All posts tagged pilgrimage

Thomas Becket: murder and the making of a saint @ the British Museum

‘Thomas is the best doctor for the worthy sick.’
(Inscription on a lead ampulla created before 1200 to hold some of the Saint Thomas Becket’s miracle-working blood)

Two years after his murder on 29 December 1170, Thomas Becket was canonised by Pope Alexander III and his tomb at Canterbury cathedral quickly became a site of miraculous healing and wonder cures, and one of the most popular pilgrimage destinations in all of Europe, second only to Rome and Santiago de Compostela.

How appropriate of the British Museum to re-open after the long COVID lockdown with a grand exhibition devoted to one of the greatest healers this country has ever known.

The healing of Ralph de Longeville. Miracle window, Canterbury Cathedral, early 1200s. © The Chapter, Canterbury Cathedral

Thomas’s story

The exhibition is in the central rotunda at the museum, smaller and more intimate than the large Sainsburys gallery at the back. It is laid out in simple chronological order, with key events told in the dozen or so big wall posters and embellished in the labels of over 100 objects brought together for the first time, including rare loans from across the UK and Europe.

Rather than reinvent the wheel, I’ll quote liberally from the exhibition wall labels:

Becket was born in 1120 in Cheapside, a stone’s throw from St Paul’s Cathedral. He had a comfortable childhood. His parents Gilbert and Matilda were immigrants from Northern France, and part of a wealthy merchant community living in the commercial heart of London.

Around the age of 18 Becket went to study in Paris. After three years in Paris, Becket returned to England. He was offered the chance to work as a clerk for Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, joining a group of ambitious young men. The legal and diplomatic training that Becket received in his nine years with Theobald was life-changing.

In 1154 the archbishop recommended him as royal chancellor to the new king, Henry II, and the two men became great friends. It was the best paid position in the royal household, earning him five shillings a day. As chancellor Becket was responsible for issuing documents in the king’s name.

In 1162 Henry II nominated Becket as Archbishop of Canterbury, following Theobald’s death. It was a controversial appointment. Becket was not a priest and until then had lived a worldly, secular life. The king wanted him to remain chancellor, hoping that having his friend in both positions would increase royal control over Church and State. This plan failed when Becket renounced the chancellorship and began to oppose Henry. In 1164, with tensions escalating, the archbishop escaped across the Channel.

Henry II saw Becket’s rejection of the chancellorship in 1162 as a betrayal. Over the next two years their relationship disintegrated. One issue in particular divided them. The king demanded that churchmen accused of serious crimes be tried in secular rather than religious courts. Becket refused to endorse this infringement of the rights of the Church, provoking the king’s outrage.

With the situation spiralling out of control, Becket was brought before the king and accused of trumped-up crimes. Fearing for his life, on 2 November 1164 the archbishop fled abroad. He spent six years in exile under the protection of Henry’s rival, Louis VII of France, returning on 2 December 1170. Henry II punished Becket for leaving England without his permission, confiscating his land and wealth.

Becket found himself in France at the same time as Pope Alexander III, who was locked in disagreement with Frederick Barbarossa, an emperor with vast territories in central Europe. Like Becket, Alexander was in exile and sought protection from King Louis VII of France. After making peace the pope returned to Rome. This image shows him embracing Becket before their farewell. Alexander was later responsible for Becket’s canonisation as a saint.

Pope Alexander, who had forbidden the Archbishop of York to perform the sacred act, receives a complaint from Becket. He asks for permission to excommunicate the bishops involved in the ceremony, which the pope duly grants.

The coronation of the Young King spurred Becket into action and, after agreeing a fragile peace with Henry II, he decided to return to England. Fatefully, before leaving France he carried out the sentences of excommunication endorsed by the pope.

On 2 December, Becket returned to Canterbury and the cathedral he had not seen for six years. At his Christmas court in Normandy, Henry learned that Becket had excommunicated the English bishops involved in his son’s coronation. He flew into a rage, calling Becket a traitor and ‘low-born clerk’. Four knights, Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Morville, Richard Brito and William de Tracy, heard the king’s outburst. They hatched a plan to bring the archbishop to Henry and headed for England to arrest him.

The knights arrived at Canterbury and entered the precincts. They tried to arrest Thomas but he fled into the cathedral itself. Here the knights again tried to seize him but Thomas refused to go with them. The knights had worked themselves up into a rage and also risked major humiliation if they ended up having to leave empty-handed. Although the precise exchanges will never be known the confrontation escalated out of control and finally the knights attacked, one of them raising his sword and bringing it down to shatter Thomas’s skull. There were quite a few eye witnesses including Thomas’s clerk, Edward Grim, who tried to intervene and was injured in the struggle. All the eye witnesses agree that Thomas’s skull was shattered and a fragment of it flew to the ground.

The exhibition contains numerous depictions of the deed, as illustrations in illuminated manuscripts such as the MS containing John of Salisbury’s Life of St Thomas Becket from the British Library, one of the earliest known representations of the murder, or as carved reliefs, as shown below.

Alabaster panel showing the murder of Thomas Becket. England, around 1425 to 1450. © The Trustees of the British Museum

Appalled at what they had done the knights returned to Henry’s court in France where the king immediately grasped the significance of the catastrophe. In the years to come he made not one but two major penances to atone for his guilt and eventually took the extraordinary step of going on pilgrimage himself to Canterbury, where he stripped to a loincloth and shuffled through the cathedral on his bare knees, arriving at the altar where he was flagellated by monks.

To understand the utterly Christian worldview of the Middle Ages, you have to grasp that this was a reasonable and practical thing for a king to do. It cleansed him of his personal guilt and thus enabled his soul to enter heaven. It went a long way to winning back those of his subjects and the hierarchy of the church in Rome which had been scandalised by the murder. And so it, at the same time, fulfilled Henry’s purpose of asserting his authority over the farflung territories of his Plantagenet empire which stretched from Scotland to the Pyrenees.

The personal drama

Complicated story, isn’t it, and I’ve followed the museum’s account so closely because your opinion of the murder has to depend on a good grasp of its context and of the precise chain of events leading up to it.

At the level of personal drama, Henry and Becket had at one time been very good friends. Becket was 13 years older than Henry, better educated and in many ways a mentor to the younger man. The pair worked well together when they were king and chancellor. When Henry raised him to the archbishopric he therefore had every expectation that Thomas would be grateful.

But Thomas was also a flamboyant man, given to grandiloquent gestures as chancellor and, when he became archbishop, there is evidence from contemporary accounts that many other clerics disapproved. He had to be promoted through the hierarchy of clerical positions at top speed which many felt made a mockery of religion.

Therefore Thomas was nervously aware of his lack of deep theological training or of proper clerical experience. Combine that with a tendency to grandstand and you have an accident waiting to happen.

To this day historians debate his motives.

1. When he refused Henry’s demands to reform ecclesiastical law in order to make priests who had committed egregious crimes (for example rape or murder) subject to the secular laws of the land, did Thomas do it because he sincerely felt everyone anointed into the church was only accountable to the church – or because of his awareness that he wasn’t a ‘proper’ churchman so he was trying to curry favour with the English church hierarchy and the distant pope?

2. When he made the dramatic move of excommunicating the bishops who anointed Henry’s young son co-king, did he do it out of purely religious fervour and in order to protect the rights and privileges of the post of archbishop of Canterbury, whose ancient right it was to perform coronations and this undermined his authority. Or was he, once again, grandstanding to curry favour, this time with the pope who he met in exile in France and who explicitly approved his actions?

3. Lastly, why did he insist on staying put when the knights came to arrest him? Chances are he knew they were behaving without Henry’s explicit permission, that arresting an archbishop was illegal, and he knew any confrontation between him and the king would inevitably draw in the pope who was a staunch ally. Why not go with the knights, have it out with the king and be exonerated?

Alabaster panel from an altarpiece showing Becket’s consecration as archbishop on 3 June 1162. England, first half of the 15th century. Private Collection. © Nicholas and Jane Ferguson.

Or, as T.S. Eliot’s play on the subject considers, did Thomas want to be martyred? Facing intractable problems, not least his own sense of inadequacy and illegitimacy (as a man who lacked the deep experience required by an archbishop) did his liking for grand gestures kick in, and he taunted the knights so much they were left with no way out?

This is the view of Paul Johnson in his 1976 History of Christianity who quotes Edward Grim, who was an eye witness:

He who had long yearned for martyrdom now saw that the occasion to embrace it had arrived. (Paul Johnson, History of Christianity, 1990 Penguin edition, page 210)

And one of Thomas’s many hagiographers, William Fitzstephen:

Had he so wished, the Archbishop might easily have turned aside and saved himself by flight, for both time and place offered an opportunity to escape without being discovered.’ (ibid)

Could he have simply walked out peacefully with the knights and accompanied them to France with no fuss? We’ll never know.

The saint and healer

The exhibition really blossoms after Becket was murdered because that’s when he was transformed from one among many squabbling European monarchs and their statesman, into a premier league saint.

News of his murder spread far and wide across Europe and almost immediately people rich and poor, high and low, young and old, male and female, began making the pilgrimage to the cathedral and to the precise steps into the choir where he was hacked down. Relics were many: his clothes, his blood, his bones, his coffin, special prayers, these all helped rain down on pilgrims inestimable blessings, healings and cures.

Not only did Canterbury become by far Britain’s premier pilgrimage site but until the Reformation Thomas was the most frequently portrayed of all saints, had more parish churches named after him than any other saint, and more English boys were called after him than any other namesake.

The exhibition includes many of the precious caskets which were lovingly created to contain this or that relic brought back by pilgrims which are all beautiful examples of medieval craftsmanship, but maybe the most striking is this reliquary casket from Norway. Norway! Because apparently in Norway Thomas’s fame was such that he was second in popularity to St Olaf, the national saint.

(If you look carefully at the bottom panel you can not only see the knight hacking Thomas’s head but also the famous fragment of skull falling to the floor.)

Reliquary casket, c.1220–50 from Hedalen Stave Church, Norway. By kind permission of Hedalen Stave Church

The stained glass

In the decades following his death, the authorities at Canterbury cathedral created a new chapel devoted to Thomas. This included what became a set of 12 tall, narrow stained glass windows over six meters in height and each containing a set of four circular roundels themselves divided into segments depicting scenes not from Thomas’s life, but from the countless miraculous healings which people attributed to his powers. Hence they are collectively known as the Miracle Windows.

Five of the original windows were destroyed over the centuries, so seven survive, and one of these seven has been lovingly dismantled, removed from the cathedral and carefully transported here to the British Museum, where the four sections have been separated and are displayed at head height in a special curving gallery.

So this is a golden opportunity to see some masterpieces of medieval stained glass, really close up, beautifully presented and with the sometimes gruesome stories portrayed in each of the panels carefully described and explained.

Take the roundel which describes the sensational story of Eilward of Westoning.

Miracle window, Canterbury Cathedral, early 1200s. © The Chapter, Canterbury Cathedral

Eilward was a peasant who was accused of stealing in a drunken quarrel. In the panel on the mid-left he stands with the stolen items tied behind his back. A judge in a cap sentences him to trial by ordeal. Eilward fails and is condemned to blinding and castration. At the bottom left, Eilward is reclining in bed, his head bandaged from a blow. Becket appears to him in a vision, emerging from a shrine to bless him. In the middle-right panel Eilward lies bound to a plank as a man holds him by the neck and stabs his eyes while another wields a blade, kneels on his legs and reaches for his testicles.

Becket appears in a vision to Eilward. The saint makes the sign of the cross in front of his face. On waking, Eilward’s eyes and testicles grow back. The top panel shows Eilward riding a horse to Canterbury Cathedral. In the bottom centre panel a crowd gathers round Eilward as he points to his eyes while another man points at his groin to highlight his miraculous healing. The green tree at the centre symbolises his restored fertility. The panel at bottom right shows Eilward giving thanks at Becket’s tomb.

The other roundels describe in similar detail the miracle of Etheldreda who recovers from a fever, Saxeva who recovers from a painful arm and stomach ache, two sisters from Boxley who were lame and are healed, a monk called Hugh from Jervaulx Abbey who is cured, and so on. I particularly liked the story of Hugh who, at one point, suffers a catastrophic nosebleed which is depicted as a vivid flow of red streaming down from his face, on the lower left.

Detail from Miracle window showing the story of Hugh of Jervaulx, Canterbury Cathedral, early 1200s. Note the vivid red nosebleed from the prostrate man’s face © The Chapter, Canterbury Cathedral

Move over, graphic novels!

Thomas and Realpolitik

I was already familiar with the story of Thomas Becket, possibly a little over-familiar with it and not much in the main body of the exhibition told me much I didn’t already know or changed my own personal opinion.

Influenced by secular historians like Paul Johnson, I am inclined to think of Thomas as a deliberately obstructive, showboating and irresponsible man who needlessly set out to make Henry II’s life as difficult as possible. In most accounts I’ve read, the Becket murder was a blip or side issue in the bigger picture of Henry’s lifelong struggle to maintain his Plantagenet empire. It had a seismic impact on popular culture but little or no impact on the diplomatic Realpolitik of the day. After his half-naked atonement Henry restored good relations with the pope who approved his selection for next Archbishop of Canterbury as well as other ecclesiastical posts, as well as his plans to invade and conquer Ireland. In practical, worldly terms, Thomas’s death changed nothing.

(It’s worth pointing out that the curators disagree, and include a treasured manuscript of Magna Carta, signed 45 years after Thomas’s death by Henry’s useless son, King John, in 1215, to make their case. The Charter’s very first clause, probably added at the insistence of Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, states that the English Church must be free from royal interference. In the curators’ opinion this demonstrates how Becket’s dispute with Henry II continued to shape English politics long after his death. In Paul Johnson’s view this struggle between king and church was the central issue of the high Middle Ages, would remain a bugbear for centuries until Henry VIII decisively ended it with victory for the secular authority, and Thomas’s death didn’t really affect the issue one way or the other. Discuss.)

The Canterbury Tales

The exhibition has a section devoted to The Canterbury Tales, one of the key texts of English literature and, with its varied and colourful tales told by a motley cross section of late 14th century personalities all engaged on a horseback pilgrimage from London to Canterbury, as explained in the lovely words of the Prologue.

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye,
So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages,
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

‘That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke’, I love that line. Who doesn’t need holp when that they are seeke?

The exhibition includes one of the earliest manuscripts which contains all 24 of the surviving stories, as well as blow-ups of the original medieval portraits of some of the storytellers (the Wife of Bath, the Yeoman, the Merchant and the Shipman). But none of the stories are actually about Thomas and, if anything, they demonstrate a woefully relaxed attitude to Christian faith and morality which would have appalled the saint and his most zealous devotees.

The suppression of a saint

The one part of the exhibition I found genuinely new and informative came right at the end and deals with Henry VIII’s aggressive erasure of the cult of Thomas.

I knew that, as part of the first steps in the Reformation and linked with the Dissolution of the monasteries, Henry had all pilgrimage sites and saints shrines shut down. I knew from Johnson’s account that Thomas’s shrine was the biggest one in the land and that Henry’s commissioners carried off a vast amount of loot, namely 4,994 ounces of gold, 4,425 of silver-gilt, 5,286 of plain silver and 26 cartloads of treasure. A generation earlier, around 1511, the Dutch reformer Erasmus and the English humanist John Colet had visited the shrine and been disgusted at its tackiness. They were offered the opportunity to kiss a prize relic, the genuine arm of St George, or to touch a manky old rag supposedly stained with the saint’s blood, and Thomas’s genuine original shoe to be kissed.

As the curators observe:

After visiting Becket’s shrine real pilgrims bought similar souvenirs, badges to pin to clothing or little flasks worn around the neck. They were made quickly and cheaply by pouring molten lead or tin into a mould. The range of Canterbury souvenirs is remarkable, from miniature bells inscribed with ‘St Thomas’ to tiny swords with detachable scabbards.

And the exhibition includes no fewer than 24 examples of these multivarious knick-knacks and gewgaws. The medieval cult of saints had degenerated to the level of Blackpool souvenirs.

So I wasn’t surprised to learn the specifics of the demolition of Thomas’s massive and treasure-laden shrine, that:

On 5 September 1538, Henry VIII arrived in Canterbury. During his three-day stay royal agents began demolishing St Thomas’s shrine, prising off the jewels and smashing the marble base. They packed up its precious metal in crates, which were taken to London. Becket’s bones were removed, and a rumour spread that they had been burnt and the ashes scattered to the wind.

What I didn’t know and found fascinating was the way King Henry VIII singled out the cult of Thomas for special suppression. It was because, at a political level, above the level of popular culture and religion, Thomas was a symbol of the independence of the Church and Henry’s reformation was about decisively ending centuries of squabbling, and asserting the paramount authority of the secular monarch.

This explains why, after 1534 when Henry broke with Rome and Parliament appointed him Supreme Head of the Church of England, he could not tolerate Becket’s status as a defender of Church liberty and denounced him as a traitor to the country, or the new notion of ‘nation’ which Henry was creating.

Hence the passage of laws which singled out the cult of Saint Thomas and banned it. The laws banned visual references to the saint and insisted that the very word ‘saint’ was to be expunged from the record. Henceforth he was to be referred to as ‘Bishop Thomas’. A wall label quotes from a Royal proclamation, of 16 November 1538:

…from henceforth the said Thomas Becket shall not be esteemed, named, reputed, nor called a saint, but Bishop Becket, and…his images and pictures through the whole realm shall be put down…

The exhibition closes with some quite fascinating examples of how this erasure from history, this rewriting of history, was carried out, including:

  • a book of hours where the devotional prayer to Becket has been carefully cut out, although the illustration of the martyrdom has been left (intriguingly) undamaged
  • a copy of the Golden Legend, a very popular compendium of the lives of saints, in which the text and image for Becket’s story have been crossed out with black ink
  • a manuscript containing texts for the celebration of mass, once owned by the parish church of St John the Baptist in Bromsgrove, near Worcester, in which thick red ink has been selectively smeared across prayers to St Thomas in order to obliterate them

Manuscript containing mass texts from the parish church of St John the Baptist in Bromsgrove in which prayers to ‘Bishop’ Thomas have been obliterated by red ink. Around 1450. © The Syndics of Cambridge University Library

Curators

  • Lloyd de Beer, curator, Medieval Britain and Europe
  • Naomi Speakman, curator, Late Medieval Europe
  • Sophie Kelly, project curator

Related links

Other medieval reviews

Other British Museum reviews

  • Complete list of all my British Museum reviews
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by Simon on May 22, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on May 22, 2021

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The Journey To The East by Hermann Hesse (1932)

A slender novella, 88 pages in the Picador paperback version, The Journey To The East is a first-person narrative told by a former member of the secretive ‘League’ of poets, writers and seekers who, in their different ways, all undertook journeys to the East in ‘the troubled, confused, yet so fruitful period following the Great War’ (p.5).

What sets it apart, at least to begin with, is that it is nothing like a sensible factual account of a straightforward ‘journey’ such as you might read by traditional travel writers like Robert Byron or Peter Fleming.

Instead it is more like a fairy story, in which the ‘travellers’ encounter legendary figures and mythical beasts, pass through fictional lands from fables and fairy tales, and travel not only in space, but in time – back into the past, penetrating ‘into the heroic and the magical’ (p.7).

One day, when I was still quite a new member, someone suddenly mentioned that the giant Agramant was a guest in our leaders’ tent, and was trying to persuade them to make their way across Africa in order to liberate some League members from Moorish captivity. Another time we saw the Goblin, the pitch-maker, the comforter, and we presumed that we should make our way towards the Blue Pot.

The giant Agramant, the Goblin. It is fairy land.

Despite these imaginative frills, though, the League feels like a Christian monastic order – casual phrases continually remind the reader that Hesse had an intensely pious Christian upbringing, against which he rebelled but whose stern moral seriousness he kept for the rest of his life.

Thus newcomers to the League are ‘novitiates’, must take an ‘oath’ to renounce the world and its temptations, must wear a ring proclaiming their membership of the order. The journey is referred to as a ‘pilgrimage’ and the travellers as ‘pilgrims’. The leader of the narrator’s group talks freely about ‘grace’ and ‘repentance’, both utterly Christian concepts.

But at the same time it is a phantasmagoria of all the cultural greats through the ages:

Our League was in no way an off-shoot of the post-war years, but that it had extended throughout the whole of world history, sometimes, to be sure, under the surface, but in an unbroken line, that even certain phases of the World War were nothing else but stages in the history of our League; further, that Zoroaster, Lao Tse, Plato, Xenophon, Pythagoras, Albertus Magnus, Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Novalis and Baudelaire were co-founders and brothers of our League.

This is a kind of greatest hits of world culture. And the way the ‘pilgrims’ travel is both a physical path or itinerary, very much in the style of medieval pilgrims –

And as we moved on, so had once pilgrims, emperors and crusaders moved on to liberate the Saviour’s grave, or to study Arabian magic; Spanish knights had traveled this way, as well as German scholars, Irish monks and French poets.

But also an imaginative one, as they travel through realms of magic and myth, experiencing not only all times, but the real and the imaginary on the same terms.

The core of the experience, the thing which, looking back, the narrator realises brought him the greatest happiness, was:

The freedom to experience everything imaginable simultaneously, to exchange outward and inward easily, to move Time and Space about like scenes in a theatre.

When you reflect on this, it sounds increasingly like the adventures of someone in their library – with the leisure time to roam freely over time and space, and between factual and imaginative literature.

The plot

The first-person narrator is ‘a violinist and story-teller’ who joined the League with the aim of travelling to the East to meet the princess Fatima and, if possible, to win her love (we learn that all League members have quirky or idiosyncratic goals, one wants to see the coffin of Mohammed, another to learn the Tao).

But the oddest thing about the story is that… they don’t travel to the East. About a third of the way through the text, the narrator tells us that at an early point of the journey, while they were still in Europe, at a place called Morbio Inferiore, a municipality in Switzerland, one of his team’s most loyal servants, Leo, goes missing, so the entire squad sets out to find him, searching up hill and dale.

Not only do they never find him, but his group begins to squabble amongst itself, loses focus. Somehow the journey was abandoned and he never made it to the East. Now, we learn, the narrator is struggling to set it all down in a written account, in a bid to revive the heady joy of those young days.

Now the narrative cuts to ‘the present’, some ten years after the journey. The narrator tells us it is a long time since he was active in the League, he doesn’t know whether it exists any more, he’s not sure it ever existed and these things ever happened to him.

And now the narrator tells us that the episode of missing Leo has given him writer’s block, he doesn’t know how to tell the episode correctly, and can’t manage to get the story past it.

And in an abrupt and surprising switch, the narrative stops being about any journey to the East whatsoever.

Now, surprisingly, the scene cuts back to the narrator’s home town and becomes spectacularly more realistic and mundane. To address his problem of writer’s block, the narrator goes to meet a friend of his who’s a newspaper editor, named Lukas, and who wrote a successful book of war memoirs.

Discussion of the war memoirs gives rise to a consideration of how difficult it is to describe any human experience, at how you need to create eras or characters or plots to even begin to get it down.

Even further than this, how some experiences are so intense or evanescent, that you can’t even be sure you had them. In which case, how do you describe them? Lukas replies that he wrote his book about the war because he simply had to, whether it was any good or not was secondary, the writing itself was vital therapy, which helped him control ‘the nothingness, chaos and suicide’ which would otherwise have overwhelmed him (p.46)

So. This is less a book about a journey anywhere, and a lot more a book about the difficulty of writing a book. Ah.

When the narrator tells Lukas how, in writing his account of the journey to the East, he’s got blocked on this episode of the missing servant, Leo, Lukas promptly looks Leo up in the telephone directory and finds there is a Andreas Leo living at 69a Seilergraben. Maybe it’s the same guy, he says – as if we’re in a 1930s detective novel and not the imaginative phantasmagoria we started out in. ‘Go and see him,’ the editor suggests.

So the narrator does, and finds 69a Seilergraben to be an apartment in an anonymous building in a quiet street. The narrator knocks on the door, questions the neighbours, hangs around, and goes back on successive days. Finally he sees this Leo exit his apartment block and walk quietly to the park where he sits on a bench and eats dried fruit from a tin.

This is not at all the mystical imaginative phantasmagoria I was promised on the back of the book, is it? This is staggeringly mundane.

The narrator approaches Leo, and tries to remind him of their time back in the League and on the great journey East which, the text confirms, happened some 10 years earlier. But Leo is calmly dismissive and walks off, leaving the narrator standing alone in the park as dusk falls, in the rain.

Now he is rejected like this, we learn the narrator is prone to depression, in fact to despair and thoughts of suicide.

I had experienced similar hours in the past. During such periods of despair it seemed to me as if I, a lost pilgrim, had reached the extreme edge of the world, and there was nothing left for me to do but to satisfy my last desire: to let myself fall from the edge of the world into the void — to death. In the course of time this despair returned many times; the compelling suicidal impulse…

In other words, he shows the same bouncing from one to extreme to the other that characterised the Steppenwolf and his moods of suicidal despair. And very like the author himself, a glance at whose biography reveals attempts at suicide, prolonged psychotherapy, and a spell in a mental sanatorium.

The narrator gets home and sits down, still damp from the rain and writes a long letter to Leo, then falls asleep. When he wakes up Leo, is sitting in his living room. Leo reveals he is still a member of the League and says he will take the narrator to see the current President. Leo leads him through the streets of the quiet town by a circuitous route, stopping at various inconsequential locations including a church, to an anonymous building, which is large and labyrinthine on the inside (reminding me of the labyrinthine buildings Franz Kafka’s protagonists stumble through).

The narrator is led into an enormous room full of shelves lined with books which turn out to be the archive the League. Leo suddenly starts singing and, as in movie special effects, the archive recedes into the distance and in the foreground appears a large judgement chamber.

A jury assembles and a ‘Speaker’, who acts like a judge. It has turned into a sort of court-room, which makes the comparison with Kafka feel overwhelming – a confused little man dragged to judgement before a huge, imposing court which he doesn’t understand. The essence of the Kafkaesque.

For the first time the narrator is named as ‘H.H.’. H.H.? So a barely veiled reference to the author himself which, yet again, could barely be more like the Kafka who named his two most famous protagonists K. and Joseph K. with his own initial.

The ‘Speaker’ refers to H.H. as ‘the self-accused’ and asks him:

‘Is your name H.H.? Did you join in the march through Upper Swabia, and in the festival at Bremgarten? Did you desert your colours shortly after Morbio Inferiore? Did you confess that you wanted to write a story of the Journey to the East? Did you consider yourself hampered by your vow of silence about the League’s secrets?’
I answered question after question with ‘Yes’…

So I was expecting H.H. to get hammered, but, surprisingly, he is now given permission to go right ahead and write a full account of the League and all its laws.

He is handed a copy of the manuscript of the Journey he had been working on and which had got bogged down at that moment when Leo left the group. But now, when he rereads it, he feels it is bodged, clumsy, inaccurate and – further – as he tries to amend it, he watches the letters change shape, become patterns and pictures, illegible, the entire manuscript changes form in front of his eyes.

Rather improbably, the Speaker gives him free run of the immense archive to research his book, which leads to a passage where H.H. rummages through the archives to find records about his friends and then himself, but finds the records written in strange languages and arcane scripts. Slowly he realises there isn’t enough time in the world to go through this immense and probably infinite library.

From all sides the unending spaciousness of the archive chamber confronted me eerily. A new thought, a new pain shot threw me like a flash of lightning. I, in my simplicity, wanted to write the story of the League, I, who could not decipher or understand one-thousandth part of those millions of scripts, books, pictures and references in the archives! Humbled, unspeakably foolish, unspeakably ridiculous, not understanding myself, feeling extremely small, I saw myself standing in the midst of this thing with which I had been allowed to play a little in order to make me realize what the League was and what I was myself.

the court magically re-assembles, with the Speaker presiding. Now we learn that this little episode was a further step in H.H.’s trial, to show him how vain and presumptuous his aim of writing a history of the league was. The Speaker asks if he is ready for the verdict on him, and whether he wants it delivered by the Speaker or the President himself.

In a surreal development, the grand figure who emerges from the bloom of the archive hall turns out to be none other than… Leo! The Leo he had followed into the party, who is himself the Leo who was his group’s servant on the Journey and now he comes to think about it, was the same President who initiated him into the League and gave him his ring.

H.H. is covered in shame and confusion. To think that he could write a history of the League. To think that he had imagined the League had ended or had never existed. Now Leo recounts H.H.s sins against the League. Forgetting about its existence. Losing his League ring. Even their long walk through the town had been a test because H.H. should have gone into the church and worshipped, as is fitting, instead of standing outside locked in his impatient egotism. It is his egotism which made him deny the League and sink into a world plagued with depression and despair.

Again, as in so many of Hesse’s books, which you imagine will be about Eastern philosophy, the most eloquent passages are about misery and despair. Leo tells the jury how H.H.s loss of faith in the League led him down into the pit, and delivers some puzzling lines:

‘The defendant did not know until this hour, or could not really believe, that his apostasy and aberration were a test. For a long time he did not give in. He endured it for many years, knowing nothing about the League, remaining alone, and seeing everything in which he believed in ruins. Finally, he could no longer hide and contain himself. His suffering became too great, and you know that as soon as suffering becomes acute enough, one goes forward. Brother H. was led to despair in his test, and despair is the result of each earnest attempt to understand and vindicate human life. Despair is the result of each earnest attempt to go through life with virtue, justice and understanding and to fulfill their requirements. Children live on one side of despair, the awakened on the other side. Defendant H. is no longer a child and is not yet fully awakened. He is still in the midst of despair.’

So: Despair is what you enter when you are no longer a child, when you become a questing adult, and before you are initiated or awakened.

Now President Leo initiates H.H. for a second time, giving him a replacement ring and welcoming him back into the ranks of the League.

This really is nothing at all about any literal Journey To The East, is it? It is about adventures of the spirit, or maybe psychological experiences, in a quiet Swiss town.

Now the President leads H.H. to the final test. He is shown the League archives about himself. Specifically, he is shown several other accounts written by members of his group or party on his Journey of ten years ago. Here he is horrified to read that it is he, H.H. that the other members of the group blamed for Leo’s disappearance, for accusing Leo of having taken key documents with him, it was he, H.H. who was blamed by the rest of the group for spreading dissension.

He learns something about trying to write ‘the truth’ (something which is, to be blunt, fairly obvious), which is that everyone has a different account of what happened, and no ‘truth’ can ever be arrived at.

If the memory of this historian was so very confused and inaccurate, although he apparently made the report in all good faith and with the conviction of its complete veracity – what was the value of my own notes? If ten other accounts by other authors were found about Morbio, Leo and myself, they would presumably all contradict and censure each other.

No, our historical efforts were of no use; there was no point in continuing with them and reading them; one could quietly let them be covered with dust in this section of the archives. ..

How awry, altered and distorted everything and everyone was in these mirrors, how mockingly and unattainably did the face of truth hide itself behind all these reports, counter-reports and legends! What was still truth? What was still credible ?

The final few pages end on an enigmatic moment and symbol. Tucked away in the shelf where his records are stored, he finds a grotesque little statuette, like a pagan idol. Only slowly does he realise it is two-sided, shows two human figures joined at the back. And then slowly makes out that one is a depiction of himself, with blurred features, weak and dying. And as he lights another candle he sees something stirring in the heart of the glass statuette, and realises that some kind of life force is moving from his half of the statuette over into Leo’s

And in the last few sentences of the book he remembers a conversation he had with the servant Leo on the Journey, ten years earlier, amid a wonderful festival early in the journey, where Leo had explained that a pet or writer drains himself in order to give eternal life to his work, just as a mother suckles a baby and gives the babe life, at her own expense. So the poet.

And on this slightly ominous, pregnant image the book ends. The narrator feels very sleepy. He turns to find somewhere to sleep. Maybe enacting exactly the gesture whereby the poet, writer or maker, gives all their spirit and life force to their creation and then expires.

Thoughts

Well, it turns out not to be a literal Journey To The East in the slightest. Anyone expecting a straightforward narrative of a pilgrimage to India will be disappointed and puzzled.

However, anyone familiar with Hesse will be less surprised by its combination of the strangely mundane and the wildly phantasmagorical. This is the same combination as in Steppenwolf, which evolved from being a dull account of a middle-aged boarder in a provincial boarding house into the giddy surrealism of the Magic Theatre.

And Steppenwolf also covered a similar range of emotional or psychological states – to be more precise, it displayed a similar, almost schizophrenic, tendency to jump between extremes of Despair and the giddy heights of ecstatic imaginative delirium.

I had this impression of Hesse as being a lofty propounder of high-minded Eastern philosophy. I wasn’t prepared to encounter so many characters who were so full of despair, self-loathing and so many discussions of suicide.

And I’m still reeling from the way the book is not about a Journey To The East at all; it’s much more about the psychological adventures or journey of a middle-aged man living in a Swiss town. All the key events happen in the narrator’s mind. It is a psychological odyssey.

Building a universe

It’s a small detail, but it’s interesting that Hesse includes among fellow members of the League, not only some of his real-life friends, but characters from his other books.

Thus the character ‘Goldmund’, one of the two leads in Narziss and Goldmund, crops up in his initial memories of the Journey, as does the painter Klingsor, who is the fictional lead of Hesse’s earlier novel Klingsor’s Last Summer.

And when I started reading Hesse’s final novel, The Glass Bead Game, early in the introduction the narrator mentions the League of Journeyers To The East as forerunners of the game. Hesse was quite obviously creating a kind of larger imaginative canon, an imaginarium, in which characters not only from history, not only actual writers and composers, along with mythical and legendary figures, but figures from his own earlier fictions, could meet and mingle on equal terms.

Images of war in The Journey To The East

I am always interested in the social history revealed by older texts. It is striking that Hesse doesn’t just launch straight into his fairy-tale journey, but feels the need to define the times, the era, the period against which his pilgrim is reacting, and that he defines these times by repeated references to the social, economic, cultural and spiritual chaos following Germany’s defeat in the Great War.

Ours have been remarkable times, this period since the World War, troubled and confused, yet, despite this, fertile…

It was shortly after the World War, and the beliefs of the conquered nations were in an extraordinary state of unreality. There was a readiness to believe in things beyond reality…

Have we not just had the experience that a long, horrible, monstrous war has been forgotten, gainsaid, distorted and dismissed by all nations? And now that they have had a short respite, are not the same nations trying to recall by means of exciting war novels what they themselves caused and endured a few years ago?…

At the time that I had the good fortune to join the League – that is, immediately after the end of the World War – our country was full of saviors, prophets, and disciples, of presentiments about the end of the world, or hopes for the dawn of a Third Reich. Shattered by the war, in despair as a result of deprivation and hunger, greatly disillusioned by the seeming futility of all the sacrifices in blood and goods, our people at that time were lured by many phantoms, but there were also many real spiritual advances. There were Bacchanalian dance societies and Anabaptist groups, there was one thing after another that seemed to point to what was wonderful and beyond the veil. There was also at that time a widespread leaning towards Indian, ancient Persian and other Eastern mysteries and religions…

His name is Lukas. He had taken part in the World War and had published a book about it which had a large circulation…

And indeed, from a structural point of view, this editor, Lukas, is included mainly for the discussion he promotes about the struggle he had to write his memoirs of the war, and his eventual conclusion that it was better to write something rather than nothing – even if untrue or less than perfect – if only because the act of writing was so therapeutic and saved him from terrible feelings of despair and suicide.

I’m doing no more than suggest that Hesse, who is generally thought of as a kind of high-minded explorer of timeless values was, in fact, very much a man of his times, and that his thinking was marked and shaped by the great cataclysm which he and his nation lived through just as much as all the other authors of the Weimar period.

Credit

Die Morgenlandfahrt by Hermann Hesse was published in German in 1932. The English translation by Hilda Rosner was published by Peter Owen Ltd in 1956. All references are to the 1995 Picador paperback edition.

Related links

20th century German literature

The Weimar Republic

German history

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by Simon on April 26, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in German literature, Germany, Great War, Novel, Novella, Philosophy, Psychology
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on April 26, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/04/26/the-journey-to-the-east-hermann-hesse/

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (1922)

Siddhartha is a brief (119-page) telling of the life story of a (fictional) contemporary of the Buddha, a fellow seeker after truth and spiritual enlightenment. The book describes his life and experiences as he follows his own personal path to enlightenment.

Siddhartha is told in simple, lucid prose and has, from start to finish, the feel of a fable, or of a certain kind of old-fashioned children’s story.

I read it in the beautifully clear and rhythmic English translation by Hilda Rosner, which was first published in 1951.

In the shade of the house, in the sunshine of the riverbank near the boats, in the shade of the Salwood forest, in the shade of the fig tree is where Siddhartha grew up, the handsome son of the Brahman, the young falcon, together with his friend Govinda, son of a Brahman. The sun tanned his light shoulders by the banks of the river when bathing, performing the sacred ablutions, the sacred offerings. In the mango grove, shade poured into his black eyes, when playing as a boy, when his mother sang, when the sacred offerings were made, when his father, the scholar, taught him, when the wise men talked. (Opening sentences)

Hermann Hesse

Siddhartha was Hesse’s ninth novel. Hesse had been born in 1877 into a devout Swabian Pietist household ‘with the Pietist tendency to insulate believers into small, deeply thoughtful groups’. He was an intensely serious young man who rebelled against his parents, tried to commit suicide, was sent to mental homes and then a boys’ institution, leaving school as soon as he could. He never attended university and became an apprentice at a bookshop. With few connections he struggled to get his early works of poetry or short fictions into print.

His breakthrough came with publication of the novel Peter Camenzind in 1904 and became popular throughout Germany. He married, had three children and supported himself for the rest of his life as a writer. Reading Schopenhauer had interested him in Eastern philosophy, and in the 1900s he read a lot about the subject.

Seven more novels followed. In 1911 he went on a trip to the East, to Sri Lanka, Borneo and Burma. On return it was clear his marriage was breaking down. The Great War broke out. His son fell ill and his wife developed schizophrenia. In 1916 Hesse went into psychotherapy, which led him to personal friendship with Freud’s disciple, Carl Jung. In 1919 Demian was published, then in 1922 Siddhartha.

The historical Buddha

The Buddha’s given name was Siddhārtha Gautama. He was born into an aristocratic family in what is present-day Nepal, around 480 BC (though his dates and all the facts relating to his life are open to extensive debate).

He renounced his privileged life and spent years travelling, learning, observing. One day he sat under the banyan tree and had a religious vision. He realised that all of life as commonly accepted amounts to duḥkha or suffering, and that only complete detachment from the wishes of the ego, the mind and body can bring complete detachment from self, and so achieve the end of dukkha – the state called Nibbāna or Nirvana.

‘Buddha’, by the way, is not a name but an adjective or title, meaning ‘Awakened One’ or the ‘Enlightened One’.

Siddhartha – part one

With fairy tale simplicity Hesse describes the efforts of Siddhartha, son of a worthy Brahmin in north India at the time of the Buddha, to attain wisdom. He meditates, he practices the ablutions and the rituals required of a high-caste Hindu Brahmin, and also reads the holy books, but he is discontent. He feels he will never attain wisdom this way.

And so he asks his father if he may leave in search of wisdom, Initially reluctant, his father lets him and, as he walks out of his ancestral village, Siddhartha is joined by his faithful friend, Govinda.

They spend ‘about three years’ (p.16) with the Samana, a sect of monks or spiritual devotees who live in the jungle, learning their ways. Then rumours arrive of a man named Gotama who is also known as the Buddha or enlightened one. Siddhartha asks the head Samana for permission to leave the community to go see this Gotama. This makes the head Samana angry, but Siddhartha (once again) overcomes all objections, and leaves.

Siddhartha and Govinda come to the town of Savathi, where Gotama has established a community of monks and followers, living in the Jetavana Grove just outside town, which a rich follower has given him.

In the morning they watch Gotama going to beg food for his mid-day meal, looking much like any other yellow-cloaked devotee. In the afternoon they hear him preach the four main points and the Eightfold Path, the way to escape the eternal recurrence of reincarnation into lives of suffering and pain, the way to escape from the cycle into the bliss of Nirvana.

Govinda is entranced and goes forward, with other pilgrims, to ask Gotama to take him into his community, and he is accepted. However, Siddhartha doesn’t. Siddhartha explains to Govinda that he has no doubt Gotama’s teachings are correct but he doesn’t wish to follow another man’s teachings, he wants to know.

Later he bumps into Gotama himself and politely asks permission to talk to him, and explains this conviction, that the Buddha’s teachings can be communicated and followed by others; but this isn’t what he’s after. He isn’t after teachings, the world is full of teachings. He is after the Buddha’s experience but that experience is, by definition, incommunicable.

Thus Siddhartha must leave the community and must find his own way. Gotama warns him against the chains of opinion and knowledge, and against being too clever.

‘Be on your guard against too much cleverness.’

But Siddhartha is determined and leaves the community, and his best friend Govinda behind.

Walking alone he has a revelation of his own – all this time, pursuing the teachings of the ancients or gurus, he has been motivated by one thing: fear of his Self, fleeing from his Self. What would happen if he accepted his own Self, his selfness, as supreme, as the basis of his existence.

‘I do not want to kill and dissect myself any longer, to find a secret behind the ruins. Neither Yoga-Veda shall teach me any more, nor Atharva-Veda, nor the ascetics, nor any kind of teachings. I want to learn from myself, want to be my student, want to get to know myself, the secret of Siddhartha.’

This is connected with a revelation of the multitudinousness of life, the blue sky and the green forest. Everything has a distinct itness. Trying to abolish the many in order to penetrate through to The One – as the Brahmins do – is a mistake.

Cleaving to his Self for the first time he feels genuinely alone, not a member of his caste or a pilgrim among pilgrims or a scholar among scholars. The world melts away and he stands like a star in the heavens. He is just Siddhartha, the one and only Siddhartha and the realisation makes ‘a feeling of icy despair’ go through him, but at the same time he is more awake than he’s ever been before. He is awakened. He is reborn.

Siddhartha – part two

Siddhartha walks through the world, enlightened. No longer does he reject and spurn the things of the world as a veil to be penetrated. The reverse: now he celebrates the amazing diversity, colour and beauty of the natural world.

But this second part is dominated by what happens next. Siddhartha takes a ferry over a river and comes to a town where he admires a beautiful woman being carried by four bearers on an ornamented sedan chair. He makes enquiries. It is Kamala the noted courtesan. He is struck. He goes into the town and has his beard cut off and his hair cut and oiled. He bathes in the river. Then he presents himself to Kamala’s people and she grants him an audience.

Long story short: he becomes her lover and best friend. She teaches him the forty ways of love, finding pleasure in every look, word and every part of the human body. She tells him she needs her lover to be rich and well-dressed and gives him an introduction to the town’s leading merchant, Kamaswami.

Siddhartha impresses Kamaswami with his education and calmness. He is hired into the business. He does well, but never really gains a taste for it, the business itself. Instead he brings calm, detachment, education and a winning manner which pleases clients.

The years pass. The awakening he experienced after leaving Gotama slowly fades. He acquires wealth, a house by the river, fine clothes. No longer a vegetarian, he eats meat, gets drunk on wine. His face grows lined and corrupt. He becomes addicted to gambling with dice, gambling for immense stakes, loses fortunes, wins back fortunes – all to show his contempt for ‘riches’ and all the things the little people value. His inner voice has grown silent. He is in his forties with his first grey hairs (p.65).

He goes to see Kamala and she, also, is upset. They make love deeply. He goes back to his house, feels sick and glutted, wishes he could vomit up his corrupt life. Goes into his pleasure garden, sits under his mango tree, reviews his life, thinks he has lost all the fire which motivated him to learn the Brahmin scriptures, to outdo Govinda in wisdom, everything he learned with the Samana and understood about the Buddha – and yet though he has gained the outer trappings of Kamaswami’s people, people of this world, he is not one of them. He is lower than them. They give themselves to their loves and passions and work and anxieties. Siddhartha only pretends, in this as in everything else.

He looks up at the stars above his mango tree and realises all this is dead to him. He says goodbye to his mango tree and his pleasure garden and his town house and walks away, leaving everything behind. Kamaswami sends out searchers but never hears of him, Kamala is saddened but gladdened that he has been true to himself. A few months later she realises she is pregnant with his child.

Siddhartha wanders. He comes to a river and is so overcome with disgust at what he has become that he leans over the river as if to fall in and drown. He is contemplating suicide. Then out of some remote part of his soul comes the word Om, the beginning and end of Brahmin prayers, the syllable of reality. And he stops, repeats the syllable, is suddenly overcome by tiredness, sinks down onto the roots of the tree and sleeps, the word Om echoing through his unconscious.

When he wakes he feels a new man, refreshed and cleansed. A monk is watching him. It is his old friend Govinda, who was passing with fellow Buddhist pilgrims and saw Siddhartha sleeping in this place which is dangerous for its snakes and wild animals, and decided to stop and look over him. Now he has awoken, Govinda will join his colleagues. Siddhartha says, Don’t you recognise me? The short answer is, No, because Siddhartha has become fat and lined and worn and is wearing rich man’s clothes. Siddhartha tells his old friend all of those attributes are fleeting. Beneath them all, he is still following his quest. Govinda digests this, then bows and goes his way.

Siddhartha reflects on how far astray his old life had led him. In fact he reviews his entire life and all its changes. He realised he was over-educated when he was young, fenced in with prayers and ablutions and meditation. He had to get out and experience the futility of riches and sensual love for himself. Now he knows. Now he has awoken refreshed, a new man, as if his long sleep was one long Om-based meditation.

It is the same river he was ferried across 20 years ago. It is the same ferryman who, after a bit of prompting, remembers him. Siddhartha says he wants to give the ferryman his fine clothes and in return become his apprentice. The ferryman’s name is Vasudeva. He accepts. Siddhartha moves in to share his humble house and food and learn the trade. Slowly the two men come to look alike, taking turns to ferry people across the wide river, or sitting in silence for hours listening to it, learning from its wisdom.

One day Siddhartha articulates to the ferryman what the river has taught him: it has surpassed Time. Its beginning, middle and end are all simultaneously present. It is always changing but always the same. Nothing is past or future, everything exists in a permanent present, including Siddhartha. The river is the voice of life, the voice of Being, of perpetual Becoming (p.87).

Then news comes. The Buddha is dying. The couple of old men find themselves ferrying increasing numbers of monks and pilgrims who want to see the Enlightened One before he attains Nirvana. Among them is Kamala who has long since abandoned her trade as courtesan, given her money and troth to the Buddha. Now she is travelling with her son by Siddhartha.

They stop to rest on the far side of the river and Kamala sleeps, but wakens with a cry. She has been bitten by a poisonous snake. Siddhartha and Vasudeva hasten to her side. They try to cleanse the wound but it is already turning black. Kamala is dying. She lingers long enough to recognise Siddhartha and say how pleased she is to see the old sparkle and happiness in his eyes. She proclaims the boy is his son. She had wanted to see the Enlightened One before she died, but is content to see Siddhartha, who has a wisdom of his own.

Kamala dies. They burn her body on a funeral pyre.

Soon Siddhartha realises that his 11-year-old son is a spoiled mummy’s boy. He thinks that by love and patience he can reconcile him to living with two ageing rice-eating poor men. But he can’t. The boy has tantrums, breaks things, is nothing but trouble.

One day Vasudeva takes him aside and tells him he must take the boy back to his own kind. There is a lesson here. Did not Siddhartha have to immerse himself in the destructive element of life, did it not take him decades to find his own path and his own wisdom? Well, he can’t short-circuit it for the boy. The boy should be returned to his own kind, to his mother’s house or to a teacher, to grow up among other rich children and find his own path.

But Siddhartha can’t bring himself to do it and the boy comes to hate him, defying him, speaking harsh words every day. Finally he steals their money, runs away, rows the ferry boat to the other side of the river and is gone. Vasudeva wisely counsels Siddhartha not to follow his errant son, but Siddhartha has to. The world and its pain are too much with him.

Siddhartha finds himself arriving at the edge of the town, by the old pleasure ground of Kamala. He stands transfixed, his mind full of memories of their young, ripe, hot-blooded time. He sits down in the dust, in a trance. He is only wakened when Vasudeva lightly touches his shoulder.

Back at the ferry, Siddhartha’s psychological wound – from the loss of his son – continues to chafe.

One day looking down into the river he realises his face reminds him of his father’s face, his father who he ran away from and never saw again and who probably died lonely, who probably suffered the same way Siddhartha is now suffering. How ridiculous, how absurd, the tragi-comic cycles of life, the endless repetition of suffering.

Vasudeva is getting old. He takes Siddhartha to sit by the river and listen. And Siddhartha hears all the voices of all the people, the plights, the lives as the river flows past, into the sea, evaporates into the sky, forms clouds over the hills, condenses and falls as rain which feeds a thousand springs which flow together to create the river. Eternal and ever-changing. And the thousands of voices converge to speak the syllable of perfection, Om.

Siddhartha feels healed, complete. He rises above his own personal suffering and becomes one with this vast unity of the world. And now Vasudeva stands and says it is time for him to slough off the skin of the ferryman Vasudeva and return to the unity of the cosmos. And he walks away from Siddhartha clothed in light.

In the final chapter Govinda arrives again. He had heard of a ferryman of great wisdom. Once again he doesn’t recognise Siddhartha till the latter announces himself. But the point of these last ten pages is that Govinda asks for help, for Siddhartha’s wisdom and when the latter explains it, it really is wisdom. It struck me with the force of a genuinely holy writing.

For Siddhartha explains that there is no such thing as time. All things are permanently present, all pasts and futures are contained in the now, and are part of a vast unity. If this is so then there are no real oppositions. Oppositions occur only in the words of teachings. To teach you have to take a view and be partial, separating x from y. But Siddhartha now scandalises Govinda by saying there is no real difference between Sansara, the Sanskrit word which betokens change and the eternal cycle of suffering, and Nirvana, the supposed heaven where the soul escapes the eternal cycle of suffering.

These, Siddhartha says, are just binary concepts required for clear doctrine and teaching. In reality everything is part of everything else. In this sense, there is no right or wrong, and certainly no good or bad. Good and bad are inextricably mixed, just as past and future are eternally present.

Therefore, the logical response, is to love the world as it is because it contains the entire future and all of heaven, here, now, implicitly. The correct attitude is complete compassion and complete love for everything as it is.

Govinda asks for a final word of help or advice and Siddhartha tells him to bend and kiss his forehead. And as he does so Govinda sees and hears all the voices of all the people in the world, all the babies, old people, lovers, warriors, priests and even gods and goddesses, a thousand thousand thousand voices and features, past and future, all contained in one vast cosmic unity. And he realises that only one other person has ever had the same level of wisdom and serenity and the same half-mocking smile on his lips. By a different route, Siddhartha has become as enlightened as the Buddha.

The personal quest

And so Siddhartha’s determination to go his own way is justified. The final wisdom, in practical terms, seems to be that everyone must find their own path:

There was no teaching a truly searching person, someone who truly wanted to find, could accept. But he who had found, he could approve of any teachings, every path, every goal, there was nothing standing between him and all the other thousand any more who lived in that what is eternal, who breathed what is divine.

Conclusion

This is a beautiful and inspiring book. You don’t necessarily have to agree with any of the Eastern philosophy on show, to find that many of the thoughts and ideas about life, about our paths through life, about trying to find meaning, ring a bell. Hesse’s novels have always been popular with the young, teenagers and students – but as a middle-aged parent I found much of what the characters discuss just as relevant to me, now, at this stage of my journey.

Above all, after over a thousand pages of bleakness, crudity, violence, rape, murder and madness in the novels of Hermann Broch and Alfred Döblin, it is a welcome relief to read a book in which people smile, enjoy the sight of the blue sky and the sound of a flowing river, are kind and wise and considerate and courteous to each other. It is like re-entering the real world after a prolonged visit to a lunatic asylum.

To put it another way, the longer Broch went on, the lengthier his dense and abstract and wordy philosophical disquisitions went on, the more impenetrable, hair-splitting, utterly academic and impractical they seemed. Whereas Hesse’s focused fable provides countless places where the character’s eloquent and strangely practical thoughts strike home to your heart and make you reflect on your own life and journey.

Related links

20th century German literature

  • The Tin Drum by Günter Grass (1959)

The Weimar Republic

German history

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by Simon on April 19, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, Buddhism, Novel
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on April 19, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/04/19/siddhartha-hermann-hesse/

Therapy by David Lodge (1995)

One of the depressing things about depression is knowing that there are lots of people in the world with far more reason to feel depressed than you have, and finding that, so far from making you snap out of your depression, it only makes you despise yourself more and thus feel more depressed.
(Therapy, page 107)

This is the story of TV scriptwriter Laurence Passmore, who’s riding high on the success of his soap opera The People Next Door. He is the archetypal middle-class middle-aged successful man who has it all – big house, lovely wife, kids successfully launched into life, fast car, award-winning career, lots of money – but is unhappy and doesn’t know why.

How many novels are written about this figure? If there’s such a thing as the ‘campus novel’, is there the ‘depressed-middle-aged-successful-professional-man’ novel? Maybe it’s the ‘menopausal man’ novel.

A new kind of character

For thirty years (1960 to 1991) Lodge had been getting into the minds of academics and intellectuals, literary critics and theologians, in texts which were never far from detailed considerations of literary theory, Catholic theology, or sex. Certainly the combination of literary high-mindedness with graphic sexual description is the tell-tale sign of his previous five or six novels.

Which makes Therapy a welcome change, at least initially. The story is told in the first-person and TV scriptwriter Passmore’s voice is refreshingly different in tone and idiolect from anything that’s gone before. Unlike the over-educated but under-worldly figures we’re used to in Lodge’s fiction, Passmore is a convincing portrayal of a much more middle-brow character: more or less the first Lodge character to be interested in sports, to be happily married and faithful to his wife, who swims confidently in the demanding but relentlessly unintellectual world of popular TV. (In the middle section we find out from  his wife that although he attended a grammar school, he was always bottom of the class, and left with just a couple of O levels – p.196)

In an amusing character trait he enjoys looking up words and sharing their definitions with us, and his nickname in the TV industry, since he put on quite a lot of weight and lost most of his hair, is Tubby. All of this is broadly funny in a tolerant, grumpy-old-man kind of way.

Part one (pages 3 to 129)

The first 129 pages consist of a diary or journal which Laurence starts in order to keep track of the painful twinges he’s getting in his knee. He has a keyhole operation to cure it which, alas, doesn’t work, but the diary goes on to record his visits to a psychotherapist, an acupuncturist, a physiotherapist and an aromatherapist as he searches for a cure to his physical ailments but also, it emerges, the undefined malaise nagging at his soul. He has everything. So why does he lie in bed at nights, unhappy?

His platonic mistress (female best friend) Amy, in London, describes his condition as Angst and, in looking it up, Laurence stumbles across the writings of the Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegård (1813 to 1855). Intrigued, he buys some of his works in the Charing Cross Road and begins to explore Kierkegård’s philosophy (as expressed in the great man’s rather confusing works). Ideas around what attitude we should take to life, to decision-making, how to avoid a permanent feeling of dread, how to live an authentic existence. In a biography he discovers how much SK’s philosophy was prompted by the one great love of his life, Regine, who he rejected in an agony of indecision, a moment he regretted for the rest of his life.

A great deal else is covered in this opening part, painting in Laurence’s everyday life and down-to-earth character, from his regular tennis games with friends to moans about his ongoing medical problems, a lot of detail about the different therapies and the idiosyncratic therapists who perform them, the day-to-day business of being married, and quite interesting insights of how his scripts are written, produced, rehearsed and directed into the thirty-minute sitcom which is the basis of his fortune.

But as he becomes more intrigued and beguiled by Kierkegård’s writings, Laurence begins to sound like many another Lodge intellectual, sometimes less a character than an idea with legs. After a few months he has understood Kierkegård well enough to be able to explain to us his rather arcane notion of repetition – that repetition is the ultimate form of existential fulfilment, that in it we find ourselves.

And exposition of this rather abstract idea leads Laurence into an eloquent hymn to married life, to its rhythm and predictability, to the virtues of getting to know someone inside out, relishing their character and tastes and the little things that please them, through the repetition of day-to-day tenderness and love.

Which makes it all the funnier, and the more heart-breaking, when this whole section ends on the bombshell that his wife, Sally, wants to divorce him.

Part two – dramatic monologues (pages 133 to 198)

Very confidently and amusingly (Lodge has done this so many times before) the entire middle section of the novel is made up of dramatic monologues from the ‘secondary’ characters. We read:

  • A court deposition from Brett Sutton, Sally’s tennis coach. Laurence had begun to suspect his wife of having an affair with Brett, so he starts stalking him, making silent phone calls to him at all times of day and night, occasionally pretending to be Sally’s mother and putting on a high-pitched voice, damaging his greenhouse and then – in the climax of this strand – breaking into his bedroom with a pair of garden shears to cut off his…. ponytail. It’s only when Brett wakes up and turns the light on that a horrified Laurence sees that he is in bed with… his boyfriend. He is gay. He emphatically has not been having an affair with Laurence’s wife.
  • Plump Amy, Laurence’s platonic girlfriend in London, a skilled casting director, explains in a series of monologues (each one representing a session with her therapist) how she hears about the news of the separation, how she comforts Laurence but fears he might now want to sleep with her, and how she is persuaded to go with him on the worst foreign holiday of all time to Tenerife, to the hotel from hell, where they push together the two single metal bunk beds and, despite all his efforts, Laurence turns out to be impotent. In its depiction of Playa de las Americas as hell, this is very funny.
  • Louise, a high-powered Hollywood producer who once, five years ago, on Laurence’s one trip to the States to discuss creating a US version of the sitcom, took a bit too much cocaine in the ladies’ loo and made a blunt pass at Laurence. We hear her phone conversation to a fellow American media woman – frequently interrupted by other important calls from Hollywood contacts – in which she describes her astonishment that Laurence flies out to California, solely to meet her, solely to recreate that long-vanished evening, solely to try and seduce her. She is flabbergasted, gets him drunk, and kicks him out of her car at his expensive hotel.
  • Ollie Silver, the middle-aged producer of The People Next Door, meets an old pal from Current Affairs in the pub and chats about work and especially the problem he has: Deborah Radcliffe the star of the sitcom, wants to leave and he needs Laurence to write her out of the series. But Laurence, caught in his mid-life meltdown, refuses all the suggestions he and the Head of Comedy have made. If he continues to refuse, they’ll invoke his contract, cut him out of the show and hire a more compliant writer.
  • Samantha Handy, the hilariously self-centred young script-editor, hired by Laurence’s lecherous agent, Jake Endicott, visits a work colleague whose mouth is wired shut due to recent dental work, and breathlessly describes being invited by Laurence on a trip to Copenhagen to research his quixotic fantasy of creating a new drama series based on the life of Kierkegård, where she expects to have to sleep with him as a return for his recommending her to Jake – but is surprised when he turns down her increasingly blunt offers. Turns out visiting the sites of Kierkegård’s life make Laurence feel genuinely philosophical, make him think much more seriously about life and the choices you make.
  • Sally Passmore, his estranged wife, meets Laurence’s therapist to emphasise that the marriage really is over, kaput, finished, but finds herself drawn into reminiscing about how they met and the constraints of their very different families in the late 1950s, which drove them to seek escape by marrying.

All very persuasive and entertaining, sometimes very funny.

Part three (pages 201 to 282)

Back to Laurence’s diary, recommencing on Tuesday 25 May, and almost immediately he reveals that he wrote the dramatic monologues listed above, as an exercise for his therapist (and Lodge’s joke at the reader’s expense). Unexpected as this twist is, I think it ultimately detracts from the novel. It would have been far more interesting to have been the genuine views of all these characters. Knowing they were done by him somehow narrows them.

Barely has Laurence explained this, than he tells us he’s been musing more and more frequently on his first girlfriend, Maureen Kavanagh, back in impoverished south-east London where he grew up, and this is the pretext for a freestanding section, titled ‘Maureen: A Memoir’, which makes up most of this part.

It is a long section (pages 222 to 258, inclusive), quite a change of tone and a complete change of setting: from the heady delights of Soho’s medialand circa 1993, to schoolboy days in black-and-white post-war Charlton, 1952, with our hero attending Lambeth Merchants’ grammar school, playing in the school soccer team, and doing a star turn at the Catholic youth club dances, holding his Maureen tight as they smooch to Nat King Cole.

Maybe this whole section – presumably indebted to Lodge’s own upbringing at the same time and in the same place – is intended to be a symptom of a man unable to face his life in the here and now, escaping back to idealised memories of halcyon innocence. But it also reads like a stand-alone short story which has been inserted, not totally convincingly, into the longer text. Also, it reworks themes familiar to any reader of Lodge: the precocious 16-year-old echoes the identically aged protagonist of Out of the Shelter; the link between teenage Catholicism and sex are unhappily present throughout his work.

The story itself starts out as the sweetly innocent romance between Laurence and local Catholic girl, Maureen. After a year of catching trams to school at opposite stops, they finally bump into each other and speak, and then Laurence starts attending the Catholic youth group in order to be close to her, especially at the Sunday night dance (supervised by a priest). And then he gets to accompany her on the 15-minute walk home. And then they kiss, a radiant memory. And then a little more than kissing. And touching. And every week thereafter, a little further, until Laurence attains every schoolboy’s Holy Grail and, in the cold damp area under the steps to Maureen’s house, he gets to feel the curve of her teenage breast. Eureka! Which goes on for several weeks.

But then they both become involved in the Church Nativity Play in which Maureen is cast as Mary. The priest directing it emphasises to her that she must not only play the role she must pray the role, aspiring to be as chaste and pure as the Virgin. And so she shyly and embarrassedly asks Laurence to stop, to stop the fondling and the kissing. And he is angry.

And I was embarrassed. I felt increasingly like a voyeur at the violation of a teenage virgin. After the slow, sweet build-up, the story unravels quickly from that point onwards. As they go on to perform in the Nativity play, Laurence puts increasingly genuine contempt for his one-time sweetheart into his performance as Herod. And as soon as the productions are finished, he publicly humiliates Maureen, quits the Catholic social club, gets a job in a West End theatre, and quickly leaves his boyhood world behind.

Now, 40 years later, as he continues using the journal to search his soul, he realises he is still haunted by his heartlessness. On the spur of the moment Laurence revisits his childhood neighbourhood, tracks down the house where he grew up, then Maureen’s house and then the Catholic church which oversaw the youth club. Here he meets the modish young priest struggling with Excel spreadsheets, and makes enquiries. Turns out Maureen married the director of the youth club nativity play – Laurence’s much despised rival, Bede. Further investigation turns up that this rather pompous young man went on to become a civil servant in the Department of Education, ultimately playing a key role in the implementation of the new National Curriculum.

So Laurence rings Bede up out of the blue and goes to visit him in his plush home in Wimbledon. Here he discovers that Bede and Maureen’s eldest son was recently murdered in Africa. And for this and other reasons Maureen, still a devout Catholic, has undertaken the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.

And, on impulse, his present life in ruins, seeking, searching, yearning for the certainty of those vanished days – Laurence decides to track her down.

If all this feels rushed and against the grain of the leisurely and fairly comedic opening sections, that’s because it is.

Part four (pages 285 to 321)

He tracks her down. He spares no expense driving up and down the autoroutes of southern France and Spain, stopping at every pilgrim’s lodge, searching for her name among the registers of overnight guests. He eventually finds her trudging along a busy A road, weary and foot-sore. After her initial amazement, she allows him to take her bags to the nearest hotel, but she insists on walking. And quite quickly he falls in with her plans, driving her backpack ahead to the nearest town, then walking back to meet her, as she slowly, painfully completes every step of the pilgrimage.

Lodge includes a lot of tourist colour, describing the landscape, the other pilgrims, the lodges and rest-houses, as if he himself has done the route or researched it pretty thoroughly. It has stopped in any way being a detached, amusing comedy. It feels more real and urgent than that. She is not the trim schoolgirl of his memory. She is a baggy, paunchy, wrinkly, tubby middle aged woman gone to seed. But it doesn’t matter to Laurence, driven by his obsession.

Finally, when Maureen has walked all the way to the cathedral and taken part in the necessary rituals and then attended the big celebration Mass – finally they repair to a swanky hotel where Laurence finally gets to make love to her (he had been offering to all the time, but she had refused while she was making pilgrimage). And thereafter, like spring chickens, like fit young 20-somethings, they make love every siesta and every night. He offers to marry her but she says, No, she must go back to Bede.

And so they make their respective ways back to London. In a tearing hurry Laurence drives up to Rummidge to try and effect a reconciliation with his wife, but she says she has now fallen in love with another man and slept with him. Game over.

As the book ends Laurence explains that the problem with his sitcom, about the actress leaving – that was all sorted out; the money is still pouring in; he’s now the best of friends with Bede and Maureen, he’s going to move to Wimbledon and join the golf club; and he and Maureen still enjoy fairly regular ‘siestas’, her ongoing marriage to Bede not appearing to trouble her at all. And the problem with his knee, which prompted him to start the journal? All cleared up, old boy. Maybe there is something in these pilgrimages.

Conclusion

There is something profoundly wrong about all this. It is fine for Lodge’s characters to fall in and out of bed with each other when they are in one of his obvious comic-fantasies. But the backdrop to this encounter is Laurence’s genuine cruelty of 40 years ago, Maureen’s bereft mourning for her dead son, the complex and real damage this has done to her marriage to Bede, and the long, agonising, physically draining experience of the pilgrimage, not easy for an out-of-shape housewife in her late 50s.

I just don’t believe a woman like that would simply open her arms and say Yes to sex. And that they would then shag like teenagers every afternoon and every evening. It feels too much like male wish-fulfilment, the need of Laurence’s penis over-riding every other real-world consideration.

From the moment in Part Two that he introduced the Maureen memoir, it began to feel like a different novel from the first half, one dealing with potentially much more serious and upsetting themes. And yet it is embedded in the increasingly inappropriate chatty, upbeat tone of his middle-brow TV scriptwriter. Subject matter and tone feel at odds.

And the facile capitulation of Maureen to his childhood fantasies – seems too much like fantasy, in the negative sense. Or that the fantasy seems cheap and easy, compared to the short but powerful scenes about the son’s death and the pilgrimage itself. These threads hint at the much deeper complexity of human nature, at enduring issues of tragedy and loss, of age and decay, of lost loves and lost hopes – which can’t just be reconciled and sorted out with a few fancy meals and improbably athletic sex in an expensive hotel room.

It feels like Lodge’s comic instincts do a disservice to his deeper intuitions about human nature.

Social history

Lodge’s previous novels are all very specific about their location in time, and all contain references to contemporary events (in the case of How Far Can You Go? almost obsessively so). Laurence’s diary commences on Monday 15 February 1993 and the last entry is on September 21.

The advantage of the diary format is you can make passing comments on anything which takes your fancy without disturbing the flow of ‘plot’ (if there is a plot). Thus Laurence bolsters the ‘realism’ of the text by including numerous references to contemporary events and trends:

  • global warming (have we really been worrying about it for 20 years?)
  • British Rail introducing the irritating phrase ‘station stop’
  • the well-publicised case of Jamie Bulger, abducted from a shopping centre and murdered by two young boys on 12 February 1993
  • on the train to and from London he works on his laptop computer (the etymological dictionary says the word was first used in 1984)
  • he hears about the death of Bobby Moore (24 February 1993) on the evening he’s gone to see Reservoir Dogs, and contrasts the dignity and heroism of the footballer with the cynical, squalid hyper-violence of the Hollywood movie
  • Diana’s Squidgeygate tapes are in the news, making him feel sorry for the Royal Family
  • the Serbs are bombing Sarajevo
  • John Major has the lowest popularity rating of any Prime Minister since records began

This deployment of background chronology has been Lodge’s practice since his earliest novels, but I question why. Ezra Pound said an ‘epic’ is a poem with history in it, and proceeded to shove his long poem, The Cantos, full of historical references, but himself ultimately judged the poem a failure, because of its lack of coherence.

Something similar is going on here. The history has to be woven into the pattern of the narrative. The history has to engage with the plot and the characters. Just noting what’s on the radio or in the papers that day – Jamie Bulger, John Major, Sarajevo – certainly matches the story against a chronology of the times – but it doesn’t integrate history into the narrative, doesn’t dramatise it. The two strands run on parallel lines without ever touching.

Mid-life crisis

Thirty seconds on the internet showed me that novels about a middle-aged man who feels he’s missing something is a well-established and thoroughly defined genre – the ‘mid-life crisis novel’ – and that Therapy is routinely included in them.

Nat King Cole – Too Young

This is one of the songs to which the 16-year-old Laurence dances with his childhood sweetheart, all those years ago, back in post-war south-east London. My mother (same generation as Lodge) had a big collection of original Nat King Cole records which my Dad bought her, and which I inherited.

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 3, 2015  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on June 3, 2015

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/06/03/therapy-david-lodge/

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