Ulysses, by James Joyce, 1922

“Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.”

‘Ulysses’ was a hard read, 933 pages of complex, allusive text, full of echoes, references, challenges and puzzles. Reading this novel passively, without paying full attention, is pretty pointless, and even with three weeks of concentrated reading, most readers, myself included, working without the benefit of one of the many guides available, will probably only scratch the surface of this novel’s complexity.

The novel’s reputation as being unreadable, on the other hand, is unjustified. A parallel with Shakespeare’s prose might help – Shakespeare is often described as being hard to follow, but if you take care and pay attention there is little in the canon that can’t be understood by a native speaker. ‘Ulysses’ is the same. (Incidentally, Shakespeare, and specifically Hamlet, echoes repeatedly throughout the novel)

Take Molly Bloom’s stream of consciousness chapter at the end of the novel. Joyce attempts to capture Molly’s thoughts as she drifts back off to sleep after being woken by Leopold, returning worse for wear from his adventures. Her thoughts range widely from her childhood memories to the events of the day. We all know that as we fall asleep our thoughts become incoherent and even bizarre. But the thread of Molly’s thoughts can almost always be followed, if one takes the time to do so.

“and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

Remove some of the conjunctions, add in a full stop or two, and this is a simple memory of her first kiss and more. It is a lovely memory to close the novel, life affirming and positive.

I first read ‘Ulysses’ several decades ago, and had inevitably forgotten large chunks of it – although I was surprised at how much still remained familiar, most strikingly the chapter Nausicaa. Here Leopold watches poor lame Gerty MacDowell, on the rocks and on the shelf. This is a wonderful, tender portrait of a delusional young woman, affecting to feel superior to her friends, but sadly unable to wish away of her lameness, which is likely to make it difficult for her to marry and have children. Equally I little realised how much Stephen Dedalus’s thoughts on Shakespeare in chapter 9, Scylla and Charybdis had influenced much of my own thoughts (not really mine, Stephen’s/Joyce’s) on the subject.

Other chapters are less accessible. Chapter 12, Cyclops, includes streams of legal jargon, biblical passages, and elements of Irish mythology, and Chapter 14, Oxen of the Sun, is bravura attempt to capture the entire history of the English language, from latinate prose to Anglo-Saxon alliteration. It ends in a long paragraphs gibberish, which I will be kind and avoid quoting. I think Joyce is predicting the decline of the language into a yahooish form of slang, but I could be missing the point?

The character of Leopold Bloom is at the heart of the novel. He doesn’t appear until chapter 4, and often slips out of view, but is a likeable, easy going chap. His wife is being unfaithful to him, but he doesn’t seem to mind very much. His thoughts touchingly often wander back to the death of his baby son Rudy. He is subjected to anti-semitic abuse, but doesn’t let it get him down, and pursues his narrow life and interests with an amiable persistence. The drawer of memories and effects that he reflects on at the end of the novel is a little pathetic, but Poldy is an everyman who bounces back and survives, a humanist but puts up with being christened three times, a pacifist prepared to stick up for himself, and a bit of a dirty old man. He makes the novel ultimately worthwhile.

Supplementary: “A cartload of apes and ivory” – Rebecca West on ‘The Golden Bowl’

‘The Golden Bowl’ certainly divides opinion. Reading some online reviews I came across a wonderful demolition of the novel by the awesome Rebecca West. I make no apologies for quoting at length from her analysis – West never pulls her punches and has a magnificent turn of phrase.

She opens by calling the novel “an ugly and incompletely invented story about some people who are sexually mad.” (“Completely invented” may harm her argument, as inventiveness is usually seen as a strength in a novelist, but this is passionate rhetoric, not measured argument) This gets straight to the point – sex drives the behaviour of the novel’s central characters, (however obliquely James may disguise his sexual references), and leads them to behave out of character. West knew all about how this could happen to even the most aristocratic people.

Her plot summary savages the novel’s central characters;

“Adam Verver, an American millionaire, buys an Italian prince for his daughter Maggie, and in her turn she arranges a marriage between her father and Charlotte, her school friend, because she thinks he may be lonely without her.”

This is fair comment – at its heart, the marriage between Amerigo and Maggie is based upon Maggie’s ability, through her father, to pay off the Prince’s many debts. James is clear (or as clear as anything is in this novel) that the marriage is a contractual and commercial agreement.

West’s critique of James’s writing style is equally robust. She writes of his

“sentences which sprawl over the pages of ‘The Golden Bowl’ with such an effect of rank vegetable growth that one feels that if one took cuttings of them one could raise a library in the garden.”

But this is not simply a question of name-calling – West has a serious critique to present. Her point is that the plot of the novel, and the behaviour of the primary characters, is utterly unrealistic. The characters

“are presented … as vibrating exquisitely to every fine chord of life, as thinking about each other with the anxious subtlety of lovers, as so steeped in a sense of one another that they invent a sea of poetic phrases, beautiful images, discerning metaphors that break on the reader’s mind like the unceasing surf.

But

“when one tries to discover from the recorded speeches of these people whether there was no palliation of their ugly circumstances one finds that the dialogue, usually so compact a raft for the conveyance of the meaning of Mr James’ novels, has been smashed up on this sea of phrases and drifts in, a plank at a time, on the copious flood….

To cap it all these people are not even human, for their thoughts concerning their relationships are so impassioned and so elaborate that they can never have had either energy or time for the consideration of anything else in the world. A race of creatures so inveterately specialist as Maggie Verver could never have attained man’s mastery over environment, but would still be specialising on the cocoa-nut or some such simple form of diet.”

I can’t argue with this, nor express it better – I doubt anyone could.

West goes on to claim to have identified why James’s writing style at the end of his life become so ornate and complex; the explanation she offers certainly has a ring of plausibility to it:

“in these later days, Mr James … began by dictating a short draft which, even in the case of such a cartload of apes and ivory as The Golden Bowl, might be no longer than thirty thousand words. Then he would take this draft in his hand and would dictate it all over again with what he intended to be enlightening additions, but which, since the mere act of talking set all his family on to something quite different from the art of letters, made it less and less of a novel. …

Always it was good, rambling talk, although fissured now and then with an old man’s lapses into tiresomeness, when he split hairs until there were no longer any hairs to split and his mental gesture became merely the making of agitated passes over a complete baldness…

Here and there the prose achieves a beauty of its own; but it is no longer the beauty of a living thing, but rather the “made” beauty which bases its claims to admiration chiefly on its ingenuity, like those crystal clocks with jewelled works and figures moving as the hours chimed, which were the glory of mediæval palaces.”

“A cartload of apes and ivory” has instantly become my all-time favourite phrase for a good bad novel!

 

1919, by John Dos Passos, 1932

‘1919’ is the second book in Dos Passos’s ‘USA’ trilogy. Which immediately begs the question, why read only the middle book in a trilogy? You wouldn’t read only ‘The Two Towers’, would you? I think there are several reasons why I am going to resist the temptation to read the rest of ‘USA’. Firstly, ‘1919’ (and only ‘1919’) was recommended by the Guardian’s list of 100 best novels written in English; second, having now read this novel, to go back to the first volume seems a bit pointless; third, I just don’t have the appetite for another 800 pages of this trilogy. The novels are intended to stand alone and I am going to take the author at his word on this (even though many online reviews argue that reading the whole trilogy is the only way to properly appreciate its constituent parts).

At one time Dos Passos was ranked with the greats of American post-war literature – Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck and Fitzgerald. While their novels have stood the test of time, I don’t think the same can be said for Dos Passos. ‘1919’ has only two reviews on Amazon’s UK site, compared to over 2,000 for Gatsby, and 1,500 for The Grapes of Wrath (Faulkner, by comparison, is little reviewed – go figure). ‘1919’ uses many innovative techniques, and these are some of the most successful aspects of the novel. Chapters are introduced with short scraps of text from newspaper and magazine headlines, followed by stream of consciousness, camera-reel impressions of the events of the following chapter. Interspersed elsewhere are short pen pictures of a series of American political and military figures who played a part in the First World War, and the industrial struggles in the United States at about the same time. (The Los Angeles Review of Books described these sections of the novels as “disruptive bumps in the reader’s way (which) have no bearing on the story, but add Americana-flavored flamboyance to the proceedings”. (It’s worth reading the whole of this review which is a pretty magisterial take down of the trilogy, describing it as “The Great American Novel That Wasn’t”!)

The body of the novel is a more traditional narrative telling the stories of five principal characters. Although these characters are Americans, the war takes them all to Europe, when the bulk of the novel’s events occur. Despite America’s extensive involvement in the war, none of the characters are involved directly in the conflict, serving as merchant seamen, ambulance drivers, or working with the Red Cross. There is a relentlessness about these stories – things happen, then something else happens, then yet more events; with troubled love affairs acting as the inevitable punctuation to another round of meetings, dinners, drinks, journeys back and forth between Rome and Paris, and so on. Because I didn’t care about these characters – possibly because I had not read about them in the first volume – I found these parts of the novel tiresome.

As an invocation of what it was like to be an American in Europe in 1917-1919 – privileged, largely immune from the conflict, endlessly bumping into one another – I am sure this is a faithful portrait. But apart from the tediousness of the primary narrative, there were other aspects of the novel which jarred. The condescending attitude towards Europeans often found in American popular culture crops up here far too often. Also prevalent is a racist (the n-word is used freely), anti-semitic, misogynist bundle of nasty prejudices which are given full rein and go completely unchallenged, despite Dos Passos’s apparent left wing ideals. As a small concession to this reactionary tide the novel closes with a historically arguable portrait of an attack on American Trade Unionists (the Centralia massacre) which is very sympathetic to the IWW (the international Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies).

As an attempt to describe how a better world could have emerged from the ashes of the First World War ‘1919’ fails completely – it is desperately pessimistic. All strikes are defeated, all socialists are isolated and the Red Scare (which swept post-War America and is in many ways still underway) looks unstoppable. From 1932 Dos Passos’s defeatism is understandable, and probably explains his subsequent steady drift to the Republican right.

‘1919’ was the third from last novel in my current reading challenge. Next up is Henry James’s ‘The Golden Bowl’, leaving’ Ulysses’ to last.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne, 1759-1767

If you type ‘Tristram Shandy’ into the search field on WordPress’s “Reader” pages, you will be presented with a large number of results. Look more closely, and it turns out that for every review of Sterne’s ridiculous, extravagant, often nonsensical novel, there is another post lamenting its unreadability. I sympathise. ‘Tristram Shandy’ was published over the course of eight years (1759-1767), so reading it now over the course of a week is a very different experience. It is a pointedly experimental novel: if ‘Tristram Shandy’ was a radio programme, it would be The Goons; if it was a television show it would be The Mighty Boosh; if it was a painting it would be something by Dali or Magritte (whether these comparisons are compliments or criticisms is of course a matter of personal taste).

As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner, 1930

William Faulkner’s ‘As I Lay Dying’ tells the story of the death of Addie Bundren and her last journey to her hometown, Jefferson, Mississippi. The novel opens with the dying Addie watching her son Cash construct her coffin. The ominous sounds of his carpentry echo around the house, forming an aural backdrop to the family’s hushed conversations about their mother’s imminent death. The summer heat is oppressive, but the night after Addie dies the expected rainstorm breaks, washing out the bridges and fords that lay on the long road to Jefferson. Undetermined, infinitely stubborn, the family set out with Addie’s body on the back of the wagon. The journey is of biblical proportions, with the family having to overcome trials of fire and flood.  

‘As I Lay Dying’ is Faulkner’s masterpiece, a virtuoso epic that is one of the most extraordinary novels I have read in a very long time. The task of doing it justice in a review is daunting, so rather than trying to explore every aspect of its astonishing variety and sophistication I am going to focus on two related aspects of the novel – Faulkner’s use of narration techniques, and the more general issue of complexity: in other words, how does the novel tell its story?

The narrative voice in ‘As I Lay Dying’ is highly complex. Ostensibly, the novel is constructed from a sequence of “stream-of-consciousness monologues, in which the characters’ thoughts are presented in all their uncensored chaos, without the organizing presence of an objective narrator” (SparkNotes). But that’s only part of the story. Underneath the naturalistic voices of the characters is another, insistent authorial voice. The narrative switches between these voices so frequently and seamlessly that it is often easy to miss the transition.

Here’s an example. The narrator here is ten-year old Vardaman. He is distressed because of his mother’s death, and struggling to process his reactions:

“I can cry quiet now, feeling and hearing my tears. It is dark. I can hear wood, silence. I know them. But not living sounds, not even him. It is as though the dark were resolving him out of his integrity into an unrelated scattering of components”.

The first sentences in this paragraph are short, child-like. Then in the sentence beginning “It is as though” another voice intrudes, and the repetition of the personal pronoun “him” is ambiguous – is this the “him” of the previous sentence, referring to one of Vardaman’s brothers that he can hear in the dark, or Vardaman himself. In other words this ultimate sentence can be read as being either by or about Vardaman. In any event, it uses a language and vocabulary that a ten-year old child would not be familiar with – it is another narrative voice.

Here’s another example from Darl, one of Vardaman’s older brothers:

“The horse moving with a light, high-kneed driving out…We go on with a motion so soporific, so dream-like, as to be uninferant of progress, as though time and not space were decreasing between us”.

Some critics have seen this change in voice, used throughout the novel, as an error. They have complained that Darl’s vocabulary, for example, is far more extensive than a Mississippi farm-hand would have known. I think it is reasonable to assume that these transitions are deliberate, which begs the question “So what’s going on?”

I can only describe the effect this technique had on me. The fragmented nature of the monologues causes the reader to concentrate to follow what is going on – no-one voice is telling us clearly what happens. Instead we slowly build up a picture of events from the thoughts and reactions of the characters. Some events are only referred to incidentally rather than directly described, and others are described from multiple, conflicting points of view. The characters’ back stories and the context of the family tragedy that unfolds has to be pieced together slowly. The presence of an ambiguous, unnamed authorial voice that intrudes into the narrative, using rich language and elaborate metaphor, gives an additional layer of complexity and opulence to the novel. The best explanation I can offer for this voice is that it is an articulation of the characters’ unconscious thoughts and feelings. This is why it invariably follows the initial, more straightforward thoughts.

The narrative voice can change within a sentence. This demands that the novel is read carefully. Another technique Faulkner uses to require this form of reading is his use of complexity.  ‘As I Lay Dying’ has an ostensibly simple structure. The storyline follows the family’s journey to Jefferson. There were however points during the narrative where I found it hard to be sure precisely what was going on. The ford-crossing scene is a good example. The family attempt to cross a flooded ford with two mules and a wagon carrying the coffin and body. The stormy waters knock them off their feet, and while the coffin is saved the mules drown, and Cash, one of Addie’s sons, breaks his leg. This scene is narrated by Darl in the present tense – “Carl and I sit in the wagon; Jewel sits the horse at the off-rear wheel”. His descriptions range from the straightforward, as in this example, to ornate, elaborate sentences we have come to expect from the elusive authorial narrator “Above the ceaseless surface they stand – trees, cane, vines – rootless, severed from the earth, spectral above a scene of immense yet circumscribed desolation”.

Darl gives the initial description of the crossing, which is followed by a past tense description from ten-year old Vardaman, and another past tense version from the Bundren’s neighbour, Vernon Tull. It is not until the narration switches back to Darl that we learn that in the accident Cash has at some point re-broken his leg, and lost all his tools, but that he has somehow rescued his mother’s coffin.

The reader is able to follow what broadly happens – the crossing is perilous, a log smashes into the wagon, and the sons fall into the water. But some of the detail is elusive, and only emerges in the later descriptions. Darl’s present tense narration puts the reader directly onto the ford with the characters, struggling with the rising waters, scared, shouting but unable to make themselves heard. This is why the description is chaotic – to capture the sense of confusion and fear that the characters are feeling.

Darl is at the heart of the novel, narrating a third of all chapters, including the one describing his mother’s last moments, even though he is not present for these scenes. In post-publication interviews Faulkner insisted on Darl’s insanity but the textual evidence for this is limited – even his act of arson can be seen as a pragmatic response to the problems the family has faced in reaching Jefferson. In his last chapter Darl’s voice has progressed from present first person narrative to third person past tense – on other words he describes his actions as if he was another person observing them.

I have never really understood the stock reaction to a wonderful book – that the reader reached the last page, only to turn back to the beginning and start again. If I had just enjoyed a steak the last thing I would want is another steak straight away (some ice-cream, maybe?). But with ‘As I Lay Dying’ this phrase began to make sense – I really did want to re-read the novel and enjoy the skill with which it is constructed all over again, and to appreciate the subtle nuances and detail with a fresh pair of eyes.

‘As I Lay Dying’ is the 96^th novel in my reading challenge. I have four left: ‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce, ‘The Golden Bowl’ by Henry James, ‘1919’ by John Dos Passos, and ‘Tristram Shandy’ by Laurence Sterne. I haven’t got a particular reading order in mind – any suggestions?

Supplementary: Last words on ‘Clarissa’, by Samuel Richardson, 1748

 

A final post about ‘Clarissa’, I promise. Please be aware of multiple spoilers in the unlikely event you were planning to read this novel.

I left Clarissa at the end of volume 4 of 9 in the hands of the sinister Robert Lovelace. In his citation of this novel in the ‘100 best novels written in the English language’ series, the Guardian’s Robert McCrum describes Lovelace as “dashing and witty” and “perhaps the most charming villain in English literature”, and characterises Clarissa and Lovelace as “lovers”, comparing them to Romeo and Juliet.

I must have missed the bit in Romeo and Juliet where Romeo imprisons Juliet in a brothel, drugs and rapes her, and distresses her so much that she eventually dies. In my reading of the novel, yes, admittedly Clarissa is initially attracted by the glamour of Lovelace’s reputation, but this attraction quickly fades following her kidnap. As it would. Sexual assault, an extraordinarily elaborate subterfuge to re-enslave her, and the drugged rape does nothing to re-kindle the flames of attraction. Clarissa finally escapes from her elaborate confinement, but her health and appetite for life has been damaged beyond repair.

Lovelace is a sinister psychopath – we are told at one point he enjoyed torturing animals as a child, a perceptive insight into his mentality. He is able to convince himself that the blame for the rape rests with Clarissa, his accomplices, her family, Miss Howe, in fact everyone but him. In volume five his psychological torture of Clarissa, culminating in the drugged rape, is highly distressing. Belford, his friend, emerges as a saner version of Lovelace, and comes to be Clarissa’s friend and protector, although not before the damage is done. Lovelace is used from childhood to getting his own way, and challenging with violence anyone who resists him. He is a serial rapist, and it is difficult to imagine how he has escaped prosecution thus far – obviously being heir to an earldom might have something to do with this. Far from being dashing and witty, he is a convincing portrait of a dangerous and psychotic narcissist.

Clarissa’s death is a long drawn out affair. What she dies from is never specified. The most likely cause is self-starvation – the symptoms of gradual weakening, loss of mobility and finally sight, suggest this is the case. Her acceptance of death is presented as a heroic process from which we can all learn. Lovelace’s fate (and that of his various accomplices) is equally presented as a morality tale, with a suggestion that Lovelace prefers “death by duel” as a way of avoiding responsibility for his actions.

In a world in which many women have no (or very little) say in who their husband is to be, ‘Clarissa’ remains hugely relevant. Clarissa is treated as property by her family (at one point she is even described as such). Lovelace’s offence is seen by Clarissa’s family and friends as a form of robbery, removing her of her commercial value on the marriage market.  Richardson lays heavy emphasis on Clarissa’s inheritance from her grandfather as being the origins of her siblings’s resentment towards her, but this bequest also complicates the question of her marriage – as the younger sister she is intrinsically of less value than Arabella, but she now has an element of personal wealth that the Harlowe’s are desperately keen to keep control over. As an act of theft, Lovelace can remedy his offence my marrying Clarissa – something Miss Howe consistently urges her to do, because it will effectively legitimise his crime – you can’t steal something that is yours.

Clarissa, and by implication Richardson, reject this notion of women as property. Clarissa is a strong minded independent character, who is unwilling to allow herself to be traded as a commodity, sold to the highest bidder irrespective of her personal preferences. It would be stretching the point to paint ‘Clarissa’ as a feminist novel; Richardson creates a fully rounded character who knows her own mind, but pays a heavy price for that independence.

‘Clarissa’ is a compelling, if ridiculously long tragedy, and was clearly hugely influential – echoes of this story can be found in ‘Pride and Prejudice’ for example. But I think we can all be grateful that the novel has evolved as a form since the eighteenth century, and is not such an all-consuming affair.

Clarissa, by Samuel Richardson, 1748, volumes 3 & 4

Back to ‘Clarissa’.  At the end of book 2, Clarissa has taken the bold, if not foolhardy step of running away from her family home with the blaggard Lovelace. While it looks to the rest of the world as if this was an elopement, the actual events were more confused – Clarissa intended to tell Lovelace the plan was off, and she was going to try one more time to persuade her family of her implacable opposition to the proposed marriage with Solmes. Well aware of this possibility, Lovelace arranges for their liaison at the end of her garden to be ‘discovered’, and bundled her into his carriage.

Volume 3 opens with the reader concerned for Clarissa’s fate – has she fallen foul of Lovelace’s dishonourable intentions? Not yet. Clarissa has exchanged one form of imprisonment for another. Lovelace keeps a close eye on his prize, but for now decides to continue to frighten her into submission rather than his usual technique of using violence, or as he would think of it, seduction.

Thus far we have had only a limited portrait of Robert Lovelace (‘loveless’?). We know of his reputation as a libertine, a seducer of innocent women, which he acknowledges is justified. He holds a grievance against all women as a result of an earlier failed romance, which he uses to explain his relentless philandering. The extent to which this is a true self-portrait, or simply a caricature, is at this point unclear. But in volume 3 and 4 he begins to emerge from the shadows, and he is a truly unpleasant creation.

In letter 12 to Belford he regrets that Clarissa and Miss Howe live so near one another,

“Else how charmingly might I have managed them both! But one man cannot have every woman worth having—Pity though—when the man is such a VERY clever fellow!

In letter 14 he congratulates himself in his restraint in not pursuing other women while his focus is on Clarissa. He estimates he has been celibate for:

“let me see, how many days and nights?—Forty, I believe, after open trenches, spent in the sap only, and never a mine sprung yet! By a moderate computation, a dozen kites might have fallen, while I have been only trying to ensnare this single lark”.

In his exchange with his spy in the Harlowe household, Joseph Leman, (V3, letters 38 and 39), he freely admits an earlier affair with a Miss Betterton, dismissing it as “a youthful frolic” and while accepting an illegitimate child was born as a result, denies Leman’s claim that “there was a rape in the case betwixt you at furste”. He then immediately contradicts himself, saying

“It is cruel to ask a modest woman for her consent. It is creating difficulties to both”

Even his closest accomplice, Belford, pleads with him to behave honourably to Clarissa, and describes him as “cruel as a panther” (V3, letter 51).

Later in volume 4 Lovelace returns to his favourite topic, bragging about his ‘seduction’ technique (letter 16), which sounds a lot like rape to me:

Is it to be expected, that a woman of education, and a lover of forms, will yield before she is attacked?… I doubt not but I shall meet with difficulty. I must therefore make my first effort by surprise. There may possibly be some cruelty necessary: but there may be consent in struggle; there may be yielding in resistance.

His plan to ensnare Clarissa slowly unfolds. He manipulates her into moving into lodgings in London, where they live together to outward purposes as husband and wife. It becomes apparent that these lodgings, unbeknown to Clarissa, are nothing more than a high class brothel, run by Lovelace’s previous victims.

Lovelace thinks of himself as a master plotter, ensuring Clarissa is isolated from family and friends and surrounded by his agents. His plot is vulnerable to discovery at any time, but a more serious objection is that Lovelace hasn’t decided what his ultimate objective is – is it to deflower and then discard Clarissa, or to marry her? He enjoys the business of plotting and manipulating, being in control, but when his plans are foiled by Clarissa’s resolution to remain chaste, he is petulant and sulks. When pressed on this issue, he claims that his seduction of Clarissa is all a test – if she successfully resists him he will reward her with marriage; if she fails and succumbs to his charms then she was never worth his attention in the first place. This is contradicted by his boastfully predictions of success, even if he should need to resort to violence – I don’t think even Lovelace himself is persuaded by this flimsy justification. He is a hard man to dissuade however, and even Belford’s point, that in ‘ruining’ Clarissa he would be furthering the aims of her brother and sister, does not deflect him from his course.

Clarissa, meanwhile, remains highly suspicious. She realises that she has become ever more vulnerable, isolated from friends and family, with just her correspondence with Miss Howe as a lifeline. The tone of the novel shifts slowly in volume four as more letters from Lovelace are featured, and the authorial voice becomes more prominent. The correspondence, which in the earlier volumes is presented verbatim, is now quite heavily edited, with the narrator telling us what sections of letters he has excised, summarising others, and commenting on the characters’ behaviour.

When a reconciliation with her family is refused, and when hopes of assistance from her long-awaited cousin Morden evaporates, Clarissa accepts that marriage with Lovelace is now her only remaining option. The wedding, and the attempt on her honour that will precede and perhaps pre-empt it, are coming to a climax when volume 4 closes. However the final chapters, possibly as an attempt to secure readers for the following volumes, show Lovelace indulging in an extraordinary rape fantasy, in which he and his fellow ‘bravos’ kidnap and rape Miss Howe, her mother, and her maid. Lovelace enjoys the thought of his trial – in which he plays the central role of conquering hero – more than the ‘escapade’ itself, and brags of using his position to avoid conviction. These letters to Belford are unanswered, and are uncomfortable reading, out of tone with the rest of the novel. Having thought that Lovelace was finally coming to terms with the likelihood of marriage, it seems he has had a last minute change of heart, and is planning to continue Clarissa’s torture as long as possible, before she finally realises he is irredeemable.

 

 

The Pilgrim’s Progress, by John Bunyan, 1678

Subtitled ‘From This World to That Which Is to Come; Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream’.

This is the third time I have recently tried to read ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ – each time previously I gave up simply due to lack of interest. Bunyan’s style is said to be straightforward, but I found the insistent preaching and sermonising soporific. This completed reading was finally achieved only through gritted teeth and from a stubborn determination not to be beaten a third time. Yet here’s the thing – ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ has been in print for almost 350 years, has a strong claim to be the first novel written in English (it has characters, tells a story, and is in prose) and had a profound influence on many novelists. All stories of personal development or growth own a debt to Bunyan, and many including ‘Little Women’, ‘Oliver Twist’ and ‘Vanity Fair’ acknowledge their debt explicitly. Wikipedia claims that the novel “is regarded as one of the most significant works of religious English literature” and goes on to claim that it has been translated into more than 200 languages. So my challenge was to find the value in this novel despite the teeth gritting.
You will be familiar with the plot, such as it is. Christian, fearing for his immortal soul, leaves his life of sinfulness and goes on a pilgrimage to find the Celestial City. He meets a range of challenges to his faith, some trivial, some less so, all of which he overcomes, to finally arrive at the Promised Land and be welcomed into heaven. A sequel, published several years after the first part, follows Christian’s wife and children as they follow a very similar path to that of the first novel – after a bit of an internal debate I decided not to read the sequel, despite it being described on publication as the second part of the story.

The circumstances of the publication of this novel are almost as well-known as the story itself. Bunyan belonged to a very small non-conformist church in Bedford, and took to preaching around the countryside in direct convention of the strict laws of the time, following the restoration of the monarchy. His original sentence was three months, but as he refused to undertake to not repeat his offence his sentence was extended repeatedly – he eventually served twelve years, leaving his young wife and four children destitute.

It is easy to overlook the positives in ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’. The problem in part is one of familiarity – we have all grown up with Giant Despair, The Slough of Despond, and Mr Worldly-Wiseman, and take their inventiveness for granted. But apart from this quality, taking the text as it reads in the present, I found very little else of value. Bunyan uses his parable to preach unremittingly at the reader. The formula he adopts is rigidly adhered to – his pilgrim, Christian, meets a character representing the personification of a sin, is tempted, (sometimes not), overcomes the challenge, and moves on. I am simplifying of course, but this is the structure for the whole novel, and there never comes a moment where the reader expects anything else to happen. Bunyan quickly runs out of serious sins, and has to resort to relatively innocuous offences – formalism, timorousness, discontent and talkativeness to name a few, which gives these sections of the novel a slightly ridiculous tone.

Later, Christian sees his fellow pilgrim, Faithful, brutally executed in Vanity Fair:
“They therefore brought him out, to do with him according to their law; and, first, they scourged him, then they buffeted him, then they lanced his flesh with knives; after that, they stoned him with stones, then pricked him with their swords; and, last of all, they burned him to ashes at the stake. Thus came Faithful to his end.”

Despite the horrors of this death, Christian takes Faithful’s martyrdom in his stride and through divine intervention escapes a similar fate. Later he meets with another pilgrim, Hopeful, and together they bully a third pilgrim, whom Bunyan labels Ignorance. Ignorance is not English, nor a follower of the Church of England. He comes from “the country of Conceit”. He is described as “a very brisk lad”, and speaks respectfully to Christian:
“Sir, I was born in the country that lieth off there a little on the left hand, and I am going to the Celestial City.”
In answer to Christian’s questioning about his credentials – “what have you to show at that gate, that may cause that the gate should be opened to you?” he replies again respectfully
“I know my Lord’s will, and I have been a good liver; I pay every man his own; I pray, fast, pay tithes, and give alms, and have left my country for whither I am going.”
Christian is having none of this
“But thou camest not in at the wicket-gate that is at the head of this way; thou camest in hither through that same crooked lane, and therefore, I fear, however thou mayest think of thyself, when the reckoning day shall come, thou wilt have laid to thy charge that thou art a thief and a robber, instead of getting admittance into the city.”

In other words, living well, paying your way, and knowing the Lord’s will, isn’t enough for Christian. He takes it on himself to challenge Ignorance’s right to aspire to redemption in the first place. Ignorance politely asks him to leave him alone – this is becoming suspiciously like bullying:
“Gentlemen, ye be utter strangers to me, I know you not; be content and follow the religion of your country, and I will follow the religion of mine”
That’s not enough for Christian who speaks to Hopeful, “whisperingly,
“There is more hope of a fool than of him.””
When Ignorance finally arrives at the Celestial City he is dealt with brutally,
“the King…commanded the two Shining Ones… to go out and take Ignorance, and bind him hand and foot, and have him away. Then they took him up, and carried him through the air to the door that I saw in the side of the hill, and put him in there. Then I saw that there was a way to hell”
None of those nasty foreigners in our Celestial City, thank you very much!

Christians might enjoy having their beliefs confirmed by this novel, but otherwise I would not recommend exhuming this one from the archives.

The Beginning of Spring, by Penelope Fitzgerald, 1988

‘The Beginning of Spring’ tells the story of the Reid family. Living in Moscow, (although originally from Salford and Norbury), the Reid’s are Frank, a printer, his wife Nellie, and their three lively children. The novel opens with Nellie’s apparently sudden decision to leave her husband and travel back to England. This breakup provides a backdrop to the novel, but the reasons for the parting are only returned to at the end of the story, and are not explored in any detail. If their married life together was unhappy we are not told in what way. Much of the novel is concerned with the day to day business of managing Frank’s household and print works, and while this is done in very convincing detail – I have no doubt the author’s research was immaculate – it felt like the inclusion of research detail without adding anything to the narrative. I need to consider whether that is fair – is the printing business a metaphor for the way the characters slowly and meticulously present their lives to one another? I suspect not. More convincingly, the printing industry is facing an imminent technological revolution – the introduction of ‘hot metal’ type setting, which foreshadows the revolution about to sweep across Russia. The other metaphor for the pending revolution Fitzgerald uses is meteorological – the beginning of spring in Russia sees the river ice melt, and the houses being thrown open to the mother of all spring cleans. While change is anticipated, and the Russia state is obviously close to breakdown, there is no real sense of menace or impending doom in the novel – Frank has carefully prepared his own retreat from Moscow should it be necessary, and we have no reason to believe that he would not be back in Norbury in time for Christmas should it be necessary.

This is all done with a light touch, but this isn’t a political novel, and despite the setting the real interest lies in the relationships between the central characters. Frank and Nellie’s marriage remains a largely closed book, but it is no surprise that when Frank employs a new nanny, Lisa Ivanovna, to care for the boisterous, confident children, he promptly and predictably falls for her. Lisa is impassive in the face of his tentative advances, and then also mysteriously leaves.

Fitzgerald disappointingly leaves her female characters largely silent. We get no direct insight into their thoughts and feelings; instead the focus remains on the male protagonists. While the narrator keeps a respectful distance we are told sufficient to allow us to work out what they are thinking – the reader is able to discern Frank’s blossoming affection for Lisa, for example, before even he is aware of it. Nellie is a “modern” woman (in the meaning of the phrase at the time, someone who is prepared to countenance pre-marital sex) and is prepared to follow her husband across Europe to preserve her family; she is also prepared to break her family up and abandon her young children. The reader can only guess at her reasons for leaving her husband, and for contemplating a relationship with Selwyn Crane, Frank’s aesthetic accountant.

This novel is full of gentle humour – I particularly liked the sister in law whose conversation revolved around damp – and the pages flew past very quickly, mainly it has to be said in search of something happening. There are some incidents in the novel, but they are sporadic and unconnected, such as the break-in at the print works, or the short holiday at the dacha. I know the intelligent reader will be saying at this point “Or are they?” (unconnected, that is) – and of course it wouldn’t be too hard to construct a narrative/interpretive thread between this series of incidents. This is the kind of novel where the reader has to do a lot of the work – and sometimes that is not worth the effort. There are enough clues in the novel, for example, to construct Nellie’s back story, an explanation for her departure at the beginning of the novel and her even more mysterious return, but I am not invested sufficiently in the characters to do this – I simply don’t care about them enough.

In her book about Fitzgerald, Hermione Lee quotes her as saying that she was very interested in the period 1912-13, just before the first world war. It was, she said, “a time of very great hope… of the coming of the 20th century, hopes of a New Life, a new world, the New Woman, a new relationship between the artist and the craftsman”. Seeing this novel in that light, as a portrait of possibilities, is helpful, but it still had an incomplete, snapshot feel to it that was unsatisfying. Is it unreasonable of me to want more? Surely it is in the nature of a novel rather than a short story to tell us more than “something happened”?

In preparing this review I came across this contemporaneous review in the New York Times. As well as being a worthwhile read on its own merits, I mention it because it mentions the echoes of E M Forster that I also noticed in reading this novel.

Finally, despite this novel’s fine writing, strong characterisation (of the male characters at least), the excellent research (into arcane and obscure details of the Edwardian printing industry in tsarist Russia) and dry humour, I have to wonder how it ended up on the Guardian’s list of the 100 best novel’s written in English. The citation – “a brilliant miniature…a short book with a sly and gentle sensibility, that somehow comprehends a whole world, and many lives.” – borders on hyperbole, but even if you take this commendation unchallenged still doesn’t approach the greatness the list aspired to classify.

Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray, 1848

“Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of humbugs and falsenesses and pretensions.”

Thackeray’s ‘Vanity Fair’ draws its name from ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’. It was published in nineteen monthly instalments, and as with many Victorian novels shows some evidence of padding – the scenes in continental Europe at the end of the novel in particular were quite obvious word-count filling.

Thackeray uses a distancing technique to allow him to present the story as a fair-ground puppet show. This allows him to present what would on some circumstances be seen as shocking or unrealistic behaviour – “it’s only a story” – but for almost all the novel the central characters are very real and present, and treated by the narrator as being genuine characters rather than archetypes.