alarm (1938) Engineer Nick Marlow is hired to run the Milan office of a British engineering company which is supplying the Italian government with munitions equipment, only to be plunged into a world of espionage, counter-espionage, and then forced to go on the run from the sinister Italian Gestapo, aided by Zaleshoff, the KGB agent from Danger. Persuasive.
  • The Mask of Dimitrios (1939) Detective writer Charles Latimer sets out on a quest to find the true story behind the dead gangster, Dimitrios Makropoulos, whose dossier he is shown by the head of Istanbul police, discovering more than he bargained for in the process.
  • Journey into Fear (1940) The war has begun and our enemies have hired an assassin to kill Mr Graham, the English engineer who is helping to upgrade the Turkish fleet. The head of Turkish security gets Graham a berth on a steamer heading to Italy but the enemy agent has followed him. Possibly the best of the six.
  • Judgment on Deltchev (1952) Playwright Foster is sent by a newspaper to report on the show trial of a fallen politician, Deltchev, in an unnamed East European country, and gets caught up in a sinister and far-reaching conspiracy.
  • The Schirmer Inheritance (1953) Young American lawyer George Carey is tasked with finding relatives who may be eligible to receive the large inheritance of an old lady who died without heirs. Because she comes of immigrant stock the task takes him on a tour of European archives – in Paris, Cologne, Geneva, Athens, Salonika – where he discovers the legacy of the Nazis lingering on into the murky world of post-War Greek politics.
  • The Night-Comers (1956) Engineer Steve Fraser is preparing to leave the newly independent Dutch colony of Sunda after a three-year project when he and his Eurasian girlfriend get caught up in a military coup. Trapped by the rebels in their apartment because it is in the same building as the strategically-important radio station, they witness at first hand the machinations of the plotters and slowly realise that all is not what it seems.
  • Passage of Arms (1959) An American couple on a Far East cruise, naively agree to front what appears to be a small and simple, one-off gun-smuggling operation, but end up getting into serious trouble. A thorough and persuasive and surprisingly light-hearted fiction, the least spy-ish and maybe the best Ambler novel so far.
  • The Light of Day (1962) Small-time con man Arthur Simpson gets caught up in a plan by professional thieves to steal jewels from the famous Seraglio Museum in Istanbul, all the time acting as an inside man for the Turkish authorities. An enjoyable comedy-thriller.
  • A Kind of Anger (1964) Journalist Piet Maas is tasked with tracking down a beautiful woman who is the only witness to the murder of an exiled Iraqi colonel in a remote villa in Switzerland, and finds himself lured into a dangerous game of selling information about a political conspiracy to the highest bidder.
  • Dirty Story (1967) Forced to flee Greece in a hurry when a porn movie project goes bad, shabby con man Arthur Simpson (who we first met in The Light of Day) takes ship through Suez to the East Coast of Africa, where he finds himself enrolled as a mercenary in a small war about mineral rights.
  • The Intercom Conspiracy (1969) Two East European intelligence chiefs conceive a money-making scam. They buy a tiny Swiss magazine and start publishing genuine intelligence reports, which publicise American, Soviet, British and NATO secrets. All those countries’ security forces fall over themselves to discover the source of the leaks and, after ineffectually threatening the hapless editor of the magazine, buy it from the colonels for a cool $500,000. Another amusing comedy-thriller.
  • The Levanter (1972) Middle Eastern industrialist Michael Howell is forced much against his will to collaborate with a Palestinian terror group planning a major atrocity, while he and his mistress frantically try to find a way out of his plight.
  • Doctor Frigo (1974) Latino doctor Ernesto Castillo is ‘persuaded’ by French security agents to become physician to political exiles from his Latin American homeland who are planning a coup, and struggles hard to maintain his professional standards and pride in light of some nasty revelations. A very enjoyable comedy thriller.
  • Send No More Roses (1977) Paul Firman narrates this strangely frustrating account of his meeting at the Villa Lipp with an academic obsessed with exposing him as the head of a multinational tax avoidance and blackmailing operation until – apparently – his boss intervenes to try and ‘liquidate’ them all, in a half-hearted attempt which completely fails, and leaves Firman in the last pages, on a Caribbean island putting the finishing touches to this narrative, designed to rebut the professor’s damning (and largely fictional) account of his criminal activities. What?
  • The Care of Time (1981) – Ex-CIA agent-turned-writer, Robert Halliday, finds himself chosen by a shadowy Middle Eastern fixer to help out with a very elaborate scam involving a mad Arab sheikh, an underground bunker, germ warfare experiments and a fake TV interview. Typically complex, typically odd.
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by Simon on October 20, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on October 20, 2014

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Epitaph for a Spy by Eric Ambler (1938)

Looking back now, I marvel at my stupidity; I was pathetically ineffectual. (p.152)

Maybe the distinguishing feature of the six thriller novels Eric Ambler published in the late 1930s is that they are all set in Europe under the shadow of war: the fictional Balkan country Ixania in The Dark Frontier, Austria and Czechoslovakia in Uncommon Danger, and the south of France here in Epitaph. This non-English setting gives them a particularly brooding, stifling, paranoid atmosphere; everyone is scheming against everyone else, the police are menacing, strangers whisper in foreign languages, and over everything a vast catastrophe is looming.

Epitaph for a Spy was serialised in the Daily Express in March 1938, just as Hitler annexed Austria. According to his autobiography, Ambler was paid £135 for it. (Here Lies, p.131)

Innocent abroad

The precarious foreign-ness of the story is emphasised by making the protagonist not only another ‘innocent’ man plunged into intrigue – like the physicist Barstow in Dark Frontier, like the journalist Kenton in Danger – but a foreigner, Josef Vadassy, a language teacher, and not only that, but a stateless foreigner, a refugee from Hungary who doesn’t have the correct papers and is – quite literally – at home nowhere in the world. The story is told by Vadassy in the first person which gives greater access to his engulfing sensations of amazement, fear and panic as the situation unfolds, and also to his serio-comic attempts to play-act the tough guy and fathom his fellow guests.

Plot

The narrative is kicked off quite simply: Vadassy is on a three-week holiday in the south of France from his language school in Paris. Stopping at a pretty resort on the Riviera he drops off some photos to be developed at a chemist’s and is amazed, when he returns, to be arrested and taken by the police for questioning! Turns out the roll of film on his camera contains incriminating photos of the naval defences at Toulon!! Somehow, at the hotel, his camera has been swapped for that of a spy. Or so he says!!! Grudgingly, the police release him on orders from a Naval Intelligence man, on condition that Vadassy return to the hotel and find out who the real spy is…

Agatha Christie

Almost all the novel is set in this sleepy French hotel in which there are ten or so guests, from different nationalities, different ages etc, all with different quirks and oddities, and any one of them could be the suspect!! This one-of-you-is-the-murderer set-up has a strong Agatha Christie feeling (Christie’s first detective novel was published in 1920), pretty much the traditional English country-house murder mystery, except in France. It’s strikingly unlike the previous two novels which involved lots of travelling, by train or plane, car chases, abandoned factories and so on. This is more like a chamber piece.

Fear…

Ambler was consciously revolting against the hard-eyed he-men which featured in the now-forgotten spy fiction of the 1930s, the epigones of John Buchan and Bulldog Drummond and E. Oppenheimer. His protagonists are very ordinary men and they react with very ordinary fear to the situations they find themselves in. Kenton isn’t really beaten up very much in Uncommon Danger, but is held prisoner for a day so that when he is released Ambler gives a very realistic description of how exhausted he is after even a small time of fleeing through the woods. There’s similar verisimilitude in the description of his escape in the snow across the barbed wire border between Austria and Czechoslovakia.

This novel starts slowly and painfully conveys the sense of injustice and craziness Vadassy feels as his world is turned upside-down and he realises he may, though he’s done absolutely nothing wrong, be facing life imprisonment in a French gaol, or even execution for spying.

I think that if anyone had suggested to me at that moment that I should not be able to leave on the Sunday, I should have laughed disbelievingly. But there would have been hysteria in that laugh for, as I sat on the floor beside my open suitcase, fear was clutching at the mechanism inside my chest, making my heart thud and my breathing short and sharp as though I had been running. I kept swallowing saliva, feeling for some curious reason that by doing so I would stop my heart beating so. It made me terribly thirsty and after a while I got up, went to the wash-basin and drank some water out of the tooth glass. (2009 Penguin Classics edition, page 31)

This novel could by sub-titled ‘The Wrong Man’ and, as such, resembles all those Hitchcock movies where an innocent man finds himself thrown into jeopardy.

… and comedy

All this said, however, the novel doesn’t have the intensity or genuine grip of the first two, for several reasons:

  • It’s very slow. The cops give Vadassy three days to find the real spy and although, in his mind, he is full of worry, in the external world not much actually happens: he gets to know the other guests, hears their stories, plays some billiards, has breakfast, lunch and dinner, swims in the sea. At one stage  his room is burgled; on the second night someone hits him over the head and rifles his pockets. That’s it. No corpses. No real violence. No car chases. No change of scene at all.
  • It’s funny. Vadassy, though given a foreign name, nationality and facility with languages, is in fact a very English nitwit. The French Naval Intelligence man says they’re only setting him free to try & catch the real spy because in his interview he came over as such an imbecile. And the first-person narrative is as much concerned with Vadassey’s ridiculous posturing, his belated retorts when he makes a fool of himself, his hysterical fears and melodramatic over-reactions. He is particularly humiliated when he bungles pretending to have had his room burgled so badly that the hotel owner, Herr Köche, calls him an amateur confidence trickster to his face, and boots him out.

In this scene Vadassy has broken into one of the guest’s rooms and is rifling his things.

I was so engrossed with these significant discoveries that I did not hear the footsteps until they were practically outside the door. Even if I had have heard them I doubt whether I should have been able to do anything more. As it was, I just had time to cram the passports back into the pocket and bundle the suit into the cupboard behind me before the handle of the door turned. In the few split seconds that followed, my brain and body seemed to go numb. I stood and gazed stupidly at the handle. I wanted to shout, hide in the cupboard, jump out of the window, scramble under the bed. But I did none of those things. I just gaped. (p.133)

More Johnny English than John Buchan.

I went downstairs feeling several kinds of fool. Instead of doing the pumping I had been pumped. Far from extracting valuable information I had been forced into a defensive position and answered questions as meekly as if I had been in the witness box… As usual, I began to think of the crushing things I ought to have said. The trouble was that my brain moved far too slowly. I was a dullard, a half-wit. (p.167)

Worldview

Ambler repeats his war-of-all-against-all worldview, the epidemic of spying and industrial espionage in the feverish atmosphere of the late 1930s.

All over Europe, all over the world, men were spying. While in government offices other men were tabulating the results of the spies’ labours; thicknesses of armour plating, elevation angles of guns, muzzle velocities, details of fire control mechanisms and range-finders, fuse efficiencies, details of fortifications, positions of ammunition stores, disposition of key factories, landmarks for bombers. The world was getting ready to go to war. For the cannon-makers and for the spies, business was good. (p.49)

There are a few other similar outbreaks of earnestness: for example,

  • each of the guests, in turn, are questioned and reveal more or less intriguing or bizarre back stories, but one of the guests, Herr Schimler, has quite a harrowing tale to tell: he once edited a Social Democrat newspaper in Germany until the Nazis came to power and threw him in a concentration camp for two years, before he managed to escape, being handed from safe house to safe house until he arrived to be protected by a fellow communist at this hotel; but his wife and child are still in Germany and he lives in constant fear of being discovered by Gestapo agents, his true identity revealed and his family suffering…
  • the final chase of the spy, once his identity is revealed, is intense and serious and leads up to a violent rooftop pursuit which ends tragically.

Yes, the text is laced with genuinely tense and tragic themes, but… overall the country house murder ambience of the main set-up, and the light-hearted feel of Vadassy’s numerous humiliating cock-ups and his red-faced mortification at them, tend to be the enduring memory.

Epitaph for a Spy is a strong title, but this book doesn’t really live up to it. Miss Marple Mislays A Camera might be closer in tone.

Centenary

In 2009, the centenary of Ambler’s birth, Penguin reissued half a dozen of his thrillers in large paperback format with stylish black and white covers, and introductions from contemporary writers. Epitaph is introduced by the poet James Fenton who had the privilege of interviewing Ambler in old age, and he repeats some of the author’s anecdotes here.

Movie

The novel was made into a 1944 movie titled Hotel Reserve, starring James Mason. Ambler was paid $3,000 for the rights (Here Lies, p.137). It was in production at Denham Studios at the same time as the wartime morale-booster which Ambler scripted, The Way Ahead. Ambler has some harsh words for it.

Though I later became a friend and neighbour of James Mason, he could never speak of Hotel Reserve without a shudder. In his autobiography and in a book about all his films he tried, almost successfully, not to speak about it at all. I shared his aversion to it. The film had a rubbishy script, bad sets and an unsuitable director. (Here Lies, p.189)

Related links

Pulp cover of Epitaph for A Spy

Pulp cover of Epitaph for A Spy

Eric Ambler’s novels

  • The Dark Frontier (1936) British scientist gets caught up in a revolution in an East European country while trying to find and destroy the secret of the first atomic bomb. Over-the-top parody.
  • Uncommon Danger (1937) British journalist Kenton gets mixed up with the smuggling of Russian plans to invade Romania and seize its oil, in which the Russian or KGB agent Zaleshoff is the good guy against a freelance agent, Saridza, working for an unscrupulous western oil company. Cartoony.
  • Epitaph for a Spy (1938) Hungarian refugee and language teacher Josef Vadassy, on holiday in the south of France, is wrongfully accused of being a spy and is given three days by the police to help them find the real agent among a small group of eccentric hotel guests. Country house murder.
  • Cause for Alarm (1938) Engineer Nick Marlow is hired to run the Milan office of a British engineering company which is supplying the Italian government with munitions equipment, only to be plunged into a world of espionage, counter-espionage, and then forced to go on the run from the sinister Italian Gestapo, aided by Zaleshoff, the KGB agent from Danger. Persuasive.
  • The Mask of Dimitrios (1939) Detective writer Charles Latimer sets out on a quest to find the true story behind the dead gangster, Dimitrios Makropoulos, whose dossier he is shown by the head of Istanbul police, discovering more than he bargained for in the process.
  • Journey into Fear (1940) The war has begun and our enemies have hired an assassin to kill Mr Graham, the English engineer who is helping to upgrade the Turkish fleet. The head of Turkish security gets Graham a berth on a steamer heading to Italy but the enemy agent has followed him. Possibly the best of the six.
  • Judgment on Deltchev (1952) Playwright Foster is sent by a newspaper to report on the show trial of a fallen politician, Deltchev, in an unnamed East European country, and gets caught up in a sinister and far-reaching conspiracy.
  • The Schirmer Inheritance (1953) Young American lawyer George Carey is tasked with finding relatives who may be eligible to receive the large inheritance of an old lady who died without heirs. Because she comes of immigrant stock the task takes him on a tour of European archives – in Paris, Cologne, Geneva, Athens, Salonika – where he discovers the legacy of the Nazis lingering on into the murky world of post-War Greek politics.
  • The Night-Comers (1956) Engineer Steve Fraser is preparing to leave the newly independent Dutch colony of Sunda after a three-year project when he and his Eurasian girlfriend get caught up in a military coup. Trapped by the rebels in their apartment because it is in the same building as the strategically-important radio station, they witness at first hand the machinations of the plotters and slowly realise that all is not what it seems.
  • Passage of Arms (1959) An American couple on a Far East cruise, naively agree to front what appears to be a small and simple, one-off gun-smuggling operation, but end up getting into serious trouble. A thorough and persuasive and surprisingly light-hearted fiction, the least spy-ish and maybe the best Ambler novel so far.
  • The Light of Day (1962) Small-time con man Arthur Simpson gets caught up in a plan by professional thieves to steal jewels from the famous Seraglio Museum in Istanbul, all the time acting as an inside man for the Turkish authorities. An enjoyable comedy-thriller.
  • A Kind of Anger (1964) Journalist Piet Maas is tasked with tracking down a beautiful woman who is the only witness to the murder of an exiled Iraqi colonel in a remote villa in Switzerland, and finds himself lured into a dangerous game of selling information about a political conspiracy to the highest bidder.
  • Dirty Story (1967) Forced to flee Greece in a hurry when a porn movie project goes bad, shabby con man Arthur Simpson (who we first met in The Light of Day) takes ship through Suez to the East Coast of Africa, where he finds himself enrolled as a mercenary in a small war about mineral rights.
  • The Intercom Conspiracy (1969) Two East European intelligence chiefs conceive a money-making scam. They buy a tiny Swiss magazine and start publishing genuine intelligence reports, which publicise American, Soviet, British and NATO secrets. All those countries’ security forces fall over themselves to discover the source of the leaks and, after ineffectually threatening the hapless editor of the magazine, buy it from the colonels for a cool $500,000. Another amusing comedy-thriller.
  • The Levanter (1972) Middle Eastern industrialist Michael Howell is forced much against his will to collaborate with a Palestinian terror group planning a major atrocity, while he and his mistress frantically try to find a way out of his plight.
  • Doctor Frigo (1974) Latino doctor Ernesto Castillo is ‘persuaded’ by French security agents to become physician to political exiles from his Latin American homeland who are planning a coup, and struggles hard to maintain his professional standards and pride in light of some nasty revelations. A very enjoyable comedy thriller.
  • Send No More Roses (1977) Paul Firman narrates this strangely frustrating account of his meeting at the Villa Lipp with an academic obsessed with exposing him as the head of a multinational tax avoidance and blackmailing operation until – apparently – his boss intervenes to try and ‘liquidate’ them all, in a half-hearted attempt which completely fails, and leaves Firman in the last pages, on a Caribbean island putting the finishing touches to this narrative, designed to rebut the professor’s damning (and largely fictional) account of his criminal activities. What?
  • The Care of Time (1981) – Ex-CIA agent-turned-writer, Robert Halliday, finds himself chosen by a shadowy Middle Eastern fixer to help out with a very elaborate scam involving a mad Arab sheikh, an underground bunker, germ warfare experiments and a fake TV interview. Typically complex, typically odd.
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by Simon on October 19, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on October 19, 2014

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Brighton Rock by Graham Greene (1938)

Was there no escape – anywhere – for anyone? It was worth murdering a world. (p.92)

Writers of the 30s

The English writers of the 1930s were defined by the fact that they missed the Great War which nonetheless ruined their world.

Born in the 1900s they were at school when masters and older boys and older brothers went off to fight and die. They were raised in prep schools and public schools which still indoctrinated all the values of the late Victorians, in which Kipling was God: to be born an Englishman was the luckiest fate in the world, for we ran the greatest Empire the world had ever seen and deserved it because we were gentlemen who played the game, ie cricket and rugger, and believed in honour and duty and self-sacrifice and decency.

This generation (including the poets Auden 1907 and Spender 1909 and MacNeice 1907, the novelists Isherwood 1904, Waugh 1903, Upward 1903, Orwell 1903 and Greene 1904) reached maturity in a world in chaos as the economic consequences of the peace produced crisis after crisis in Weimar Germany and Europe, the consequences of the Russian revolution spread communist and socialist ideology around the globe, the Western world seemed weak and feeble and then, with the great crash and Depression of the early 1930s, it really seemed as if everything the West stood for, all the values their parents and teachers had inculcated, had turned to dust, and they were left abandoned without any workable beliefs in a world permanently in crisis.

The search for belief

Thus it is a well-known cliché that the writers of this decade were all, in one way or another, in search of some kind of value system to replace the schoolboy Imperialism which had proved so inadequate. Innumerable memoirs of the decade repeat the truism that, to many intellectuals it seemed as if the only choice lay between Marxism or religion, and that religion not the milk-and-water Anglicanism of their school days, but full-on, ideological Roman Catholicism. Both were rigorous worldviews demanding lifelong ‘commitment’. Those who chose Left included the circle around Auden, the ‘Oxford poets’, all left-leaning, contributing to Left Book Club etc. Orwell became a famous left-wing journalist and went to fight in the Spanish Civil War.

On the Christian front, T.S. Eliot, the granddaddy of Modernism who had given the great panorama of waste and futility which so many saw in the post-War period its typical expression in his Modernist masterpiece The Waste Land, surprised everyone by converting to a High Church form of Anglicanism in 1927. Evelyn Waugh converted to Catholicism in 1930.

Graham Greene pre-empted them both by being baptised a Roman Catholic on 26 February 1926.

Religious belief – or organised despair?

A lot happened in the world during the 1930s but you’d never know it from Greene’s novels which focus on the same themes obsessively: the world is a battlefield of all against all without meaning or purpose in which there is no beauty or truth but absolutely everything is shabby, seedy and sordid, a world of mass-produced tat in which everyone seeks to exploit or hurt everyone else, in which no-one is happy or fulfilled since everyone is confused, lonely, abandoned, trailing memories of having been bullied and beaten at school, all to the soundtrack of cheap popular songs and the meretricious glamour of the ‘flickers’.

Brighton Rock is no different. It is an orgy of squalor. But, if you’re interested in Greene’s Catholicism, it is arguably his first overtly Catholic novel. There are Catholic characters in his earlier novels – maybe Minty in England Made Me is portrayed in most depth – but the two lead figures in Brighton Rock are very much Catholics, the teenage psychopath Pinkie and the innocent girl Rose he pretends to love solely so she doesn’t implicate the gang in a murder. Their Catholicism builds from scattered references in the first half to a crescendo of theology as the couple marry and then fornicate in a state of mortal sin – thus scoring double on Greene’s ever-active Sin-ometer.

Seediness, failure

The funfair seaside world of Brighton is a gift for Greene, allowing him to contrast the supposed gaiety and good times of ice creams and amusement arcades with the unremittingly seedy and squalid reality of his poor characters’ lives.

‘Waste not, want not,’ Ida said gently, taking in the details of the bony face, the large mouth, the eyes too wide apart, the pallor, the immature body… (p.74) Mr Corkery wore a blazer with a badge and a stiff collar underneath. He looked as if he needed feeding up, as if he was wasted with passions he had never had the courage to express. (p.75) The inspector looked old and tired and shy. He had tried to hide a tin of fruit drops behind a telephone and a manuscript book. (p.77) Spicer’s hair was thin on top, dry and brittle under the dandruff. (p.85) There was Rose, dressed to go out in a shabby black straw which made her face look as it would look in twenty years’ time, after the work and the child-bearing. (p.86) [She took off her hat] her mousy hair lay flat on the small scalp: he watched her with distaste. (p.88) Hundreds of feet below the pale green sea washed into the scarred and shabby side of England. (p.88) He looked at the mousy skull, the bony body and the shabby dress – and shuddered. (p.90) She got up and he saw the skin of her thigh for a moment above the artificial silk, and a prick of sexual desire disturbed him like a sickness. (p.92) [Mr Prewitt the corrupt lawyer] showed his tartar-coated teeth in a fatherly smile. (p.118)

Blame sex

It is the nearest Greene comes to a joke that the teenage psychopath Pinkie comes from a slum neighbourhood in Brighton named Paradise Piece.

The houses which looked as if they had passed through an intensive bombardment, flapping gutters and glassless windows, an iron bedstead rusting in a front garden, the smashed and wasted ground in front where houses had been pulled down for model flats which had never gone up. (p.90)

But his disgust and the repressed sexuality which can only express itself in violence, in razoring people, killing them, pushing them over stairwells or throwing acid in their faces, are all attributed to his bed being in the same room as his parents’ bed, and his seeing his parents have sex every week throughout his childhood.

‘Saturday’, he thought… remembering the room at home, the frightening weekly exercise of his parents which he watched from his single bed. That was what they expected of you, every polony you met had her eye on the bed… (p.90)

Then, using the ‘memory technique’ I’ve described in another post, Greene refers to this scene – what Freud called the Primal Scene – repeatedly. In references varying from a paragraph or a sentence long to just a few words, Greene uses it to convey how Pinkie’s violence and hatred is fuelled by the memory, and, at a deeper level, to create the character of Pinkie. Pinkie’s consciousness is the obsessive repetition of the scene.

He didn’t want that relationship with anyone: the double bed, the intimacy, it sickened him like the idea of age. (p.101)

He knew what was expected of him; he regarded her unmade-up mouth with faint nausea. Saturday night, eleven o’clock, the primeval exercise. (p.128)

[visiting the ruined slum] … the room where the Saturday night exercise had taken place was now just air. (p.140)

‘You can’t teach me the rules,’ the Boy went on with gusty anger. ‘I watched ’em every Saturday night, didn’t I? Bouncing and ploughing.’ His eyes flinched as if he were watching some horror. (p.164)

[Pinkie] heard the stealthy movement of his parents in the other bed. It was Saturday night. His father panted like a man at the end of a race and his mother made a horrifying sound of pleasurable pain. He was filled with hatred, disgust, loneliness: he was completely abandoned… (p.186)

Sex and violence. Violence arising out of repressed and perverted sex. Spicer’s ex offers herself in the back of a car and Pinkie’s rage knows no bounds for he simply doesn’t know what to do with a woman and this enormous, humiliating frustration vents itself as the wish to hurt someone. ‘He was like a child with haemophilia; every contact drew blood.’ (p.150)

Greene makes it personal, psychological, Freudian assumptions that lie behind Pinkie’s monstrous character. That Pinkie and Rose are poor, coming from Brighton’s appalling slums, is an aspect of their lives described – and conveyed through the depressing visit to her parents – but not offered as an explanation for their behaviour. Psychology, religion, sex, these determine Greene’s characters – not class, money, power.

Plausibility

I don’t find any of these early novels believable. The plots seem limp and contrived. They are at the same time melodramatic and strangely flat, uneventful. I didn’t for a second believe Krogh as a portrait of the CEO of a multinational company, he just read like another Greene lost soul, uncomfortable at the opera, out of his place at cocktail party discussions of art, I didn’t believe he’d hire a loser like Anthony Farrant or that, just a few days later, he’d acquiesce in his murder. All the events in England Made Me seemed contrived solely to provide a neat, cynical plot; the novel seemed like an absurd confection.

Same for the domestic melodrama of Battlefield, where all the characters have the same monotonous thoughts about the futility of life, and the climax – the shooting which goes wrong – is there solely to symbolise the pathos of human failure rather than anything which might actually happen.

Similarly, in Brighton Rock, it is impossible to take the characters seriously. An atmosphere of rather farcical grand guignol is built up around characters who remind me of the Ealing comedies or Carry On films. In all of these novels it seems to me Greene can’t find the situations or plots on which to convincingly hang his two standout attributes: his miserabilist worldview and his striking way with description. These early novels amount to a worldview in search of a plot.

Some people find Brighton Rock a powerful thriller but, having met some hardened criminals, I find it impossible to believe.

  • I don’t understand the motive for the gang killing Hale (it is given on page 130, that Hale was ‘A dirty little journalist who played in with Colleoni and got Kite killed’ but this doesn’t work).
  • I don’t understand how they actually kill him to make it appear due to natural causes.
  • I don’t believe a 17-year-old could run a gang of adult crooks – especially as he seems so maladroit, his solution to every little problem being to kill someone, and the whole point of the novel is how quickly he fails.
  • There’s little description of what the gang actually do to justify them being a gang at all apart from worry about the consequences of killing Hale. There are some references to gambling at the races, but it isn’t really explained or shown.
  • The whole plot hinges on one of the gang continuing to hand out Hale’s secret cards after they’ve bumped him off in order to give themselves an alibi. But this gang member is seen by the 16-year-old waitress in the cafe. She can prove it wasn’t Hale and so could tell the police that Hale must have been murdered before that time and that this member of the gang must be somehow involved. This spurs Pinkie on to seduce her and then marry her so she can’t testify against her husband. It all seem ludicrously contrived. There’s no real sense that this is how criminal gangs operated in the 1930s.

If it wasn’t for the pervasive mood of squalor and futility and the one sickening scene at the races where Pinkie is himself razored, it could almost be a children’s adventure book.

Greene’s descriptions

What is believable, what gives his excessively morose worldview its plausibility, what redeems the catchpenny plots, is the incredible amount of observation and detail Greene crams into the text. Page after page of clear-eyed, disenchanted description which, for some reason, I find more rich and striking in Brighton Rock than any of the previous books.

A mounted policeman came up the road, the lovely cared-for chestnut beast stepping delicately on the hot macadam, like an expensive toy a millionaire buys for his children; you admired the finish. the leather as deeply glowing as an old mahogany table top, the bright silver badge; it never occurred to you that the toy was for use… A man stood by the kerb selling objects on a tray; he had lost the whole of one side of the body: leg and arm and shoulder, and the beautiful horse as it paced by turned its head aside delicately like a dowager. (p.12)

It is a key part of Greene’s style to use objective correlatives, to find descriptions which embody his characters’ moods, which both embody and create, perpetuate, the ambience of a world abandoned by God, in ruins, populated by failure and anomie.

An old man went stooping down the shore, very slowly, turning the stones, picking among the dry seaweed for cigarette ends, scraps of food. The gulls which had stood like candles down the beach rose and cried under the promenade. The old man found a boot and stowed it in his sack and a gull dropped from the parade and swept through the iron nave of the Palace Pier, white and purposeful in the obscurity. (p.131)

Roman Catholicism

Catholicism is a fascinating theology but as an ethos seems to have a very detrimental affect on people’s characters, being more or less a practical demonstration of Freud’s notion of ‘repression’, the repression of instinctive drives which results in neuroses, obsessions, unhappiness. On the up side, the compensation appears to be the belief that you are the centre of the universe and that God the Creator is riveted by every motion of your immortal soul. Comforting. Because Catholic belief lists so many ways to sin, it invests what other people, we infidels, think of as harmless everyday acts, with a vast supernatural significance, enough to satisfy even the most monstrous narcissism.

Catholic belief – maybe especially for converts like Waugh and Greene – is thus a way to fill with meaning an otherwise terrifyingly meaningless world. So, on a mundane level, Pinkie marries the simple-minded Rose in a hurry, purely so she can’t testify against him in court. But Rock is sometimes described as Greene’s first overtly Catholic novel because the actions and thoughts of the two sorry protagonists are invested with the garish lights of a melodramatic theology. Because neither of them took confession before taking the sacrament of marriage Pinkie and Rose are, technically – and what else is Catholicism if it isn’t an enormous textbook of technicalities – commiting a mortal sin.

[I didn’t confess, admits Rose.] I went away.’ She said with a mixture of fear and pride. ‘We’re going to do a mortal sin.’ The Boy said with bitter and unhappy relish,’It’ll be no good going to confession ever again – as long as we’re both alive.’ He had graduated in pain… He had a sense now that the murders of Hale and Spicer were trivial acts, a boy’s game, and he had put away childish things. Murder had only led up to this – this corruption. He was filled with awe at his own powers. (p.167)

In the old days, it occurred to him, you signed covenants like this in your blood. He stood back and watched Rose awkwardly sign – his temporal safety in return for two immortalities of pain. He had no doubt whatever that this was mortal sin, and he was filled with a kind of gloomy hilarity and pride. He saw himself now as a full-grown man for whom the angels wept. (p.169)

It seems to me it’s not only Pinkie who thinks dragging Catholic theology into the story will invest him with a spurious maturity and significance – but also the author. From this novel onwards Greene and his fans are able to say that, even if the plot and the characterisation are often not entirely credible, well, he’s got the weight of two thousand years of Catholic theology to dignify his novels, to lend them depth and resonance. It seems, to me, to be cheating.

The Catholicism allows Greene to invest what had been tawdry from a mundane point of view, with the new and sinister glamour of sin. Sin!

She took off her hat, her mackintosh – this was the ritual of mortal sin: this, he thought, is what people damn each other for… ‘It’s Saturday night,’ he said with a bitter taste on his tongue, ‘it’s time for bed.’… Shaken by a kind of rage, he took her by the shoulders… he pushed her against the bed. ‘It’s mortal sin,’ he said, getting what savour these was out of innocence, trying to taste God in the mouth: a brass bedball, her dumb, frightened and aquiescent eyes – he blotted everything out in a sad brutal now-or-never embrace: a cry of pain and then the jangling of the bell beginning all over again. ‘Christ,’ he said… He felt an odd sense of triumph: he had graduated in the last human shame – it wasn’t so difficult after all… he had a sense that he would never be scared again. Running down from the track he had been afraid, afraid of pain and more afraid of damnation – of the sudden and unshriven death. Now it was as if he was damned already and there was nothing more to fear ever again… This was hell, then; it wasn’t anything to worry about; it was just  his own familiar room… (pp.180-182)

And much, much more in the same vein. Greene’s Catholicism doesn’t redeem anything at all. It is deployed as a tactic to give his protagonists’ tawdry doings – and therefore the entire text – an extra level of meaning. It doesn’t lead anywhere. It resolves nothing. It is a kind of God porn, leaving the reader in a continuous state of theological arousal.

He heard a whisper, looked sharply round, and thrust the paper back. In an alley between two shops, an old woman sat upon the ground; he could just see the rotting and discoloured face: it was like the sight of damnation. Then he heard the whisper, ‘Blessed art thou among women,’ saw the grey fingers fumbling at the beads. This was not one of the damned: he watched with horrified fascination: this was one of the saved. (p.97)

Greene’s interpretation

In chapter 12 of volume II of Norman Sherry’s biography of Greene, he discusses Greene’s anger at the way the 1943 stage production of the book changes his meaning. I had thought the character of Ida, the plump, bossy woman who determines to track down Hale’s killers (ie Pinkie’s gang) and who drives the story forwards to Pinkie’s eventual death, I thought she was a good person. Apparently not. Greene wrote an outraged note to the play’s director.

‘The idea is that Pinkie & Rose belong to the real world in which good & evil exist, but that the interfering Ida belongs to a kind of artificial surface world in which there is no such thing as good & evil but only right & wrong.’ (the Life of Graham Greene, volume II, p.163)

I understand the theology of this but find it shocking as a real belief. It is a form of Platonism: this world is a spume, a dream, a fantasy, a bubble, compared to the True Eternal World of Forms or God’s Love. Pinkie and Rose, because baptised and educated in Catholicism, are playing their parts in that eternal world. Even though evil and sinful people, they have the benefit of being Roman Catholics and therefore true human beings- whereas Ida belongs to the shallow, empty world of the atheists and agnostics and humanists.

It is rather terrifying to realise how completely religious believers can dismiss the good, moral, altruistic behaviour of non-believers, as somehow trivial and insignificant, as unreal and therefore unworthy, compared to their own potentially wicked and evil, but somehow more real and therefore more valid, actions.

And this, from Greene’s own pen, is the meaning and intent of the novel.

Related links

1961 Australian pulp cover of Brighton Rock

1961 Australian pulp cover of Brighton Rock

The movie

The theatrical production was adapted for the screen, featuring many of the same actors from the stage, notably the 19-year-old Richard Attenborough in his breakthrough role as Pinkie.

Greene’s books

Greene’s books

  • The Man Within (1929) One of the worst books I’ve ever read, a wretchedly immature farrago set in a vaguely described 18th century about a cowardly smuggler who betrays his fellows to the Excise men then flees to the cottage of a pure and innocent young woman who he falls in love with before his pathetic inaction leads to her death. Drivel.
  • The Name of Action (1930) (repudiated by author, never republished)
  • Rumour at Nightfall (1931) (repudiated by author, never republished)
  • Stamboul Train (1932) A motley cast of characters find out each others’ secrets and exploit each other on the famous Orient Express rattling across Europe, climaxing in the execution of one of the passengers, a political exile, in an obscure rail junction, and all wound up with a cynical business deal in Istanbul.
  • It’s a Battlefield (1934) London: a working class man awaits his death sentence for murder while a cast of seedy characters, including a lecherous HG Wells figure, betray each other and agonise about their pointless lives.
  • England Made Me (1935) Stockholm: financier and industrialist Krogh hires a pretty Englishwoman Kate Farrant to be his PA/lover. She gets him to employ her shiftless brother Anthony who, after only a few days, starts spilling secrets to the seedy journalist Minty, and so is bumped off by Krogh’s henchman, Hall.
  • A Gun for Sale (1936) England: After assassinating a European politician and sparking mobilisation for war, hitman Raven pursues the lecherous middle man who paid him with hot money to a Midlands town, where he gets embroiled with copper’s girl, Anne, before killing the middle man and the wicked arms merchant who was behind the whole deal, and being shot dead himself.
  • Brighton Rock (1938) After Kite is murdered, 17 year-old Pinkie Brown takes over leadership of one of Brighton’s gangs, a razor-happy psychopath who is also an unthinking Catholic tormented by frustrated sexuality. He marries a 16 year-old waitress (who he secretly despises) to stop her squealing on the gang, before being harried to a grisly death.
  • The Confidential Agent (1939) D. the agent for a foreign power embroiled in a civil war, tries and fails to secure a contract for British coal to be sent to his side. He flees the police and unfounded accusations of murder, has an excursion to a Midlands mining district where he fails to persuade the miners to go on strike out of solidarity for his (presumably communist) side, is caught by the police, put on trial, then helped to escape across country to a waiting ship, accompanied by the woman half his age who has fallen in love with him.
  • The Lawless Roads (1939) Greene travels round Mexico and hates it, hates its people and its culture, the poverty, the food, the violence and despair, just about managing to admire the idealised Catholicism which is largely a product of his own insistent mind, and a few heroic priests-on-the-run from the revolutionary authorities.
  • The Power and the Glory (1940) Mexico: An unnamed whisky priest, the only survivor of the revolutionary communists’ pogrom against the Catholic hierarchy, blunders from village to village feeling very sorry for himself and jeopardising lots of innocent peasants while bringing them hardly any help until he is caught and shot.
  • The Ministry of Fear (1943) Hallucinatory psychological fantasia masquerading as an absurdist thriller set in London during the Blitz when a man still reeling from mercy-killing his terminally ill wife gets caught up with a wildly improbable Nazi spy ring.
  • The Heart of The Matter (1948) Through a series of unfortunate events, Henry Scobie, the ageing colonial Assistant Commissioner of Police in Freetown, Sierra Leone, finds himself torn between love of his wife and of his mistress, spied on by colleagues and slowly corrupted by a local Syrian merchant, until life becomes intolerable and – as a devout Catholic – he knowingly damns himself for eternity by committing suicide. Whether you agree with its Catholic premises or not, this feels like a genuinely ‘great’ novel for the completeness of its conception and the thoroughness of its execution.
  • The Third Man (1949) The novella which formed the basis for the screenplay of the famous film starring Orson Welles. Given its purely preparatory nature, this is a gripping and wonderfully-written tale, strong on atmosphere and intrigue and mercifully light on Greene’s Catholic preachiness.
  • The End of The Affair (1951) Snobbish writer Maurice Bendrix has an affair with Sarah, the wife of his neighbour on Clapham Common, the dull civil servant, Henry Miles. After a V1 bomb lands on the house where they are illicitly meeting, half burying Bendrix, Sarah breaks off the affair and refuses to see him. Only after setting a detective on her, does Bendrix discover Sarah thought he had been killed in the bombing and prayed to God, promising to end their affair and be ‘good’ if only he was allowed to live – only to see him stumbling in through the wrecked doorway, from which point she feels duty bound to God to keep her word. She sickens and dies of pneumonia like many a 19th century heroine, but not before the evidence begins to mount up that she was, in fact, a genuine saint. Preposterous for most of its length, it becomes genuinely spooky at the end.
  • Twenty-One Stories (1954) Generally very short stories, uneven in quality and mostly focused on wringing as much despair about the human condition as possible using thin characters who come to implausibly violent endings – except for three short funny tales.
  • The Unquiet American (1955) Set in Vietnam as the French are losing their grip on the country, jaded English foreign correspondent, Thomas Fowler, reacts very badly to fresh-faced, all-American agent Alden Pyle, who both steals his Vietnamese girlfriend and is naively helping a rebel general and his private army in the vain hope they can form a non-communist post-colonial government. So Fowler arranges for Pyle to be assassinated. The adultery and anti-Americanism are tiresome, but the descriptions of his visits to the front line are gripping.
  • Loser Takes All (1955) Charming comic novella recounting the mishaps of accountant Bertram who is encouraged to get married at a swanky hotel in Monte Carlo by his wealthy boss who then doesn’t arrive to pick up the bill, as he’d promised to – forcing Bertram to dabble in gambling at the famous Casino and becoming so obsessed with winning that he almost loses his wife before the marriage has even begun.
  • Our Man In Havana (1958) Comedy about an unassuming vacuum cleaner salesman, Jim Wormold, living in Havana, who is improbably recruited for British intelligence and, when he starts to be paid, feels compelled to manufacture ‘information’ from made-up ‘agents’. All very farcical until the local security services and then ‘the other side’ start taking an interest, bugging his phone, burgling his flat and then trying to bump him off.
  • A Burnt-Out Case (1960) Tragedy. Famous architect Querry travels to the depths of the Congo, running away from his European fame and mistress, and begins to find peace working with the local priests and leprosy doctor, when the unhappy young wife of a local factory owner accuses him of seducing her and fathering her child, prompting her husband to shoot Querry dead.
  • The Comedians (1966) Tragedy. Brown returns to run his hotel in Port-au-Prince, in a Haiti writhing under the brutal regime of Papa Doc Duvalier, and to resume his affair with the ambassador’s wife, Martha. A minister commits suicide in the hotel pool; Brown is beaten up by the Tontons Macoute; he tries to help a sweet old American couple convert the country to vegetarianism. In the final, absurd sequence he persuades the obvious con-man ‘major’ Jones to join the pathetic ‘resistance’ (12 men with three rusty guns), motivated solely by the jealous (and false) conviction that Jones is having an affair with his mistress. They are caught, escape, and Brown is forced to flee to the neighbouring Dominican Republic where the kindly Americans get him a job as assistant to the funeral director he had first met on the ferry to Haiti.
  • Travels With My Aunt (1969) Comedy. Unmarried, middle-aged, retired bank manager Henry Pullman meets his aunt Augusta at the funeral of his mother, and is rapidly drawn into her unconventional world, accompanying her on the Orient Express to Istanbul and then on a fateful trip to south America, caught up in her colourful stories of foreign adventures and exotic lovers till he finds himself right in the middle of an uncomfortably dangerous situation.
  • The Honorary Consul (1973) Tragedy. Dr Eduardo Plarr accidentally assists in the kidnapping of his friend, the alcoholic, bumbling ‘honorary consul’ to a remote city on the border of Argentina, Charley Fortnum, with whose ex-prostitute wife he happens to be having an affair. When he is asked to go and treat Fortnum, who’s been injured, Plarr finds himself also taken prisoner by the rebels and dragged into lengthy Greeneish discussions about love and religion and sin and redemption etc, while they wait for the authorities to either pay the ransom the rebels have demanded or storm their hideout. It doesn’t end well.
  • The Human Factor (1978) Maurice Castle lives a quiet, suburban life with his African wife, Sarah, commuting daily to his dull office job in a branch of British Security except that, we learn half way through the book, he is a double agent passing secrets to the Russians. Official checks on a leak from his sector lead to the improbable ‘liquidation’ of an entirely innocent colleague which prompts Castle to make a panic-stricken plea to his Soviet controllers to be spirited out of the country. And so he is, arriving safely in Moscow. But to the permanent separation with the only person he holds dear in the world and who he was, all along, working on behalf of – his beloved Sarah. Bleak and heart-breaking.
  • Monsignor Quixote (1982) Father Quixote is unwillingly promoted monsignor and kicked out of his cosy parish, taking to the roads of Spain with communist ex-mayor friend, Enrique ‘Sancho’ Zancas, in an old jalopy they jokingly nickname Rocinante, to experience numerous adventures loosely based on his fictional forebear, Don Quixote, all the while debating Greene’s great Victorian theme, the possibility of a doubting – an almost despairing – Catholic faith.
  • The Captain and The Enemy (1988) 12-year-old Victor Baxter is taken out of his boarding school by a ‘friend’ of his father’s, the so-called Captain, who carries him off to London to live with his girlfriend, Liza. Many years later Victor, a grown man, comes across his youthful account of life in this strange household when Liza dies in a road accident, and he sets off on an adult pilgrimage to find the Captain in Central America, a quest which – when he tells him of Liza’s death – prompts the old man to one last – futile and uncharacteristic – suicidal gesture.
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by Simon on October 3, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, Christianity, Novel
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Posted by Simon on October 3, 2014

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2014/10/03/brighton-rock-graham-greene/

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