All posts tagged David Lodge

The Satyricon by Petronius Arbiter

‘Here you are, gifted with talents enough to make your fortunes and you still lead a life of misery, and every day you bring new torments upon yourselves, as the fruits of your own acts!’
(Eumolpus castigating Encolpius and Giton in the Satyricon, Fragment 98)

I admit I have done many wrong things. After all, I am a man…
(Encolpius in a letter to Circe, Fragment 130)

A text has come down to us in many manuscript copies, titled the Satyricon. It consists of over 100 fragments, some as short as a single sentence, most a paragraph or so long, and a handful of longer, more complete, episodes. What we have, collected together, makes about 150 pages of paperback text. Scholars think the original text had upwards of 80 chapters and would have been as long as a huge eighteenth century novel like Tom Jones, five or six hundred pages long.

Menippean satire

The work was a satirical medley, meaning it was a deliberate hodge-podge or prose and poetry, a loose narrative giving room for digressions about contemporary art and literature, interpolated folk tales (such as the ones about a werewolf and witches told during Trimalchio’s feast), traditional stories (the woman from Ephesus, Fragment 111), lots of poetic interludes of varying lengths in varying styles, and so on. The combination of humorous prose and mock poetry was known as Menippean satire.

This form was developed in ancient Greece and named after its chief practitioner, Menippus. Menippus of Gadara (3rd century BC) was a Cynic satirist. All of his works are lost but later authors described him as both an important purveyor of Cynic philosophy and a major comic influence.

According to later summarisers, Menippus discussed serious subjects in a spirit of ridicule; he particularly mocked the two main philosophical schools of Epicureans and Stoics. The translator of the Penguin edition of the Satyricon says it was the distinctive characteristic of Menippean satire that it mixed humour with philosophy (or whatever aesthetic principles the author might substitute) (Introduction, page 18).

Thus the Satyricon‘s author uses characters to criticise contemporary art, literature, rhetoric, education, poetry and – in the long chapter on Trimalchio’s feast – the behaviour, manners, vulgarity and crude display of the Roman nouveaux riches.

What makes the Satyricon distinctive is that this Menippean approach (humour mixed with occasional serious subjects) was combined with a completely different genre, the idealising and sentimental Greek romance.

This is present in the Satyricon at least two ways: one is the long-running relationship between the loved-up narrator, Encolpius, and his handsome 16-year-old boy lover or ex-slave or rent boy, Giton. They’re constantly bursting into tears and forgiving each other for their lovers’ tiffs and jealousies: ‘Come to my arms, dear Giton.’ More narrowly, it colours the sentimental romance between Encolpius and Chrysis in the final passages of the text.

The translator of the Penguin edition, J.F. Sullivan, characterises these two elements vying in the text, as the satirist and the novelist, because Petronius selects subjects common in satire – low city life, sexual decadence, vulgarity of the nouveaux riches – but he doesn’t judge them with the same moral fury that satirists from Juvenal to Swift use. He is more detached than that, interested and amused by the behaviour of his characters in themselves rather than as epitomes of the usual moral rules.

It is this combination of the satirical tone and frequent reversion to poetry (of Menippean satire) with a consistent (if episodic) narrative, and an overall lack of moral judging, which was, apparently, something quite new in Roman literature.

The adventures of Encolpius

For at its core, long and rambling with many digressions though it appears to have been intended, the Satyricon nonetheless has a simple premise: it is a first-person account of the peripatetic adventures of Encolpius, and his companion, slave and boyfriend, Giton.

The deep driver of the plot is the wrath of the god Priapus (god of procreation; guardian of gardens and vineyards; personification of the phallus) against the hero. At some point, before the narrative we have opens, Encolpius had offended Priapus (maybe by looting a temple of his?), and now the offended god dogs and frustrates his every move. This is intended as a mockingly knowing reference to the way the offended Poseidon blocks Odysseus’s return to Ithaca in Homer’s Odyssey and the offended Juno blocks Aeneas’s journey to Italy in the Aeneid.

(To be candid, although all the introductions make much of this alleged persecution of the hero by Priapus, when you come to read the actual text it only really crops up in the Quartilla passage at the start, and then re. his problem with impotence and encounter with the priestess of Priapus, Oenothea, towards the very end.)

The surviving sections of the novel begin with Encolpius traveling with a companion and former lover named Ascyltos, who has joined Encolpius on his adventures. They appear to be in the port town of Puteoli (not explicitly named, so scholars debate this). Meanwhile, Encolpius’s boyfriend, Giton, is back at the lodging house they’ve rented. As the text we have progresses we learn that Encolpius and Ascyltos have made some kind of pact, to undertake illegal activities together, and also to share Giton’s affections. Encolpius at one point says of himself: ‘I escaped the law, cheated the arena, killed a host.’ (Fragment 81). They also appear to have stolen gold from someone they murdered (?) and hidden it in a tunic, which Encolpius then managed to lose.

But the overall point is that the narrative takes us through a series of adventures among the middling and common people of Rome i.e. the mass of the population who we never hear about in the predominantly aristocratic literature which has come down to us.

Obscure descriptions of sex

In particular, the work describes Encolpius’s involvement in orgies: in the wider sense of riotous dinner parties (Trimalchio’s banquet), and in the narrower sense of scenes of eroticism and sexual decadence.

For a long time, throughout early modern history and into the Victorian era, this meant the book was often published in limited editions, with scandalously explicit illustrations. However, reading it nowadays, the most noticeable thing is that: a) there aren’t as many explicitly sexual scenes as you might expect, and b) they aren’t very explicitly described, in fact they are so obscurely or elliptically described that I barely noticed some of them or, when I did, was frequently puzzled by what was going on.

For example, here’s a fragment (Fragment 21) from the scene where Quartilla, her maid Psyche, and their little girl, are joined by a male prostitute in invading the lodgings of Encolpius, Ascyltus and Giton.

Finally, up came a pansy dressed in myrtle-green shaggy felt, which was tucked up under his belt. He pulled the cheeks of our bottoms apart, then he slobbered vile, greasy kisses on us, until Quartilla, carrying a whale-bone rod, with her skirts up round her, put an end to our sufferings. (p.40)

Now, I can see that this is certainly intimate what with their buttocks being pulled apart, presumably to expose their anuses. But in a standard porn narrative you’d expect the next step for them to be buggered. I don’t follow the logic of pulling someone’s buttocks apart and then…kissing them? Kissing their faces or mouths presumably involves turning them round to face you? Or are they turning their heads sideways and backwards to be kissed while the pansy buggers them? Or is the pansy meant to be kissing their anuses? I suppose it’s possible, but it’s not, I’d have thought, the obvious thing to do.

And I don’t understand at all why Quartilla is then introduced into the scene nor why she is holding a whale-bone rod? Is it to bugger them with?? Are the male prostitute’s slobbery kisses by way of lubricating their anuses in preparation for Quartilla using the rod to sodomise them? But if so, how could this be described as putting an ‘end’ to their sufferings, when it sounds very much to me as if that would be the start of their sufferings?

A lot of the sex scenes in the Satyricon are like this: something very rude and intimate is definitely going on, but the descriptions are bewilderingly at odds with any description of sexual acts I’m used to, for example in the surprisingly explicit novels of David Lodge, let alone ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’-style modern erotica.

In summary, I didn’t find any of the sex scenes in the Satyricon at all erotic; I generally found them as puzzling as a Wordle problem or a jigsaw.

Outline synopsis

There’s a fairly detailed synopsis of the work in the Wikipedia article. This is a list of key incidents:

In Puteoli

  • Argument with Agamemnon The text starts in mid-sentence with Encolpius arguing with Agamemnon the sophist against the florid Asiatic style and false taste in literature
  • Wrong directions Lost in this strange town, Encolpius asks the way of an old lady and is led to a brothel.
  • Reunion Encolpius finds his way back to the boarding house to be reunited with Ascyltos and Giton.
  • Lovers’ quarrel Later, Encolpius tries to have sex with Giton but is interrupted by Ascyltos, who assaults him after catching the two in bed. They all make up.
  • At the market The trio go to the market where they appear to discover the tunic filled with gold but there is an argument with the stallholder which threatens to escalate so they escape back to the boarding house.
  • Quartilla and the great debauch Here they are confronted by Quartilla, a priestess of the god Priapus, who condemns their eavesdropping on the cult’s secret rites (something which obviously took place before our text begins). Our three companions are overpowered by Quartilla, her maid Psyche and a gay prostitute. This leads to an orgy which is described in scattered and puzzling fragments. In the final part, Psyche suggests to Quartilla that they get the little 7-year-old girl they’ve brought with them, Pannychis, ‘married’, so they hold a little ceremony wedding her to young Giton then bundle them both into a side room to , while Quartilla spies on them through a crack in the door, dragging Encolpius down to share the view and kiss him in her excitement.

Trimalchio’s dinner

  • Trimalchio’s dinner Next day, recovering from their ‘ordeal’, Encolpius and companions are invited by one of Agamemnon’s slaves to a feast at the estate of Trimalchio, a freedman or liberti of enormous wealth. After a preliminary meeting at the town baths, the guests proceed to Trimalchio’s huge mansion where they are entertained with ostentatious and grotesque extravagance.

In this excellent blog post, author Suzette Field gives a forensic summary of all aspects of the banquet given by vulgar, bragging parvenu Trimalchio and his fat, ex-chorus girl wife, Fortunata, listing the guests, detailing the astonishing dishes, the music and entertainments (including a mock hunt), the rambling variety of conversational topics, including guests describing encounters with a werewolf (p.73) and witches (p.74).

  • The escape Sickened by the food and the vulgarity, Encolpius and his companions make their escape but only with some difficulty and after falling into a big fishpond, and after the party has made such a racket the local fire brigade are called to break it up.
  • The argument Back at the inn, next morning the trio fall out after Encolpius discovers Ascyltos in bed with Giton. He forces the boy to choose between the two men and is shocked when Giton chooses to leave with Ascyltos.
  • The soldier After two or three days sulking Encolpius sets out sword in hand to find and take revenge on Ascyltos but is disarmed by a soldier he encounters in the street.

Eumolpus the poet

  • The art gallery Wandering into a nearby art gallery Encolpius meets an old poet, Eumolpus. a) Eumolpus describes an affair with a youth in Pergamon while employed as his tutor but who wore him out with his sexual demands b) the pair discuss the inferiority of modern painters and writers to the good old days: ‘but we, besotted with drink and whoring, don’t study any arts with a tradition.’
  • Eumolpus stoned Eumolpus had ended their discussion with a long poem on the subject of the Trojan war and, comically, this prompted all the passersby to pelt him with stones. Feeling sorry for him, Encolpius invites Eumolpus to dinner (90).
  • Reunited with Giton Back at his lodgings Encolpius encounters Giton who begs him to take him back as his lover. They are reconciled. ‘I hugged him to my heart.’ Eumolpus arrives from the baths and reveals that a man there (evidently Ascyltos) was looking for someone called Giton.
  • Comedy suicides Encolpius and Eumolpus fight over Giton. Eumolpus grabs Giton, runs out the door and locks it from the outside. Encolpius is so distraught he decides to hang himself and is dangling from a belt when the pair return and hurriedly take him down. Giton in turn is distraught and grabs a razor from Eumolpus’s servant and slashes his own throat, falling to the floor. Encolpius snatches up the razor and cuts his throat only to realise it is a ‘practice’ razor for apprentice barbers to use. Farce.
  • The fight At this moment, the landlord of these seedy lodgings, Marcus Manicius, arrives and accuses our boys of being runaways slaves or preparing to abscond without paying. Eumolpius slaps him in the face, the landlord throws a pot which hits him on the head, and the two stumble out into the landing where the landlord’s slaves get involved, plus an old hag bringing up a guard dog, and the whole thing degenerates into a big fight. Encolpius enjoys watching it through a spyhole in their bedroom door. When soft-hearted Giton suggests intervening he boxes the boy on the head, so he retired crying to the bed.
  • Bargates The ‘agent for the building’ Bargates intervenes to break up the fight. He recognised Eumolpus and asks him to write a lampoon against his mistress.
  • Reward At this point a ‘cryer’ accompanied by Ascyltos and a crowd arrives announcing a reward of 1,000 sesterces for information on the whereabouts of a curly-haired boy named Giton. Encolpius tells the boy to hide under the bed. When the search party arrives at their room, Encolpius has bolted the door so the searchers have to pry it off its hinges with axes. Then Encolpius throws himself at Ascyltos’s feet and offers his neck to the axe to be killed. Ascyltos assures him he means no harm, he just wants the boy back.
  • The sneezes They don’t find Giton hiding under the bed, so leave. At this moment Eumolpus re-enters the bedroom. Encolpius lies, assuring Eumolpus that Giton has disappeared off into the streets and weepingly begging him to help find him. He’s nearly persuaded him, when Giton lets out three loud sneezes, thus revealing his position under the bed to Eumolpus. (All this is literally a bedroom farce.) Eumolpus is upset at the deception but Giton, with characteristic gentleness, treats Eumolpus’s head wound then gives the old poet his own cloak, thus winning him round. Giton laments that he should be the cause of endless fights between his two lovers (Encolpius and Ascyltos). Eumolpus castigates the threesome for failing to use their talents and instead contriving to lead a never-ending life of misery.

Ship and shipwreck

  • Boarding ship Eumolpus suggests they escape all their troubles by taking ship, so they do, along with Eumolpus’s hired servant, later named as Corax.
  • Lichas and Tryphaena Suddenly they hear two voices which strike terror into them. Eumolpus explains the ship belongs to, and is captained by, an old enemy of theirs, Lichas of Tarentum. Scholars calculate, from scattered hints, that Encolpius had a) stolen something from Lichas b) seduced his wife c) somehow publicly humiliated him in the portico of a temple to Hercules – all this must have taken place in lost passages earlier in the text. It certainly explains their horror at now finding themselves in Lichas’ power. The other voice belongs to Tryphaena, who appears to have taken a fancy to Giton, also in an earlier, lost, section.
  • Disguise They discuss plans to escape the moving ship but settle on a scheme to pretend to be Eumolpus’s slaves, shaving their hair off and having their faces printed with the formula for renegade slaves (usually this is tattooed into the skin; our heroes have it done in ink). To no avail, and Lichas and Tryphaena recognise them.
  • Fight onboard Eumolpus mounts a mock defence of the pair, which doesn’t work. Encolpius threatens Tryphaena if she tries to take possession of Giton and this escalates into a fight, with Lichas’ men taking one side, our heroes, Emolpus and his servant the other. Giton tries to stop the fighting by threatening to cut off his cock and balls (‘the cause of all our misery’) as a threat to Tryphaena, who clearly wants him for sexual purposes. In the end the navigator parlays a truce, and both parties sign a mock peace treaty (p.118).
  • Wigs Since so much appears to derive from Tryphaena’s unfulfilled love/lust for Giton, her maids take the boy belowdecks, give him a wig and paint back on his eyebrows, so he emerges looking prettier than ever (110).
  • The widow of Ephesus At first she planned to starve herself to death in her husband’s tomb, but she was seduced by a soldier guarding crucified corpses, and when one of these was stolen she offered the corpse of her husband as a replacement.
  • The storm A big storm blows up and the ship is wrecked (114). Giton ties himself to Encolpius with a belt so they’ll survive or drown together. Tryphaena is bundled into a lifeboat by her maids. Encolpius, Giton Eumolpus and the latter’s servant all get to shore safely. Here Encolpius observes Lichas’ corpse being washed ashore, triggering stock reflections about fate, Fortune, the fickleness of man’s estate etc. The build a pyre for him and Eumolpas writes an epigram.

On the road to Croton

Croton was a former Greek colony on the toe of Italy. Sullivan in his notes points out that the narrative in this section is more fantastical and less realistic than the section in Puteoli because a) Petronius was a lot less familiar with Croton, and b) the subject – the iniquity of legacy hunters – was a familiar, stock literary topic, therefore the section is more invented, literary and bookish. In fact, it has the fantastical feel of medieval allegory or Gulliver’s Travels.

  • The farmer A farmer explains that the inhabitants are notorious legacy-hunters, that anyone who has and raises children is despised, whereas childless parasites are held in the highest opinion.
  • The scam They cook up a scam that Eumolpus will pose as a man of enormous wealth who has recently lost his son, and just been shipwrecked, but owns vast estates with countless slaves in North Africa. Encolpius and Giton will pose as his slaves, alongside his servant Corax.
  • Parody of Lucan As they walk towards Croton Eumolpus delivers a serious lecture on the shortcomings of contemporary poetry, which he claims has abandoned depth of meaning, the apparatus of divine involvement in human affairs, and smooth flow in favour of shiny epigrams. He then proceeds to regale his companions (and readers) with an extended rendition (nearly 300 lines) of his own poem on the subject of the Civil War between Julius Caesar and Pompey. This has universally been taken of criticism of, and a parody of, the Pharsalia of Petronius’s contemporary, Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, known simply as Lucan. (It is notable that Sullivan deliberately echoes the Cantos of Ezra Pound in the style of his translation of this passage [see p.132] as he warned us he would in his introduction, an interesting indication of how widespread Pound’s influence still was in 1964; Pound only died in 1972. Unfortunately, Sullivan’s idiosyncratic version makes it impossible to compare with the relatively sensible translation of the Pharsalia by Anthony Kline which I’ve just finished reading.)
  • Arriving in Croton They find the legacy-hunters very willing to believe Eumolpus is an heirless millionaire, so he receives invites to multiples homes and they all compete to put their finances at his disposal (in the hope that they’ll be named heirs in his will). In other words, their scam is working.

In Croton

There is then a Big Gap in the text. When it resumes, the companions have apparently been in Crotona for some time.

  • Chrysis Encolpius, as part of his pose of being Eumolpus’s slave, has adopted the name Polyaenus. Chrysis is a maid of the beautiful Circe. The fragment opens with them talking together in some kind of public park. Chrysis describes her mistress as the type of woman who likes a bit of rough i.e. gladiators slaves. The type of woman who is aroused by kissing the whipmarks on slaves’ bodies (p.143). Whereas Chrysis explains that she aspires to more upmarket lovers. In other words, each woman is aroused by the opposite class to themselves.
  • Circe Chrysis now swiftly introduces Circe, who is breath-takingly beautiful and wants to become Encolpius’s lover. She knows about his love for Giton, and says she is willing to be Encolpius’s girlfriend alongside his boyfriend, an interesting comment on Roman tolerance in relationships and complete acceptance of bisexuality. They lie down on the grass and start snogging.
  • Encolpius’s impotence In the next fragment Circe is upset because Encolpius can’t get an erection. She asks Chryses if she smells or something about her is ugly, then runs off to a temple of Venus leaving Encolpius feeling mortified.
  • Letters Circe sends a letter hoping Encolpius will recover his ‘strength’. Encolpius sends a reply, confessing he is a terrible man, he has ‘killed a man and robbed a temple’, but he will be restored to virility if she will punish and redeem him.
  • Proselenus Next morning Chrysis brings round the wizened old crone, Proselenus, who uses crude magic (spit, dust, hot pebbles) and gives Encolpius a magnificent erection.
  • Failure and flogging However, when Encolpius goes to Circe’s house and she invites him onto her couch and after much kissing prepares to be embraced…he can’t get an erection, again. Infuriated, Circe has him whipped, assembles the entire household to spit at him, has Chrysis flogged and Proselenus thrown out. Oh well.
  • Punishing Percy Encolpius is tempted to cut off his penis but makes do with giving it a stern telling off.
  • Prayer to Priapus Encolpius goes to the temple of Priapus and delivers a long prayer from which we deduce that, earlier in the narrative, he stole something from another temple of Priapus. Now he begs forgiveness and promises lavish offerings, when he has the money…
  • Thrashing Old Proselenus appears, berates Encolpius for his failure to get an erection, leads him into a side room of the temple and delivers a sound thrashing. What I don’t understand is a) Encolpius makes no resistance even through the thrashing cuts him and b) it cuts him in the groin so she appears to be whipping his front.
  • Oenothea priestess of the temple arrives. Proselenus explains Encolpius’s impotent and Oenothea, who is also a sorceress, says she can cure him.
  • Cooking In a sentence-long fragment Oenothea lays on a bed and kisses Encolpius. But we don’t get any sex because the fragment immediately following describes her starting to cook a knackered old piece of ham and ordering him to shell some beans i.e. there’s a sizeable gap.
  • The geese Suddenly it is the old woman who is cooking, and a stool she’s standing on breaks and she knocks over the pan into the fire and gets her face covered in soot. While she goes off to clean up, Encolpius is suddenly attacked by the temple’s sacred geese. He beats one to death with a leg from the rickety stool.
  • Oenothea’s horror Encolpius hides the goose, bathes his wound in vinegar and is just about to leave the cottage when Oenothea returns. When she asks where the beans are he was meant to be shelling, he explains that a bunch of geese invaded the house and ate them but he managed to kill one and shows her. Oenothea is horrified, claiming these are holy geese sacred to Priapus. He could be crucified for this crime and she could be expelled as priestess. Encolpius desperately offers to replace the dead goose with an ostrich.
  • Cash Proselenus returns to the cottage and is equally horrified. Encolpius offers them two gold pieces as compensation.

In its last pages the text disintegrates into a series of very short, often one-sentence fragments, which give snapshots of successive scenes:

  • Oenothea opens the dead goose and uses its liver to foretell Encolpius’s future.
  • Then she cuts it up and cooks it and they all enjoy a very good meal.
  • Oenothea brings out a leather dildo, rubs it with oil, ground pepper and crushed nettle seed, and inserts it into Encolpius’s anus.
  • She mixes the juice of cress with some southern-wood, soaks his cock and balls in it, then starts whipping them with a fresh stinging nettle stalk.
  • Cut to Encolpius, presumably having fled this treatment, being pursued through the street by the two old women.
  • In one sentence, Chrysis declares her undying love for Encolpius.
  • A paragraph of Encolpius begging to be taken back into Circe’s house so he can prove himself.
  • Suddenly he is back at base with Giton, who tells him a very elegant lady came asking about him the day before.
  • Chrysis clasps him to her bosom and tells him she will love him forever.
  • One of Eumolpus’s new servants tells Encolpius that his master is furious at him for being absent for two days (presumably he was kidnapped by Proselenus and Oenothea?).

In the last substantial piece of text (one page long) we are told about an aging legacy-huntress named Philomela. Now too old to seduce rich men, she prostitutes out her son and daughter and is now proceeding to ‘place’ them with Eumolpus, ostensibly for their education.

A comic sex scene which, for once, I did understand: Eumolpus has told everyone he is a martyr to gout and other ailments in order to secure loans and favours from all the legacy hunters. Therefore he cannot have sex with the daughter in the usual athletic way. Therefore he lies on a bed, gets the girl to straddle him, and gets his servant, Corax, to lie directly underneath him, under the bed, and move his thighs and hips up and down, so that Eumolpus’s penis enters and exits the daughter’s vagina, without Eumolpus actually moving. Presumably this had Nero’s courtiers in fits of laughter when read out to them.

Encolpius finds the brother watching this performance through a spy hole.

(This is a recurrent theme of the narrative. Early on in the text, Encolpius watches Giton and the 7-year-old having some kind of sex through a crack in the door; then watches Eumolpus being beaten up through a spy hole. In his notes, Sullivan refers to this recurring theme as scopophilia which means, literally, ‘love of looking’.)

Anyway, in this fragment, despite the boy being willing, Encolpius yet again can’t get an erection, attributing it to the recurring theme of ‘divine hostility’ i.e Priapus’s enmity.

However, abruptly, in the next fragment, he can! attributing his blessed cure to Mercury. He lifts up his tunic to show Eumolpus his erection and the old poet, just to be sure, ‘held in both hands the gift of the gods.’

In the last few one-line fragments, someone is warning Eumolpus that the ships of wealth he had told everyone would soon arrive from Africa have not showed and therefore the many legacy-hunters they’ve been bilking are starting to get impatient and suspicious.

A sentence, apparently from Eumolpus’s will, promising that all his creditors will be paid but only on condition that they cut up his corpse and eat it in front of the people.

Then the implication that one, at least, of the creditors, blinded by greed, was ready to do this.

The final paragraph lists reasons for agreeing to cannibalism – pretend you’re eating something else; an hour of disgust will buy a lifetime of wealth; all meats are disgusting, that’s why we season them – and some historical examples of cannibalism in cities under siege.

And with this gruesome little fragment, the text of the Satyricon ENDS.

Petronius Arbiter

All scholars and introductions devote some time to the problem of identifying the author of the work. The manuscripts of the Satyricon ascribe the work to a ‘Petronius Arbiter’. Most scholars identify this with the young author and dandy named Petronius who flourished at the time of the emperors Claudius (41 to 54) and Nero (54 to 68). Tacitus mentions him in his Annals, telling us that Petronius had been at one time governor of Bithynia in Asia Minor. On his return to Rome the young man-about-town was brought into Nero’s inner circle as its arbiter elegantiae or arbiter of taste, elegance and wit.

According to Tacitus, Petronius fell victim to ‘the jealousy of [Nero’s secretary] Tigellinus against an apparent rival, more expert in the science of pleasure than himself’, Tigellinus turned Nero against him and, as with Seneca, as with Lucan, Nero compelled him to commit suicide.

The Satyricon is one of the very few light-hearted/humorous prose works from the Roman period and helped to found the picaresque tradition. This is the tradition of prose narratives describing a young hero (or picaro, in Spanish) having a series of rambling comic adventures, generally with a sidekick and comic companion, which was, from the early modern period (1550) to become such a major thread in European literature, enduring, in some comic writers, up to the present day.

Two translations

I read two translations in tandem, the Penguin Classics version by J.P. Sullivan, first published in 1965, and the online Project Gutenberg version, which reproduces the 1922 translation by W. C. Firebaugh (with wonderfully solid illustrations by Norman Lindsay).

The style of the 1922 is cumbersomely Victorian BUT it includes passages of text which scholars now think are later forgeries by otherwise unknown authors named Nodot and Marchena, plus the readings introduced into the text by a scholar named De Salas. The point is that these much later interpolations were made to smooth out the narrative and they do, making the Victorian version a much more enjoyable and continuous read.

By contrast the translator the Penguin edition, J.P. Sullivan, takes the intellectually reputable line of sticking solely to what scholars think Petronius actually wrote – with the result that his text is much more fragmented and puzzling. The Gutenberg edition may be old fashioned, and include blatant forgeries, but it is the better read.

There’s also a 2018 translation by A.S. Kline. This is a little more lucid than the Sullivan version but, like him, excludes all the forgeries and interpolations, and so shares the same fragmentary feel.

Related links

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Posted by Simon on January 2, 2023

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Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh (1928)

‘Besides, you see, I’m a public school man. That means everything. There’s a blessed equity in the English social system,’ said Grimes, ‘that ensures the public school man against starvation. One goes through four or five years of perfect hell at an age when life is bound to be hell anyway, and after that the social system never lets one down.’
(Captain Grimes in Decline and Fall)

This was Evelyn Waugh’s first published novel, after a little runup of student and young mannish articles. His preface to the 1961 edition of Vile Bodies tells us it was well reviewed but only sold a few thousand copies. It was Vile Bodies published 2 years later, in 1930, which made his name and shot him into the bestseller league.

Maybe it was because, despite its modish aspects, Decline and Fall is basically a very traditional narrative. It recounts the picaresque adventures of an innocent young man, Paul Pennyfeather, abroad in a naughty world.

Paul is a cipher, a narrative device whose purpose is to lead us through a succession of scenes and incidents conceived solely for their humorous effect, the humour ranging from broad farce, slapstick and caricature, to satire of contemporary mores and, from time to time, hints of something a bit darker. This kind of narrative goes back through his immediate predecessor Aldous Huxley, to Dickens in the 19th century, Tom Jones or Candide in the 18th, Don Quixote in the 17th, and back past them to classical forebears, while also looking forward to the hapless adventures of naive young men in the novels of Kingsley Amis, David Lodge and Howard Jacobson.

The whole of this book is really an account of the mysterious disappearance of Paul Pennyfeather… because, as the reader will probably have discerned already, Paul Pennyfeather would never have made a hero, and the only interest about him arises from the unusual series of events of which his shadow was witness.

Part one – disgrace and public schoolteacher

Oxford

The narrative opens at the fictional Scone College Oxford where Mr Sniggs, the Junior Dean, and Mr Postlethwaite, the Domestic Bursar, witness innocent hapless Paul Pennyfeather being debagged (having his trousers pulled off) by the drunken members of Bollinger Club (obviously a reference to the real-life Bullingdon Club, of which David Cameron and Boris Johnson were members) led by the raffish Sir Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington and featuring the loud Lumsden of Strathdrummond.

Pennyfeather is a mild and harmless student of Divinity and had just returned from a characteristically high-minded meeting of the League of Nations Union, Oxford branch. On the fateful night he is set upon, has his trousers pulled off and is chucked in the fountain. He is last seen running trouserless across the main quad. Next morning he is summoned by the Dean and flabbergasted to be told he is being sent down i.e. expelled. The comedy is in the way the drunken aristocrats who attacked him get off scot-free. No one thinks of blaming them, not even Paul himself. Thus the world as it is.

Paul returns to stay with his guardian (he is an orphan, symbol of his abandonment and forlorn status) in London, his hopes of a decent career in tatters. He traipses round employment agencies, including one (‘Church and Gargoyle, scholastic agents’) which finds iffy graduates jobs at dodgy private schools. Despite a comic absence of any of the qualities required (fluent in German, excellent at music and good at games) the agency puts Paul forward for the job and the desperate school accepts.

Llanabba Castle

Thus he finds himself catching a train to remotest north Wales where he arrives at the grandly named Llanabba Castle, an impressive building stuffed with Victorian crenellations and battlements. (It may be worth noting that this, like so much in Waugh’s books, is closely based on his own experiences. Unemployed after leaving Oxford in 1923, the young, unknown and unpublished Waugh took a job at a prep school in remotest Wales in January 1925. He was, as you can imagine, completely miserable and quit 6 months later.)

At Llanabba Castle, as you would totally expect, he meets a ripe cast of eccentrics. It’s very much St Trinians 20 years avant la lettre.

Thus the head is an obvious rogue, Dr Augustus Fagan PhD. He has two daughters, Florence and Diana, who the boys nickname Flossie and Dingy. There’s a slightly sinister butler, who improbably calls himself Sir Solomon ‘Solly’ Philbrick. Only a few other teachers are named, namely Mr Prendergast,  a weak and vacillating man who constantly thinks about leaving to become a vicar, whose most notable feature is his ill-fitting wig which the boys ceaselessly taunt him about; and Captain Grimes, a leery, rambuctious man with wooden leg and a liking for the local pub.

Obviously there are several chapters filled with comic incidents, especially Paul’s abrupt introduction to the rough and tumble of teaching i.e. the boys ragging him, playing tricks, him slowly realising how pointless it is to try and teach them anything. Once a week he has to take young Peter Beste-Chetwynde to the local church and supervise him playing the organ, which neither of them know the first thing about.

There are a number of storylines or themes. Paul discovers that everyone wants to tell him the story of their lives, he’s that kind of person, a passive listener. The most florid example is Philbrick who tells him a long cock and bull story about being an experienced burglar and criminal which goes on for pages and pages. Later Paul discovers that he’s spun equally as extensive and detailed yarns to Prendergast and Grimes except with completely different content.

Grimes finds himself manoeuvred into a position where he is going out with, and then expected to marry, Dingy, which fills him with comic unhappiness. As often as he can, he takes Paul down the local pub, run by a Mrs Roberts, to bemoan the latest blow to his fortunes. He is, he laments, constantly landing ‘in the soup.’

Sports Day

The big set piece – rather as in the St Trinians films – is the annual sports day. It is, of course, a fiasco. There are no running tracks laid out (the boys are told to run to a clump of trees at the edge of the ground and back), the marquee keeps falling down, a local company delivers ‘hurdles’ which turn out to be 5 foot tall metal railings with lethal spikes along the top, and so on.

It’s an opportunity to meet the some of the parents who all have comic names, for example Mr and Mrs Clutterbuck, the Earl of Circumference whose son, little Lord Tangent is at the school, the local Vicar, Colonel Sidebotham and the Hope-Brownes. A mangy looking peevish local brass band shambles up. It’s a comic version of an Agatha Christie village fete.

By far the most impressive parent is Mrs Margot Beste-Chetwynde whose son Peter Paul has got to know and like on their pointless weekly trips to the organ loft. She arrives in ‘an enormous limousine of dove-grey and silver’. She is to become the dominating presence of the narrative, certainly dominating and guiding Paul’s destiny.

The door opened, and from the cushions within emerged a tall young man in a clinging dove-grey overcoat. After him, like the first breath of spring in the Champs-Elysées, came Mrs Beste-Chetwynde—two lizard-skin feet, silk legs, chinchilla body, a tight little black hat, pinned with platinum and diamonds, and the high invariable voice that may be heard in any Ritz Hotel from New York to Buda-Pest.

Not only is she magnificent but she has brought her boyfriend, Chokey, who is an impeccably dressed, stylish black man. Some modern readers may struggle to get past the fact that several of the other characters refer to him using the n word. But it seemed to me an obvious reference to the extreme fashionability among a certain type of upper class bohemian woman of taking a cool black lover, as exemplified by the rich society heiress Nancy Cunard who, in 1928, began an affair with Henry Crowder, an African-American jazz musician who was working in Paris. Chokey drops out of the narrative later, but makes a great impression in his beautiful suit, accompanying the stunning Margot.

(It’s initially a peripheral event among the general mayhem that Prendergast fires the starting pistol (an actual service revolver lent to him by Philbrick) into the ground as ordered, but in doing so grazes little Lord Tangent’s foot, his ankle in fact. Later we learn that the foot becomes infected and has to be amputated. One of 3 or 4 harsh and bleak snippets or details away to the side of the main narrative, which hint at a darker world.)

After the fiasco of the sports day, attention shifts to Captain Grimes and his reluctant marriage to Dingy, much to the disgust of her father, Dr Fagan. He’s doing it because he needs to get on and the marriage will, he hopes, bring him a part share in the business.

There is, however, a catch, which Grimes points out to Paul. He’s already married! To an Irishwoman, who shortly afterwards begins to make enquiries about him. Miserably unhappy in his new marriage, Grimes one day stages his own suicide, leaving all his clothes on the beach, in the style of John Stonehouse and Reggie Perrin.

(It may be worth noting the striking fact that this mode of suicide was based on Waugh’s own. In the summer of 1925 he quit his job at a Welsh prep school, believing he had secured a post as assistant to the noted author, C. K. Moncrieff, at the same time enthusiastically sending off the manuscript of his first novel to a friend from Oxford. But the post with Moncrieff fell through and the friend from Oxford savaged his novel, and the twin blows were enough to make him suicidal. He records that he went down to a nearby beach, left a farewell note with his clothes and walked out into the cold waves. However, in the best comic tradition, an attack by jellyfish made him reconsider his plan of action and he returned quickly to the shore.)

Part two – Margot

Mrs Beste-Chetwynde had taken rather a fancy to Paul at the sports day and now asks him (via a letter to her son, Peter) to come and visit her at her house, King’s Thursday, in Hampshire, over the upcoming East holidays.

Margot’s house is the pretext for some broad satire of contemporary life, namely the fashion for the new, modernist, Continental architecture of the Bauhaus mode. Several pages are devoted to describing the traditional splendour of King’s Thursday, its Tudor brickwork and original wood carvings and panelling etc. We are told that when it is put up for sale, a national campaign is launched by the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings to save it for the nation. Then, with comic brutality, we are told that Mrs Beste-Chetwynde buys it and has it completely demolished.

She has it rebuilt in the modern style by fierce and unforgiving Professor Otto Friedrich Silenus, a Hungarian modernist architect of advanced opinions. His advanced opinions are described in detail, rotating around the idea that houses are machines for living in and would ideally be inhabited by machines. He is very disappointed by humans and their failure to be more like machines.

The utterly up-to-date modernist masterpiece he constructs for Margot becomes a running joke throughout Paul’s extended stay there, the narrative dotted with casually comic references to the luminous ceiling in Mrs Beste-Chetwynde’s study, the india-rubber fungi in the recessed conservatory, to the little drawing-room whose floor was a large kaleidoscope set in motion by an electric button.

There are references to the glass floor and the pneumatic rubber furniture and the porcelain ceiling and the leather-hung walls. To the lift which carries passengers to the top of the great pyramidical tower from which they can look down on the roofs and domes of glass and aluminium ‘which glittered like Chanel diamonds in the afternoon sun’ (p.142). There’s a tank of octopuses. The study is shaped like a cylinder (p.133).

Here Paul is taken by young Peter Beste-Chetwynde in a chauffeur-driven car and spends wonderful, idle weeks of what turns into a permanent house party, a more brittle, glass and steel version of the weekend house parties which feature in the early novels of Aldous Huxley only more chaotic, the young people ‘faster’, with racier slang. The guests have names like the Honourable Miles Maltravers MP and Lord Parakeet, with pride of place going to the slightly older Sir Humphrey Maltravers, the Minister of Transportation who wanly wants to marry Margot. In fact all the men want to marry Margot. But as the arrive, have hi jinks and cocktails, play tennis, go for walks, pine for Margot and eventually leave, Paul remains a fixture and slowly becomes aware that she has taken a shine to him.

In fact she manages to manoeuvre Paul into proposing to her and she accepts. That night, in a scene which was presumably daring for 1928 (remember some of D.H. Lawrence’s novels were banned for obscenity) Margot slips into the darkness of Paul’s guest bedroom, lets her silk pyjamas fall to the floor and climbs into bed with him, just to check that she isn’t making a mistake.

At one point Paul is surprised to discover his old friend from Oxford, Arthur Potts, arriving at King’s Thursday to enquire the whereabouts of Captain Grimes. As far as Paul knows Grimes is dead, but he’s struck by Potts’s role as some kind of official snoop.

The looming marriage promises to transform Paul’s life. He is going to be rich. He writes to Dr Fagan quitting his job at Llanabba Castle.

The Latin-American Entertainment Co. Ltd

All this is very entertaining in a lazy social comedy kind of way, but the plot sharpens up a bit when we hear that Margot is involved in a commercial enterprise, The Latin-American Entertainment Co. Ltd, which was founded by her father. Margot and Paul head to London to finalise arrangement for their marriage i.e. sending invitations to all the Bright Young Things and a lot of shopping.

In among this Margot takes Paul along with her to an ‘audition’ carried out in a bizarrely furnished sports room, where she interviews a series of young women for work in her entertainment venues in South America. Paul is puzzled by the way the ones with the least experience get the gig. They are all quite rough, working class girls.

Paul is surprised to discover Arthur Potts hanging round outside the interview venue, as if he’s spying on things.

With only days to go, Margot asks Paul to do her a little favour and fly to Marseilles to sort out the passports and visas for Margot’s girls to catch their ships to South America. Being the unquestioning cipher and innocent abroad that he us, Paul proceeds to do this, excited at flying to the South of France and staying in a swish hotel, though there is momentarily a sense of menace when he finds himself taken by taxi later the same night into an increasingly dark, dingy and threatening slum quarter of Marseilles. He is eventually so scared that he runs away and back towards the well lit streets, but not before the reader has gotten a pretty shrewd idea that these English girls are being shipped into prostitution.

Next day Paul shuttles between French passport and visa offices to clear the girls’ way to travel abroad, not understanding the officials’ nods and winks and innuendos, although the reader does. Then he flies back to London just days before the date set for the wedding.

Paul is enjoying a is surprised at the squalid slum they seem to be staying in and then the nods and winks and innuendoes of the French officials he has to speak to and pay small bribes to ensure their passage.

Back in London he is having a boozy lunch with his best man-to-be, Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington, (the same bounder who debagged him right at the start of the story, but all’s fair in love and war, old man) when there’s a tap on his shoulder and Inspector Bruce of Scotland Yard arrests him.

Part three – prison

Paul is convicted of white slaving and sentenced to 7 years hard labour. Margot’s name is never mentioned during the trial and Paul doesn’t mention the fact that he was simply carrying out instructions for his fiancée who, he now realises, made her money from running what they used to call the white slave trade and we nowadays call people trafficking. In fact the reverse; the pompous judge goes out of his way to contrast Margot’s spotless reputation with Paul’s implied depravity.

Margot Beste-Chetwynde’s name was not mentioned, though the judge in passing sentence remarked that ‘no one could be ignorant of the callous insolence with which, on the very eve of arrest for this most infamous of crimes, the accused had been preparing to join his name with one honoured in his country’s history, and to drag down to his own pitiable depths of depravity a lady of beauty, rank and stainless reputation.’

This is a complete comic inversion of the truth, structurally identical to the way the titled yobbos who debagged Paul at Oxford got off scot free while his life was ruined.

Paul is shipped off to Blackstone Prison as Prisoner D.4.12. Here, in the best tradition of comic novels, he meets many of the characters we know from earlier in the book, namely Philbrick, who’s got the cushy job of meeting new convicts, delousing them and handing out a uniform covered in arrows. And when the chaplain visits Paul in his cell, he turns out to be none other than weedy Mr Prendergast, still full of doubt and uncertainty, still wearing a terrible wig, and ragged by the prisoners even worse than he was by the boys.

Satire

The prison is the setting for multiple strands of comedy and satire. There is a great deal of fun at the expense of the newish governor of the prison who is an academic, Sir Wilfred Lucas-Dockery, a sociologist, whose fatuous attempts to treat the prisoners as sensitive individuals is epitomised by his belief that:

I came to the conclusion many years ago that almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.

Thus Sir Lucas insists that all the prisoners take part in an Arts and Crafts class he’s set up for them to express their creativity but where, in fact, one or two prisoners each week take advantage of the sharp tools to try and commit suicide. He sets up a bookbinding class which fails because many of the prisoners eat the paste, claiming it’s better than the prison porridge.

Sir Lucas is prey to all kinds of fashionable fads like his plan to introduce artificial sunlight into prisons. He also wants to hire a permanent psychoanalyst and his interviews with the prisoners are continually pushing psychoanalytical ideas (‘Would you say you are an introvert or an extrovert?’) which confuse both the prisoners and the strict disciplinarian Chief Warder. He is, in other words, a broad caricature of the well-meaning, high-minded liberal whose pampered upbringing means he has no understanding at all of the institution and people he has been set to manage. The dynamic between his wispy ideas and the hard-knuckled approach is identical to the dynamic between the governor of Slade Prison and Mr Mckay in the TV series Porridge.

The extended satire comes to a gruesome climax when the governor, in thrall to his faddish beliefs about psychoanalysis and frustrated creative urges, lets a man who is clearly a religious psychopath attend carpentry class in order ‘to express himself’. With utter predictability, at the first opportunity, the psychopath uses the carpentry tools to attack Mr Prendergast the chaplain, who he is convinced is the antichrist, and saw his head off! Like the incident of little Lord Tangent being shot in the foot and dying of blood poisoning, only on a much bigger scale, this incident takes farce and ‘humour’ to the limit.

The good news for the prisoners is the incident quite dampens Sir Wilfred’s faddish ideas and the prison returns to being run by the Chief Warden, who is much more of a stickler for rules and regulations. The prisoners like him. They know where they are and what to expect. Everyone is very happy.

There’s a minor thread satirising public school (every novel written by someone who went to public school has to criticise public school, it’s part of the contract). There’s comedy in the way that Paul, like all arrivals at Blackstone, has to undergo 4 weeks of solitary confinement but how, when the 4 weeks are up and he goes to see the governor, he surprises both him and the Chief Warden by asking if he can continue being in solitary. He finds it peaceful and thoughtful. After all:

anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums, Paul learned, who find prison so soul-destroying. (p.188)

Egdon Heath and Captain Grimes

After a few months, Paul is transferred to the Convict Settlement at Egdon Heath, where the prisoners spend the day hacking rocks in a quarry. Here he meets none other than Captain Grimes. After faking his own death, he travelled incognito to London and was hoping to start a new life away from his two wives, but he was caught, charged, convicted and sentenced to 3 years for bigamy.

On the train to Egdon a warder charitably shows him the day’s paper which happens to contain a big photo of Margot and the news that Peter has inherited the title of Earl of Pastmaster. While we were at King’s Thursday Peter somehow morphed in a few weeks from being a schoolboy to becoming the self-possessed young man who claimed to have set Paul and Margot up (though, as we know, Margot had her own motives in ‘hiring’ Paul to do her bidding). Now he is an Earl. He has aged far more than the time described in the novel, but then it is a panto.

Paul settles in to life at Egdon but soon becomes aware that a guardian angel is looking after him: unaccountably nice food is sent to his cell, the prison trusty offers, instead of greasy tomes from the library brand new books sent from London. The guardian angel is, very clearly, Margot, who feels frightfully guilty at how things turned out for him.

Then the Great Lady herself comes to visit, mainly to complain that her acquaintances are cutting her and she feels she is growing old and to tell Paul that she is going to marry Maltravers (who has now been promoted to Home Secretary) she hopes he doesn’t mind and she sweeps out, leaving Paul stunned but no longer surprised. Nothing surprises him.

Meanwhile Grimes gets restless. He can’t stand being locked up (unlike Paul who rather likes the solitude and lack of distraction). One foggy day in the quarry Grimes creates a distraction, then manages to leap astride a warder’s horse and gallop off into the gloom. He escapes. His hat is found in the centre of the great Egdon Marsh and he is reported dead, but Paul realises Grimes is too much of a life force to ever be extinguished.

Paul’s escape

Then Paul escapes. It is impresario-ed by Margot, with the details managed by her now very capable son, the ever-more mature Peter. Peter arranges for his stepfather, Sir Humphrey, who is now the Home Secretary, to sign a form permitting Paul to be taken to a clinic to have his appendix removed.

(Sir Humphrey has been made a lord and taken the name Lord Metroland, which makes Margot Margot Metroland. We learn that none of this has stopped Margot taking a younger lover, Alisdair.)

Paul protests to the warder taking him to the clinic that he’s already had his appendix out, but the warder gives him a broad wink and more or less tells him it’s a scam. Paul will be taken to a clinic on the South Coast where he will apparently ‘die’ under the knife. Death certificates will be signed to terminate his legal existence. Then the man with no legal existence will be rowed out to Margot’s yacht, waiting anchored off the coast, and sail civilisedly round France, into the Med and be conveyed to Margot’s luxury villa on Corfu.

Which is exactly what happens, the comic element being played up by the fact that the clinic he is sent to is run by none other than our old friend Dr Fagan, who’s packed up the teaching lark and sold Llanabba Castle. And by the presence of young Peter and Sir Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington to oversee it all, not least handling the comically drunk surgeon, who is so plastered they easily persuade him the patient has died under the knife, with the result that he bursts into drunken tears and signs the death certificate before passing out.

Corfu

The scene cuts to Corfu. Life is very civilised in Margot’s villa. Who should he meet but Professor Otto Friedrich Silenus, spouting his metallic modernist opinions. He delivers a speech which might sort of be the serious point of the novel – or a semi-serious meditation on life provided for readers who enjoy that sort of thing. It’s to the effect that there are two kinds of people, the static and the dynamic. Paul is static and ought to sit in the stalls watching life. Margot is dynamic and loves throwing herself onto the whirling fairground ride of life, screaming her head off. Silenus naturally gravitates to the centre of the spinning wheel of life where, for a master such as himself, there is stability. Paul should never have got involved with dynamic people.

Epilogue

The book ends with a very satisfactory completion of the circle, when Paul, comically disguised with a moustache, returns to Oxford, gains readmission to his old college and resumes his studies in divinity.  After a bit of thought he retains the surname Pennyfeather but takes another first name and tells everyone he is the other guy’s cousin.

There is some broad comedy in the way he discovers that ‘Paul Pennyfeather’ has, in his brief absence (of, we are startled to discover, only a little over a year) become a legend at Scone College, various college worthies telling him about the legendary figure’s madcap escapades, all of which Paul knows to be utterly fictitious. Fictions within a fiction. Comic quirkiness and character are added when Waugh gives us details of some of the early Christian heresies Paul is now happily studying.

The story really does come full circle when, one quiet and studious evening, Paul hears a loud commotion in the quad outside and realises it’s the Bollinger Club again. Soon afterwards his door crashes open and it is none other than Peter Beste-Chetwynde who is now a student at Paul’s college and has been getting plastered with the other aristocrats. He drunkenly reels off all the adventures they’ve had in the past year, which serves as a useful summary of the story, told by a drunken student, a clever and funny device. Peter reels out and quiet Paul returns to his study of the Ebionite heresy.

Very neat, very stylish, very satisfying.

Descriptions

So much for the plot. This young man’s first novel also contains all kinds of verbal and stylistic pleasures. Here are a couple from Paul’s time at King’s Thursday.

Paul had noticed nothing in the room except Mrs Beste-Chetwynde; he now saw that there was a young man sitting beside her, with very fair hair and large glasses, behind which his eyes lay like slim fish in an aquarium; they woke from their slumber, flashed iridescent in the light, and darted towards little Beste-Chetwynde.

And:

As the last of the guests departed Mrs Beste-Chetwynde reappeared from her little bout of veronal, fresh and exquisite as a seventeenth-century lyric. The meadow of green glass seemed to burst into flower under her feet as she passed from the lift to the cocktail table.

Characters and tones

Waugh is excellent at mimicry, at ventriloquism, at doing various voices. There’s the raffish, disreputable voice of Captain Grimes always wanting to go off down the pub; the Germanic mechanical tone of Professor Silenus; or the impressive capture of Peter Beste-Chetwynde’s drunken dialogue right at the very end. There’s the elaborate Welsh locutions of the Llanabba brass band and the chilled drawl of Chokey, the extremely smooth black man.

Waugh particularly relishes music hall cockney, which I find particularly enjoyable to read in my mind’s ear, or out loud. Here’s a warder at Egdon reassuring Margot, when she comes to visit, that she can say what she likes without fear of being reported:

‘Don’t mind me, mum, if you wants to talk personal,’ said the warder kindly. ‘I only has to stop conspiracy. Nothing I hears ever goes any further, and I hears a good deal, I can tell you. They carry on awful, some of the women, what with crying and fainting and hysterics generally. Why, one of them,’ he said with relish, ‘had an epileptic fit not long ago.’ (p.194)

‘He said with relish’ :). Waugh is always looking for the comic detail, the foible which reveals people as the rogues and rascals that, deep down, they all are.

Related links

Evelyn Waugh reviews

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Posted by Simon on December 3, 2021

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Ping by Samuel Beckett (1966)

Ping is a very short text, just 908 words long. Beckett wrote it in French with the title Bing then translated it into English.

It is in one continuous block of prose, like The Unnamable. It uses a fanatical amount of verbal repetition like How It Is does, taking a handful of key phrases and repeating them in almost every sentence to build up a sense of hysteria.

As so often the vocabulary is plain and simple except for a handful of distractingly unusual words, in this case ‘haught’ (7 instances), ‘unover’ (6 instances) and, of course, the title word, ‘ping’ (37 instances).

The word ‘white’ is particularly repeated and the work’s original title in French was, apparently, Blanc, reminding us of various attempts to create pure white poetry unstained by meaning by the likes of the French poet Stephane Mallarmé. The word ‘white’ is repeated 93 times, making up over 10% of the words used. Ping occurs 37 times, 4%.

The text

All known all white bare white body fixed one yard legs joined like sewn. Light heat white floor one square yard never seen. White walls one yard by two white ceiling one square yard never seen. Bare white body fixed only the eyes only just. Traces blurs light grey almost white on white. Hands hanging palms front white feet heels together right angle. Light heat white planes shining white bare white body fixed ping fixed elsewhere. Traces blurs signs no meaning light grey almost white. Bare white body fixed white on white invisible. Only the eyes only just light blue almost white. Head haught eyes light blue almost white silence within. Brief murmurs only just almost never all known. Traces blurs signs no meaning light grey almost white. Legs joined like sewn heels together right angle. Traces alone unover given black light grey almost white on white. Light heat white walls shining white one yard by two. Bare white body fixed one yard ping fixed elsewhere. Traces blurs signs no meaning light grey almost white. White feet toes joined like sewn heels together right angle invisible. Eyes alone unover given blue light blue almost white. Murmur only just almost never one second perhaps not alone. Given rose only just bare white body fixed one yard white on white invisible. All white all known murmurs only just almost never always the same all known. Light heat hands hanging palms front white on white invisible. Bare white body fixed ping fixed elsewhere. Only the eyes only just light blue almost white fixed front. Ping murmur only just almost never one second perhaps a way out. Head haught eyes light blue almost white fixed front ping murmur ping silence. Eyes holes light blue almost white mouth white seam like sewn invisible. Ping murmur perhaps a nature one second almost never that much memory almost never. Whitewalls each its trace grey blur signs no meaning light grey almost white. Light heat all known all white planes meeting invisible. Ping murmur only just almost never one second perhaps a meaning that much memory almost never. White feet toes joined like sewn heels together right angle ping elsewhere no sound. Hands hanging palms front legs joined like sewn. Head haught eyes holes light blue almost white fixed front silence within. Ping elsewhere always there but that known not. Eyes holes light blue alone unover given blue light blue almost white only colour fixed front. All white all known white planes shining white ping murmur only just almost never one second light time that much memory almost never. Bare white body fixed one yard ping fixed elsewhere white on white invisible heart breath no sound.Only the eyes given blue light blue almost white fixed front only colour alone unover. Planes meeting invisible one only shining white infinite but that known not. Nose ears white holes mouth white seam like sewn invisible. Ping murmurs only just almost never one second always the same all known. Given rose only just bare white body fixed one yard invisible all known without within. Ping perhaps a nature one second with image same time a little less blue and white in the wind. White ceiling shining white one square yard never seen ping perhaps way out there one second ping silence. Traces alone unover given black grey blurs signs no meaning light grey almost white always the same. Ping perhaps not alone one second with image always the same same time a little less that much memory almost never ping silence.Given rose only just nails fallen white over. Long hair fallen white invisible over. White scars invisible same white as flesh torn of old given rose only just. Ping image only just almost never one second light time blue and white in the wind. Head haught nose ears white holes mouth white seam like sewn invisible over. Only the eyes given blue fixed front light blue almost white only colour alone unover. Light heat white planes shining white one only shining white infinite but that known not. Ping a nature only just almost never one second with image same time a little less blue and white in the wind. Traces blurs light grey eyes holes light blue almost white fixed front ping a meaning only just almost never ping silence. Bare white one yard fixed ping fixed elsewhere no sound legs joined like sewn heels together right angle hands hanging palms front. Head haught eyes holes light blue almost white fixed front silence within. Ping elsewhere always there but that known not. Ping perhaps not alone one second with image same time a little less dim eye black and white half closed long lashes imploring that much memory almost never. Afar flash of time all white all over all of old ping flash white walls shining white no trace eyes holes light blue almost white last colour ping white over. Ping fixed last elsewhere legs joined like sewn heels together right angle hands hanging palms front head haught eyes white invisible fixed front over. Given rose only just one yard invisible bare white all known without within over. White ceiling never seen ping of old only just almost never one second light time white floor never seen ping of old perhaps there. Ping of old only just perhaps a meaning a nature one second almost never blue and white in the wind that much memory henceforth never. White planes no trace shining white one only shining white infinite but that known not. Light heat all known all white heart breath no sound. Head haught eyes white fixed front old ping last murmur one second perhaps not alone eye unlustrous black and white half closed long lashes imploring ping silence ping over.

Obsession with posture

There is, as usual with Beckett, obsessive and obsessively repeated concern for the precise configuration of the human body. What happens if you extract the phrases solely describing the body?

white body fixed one yard legs joined like sewn…
bare white body fixed only the eyes only just…
hands hanging palms front white feet heels together right angle…
bare white body fixed…
bare white body fixed…
head haught…
legs joined like sewn heels together right angle…
bare white body fixed one yard…
white feet toes joined like sewn heels together right angle…
bare white body fixed one yard…
hands hanging palms front…
bare white body fixed…
head haught…
mouth white seam like sewn…
white feet toes joined like sewn heels together right angle…
hands hanging palms front legs joined like sewn…
head haught…
bare white body fixed one yard…
nose ears white holes mouth white seam like sewn…
bare white body fixed one yard invisible…
long hair fallen white invisible…
head haught…
nose ears white holes mouth white seam like sewn…
bare white one yard fixed…
legs joined like sewn heels together right angle hands hanging palms front…
head haught…
legs joined like sewn heels together right angle hands hanging palms front head haught eyes white invisible fixed front…
head haught…

Well if you do this the quality of repetition becomes more obvious, as does the importance of the precise physical posture of the figure.

Physical posture as the seed of the pieces

It’s never really clear that these postures relate to anything else at all, no known symbolism, whether astrology or yoga or the kama sutra. Beckett just seems to have conceived of (generally old and decrepit) human bodies in different contorted and uncomfortable postures, and then built texts around them (All Strange Away, Imagination Dead Imagine, How It Is, Enough).

For example, once he had conceived of a decrepit old human body crawling through mud and imagined the right leg moving up along with the right arm in a kind of crab-like movement to shunt itself forward through the mud, then virtually the whole of How It Is follows fairly logically.

Or once he had conceived of a decrepit old man so spavined that he walks literally bent double and can only see the little patch of grass and flowers at his feet, then the text of Enough flows fairly logically.

In each case the positions need to be described in as concentrated and abstract way as possible to achieve the writing degree zero minimalism he was aiming at and this creates a kind of basic mantra or chant which will be repeated ad nauseam, with tiny variations, and will form the scaffold of the piece.

Then, like a christmas tree, the various baubles and bangles can be added – the blue eyes, the white hair, the confined space (as is so frequent in these so-called ‘closed space’ works) and then just the bare minimum possible of sputtering mind or consciousness, in this case the half dozen references to the almost obliterated faculty of memory to suggest the last gasping ghostly operation of something which was once ‘mind’.

Other strands

A shorter extract could be made focusing on the colours because, despite the emphasis on white, there are other colours, namely black, grey, blue, rose. A slightly longer one focusing on the references to eyes. Or the half dozen references to memory. The references to Ping, whatever he, she or it is. So the text can be parsed out into blocks around each of this handful of themes. Or into strands of spaghetti, a whole plateful of text woven out of what, when you single them out, are only ten or so separate strands.

David Lodge tries to salvage the piece for the tradition

Novelist and critic David Lodge, in a 1968 review of Ping, suggests that the ‘consciousness’ depicted in the piece makes repeated efforts to assert the possibility of colour, movement, sound, memory and another person’s presence, only to collapse each time into the acceptance of colourlessness, paralysis, silence, amnesia and solitude. He suggests Ping is:

the rendering of the consciousness of a person confined in a small, bare, white room, a person who is evidently under extreme duress, and probably at the last gasp of life.

Maybe. It’s one approach. It’s an attempt to situate Beckett or a Beckett text within the tradition of realistic or psychologically coherent fiction, as if it was in any way about anything like a human being depicted in anything like the way one is usually depicted in realist fiction.

Ping seen as incantation

Personally, I wouldn’t bother. I think Ping and the other short prose works of the period are more like incantations, spells or chants. Certainly they all benefit from being read out loud. Words can never escape having meanings (well, words in a language you understand). But they are also susceptible to rhythm and pattern, the pattern of sounds (vowel, consonant, long or short sounds, plosives and sibilants) and the rhythm of the way the same words place in different orders or interactions, take different weight or rhythm.

The ostensible meaning may well be the depiction of yet another Beckett protagonist, speaker or ‘voice’ on the verge of conking out. But the text is also, quite obviously, an assemblage of sounds, arranged with obsessive repetition with variations and the continual addition of small new details, to give the thing a dynamic, a sense of a continually changing, rather shimmering surface.

The crucifixion

Lastly, I won’t make a big deal out of it, because I don’t think the text fully intends it, but when I read:

bare white body fixed… hands hanging palms front white feet heels together

I had a vision of the crucifixion and thereafter couldn’t get it out of my mind, despite the repeated references to some kind of container ‘one yard by two’, the characteristic ‘closed space’ of these mid-1960s prose pieces.

And having highlighted the importance of the central physical posture to all of these mid-60s prose pieces, and the obsessive way Beckett repeats descriptions of the contorted, painful position at the centre of each text, it dawned on me that the great Positioned Body in our tradition, the archetypal image of a human body bent into an agonising posture in Western civilisation is, of course, the body of Christ nailed to the cross.

I’m not familiar with Beckett’s biography, I’ve no idea whether he was ever a Christian believer, but he was born and bred in Ireland which is a land dominated by churches and Catholic imagery. So I’ll leave it at just the simple thought: maybe all the contorted, painfully positioned and obsessively described bodies which haunt Beckett’s prose are aftershocks, knackered variations in a different mode, in a modernist style, in a post-nuclear lens, of the original contorted, painfully positioned body which underpins our civilisation.

Related link

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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Posted by Simon on December 30, 2020

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Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe (1592)

JOHN FAUSTUS: All things that move between the quiet poles
Shall be at my command: emperors and kings
Are but obeyèd in their several provinces;
But his dominion that exceeds in this
Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man;

Title and provenance

The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus.

Date Written: c. 1589-1592.

Source: In 1587 a version of the story of Doctor John Faustus was published in Frankfurt-on-Main, in German. Soon after – a 1592 edition is the earliest one extant – an anonymous English translation, containing modifications and additions, was published in England, under the title The Historie of the damnable life of Doctor John Faustus. It is clear from the numerous similarities in plot, episodes and even language that the History was Marlowe’s primary source for his play.

Doctor Faustus exists in two versions: the 1604 (‘A’ text) quarto is shorter; a second, longer version was published in 1616 (the ‘B’ text). Which one is more ‘authentic’ has been exercising Marlowe scholars for four hundred years. The editor of the New Mermaid edition – Roma Gill – thinks the shorter A version likely to be purer Marlowe, and the later B version includes additions by other writers. This is a review of the 1616 ‘B’, long version, as found on the ElizabethanDrama.org website.

Executive Summary

The famous theologian Doctor John Faustus is spiritually unfulfilled with his chosen vocation, teaching and debating at the university in Wittenberg. He reviews all existing forms of human learning, dismissing them one by one as trash, fit only for small minds. He decides occult knowledge and magic is the only thing for him and the climax of part one is when he conjures a devil, an agent of Satan, Mephistopheles, and signs a contract with him, which gives Faustus the gift of sorcery and the secrets of the universe for 24 years, in exchange for his eternal soul.

Then there’s the middle bit where Faustus takes advantage of his magical powers, flying into space in a chariot drawn by dragons, an extended farce scene poking fun at the pope, before the most famous scene where he conjures up the most beautiful woman in all human history, Helen of Troy, with the words: ‘Is this the face that launched a thousand ships…’ Different printed editions of the play give different scenes demonstrating how Faustus uses his powers.

In the final part of this moralising fairy tale Mephistopheles returns and demands Faustus’s soul and, after a lot of pleading, Faustus is dragged down to hell. So let that be a lesson to you, children: Do NOT sign away your soul to the devil, no matter how tempting the short-term offer. ‘What must you not do, Johnny?’ ‘I must no sign my soul away to the devil, miss.’ ‘Good boy, Johnny.’

The play

Prologue

Consciously rejects the grand locations and warlike deeds of his earlier plays (Dido, Tamburlaine and the Jew of Malta) for something more intimate. The prologue introduces Dr John Faustus with a potted biography of his birth, upbringing and education at Wittenberg, where he soon excels in theology.

Till swoln with cunning of a self-conceit,
His waxen wings did mount above his reach,
And, melting, heavens conspired his overthrow;
For, falling to a devilish exercise
And glutted now with learning’s golden gifts,
He surfeits upon cursèd necromancy;
Nothing so sweet as magic is to him,
Which he prefers before his chiefest bliss:
And this the man that in his study sits.

This is very slick and professional, to take us from nothing to having a good grasp of Faustus’s character and biography in just 27 lines before the prologue indicates the scene with his hand, and the play opens. Very impressive.

Act 1

Dr Johann Faustus is sitting in his study reviewing books of learning, the law, medicine, politics, and dismisses them all as superficial trash:

Philosophy is odious and obscure;
Both law and physic are for petty wits;
‘Tis magic, magic, that hath ravished me

Here, right at the start of the play a Good Angel and a Bad Angel appear to Faustus, respectively encouraging him, and telling him not to, study magic. Faustus summons two fellow students of the dark arts who have, apparently, helped him, Valdes and Cornelius. To all these characters, Marlowe allots his trademark booming verse, packed with soaring ambition, studded with stunning images of luxury and power, imagining what it will be like when they have total magical control:

VALDES: As Indian Moors obey their Spanish lords,
So shall the spirits of every element
Be always serviceable to us three;
Like lions shall they guard us when we please;
Like Almain rutters with their horsemen’s staves,
Or Lapland giants, trotting by our sides;
Sometimes like women, or unwedded maids,
Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows
Than has the white breasts of the queen of love:
From Venice shall they drag huge argosies,
And from America the golden fleece
That yearly stuffs old Philip’s treasury;

Faustus gets excited at the images of power and luxury his friends conjure up, and he invites them for dinner and to plan how to practice magic.

Scene 2 Street outside Faustus’s house Two scholars enter and ask Faustus’s servant, Wagner, where his master is. The scene is padded out with comic material, namely that Wagner has picked up scraps of rhetoric and logic and so teases the two scholars by proving their arguments illogical or wrongly formed etc. Eventually he spits out that his master is at dinner with Valdes and Cornelius and the two scholars go away, sad, and tutting and shaking their heads, because that pair have a bad reputation for the dark arts.

Scene 3 A grove This is the scene where Faustus, alone in a grove in the countryside, has drawn a circle and written into it various magical symbols and now recites a Latin spell, there is a crack of thunder, and a devil appears, Mephistopheles. Although he should be terrifying, he proceeds to explain the processes and procedures of devils in relatively bureaucratic terms: when they hear anyone abjure Christ, God and the Scriptures a devil will come speeding, hoping to win a soul.

Faustus’s superficiality, the lack of understanding behind all his fine reading, is amply demonstrated. He says he agrees with the ancient philosophers in thinking hell a children’s fable, of confounding heaven and hell. When Mephistopheles tries to explain that hell isn’t a world of punishments, it is deprivation of the boundless soul-filling job of being in heaven, Faustus mocks him and tells him to ‘learn of Faustus manly fortitude’. In other words, it is plain for everyone in the audience to see that Faustus is not only a blasphemer and infidel, he us stupid when it comes to the only thing in life which matters.

It is Faustus who boastfully makes the offer, telling Mephistopheles to go and tell his master, mighty Lucifer:

FAUSTUS: Say he surrenders up to him his soul,
So he will spare him four and twenty years,
Letting him live in all voluptuousness,
Having thee ever to attend on me,
To give me whatsoever I shall ask,
To tell me whatsoever I demand,
To slay mine enemies, and to aid my friends,
And always be obedient to my will.

You can see how this kind of megalomaniac over-reaching is first cousin to Tamburlaine’s heaven-vaulting ambition, and Faustus’s ambitions are cast in very similar terms:

By him I’ll be great emperor of the world,
And make a bridge thorough the moving air,
To pass the ocean with a band of men;
I’ll join the hills that bind the Afric shore,
And make that country continent to Spain,
And both contributary to my crown.
The Emperor shall not live but by my leave,
Nor any potentate of Germany.
Now that I have obtained what I desired.

Scene 4 A comic scene with Wagner the servant (who speaks in servant prose) who encounter a ‘clown’ or beggar in the street and raises two devils to terrify the clown into serving him (Wagner).

Wagner can raise devils? This scene, in fact all the scenes with Wagner and some of the banter between Faustus and Mephistopheles has a raggedy comedy about it. T.S. Eliot described The Jew of Malta as ‘a savage farce’ and Faustus also has farcical elements, as if Marlowe can’t take his own story seriously.

Scene 5 Faustus’s study He listens to the arguments of the good and bad angel, but is resolved for bad, He realises:

The god thou serv’st is thine own appetite,

And yet he is determined to do it. He argues back against the good angel, and then – it being midnight – conjures Mephistopheles. The devil tells him to stab his arm to draw the blood to sign his pact with great Lucifer.

But something genuinely spooky happens. As Faustus tries to write, his blood keeps congealing, preventing him from continuing to sign away his soul. Mephistopheles hurries offstage and returns with a chafer of flame which they use to prevent Faustus’s blood congealing, and he finishes writing out the contract. But then appears on his arm the words Homo fuge, Latin for ‘man, flee!’ Faustus is momentarily panic-stricken, but Mephistopheles magics up a dancing troupe of devils to distract him. Thus reassured (or dazzled) Faustus reads out the contract he has drawn up: Mephistopheles will be his to command for 24 years to carry out his every wish, and then:

I, John Faustus of Wittenberg, Doctor, by these presents, do give both body and soul to Lucifer, Prince of the East, and his minister Mephistophilis; and furthermore grant unto them, that, four-and-twenty years being expired, and these articles above written being inviolate, full power to fetch or carry the said John Faustus, body and soul, flesh and blood, into their habitation wheresoever.

Mephistopheles again double checks that Faustus is entering into the contract of his own free will. This is important for the very legal pernicketiness which characterises Christian theology. Faustus affirms it. Now commences his 24 years of fun.

Faustus asks Mephisopheles about hell and the latter gives a famous and profound description:

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self place, for where we are is hell,
And where hell is, there must we ever be.

Hell is the absence of God and of God’s grace which is what saves and redeems humans. It is not so much a place, as a condition we carry round with us. Hence Mephistopheles’ earlier declaration:

Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it:
Think’st thou that I, that saw the face of God
And tasted the eternal joys of Heaven
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,
In being deprived of everlasting bliss?

Once again Faustus shows his idiocy by saying he doesn’t believe hell exists, it’s an old wives’ tale. Nonetheless, Mephistopheles says he’ll bring him the most beautiful women in the world, each morning, fresh to his bed. And Mephistopheles gives him a book full of magic spells.

Scene 6 Some time later, in Faustus’s house, he accuses Mephistopheles of misleading him, of looking up at the stars and the beautiful heaven he will never see. Mephistopheles tries to talk him round, the two angels appear and the bad won triumphs, hardening Faustus’s heart. Incidentally, there’s an indication of what the pair have been up to:

Have not I made blind Homer sing to me
Of Alexander’s love and Oenon’s death?
And hath not he, that built the walls of Thebes
With ravishing sound of his melodious harp,
Made music with my Mephistophilis?

He quizzes him about the nature of the solar system, the planets and the stars, which knowledge Mephistopheles rattles off but when Faustus asks him who made it all the devil literally cannot bring himself to utter the word God.

When the good angel prompts Faustus to try to repent he is visited by Lucifer and Beelzebub. They tell him not to think on heaven or call on God. To distract him they summon up an allegorical masque of the seven deadly sins. Faustus loves the show and Lucifer gives him a parting gift of a book of magic before exiting.

Scene 7 A comic scene between Robin and Dick, two ostlers or staff at an inn who have got their hands on one of Faustus’s books and appear to be thinking of using it to gain magical powers.

Chorus 1 The chorus describes how Faustus rode a chariot pulled by dragons out into the solar system to behold the planets in their motion. Returned to earth after 8 days, he is now riding a dragon across its surface and will soon arrive at Rome.

Scene 8 Faustus and Mephistopheles review the tour they’ve made through France, Germany and down into Italy. Faustus is loving it:

Whilst I am here on earth, let me be cloyed
With all things that delight the heart of man:
My four-and-twenty years of liberty
I’ll spend in pleasure and in dalliance…

Now they hide in order to watch the annual Festival of St Peter inside the palace of the Pope. A procession enters, the striking part of which is that a ruler named Bruno is in chains, and the Pope orders him to go on all fours so as to act as a footstool for him (the Pope) to ascend his throne.

This Bruno is a fictitious ‘anti-pope’, a role which arose in the 14th century when two different popes were elected for a period of fifty years, who opposed and anathematised each other. But there was never an anti-pope named Bruno, just as the pope in these scenes is referred to as Adrian and depicted as an enemy of the Holy Roman Emperor, whereas the one and only pope named Adrian (the only Englishman to have been pope) ruled from 1154 to 1159 and was an ally of the Holy Roman Emperor. Similarly, the scene features a King Sigismund of Hungary and there has never been a King Sigismund of Hungary. In other words, these names are just handy labels for a scene of broad farce. Similarly, the scene

Faustus and Mephistopheles watch all this then disguise themselves as cardinals of France and Padua in order to give the pope their theological opinion that the antipope Bruno should immediately be burned at the stake and the Emperor excommunicated. The pope hands Bruno over to our disguised pair to carry out the sentence.

Scene 9 The pope’s privy chamber The pope is holding a feast for king Sigismund and his cardinals. Faustus reveals that he and Mephistopheles have magically transported Bruno safely back to Germany. The two real cardinals of France and Padua enter and are perplexed when the pope asks how their imprisoning and punishment of Bruno is going; both deny any knowledge although, of course, the pope’s entire court swears they saw it happen. So the cardinals are dragged off to prison and punishment.

Faustus gets Mephistopheles to say a spell (interesting to compare these spells with the same sort of thing Shakespeare used in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) to make him invisible and proceeds to wreak havoc, whispering insults in the pope’s ear, as if from his neighbour, whisking away the pope’s plates and goblet of wine, etc, eventually slapping the pope. Concluding some evil spirit is loose among them, the pope calls in some friars who solemnly chant magic spells, er, prayers, until Faustus and Mephistopheles set about them, too, beating them and throwing fireworks at them as they run away.

Pantomime.

Scene 10 Street near an inn Back to the serving men Robin and Dick. The vintner accuses them of stealing a cup from the inn. Rather over-reacting, Robin uses Faustus’s book to read and spell and conjure up Mephistopheles. As punishment for dragging him away from more important work, Mephistopheles transforms them into a dog and an ape, who promptly bark and bounce around the stage. Panto.

Scene 11 Court of the Holy Roman Emperor at Innsbruck Two servants, Frederick and Martino, explain that Faustus has arrived at the Emperor’s court, having magically transported Bruno to Germany, and has promised to show the emperor all his historical antecedents.

Scene 12 The emperors ‘presence chamber’ The emperor formally greets Faustus and thanks him for rescuing Bruno, the German anti-pope. Faustus then presents a dumb show in which we all see the figure of Alexander the Great confront and defeat the Persian emperor Darius before setting the latter’s crown on the head of his paramour. The emperor is mightily impressed, though he has to be restrained by Faustus from embracing the dumbshow Alexander.

One of the emperor’s courtiers is a drunken nitwit named Benvolio, and as a result of saying he doesn’t believe in Faustus’s powers, the latter gives him the horns of a stag. Everyone laughs then Faustus menaces him with setting a pack of devils to tear him to pieces as Diana’s hounds tore Actaeon to pieces. The emperor intercedes and so Faustus relents and removes Benvolio’s horns. This is comedy, farce – but what strikes me is the use of classical myth to articulate it. The Greek myths and legends dominate Marlowe’s imagination from start to finish.

Scene 13 A grove near Innsbruck In revenge for his humiliation, Benvolio organises an ambush with Frederick and Martino and, when Faustus comes along, they stab him, knock him to the ground and then chop off his head! They exult over his corpse but are terrified when the headless body gets to its feet. He cannot be killed. Now he conjures up Mephistopheles and two other devils to drag the three conspirators off to dump them in mud and drag them through thornbushes and throw them off steep rocks to break their bones, and they all exit, screaming.

That’s not all. Some soldiers had been included in the assassination attempt and when they now come forward to attack Faustus, the latter conjures up Mephistopheles and other devils in the guise of an army with drums and fife who march against the soldiers and chase them offstage with fireworks.

Scene 14 Show what became of the three conspirators Benvolio, Frederick and Marino, now covered in mud, scratched and bruised and,.. with stags horns on their heads! They conclude there is nothing they can do against such magic and will retreat to Benvolio’s castle, there to live in retirement till their shame has passed.

Scene 15 A convoluted comic scene in which a horse-courser or dealer begs Faustus to sell him his magic horse, which he finally does for 40 dollars but tells the man not to ride it into water. Barely 30 seconds have passed and Faustus has just gone to bed, before the dealer returns to say he did ride the horse into water and it disappeared leaving just a straw behind. Now the dealer goes to pull Faustus out of bed but his leg comes off in his hand, Faustus wakes up shouting Murder, murder’, and the dealer runs off. Faustus’s leg is magically restored (just as his head was in scene 13) and  his servant tells him the Duke of Vanholt wishes to see him.

Scene 16 Robin, Dick, the horse-courser, and a carter are down the pub sharing their reasons for hating Faustus.

Scene 17 The Court of the Duke of Vanholt The Duke thanks Faustus for building him a castle in the air. His wife, the duchess, is pregnant and expresses a fancy for grapes. Although it is midwinter, Faustus dispatches Mephistopheles who returns a few seconds later with a spray of wonderful fresh grapes.

The Duke and Duchess are still marvelling at this when there is a load of rowdy banging at the gate. It is Robin, Dick, the carter, and the horse-courser. They’re drunk, insult Faustus and demand more beer! Faustus asks the duke to indulge him and calls for more beer. This scene takes up an inordinate space, in which the horse dealer drunkenly asks whether Faustus can remember having his leg pulled off, Faustus says yes, the dealer asks where it is, Faustus replies, back here with me, and so on. Presumably the Elizabethan audience found all this very funny.

All four begin to accuse Faustus with their grievances but one by one he strikes them dumb, last of all the hostess who’s come to ask for her bill to be paid, and they exit like zombies. The duke and duchess are very amused.

Scene 18 Back at Faustus’s, Wagner enters to tell us his master is preparing to die, has given Wagner:

his wealth,
His house, his goods, and store of golden plate,
Besides two thousand ducats ready-coined.

Then we see Faustus at dinner with two scholars. They have been discussing who was the most beautiful woman in the world (as wise and learned scholars will, after a few beers) and decided it must be Helen of Troy. Faustus promptly gets Mephistopheles to lead her in, in a dumbshow of the same style as the one where Faustus conjured up Alexander the Great. They are immensely impressed and gratified, thank Faustus and leave.

The tone completely changes as an old man enters and warns Faustus, at length, to save his soul. Faustus is stricken with remorse and tries to repent but Mephistopheles turns savage, accuses him of breaking the bargain, and warns him he will tear his flesh in piecemeal.

Faustus is so terrified he instantly promises to renew his vow, and Mephistopheles hands him a dagger so he can cut his arm and renew the contract in his own blood and then, vengefully, orders Mephistopheles to torment the good old man who just visited him. Faustus asks for just one thing – that he may possess Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world they saw a few minutes ago, to distract him from his vow.

Re-enter Helen, passing over the stage between two Cupids which prompts the famous lines:

FAUSTUS: Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? −
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
[He kisses her]
Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies! −
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.

What strikes me now about this speech is, again, the way it is drenched in references to Greek myth, and references Troy, Paris, Achilles, Jupiter, Semele and Arethusa.

Scene 19 in which Faustus pays his debt and is dragged down to hell With a crack of thunder Lucifer, Beelzebub, and Mephistophilis enter Faustus’s study. Separately, Faustus finalises his will with Wagner, gifting him all his belongings. Then the scholars visit and Faustus laments and regrets his life of sin, his promise and the threat of eternal damnation.

A scholar tells him to turn to God but the devils hold his tongue, dry his tears, pull down his hands so he cannot pray. Then he for the first time tells them the full story, of how he sold his soul to the devil for 24 years of partying, Horrified, the three scholars retire into the next room.

Now Mephistopheles closes in on him, admitting it was he who drew his taste to books of magic, closed up the books of divinity and steered Faustus’s soul to damnation. The good angel and bad angel appear, the good one showing him the throne in heaven Faustus would have been awarded, the bad one explaining now he will be dragged down to hell and hell appears to be a pretty bad place. Mephistopheles shows it to him:

EVIL ANGEL: Now, Faustus, let thine eyes with horror stare
Into that vast perpetual torture-house.
There are the furies tossing damnèd souls
On burning forks; their bodies boil in lead;
There are live quarters broiling on the coals,
That ne’er can die; this ever-burning chair
Is for o’er-tortured souls to rest them in;
These that are fed with sops of flaming fire,
Were gluttons, and loved only delicates,
And laughed to see the poor starve at their gates:
But yet all these are nothing; thou shalt see
Ten thousand tortures that more horrid be.

It is noticeable how traditional this image is, and how different from the much more subtle, psychological definition of hell (as the absence of God which all damned people carry around within themselves wherever they go) which Mephistopheles expressed at the start of the play. Too subtle for the climax of a tragedy, which requires blood and guts and screaming, or as much garish suffering as possible. And hence the reversion to a traditional fire and pitchforks interpretation here at the play’s climax.

The clock chimes eleven. He has an hour left and delivers a blisteringly intense speech of terrified desperation:

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.
O, I’ll leap up to my God! − Who pulls me down? −
See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul, half a drop: ah, my Christ! −

The clock ticks relentlessly forward and then strikes midnight. There isn’t, as you might have expected, a big set-piece scene featuring Lucifer, Beelzebub et all gloatingly seizing him. Instead Faustus’s final moments are brief and brutal as a pack of devils enter and drag Faustus offstage as he screams his final lines:

O mercy, Heaven! look not so fierce on me!
Adders and serpents, let me breathe a while!
Ugly hell, gape not! Come not, Lucifer!
I’ll burn my books! − O Mephistophilis!

Even reading this I found genuinely harrowing. Well acted onstage it can be terrifying.

Scene 20 There is a short, half-page-long scene as the three scholars cowering next door, go into Faustus’s study and discover his body all torn to pieces, and recount the terrible screams they heard. Well, they’ll gather up his body and give him a fine funeral at which all the students of the university will wear black.

Chorus 2 Brief and to the point:

Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,
And burnèd is Apollo’s laurel bough,
That sometime grew within this learnèd man.
Faustus is gone: regard his hellish fall,
Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise,
Only to wonder at unlawful things,
Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits
To practise more than heavenly power permits.

Thoughts

A divided text Clearly there are two completely different types or tones of content sitting cheek-by-jowl in this strange uneven text: the genuinely tragical and sometimes very moving, and the farcical, panto content. Most scholars and indeed readers and audiences can easily see that the comic scenes were almost certainly not written by Marlowe. Marlowe’s humour, as demonstrated in The Jew of Malta, is stylish, cynical and savage. Much of the humour in Faustus’s comic scenes (pulling Faustus’s leg off, cutting his head off, four churls getting drunk down the pub) is just stupid.

Endless theology There’s enough theological issues or problems in the play – the precise status of the good and bad angel, the extent of Faustus’s free will, whether God’s grace could save him up to the last minute – to keep serious-minded scholars in academic papers for the rest of time. After all, Marlowe was himself a scholarship-winning student of divinity at Cambridge and Roma Gill’s introduction informs us that Mephistopheles’ subtle vision of hell as exclusion from the bliss of salvation is in fact closely translated from a text by the 4th century Church Father, Saint John Chrysostom.

Dazzling escapades For us ordinary folk, though, it’s useful to make a list of Faustus’s various escapades: that he rides through the solar system in a chariot pulled by dragons (!), rides across Europe on the back of a dragon, gets to slap the pope and chase friars with fireworks, and that Mephistopheles changes two servants into an ape and a dog. He creates a masque featuring Alexander the Great and builds a castle in the air and, by implication, has Homer sing to him, and has sex with Helen of Troy. On the farcical end of the scale, he sells a horse dealer a horse which is in fact a straw, gives a drunken knight real stags’ horns, survives having his head cut off and his leg pulled off, and strikes four noisy chavs dumb.

Clever critics have pointed out that Faustus’s escapades mark stages on his degeneration: he starts out hymning the infinite power of the mind, associating with Homer and travelling the solar system, before degenerating into a court entertainer for the Duke of Vanholt, calling up historical masques and magicking up fresh grapes, before he becomes involved in the downright stupid escapades involving lost heads and legs and, in the final scenes, wishes to cease having a body altogether, to be buried in the earth or to become as incorporeal as the dew, so as to escape the torments of hell.

It’s a neat idea, but ignores the actual order of some of the adventures, not least that the best one – kissing Helen of Troy – happens at the end. But it does tie together all the adventures and bring out the often tawdry and banal nature of what people actually get when their dreams are fulfilled.

Marlowe’s Greek imagination Shakespeare litters his plays with references to English folklore, dialect words and imagery (the names and symbolism of English flowers, for example). There’s nothing like that in Marlowe. In Marlowe almost every analogy or metaphor references Greek myths or legends. From the masque of Alexander the Great early on through the apparition of Helen of Troy at its climax, through to the best line in the short epilogue mentioning Apollo, and via hundreds of other references, the Greek myths and legends dominate Marlowe’s imagination from start to finish.

Campus tragedy Dr Faustus is a tragedy about an academic. It is a tragedy about the overweening pride which comes from being very learnèd and superior, ‘glutted with learning’s golden gifts… swollen with cunning of a self-conceit’, as the prologue puts it – but lacking wisdom or morality.

In a way, it is a tragedy about the perils of over-education. There’s a modern genre called the campus novel or campus comedy, dating from Kingsley Amis’s novel Lucky Jim and characterising many of David Lodge’s novels. The presence of the three scholars right at the climax of the play highlights the fact that, all the way through, Dr Faustus is a campus tragedy.

Dr Faustus as Marlowe’s psychodrama

Marlowe studied Divinity at university, but also read widely in Latin classical literature. The quote from St John Chrysostom indicates how deeply he knew his theology, and a glance at any of the poems or plays shows how drenched his imagination was in the Greek myths and legends.

It isn’t the most obvious thing about the play, but Dr Faustus can be read as a dramatised debate between these two halves of Marlowe’s education, between the two major cultural traditions of Europe, Christian belief and the enormous cultural heritage of the classical world.

On the whole Faustus’s vision of power and the infinite reach of the human imagination are expressed through metaphors and references to Greek myth – the downsides, the price to pay for overweening ambition, the limits of the purely human, are expressed in theological terms. Man can aspire to the marvellous – but at the end of the day, he is a creature, created by a Creator, to whom he owes an infinite debt.

Obviously this tension is openly expressed throughout the play, most narrowly in the debates between the good and evil angel, or in the warnings of the old man, who wanders in off the street to tell Faustus to repent. It is encoded in the imagery of the play, in the two contrasting sets of symbols and images, one pagan, one Christian.

But you can argue that the debate, the conflict of value systems, comes to a symbolic climax in the figure of Helen of Troy, and her appearance just before Faustus is dragged offstage by the devils.

Helen is maybe the most famous figure from all Greek myth, an image of worldly beauty, of sensual bliss who also epitomises the appeal and attraction of classical culture, and by extension, the world of the Imagination, with its promise of intellectual reward, emotional comfort and psychological reassurance. How many thousands of artists and millions of art-lovers find consolation in turning from the banal, dirty, frail and disappointing realities of the world, to open a book and enter a wonderful world of imaginative consolation.

And yet… Helen has been conjured by a devil. The entire thing is a deception. She is not real, the pleasure she brings is not real. When Faustus says:

Her lips sucks forth my soul: see, where it flies! −

There is a clear and very obvious ambiguity in the line. It is simultaneously a lover’s expression of sensual bliss, the kind of erotic hyperbole common to Renaissance poets and their heirs – but at the same time has a diabolical and theological meaning. The devil who made or is impersonating Helen really is sucking out his soul. The Helen Faustus and the audience sees is a gorgeous mask over a death’s-head skull.

And so, along with being a storming theatrical entertainment, and a satire on the entire notion of the over-ambitious Renaissance Man – Dr Faustus can also be read as dramatising the tensions in Marlowe’s divided mind between the two central traditions of European thought, which he was expert in, which saturated his thinking, and which he never managed to reconcile in his short life.

Related links

Marlowe’s works

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by Simon on October 26, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on October 26, 2020

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Mrs Craddock by Somerset Maugham (1902)

‘Entre deux amants il-y-a toujours un qui aime, et un qui se laisse aimer.’

After the success of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth in 1897, the 23-year-old William Somerset Maugham optimistically abandoned his career as a trainee doctor to become a professional writer. Later in life, Maugham considered this to have been a bad mistake, for literary success came only slowly and he spent nearly a decade churning out ten novels which sold little or poorly.

All the time his real ambition was to be a playwright, but none of his plays were accepted either. It was only in 1907, ten years after Liza, that his play Lady Frederick was finally staged and, to his own surprise, became a runaway success, transforming his reputation and fortunes. Within a year he had four plays running in the West End and had arrived.

Mrs Craddock

Mrs Craddock, from 1902, is a product of his lean early years, and you can see why. It is a long and uneven narrative, sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, covering ten or so years in the life of Bertha Leys:

  • from when she is a head-strong, romantic orphan under the guardianship of her aunt Mary living in the family home, Court Leys in Kent
  • through her infatuation for and marriage to the virile local farmer Edward Craddock
  • her slow realisation that Edward is conventional, unimaginative and boring and cares more about his wretched cows and pet dogs than about Bertha’s feelings
  • (something she starts to suspect on their honeymoon in London where he laughs at crude vaudeville and can’t see the point of the art galleries which Bertha adores)
  • she is mortified when he humiliates her at tennis at a big party of the local gentry
  • she hopes that getting pregnant and having a child will bring them close together again, or at least provide a focus for her thwarted love
  • but, inevitably, she has a long, drawn-out miscarriage and the baby is still-born
  • worse than anything is the calm, sensible way Edward accepts this and its corollary, the doctor’s conclusion that she will never again be able to have children – news at which Bertha is, understandably, distraught (chapter 17)
  • their married life becomes a series of niggling arguments – like the one about whether the farm workmen should chop down some beech trees which overshadow an important field (Edward) or should not, because they are old and beautiful (Bertha)
  • these escalate into flaring rows and, slowly, Bertha is forced to admit that she can no longer stand her husband
  • so she leaves Edward and Kent to go travelling with Aunt Mary on the Continent for months
  • on her return to London she has an ill-advised but madly passionate fling with a distant cousin, Gerald Vaudrey
  • but when, after torments of separation, and even mad thoughts about going with him to the New World, Gerald finally leaves for New York, Bertha’s spirit snaps and she returns to Court Leys emotionally empty

Ironically, throughout the novel, as Bertha’s love for him dwindles and dies, we watch as Edward’s career has gone from strength to strength. He manages the Ley property superbly, making a hefty profit and buying up surrounding land, restoring the house, building a tennis court in the grounds, and becoming the life and soul of local North Kent society.

It’s just a shame that Bertha loathes and detests local North Kent society for its parochialism and small-minded snobbery. In the final chapters of the book Bertha and Edward live together but utterly separate in spirit. Bertha, bored out of her mind, walks the local countryside, watches the changing seasons, goes down to the sea and stares for hours at its endless waves, dreaming of escape, dreaming sometimes of suicide or some kind of painless dissolution, anything to make the dreary routine of morning, noon and night, boring dinners with her husband or dreary visits to the local vicar or other landowners, all go away.

Then Edward, stubborn and confident to the end, goes out riding on a horse which has already thrown him once and broken his collarbone. The horse shies at a fence, falling on top of him and he dies. Stunned, Bertha staggers to her bed and reviews her life. Shocked and dismayed, she realises that she is… free!

On the day of the funeral, there is social comedy about who should get order of precedence in the funeral parade among the various organisations Edward which was a leading member of (the freemasons, the county council, the Conservative Party).

But quite separate from all that, Bertha doesn’t attend the funeral. Remote and isolated from the hurly burly of the entire world, she lies on her sofa, in the beautifully restored house, admiring the fine view to the sea, and picks up a book. The End.

Response

I enjoyed reading Mrs Craddock but was aware of its numerous faults. For a start, there are several odd passages where Maugham is being ‘experimental’ (or giving in to contemporary literary fashion) but which really don’t come off.

One of them occurs half way through, when Bertha, still in her infatuation stage, hears tell that Edward is a little injured, and goes off into a peculiar hallucination of him being brought in dead, her washing the corpse, lowering the coffin into the grave and her throwing herself on top of it, a bizarre stream-of-consciousness hallucination – at the end of which Edward walks in right as rain and wondering why she’s in such a state.

The book is also heavily garlanded with over-ripe, purple prose passages describing the Kent countryside or the romantic air of Italy, which go on for pages.

That said, the book has two obvious virtues or strengths:

One is the effectiveness of the social comedy generated by the stiflingly conventional provincial society of Blackstable (the thinly disguised version of Whitstable where Maugham was himself brought up in the 1880s).

The characterisation of the stiff local vicar, Mr Grove, his well-intentioned sister, the hearty doctor, the dashing local landowner Branderton, the chorus of snobbish local ladies led by Mrs Branderston, with Mrs Mayston Ryle and Mrs Molsons not far behind, the scenes involving this little community – are often very funny.

The vicar’s sister, Miss Glover, is a particularly memorable character, all shiny stiff dress and sincere Christian sympathy. Maugham was always strong on social comedy, and strong on the subtleties and veiled malice of petty snobbery. It would later reappear in his feel for the thousand and one stupid restrictions on colonial life in the Far East, as described in his short stories of the 1920s.

Another is Maugham’s knack for beginning or setting his stories in very mundane settings, and often mundane incidents, but from this base working up passages of tremendous emotional intensity which stay with the reader.

Thus, for example, Bertha’s passionate lust and master-worship of Edward are described with real heat, as is her second great infatuation, the sensuality leading to inflamed lust for young Gerald. You can almost smell the sex. Unusual for its day.

Similarly, Bertha’s anger when she realises that Edward doesn’t much care if she lives or dies or what she does, is vividly described and moving.

And so, again, towards the end, is her prolonged mood of depression as she wanders down to the grey Kent sea and fantasises about drowning in it.

So far so good. But whether all these passages really come together to form a convincing description of a plausible personality, such as literature is meant to, I’m not sure.

I’m not sure and I’m also not sure if I’m qualified to judge. For a start, maybe only a woman reader or critic could really assess whether Bertha is a ‘realistic’ character. Who am I to say?

Secondly, the novel covers a period from the 1880s to the end of the 1890s and… that was so long ago, so far away, in a kind of constipated rural Victorian society which is almost impossible for us to imagine, that I can’t see how any modern reader can make a just assessment of its veracity.

What can be confidently made is the criticism that the number two figure in the story – Edward Craddock – never really comes alive. Tall, strong and good-humoured he remains throughout the novel – admittedly putting on weight and growing red-cheeked as the years pass – an unbendingly good, honest, efficient and utterly boring man, the straight man to Bertha’s fireworks display of emotions.

Maybe it’s the failure to bring the man in this novel fully alive which has contributed to it being more or less forgotten.

But what is good, I think, in the novel, is the slow, slow pace at which Maugham describes Bertha’s slow, slow, slow loss of her infatuation, then loss of her love, then her loss of respect for her husband. The book has to be long because its whole point is to describe the very gradual erosion of her love in great detail. In this respect, in the care with which Maugham has plotted the decay of passionate love, I think the novel works.

Sex and lust

Without much by way of introduction or preparation the book launches us straight into the flustered mind of twenty-one-year-old Bertha – living calmly and respectably with her aunt in the family home Court Leys – and her fiercely physical infatuation with the tall, strong, dark local farmer, Edward Craddock who is a tenant farmer on the Ley family land, at Bewlie’s Farm.

He came nearer, a tall fellow of twenty-seven, massively set together, big boned, with long arms and legs, and a magnificent breadth of chest. Bertha recognised the costume that always pleased her, the knickerbockers and gaiters, the Norfolk-jacket of rough tweed, the white stock and the cap – all redolent of the country which for his sake she was beginning to love, and all vigorously masculine. Even the huge boots which covered his feet gave her by their very size a thrill of pleasure; their dimensions suggested a certain firmness of character, a masterfulness, which were intensely reassuring… His cheeks were flushed and his eyes glistened. His vitality was intense, shining out upon others with almost a material warmth.

Although it’s hard for us now to imagine, a number of later writers, in the 1930s and 1940s, paid tribute to the way Maugham broke free of Victorian silence about sex, and wrote with a new openness and candour about passionate, physical love.

This fierce physicality was there right from the start in Maugham’swork, in the powerful descriptions of Liza’s pulse racing and her body swooning against the tall, strong, masculine figure of Jim Blakeston in his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897) – and exactly the same thing is repeated here, as impressionable young Bertha thrills at the touch and swoons against the tall, strong, masculine figure of young Edward.

When he put it round her shoulders, the touch of his hands made her lose the little self-control she had left. A curious spasm passed through her, and she pressed herself closer to him; at the same time his hands sank down, dropping the cloak, and encircled her waist. Then she surrendered herself entirely to his embrace and lifted her face to his. He bent down and kissed her. The kiss was such utter madness that she almost groaned. She could not tell if it was pain or pleasure. She flung her arms round his neck and drew him to her.

When at last he bade her good-bye and shook hands, she blushed again; she was extraordinarily troubled, and as, with his rising, the strong masculine odour of the countryside reached her nostrils, her head whirled.

In a field she saw him, directing some operation. She trembled at the sight, her heart beat very quickly; and when, seeing her, he came forward with a greeting, she turned red and then white in the most compromising fashion. But he was very handsome as, with easy gait, he sauntered to the hedge; above all he was manly, and the pleasing thought passed through Bertha that his strength must be quite herculean. She barely concealed her admiration.

‘I’m rather frightened of you, sometimes,’ she said, laughing. ‘You’re so strong. I feel so utterly weak and helpless beside you.’
‘Are you afraid I shall beat you?’
She looked up at him and then down at the strong hands.
‘I don’t think I should mind if you did. I think I should only love you more.’

‘Let me look at your hands,’ she said. She loved them too. They were large and roughly made, hard with work and exposure, ten times pleasanter, she thought, than the soft hands of the townsman… She stretched out the long, strong fingers. Craddock, knowing her very little, looked with wonder and amusement. She caught his glance, and with a smile bent down to kiss the upturned palms. She wanted to abase herself before the strong man, to be low and humble before him. She would have been his handmaiden, and nothing could have satisfied her so much as to perform for him the most menial services. She knew not how to show the immensity of her passion.

It’s a commonplace enough word but in Maugham’s hands the word ‘thrill’, more nakedly than in other writers of the time, describes the physical impact of sexual arousal and lust.

Even the huge boots which covered his feet gave her by their very size a thrill of pleasure…

Craddock blushed. Bertha noticed it, and a strange little thrill went through her…

He took her hand and the contact thrilled her; her knees were giving way, and she almost tottered.

His letters had caused her an indescribable thrill, the mere sight of his handwriting had made her tremble, and she wanted to see him; she woke up at night with his kisses on her lips.

It gave her a queer thrill to see him turn white when she held his hand, to see him tremble when she leaned on his arm.

It’s a striking paradox that such an externally polite, formal, correctly dressed, well-mannered and self-contained man as Maugham wrote so obsessively and fiercely, throughout his career, of complete sexual abandonment and the heart-stopping power of sheer physical lust.

Never before had she experienced that utter weakness of the knees so that she feared to fall; her breathing was strangely oppressive, and her heart beat almost painfully.

And the candid way he describes the wish to be mastered, dominated, controlled, owned and directed by a powerful strong man.

For the moment Bertha forgot her wayward nature, and wished suddenly to subject herself to his strong guidance. His very strength made her feel curiously weak.

‘Shut your eyes,’ she whispered, and she kissed the closed lids; she passed her lips slowly over his lips, and the soft contact made her shudder and laugh. She buried her face in his clothes, inhaling those masterful scents of the countryside which had always fascinated her.

Later in the book, the same thing happens all over again when she becomes infatuated with Gerald. In the course of that affair there takes place something you don’t usually read about at the period, which is the clearly defined moment when Bertha decides to have sex with Gerald, to give him the great gift of her body, to make their union unique and unforgettable.

You can almost smell the pheromones radiating off the page as Bertha pursues Gerald across London, tracking him down to her aunt’s house, her aunt goes out and they are on the verge of doing something unforgiveable according to Victorian custom (Bertha was still a married woman and keeps telling us that Gerald is almost young enough to be her son) when… there’s a knock at the door and Aunt Mary reappears in the nick of time!

Still. The description of Bertha’s heat and arousal as` she gets so close to her goal is almost pornographic in its blood-heating intensity.

Later, in the 1920s, Maugham met D.H. Lawrence (but then, he met everyone) although they didn’t hit it off. From the limited knowledge I have, I can’t help thinking that this story about a passionate young woman’s lust for a farmer prefigures Lawrence’s novels of love among the haystacks, and I wonder what the younger man thought of the trail Maugham had blazed with his shocking-for-their-time descriptions.

The battle of the sexes

Arguably the central subject of ‘the novel’ since its birth has been the battle of the sexes – to be precise the struggle to find and keep the perfect partner.

The English novel starts in 1748 with Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, a 500-page battle between a man who wants to ravish his servant girl (Pamela) and the said servant girl who insists that they are married before he takes her ‘virtue’. And the rest of ‘serious’ fiction continued to be centred on this theme for at least 150 years – the sly marriage markets of Jane Austen, the earnest character studies of George Eliot, in the American ladies in Europe of Henry James and the Golden Age snobbery of Edith Wharton, through the endless sex war in D.H. Lawrence, eachoed in the love comedies of H.G. Wells or Aldous Huxley, and so on.

Literature which doesn’t address the problem of finding the right partner, and holding onto them i.e. of marriage and adultery, tends not to be thought central to the Great Tradition of the English Novel. Thus ‘serious’ literary critics for a long time refused to admit Sterne, Dickens or Conrad to the ‘canon’.

Love, marriage, infidelity, these are the topics which fill vast warehouses of ‘serious’ literature. Madame Bovary. Anna Karenina.

Mrs Craddock is smack bang in the middle of that tradition for which marriage is the sole interest of human life and, in particular, unhappy marriage. Unhappy, mismatched and ill-fated love turned out to be the central theme of Maugham’s long career.

And Mrs Craddock amounts to an extended early exploration of this theme.

Maugham and women

And at the heart of these mismatched marriages is the women. Maugham throughout his long career had a special sympathy with women. Take imaginative, free-spirited, if naive, Kitty Garstin getting bored of her dull husband in The Painted Veil. Or Mary Panton, unsuitably married to an alcoholic gambler in Up At the Villa and then seriously considering a second (and obviously foolish) marriage to an eminent diplomat twice her age. Or Julia Lambert, famous actress throwing herself away on a worthless young cad in Theatre. Or Liza giving her heart and body to rascally Jim Blakeston instead of decent loyal Tom in Liza of Lambeth. Mismatches, all of them. And women all at the centre of the stories.

In Maugham’s theatrical comedies of manners, there is also a wide array of interesting women characters. There are old and amusingly cynical women (Lady Grayson in Our Betters), younger, powerful women (Constance Middleton in The Constant Woman) and mature, tragic women (Mrs. Tabret in The Sacred Flame).

It is the women, and their often painful emotional journeys, who stick in the reader’s imagination, while the callow young men in these plays are often only dramatic ciphers.

Maugham’s subject is the eternal erring of the human heart, but it is nearly always a woman’s heart which is described, and felt, with greatest intensity.

The New Woman

As if the marriage theme wasn’t already central enough in the literary tradition, the 1890s saw a particular interest in the role and experience of women in contemporary society. It was the era of ‘the New Woman’, and a flurry of novels were published examining the issue of women in society, with narratives and characters being created to explore the rights and wrongs of women.

The term ‘New Woman’ was popularized by British-American writer Henry James, who used it to describe the growth in the number of feminist, educated, independent career women in Europe and the United States. Independence was not simply a matter of the mind: it also involved physical changes in activity and dress, as activities such as bicycling expanded women’s ability to engage with a broader more active world. The New Woman pushed the limits set by a male-dominated society, especially as modeled in the plays of Norwegian Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906). (Wikipedia)

The New Woman was in all the papers, in magazines, in articles, on the stage, discussed in Parliament, aired in a thousand short stories and novels. It even percolated through to the provincial backwater of Blackstable where Mrs Craddock is set, and where clever, cosmopolitan Miss Ley enjoys teasing the hide-bound locals.

‘Which do you think is the predominant partner?’ she asked, smiling drily [referring to Edward and Bertha].
‘The man, as he should be,’ gruffly replied the doctor.
‘Do you think he has more brains?’
‘Ah, you’re a feminist,’ said Dr. Ramsay, with great scorn.

Striking that old fuddy-duddy Dr Ramsay knows what a feminist is and uses the term ‘feminist’ in a story set in the 1880s. Amazing that women were arguing with men about the role of women, and both able to joke and josh about it, some 130 years ago. In that 130 years hundreds of novels, plays, films, thousands of factual books and hundreds of thousands of articles have been written about the New Woman, about feminism, women’s liberation and #metoo.

Quite clearly it is an issue, a real and enormous issue – but one like homelessness and poverty and managing the economy and the North-South divide and how to run the railways, which every generation of intellectuals thinks it has discovered, discusses to death, but which is, somehow, never finally solved.

Boldness about marriage

I mentioned Maugham’s surprising candour in describing the physical characteristics of lust. He makes at least one of his characters be just as scandalously blunt about the broader realities of sex and reproduction. It is Bertha’s aunt, Miss Ley, who is given a speech impatiently telling the dry-as-dust Miss Glover, the vicar’s sister, that the basis of marriage is biological reproduction and nothing more.

‘Yes, I know what you all think in England,’ said Miss Ley, catching the glance and its meaning. ‘You expect people to marry from every reason except the proper, one – and that is the instinct of reproduction.’
‘Miss Ley!’ exclaimed Miss Glover, blushing.
‘Oh, you’re old enough to take a sensible view of the, matter,’ answered Miss Ley, somewhat brutally. ‘Bertha is merely the female attracted to the male, and that is the only decent foundation of marriage – the other way seems to me merely horrid. And what does it matter if the man is not of the same station, the instinct has nothing to do with the walk in life; if I’d ever been in love I shouldn’t have cared if it was a pot-boy, I’d have married him – if he asked me.’
‘Well, upon my word!’ said the doctor.
But Miss Ley was roused now, and interrupted him: ‘The particular function of a woman is to propagate her species; and if she’s wise she’ll choose a strong and healthy man to be the father of her children. I have no patience with those women who marry a man because he’s got brains. What is the good of a husband who can make abstruse mathematical calculations? A woman wants a man with strong arms and the digestion of an ox.’
‘Miss Ley,’ broke in Miss Glover, ‘I’m not clever enough to argue with you, but I know you’re wrong. I don’t think I am right to listen to you; I’m sure Charles wouldn’t like it.’
‘My dear, you’ve been brought up like the majority of English girls – that is, like a fool.’
Poor Miss Glover blushed. ‘At all events I’ve been brought up to regard marriage as a holy institution. We’re here upon earth to mortify the flesh, not to indulge it. I hope I shall never be tempted to think of such matters in the way you’ve suggested. If ever I marry I know that nothing will be further from me than carnal thoughts. I look upon marriage as a spiritual union in which it is my duty to love, honour, and obey my husband, to assist and sustain him, to live with him such a life that when the end comes we may be prepared for it.’
‘Fiddlesticks!’ said Miss Ley.

As with his hot-blooded descriptions of lust, Maugham’s correlation of human reproduction with animal reproduction i.e. as an animal instinct devoid of all moral or religious meaning, strikes me as definitely anticipating D.H. Lawrence.

Boldness about religion

And the same goes for his treatment of traditional religion. After his parents died, Maugham was brought up an orphan in the home of his father’s brother, the unimaginative vicar of Whitstable in the 1880s (hence the accuracy of the social comedy of provincial Kentish society in this novel).

Sometime in his student years, Maugham’s Christian faith just melted away and he experienced a tremendous sense of liberation, liberation (as Selina Hastings’s fabulous biography of Maugham makes crystal clear) to have sex with whoever he wanted, male or female.

Accompanying Miss Ley’s blunt truth-telling about sex, there is a similar passage in which Bertha brutally attacks the Christian faith. Devout, tightly-laced Miss Glover, the vicar’s spinster sister, has come to ‘comfort’ Bertha after she’s lost her baby in childbirth. Bertha demurs.

‘Oh, Bertha, you’re not taking it in the proper spirit – you’re so rebellious, and it’s wrong, it’s utterly wrong.’
‘I can only think of my baby,’ said Bertha, hoarsely.
‘Why don’t you pray to God, dear – shall I offer a short prayer now, Bertha?’
‘No, I don’t want to pray to God – He’s either impotent or cruel.’
‘Bertha,’ cried Miss Glover. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying. Oh, pray to God to melt your stubbornness; pray to God to forgive you.’
‘I don’t want to be forgiven. I’ve done nothing that needs it. It’s God who needs my forgiveness – not I His.’

The attack continues later, when Miss Glover returns with the vicar as back-up. Bertha initially starts off meekly reading the Prayer Book with them, but then breaks down:

‘I have no wish to “give hearty thanks unto God,”‘ she said, looking almost fiercely at the worthy pair. ‘I’m very sorry to offend your prejudices, but it seems to me absurd that I should prostrate myself in gratitude to God.’
‘Oh, Mrs. Craddock, I trust you don’t mean what you say,’ said the Vicar.
‘This is what I told you, Charles,’ said Miss Glover. ‘I don’t think Bertha is well, but still this seems to me dreadfully wicked.’
Bertha frowned, finding it difficult to repress the sarcasm which rose to her lips; her forbearance was sorely tried. But Mr. Glover was a little undecided.
‘We must be as thankful to God for the afflictions He sends as for the benefits,’ he said at last.
‘I am not a worm to crawl upon the ground and give thanks to the foot that crushes me.’
‘I think that is blasphemous, Bertha,’ said Miss Glover.
‘Oh, I have no patience with you, Fanny,’ said Bertha, raising herself, a flush lighting up her face. ‘Can you realise what I’ve gone through, the terrible pain of it? Oh, it was too awful. Even now when I think of it I almost scream.’
‘It is by suffering that we rise to our higher self,’ said Miss Glover. ‘Suffering is a fire that burns away the grossness of our material natures.’
‘What rubbish you talk,’ cried Bertha, passionately. ‘You can say that when you’ve never suffered. People say that suffering ennobles one; it’s a lie, it only makes one brutal…. But I would have borne it – for the sake of my child. It was all useless – utterly useless. Dr. Ramsay told me the child had been dead the whole time. Oh, if God made me suffer like that, it’s infamous. I wonder you’re not ashamed to put it down to God. How can you imagine Him to be so stupid, so cruel! Why, even the vilest beast in the slums wouldn’t cause a woman such frightful and useless agony for the mere pleasure of it.’

This powerful scene should take its place in any anthology describing the collapse of Christian belief in the later 19th century.

What with the Darwinian view of human reproduction, this forthright atheism, and the implicit theme of the New Woman throughout the novel, along with the numerous natural descriptions which I’ve mentioned, Maugham was clearly making an effort to write a Big Serious Novel tackling some of the fashionable Issues of the Day.

It doesn’t work because the central characters aren’t, in the end, really believable enough to support the great weight placed on them. But it’s a valiant attempt.

Miss Ley

All this is to overlook the third major character in the story who is, on one reading, arguably its most successful character – Bertha’s Aunt Mary, or Miss Ley as she’s referred to.

In the opening scenes of the novel, Bertha is still living under Miss Ley’s guardianship, we see them often together, and so she is one of the first characters we get to know and like. Although she then disappears from view for the long stretches which describe Bertha and Edward’s marriage, whenever Miss Ley does reappear – when Bertha goes to stay with her for a short break, and then runs away with her to the continent, and in the prolonged sequence when Bertha is staying with Miss Ley while she has her almost-affair with young Gerald – she was greeted with cheers from this reader. Why? Because she is drily, quietly funny.

Miss Ley sat on the sofa by the fireside, a woman of middle-size, very slight, with a thin and much wrinkled face. Of her features the mouth was the most noticeable, not large, with lips that were a little too thin; it was always so tightly compressed as to give her an air of great determination, but there was about the corners an expressive mobility, contradicting in rather an unusual manner the inferences which might be drawn from the rest of her person. She had a habit of fixing her cold eyes on people with a steadiness that was not a little embarrassing. They said Miss Ley looked as if she thought them great fools, and as a matter of fact that usually was her precise opinion. Her thin grey hair was very plainly done; and the extreme simplicity of her costume gave a certain primness, so that her favourite method of saying rather absurd things in the gravest and most decorous manner often disconcerted the casual stranger.

‘Saying rather absurd things in the gravest and most decorous manner’. Miss Ley emerges as the vehicle for the best of the book’s sub-Jane Austen sly wit, acting – especially in the first half – as the tart and comic centre of the novel, as drily cynical and Bertha is passionately romantic.

Humanity, Miss Ley took to be a small circle of persons, mostly feminine, middle-aged, unattached, and of independent means, who travelled on the continent, read good literature and abhorred the vast majority of their fellow-creatures.

She asked politely after [the doctor]’s wife, to whom she secretly objected for her meek submission to the doctor. Miss Ley made a practice of avoiding those women who had turned themselves into mere shadows of their lords, more especially when their conversation was of household affairs.

[Miss Ley] had already come to the conclusion that he [Craddock] was a man likely to say on a given occasion the sort of thing which might be expected; and that, in her eyes, was a hideous crime.

Miss Ley was anxious that no altercation should disturb the polite discomfort of the meeting.

Miss Ley revels in the embarrassment of other people, especially the uptight, narrow-minded provincials around her. She spends as much time as she can in London, and even more abroad in Italy (in another anticipation of a more famous novelist, this time E.M. Foster with his nice-girls-and-their-aunts-in-Italy stories). Whenever Miss Lay arrives back in Kent it is hilarious to watch the locals being affronted and outraged and shocked and tutting and twitching the curtains, under fire from Miss Ley’s dry wit and through Miss Ley’s quiet, sardonic gaze.

And she is not only an appealing character in her own right. But at a number of key moments (throughout Bertha’s early infatuation with Edward, then slyly noticing her loss of faith in her husband, and then throughout the Gerald affair) Miss Ley’s role as onlooker and chorus to the main action pushes her closer to the reader’s perspective.

It is as if she was standing next to us in the wings of a theatre, muttering an ironic commentary as we both watch the overwrought romantic heroine fainting and weeping and panting with passion.

Oscar Wilde

Moreover, Miss Ley gets most of the book’s one-liners. Much of the dialogue of Mrs Craddock contains the sub-Wildean cynical wit which was to characterise Maugham’s later string of extremely successful plays, such Oscarisms as:

‘Marriage is always a hopeless idiocy for a woman who has enough money of her own to live upon.’

‘Marriage is an institution of the Church, Miss Ley,’ replied Miss Glover, rather severely.
‘Is it?’ retorted Miss Ley. ‘I always thought it was an arrangement to provide work for the judges in the Divorce Court.’

‘Mr. Branderton has been to Eton and Oxford, but he conceals the fact with great success.’

‘My dear Dr. Ramsay, I have trouble enough in arranging my own life; do not ask me to interfere with other people’s.’

It is madness for a happy pair to pretend to have no secrets from one another: it leads them into so much deception.

‘I make a point of thinking with the majority – it’s the only way to get a reputation for wisdom.’

‘You wouldn’t rob us of our generals,’ said Miss Ley. ‘They’re so useful at tea-parties.’

And the fact that almost all of these lines are given to Miss Ley, and that she emerges as in many ways the most loveable character, explains why Maugham begins the book with a dedication – more precisely, a mock ‘Epistle Dedicatory’ – to her. He obviously liked her best of all the characters in the book, and she is the only one you would want to meet.

A tiny Marxist comment

Having just been to an extensive feminist art exhibition, and read numerous articles about the Judge Kavanaugh affair, and read some feminist articles about Maugham and Women and, given that Bertha is quite clearly a heroine who traditional feminist criticism would see as the oppressed, repressed, stifled, stymied victim of the Patriarchy – it is worth pointing out that Bertha never does a day’s work in her life.

Bertha lives her entire life off the labour of the workers on her father’s farms and estates, as does Miss Ley.

Both women live lives full of books and art and travel and galleries and fine feelings, their meals are cooked and served and cleared away by nameless faceless servants (we never learn the names of any of the Craddocks’ household servants or farm workers), their rooms are cleaned, their laundry is washed, trains run for them, boats sail for them, galleries open for them – without them ever lifting a finger to earn it.

They belong to the rentier class. They are social parasites. Edward works hard and is efficient and effective at transforming the fortunes of the Ley estate, at managing its livestock and agriculture, and joins local bodies like the parish council and freemasons, which he also runs with exemplary honesty and thoroughness. And for this – he is bitterly mocked by his wife:

Bertha soon found that her husband’s mind was not only commonplace, but common. His ignorance no longer seemed touching, but merely shameful; his prejudices no longer amusing but contemptible. She was indignant at having humbled herself so abjectly before a man of such narrowness of mind, of such insignificant character. She could not conceive how she had ever passionately loved him. He was bound in by the stupidest routine. It irritated her beyond measure to see the regularity with which he went through the varying processes of his toilet. She was indignant with his presumption, and self-satisfaction, and conscious rectitude. Edward’s taste was contemptible in books, in pictures, and in music; and his pretentions to judge upon such matters filled Bertha with scorn.

Books, art and music – that is how Bertha judges people, not for their character or dutifulness or patriotism or hard work. All these are rather ridiculous qualities in her eyes.

This scorn is echoed by young Gerald, himself the wastrel son of rich parents, who was kicked out of public school and has got his family’s housemaid pregnant.

On one occasion Edward comes up to see his wife during her stay with Miss Ley. After he has left, Gerald, the good-for-nothing idler, mocks solid, efficient, patriotic Edward Craddock to Miss Ley, who feebly defends him:

‘His locks are somewhat scanty but he has a strong sense of duty.’
‘I know that,’ shouted Gerald. ‘It oozes out of him whenever he gets hot, just like gum.’

This, one cannot help thinking, is all too often the attitude of high-minded writers and artists – regardless of gender or race – to the actual, physical, hard, demanding labour of making and maintaining the world; the smug condescension of the bookish toward those who do the daily necessary labour which makes their luxurious lives of fine feelings and deep thoughts and carefree travel possible.

Maugham pours so much feeling and sentiment and imagination and sympathy into hundreds of pages describing Bertha’s feelings and passions and thoughts and worries and fears and disillusion and unhappiness and despair – that it is easy to forget that she is a leech.

Plus ça change

Reading older literature, I am continually struck at the way that things which bothered the late-Victorians are still bothering us now. The status, roles and rights of women were exercising many of their best minds. Same now. And so was the problem of the poor, the homeless, and the huge inequalities in society. Same now.

But there are other, lesser issues, too, which made me think that some things really never change.

Railways For example, it was only last week that we were hearing about the Labour Party’s plans to renationalise the railways because, in private hands, the level of service given by the railways is shocking, and all the money they raise seems to end up as massive dividends for their shareholders. Well, here is what Maugham thought about British railways in 1902.

Though it was less than thirty miles from Dover to Blackstable the communications were so bad that it was necessary to wait for hours at the port, or take the boat-train to London and then come sixty miles down again. Bertha was exasperated at the delay, forgetting that she was now (thank Heaven!) in a free country, where the railways were not run for the convenience of passengers, but the passengers necessary evils to create dividends for an ill-managed company. (Chapter 23)

Brexit There’s a passage designed to contrast Edward’s narrow-minded Little Englandism and his simple patriotism with Bertha’s cultured cosmopolitanism and loathing of patriotic symbols (in this case, jingoistic late-Victorian music) which anticipates a lot of the rhetoric of Brexit. Manly if thick Edward is talking:

‘I don’t mind confessing that I can’t stand all this foreign music. What I say to Bertha is – why can’t you play English stuff?’
‘If you must play at all,’ interposed his wife.
‘After all’s said and done The Blue Bells of Scotland has got a tune about it that a fellow can get his teeth into.’
‘You see, there’s the difference,’ said Bertha, strumming a few bars of Rule Britannia, ‘it sets mine on edge.’
‘Well, I’m patriotic,’ retorted Edward. ‘I like the good, honest, homely English airs. I like ’em because they’re English. I’m not ashamed to say that for me the best piece of music that’s ever been written is God Save the Queen.’
‘Which was written by a German, dear Edward,’ said Miss Ley, smiling.
‘That’s as it may be,’ said Edward, unabashed, ‘but the sentiment’s English and that’s all I care about.’
‘Hear! hear!’ cried Bertha. ‘I believe Edward has aspirations towards a political career. I know I shall finish up as the wife of the local M.P.’
‘I’m patriotic,’ said Edward, ‘and I’m not ashamed to confess it.’
‘Rule Britannia,’ sang Bertha, ‘Britannia rules the waves, Britons never, never shall be slaves. Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay! Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!’
‘It’s the same everywhere now,’ proceeded the orator. ‘We’re choke full of foreigners and their goods. I think it’s scandalous. English music isn’t good enough for you – you get it from France and Germany. Where do you get your butter from? Brittany! Where d’you get your meat from? New Zealand!’ This he said with great scorn, and Bertha punctuated the observation with a resounding chord. ‘And as far as the butter goes, it isn’t butter – it’s margarine. Where does your bread come from? America. Your vegetables from Jersey.’
‘Your fish from the sea,’ interposed Bertha.
‘And so it is all along the line – the British farmer hasn’t got a chance!’ (Chapter 12)

Or again, Edward stoutly declares:

‘I’m quite content to be as I am, and I don’t want to know a single foreign language. English is quite good enough for me…. I think English people ought to stick to their own country. I don’t pretend to have read any French books, but I’ve never heard anybody deny, that at all events the great majority are indecent, and not the sort of thing a woman should read… What we want now is purity and reconstitution of the national life. I’m in favour of English morals, and English homes, English mothers, and English habits.’

Cosmopolitan contempt for Britain The cosmopolitan Miss Ley thinks there is something intrinsically pathetic about the English.

‘You’ve never had a London season, have you? On the whole I think it’s amusing: the opera is very good and sometimes you see people who are quite well dressed.’

To this day there is a broad streak of intellectual literary life which despises the English and worships the literature, climate, fashion and landscape of France or Italy.

Tourism When I went to Barcelona recently I couldn’t miss the graffiti everywhere telling tourists to go home and stop ruining their city. I’ve since read articles about other tourist destinations which are struggling to cope with the number of visitors. Back in 1902 Miss Ley shared this feeling that tourism was ruining everywhere, in this case Paris:

We have here a very nice apartment, in the Latin Quarter, away from the rich people and the tourists. I do not know which is more vulgar, the average tripper or the part of Paris which he infests: I must say they become one another to a nicety. I loathe the shoddiness of the boulevards, with their gaudy cafés over-gilt and over-sumptuous, and their crowds of ill-dressed foreigners. But if you come I can show you a different Paris – a restful and old-fashioned Paris, theatres to which tourists do not go; gardens full of pretty children and nursemaids with long ribbons to their caps. I can take you down innumerable grey streets with funny shops, in old churches where you see people actually praying; and it is all very quiet and calming to the nerves. And I can take you to the Louvre at hours when there are few visitors…

Infest! She says tourists infest parts of Paris. If she had been describing immigrants, the book would be banned.

Politicians are idiots In a funny scene Edward stands for election to the local council and makes a speech riddled with pompous expressions, bad jokes, stories which disappointingly taper off, but still manages to end with rousingly jingoistic rhetoric.

Bertha is more ashamed and embarrassed than she’s ever been in her life by its simple-minded idiocy. But the speech is greeted with wild applause and Edward is elected by a landslide. People, Bertha concludes, are idiots. And the biggest idiots of all are running the country.

There is nothing so difficult as to persuade men that they are not omniscient. Bertha, exaggerating the seriousness of the affair, thought it charlatanry [of Edward] to undertake a post without knowledge and without capacity. Fortunately that is not the opinion of the majority, or the government of this enlightened country could not proceed.

Throughout the book the reader finds the same tone, and the same arguments, applied to the same ‘issues’ that we are still discussing and arguing about, 120 years later. Many superficial details change – but arguments about the rights of women, the idiocy of politicians, the rubbish train system, the philistine patriotism and the snooty snobbery of the book and art world – all of this remains the same as ever.

Related links

Somerset Maugham’s books

1897 Liza of Lambeth
1902 Mrs Craddock
1915 Of Human Bondage
1919 The Moon and Sixpence

1921 The Trembling of a Leaf: Little Stories of the South Sea Islands (short story collection)
1921 The Circle (play)
1922 On a Chinese Screen (travel book)
1923 Our Betters (play)
1925 The Painted Veil (novel)
1926 The Casuarina Tree: Six Stories
1927 The Constant Wife (play)
1928 Ashenden: Or the British Agent (short story collection)
1929 The Sacred Flame (play)

1930 Cakes and Ale: or, the Skeleton in the Cupboard
1930 The Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey From Rangoon to Haiphong
1931 Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular (short story collection)
1932 The Narrow Corner (novel)
1933 Ah King (short story collection)
1933 Sheppey (play)
1935 Don Fernando (travel book)
1936 Cosmopolitans (29 x two-page-long short stories)
1937 Theatre (novel)
1938 The Summing Up (autobiography)
1939 Christmas Holiday (novel)

1940 The Mixture as Before (short story collection)
1941 Up at the Villa (crime novella)
1942 The Hour Before The Dawn (novel)
1944 The Razor’s Edge (novel)
1946 Then and Now (historical novel)
1947 Creatures of Circumstance (short story collection)
1948 Catalina (historical novel)
1949 A Writer’s Notebook

1963 Collected short stories volume one (30 stories: Rain, The Fall of Edward Barnard, Honolulu, The Luncheon, The Ant and the Grasshopper, Home, The Pool, Mackintosh, Appearance and Reality, The Three Fat Women of Antibes, The Facts of Life, Gigolo and Gigolette, The Happy Couple, The Voice of the Turtle, The Lion’s Skin, The Unconquered, The Escape, The Judgement Seat, Mr. Know-All, The Happy Man, The Romantic Young Lady, The Point of Honour, The Poet, The Mother, A Man from Glasgow, Before the Party, Louise, The Promise, A String of Beads, The Yellow Streak)
1963 Collected short stories volume two (24 stories: The Vessel of Wrath, The Force of Circumstance, Flotsam and Jetsam, The Alien Corn, The Creative Impulse, The Man with the Scar, Virtue, The Closed Shop, The Bum, The Dream, The Treasure, The Colonel’s Lady, Lord Mountdrago, The Social Sense, The Verger, In A Strange Land, The Taipan, The Consul, A Friend in Need, The Round Dozen, The Human Element, Jane, Footprints in the Jungle, The Door of Opportunity)
1963 Collected short stories volume three (17 stories: A Domiciliary Visit, Miss King, The Hairless Mexican, The Dark Woman, The Greek, A Trip to Paris, Giulia Lazzari, The Traitor, Gustav, His Excellency, Behind the Scenes, Mr Harrington’s Washing, A Chance Acquaintance, Love and Russian Literature, Sanatorium)
1963 Collected short stories volume four (30 stories: The Book-Bag, French Joe, German Harry, The Four Dutchmen, The Back Of Beyond, P. & O., Episode, The Kite, A Woman Of Fifty, Mayhew, The Lotus Eater, Salvatore, The Wash-Tub, A Man With A Conscience, An Official Position, Winter Cruise, Mabel, Masterson, Princess September, A Marriage Of Convenience, Mirage, The Letter, The Outstation, The Portrait Of A Gentleman, Raw Material, Straight Flush, The End Of The Flight, A Casual Affair, Red, Neil Macadam)

2009 The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham by Selina Hastings

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Posted by Simon on October 9, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/10/09/mrs-craddock-somerset-maugham/

A Man of Parts by David Lodge (2011)

At forty-five she [Violet Hunt] had already lost the beauty for which she had been admired in her younger years, and painted heavily to disguise a poor complexion, but her body was still slim and limber, able to adopt any attitude in bed he suggested, and to demonstrate a few that were new to him. Her years with Crawfurd had made her shamelessly versatile in the art of love, and she did not hesitate to use her mouth and tongue to arouse him for an encore when they had time to indulge in one. ‘Now I know why Henry James calls you the Great Devourer,’ he said, watching her complacently as she performed this service.
(A Man of Parts by David Lodge, page 255)

Wells’s significance

This is a long, thorough and absorbing historical novel about the science fiction pioneer, novelist, journalist, political thinker and social ‘prophet’, H.G. Wells. Wells’s impact on his time was huge to an extent difficult for us now to recapture. In his 1941 essay about him, George Orwell wrote:

‘It would be no more than justice to give his name to the twenty-five years between the ‘nineties and the War. For it was he who largely wove their intellectual texture’ (quoted on page 513)

This novel

It’s very similar in conception and design to Lodge’s previous historical novel, Author Author, which was about Henry James. Like that book, A Man of Parts opens with our hero at the end of his life, reviewing its events and meaning.

In Well’s case, the spring and summer of 1944 find him holed up in his house in Hanover Terrace, one of the rows of smart houses built by the architect John Nash on the edge of Regents Park in the 1820s. Refusing to be cowed by Hitler’s V1 or V2 rockets now dropping on London, Wells – or H.G. as everyone calls him – insists on sitting out the war in the capital, attended by a few servants and cooks, visited by former lovers like Rebecca West and Moura Budberg, and by his sons ‘Gip’ and Anthony.

[She] however agreed nonchalantly, stepped out of her drawers, lay down on the coat he spread on the springy bracken, and opened her knees to him. (p.219)

Visitors often find him tucked up in a bath chair mumbling to himself. Lodge deploys various narrative devices in the novel, mostly third-person narrator, but long stretches take the form of Wells interviewing himself – his young thrusting journalist persona quizzing the old, super-annuated man of letters – the youngster’s aggressive questions in bold, the old man’s often defensive answers in indented paragraphs.

She fell into them instantly, and he felt the soft, warm pressure of her breasts through his thin summer jacket as she clung to him. (p.209)

Lodge’s obsession with Wells’s sex life

Given that Wells was a self-taught polymath with a vivid interest in the scientific and social developments which took place during his adult life – essentially the 1880s through to the Second World War – it is disappointing that Lodge chooses to make the central concern of this long rumination on Wells’s life and achievements his SEX LIFE.

They embraced and lay in each other’s arms, exploring and gently stroking each other’s bodies like blind people. ‘Is that your…?’ Amber whispered. ‘That is my erect penis,’ he said, ‘a column of blood, one of the marvels of nature, a miracle of hydraulic engineering.’ ‘It’s enormous,’ she said. ‘Will it hurt me when you…?’ ‘It may hurt a little the first time,’ he said. ‘I don’t mind anyway,’ she said. ‘I want it inside me. I want you inside me.’ (p.292)

It’s true that SEX – the persistent urge to seduce as many women as possible – dominated his life, led him to have over a hundred sexual partners, to be unfaithful to all his wives and lovers, to break with his comrades in the Fabian movement, and to be publicly shamed and humiliated on more than one occasion. His last meaningful lover, Rebecca West, spoke bitterly about Wells’s ‘sex-obsession’ (p.397).

He could see she was excited by this badinage and soon they were entwined on the bed in vigorous and joyful intercourse. (p.391)

Certainly the book contains some accounts of his political interventions:

  • his difficult relationships with the stuffy old Fabian Society (which he joined in February 1903) led by Sidney and Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw
  • his involvement writing propaganda during the Great War

and occasionally refers to the science behind some of his novels:

  • there is a particularly interesting page on his meeting with an aeronautical engineer involved in early airplane flight which inspired The War In The Air (John William Dunne, p.247)

but the overwhelming theme of the book is his relentless pursuit of female flesh and the countless sexual encounters which Lodge depicts with his characteristic, unnervingly clinical detachment.

They sat down together on the sofa and began to kiss and fondle each other, getting more and more exited. Soon he had her blouse undone and his lips on an exposed breast, while his hand was under her skirt and between her thighs. Rebecca began to moan and heave her pelvis against the pressure of his forefinger. ‘Take me, have me!’ she whimpered. (p.427)

The turbulent political climate during the Edwardian Era, the crisis over Irish Independence, the clash between House of Commons and House of Lords over the Liberal budget, the campaigns against poverty, any reference at all to the vast British Empire? Barely mentioned, if at all. Instead the central revelation of the book is that Wells had an unusually large penis, something which comes as a surprise – painful or delightful – to the numerous women he beds and bonks.

‘My, you’ve got a big one for a little chap,’ the woman said, as she lay back on the bed and spread her knees. (p.80)

Wells’s wives

Wells married his cousin, Isabel Mary Wells, in 1891 but she never showed the slightest pleasure in sex, regarding it as a male conspiracy against women. When he fell in love with one of  his students in 1894, he and Isabel agreed to separate and Wells went on to marry the student, Amy Catherine Robbins, in 1895. But then, although Amy worshipped his mind, she also turned out to be less than imaginative or enthusiastic about sex. Instead Wells developed the habit of getting sexual satisfaction wherever he could. He he is taking one of the maids.

The sight of her standing there, demurely bloused from the waist up, wantonly déshabillé below, inflamed him further and he knelt to pull down her drawers and bury his face in her belly. She laughed as he did so – laughed! Isabel never laughed when he made love to her; nor, for that matter, did she speak or move. This girl raised her hips to meet his thrusts and cried aloud, ‘Oh! Lovely lovely lovely!’ as she reached the climax of her pleasure, doubling his own. (p.84)

Wells gave Amy the nickname ‘Jane’ and Jane she remained until her death in 1927. Jane was passionately in love with the older, brilliantly clever and charismatic writer but she also, alas, wasn’t that interested in sex and so the novel chronicles the evolution of their relationship towards an ‘open marriage’ i.e. Wells agreed to tell her all about his numerous affairs and Jane agreed to accept them, maintaining hearth and home and a secure base from which the predatory author could go on the prowl.

After which there was nothing to do but take Dusa to Eccleston Square in a brougham and quell his jealousy and his doubts by possessing her with as much violent passion as she could bear. In the cab he whispered to into her ear exactly what he intended to do, and felt her trembling with a mixture of excitement and fear. She fought him with spirit, and afterwards they kissed each other’s scratches and bite marks tenderly, and cuddled like babes. She was a girl in a thousand. (p.316)

Sensible though this set-up sounds, it didn’t prevent all kinds of complications and unhappiness, especially when the 40-something and world-famous author had a succession of affairs with women young enough to be his daughter – and their parents found out. This was the case with Rosamund Bland (daughter of the children’s author E. Nesbit), with Amber Reeves, a precociously brilliant student at Cambridge, the daughter of a Fabian Society colleague, and most fierily with Rebecca West (real name Cicely Isabel Fairfield). They were all around 20 when the affairs began, meaning the book is full of descriptions of taut young naked bodies and lingers over the moments when they lose their virginities.

Amber was wonderful. In the daylight that filtered through the thin curtains her body was as delectable as it had promised to be under his blind touch in Spade House, shapely but lithe, with a delta of dense black pubic hair that set off her milk-white skin. She gave a cry that mingled pain and pleasure as he penetrated her, and when he had spent she wanted immediately to do it again. (p.292)

Scores of pages are devoted to the time and money it took to set up these lovers in country cottages and hotel rooms and loaned apartments and London flats, so they can be readily accessible to Wells’s outsize member.

They met perhaps half a dozen times in the cottage that summer, and on the last occasion she forgot to worry about whether she was doing it right and came to a genuine, uncontrollable climax, crying out in surprise and joy. (p.217)

These women’s impressive busts, their limber figures, their handling of Wells’s large member, their copulations furious, tender, loving, innocent, depraved, in cheap hotels, rented rooms or holiday cottages, provide the main current and theme of the book in a welter of orgasmic gasps and spurts, and the text pays obsessive attention to the curves and shapes of almost every female character. Take young Rosamund Bland and her bust:

Rosamund was an attractive and outgoing girl, with a well-developed figure for her age (p.158)… Rosamund, now eighteen and a striking young woman, with a pretty face and a buxom figure (p.168)… wearing a straw hat and a loose blue muslin dress with a neckline that showed her remarkable bosom to advantage… (p.177)

It’s a relief when the book tears itself away from Wells’s groin to deal with some of the other aspects of his life and other aspects there are. The book is stuffed with biographical information distilled from the many works by and about Wells which Lodge references in the five-page acknowledgement. In fact, by half way through I wished it had an Index, as in a standard biography or textbook – which the book itself resembles for long stretches – to help you refer back to the many anecdotes about George Bernard Shaw or Joseph Conrad or Henry James or E. Nesbit or any of the other notable figures who appear in the account conversing, dining, debating and, if they’re women, subject to Wells’s ever-ready urge to copulate.

They were truly two in one flesh at last, with no membrane of rubber between them. Amber gave a great shout when she climaxed, and afterwards, as she lay limply in his arms, she said: ‘I’m sure I’ve conceived.’ (p.323)

Wells’s books

One of the interview sections describes Well’s early life as the son of a hard-up couple – a gardener and domestic servant – who worked at a grand country house in Sussex, Up Park, and his early apprenticeship to a chemist in nearby Midhurst and in a draper’s shop in Southsea – experiences which shaped his sense of society’s unfairness, fuelled his political beliefs and gave his enemies countless opportunities to belittle his humble social origins.

At that moment, euphoric with the success of his speech, adrenaline still coursing through his veins, nothing would have pleased him more than to discharge his excitement in a bout of passionate copulation with Rosamund. (p.231)

Luck, innate talent and hard work won Wells a scholarship to the Normal School of Science (later the Royal College of Science in South Kensington, now part of Imperial College London).

She [Countess Elizabeth von Arnim] was petite, with a neat figure that curved in and out at the right places in spite of all her childbearing… ‘Au revoir,’ she smiled, and walked away towards the turnstiles, her neat rounded rear swaying under her tailored coat. (p.385)

The meat of the third-person narrative kicks in after Wells has found fame with his early scientific romances – the clutch of works in the mid and late 1890s which virtually invented modern science fiction – The Time Machine, The War of The Worlds, The Invisible Man – and these, along with his prolific journalism, have established him as an author. It is 1902 and Wells has designed a house with all modern conveniences (insisting on a lavatory for each bedroom) – Spade House overlooking Sandgate, near Folkestone on the south coast.

‘I never felt such sensations before,’ she sighed after a gratifying orgasm. ‘And I never realised a man could go on for so long.’ (p.388)

From 1902 onwards the novel – like a critical biography – namechecks every one of Wells’s works, frequently stopping in its tracks to describe the germination and writing of each book, with a summary of the plot and, a few pages later, once it’s published, a page or so of the contemporary reviews.

  • The Sea Lady, 1902 (summary pages 145 to 148)
  • Kipps, 1905 (summary p.162)
  • A Modern Utopia, 1905 (summary pages 163 to 164)
  • In the Days of the Comet, 1906 (summary p.176, pages 202 to 204)
  • The War in the Air, 1908 (origins p.247)
  • Tono-Bungay, 1909 (summary p.246, reviews pages 317 to 318)
  • Ann Veronica, 1909 (summary pages 300 to 305, reviews p.355)
  • The History of Mr Polly, 1910 (summary p.375)
  • The New Machiavelli, 1911 (summary pages 376 to 380)
  • Marriage, 1912 (summary p.387, reviews p.395, Rebecca’s review p.396)
  • The Passionate Friends, 1913 (summary pages 407 to 408, reviews p.423)
  • The World Set Free, 1914 (summary p.408, reviews p.441)
  • Mr Britling Sees It Through, 1916 (summary p.408, reviews pages 441, 464, 472 to 476)
  • Boon, 1915 (summary p.472)
  • The Research Magnificent, 1915 (summary p.476)
  • The Secret Places of the Heart, 1922 (p.496)

I knew already that Wells’s novels moved sharply away from the classic sci-fi stories of his initial success at the turn of the century and that he frittered his energies away writing long novels dramatising his own life and the social issues of the day, which are a lot less remembered these days.

It was interesting to read that even Wells himself referred to some of these as ‘prig’ novels, in which the hero is taller and handsomer than their author, and possessed of various high-minded ideals which are blocked, or encouraged, by the great love of his life etc. No surprise that they’re little read today.

Free Love and feminism

What interests me in Wells’s novels is the visionary power of the sci-fi stories, the cheeky humour of the comedies, and the social criticism of Edwardian England scattered throughout.

Amber he had always thought of as an athlete of sex, a kind of Atalanta, clean-limbed, agile, pagan, whereas there was something feral about Rebecca when she was stripped and hungry for love. Her body was less classically beautiful than Amber’s, but it was sensual, with a full bust, small waist, broad hips and a generously curved bottom. She had a luxuriant bush of pubic hair. (p.428)

What interests Lodge is the theme of personal relations. In novel after novel from 1902 onwards Wells worried away at the problems of the relations between men and women, the problem which dominated his own private life. These find their focus in the new ideas of ‘Free Love’ which were (apparently) much discussed at the turn of the century. And it’s this issue of Free Love which really bedevils his life, features again and again in his novels, and dominates this book.

They spent their days hiking through the foothills and pin woods, taking a simple picnic with them in their rucksacks, and making love after their lunch on mattresses of pine needles covered with their clothes. Little E enjoyed sex in the open air as much as himself, and relished the sensation of sun and breeze on her naked skin. (p.394)

The aim of Free Love movement appears to have been to free the practice of love and sex from the imprisonment of marriage, seen as a patriarchal male institution. Some Free Lovers wanted to abolish marriage altogether, as did many feminists. Most insisted that men and women should be free to love who and where and when and how they wanted, untrammelled by the restrictions of (a patriarchal) society.

She would crouch on the bed, naked, like a panther couchant, with her head up, following him with her eyes as he, naked too, prowled round the room, emitting low-pitched growls, and then he would suddenly pounce, and locked together they would roll about on the bed, or on the floor, licking, biting and digging their claws into each other before he mated with her and they came to a noisy climax. (p.433)

In this respect one of the interesting revelations of the book is just how many of the women of the era thought of themselves as feminists, or hold feminist beliefs. It was of course the heyday of the Suffragette Movement, itself split into extreme and moderate wings. All the educated women Wells encounters have views about the Suffragettes, and about the issue of ‘the New Woman’, and Free Love, many very fierce and passionate advocates of women’s liberation and the overthrow of tyrannical patriarchy, and a surprising number of them have or will write their own novels on the subject.

Their sexual life remained as exciting as ever, and as her belly swelled it became more comfortable as well as conducive to their private fantasy to come to climax in the natural position of feline copulation, Rebecca crouched under him as he covered her from behind, with her head buried in a pillow to muffle her yowls. (p.441)

But if this issue – how to be free to love wherever you will and to have sex with whomever you want – dominates Wells’s life and writings, and conversations with umpteen intelligent women – Beatrice Webb, Edith Nesbit, Rosamund Bland, Amber Reeves, Elizabeth von Arnem, Viola Hunt, Rebecca West – what the book shows us happening in practice is that the person who is free to love is the man in the situation – Wells – and that the people who suffer again and again are his women lovers, all of whom – once the affairs are revealed:

a) suffer intense social stigma and shaming (starting most intensely in their own homes, with their furious parents)
b) get pregnant – Wells impregnated Amber Reeves, Dorothy Richards and Rebecca West
c) and so end up as second-best mistresses, shacked up in love nests with their love children, feeling increasingly lonely and isolated, while Wells continued to enjoy all the advantages of married life, socialising and entertaining, provided with clean shirts and regular meals, by the ever-uxorious Jane

No matter how hard he protests that they seduced him, took advantage of him, waylaid and wanted him, there’s no avoiding the strong feeling that Wells lived his life selfishly, taking his pleasure where he wanted and leaving a trail of damaged lives and embittered women behind him.

Wells and James

Henry James was the subject of Lodge’s long historical novel before this one, and there is a pleasing element of overlap in the books because the two authors knew each other and were in regular correspondence right up to the end of James’s life (1916). They could not have been more different as men and as writers: Wells the unstoppable sex machine contrasted with James a lifelong celibate; and Wells with his ‘instrumental’ view that the novel should do something, promote an idea or explore an issue or share a vision of the world and its future

To me literature like architecture is a means, it has a use. (p.469)

compared to James’s well-matured view that the aim of the artist is to raise the tone of the culture through the presentation of finished works.

‘The job of the artist is to enlighten and enrich the collective consciousness by the exercise of his imagination in his chosen medium.’ (p.223)

They eventually fell out after James published a sustained attack on Well and Arnold Bennett, grouped together with John Galsworthy as the representatives of ‘The Younger Generation’ (p.442) and Wells replied by including a lengthy satire of James’s ponderous manner in his wide-ranging satire on the literary scene, Boon. The latter represented a final break in an unlikely relationship, which Wells came to regret.

Enough of men

As I write it’s not clear whether this will be Lodge’s final novel. It certainly represents a climax of many themes in his work, the two leading ones being:

  • teaching – the factual presentation of literature
  • sex – all his books are full of clinically described erections and sexual couplings

What’s missing from this one is the agonising over Roman Catholic theology which flavours most of his novels. And although I emerged from these 560 pages just about managing to still like Wells as much as I had before, the reader’s super-saturation in the Male Gaze – the controlling, shaping, sexually predatory way of eyeing up every single female as a potential sexual conquest – has made me heartily sick of male writers, male comedy writers in particular.

Kingsley Amis, David Lodge, Howard Jacobson, their novels show a relentless obsession with sex and a relentlessly objectifying, exploitative and abusive view of women which has come to sicken me.

She [Moura Budberg] had the softest skin he had ever encountered. She murmured incomprehensible but exciting Russian words and phrases as she reached her climax and he released the pent seed of three weeks’ abstinence into the sheath he had prudently brought with him from England. (p.493)

When I put down the book I knew I was meant to feel moved by the picture of the old lecher hunkered down in his World War Two eyrie which Lodge leaves us with.

In fact I was much more intrigued by the women mentioned in the text: the women who experienced a dose of Free Love with Wells before going on to become authors and creators in their own right – Rebecca West, Dorothy Richardson, Violet Hunt, Amber Reeves – women who tried to crack open the masculine domination of literature (and everything else) and strove to create new ways of writing and thinking and expressing themselves, free of the tyranny of male concupiscence, the type of lecherous gaze which, alas, dominates this book.

Hedwig Verena opened the front door, dressed in a filmy tea gown and little else, and led him immediately upstairs to the bedroom. (p.503)

[Odette Keun] had a supple, slender body and she was like a monkey on heat as a lover. (p.509)

So I’m grateful to Lodge for opening such a big window on Wells and his time and also for introducing me to a number of interesting and new (to me) women writers.

Credit

A Man of Parts by David Lodge was published by Harvill Secker in 2011. All references are to the 2012 Vintage paperback edition.

Reviews of David Lodge novels

1960 The Picturegoers – An ensemble piece following the lives of various characters in the fictional London suburb of Brickley, all linked by their attendance at their local cinema, the Palladium, as they fall in and out of love, practice various degrees of Catholicism and worry about sex.
1962 Ginger, You’re Barmy – Jonathan Browne is fresh from gaining a First in English when he is plunged into National Service among brutal proles and cruel NCOs in a windswept barracks in Yorkshire. Onto this amiable backdrop is nailed a melodramatic story about his friend at university, Mike the ginger-haired renegade of the title, attacking a cruel NCO, being imprisoned, being spring by the IRA, and then forced to return to make a raid on the barracks which Jonathan, by freakish coincidence, ends up foiling.
1965 The British Museum Is Falling Down – a day in the life of young academic Adam Appleby, unhappy Catholic father of three, who spends a day at the BM failing to do any research and finds himself embroiled in more and more comic complexities, all the time panic-stricken that his wife might be pregnant for an unbearable fourth time.
1970 Out of the Shelter – the boyhood and teenage years of Timothy Young, child of very ordinary suburban London parents, who is a toddler during the Blitz, a boy at the end of the war, and a teenager when he goes to stay with his older sister in post-war Germany, where he makes all kinds of discoveries about war and peace and life and love.
1975 Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses – It is January 1969 and two English Literature professors are swapping jobs for a term: down-trodden Englishman Philip Swallow is heading for the Californian delights of Euphoria State University, and lit crit superstar Morris Zapp is heading towards rundown rainy Rummidge University. How will they cope with the resulting culture shocks? A hilariously knowing romp, a sophisticated comedy classic.
1980 How Far Can You Go? – The stories of ten young Catholic students in the 1950s, following their adventures as they mature during the 1960s and 70s, with extensive commentary about the sweeping changes to Catholic dogma during this period, and lots and lots of clinical descriptions of sex, in a surprisingly flat and unentertaining novel.
1984 Small World: An Academic Romance – a brilliantly conceived comedy of manners satirising the world of modern literary scholarship with its cast of jetsetting, globe-trotting, back-stabbing, vaultingly ambitious and goatishly lecherous academics, led by the protagonists of Changing Places, but with a whole lot more characters added, all travelling, questing and falling in and out of love in the artfully contrived and very funny modern-day equivalent of a medieval romance. (A pilgrimage novel)
1988 Nice Work – feminist literary academic Robyn Penrose reluctantly takes part in the university’s scheme to shadow figures from local industry, being assigned to the equally reluctant Vic Wilcox, Managing Director of J. Pringle and Sons, a local metal-working factory. Initially antagonistic, they open each other’s eyes to new worlds, rather inevitably, fall in love, but then go beyond that to reach a more mature and realistic friendship.
1991 Paradise News – Agnostic priest Bernard Walsh is rung up by his dying aunt Ursula who lives in Honolulu (she married an American during the war) asking him to come visit her and bring his father (her brother). Thus begins a ‘holiday’ in ‘paradise’ in which old family secrets are disinterred, old wounds healed, and new life begins. (A pilgrimage novel)
1995 Therapy – Successful TV scriptwriter Laurence Passmore has it all – hit show, sexy wife, grown-up kids flown the nest, big house, flash car – but is still obscurely unhappy, a problem which turns into a plight when his wife abruptly sues for divorce and he seeks refuge in the past as his life falls apart. (A pilgrimage novel)
2001 Thinks… – At the (fictional) University of Gloucester, clever, lecherous, married cognitive scientist Ralph Messenger seduces bereaved novelist Helen Reed, in a story sprinkled with lectures on artificial intelligence which feel as if they’ve been cut & pasted from the popular science books of the 1990s.
2004 Author, Author – A long and fascinating account of Henry James’s life from the mid-1880s to the mid-1890s as he attempted to branch out from writing novels and short stories with a sustained attempt to write plays for the stage, which proved, in the end, to be a humiliating failure – all told in a book which is saturated with interesting stories and gossip from the era.
2008 Deaf Sentence – A return to a contemporary setting, in which Desmond Bates is a retired professor of linguistics struggling with his growing deafness and difficult family, a fractious second wife, a senile father and a dangerously predatory American PhD student, an initially humdrum tale which moves towards some surprisingly dark and harrowing scenes.
2011 A Man of Parts – A very long novel in which science fiction pioneer, novelist, political columnist and all-purpose social ‘prophet’, H.G. Wells, looks back over his life and recounts in squelchy detail his many, many sexual conquests.

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Posted by Simon on September 13, 2016

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Deaf Sentence by David Lodge (2008)

An autobiographical author

Lodge’s novels are strongly autobiographical and, laid end to end, build up to the portrait of a certain type of life and its possibilities – in a quiet way, he has recorded the experience of a generation.

Out of the Shelter describes the boyhood and teenage years of the son of suburban south London parents, who is a toddler during the Blitz, a boy at the end of the war – as Lodge was. The Picturegoers explores the lives of characters in the fictional south London suburb of Brickley – very similar to the suburb of Brockley where Lodge grew up. Ginger, You’re Barmy describes the experiences of a bright university scholarship boy plunged into the harsh world of National Service – based on the two years the university graduate Lodge spent in the Royal Armoured Corps.

Lodge married young (24) and had three children in quick succession while he worked to establish himself as a university teacher of English literature. The British Museum Is Falling Down describes a day in the life of young English academic, the unhappy Catholic father of three small children. How Far Can You Go steps back from the day-to-day to provide a panoramic overview of the lives and loves of 10 young Catholic men and women, students in the 1950s who mature during the social and theological changes of the 1960s and 1970s – as Lodge and his friends did.

Paradise News and Therapy describe in different ways the familiar subject of male mid-life crisis, the sense of being successful and surrounded by all the material good things of life, and yet feeling something is missing – a malaise which is healed by liberating sex and family reconciliation in Paradise News, and by joining an old flame on her devout Catholic pilgrimage, in Therapy.

Even his classic comic novels, the so-called Campus Trilogy – Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work – are closely based on his own experiences of teaching at a Californian university during the heady 1960s, of attending countless international literary conferences in the 1970s, and of working in a scheme designed to bring university and industry closer together in his adopted city of Birmingham – referred to throughout the trilogy as ‘Rummidge’.

Unexpectedly, at the end of his writing life, Lodge broke this pattern with two long and thoroughly researched ‘historical’ novels – Author, Author (2004) and A Man of Parts (2011) – based around the lives and loves of Henry James and H.G. Wells, respectively.

Slipped in between them is this ‘contemporary’ novel which reverts to the usual pattern and brings the generic Lodge figure into the final stages of life – into retirement, forced to face the indignities of old age, the difficulty of an ageing marriage, the fractiousness of an extended family, and the decline and death of his own parent. There is no escaping the fact that, despite occasional smiles, this is for most of its length quite a depressing novel which, at its very end, I found unbearably moving.

Deaf Sentence

The novel’s 300 pages are told in the first person by Desmond Bates, a retired professor of linguistics living in an unnamed northern city (presumably Lodge avoided the fictional city of Rummidge as too associated with his comic past), who began to go deaf in his 40s and now requires a high-powered hearing aid to hear anything at all.

The events take place over a defined period, from 2 November 2006 through to 8 March 2007. We know this because a lot of the sections are diary entries given a precise date but also because, like a lot of 21st century novels (by Amis, Jacobson, McEwan), it keenly references contemporary events, referring several times to terrorist atrocities, to the 7/7 bombings (7 July 2005), to the war in Iraq, to the hanging of Saddam Hussein (December 30 2006).

Are contemporary novels more weighted down by contemporary events than in the past? Does the news, in all its grimness, bear down more on the present generation than ever before? It sometimes feels like it.

The novel is an amiable, factual record of Desmond’s thoughts and feelings about retirement, the academic life, about deafness and marriage (he is married to the eight-years-younger Winifred, companionably nicknamed ‘Fred’), about his two grown-up children Anne and Richard, and his growing concern for his 89-year-old Dad, displaying evermore symptoms of senility.

Much of the tone is deliberately flat and humdrum to the point of banality:

  • 12th November I phoned Dad, as I always do on a Sunday evening, at about six o’clock.
  • 28th November I went to London yesterday to see Dad…
  • 22nd December I have spent the last two days in bed trying to get over my cold…

There’s not so much a plot as a number of relationships which develop and change over the four and a bit months of the narrative.

  • Desmond visits his old Dad in the shabby south London suburb of Brickley (the fictional setting of Out of the Shelter) and Lodge slowly builds up a portrait of the old boy, once a jazz musician playing in all sorts of bands in and around London, with a wide circle of musician mates – all dead now, like his wife – which is why he’s now living alone in their pokey old terraced house, where he refuses to have a cleaner and so everything is coated in a layer of cooking fat and dust. Brutally honest, the Dad sections were flat and depressing to read; there are no redeeming features to being this old and worn out.
  • Desmond’s family consists of his daughter, Anne, 6 months pregnant, and his son, Richard, a specialist in low-temperature physics at Cambridge, cultivated, clever but distant. Desmond’s first wife – the kids’ mother, Maisie – died of cancer when they were small. In their different ways they were all scarred by this tragedy.
  • After some time alone, Desmond met and began an affair with a mature student at the university where he taught, posh Winifred, who was raised in an upper-middle-class Catholic family. She herself got married young to a complete cad who was unfaithful to her, and it took her a while to summon up the courage to divorce him. Desmond and Winifred’s affair continued, deepened, and they ended up getting married. Desmond moved into her house, big and grandly furnished, and for a while they lived a high lifestyle. But his deafness and his early retirement have estranged them a bit, in addition to which Fred has had a second lease of life since she opened an interior design shop with a good friend, Jakki, and has been exercising, losing weight and even had a breast reduction operation.

Alex Loom

The nearest thing to a ‘plot’ is the intrusion into Desmond’s life of an American woman post-graduate student named Alex Loom. The novel opens with her button-holing him at an art exhibition and then she pops up periodically, displaying ever more psychotic behaviour. Initially she says she wants his advice and help with the thesis she’s writing, a ‘discourse analysis’ of suicide notes. She invites him to her flat, where her manner is odd and, when Desmond gets home, he finds she’s hidden a pair of panties in his overcoat pocket.

Next, she sends him an email apologising and saying he is welcome to go round to her flat in a few days time, at precisely 3pm, when she will leave the door ajar, and will be in the study with the curtains drawn, bending over her desk, naked from the waist downwards, and he must say nothing, but roll up his sleeves and spank and spank and spank her until his anger is assuaged, ignoring her cries or pleas – and then rebutton his sleeves, put on his raincoat, and leave without saying a word (p.136).

The email gives Desmond an erection every time he reads it – an arousal he takes out on Winifred in one of their now-rare acts of coition – but Desmond wisely doesn’t keep the appointment.

Nonetheless, Alex continues behaving like a bunny-boiler, scaring him by phoning him from outside Fred’s boutique and threatening to go in and tell her ‘everything’. What everything? Nothing has happened. Still, Desmond is now scared of her, and appalled when she turns up at the first night of a play at the local theatre and inveigles herself so successfully with Fred, that the latter merrily invites Alex to the couple’s big Christmas party.

In line with the novel’s realistic depiction of life as one damn thing after another there isn’t a particular climax, but a series of set pieces which bring various relationships and issues to a head.

Christmas

First of all there is a long description of the complicated and large family Christmas which involves catering for 13 adults and two children (p.188). It involves Desmond in driving down to London to collect his Dad, to ferry him back to the northern city where the story is set. But Desmond has not made adequate provision for his Dad’s incontinence, which leads to an embarrassing/amusing scene of his Dad wetting himself and needing to have clean trousers and pants brought from the car and handed to him in a toilet cubicle at the next Services – to the entertainment of the horde of motorway toilet-goers. The Christmas itself is the traditional snake pit of frictions, mostly between Fred’s very prim mother, Cecilia, and Desmond’s scruffy, uncouth and deaf Dad. There are some comic moments, but more moments of irritation and fretfulness and family arguments.

Center Parcs

It’s called ‘Gladeworld’ in the novel, possibly for legal reasons, because the narrator, in his grumpy old man way, is unremittingly hostile to it. He goes so far as to compare the hot, muggy, chlorine-saturated swimming pool with its piles of human bodies flinging themselves around through flumes and circling in the pointlessly shaped pools, to Dante’s vision of hell. He and Winifred are invited to spend New Year’s Eve there by her business partner, Jakki, and her smooth husband, Lionel, but the trip is not a success, leading to more friction between Desmond and Fred.

Poland

To his surprise Desmond is phoned by an old contact at the British Council who asks if he’d be prepared to step in at short notice to cover a small lecture tour of Poland since the academic scheduled to do it has had a bad skiing accident and – to escape worry about his Dad and his increasingly argumentative relationship with Fred – Desmond accepts. The narrator skips the journey there, his lectures, the dinners and receptions, in order to zero in on his pained visit to Auschwitz, close to the final destination of Cracow. Here, at the end of his writing career, Lodge confronts a truth much bigger and all-devouring than anything tackled in his previous fiction. Since this the visit takes place in January it is growing dark as he arrives, and the narrator finds himself walking through the endless rows of barracks of the vast death camp as the light goes and the world descends into total darkness.

(Having recently reread the works of Primo Levi I am familiar with a lot of the factual background. In an odd way, I found the account of the death camp which is at the heart of Robert Harris’s first thriller,  Fatherland, almost as harrowing, because it was more fully crafted and embedded in a text fraught with terror.)

Back at the hotel there is a message saying his daughter has had her baby, prematurely. Panic that she or it might be unwell gives way to joy when he manages to phone England and be reassured that mother and daughter are well. But then another message is left for him saying  his father has had a stroke.

Dad’s death

There follow twenty harrowing pages, as Desmond returns to find his Dad was discovered on the floor of  his house, maybe been there for days, incapacitated and barely conscious. In the hospital he’s moved to, he sinks slowly and steadily, never regaining enough consciousness to talk with his son, who watches his battered bruised body, tortured by catheters and intravenous drips, slowly decay.

This is exactly what happened to my father. I watched the same inexorable decline five years ago. And last year I spent a week in a public ward at a big London hospital, surrounded by senile, demented and distressed old men, myself strapped up to intravenous drips and painkillers, suffering complete incapacity, dazed and helpless, in thrall to the banging rhythms of the noisy hospital and the endless smells of bad food and my neighbours’ excrement.

Reading these pages brought both experiences back much more vividly than I ever want to remember them again.

As if placing a trip to Auschwitz next to a harrowingly realistic description of his Dad’s death weren’t enough, at the core of the sequence Lodge has Desmond confess to Fred that he, Desmond, packed the kids off to stay with relatives during his first wife’s last days because he – with the complicity of their GP – knowing his wife was in the last stages of terminal cancer and in continual pain, helped her take an overdose of brandy and painkillers, curled up on the bed beside her, and held her till she died.

All three scenes, coming one after the other, make for a very harrowing and upsetting read.

Aftermath

He organises  his father’s cremation and the scattering of the ashes. In what now seems quite an anti-climax he decisively and finally turns down Alex Loom’s phone and email requests for him to supervise her thesis. He knows she’ll never finish it. He knows he’ll end up doing most of the work. And he doesn’t trust her. Even so, when he receives an email from her saying he’s right, she’s a useless failure, she always screws up and so that’s why she’s going to kill herself, she’s just taken the pills to kill herself – Desmond still jumps into his car and hurtles across town to her flat, hoping and praying she’s still alive –

But only to find the bailiffs and removal men taking out the furniture. She had fallen behind on her rent and payments for all the furniture so it’s all being repossessed. Alex herself was last seen heading off in a taxi with a few belongings, presumably to return to the States. It was a hoax.

So. With his Dad dead and cremated, Desmond is set to inherit some money, which he’ll give to his own children. The crisis has brought him and Fred together, wiping away the frets and arguments of Christmas. He is a lucky man and he knows it. He has admitted the extent of his deafness to himself and has started attending lip-reading classes – and gets along very well with the old men and women who surround him, and is himself amused by the little quizzes and competitions the class teacher sets them all.

Auschwitz and the experience of his own Dad’s death have made him treasure life, even in the smallest details, every bit of it, every minute.

An information novelist

In my review of its predecessor, Author, author I pointed out how most of Lodge’s books have a strong pedagogic streak: he is a teacher to his marrow. In the early novels you learn a lot about Roman Catholic teaching and practice, especially around the oh-so-taboo subject of sex in the chaste 1950s and suburban 1960s. The Changing Places trilogy is all the funnier for being stuffed with literary references and lit crit ideas. 2001’s Thinks… is packed with information about artificial intelligence and current scientific knowledge about consciousness, and Author, Author routinely explains to the reader all kinds of details and aspects of late Victorian life and culture.

Lodge is often categorised as a ‘Catholic novelist’ or a ‘campus novelist’. Reviewing his oeuvre, I think it’s more appropriate to think of him as an information novelist; whatever the ostensible subject matter, Lodge is always calm, sober and, above all – informative. Making the narrator of this novel a professor of linguistics allows Lodge to share with his readers all sorts of diverting factoids about the use and abuse of language, specially as it relates to the central character’s dominating condition of deafness. He sets this pedagogic tone on the first page:

This is known to linguists as the Lombard Reflex, named after Etienne Lombard, who established early in the twentieth century that speakers increase their vocal effort in the presence of noise in the environment in order to resist degradation of the intelligibility of their messages. (p.3)

Desmond explains to us that in his professional life he was an exponent of ‘Discourse Analysis’ and then has, of course, to explain to us what that is and how it differs from linguistics, semiotics or structuralist analyses. And give us a few examples of his expertise:

‘F’ is called a labiodental fricative because you produce it by bringing your top teeth into contact with your bottom lip and allowing some air to escape between them. (p.20)

There is a steady stream of these informative snippets and factoids, which are always clearly explained at a kind of first-year undergraduate level, and are never less than interesting.

In the classic Austin scheme there are three possible types of speech act entailed in any utterance, spoken or written: the locutionary (which is to say what you say, the propositional meaning), the illocutionary (which is the effect the utterance is intended to have on others) and the perlocutionary (which is the effect it actually has). (p.104)

The visit to Auschwitz has plenty of explanatory matter that could have come from a guidebook. His Dads’s medical condition, decline, and the various treatment options are explained to him by the houseman with textbook clarity. In some ways, the world arranges itself around Lodge’s fictional characters like a textbook.

Deafness

The central element of the novel – before it is rather overwhelmed by the dark ending – is, as the title suggests, the severe deafness of the central character. This is based (as might be expected) on Lodge’s own deafness and the book shows a detailed knowledge of the scientific causes of deafness, the latest news about attempts at cures, and shares more than most of us probably want to know about the various hearing aids on the market. Some of this is played for laughs -–for example, a sort of comic business is made of the never-ending failure of batteries at just the wrong moment at parties or conversations or holidays. And Lodge/Desmond lament that whereas blindness is perceived as being truly tragic, for the most part deafness – or at least partial deafness – has always been comic.

Desmond/Lodge shares his thoughts about famous ‘deafies’ such as Goya and Beethoven, both of whom might be said to have been made as artists by their affliction. Alex Loom’s macabre PhD about suicide notes allows Lodge to tie in with Beethoven’s famous Heiligenstadt Testament, written to the composer’s brothers to explain his surly and anti-social behaviour as a protection mechanism for an extremely proud and sensitive man who couldn’t bear not to hear or understand what people were saying to him, and fearful of seeming ridiculous. Better a curmudgeon that a cretin.

There is also a series of bad deaf puns, as the academic narrator refers to the Deaf Instinct (p.126), wishes he were half in love with easeful deaf, (in relation to Alex) thinks about Deaf and the Maiden (p.129), and titles a section of the book Deaf in the Afternoon. Ha ha.

The rest of the ‘plot’ aside, the novel amounts to the most sustained description of the indignities, the embarrassments and the strain on even the most loving marriage which the deafness of one partner creates that I’m aware of.

Experimental novelist

Lodge’s books use various Modernist techniques, the kind of thing he must have discussed countless times in his classes about James Joyce or Virginia Woolf – stream of consciousness, different points of view, parody and pastiche – but in a completely homespun way, somehow emptied of any of their original excitement or threat. Like his popular lit crit books, his novels draw the teeth of those formal innovations, demystify and domesticate them.

Thus the narrative is a little tricksy in the way it alternates between first-person diary accounts and having a third-person objective narrator describe many scenes – and yet you don’t really notice. The first time the text switches to the third person it does so with a laconic sentence, ‘I feel a fit of the third person coming on’ (p.28). Oh, alright. What’s remarkable is how easily the reader assimilates all this – the switching of point of view, the incorporation of diary format with emails, notes, conversations real and reconstructed – without blinking.

Sex

All of Lodge novels feature sex, some are dominated by sex as the main motivating force for the male characters – but I always find the many sexual events which take place are described in an unnervingly graphic and cold way. For me the enduring memory of his oeuvre is the number of erect penises which litter the books and the number of acts of coition described with clinical accuracy.

There’s still a fair amount of sex in this book, though it is now OAP sex i.e. Desmond fails to get an erection, fails to persuade Fred to do anything about it, or just falls asleep before there is any sexual congress. In a sort of funny running joke, whenever Desmond opens his email he is bombarded with adverts for Viagra and other erection-boosting panaceas, in increasing wildness of tone and promise, all of which remind him of the moribundity of his own sex life.

Now his protagonist is nearly 70, sex is no longer the consuming passion it was in the earlier books, but Lodge still describes his characters’ sexual proclivities and histories with unnerving factuality. Desmond contrasts his sex life with his first wife, Maisie (who had ‘an unconquerable aversion to oral sex in any form’, p.76) with the second wife, Fred, who still, from time to time, treats his penis as ‘a particularly delicious stick of seaside rock’ (p.76). Ah. Thanks for that. When Desmond and Lionel unwisely share the small sauna cubicle at Center Parcs, oops Gladeworld, Desmond is close enough to be impressed at the size of Lionel’s manhood, ‘his flaccid organ hanging down like a rubber cosh between his thighs’ (p.236).

What is lowering about all this is the protagonist’s predatory attitude – even towards his own wife, cunningly trying to steer her towards sex, shaping his conversation, the whole rhythms of his day, to manipulate her towards the bedroom. Half the time this has ‘comic’ results i.e. he can’t get it up or just falls asleep. But the unrelentingness of the lechery gets a bit wearisome. Coming to Lodge’s last books after reading the last novels of Kingsley Amis and the first four by Howard Jacobson I think I’ve had more than enough of bookish, middle-aged men who don’t appear to be able to think about anything else except sex sex sex.

Alex Loom’s ‘spanking’ email comes as a bolt from another life, another world, another discourse altogether – a little bit of Fifty Shades of Grey parachuted into the story of an increasingly grumpy old academic. It also has a life and vigour which Desmond’s addled couplings don’t. If you wanted to be provocative, you could ask why the only woman who shows independence and agency in her sex life – i.e. Alex, with her spirited creation and control of the spanking scenario – is described as mad and punished with expulsion from academia and from the country.

Out of touch

Lodge’s narrator describes the mundane realities of contemporary life in soul-sapping detail: the trips to Sainsburys with the marital shopping list, the two-for-the-price-of-one offers, the daytime TV, the traffic jams whenever anyone tries to drive anywhere, the morons shouting into their mobile phones in the ‘quiet carriage’ of trains.

The narrator jokes that he’s a grumpy old grouch, but he puts real feeling into the prolonged passage about why he hates Christmas, and the two-page diatribe against ‘Gladeworld’ is hilariously mean-spirited. But there are many smaller details which reveal the narrator as an old man. In fact, in these peripheral ways, the book is interesting for showing how even someone who has clearly made an effort to keep up with changing society – as Lodge clearly has – eventually lacks the feel for it, for the current conversations and experiences.

As a small example, Desmond notes the graffiti covering everything in South London but bemoans its lack of semantic content. He shares with us the only piece of graffiti which has ever amused him. Underneath the official notice ‘Bill stickers will be prosecuted’ someone had scrawled Bill Stickers is innocent. Ha ha. The internet says this joke goes back to the 1960s – that’s 50 years old.

In another passage Lodge writes the rather dull cliché that we live in an ‘age of communication’ and goes on to list the channels of communication as books, newspapers, magazines, radio, TV and the internet – and the way he places the internet last after all the others, makes you realise that this book, recent though it is (2008), was still written before the tsunami of comms which burst with the arrival of smart phones, tablets, iPads and the social media platforms Facebook, twitter, Youtube, Instagram and so on, which have revolutionised communication, especially between the young.

The novel won’t ‘die’ – indeed more novels are published every year than ever before. But it will be interesting to see how the tsunami of simplified and simple-minded digital discourse affects the rhetoric and strategies of longer fictions.

Conclusion

For most of its length it would be easy to dismiss this as a rather boring book – some but not many laughs, long stretches about car journeys, or the food in the cafés in Sainsburys, or the hassle of getting hearing aid batteries – in which not much happens.

But I think that would be to underestimate it. In his quiet, undramatic way, Lodge introduces us to quite a large cast of characters and slowly, through prolonged exposure to Desmond, Winifred and his Dad, we not only situate them in their web of relationships, but come to care for them.

You could argue that Lodge often treats his characters with the same kind of clear, logical, factual style as he treats his technical explanations of Discourse Theory or Speech Acts, in the flat factual tone set by the ageing academic narrator himself, a lucid, logical kind of fellow. There is little or no passion in his accounts of anything. When he describes how his first wife died of cancer nobody is moved. When he gets aroused and wants sex with his wife, the reader is not aroused, but feels like a zoologist observing the mating rituals of a peculiar species.

It is this calm, even tenor of Lodge’s prose which makes the final passages all the more upsetting. When the bad things happen – in Auschwitz, his father’s slow death and then the revelation of how he helped his first wife to die – it is precisely because they are occurring to such a sensible, rational, logical and inoffensive chap which makes them feel so terrible.

Credit

Deaf Sentence by David Lodge was published by Harvill Secker in 2008. All quotes and references are to the 2009 Penguin paperback edition.

Related links

Reviews of David Lodge novels

1960 – The Picturegoers – An ensemble piece following the lives of various characters in the fictional London suburb of Brickley, all linked by their attendance at their local cinema, the Palladium, as they fall in and out of love, practice various degrees of Catholicism and worry about sex.
1962 – Ginger, You’re Barmy – Jonathan Browne is fresh from gaining a First in English when he is plunged into National Service among brutal proles and cruel NCOs in a windswept barracks in Yorkshire. Onto this amiable backdrop is nailed a melodramatic story about his friend at university, Mike the ginger-haired renegade of the title, attacking a cruel NCO, being imprisoned, being spring by the IRA, and then forced to return to make a raid on the barracks which Jonathan, by freakish coincidence, ends up foiling.
1965 – The British Museum Is Falling Down – a day in the life of young academic Adam Appleby, unhappy Catholic father of three, who spends a day at the BM failing to do any research and finds himself embroiled in more and more comic complexities, all the time panic-stricken that his wife might be pregnant for an unbearable fourth time.
1970 – Out of the Shelter – the boyhood and teenage years of Timothy Young, child of very ordinary suburban London parents, who is a toddler during the Blitz, a boy at the end of the war, and a teenager when he goes to stay with his older sister in post-war Germany, where he makes all kinds of discoveries about war and peace and life and love.
1975 – Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses – It is January 1969 and two English Literature professors are swapping jobs for a term: down-trodden Englishman Philip Swallow is heading for the Californian delights of Euphoria State University, and lit crit superstar Morris Zapp is heading towards rundown rainy Rummidge University. How will they cope with the resulting culture shocks? A hilariously knowing romp, a sophisticated comedy classic.
1980 – How Far Can You Go? – The stories of ten young Catholic students in the 1950s, following their adventures as they mature during the 1960s and 70s, with extensive commentary about the sweeping changes to Catholic dogma during this period, and lots and lots of clinical descriptions of sex, in a surprisingly flat and unentertaining novel.
1984 – Small World: An Academic Romance – a brilliantly conceived comedy of manners satirising the world of modern literary scholarship with its cast of jetsetting, globe-trotting, back-stabbing, vaultingly ambitious and goatishly lecherous academics, led by the protagonists of Changing Places, but with a whole lot more characters added, all travelling, questing and falling in and out of love in the artfully contrived and very funny modern-day equivalent of a medieval romance. (A pilgrimage novel)
1988 – Nice Work – feminist literary academic Robyn Penrose reluctantly takes part in the university’s scheme to shadow figures from local industry, being assigned to the equally reluctant Vic Wilcox, Managing Director of J. Pringle and Sons, a local metal-working factory. Initially antagonistic, they open each other’s eyes to new worlds, rather inevitably, fall in love, but then go beyond that to reach a more mature and realistic friendship.
1991 – Paradise News – Agnostic priest Bernard Walsh is rung up by his dying aunt Ursula who lives in Honolulu (she married an American during the war) asking him to come visit her and bring his father (her brother). Thus begins a ‘holiday’ in ‘paradise’ in which old family secrets are disinterred, old wounds healed, and new life begins. (A pilgrimage novel)
1995 – Therapy – Successful TV scriptwriter Laurence Passmore has it all – hit show, sexy wife, grown-up kids flown the nest, big house, flash car – but is still obscurely unhappy, a problem which turns into a plight when his wife abruptly sues for divorce and he seeks refuge in the past as his life falls apart. (A pilgrimage novel)
2001 – Thinks… – At the (fictional) University of Gloucester, clever, lecherous, married cognitive scientist Ralph Messenger seduces bereaved novelist Helen Reed, in a story sprinkled with lectures on artificial intelligence which feel as if they’ve been cut & pasted from the popular science books of the 1990s.
2004 – Author, Author – A long and fascinating account of Henry James’s life from the mid-1880s to the mid-1890s as he attempted to branch out from writing novels and short stories with a sustained attempt to write plays for the stage, which proved, in the end, to be a humiliating failure – all told in a book which is saturated with interesting stories and gossip from the era.
2008 – Deaf Sentence – A return to the ‘contemporary’ novel, in which Desmond Bates is a retired professor of linguistics struggling with his growing deafness and difficult family, a fractious second wife, a senile father and a dangerously predatory American PhD student, an initially humdrum tale which moves towards some surprisingly dark and harrowing scenes.
2011 – A Man of Parts – A very long novel in which science fiction pioneer, novelist, political columnist and all-purpose social ‘prophet’, H.G. Wells, looks back over his life and recounts in squelchy detail his many, many sexual conquests.

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by Simon on September 10, 2016  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on September 10, 2016

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Author, Author by David Lodge (2004)

Lodge (b.1935) taught English literature at university level from 1960 to his retirement in 1987, specialising in classic novels of the 19th century, from Jane Austen to Henry James, explaining and theorising about them in his many works of literary criticism.

Coming towards the end of his writing career, this novel can perhaps be taken as a labour of love – a long (382 densely-printed pages in the Penguin paperback), lovingly detailed account of the life and career of the writer many regard as the novelist, Henry James. The novel focuses on the years during which James tried – and embarrassingly failed – to write for the stage, writing half a dozen plays (The American, Mrs Jasper’s Way, Summersoft) most of which weren’t even staged or were flops, leading up to the public disaster of Guy Domville where James himself, going to take a bow after the first night performance – to cries of ‘author, author’ from the audience – was heartily booed and jeered, a public humiliation which his biographer, Leon Edel, claims he never recovered from.

Lodge the pedagogue

Lodge always writes clearly and logically. He knows where the interest lies for sure – but quite often it is a factual or historical or literary interest. An academic interest. Dry, unemotional. This ability to write clearly, to demystify literary terminology and ideas, explains the success of the articles he wrote for the Independent newspaper in the early 1990s, which were brought together in the book The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts. He is/was a great teacher.

And this urge to teach and inform explains why, from the beginning, his novels have included plenty of factual information along with the plot:

  • In the early ones, there’s lots of patient explication of Roman Catholic theology and the changes to it brought about by the Second Vatican Council.
  • In his mid-70s comedy classics he uses his in-depth knowledge of literature as the background for hilarious high jinks, stuffed with witty references to Eng Lit classics.
  • The novel before this one, Thinks… (2001), similarly tries – unsuccessfully, in my opinion – to insert a lot of current scientific theory about Artificial Intelligence and the nature of human consciousness into an all-too-predictable story about a randy married university lecturer seducing the new, dim writer-in-residence.

So he’s always been a fact-based novelist.

A historical novel

This is Lodge’s first historical novel, not set during a period he’s lived through and not, to some extent, based on his own life experiences.

The novel starts with Henry James’s final months (he died in February 1916) then flashes back to the mid-1880s and gives a slow patient description of his attempts to write for the stage over the next decade, interspersed with a wealth of detail about James’s densely packed social life and professional activities.

It is all very readable and interesting, very enjoyable, very easy to dip in and out of – but in a completely factual way. I don’t know that much about James and so was interested to learn about his family background, about the two brothers who fought in the American Civil War and were ruined by it, while he and brother William James escaped conscription as students and went on to have eminent careers – as well as about his invalid sister, Alice, her final decline and death, tended to the end by a loyal lady friend in that claustrophobic Victorian style.

Most of all I enjoyed Lodge’s weaving of the lives and biographies of all the men of letters, musicians, artists, actors and theatrical people who the hugely sociable James knew, met, dined and corresponded with. Being unmarried and celibate gave James the time to have an enormous circle of friends and to be invited everywhere. He seems to have known everyone who was anyone during the period and the novel therefore amounts to a panoramic overview of many of the most interesting literary and artistic events of the period.

Interesting anecdotes

For example, we get an interesting account of his long friendship with Punch cartoonist-turned novelist, George du Maurier (nickname ‘Kiki’), whose failing sight leads him to diversify into writing novels and eventually to the popular success of Trilby, the book which gave the world the phrase ‘Svengali’ (meaning ‘a person who completely dominates another, usually with selfish or sinister motives’) as well as the trilby hat. Trilby‘s phenomenal world-wide success and the wealth it brought du Maurier stand as a permanent ironic reproach to James’s own failing fortunes: in the year du Maurier’s novel sells 250,000 copies, some of James’s books barely sell 20.

Another long-term friendship is with the novelist and poet Constance Fenimore Woolson, who he took to referring to as ‘Fenimore’ and whose meetings of mind and imagination, but slight reticences and hesitations, are delicately depicted. It comes as all the more of a shock when, half way through the book, we learn that she committed suicide by jumping from a hotel balcony in Venice. James feels unbearable guilt at the things left unsaid and unfelt in their relationship.

Then there are numerous references to the wider world of letters, particularly to his encounters with contemporary writers such as Oscar Wilde (who he found vulgar and preening), the young Rudyard Kipling (whose bride Caroline ‘Carrie’ Balestier he found himself giving away at their wedding) but who he found beastly and vulgar, accounts of his good friend Robert Louis Stevenson who has travelled to the other side of the world to live in the South Seas – and so on and so on.

We meet the French in the shape of the ageing novelist Alphonse Daudet whose incontinence means he has to keep slipping away from his chair at the banquet called in his honour to take a pee into a chamber pot behind a carefully positioned screen (the toilet is too far away); and Guy de Maupassant who shocks James by asking him to approach a lone woman in a restaurant, because Maupassant ‘needs’ a woman’, hasn’t had a woman for a whole week! In fact the atmosphere of moral turpitude i.e. free love i.e lots of sex, in the French literary world, is the single factor which had decided James not to live in Paris but to settle in more philistine, but more restrained, London.

Thus Author, Author has the feel of a leisurely literary biography, full of interesting grace notes and biographical asides.

The theatrical impresario who takes on James’s first play and puts up with his endless emendations before it flops in London, Edward Compton, is shown being father to a promising little boy, who the alert reader realises will grow up to be Sir Compton Mackenzie, OBE the ‘Scottish writer of fiction, biography, histories and a memoir, as well as a cultural commentator, raconteur and lifelong Scottish nationalist’, most famous for his comic novels Whiskey Galore and Monarch of the Glen.

When James hears that John Addington Symonds has died (April 1893) it gives rise to a couple of pages telling us about Symonds’ privately published pamphlet calling for society to accept sexual love between Uranists (who were, as Lodge helpfully points out, just starting to be described by the new term ‘homo-sexuals’) and James’s own opinion on the matter.

When du Maurier confides that he doesn’t believe in God he is careful to use the newish word ‘agnostic’ and Lodge is careful to let us know it was a neologism recently coined by the Darwin apologist, Thomas Henry Huxley, in 1869.

When James and du Maurier ponder the amazing popularity of Henry Rider Haggard’s debut adventure novel, King Solomon’s Mines (1885), du Maurier is made to remind us how this success was partly due to the blizzard of posters put up all over London the morning the book was published by Haggard’s enterprising publishers, Cassells, in an early example of a mass advertising campaign.

One of James’s young men friends, Henry Harland, is planning to set up a new literary and artistic journal, The Yellow Book, and Lodge (through James) contrasts the style of its main illustrator, the young Aubrey Beardsley, with that of du Maurier’s more traditional Victorian illustrations for Punch magazine.

The historical novelist as tour guide

Fenimore and James happen to be walking through the Place Vendôme in Paris where James takes the opportunity to tell her that the column at its centre is made from 1200 cannon captured at the Battle of Austerlitz, and Fenimore replies that he sounds like a guide book (p.178). In fact the whole text often sounds like a guide book. The hero is strolling across Piccadilly Circus? An opportunity to share with us that the statue of Eros (erected 1893) is made of aluminium so as not to tarnish in the smoggy London atmosphere (p.244). Walking past Buckingham Palace? An opportunity to tell us that Queen Victoria had recently opened some of the royal apartments to visitors. And so on.

Same with people, with the famous personalities of the day. Who is this in the stalls at the first night of Guy Domville, reviewing it for the Saturday Review? Could it be the red-haired figure of George Bernard Shaw, the up-and-coming music critic, rumoured to have written a few plays of his own? And over there, surely that’s the Pall Mall magazine’s new drama critic, Herbert Wells, been in his job all of four days since the PM’s editor Harry Cust promised the thrusting young freelance journalist the first vacancy which came up at the magazine and this turned out to be it. So wet behind the ears he had to rush out to buy a set of evening dress made for him in just 24 hours. When Shaw and Wells get chatting Herbert boasts about the short story he’s just sold to the Pall Mall Gazette for £100, entitled The Time Machine. And so on.

There is a kind of innocence about the exchanges like this which pepper the book, as if a teacher had set his 6th formers a piece of homework to imagine a conversation between the young H.G. Wells and Bernard Shaw. The book evinces a kind of simple-minded excitement at the sheer existence of these writers, a wonderment that Wells and Shaw and, in fact, the young Arnold Bennett, were alive and bumping into each other in the same town, along with Oscar Wilde and Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle, not to mention artists like Singer Sargent, Burne-Jones, Alma-Tadema, Frederick Leighton and so on. What bubbles up off the page is Lodge’s sheer enjoyment of this star-studded era.

A guide not a novel?

There are scores and scores of other examples of interesting and beguiling facts, stories and anecdotes throughout the book, as well as countless titbits about Paris and London, Rome and Venice. Taken together they probably make up the majority of the actual text. Author, Author has plenty of biography of the great man and lots of stories about his (fascinating) life and times, and the world of literature and art as it swirled around him. All very interesting, and Lodge has gathered much be interested and informed about.

But not in the teeniest bit moving or emotional. I didn’t feel anything at all at any part of the book – even at the climax where James takes the stage after the first performance of Guy Domville (5 January 1895) to be publicly booed and humiliated. Well, what of it? We know that James will survive and go on to write the late masterpieces which have secured him a high place in the history of English Literature. Even the scenes where he is called to Venice to help the distraught family of Fenimore dispose of her vast collection of belongings, I found interesting rather than moving. And the final pages which revert to James on his death-bed in 1916 are done very factually and so, I’m afraid, didn’t move me at all. I was more interested in the way the James family nobly offered his loyal servants continued employment after his death.

This is a very enjoyable book but for long stretches it doesn’t feel like a novel at all, more like an old-fashioned literary biography with made-up scenes and conversation added to enliven the basic narrative of events, and plenty of fascinating facts thrown in. It could have been called ‘Henry James and His World’.

On this basis I’m looking forward to reading Lodge’s last novel, A Man Of Parts, which hopefully does much the same thing for H.G. Wells, another pivotal and well-connected figure from a slightly later period.

Credit

Author, Author by David Lodge was published by Secker and Warburg in 2004. All quotes and references are to the 2005 Penguin paperback edition.

Related links

Penguin paperback edition of Author, Author

Penguin paperback edition of Author, Author

David Lodge’s novels

1960 – The Picturegoers – An ensemble piece following the lives of various characters in the fictional London suburb of Brickley, all linked by their attendance at their local cinema, the Palladium, as they fall in and out of love, practice various degrees of Catholicism and worry about sex.
1962 – Ginger, You’re Barmy – Jonathan Browne is fresh from gaining a First in English when he is plunged into National Service among brutal proles and cruel NCOs in a windswept barracks in Yorkshire. Onto this amiable backdrop is nailed a melodramatic story about his friend at university, Mike the ginger-haired renegade of the title, attacking a cruel NCO, being imprisoned, being spring by the IRA, and then forced to return to make a raid on the barracks which Jonathan, by freakish coincidence, ends up foiling.
1965 – The British Museum Is Falling Down – a day in the life of young academic Adam Appleby, unhappy Catholic father of three, who spends a day at the BM failing to do any research and finds himself embroiled in more and more comic complexities, all the time panic-stricken that his wife might be pregnant for an unbearable fourth time.
1970 – Out of the Shelter – the boyhood and teenage years of Timothy Young, child of very ordinary suburban London parents, who is a toddler during the Blitz, a boy at the end of the war, and a teenager when he goes to stay with his older sister in post-war Germany, where he makes all kinds of discoveries about war and peace and life and love.
1975 – Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses – It is January 1969 and two English Literature professors are swapping jobs for a term: down-trodden Englishman Philip Swallow is heading for the Californian delights of Euphoria State University, and lit crit superstar Morris Zapp is heading towards rundown rainy Rummidge University. How will they cope with the resulting culture shocks? A hilariously knowing romp, a sophisticated comedy classic.
1980 – How Far Can You Go? – The stories of 10 young Catholics in the 1950s and their adventures as they mature during the 1960s and 70s, larded with lots of commentary about the sweeping changes to Catholic dogma during this period, and lots and lots of clinical descriptions of sex, in a surprisingly flat and unentertaining novel.
1984 – Small World: An Academic Romance – a brilliantly conceived comedy of manners satirising the world of modern literary scholarship with its cast of jetsetting, globe-trotting, back-stabbing, vaultingly ambitious and goatishly lecherous academics, led by the protagonists of Changing Places, but with a whole lot more characters added, all travelling, questing and falling in and out of love in the artfully contrived and very funny modern-day equivalent of a medieval romance. (A pilgrimage novel)
1988 – Nice Work – feminist literary academic Robyn Penrose reluctantly takes part in the university’s scheme to shadow figures from local industry, being assigned to the equally reluctant Vic Wilcox, Managing Director of J. Pringle and Sons, a local metal-working factory. Initially antagonistic, they open each other’s eyes to new worlds, rather inevitably, fall in love, but then go beyond that to reach a more mature and realistic friendship.
1991 – Paradise News – Agnostic priest Bernard Walsh is rung up by his dying aunt Ursula who lives in Honolulu (she married an American during the war) asking him to come visit her and bring his father (her brother). Thus begins a ‘holiday’ in ‘paradise’ in which old family secrets are disinterred, old wounds healed, and new life begins. (A pilgrimage novel)
1995 – Therapy – Successful TV scriptwriter Laurence Passmore has it all – hit show, sexy wife, grown-up kids flown the nest, big house, flash car – but is still obscurely unhappy, a problem which turns into a plight when his wife abruptly sues for divorce and he seeks refuge in the past as his life falls apart. (A pilgrimage novel)
2001 – Thinks… – At the (fictional) University of Gloucester, clever, lecherous cognitive scientist Ralph Messenger fancies fucking bereaved novelist Helen Reed, in a story sprinkled with lectures on artificial intelligence which feel as if they’ve been cut & pasted from the popular science books of the 1990s.
2004 – Author, Author – A long and fascinating account of Henry James’s life from the mid-1880s to the mid-1890s as he attempted to branch out from writing novels and short stories with a sustained attempt to write plays for the stage, which proved, in the end, to be a humiliating failure – all told in a text rich with interesting stories and gossip from the era.
2008 – Deaf Sentence
2011 – A Man of Parts

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by Simon on September 1, 2016  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, English literature, History, Novel
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Posted by Simon on September 1, 2016

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/09/01/author-author-david-lodge/

The Picturegoers by David Lodge (1960)

First Hilda, then Damien, then Mark. Hilda’s life was ruined – she was a complete neurotic. Damien was all queer and twisted because he had thought she liked him when she didn’t. And Mark – he would never make a priest. He would end up as another frustrated religious failure like herself and Damien. Religion had ruined him. Religion had ruined them all.
(The Picturegoers, page 208)

David Lodge’s first novel, published when he was 25. Short and powerful, it confidently establishes techniques and themes which will dominate his later writing.

Multiple characters

The most obvious feature is the technique of featuring a dozen or so characters and continually cross-cutting between them. The novel is divided into three parts but within them there are no chapters, no sense of moving between big blocked-out scenes. Instead there are a hundred or more relatively short (sometimes less than a page) sections of prose, each devoted to one or a pair of characters, their dialogue, thoughts, decisions, actions, feelings.

This is a very economical, snappy approach. Compare and contrast the directly opposite approach of his friend Malcolm Bradbury who, in his debut novel Eating People Is Wrong for example, opens one chapter with a page-long description of the ‘moral’ development of one of the characters (Emma Fielding), as if rewriting a Jane Austen novel. Unlike Bradbury, Lodge is actually in the 20th century and realises that cutting between short cameo scenes means you don’t have to give yourself the labour of writing – and the reader the burden of reading – long establishing sequences. Bang! You’re there!

The title, The Picturegoers, is not as mysterious and cryptic as I initially took it to be: the book literally describes a cast of picturegoers ie a group of (generally young) people who, on the evening described in part one, all converge on their local, run-down cinema in the fictional town of Brickley, and for whom the cinema flickers in and out of the warp and weave of their lives over the next few months.

Dramatis personae

  • Mr Maurice Berkley, one-time manager of the music hall which declined, was shut down, and replaced by the new cinema, which he sadly manages, lamenting the passing of the glory days.
  • Mr Mallory, kind-hearted middle-aged man, head of a vast Catholic family, eyes the cinema-going young girls in their tight dresses, but warmly loves his wife.
  • Patrick and Patricia Mallory, two of their younger children, who bicker and argue their way to the cinema; when Patricia leaves early a middle-aged man moves next to Patrick in the dark and puts his hand on Patrick’s thigh – there is a short description of the panic of a pubescent boy at being touched up before Patrick is brave enough to get up and flee the building.
  • Clare Mallory – only recently arrived home after abandoning her vocation as a nun, still full of piety and innocent emotions, good and honest and pure and who immediately bewitches the new lodger, Mark.
  • Mark Underwood, recently arrived with the Mallorys as their lodger, is a lapsed Catholic who unexpectedly finds himself responding to the Irish Catholic atmosphere of the Mallory household, initially because he fancies the beautifully innocent Clare. He is a would-be writer, depressed at having his stories rejected for publication, and so presumably the representative of the ‘author’ in the text ie a more educated, ironical observer of the life around him, and with more space than for other characters devoted to his early life, his upbringing in a stifling lower-middle-class household in the respectable suburb of Batcham.
  • Damien O’Brien, cousin of the Mallorys over from Ireland, rat-faced, intensely pious, seething with jealousy over the casual way Mark Underwood asked Clare out, takes her to the pictures and has generally become her boyfriend – exactly what Damien obsessively wants to be.
  • Father Martin Kipling, naive and innocent, is on his first visit to a ‘cinema’, in order to see the pious Song of Bernadette. He trips over feet in the dark, wants to chat to neighbours and then is appalled at the scantily clad ‘actresses’ on the screen whose sole purpose seems to be stirring up lascivious passions in their audience. He woefully discovers the Song isn’t on this evening, instead he is watching the legendary Hollywood actress Amber Lush in a variety of scenes which show off her taut buttocks and pert bosom.
  • Len, working class man, in love with Bridget, is frustrated by both his poverty and the knowledge he is about to be called up for National Service.
  • Bridget, Len’s girlfriend.
  • Doreen the usherette who dreams of having the kind of life those stars up on the screen enjoy and sort of fancies the older, married, Mr Berkley.
  • Harry, a wound-up, monosyllabic, very angry youth, dressed in black, who fantasises about hurting everyone he meets, carries a flick knife and – very spookily – follows Bridget home down dark roads and across bombed-out lots so that I was beginning to worry I might be about to read a rape scene, but no, she gets home just in time, making herself a cocoa with her hands shaking. Makes me realise that in all the other Lodge novels, in the Amis novels and Bradbury novels which I’ve been reading, there are few if any actual criminals – men obsessed with sex in every one, sure, as the authors themselves seem obsessed with sex; but men who break the law, through theft or vandalism or violence ie a type of man who obviously exists in the real world in large numbers — none.

Part one

All the characters converge on the knackered old Palladium cinema, bringing their hopes and fears into its sweaty, smoky interior, as per the thumbnail sketches above.

Part two

Six months later. We learn that the serio-comic result of Father Kipling’s visit to the cinema was a fervent sermon he gave denouncing film as the work of the devil and announcing he would be moving the Thursday Benediction to Saturday nights, as an alternative, and launching a crusade against the Cinema. Six months later, a mere 12 parishioners are turning up for it and he ruefully regrets the enmity created with the cinema manager, who complained to Kiplings bishop about the boycott, the bishop then, embarrassingly, over-ruling Father Kipling and saying there was nothing ungodly about the cinema.

Meanwhile, the Mallory’s lodger, Mark, who started out pretending to be religious in order to seduce Clare, really has undergone a conversion back to his boyhood Catholicism and, ironically, now finds himself the pious one in the relationship, while Clare herself has completely redirected her libido towards him – with tearful results.

Damien is the furtive watcher, the ‘creeping Jesus’, who is always spotting them in the street or kissing in a doorway or overhears their endearments on the front doorstep, as his crush on Clare curdles into hatred and contempt.

The old cinema manager Mr Berkley is now having an affair with the once naive and innocent usherette Doreen, happy now to strip off in the manager’s office and climb into their makeshift bed for office sex, before they get dressed again, he drives her home and then returns to his wife.

Harry, the would-be rapist, takes his stalking of Bridget to another level, lying in wait for her in a bombed-out lot near her house but – to our relief – miserably fails to assault her; he’s barely got his hands over her mouth before she bites his fingers down to the bone and screams her head off, sending him running off down the street.

Central to this part is the evening when a number of the key characters converge on The Palladium to see The Bicycle Thieves, the 1948 Italian Neorealistic classic which Mr Berkley is showing as part of an effort to liven up the cinema and draw in a new crowd. In this it is a complete failure, a depressing and inconclusive movie which reminds most of the visitors of their own cramped lives, except for Mark, of course, who incisively and intellectually analyses it for Clare, who understands nothing, but nods approval in her doomed infatuation.

Part three

Two months after that evening things have moved on for all of the characters. This third part again features an evening at the cinema; after the failure of trying contemporary European movies Mr Berkley has booked the latest Rock’n’Roll movie, blaring with its Bill Haley soundtrack. This time there are queues around the block of Teddy Boys and their pony-tailed, bobby-soxed girlfriends. And in this final 40-page section Lodge winds up the stories of our ten or so characters:

Clare and Mark have a painful showdown in which he declares his wish to join the Dominican Order and try his vocation. Clare is furious at him leading her on, leading her to abandon the last of her religious feelings which she transferred to secular love, only to be dumped.

Mark walks back to the Mallory house where he is mortified to discover Mrs Mallory has stumbled over some of his scribblings about love and Clare and sex, explicit notes and thoughts jotted down for a story. She thinks he’s revealed himself as immoral when, ironically, he is reaching the height of his religious faith and completely disavows the writings. He offers to leave immediately and makes his way, disconsolately but firmly back to the stifling purgatory of his suburban home, determined to apply to a religious order.

Devastated after their final argument, Clare wanders the streets in a daze, passing the cinema and its huge queue of jitterbugging rockers but, with no money to spend, ends up, ironically, in the local Catholic church. Here – as it happens – she is press-ganged into being a witness to the rushed wedding of Len and Bridget.

After the sad service she finds herself in the church alone with Father Kipling and realises for the first time how feeble and unsatisfactory he is, and how sadly conscious he is of his shortcomings as a priest. Depressed, she emerges to find Len and Bridget having cheap photos taken and then is further press-ganged into accompanying them to the nearest Lyons Corner House for their wedding ‘reception’.

As she listens to their tale of poverty – nowhere to stay, Len’s poor widowed mother, his miserable time doing National Service in the Army – Clare is overcome with compassion and writes them a cheque for £5 to pay for a few days’ honeymoon at Margate or somewhere, and promises to talk to Father Kipling about a little church flat which she knows has become empty because the old lady who was living in it has gone into hospital.

These scenes could hardly convey a more depressingly miserable, black-and-white, cramped, austere, limited, narrow ration books and National Service existence. How awful the 1950s sound.

If the two main characters, Mark and Clare, end in disarray, minor characters have unexpected epiphanies. Harry, the would-be rapist, hanging round outside the cinema, finds himself drawn in and then the Teds and Rockers who are packing the place start getting out of their chairs and dancing to Bill Haley in the aisles. To his amazement a pretty little blonde girl asks him to dance and he turns out to be able to do it and it makes him smile and even laugh, for the first time in years; later that night he walks her home and, after a quick peck on the cheek, makes an date to see her at the Monday night hop.

We eavesdrop the thoughts of Mr Berkley, the cinema manager – initially happy at the big box office takings then concerned at the way the Teds are getting out of their seats – as he dismisses rock’n’roll for being unmusical, simple-minded etc. He predicts it will only last a year then be replaced by the next fad. But we have seen, in the story of Harry, that simply dancing, that music and dance and physical expression, can liberate the soul.

At the end of Part Two Lodge showed us Mr Berkley having sex with Doreen in his office, for the first time not using a condom as he had run out. Now, two months later, Doreen is pregnant. Mr Berkley knows his (Catholic) wife will never divorce him in that guaranteed-to-make-everyone-as-miserable-as-can-be way of theirs, so he gives Doreen a load of money and the address of a boarding house in Newcastle where she can go to have it. In almost the last scene we see her confidently on the Newcastle train getting into conversation with a likely cockney lad also going the same way. Might love be about to blossom…

It is a multi-stranded ending to a multi-stranded novel and a triumph, unexpected, moving, insightful, poignant.

Themes

David Lodge’s three themes are Catholicism, sex, and Eng lit academics and all are present here.

Catholicism

In the point of view and thoughts of the priest and every member of the Mallory family (Dad, Mum, Patrick, Patricia, Clare) as well as the reconverted Mark and the Irish cousin Damien – that’s seven characters who all provide different perspectives on faith and belief and sin and the rest of it, so we have the thoughts of the cradle Catholic, the convert, the zealot, the lapsed Catholic, the teenage Catholic, the ex-nun, and so on. Enough Catholicism for most tastes.

The common mistake of outsiders, that Catholicism was a beautiful, solemn, dignified, aesthetic religion. But when you got inside you found it was ugly, crude, bourgeois. Typical Catholicism wasn’t to be found in St Peter’s, or Chartres, but in some mean, low-roofed parish church, where hideous plaster saints simpered along the wall, and the bowed congregation, pressed perspiration tight into the pews, rested their fat arses on the seats, rattled their beads, fumbled for the smallest change, and scolded their children. Yet in their presence God was made and eaten all day long, and for that reason those people could never be quite like other people, and that was Catholicism. (p.173)

Pilgrimage

A long section at the end of Part Two describes how Mark, in the grip of his new Catholic fervour, undertakes the pilgrimage to Walsingham in Norfolk; it is referred to by other characters and Mark gets out and rereads his diary of the experience which suddenly gives us a blast of full-on first person narrative. This is the first mention of the pilgrimage theme which will also be present in Lodge’s later novels, in comic form in Small World, and more seriously in the concluding sections of Therapy.

Sex

Mark starts out simply wanting to seduce Clare. Damien is obsessed with Clare but sublimates his feelings into fierce religiosity. Clare was expelled from the convent where she had been a novice nun, for her passionate/lesbian involvement with a teenage girl pupil, and now finds herself actively wanting Mark’s masculine touch. Old Mr Mallory enjoys watching the pretty young things dolled up on a Saturday night, but also enjoys making love to his plump wife. He is disappointed when Mr Berkley experiments by showing contemporary foreign films, namely the depressing The Bicycle Thieves.

Where were the luscious slave-girls with swelling breast and buttocks like ripe fruit, on which he could feed his harmless, middle-aged lechery. (p.130)

Mr Berkley enters Doreen in his office. Len, on their wedding night, blissfully ‘broaches’ Bridget, Damien sees couples in the sunny park, men’s hands up girls’ dresses, driving him wild with anger/frustration.

I am, I hope, an averagely-sexed middle-aged man and no prude, but I find the relentlessness of the Male Gaze in all Lodge’s novels a little hard to take.

[Mr Berkley] stood at the back of the packed auditorium. There were people standing all along the back, and down the sides. He watched with interest a young girl in front of him in tight trousers. Her buttocks were twitching rhythmically to the music. On each alternate beat a hollow appeared in her left flank. (p.226)

In a touching scene the confused 17-year-old Patricia, who has a crush on Mark, has a chat with him about how isolated she feels in the family and how she wants to run away from home. All very sensitive apart from one false note. She’s wearing a faded old dressing gown buttoned up to the neck, but: ‘Beneath the faded material was a figure full of promise.’ (p.169) Who makes this remark? Not Mark, who is in his newly moral religious phase. Not Patricia herself. It is the narrator, the creator, the author, creating all sorts of women whose shapes and naked bodies he can then lovingly describe.

[Patrick, 16] had slipped into a rather alarming habit lately of looking at every girl or woman he encountered to see how big her bust was. Bust. That was a new word he had just discovered. There were several words that meant the same thing. Bust, bosom, breasts…  (p.136)

All the way back in 1960 I wonder if Lodge’s novels were praised for their frankness and honesty and lack of shame about sex. I can see the merit in his not shying away from the fact that sex does indeed dominate lots of men’s thoughts lots of the time. But it is a bit like the food in a certain restaurant always being a bit too salty or spicy or oily. Lodge is great at what he does, but the relentlessness of the sex sex sex, and the way it’s always the horny male view of sex, sometimes gets a bit too much.

Literature

Mark is a would-be writer, still very young, self-conscious and unpublished, he keeps a notebook which he fills up with bons mots and insights, is constantly on the lookout for material, feelings and incidents which he can turn into a short story, and he is considerably more intellectual than the other characters. He shares his sophisticated insights into The Bicycle Thieves, into the warmth and piety of the Mallory household; he gets the lengthy theological passages tossing to and fro about the religious life and sin and redemption and forgiveness etc, in this respect the precursor of all the other Lodge protagonists who will agonise over Roman Catholic faith, sometimes at very great length. Most 20th religious novels document the painful fading of a character’s religious faith – I thought it original enough to see a young man following the opposite trajectory.

Humanity

Lodge’s style is cold and blank, not deliberately heartless but always factual, clear, unambiguous, unsentimental. For example, he describes Clare’s feelings when Mark dumps her, but doesn’t really wring the reader’s heart. Same for Mark’s increasing sense of devotion, specially in a Mass he attends. But if there aren’t extremes of emotion, not emotion in the language, anywhere in his work, there is often a kind of cool, limpid humanity; an implicit sympathy for the sadness of so many people who life has let down. Thus Clare, after being dumped by Mark, finds herself observing Father Kipling as if for the first time, as if for the first time really understanding something about other people and their pain. Without any comment from the author it dawns on me that she is possibly finding within herself the compassion and charity for others which she was too young to experience when she was a novice nun.

[Father Kipling] stooped over the sink, leaning heavily on locked arms, and staring at his hands, flattened against the bottom of the bowl. The sense of failure which haloed his bowed head made Clare conscious for the first time of his identity as a person. He had never been an impressive priest –  dispensing sacraments, sermons and whist-drive announcements with the same patient ennui, like a weary shopkeeper who has forgotten why he ever started to sell. But now, at this moment, she understood his inadequacy in personal terms, realised what it meant to him not to be able to move people, not to be able to find the encouraging word, the inspiring slogan. (p.217)

With its understated humanity, with its confident handling of the multi-character cast, in its quiet way I think this is a very good, a very powerful and moving novel – and quite amazing considering it was his first.

Reviews of David Lodge novels

1960 – The Picturegoers – An ensemble piece following the lives of various characters in the fictional London suburb of Brickley, all linked by their attendance at their local cinema, the Palladium, as they fall in and out of love, practice various degrees of Catholicism and worry about sex.
1962 – Ginger, You’re Barmy – Jonathan Browne is fresh from gaining a First in English when he is plunged into National Service among brutal proles and cruel NCOs in a windswept barracks in Yorkshire. Onto this amiable backdrop is nailed a melodramatic story about his friend at university, Mike the ginger-haired renegade of the title, attacking a cruel NCO, being imprisoned, being spring by the IRA, and then forced to return to make a raid on the barracks which Jonathan, by freakish coincidence, ends up foiling.
1965 – The British Museum Is Falling Down – a day in the life of young academic Adam Appleby, unhappy Catholic father of three, who spends a day at the BM failing to do any research and finds himself embroiled in more and more comic complexities, all the time panic-stricken that his wife might be pregnant for an unbearable fourth time.
1970 – Out of the Shelter – the boyhood and teenage years of Timothy Young, child of very ordinary suburban London parents, who is a toddler during the Blitz, a boy at the end of the war, and a teenager when he goes to stay with his older sister in post-war Germany, where he makes all kinds of discoveries about war and peace and life and love.
1975 – Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses – It is January 1969 and two English Literature professors are swapping jobs for a term: down-trodden Englishman Philip Swallow is heading for the Californian delights of Euphoria State University, and lit crit superstar Morris Zapp is heading towards rundown rainy Rummidge University. How will they cope with the resulting culture shocks? A hilariously knowing romp, a sophisticated comedy classic.
1980 – How Far Can You Go? – The stories of ten young Catholic students in the 1950s, following their adventures as they mature during the 1960s and 70s, with extensive commentary about the sweeping changes to Catholic dogma during this period, and lots and lots of clinical descriptions of sex, in a surprisingly flat and unentertaining novel.
1984 – Small World: An Academic Romance – a brilliantly conceived comedy of manners satirising the world of modern literary scholarship with its cast of jetsetting, globe-trotting, back-stabbing, vaultingly ambitious and goatishly lecherous academics, led by the protagonists of Changing Places, but with a whole lot more characters added, all travelling, questing and falling in and out of love in the artfully contrived and very funny modern-day equivalent of a medieval romance. (A pilgrimage novel)
1988 – Nice Work – feminist literary academic Robyn Penrose reluctantly takes part in the university’s scheme to shadow figures from local industry, being assigned to the equally reluctant Vic Wilcox, Managing Director of J. Pringle and Sons, a local metal-working factory. Initially antagonistic, they open each other’s eyes to new worlds, rather inevitably, fall in love, but then go beyond that to reach a more mature and realistic friendship.
1991 – Paradise News – Agnostic priest Bernard Walsh is rung up by his dying aunt Ursula who lives in Honolulu (she married an American during the war) asking him to come visit her and bring his father (her brother). Thus begins a ‘holiday’ in ‘paradise’ in which old family secrets are disinterred, old wounds healed, and new life begins. (A pilgrimage novel)
1995 – Therapy – Successful TV scriptwriter Laurence Passmore has it all – hit show, sexy wife, grown-up kids flown the nest, big house, flash car – but is still obscurely unhappy, a problem which turns into a plight when his wife abruptly sues for divorce and he seeks refuge in the past as his life falls apart. (A pilgrimage novel)
2001 – Thinks… – At the (fictional) University of Gloucester, clever, lecherous, married cognitive scientist Ralph Messenger seduces bereaved novelist Helen Reed, in a story sprinkled with lectures on artificial intelligence which feel as if they’ve been cut & pasted from the popular science books of the 1990s.
2004 – Author, Author – A long and fascinating account of Henry James’s life from the mid-1880s to the mid-1890s as he attempted to branch out from writing novels and short stories with a sustained attempt to write plays for the stage, which proved, in the end, to be a humiliating failure – all told in a book which is saturated with interesting stories and gossip from the era.
2008 – Deaf Sentence – A return to the ‘contemporary’ novel, in which Desmond Bates is a retired professor of linguistics struggling with his growing deafness and difficult family, a fractious second wife, a senile father and a dangerously predatory American PhD student, an initially humdrum tale which moves towards some surprisingly dark and harrowing scenes.
2011 – A Man of Parts – A very long novel in which science fiction pioneer, novelist, political columnist and all-purpose social ‘prophet’, H.G. Wells, looks back over his life and recounts in squelchy detail his many, many sexual conquests.

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Posted by Simon on June 24, 2015

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/06/24/the-picturegoers-david-lodge/

Thinks… by David Lodge (2001)

‘Imagine what the Richmonds’ dinner party would have been like, if everyone had had those bubbles over their heads that you get in kids’ comics, with “Thinks…” inside them.’…
‘I suppose that’s why people read novels,’ she says. ‘To find out what goes on in other peoples’ heads.’
‘But all they really find out is what has gone on in the writer’s head. It’s not real knowledge.’
‘Oh, what is real knowledge, then?’
‘Scientific knowledge.’
(Thinks…, page 42)

The plot

Self-doubting and recently bereaved lady novelist Helen Reed hesitantly takes up a position teaching creative writing at the (fictional) University of Gloucester. Along with the rest of the faculty she meets cognitive scientist and media star, Ralph Messenger, secure in the bosom of his rich American wife, four kids and big house in the country. He gives her (and the reader) a Brody’s Notes-level introduction to the newly fashionable sciences of artificial intelligence, evolutionary psychology and so on, touching on other topics which came to popular attention in the 1990s, such as chaos theory and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

Helen is not only a novelist but a lapsed Catholic and so, rather predictably, responds to Messenger’s confident scientism with her belief that you can’t reduce consciousness to algorithms, graphs and charts -surely there is some meaning to the universe, what about our feelings etc.

Via the stream-of-consciousness tape recordings Messenger is making to ‘capture’ his thoughts in flight, we learn the rather predictable fact that he is scheming to screw Helen. Via her sensitive diary, we learn that Helen is tempted but recoils, but is tempted again, but recoils etc. No but yes but no.

The text consists of Messenger’s tape recordings, Helen’s diary, and a third-person omniscient narrator, often covering the same incidents from different points of view. This is a fairly interesting idea, but in practice a little dull, since it is devoted entirely to the subject of middle-aged academics pondering at great length their adulterous affairs.

The text is also interspersed with essays and assignments by Helen’s creative writing students. These score ten on the clever-clogs-ometer for being done in the style of a range of bang-up-to-date 1990s authors, such as Martin Amis, Irvine Welsh, Salman Rushdie et al.

Halfway through the novel Helen discovers that her dead husband – an award-winning BBC radio documentary maker and hitherto a mournful memory – had been systematically unfaithful to her. This is cleverly (and amusingly?) done, because Helen reads an account of her husband’s sexual technique and peccadilloes in a piece of fiction written by one of her students. A bit of clandestine digging reveals that the said student was a ‘research assistant’ to her husband in the early 1990s. When she confronts her student, the latter confesses all and implies that her husband was notorious for seducing his research assistants and having it off whenever he was away on location.

All this comes as a devastating thunderbolt to Helen but made me laugh out loud. Because a) in terms of her character, it shows that being a sensitive lady novelist with two published books does not make you a lofty exception to the human race, does not mean you are especially intelligent or have special insight into other people. In fact, the opposite.

He must have been very, very careful. Or perhaps it was just me who was very stupid, very unobservant, very trusting. (p.202)

Quite. b) In terms of the plot, it very conveniently means that she is not only now ‘available’ for sex, but vows to make up for lost time. Messenger’s boat has come in.

Common themes in David Lodge’s fiction

This is David Lodge’s 11th novel and certain patterns in his fiction are very apparent:

  • there will be a lot of embarrassingly blunt sexual descriptions
  • one or more of the protagonists will be experts on an academic subject and not shy about lecturing the reader on it
  • one or more of the characters will be a Roman Catholic liable, at the drop of a chasuble, to conjure up memories of their cramped, traditional religious upbringing and how they heroically overcame it
  • there will be ‘formal’ tricksiness ie Sunday supplement experimentalism (eg the deployment of the clever literary pastiches mentioned above)
  • a male and female character will journey towards reconciliation and love

Sex

Oh dear. The male lead, cognitive scientist Ralph Messenger, is as randy as a goat on heat. The novel opens with a transcript of him recording his secret, innermost thoughts, trying to catch the free association of ideas in action:

I recorded us in bed to test the range of the condenser mike, left it running on the chair with my clothes without her knowing… she made a lot of noise when she came I like that in a woman… What a lot of pubic hair she had, black and springy and densely woven, like a birdsnest, you wouldn’t have been surprised to find a little white egg warm inside her labia… (p.2)

Maybe I’m very prudish but I think the novelist has to earn the right to be this blunt about sex in general, and have the good manners to introduce us to the characters as human beings before giving us dreamy descriptions of their labia. D.H. Lawrence takes a long time setting the scene and ambience before the famous rude scenes in Lady Chatterley. By contrast, opening a Lodge novel is like turning on a TV to be instantly confronted by a big close up of penises shoving into vaginas amid howls and grunts. Maybe that is progress.

As the novel progresses Messenger gravitates from using a tape-recorder to a computer transcription program. When he’s wondering what to describe to test out the new transcription device, he was a brainwave – he’ll describe his ‘first fuck’ (p.73) – which leads him into a sequence of reminiscences about being in a strip joint, being discovered swimming naked when he was a teenager, and so on, complete with plenty of erections and ejaculations.

she laughed softly and came over and stood in front of me so I was staring straight at her crotch sparsely fleeced with ginger pubic hair veiling but not concealing the pinky-brown crease of her cunt… (p.78)

A little later, he ponders the plight (as he sees it) of being homosexual:

What a deprivation, not to find the bodies of women attractive, their curves and their cunts and all the other fascinating differences from women… (p.116)

The novel is divided broadly into three points of view: the prim and proper diary which Helen Reed is keeping; an objective 3rd-person narrator; and Messenger’s stream-of-consciousness passages. The heart sinks when you come to every new Messenger section, for we are never very far from pricks and cunts.

It is odd that Lodge’s later novels regularly include figures who worry about the high moral purpose of art, of the value of the soul, of the imagination etc, sometimes almost as if they mean it – but the texts themselves routinely return us to an unpleasantly male gaze, a coarse objectifying of women, the brutal use of the crudest possible language.

I had time for a quick appraisal as she shrugged off her robe and climbed into the tub.. the tits are a little low slung and wide apart, but shapely and firm… they bounced perceptibly – with their own elasticity, not the cotton latex, as she stepped into the tub… in fact only a tiny strip of material, not much more than an inch wide, prevented me from staring right up her fanny… (p.117)

Comments like that, if written or even spoken aloud, would get you sacked for gross misconduct in most modern work-places. Yet slip them into a cleverly-structured, large-format Penguin paperback and this kind of vulgar language and grossly objectifying attitude wins literary prizes.

I’d like to fuck Emily [his step-daughter]…. Helen Reed, yes, I’d like to fuck her too… (p.118)

Speaking of his teenage step-daughter:

That time I saw her naked about a year ago, when I walked into the family bathroom, looking for something, and she was having a bath… just glimpsed her taut adolescent breasts gleaming wet with big brown aureoles and pointed nipples before I turned on my heel and walked out… (p.117)

No doubt the defense is that the very point of the stream-of-consciousness is to reveal everything, no matter how embarrassing, about a character. OK. But it seems to me a failure of imagination to think that revelations, secrets and embarrassments have to and can only be sexual revelations, secrets and embarrassments. There is more to human beings than screwing. On top of which, it feels lame that this extremely limited view of human nature can itself only be expressed by the monotonous repetition of the crudest language.

my tumescent cock… given me a tremendous hard-on (78)… panting for breath and with an erection like a broomstick (118)… I had to stay behind in the tub till my hard-on subsided (148)… if it happened that he lost his erection it didn’t matter (177)… How eager the young men were, how impatient their quivering erections (178).. It isn’t easy to drive with an erection (p.256)…

Male and female

Changing Places was structured around the comparison between go-getting American academic Morris Zapp and shy, bumbling English lecturer Philip Swallow.

Nice Work was structured around the contrast between high-falutin’ literary expert Robyn Penrose and hard-headed industrialist Vic Wilcox.

Thinks… is another dichotomy built around the opposition of Dr Ralph Messenger (male, scientist, rational) and Helen Reed (woman, novelist, feeling). Ralph is all aggressive rationalism and long lectures about current thinking in Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence. Helen was already a deeply sensitive person, and is now prone to even more intense feelings due to the recent, unexpected death of her husband (which also, of course, makes her conveniently available for a love affair).

Woman meets man = Sex. Or 300 pages of well-mannered foreplay rotating round and round the subject of sex. Again and again, I thought: Just get on and fuck him, for God’s sake, and then progress to the next, equally predictable stage – reams of high-minded literary regret.

Cognitive science

In his 1920s the novelist Aldous Huxley set out to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it. Nancy Cunard said you could tell which letter he was up to by his conversation. If it was all about hormones, horses and hysteria, he was up to… H! Something similar can be applied to Lodge. What has he been reading up on to turn into the theme of his next novel?

In his previous novel, Therapy, Lodge had obviously been reading the work of Søren Kierkegård because the protagonist of that novel gives us frequent expositions of the Danish philosopher’s theories, ethics and religious beliefs, as well as his biography, and eventually ends up travelling to Copenhagen to visit the Kierkegård museum and the places where the Great Dane lived and loved. Lodge is nothing if not thorough.

In the run-up to this novel Lodge has read intensively around the subjects of Cognitive Science, Artificial Intelligence and related fields. We know this because of the two-page acknowledgement at the back of the book which thanks various cognitive scientists for their help and encouragement, and includes an impressive reading list.

The novel is, therefore, an exercise in weaving Lodge’s characteristically clear, plain and forthright expositions of this branch of science into the more mundane love story between the randy science professor and the sensitive lady novelist.

Will there be misunderstandings and arguments? Will they squabble about the relative importance of science versus art, of evidence versus emotion? Will there be a lot of expository prose about cognitive science and artificial intelligence and qualia and affective modelling and genetic algorithms? Yes. Lots.

  • Genetic algorithms are computer programs designed to replicate themselves like biological life forms (p.45)
  • Affective modelling is computer simulation of the way emotions affect human behaviour (p.45)
  • qualia – the specific quality of our subjective experiences of the world – like the smell of coffee, or the taste of pineapple (p.36)
  • ‘Mentalese’ – some kind of preverbal medium of consciousness which at a certain point, for certain purposes, gets articulated by the particular parts of the brain that specialise in speech (p.37)
  • The Prisoner’s Dilemma (p.51)
  • Schrödinger’s Cat (p.54)
  • Locked-in syndrome (p.86)
  • Very small particles behave like waves, in random and unpredictable ways,’ says Douglas. ‘When we make a measurement, we cause the wave to collapse. It’s been suggested that the phenomenon of consciousness is a series of continuous collapses of the wave function.’ (p.127)
  • ‘Heisenberg demonstrated that you cannot accurately specify both the position and the speed of a particle. If you get one right, you get the other wrong.’ (p.128)
  • ‘Chaos theory deals with systems that are unusually sensitive to variations in their initial conditions or affected by a large number of independent variables. Like the weather, for instance.’ (p.128)
  • ‘TOM. Theory of Mind. Knowing that other people may interpret the world differently from yourself. The ability to lie depends on it. Most children acquire it at age three or four. Autistics never do.’ (p.134)

My son’s doing philosophy A-Level and I am surprised at the high standard of information and debate required for the subject. This novel is not pitched as high as A-Level. It raises various school debating society issues, but almost all in conversation, in dialogue, briefly, without going into depth: Is there a soul or are our minds just complex computers? Is life meaningful if there is no afterlife, or is it horribly pointless? —

When Lodge quotes from his sources (as above) the text is densely factual. But when he dramatises them into the mouths of his characters, especially the dim lady novelist, they are all too easily dumbed down into jokey dialogue. One of the characters has an autistic son: when Helen has one of the AI programs explained to her (it can process information but has no emotions) she quips that it is autistic. Having had chaos theory explained to her, she watches the annual rubber duck race on a nearby river, held for charity: and points out to the prof that what determines which duck gets into the lead is tiny variations in the initial conditions: Helen’s Chaos theory of Ducks! Boom boom. See how the novelist has dramatised these complex scientific theories for the benefit of us stupid people.

Is all this thorough learning integrated into the narrative of the novel? No. It would have been riveting if the plot had somehow turned on developments in AI, if one of the computer programs or experiments had somehow caused a crucial plot development. (Something like this in fact happens in Robert Harris’s thriller, The Fear Index, where an artificially intelligent algorithm designed to play the stock market starts to flex its muscles.) But here? No. The core of the novel is simply about a randy male academic who wants to sleep with an attractive female academic. The scientific elements appear from time to time as topics of conversation like any other, in among the hum of chat about the General Election or young people these days or the future of higher education or nice pubs in Gloucestershire.

Roman Catholicism

There’s always at least one Catholic character in a Lodge novel (some are entirely about Roman Catholic teaching and its recent history, such as The British Museum Is Falling Down or How Far Can You Go?).

The Catholic in this novel is the creative writing teacher, Helen Reed. She abandoned her faith decades ago, when a student, but her husband recently died of a brain haemorrhage and she now finds herself (very predictably) attracted to the campus chapel, nostalgically hankering for the religious certainties of her childhood faith. Yawn. When she visits her parents at Easter she is drawn back to the elaborate rituals of the weekend of special services. And when she discusses the mind, consciousness and fiction with her polar opposite, the alpha male scientist, Helen draws on convenient snippets of Christian belief to perform her allotted role in the novel’s scheme: as representative of the “lady novelist / emotions and empathy / but surely the universe has some meaning?” school of argument.

‘But aren’t there areas of human experience where scientific method doesn’t apply?’
‘Qualia, you mean?’
‘I suppose so,’ [Helen] said. ‘I was thinking of happiness, unhappiness. The sense of the sublime. Love.’ (p.229)

Dear oh dear. She is made out to be laugh-out-loud dim and – the point of her not realising her husband was unfaithful – completely unperceptive about other people. But like many dim people, she takes her own inability to follow an argument or to weigh the evidence systematically, as a virtue, as a proof that her own vague post-Christian vapourings about souls and spirits and the universe and feeling, are somehow more true, more authentic, more real than yukky science.

Bourgeois world

After Small World, Lodge appears to have made a conscious choice not to return to the cartoony, comic exuberance of that and its predecessor novels. Although comedic in structure (they have happy endings) and often funny in occasional details, Nice Work, Paradise News, Therapy and Thinks… address more ‘serious’ subjects and seem to be trying to treat them in a more adult style. Lacking the zany improbabilities of the comic novels, they become more ‘realistic’ in tone and approach.

1. I read the news today…

One sign of this is the foregrounding of contemporary news and issues in the text. All these novels are set in very carefully defined time periods. Often (in Therapy and here) the majority of the text consists of journals or diaries where Lodge is able to tie the characters’ thoughts or events to specific dates in specific years, and to reference the political events, the economic background and the news stories to create a ‘realistic’ timeframe for the narrative (the Jamie Bulger case, Squidgygate, the bombing of Sarajevo etc in Therapy).

In this novel it is the build-up to the General Election in May 1997 which ended 18 years of Conservative government, and inaugurated 13 years of New Labour rule. (Typically, Messenger and Helen have sex on the momentous night itself. Sex overrides every other value in these novels.)

However, I’m not sure this tactic really works. I argued in my review of Therapy that just referring to contemporary events without somehow integrating them into the plot or narrative has the paradoxical effect of making the narratives appear shallower, as if the stories are themselves as trite and throwaway as the daily papers.

2. Bourgeoisification

But the other noticeable trend in these post-comic novels is the increasing embourgeoisement of the characters. The clever grammar school boy swept up into National Service in Ginger, You’re Barmy or whose childhood and youth are sensitively described in Out Of The Shelter are exceptional, maybe, in their precocious intelligence, but act as windows onto a broader social scene, the working class squaddies in Ginger or American-dominated post-war Germany. The academic world of Changing Places and Small World is deliberately exaggerated to cartoon colourfulness for our amusement, and generally features comically poor, struggling, up-and-coming, frustrated, stymied and accident-prone academics.

But in these later novels the characters have made it. They are successful and they enjoy the conventional trappings of success. In Therapy the protagonist has a big house in the Midlands (with four loos), a flash car and a handy flat in central London. In Thinks… the lady novelist’s books have won prizes, she has a house in London, her parents have a nice retirement home in Southwold; the male protagonist, Ralph Messenger, has a house on the university campus and another fabulous house in the country, with a hot tub set on a slope with a commanding view, which the characters luxuriate in while discussing the nature of consciousness and the problem of point-of-view in fiction. (Or looking at the women’s tits, if you’re Messenger.)

There is lots of fine dining. More attention is paid than before to the brands of food and – maybe the most salient marker of English bourgeois life – of wine. Messenger likes his wines and, characteristically, uses them to try and get women drunk and into bed. In line with her role as the representative of Henry James and religious feeling and fine sensibility, it is the lady novelist through whose eyes we see the middle-class dinner parties and cocktail parties and birthday parties, the lovely house in the country, the charming town of Cheltenham with its lovely Regency architecture and charming curio shops which sell such lovely trinkets and the charming pubs in the lovely villages around Gloucester which serve such wonderful lunches.

After Helen has visited the wonderful church of Ledbury and communed with the soul of Henry James, who also visited it and left such an exquisite diary entry about it, she returns to a just adorable pub she spotted in the village.

Logs smouldered in the big open fireplace, and there were spring flowers on every table – solid, unpolished wooden tables, with comfortable Windsor armchairs. Blackboards over the long bar listed an enticing and adventurous menu. I ordered garlic and herb tagliatelle with chilli prawns and sun-dried tomatoes, reserving the possibility of an orange truffle pot with Grand Marnier sauce for dessert. A smiling motherly waitress took my order, to which I added a large glass of the house Chardonnay. The first course, when it came, was as mouth-watering as its description promised. I could hardly believe my good fortune. (p.233)

The scene, the prose are like something from Cotswolds tourist board, like an upmarket review on TripAdvisor.

But it is, with thumping inevitability, on this little pilgrimage to an out-of-the-way church, in this well-appointed pub with its wonderful cuisine that Helen spots Messenger’s wife and another man clearly having an illicit meeting, obviously carrying on an affair.

It is the inevitability of the way that, in middle-class novels, it is always the formal dinner party or the lovely meal with the Chardonnay (or was it that wonderful Pouilly-Fuissé, darling?) or the trip to the exquisite restaurant, where one or other married character makes a pass at another married character, or so-and-so’s affair is discovered and there is the most horrendous scene.

I find this world – real enough as it is, and as I’ve experienced it at numerous tense dinner parties – narrow, limited, sticky and thick with hypocrisy, full of successful bankers and lawyers and academics guffawing and pouring you some more Beaujolais and telling you why Tony just has to support George because there definitely are weapons of mass destruction, you know, a good friend in the FO told me it’s all true, and Saddam Hussein is just such a beastly man. A hermetically sealed world of People Like Us who never let the ugly, uncongenial facts of existence disturb their cosy groupthink.

It is a world and a class which are hard not to find repellent in its cosseted smugness. I preferred Norman the pig man in Ginger, You’re Barmy – his memory makes me smile because he represented something unsmooth and rebarbative, something which couldn’t be bought off with another glass of this rather fine Nuits-Saint-Georges, a working-class aggression which turned out to have an oddly endearing sweetness about it, something unexpected and which therefore stretched my imagination and human sympathies. A rude honesty which reaches back through Shakespeare to Chaucer and medieval gargoyles.

More plot

But there’s more. Once she’s discovered her (now dead) husband was unfaithful to her, Helen – on the rebound – of course makes herself available to the nearest thrusting alpha male, Dr Messenger. She prepares carefully for a scene of touching and sensitive seduction, cleaning her small flat, changing the sheets, washing and putting on one of her nicest outfits. So far the female point of view. Messenger records it on his tape thus:

This afternoon I fucked one of England’s finest female novelists… She looked so attractive at Bourton-on-the-Water, in a close-fitting pair of white jeans that showed her shapely bum to advantage, and her breasts moving about interestingly under her sweater… I didn’t want to give her any time for second thoughts, and I soon discovered that there was no need for elaborate foreplay. In fact she came with astonishing rapidity, almost as soon as I entered her. (p.257)

(It helps for practical purposes that Messenger’s wife has been called to America to the bedside of her ailing father.)

Thus Helen allows Messenger to fuck her and, like millions of women before and since, wonders whether she is truly in love with him and just what her feelings are and whether she has somehow betrayed her loyalty to her dead husband and is there still some vestige of sin in adultery etc etc etc etc for page after page of her dim-witted self-absorbed journal — while Messenger just calculates all the different ways and places he can fuck her – in the jacuzzi, high on a sheep-covered hillside, in their country retreat quietly when the kids are asleep, in her flat, on top, from behind, ringing the changes and treating her like a hank of meat.

[Messenger] liked to get inside her quickly and copulate in various positions before he achieved his orgasm, bringing Helen to several in the meantime. He was immensely strong in the arms and shoulders, and flipped her effortlessly this way and that, over and under him, like a wrestler practising ‘holds’. (p.263)

All of which crude abuse we read Helen rationalising to herself as just a rather boisterous expression of his love for her, his emotions for her, of the deep spiritual bond they have forged together. Pathetic stupid self delusion.

Crescendo and climax

After a fairly leisurely 280 pages the last 60 pick up speed as a number of plot strands converge:

  • In chapter 23 Messenger had visited Prague, where his publisher had fixed him up with a slender beauty to show him round (and what do you think they do that night? Fuck? Correct.) Messenger vaguely promised her she could attend the summer conference at his university. Now she writes, taking him up on his promise and eventually threatening to reveal their affair (one fuck) to his wife.
  • More dramatically, Messenger is diagnosed with a lump on the liver which dominates the final chapters. It is eventually revealed to be benign, a cyst caused by a parasite picked up during a youthful holiday working on a sheep farm. But the fear that it is cancer casts a pall over everyone. With crashing inevitability, it brings him and his wife closer together. He realises what a fool he’s been (lol), screwing around with the Czech woman, and then this crazy affair with Helen. He completely disengages from her. For her part, Helen is beside herself with concern and can’t understand why Messenger is suddenly so stand-offish (being unable to imagine that she was, all along, a glorified sex doll for a middle-aged sex maniac).
  • On the night of the big conference a small plot strand explodes when the Child Pornography Unit of Gloucestershire Police arrive to announce that someone in his department has been downloading child pornography – an investigation which quickly takes them to Messenger’s number two, the angry, frustrated Professor Duggan, a perennial loser who never got over Messenger being appointed to the job he thought was his by rights and who – in a surprise move – hangs himself from shame.
  • All of these incidents rushing together make Messenger immediately and logically realise he wants to terminate the fling with Helen. Apart from anything else, it is his American wife who is the rich one – in a divorce she would probably keep all the money, the house and the children. Yes, but better break it to her gently, old chap. Helen, characteristically, takes a lot longer and invokes the soul, art and Henry James before reaching pretty much the same conclusion. Her heart says one thing, her head says another – ‘I fear I love this man!’ (and so on).

In the final scene Messenger goes to her flat to tell her it’s over. She is late back from work. At a loose end he opens her laptop, starts to read her journal and is thunderstruck to discover that his wife, Carrie, is herself having an affair (from the entry Helen made about seeing Carrie with the man at the pub in Ledbury). Turns out Messenger doesn’t know what’s going on in other people’s heads, either.

Or: it turns out that just about every superior middle-class person in the book is totally available for affairs and flings, adultery and betrayal. It is a dispiritingly shallow view of the world and human nature, that all this expensive education, all this knowledge and insight, is put almost exclusively to the service of furtive fucking.

Morality and irresponsibility

Helen, in her high-mindedly self-deceiving way, thinks that all her windy hand-wringing about whether to fuck Messenger is essentially a moral question and (God help us) what novels mostly are and should be about. After the biggest computer in the world replicates all human thought processes, she states,

‘The same moral problems of love and lust, fidelity and betrayal, will remain.’ (p.299)

No doubt morality will remain, but I find the notion that morality is exclusively concerned with sexual behaviour – as this statement (and the whole novel) implies – to be constrictingly narrow and unattractive.

Freud, who knew a thing or two about human sexuality, says ‘morality is simple’. Are you going to betray your marriage vows, yes or no. If you think it will make you unhappy and is ‘wrong’, don’t do it.

This novel reminded me of Woody Allen’s films (not just because of the scene where he sexually fantasises about his step-daughter) but also because the characters can’t seem to behave like adults, can’t live by simple rules, can’t – and this is the point – deny themselves any pleasures they set their eyes on. It is a world where everyone wants to be happily married but also screw anyone they want to. Aaaaaaw mom, I wanna ice cream!!!

Like Allen’s films, this kind of novel teaches us nothing about ‘morality’, but a great deal about the self-centred, spoilt, childish kidults from the 80s and 90s who dress up their inability to act their age in fancy words and long-winded monologues about self-expression or life choices or qualia.

Morality is about respecting other people and helping and supporting them through a life which can often be difficult and painful, through bereavement and accident and disease and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, through the natural stages of loving and committing and parenting and caring for children, for your partner, for your parents when they become old and ill. It is about behaving with generosity and kindness, giving, helping, acting responsibly and rationally, overcoming difficulties and – through all of this – accepting that a large part of being an adult means self-denial.

Morality is not about having a well-paid job, a loving partner, living in a big house overflowing with food and over-educated friends – and agonising about who to fuck next. That is self-indulgence, indiscipline and decadence.

Satire?

The concluding question is: is this novel a satire? Does Lodge intend us to dislike and despise these characters as much as I do? The scientific gobbets are presented at face value. And so are the characters’ discussions of them. Helen’s upset at her husband’s death, and then of discovering his betrayal, seem serious. The child porn addict hanging himself – is that utterly serious, or does it smack a little of the savage farcical angle of a Tom Sharpe satire? Carrie’s father’s illness, Messenger’s own diagnosis with a liver condition – these are both presented ‘straight’, as if in a completely realistic novel where we are meant to sympathise with the characters’ plights and problems.

But surely Lodge cannot have created such a rapacious monster of egotism (Messenger) and such a self-absorbed, self-deceiving ninny as Helen, without realising it?

Lodge has been studying, teaching and writing novels for 50 years. Is he cannily creating space within the text for the reader to create the story they need? Some will warm to Helen’s tender-heartedness and read it as one woman’s journey to self-realisation; others might take from it the clever interweaving of up-to-date science with contemporary characters; randy men might warm to, or at least find hilarious, Messenger’s uninhibitedly frank sex talk.

Is a consistent take on the characters and the ‘story’ difficult because Lodge is deliberately deploying the material over a spectrum of ‘seriousness’, from the entirely heart-felt to the savagely ironic. The text very obviously consists of three main ‘voices’ (Messenger’s tape recordings, Helen’s diary entries, the omniscient narrator linking it all). Are there also different ‘registers of seriousness’ weaving across all three voices i.e. sometimes we’re meant to take their feelings and ideas seriously but at other times they are meant to be laughable and at other times… somewhere in between?

In the final page, looking back from some years later, the narrator records that Helen settles down with another writer and wins prizes for her novels, while Messenger is awarded the CBE for services to science. Is the novel serious in intention and satirical in outcome – both at the same time? Is official society’s recognition of this fine pair of boobies (prizes, honours) a parting gesture by Lodge which unmistakably marks the text as a satire on our values today, the way we live now? Or is the whole novel a sophisticated litmus test in which the reader’s response reveals more about him or her than about the author or his ‘intentions’?

Reviews of David Lodge novels

1960 – The Picturegoers – An ensemble piece following the lives of various characters in the fictional London suburb of Brickley, all linked by their attendance at their local cinema, the Palladium, as they fall in and out of love, practice various degrees of Catholicism and worry about sex.
1962 – Ginger, You’re Barmy – Jonathan Browne is fresh from gaining a First in English when he is plunged into National Service among brutal proles and cruel NCOs in a windswept barracks in Yorkshire. Onto this amiable backdrop is nailed a melodramatic story about his friend at university, Mike the ginger-haired renegade of the title, attacking a cruel NCO, being imprisoned, being spring by the IRA, and then forced to return to make a raid on the barracks which Jonathan, by freakish coincidence, ends up foiling.
1965 – The British Museum Is Falling Down – a day in the life of young academic Adam Appleby, unhappy Catholic father of three, who spends a day at the BM failing to do any research and finds himself embroiled in more and more comic complexities, all the time panic-stricken that his wife might be pregnant for an unbearable fourth time.
1970 – Out of the Shelter – the boyhood and teenage years of Timothy Young, child of very ordinary suburban London parents, who is a toddler during the Blitz, a boy at the end of the war, and a teenager when he goes to stay with his older sister in post-war Germany, where he makes all kinds of discoveries about war and peace and life and love.
1975 – Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses – It is January 1969 and two English Literature professors are swapping jobs for a term: down-trodden Englishman Philip Swallow is heading for the Californian delights of Euphoria State University, and lit crit superstar Morris Zapp is heading towards rundown rainy Rummidge University. How will they cope with the resulting culture shocks? A hilariously knowing romp, a sophisticated comedy classic.
1980 – How Far Can You Go? – The stories of ten young Catholic students in the 1950s, following their adventures as they mature during the 1960s and 70s, with extensive commentary about the sweeping changes to Catholic dogma during this period, and lots and lots of clinical descriptions of sex, in a surprisingly flat and unentertaining novel.
1984 – Small World: An Academic Romance – a brilliantly conceived comedy of manners satirising the world of modern literary scholarship with its cast of jetsetting, globe-trotting, back-stabbing, vaultingly ambitious and goatishly lecherous academics, led by the protagonists of Changing Places, but with a whole lot more characters added, all travelling, questing and falling in and out of love in the artfully contrived and very funny modern-day equivalent of a medieval romance. (A pilgrimage novel)
1988 – Nice Work – feminist literary academic Robyn Penrose reluctantly takes part in the university’s scheme to shadow figures from local industry, being assigned to the equally reluctant Vic Wilcox, Managing Director of J. Pringle and Sons, a local metal-working factory. Initially antagonistic, they open each other’s eyes to new worlds, rather inevitably, fall in love, but then go beyond that to reach a more mature and realistic friendship.
1991 – Paradise News – Agnostic priest Bernard Walsh is rung up by his dying aunt Ursula who lives in Honolulu (she married an American during the war) asking him to come visit her and bring his father (her brother). Thus begins a ‘holiday’ in ‘paradise’ in which old family secrets are disinterred, old wounds healed, and new life begins. (A pilgrimage novel)
1995 – Therapy – Successful TV scriptwriter Laurence Passmore has it all – hit show, sexy wife, grown-up kids flown the nest, big house, flash car – but is still obscurely unhappy, a problem which turns into a plight when his wife abruptly sues for divorce and he seeks refuge in the past as his life falls apart. (A pilgrimage novel)
2001 – Thinks… – At the (fictional) University of Gloucester, clever, lecherous, married cognitive scientist Ralph Messenger seduces bereaved novelist Helen Reed, in a story sprinkled with lectures on artificial intelligence which feel as if they’ve been cut & pasted from the popular science books of the 1990s.
2004 – Author, Author – A long and fascinating account of Henry James’s life from the mid-1880s to the mid-1890s as he attempted to branch out from writing novels and short stories with a sustained attempt to write plays for the stage, which proved, in the end, to be a humiliating failure – all told in a book which is saturated with interesting stories and gossip from the era.
2008 – Deaf Sentence – A return to the ‘contemporary’ novel, in which Desmond Bates is a retired professor of linguistics struggling with his growing deafness and difficult family, a fractious second wife, a senile father and a dangerously predatory American PhD student, an initially humdrum tale which moves towards some surprisingly dark and harrowing scenes.
2011 – A Man of Parts – A very long novel in which science fiction pioneer, novelist, political columnist and all-purpose social ‘prophet’, H.G. Wells, looks back over his life and recounts in squelchy detail his many, many sexual conquests.

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by Simon on June 4, 2015  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on June 4, 2015

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/06/04/thinks-david-lodge/

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