BRITISH WRITERS
BRITISH WRITERS JAY PARINI Editor
SUPPLEMENT XV
British Writers Supplement XV Project Editors: Michelle Kazensky Copyeditors: Katy Balcer, Gretchen Gordon, Robert E. Jones, Linda Sanders Proofreaders: Susan Barnett, Carrie Snyder Indexer: Wendy Allex
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA British writers. Supplement XV / Jay Parini, editor. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-684-31555-3 (alk. paper) 1. English literature--History and criticism. 2. English literature--Bio-bibliography. 3. Commonwealth literature (English)--History and criticism. 4. Commonwealth literature (English)--Bio-bibliography. 5. Authors, English--Biography. 6. Authors, Commonwealth-- Biography. I. Parini, Jay. PR85.B688 Suppl. 15 820.9--dc22
[B] 2009024091
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Acknowledgements Acknowledgement is gratefully made to those publishers and individuals who permitted the use of the following materials in copyright.
ATHOL FUGARD. Walder, Dennis. From Athol Fugard. Northcote House Publishers Ltd., 2003. Copyright © 2003 by Dennis Walder. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.
Clarke. Carcanet/The Bridge Press, 2008. Reproduced by permission of R Dardis Clarke, 17 Oscar Square. Dublin 8. / Clarke, Austin, From “Three Poems About Children,” in Austin Clarke Collected Poems. Edited by R Dardis Clarke. Carcanet/The Bridge Press, 2008. Reproduced by permssion of R Dardis Clarke, 17 Oscar Square, Dublin 8. / Clarke, Austin. From “Ancient Lights,” in Austin Clarke Collected Poems. Edited by R Dardis Clarke. Carcanet/The Bridge Press, 2008. Reproduced by permission of R Dardis Clarke, 17 Oscar square, Dublin 8. / / Clarke, Austin. From “Martha Blake at Fifty-One,” in Austin Clarke Collected Poems. Edited by R Dardis Clarke. Carcanet/ The Bridge Press, 2008. Reproduced by permission of R Dardis Clarke, 17 Oscar square, Dublin 8. / Clarke, Austin. From “Martha Blake at 51,” in Collected Poems. Edited by Liam Miller. The Dolmen Press, 1974. © Nora Clarke, 1974. Reproduced by permission of the author. / Clarke, Austin. From “Mnemosyne Lay in Dust,” in Austin Clarke Collected Poems. Edited by R Dardis Clarke. Carcanet/The Bridge Press, 2008. Reproduced by permission of R Dardis Clarke, 17 Oscar Square, Dublin 8.
AUSTIN CLARKE. Clarke, Austin. From Twice Round the Black Church: Early Memories of Ireland and England. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962. Copyright © Austin Clarke 1962. Reproduced by permission of the publisher. / Clarke, Austin. From “The Vengeance of Fionn,” in Austin Clarke Collected Poems. Edited by R Dardis Clarke. Carcanet/The Bridge Press, 2008. Reproduced by permission of R Dardis Clarke, 17 Oscar Square, Dublin 8. / Clarke, Austin. From an introduction in Austin Clarke Collected Poems. Edited by R Dardis Clarke. Carcanet/ The Bridge Press, 2008. Reproduced by permission of R Dardis Clarke, 17 Oscar Square, Dublin 8. / Clarke, Austin. From “The Itinerary of Ua Cleirigh,” in Austin Clarke Collected Poems. Edited by R Dardis Clarke. Carcanet/The Bridge Press, 2008. Reproduced by permission of R Dardis Clarke, 17 Oscar Square, Dublin 8. / Clarke, Austin. From “The Frenzy of Suibhne,” in Austin Clarke Collected Poems. Edited by R Dardis Clarke. Carcanet/The Bridge Press, 2008. Reproduced by permission of R Dardis Clarke, 17 Oscar Square, Dublin 8. / Clarke, Austin, From “The Lost Heifer,” in Austin Clarke Collected Poems. Edited by R Dardis Clarke. Carcanet/The Bridge Press, 2008. Reproduced by permission of R Dardis Clarke, 17 Oscar Square, Dublin 8./Clarke, Austin, From an introduction in Austin Clarke Collected Poems. Edited by R Dardis Clarke. Carcanet/The Bridge Press, 2008. Reproduced by permission of R Dardis Clarke, 17 Oscar Square, Dublin 8. / Clarke, Austin. From “Pilgrimage,” in Austin Clarke Collected Poems. Edited by R Dardis Clarke. Carcanet/The Bridge Press, 2008. Reproduced by permission of R Dardis Clarke, 17 Oscar Square, Dublin 8 / Clarke, Austin. From “Note to Pilgrimage,” in Austin Clarke Collected Poems. Edited by R Dardis Clarke. Carcanet/The Bridge Press, 2008. Reproduced by permission of R Dardis Clarke, 17 Oscar Square, Dublin 8. / Clarke, Austin. From “Tenebrae,” in Austin Clarke Collected Poems. Edited by R Dardis Clarke. Carcanet/The Bridge Press, 2008. Reproduced by permission of R Dardis Clarke, 17 Oscar Square, Dublin 8 / Clarke, Austin. From “The Straying Student,” in Austin Clarke Collected Poems. Edited by R Dardis
DAVID CONSTANTINE. Constantine, David. From Collected Poems. Bloodaxe Books, 2004. Copyright © David Constantine 1980, 1983, 1987, 1991, 1994, 1998, 2002, 2004. Reproduced by permission. / Holderlin, Friedrich. From Friedrich Holderlin Selected Poems. Translated by David Constantine. Bloodaxe Books, 1990. Copyright © David Constantine 1990, 1996. Reproduced by permission. / Szirtes, George. From a back cover review of Selected Poems. Bloodaxe Books, 1991. Copyright ©David Constantine 1980, 1983, 1987, 1991. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission. / Constantine, David. From the back cover of The Pelt of Wasps. Bloodaxe Books, 1998. Copyright © David Constantine 1998. Reproduced by permission. KIRAN DESAI. Michiko Kakutani, “’Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard’: Celebrity Frenzy in a Sleepy Village,” The New York Times, June 12, 1998. Reproduced by permission. HENRY REED. Reed, Henry. From “Naming of Parts,” in Henry Reed Collected Poems. Edited by Jon Stallworthy. Carcanet, 2007. The poems of Henry
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Reed © The Executor of Henry Reed’s Estate 2007. Reproduced by permission of Carcanet Press Limited. / Reed, Henry. From “Lessons of the War,” in Henry Reed Collected Poems. Edited by Jon Stallworthy. Carcanet, 2007. The poems of Henry Reed © The Executor of Henry Reed’s Estate 2007. Reproduced by permission of Carcanet Press Limited. / Reed, Henry. From “Movement of Bodies,” in Henry Reed Collected Poems. Edited by Jon Stallworthy. Carcanet, 2007. The poems of Henry Reed © The Executor of Henry Reed’s Estate 2007. Reproduced by permission of Carcanet Press Limited. / Reed, Henry. From “Returning of Issue,” in Henry Reed Collected Poems. Edited by Jon Stallworthy. Carcanet, 2007. The poems of Henry Reed © The Executor of Henry Reed’s Estate 2007. Reproduced by permission of Carcanet Press Limited. / Reed, Henry. From “Moby Dick,” in Henry Reed Collected Poems. Edited by Jon Stallworthy. Carcanet, 2007. The poems of Henry Reed © The Executor of Henry Reed’s Estate 2007. Reproduced by permission of Carcanet Press Limited. / Reed, Henry. From “The Auction Sale,” in Henry Reed Collected Poems. Edited by Jon Stallworthy. Carcanet, 2007 The poems of Henry Reed © The Executor of Henry Reed’s Estate 2007. Reproduced by permission of Carcanet Press Limited. / Reed, Henry. From “The Captain,” in Henry Reed Collected Poems. Edited by Jon Stallworthy. Carcanet, 2007. The poems of Henry Reed © The Executor of Henry Reed’s Estate 2007. Reproduced by permission of Carcanet Press Limited. / Reed, Henry. From “Chard Whitlow,” in Henry Reed Collected Poems. Edited by Jon Stallworthy. Carcanet, 2007. The poems of Henry Reed © The Executor of Henry Reed’s Estate 2007. Reproduced by permission of Carcanet Press Limited. / Reed, Henry. From “Hiding Beneath the Furze,” in Henry Reed Collected Poems. Edited by Jon Stallworthy. Carcanet, 2007. The poems of Henry Reed © The Executor of Henry Reed’s Estate 2007. Reproduced by permission of Carcanet Press Limited. / Reed, Henry. From “A Map of Verona,” in Henry Reed Collected Poems. Edited by Jon Stallworthy. Carcanet, 2007. The poems of Henry Reed © The Executor of Henry Reed’s Estate 2007. Reproduced by permission of Carcanet Press Limited. / Reed, Henry. From “Judging Distances,” in Henry Reed Collected Poems. Edited by Jon Stallworthy. Carcanet, 2007. The poems of Henry Reed © The Executor of Henry Reed’s Estate 2007. Reproduced by permission of Carcanet Press Limited. / Reed, Henry. From “Unarmed Combat,” in Henry Reed Collected Poems. Edited by Jon Stallworthy. Carcanet,
2007. The poems of Henry Reed © The Executor of Henry Reed’s Estate 2007. Reproduced by permission of Carcanet Press Limited. / Reed, Henry. From “Psychological Warfare,” in Henry Reed Collected Poems. Edited by Jon Stallworthy. Carcanet, 2007. The poems of Henry Reed © The Executor of Henry Reed’s Estate 2007. Reproduced by permission of Carcanet Press Limited. / Reed, Henry. From “The Town Itself,” in Henry Reed Collected Poems. Edited by Jon Stallworthy. Carcanet, 2007. The poems of Henry Reed © The Executor of Henry Reed’s Estate 2007. Reproduced by permission of Carcanet Press Limited. / Reed, Henry. From “The Blissful Land,” in Henry Reed Collected Poems. Edited by Jon Stallworthy. Carcanet, 2007. The poems of Henry Reed © The Executor of Henry Reed’s Estate 2007. Reproduced by permission of Carcanet Press Limited. / Reed, Henry. From “Three Words,” in Henry Reed Collected Poems. Edited by Jon Stallworthy. Carcanet, 2007. The poems of Henry Reed © The Executor of Henry Reed’s Estate 2007. Reproduced by permission of Carcanet Press Limited. JOHN MONTAGUE. Montague, John. From About Love. The Sheep Meadow Press, 1993. Copyright © 1993 by John Montague. By kind permission of the author c/o The Gallery Press, Loughcrew, Oldcastle, County Meath, Ireland and by Wake Forest University Press in North America. / Montague, John. From Collected Poems. The Gallery Press, 1995. By kind permission of the author and The Gallery Press, Lougherew, Oldcastle, County Meath, Ireland, and Wake Forest University Press in North America. / Montague, John. From Drunken Sailor. Wake Forest University Press, 2005. Used by kind permission by of the author c/o The Gallery Press, Loughcrew, Oldcasstle, County Meath, Ireland and Wake Forest University Press in the United States. / Montague, John. From The Rough Field 1961-1971. Wake Forest University Press, 2005. Copyright © John Montague, 2005. All rights reserved. Used by kind permission by of the author c/o The Gallery Press, Loughcrew, Oldcasstle, County Meath, Ireland and Wake Forest University Press in North America. / Montague, John. From The Rough Field 1961-1971. Wake Forest University Press, 2005. Copyright © John Montague, 2005. Used by kind permission by of the author c/o The Gallery Press, Loughcrew, Oldcasstle, County Meath, Ireland and Wake Forest University Press in the United States.
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Contents
Contents .......................................................................................................................................................................vii Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................................ix Chronology ....................................................................................................................................................................xi List of Contributors ......................................................................................................................................................lv Subjects in Supplement XV AMA ATA AIDOO / Kwadwo Osei-Nyame, Jnr. .....................................................................................................1 AUSTIN CLARKE / Tom Walker ...........................................................................................................................15 SUSANNA CLARKE / Joseph Dewey ....................................................................................................................33 JONATHAN COE / William May ...........................................................................................................................49 DAVID CONSTANTINE / Aaron Deveson ............................................................................................................65 KIRAN DESAI / Carolyn Alessio ............................................................................................................................83 ATHOL FUGARD / Edwin Hees .............................................................................................................................99 WILLIAM GODWIN / Patrick Abatiell ..............................................................................................................115 NICK HORNBY / Paul Sullivan ...........................................................................................................................133 ELIZABETH INCHBALD / Marianne Szlyk ......................................................................................................147 RICHARD JEFFERIES / Fred Bilson .................................................................................................................165 HARRIET MARTINEAU / Sandie Byrne ...........................................................................................................181 ZAKES MDA / Christopher Warnes ....................................................................................................................195 JOHN MONTAGUE / Maureen C. Manier .........................................................................................................209 TONY PARSONS / Laurie Champion ..................................................................................................................227 HENRY REED / Katherine Firth .........................................................................................................................243 MICHÈLE ROBERTS / Jennifer E. Dunn ..........................................................................................................259 FLORA THOMPSON / Patricia B. Heaman .......................................................................................................277 MASTER INDEX to Volumes I–VII, Supplements I–XV, Retrospective Supplements I–II .........................293
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INTRODUCTION
It was Dr. Samual Johnson who once remarked, in passing, that “the chief glory of any people arises from its authors.” Serious readers will know this, understanding that any culture worth its salt can survey the work of its writers and see, in their plays and poems, their novels and essays, its brilliance as well as its faults. Certainly the traditions of Britain, and the empire they created and ultimately lost, must count among the most diverse and effective of all literary achievements by a particular people. In British Writers, from the outset, we have celebrated and analyzed this achievement. In Supplement XV we present detailed, articulate, well-balanced introductions to a range of authors in various genres. In each case the articles have been designed to increase the reader’s pleasure in the work of the subject at hand, and to make the shape of that career understandable; a further purpose has been to underscore the way this writer has contributed, on some level, to the making of the British literary tradition. As a whole, this series brings together a wide range of articles on British writers who have a reputation for excellence and have already attracted a following. As in previous volumes, the subjects have been chosen for their contribution to British or Anglophone culture. We hope that readers of this particular supplement will find these essays lively and thoughtful, interesting to those unfamiliar with the work under discussion and useful to those who know the work quite well. We accomplish this double task by providing close readings of individual texts and a sketch of the biographical, cultural, and critical context of that work as it has evolved in the writer’s lifetime. British Writers was originally an off-shoot of a series of monographs that appeared between 1959 and 1972, the Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers. These pamphlets were incisively written and informative, treating ninety-seven American writers in a format and style that attracted a devoted following of readers. The series proved
invaluable to a generation of students and teachers, who could depend on these reliable and interesting critiques of major figures. The idea of reprinting these essays occurred to Charles Scribner, Jr., an innovative publisher during the middle decades of the twentieth century. The series appeared in four volumes entitled American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies (1974). British Writers began with a series of essays originally published by the British Council, and regular supplements have followed, culminating in this, the fifteenth volume. The goal of the supplements has been consistent with the original idea of the series: to provide sharp, informative essays aimed at the general reader. The authors of these eighteen articles are mostly teachers as well as scholars. Many have published books and articles in their field, and several are well-known writers of poetry or fiction as well. As anyone glancing through this book will see, our critics have been held to the highest standards of clear writing and sound scholarship. Jargon has been discouraged, except when strictly relevant: that is, when a theoretical underpinning may be useful to the reader in understanding the context of a given work. Each of the essays concludes with a select bibliography of works by the author under discussion and secondary works that might be useful to those who wish to pursue the subject further. Supplement XV is focused on contemporary writers, many of whom have had little sustained attention from critics thus far, although most are well known. Ata Ama Aidoo, Susanna Clarke, David Constantine, Athol Fugard, Tony Parsons, John Montague, Jonathan Coe, Nick Hornby, Zakes Mda, Michèle Roberts, and Kiran Desai have all been written about in the review pages of newspapers and magazines, often at considerable length, and their work has acquired a substantial following, but their careers have yet to attract significant scholarship. That will certainly follow, but the essays included in this
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INTRODUCTION volume constitute a beginning of sorts, an attempt to map out the particular universe of each writer. Henry Reed, Flora Thompson, and Austin Clarke might be considered “modern classics,” writers of the fairly recent past who have yet to be written about in detail by critics, although they remain widely read in literary circles. The essays included here go a long way toward revealing their importance to readers of the early and mid-twentieth century. Four major writers from the distant past included here are Elizabeth Inchbald, Harriet Martineau, Richard Jefferies, and William Godwin—all important writers who, for one reason or another, have yet to be treated in this series. It is time they were added to the series. As ever, our purpose in presenting these critical and biographical essays is to bring readers
back to the texts discussed, to help them in their reading, and to generate appreciation for the role these writers have played in the creation of a distinguished and useful cultural past and literary present. These are strong and stimulating essays, and they should enable students and general readers to enter into the world of these writers freshly, encouraging them on their intellectual journeys. They should help readers to appreciate the way things are said by these authors, thus enhancing their pleasure in the texts. Above all, these essays should lengthen the reading list of those wishing to broaden or deepen their understanding of Anglophone culture in places like Ghana (Aidoo) or South Africa (Mda, Fugard), countries that owe something to the British literary tradition.
—JAY PARINI
x
Chronology
ca. 1342 1348 ca. 1350 1351
1356 1360
1362
1369
1369–1377 ca. 1370 1371 1372 1372–1382 1373–1393
ca. 1373 ca. 1375–1400 1376 1377–1399 ca. 1379 ca. 1380 1381 1386
1399–1413 ca. 1400 1400 1408 1412–1420 1413–1422 1415
Birth of John Trevisa and Julian of Norwich The Black Death (further outbreaks in 1361 and 1369) Boccaccio’s Decameron Langland’s Piers Plowman The Statute of Laborers pegs laborers’ wages at rates in effect preceding the plague The Battle of Poitiers The Treaty of Brétigny: end of the first phase of the Hundred Years’ War Pleadings in the law courts conducted in English Parliaments opened by speeches in English Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess, an elegy to Blanche of Lancaster, wife of John of Gaunt Victorious French campaigns under du Guesclin John Lydgate born Sir John Mandeville’s Travels Chaucer travels to Italy Wycliffe active in Oxford William of Wykeham founds Winchester College and New College, Oxford Margery Kempe born Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Death of Edward the Black Prince Reign of Richard II Gower’s Vox clamantis Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde The Peasants’ Revolt Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales begun Chaucer sits in Parliament Gower’s Confessio amantis Reign of Henry IV Death of William Langland Death of Geoffrey Chaucer Death of John Gower Lydgate’s Troy Book Reign of Henry V The Battle of Agincourt
ca. 1416 1420–1422 1422–1461 1431 ca.1439 1440–1441 1444 1450 ca. 1451 1453 1455–1485 ca. 1460 1461–1470 1470–1471 1471 1471–1483 1476–1483
1483–1485 1485 1485–1509 1486
1492 1493
1497–1498 1497–1499 1499
1503 1505
xi
Death of Julian of Norwich Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes Reign of Henry VI François Villon born Joan of Arc burned at Rouen Death of Margery Kempe Henry VI founds Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge Truce of Tours Jack Cade’s rebellion Death of John Lydgate End of the Hundred Years’ War The fall of Constantinople The Wars of the Roses Births of William Dunbar and John Skelton Reign of Edward IV Reign of Henry VI Death of Sir Thomas Malory Reign of Edward IV Caxton’s press set up: The Canterbury Tales, Morte d’Arthur, and The Golden Legend printed Reign of Richard III The Battle of Bosworth Field; end of the Wars of the Roses Reign of Henry VII Marriage of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York unites the rival houses of Lancaster and York Bartholomew Diaz rounds the Cape of Good Hope Columbus’ first voyage to the New World Pope Alexander VI divides undiscovered territories between Spain and Portugal John Cabot’s voyages to Newfoundland and Labrador Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India Amerigo Vespucci’s first voyage to America Erasmus’ first visit to England Thomas Wyatt born John Colet appointed dean of St.
CHRONOLOGY 1509–1547 1509 1511 1513 1515 1516 1517
1519 1519–1521 1525 1526
1529 1529–1536 1531 1532
1533
1534
1535
1536
1537
1538 1540
Paul’s: founds St. Paul’s School Reign of Henry VIII The king marries Catherine of Aragon Erasmus’ Praise of Folly published Invasion by the Scots defeated at Flodden Field Wolsey appointed lord chancellor Sir Thomas More’s Utopia Martin Luther’s theses against indulgences published at Wittenberg Henry Howard (earl of Surrey) born Charles V of Spain becomes Holy Roman Emperor Magellan’s voyage around the world Cardinal College, the forerunner of Christ Church, founded at Oxford Tyndale’s English translation of the New Testament imported from Holland Fall of Cardinal Wolsey Death of John Skelton The “Reformation” Parliament Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Governour published Thomas Cranmer appointed archbishop of Canterbury Machiavelli’s The Prince The king secretly marries Anne Boleyn Cranmer pronounces the king’s marriage with Catherine “against divine law” The Act of Supremacy constitutes the king as head of the Church of England Sir Thomas More executed Thomas Cromwell appointed vicar general of the Church of England The Pilgrimage of Grace: risings against the king’s religious, social, and economic reforms Anne Boleyn executed The king marries Jane Seymour The dissolution of the monasteries: confiscation of ecclesiastical properties and assets; increase in royal revenues Jane Seymour dies First complete English Bible published and placed in all churches The king marries Anne of Cleves Marriage dissolved
1542 1543
1546 1547 1547–1553 1548–1552 1552 ca. 1552 1553 1553–1558 ca. 1554
1554
ca. 1556 1557
ca. 1558 1558
1558–1603 1559 ca. 1559 1561
1562
1562–1568 1564 1565 1566
xii
The king marries Catherine Howard Fall and execution of Thomas Cromwell Catherine Howard executed Death of Sir Thomas Wyatt The king marries Catherine Parr Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium Trinity College, Cambridge, refounded The earl of Surrey executed Reign of Edward VI Hall’s Chronicle The second Book of Common Prayer Edmund Spenser born Lady Jane Grey proclaimed queen Reign of Mary I (Mary Tudor) Births of Walter Raleigh, Richard Hooker, John Lyly, and Fulke Greville Lady Jane Grey executed Mary I marries Philip II of Spain Bandello’s Novelle Philip Sidney born George Peele born Tottel’s Miscellany, including the poems of Wyatt and Surrey, published Thomas Kyd born Calais, the last English possession in France, is lost Birth of Robert Greene Mary I dies Reign of Elizabeth I John Knox arrives in Scotland Rebellion against the French regent George Chapman born Mary Queen of Scots (Mary Stuart) arrives in Edinburgh Thomas Hoby’s translation of Castiglione’s The Courtier Gorboduc, the first English play in blank verse Francis Bacon born Civil war in France English expedition sent to support the Huguenots Sir John Hawkins’ voyages to Africa Births of Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare Mary Queen of Scots marries Lord Darnley William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure, a miscellany of prose stories,
CHRONOLOGY 1567
1569 1570 1571 ca. 1572 1572 1574 1576
1576–1578 1577–1580 1577 1579
1581 1582 1583 1584–1585 1585
1586
1587
1588
the source of many dramatists’ plots Darnley murdered at Kirk o’Field Mary Queen of Scots marries the earl of Bothwell Rebellion of the English northern earls suppressed Roger Ascham’s The Schoolmaster Defeat of the Turkish fleet at Lepanto Ben Jonson born St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre John Donne born The earl of Leicester’s theater company formed The Theater, the first permanent theater building in London, opened The first Blackfriars Theater opened with performances by the Children of St. Paul’s John Marston born Martin Frobisher’s voyages to Labrador and the northwest Sir Francis Drake sails around the world Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande John Lyly’s Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives The Levant Company founded Seneca’s Ten Tragedies translated Richard Hakluyt’s Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America Philip Massinger born Sir John Davis’ first voyage to Greenland First English settlement in America, the “Lost Colony” comprising 108 men under Ralph Lane, founded at Roanoke Island, off the coast of North Carolina Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy Marlowe’s Tamburlaine William Camden’s Britannia The Babington conspiracy against Queen Elizabeth Death of Sir Philip Sidney Mary Queen of Scots executed Birth of Virginia Dare, first English child born in America, at Roanoke Island Defeat of the Spanish Armada Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus
1590
1592
1593 1594
1595 1596
ca. 1597 1597 1598 1598–1600
1599 1600 1601 1602
1603–1625 1603
1604 ca. 1605 1605 1606
1607 1608 1609 1610 1611
xiii
Spenser’s The Faerie Queen, Cantos 1–3 Richard Brome born Outbreak of plague in London; the theaters closed Henry King born Death of Christopher Marlowe The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the company to which Shakespeare belonged, founded The Swan Theater opened Death of Thomas Kyd Ralegh’s expedition to Guiana Sidney’s Apology for Poetry The earl of Essex’s expedition captures Cadiz The second Blackfriars Theater opened Death of George Peele Bacon’s first collection of Essays Jonson’s Every Man in His Humor Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffıcs, and Discoveries of the English Nation The Globe Theater opened Death of Edmund Spenser Death of Richard Hooker Rebellion and execution of the earl of Essex The East India Company founded The Bodleian Library reopened at Oxford Reign of James I John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays Cervantes’ Don Quixote (Part 1) The Gunpowder Plot Thomas Browne born Shakespeare’s Othello Shakespears’s King Lear Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy Bacon’s Advancement of Learning Shakespeare’s Macbeth Jonson’s Volpone Death of John Lyly Edmund Waller born The first permanent English colony established at Jamestown, Virginia John Milton born Kepler’s Astronomia nova John Suckling born Galileo’s Sidereus nuncius The Authorized Version of the Bible
CHRONOLOGY 1612
ca. 1613 1613 1614 1616
ca. 1618 1618
1619
1620 1621
1622 1623
1624 1625–1649 1625 1626
1627
Shakespeare’s The Tempest Death of Prince Henry, King James’s eldest son Webster’s The White Devil Bacon’s second collection of Essays Richard Crashaw born The Globe Theatre destroyed by fire Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi Ralegh’s History of the World George Chapman’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey Deaths of William Shakespeare, Francis Beaumont, and Miguel Cervantes Richard Lovelace born The Thirty Years’ War begins Sir Walter Ralegh executed Abraham Cowley born The General Assembly, the first legislative assembly on American soil, meets in Virginia Slavery introduced at Jamestown The Pilgrims land in Massachusetts John Evelyn born Francis Bacon impeached and fined Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy Andrew Marvell born Middleton’s The Changeling Henry Vaughan born The First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays Visit of Prince Charles and the duke of Buckingham to Spain; failure of attempts to negotiate a Spanish marriage War against Spain Reign of Charles I Death of John Fletcher Bacon’s last collection of Essays Bacon’s New Atlantis, appended to Sylva sylvarum Dutch found New Amsterdam Death of Cyril Tourneur Death of Francis Bacon Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore Cardinal Richelieu establishes the Company of New France with monopoly over trade and land in Canada Buckingham’s expedition to the Isle of Ré to relieve La Rochelle Death of Thomas Middleton
1627–1628 1628
1629
1629–1630 1631 1633
1634 1635 1636 ca. 1637 1637
ca. 1638 1638 ca. 1639 1639
1639–1640 1640
xiv
Revolt and siege of La Rochelle, the principal Huguenot city of France Buckingham assassinated Surrender of La Rochelle William Harvey’s treatise on the circulation of the blood (De motu cordis et sanguinis) John Bunyan born Death of Fulke Greville Ford’s The Broken Heart King Charles dismisses his third Parliament, imprisons nine members, and proceeds to rule for eleven years without Parliament The Massachusetts Bay Company formed Peace treaties with France and Spain John Dryden born Death of John Donne William Laud appointed archbishop of Canterbury Death of George Herbert Samuel Pepys born Deaths of George Chapman and John Marston The Académie Française founded George Etherege born Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid Harvard College founded Thomas Traherne born Milton’s “Lycidas” Descartes’s Discours de la méthode King Charles’s levy of ship money challenged in the courts by John Hampden The introduction of the new English Book of Common Prayer strongly opposed in Scotland Death of Ben Jonson Death of John Webster The Scots draw up a National Covenant to defend their religion Death of John Ford Parliament reassembled to raise taxes Death of Thomas Carew Charles Sedley born The two Bishops’ Wars with Scotland The Long Parliament assembled The king’s advisers, Archbishop Laud and the earl of Strafford, im-
CHRONOLOGY
1641
1642
1643
1644
1645
1646
1647
peached Aphra Behn born Death of Philip Massinger Strafford executed Acts passed abolishing extraparliamentary taxation, the king’s extraordinary courts, and his power to order a dissolution without parliamentary consent The Grand Remonstrance censuring royal policy passed by eleven votes William Wycherley born Parliament submits the nineteen Propositions, which King Charles rejects as annihilating the royal power The Civil War begins The theaters close Royalist victory at Edgehill; King Charles established at Oxford Death of Sir John Suckling Parliament concludes the Solemn League and Covenant with the Scots Louis XIV becomes king of France Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset, born Parliamentary victory at Marston Moor The New Model army raised Milton’s Areopagitica Parliamentary victory under Fairfax and Cromwell at Naseby Fairfax captures Bristol Archbishop Laud executed Fairfax besieges King Charles at Oxford King Charles takes refuge in Scotland; end of the First Civil War King Charles attempts negotiations with the Scots Parliament’s proposals sent to the king and rejected Conflict between Parliament and the army A general council of the army established that discusses representational government within the army The Agreement of the People drawn up by the Levelers; its proposals include manhood suffrage King Charles concludes an agree-
1648
1649–1660 1649
1650 1651
1652 1653
1654 1655
1656
1657
1658
xv
ment with the Scots George Fox begins to preach John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, born Cromwell dismisses the general council of the army The Second Civil War begins Fairfax defeats the Kentish royalists at Maidstone Cromwell defeats the Scots at Preston The Thirty Years’ War ended by the treaty of Westphalia Parliament purged by the army Commonwealth King Charles I tried and executed The monarchy and the House of Lords abolished The Commonwealth proclaimed Cromwell invades Ireland and defeats the royalist Catholic forces Death of Richard Crashaw Cromwell defeats the Scots at Dunbar Charles II crowned king of the Scots, at Scone Charles II invades England, is defeated at Worcester, escapes to France Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan War with Holland Death of Richard Brome The Rump Parliament dissolved by the army A new Parliament and council of state nominated; Cromwell becomes Lord Protector Walton’s The Compleat Angler Peace concluded with Holland War against Spain Parliament attempts to reduce the army and is dissolved Rule of the major-generals Sir William Davenant produces The Siege of Rhodes, one of the first English operas Second Parliament of the Protectorate Cromwell is offered and declines the throne Death of Richard Lovelace Death of Oliver Cromwell Richard Cromwell succeeds as Pro-
CHRONOLOGY 1659 1660
1660–1685 1661
1662
1664
1665
1666
1667
1668
1670
tector Conflict between Parliament and the army General Monck negotiates with Charles II Charles II offers the conciliatory Declaration of Breda and accepts Parliament’s invitation to return Will’s Coffee House established Sir William Davenant and Thomas Killigrew licensed to set up two companies of players, the Duke of York’s and the King’s Servants, including actors and actresses Pepys’s Diary begun Reign of Charles II Parliament passes the Act of Uniformity, enjoining the use of the Book of Common Prayer; many Puritan and dissenting clergy leave their livings Anne Finch born Peace Treaty with Spain King Charles II marries Catherine of Braganza The Royal Society incorporated (founded in 1660) War against Holland New Amsterdam captured and becomes New York John Vanbrugh born The Great Plague Newton discovers the binomial theorem and invents the integral and differential calculus, at Cambridge The Great Fire of London Bunyan’s Grace Abounding London Gazette founded The Dutch fleet sails up the Medway and burns English ships The war with Holland ended by the Treaty of Breda Milton’s Paradise Lost Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society Death of Abraham Cowley Sir Christopher Wren begins to rebuild St. Paul’s Cathedral Triple Alliance formed with Holland and Sweden against France Dryden’s Essay of Dramatick Poesy Alliance formed with France through
1671 1672
1673
1674
1676 1677
1678
1679
1680 1681 1682
1683
1685–1688 1685
xvi
the secret Treaty of Dover Pascal’s Pensées The Hudson’s Bay Company founded William Congreve born Milton’s Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained War against Holland Wycherley’s The Country Wife King Charles issues the Declaration of Indulgence, suspending penal laws against Nonconformists and Catholics Parliament passes the Test Act, making acceptance of the doctrines of the Church of England a condition for holding public office War with Holland ended by the Treaty of Westminster Deaths of John Milton, Robert Herrick, and Thomas Traherne Etherege’s The Man of Mode Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics Jean Racine’s Phèdre King Charles’s niece, Mary, marries her cousin William of Orange Fabrication of the so-called popish plot by Titus Oates Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress Dryden’s All for Love Death of Andrew Marvell George Farquhar born Parliament passes the Habeas Corpus Act Rochester’s A Satire Against Mankind Death of John Wilmot, earl of Rochester Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel (Part 1) Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel (Part 2) Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserv’d Philadelphia founded Death of Sir Thomas Browne The Ashmolean Museum, the world’s first public museum, opens at Oxford Death of Izaak Walton Reign of James II Rebellion and execution of James Scott, duke of Monmouth
CHRONOLOGY 1686
1687
1688
1689–1702 1689
1690
1692 ca. 1693 1694
1695 1697
1698
John Gay born The first book of Newton’s Principia—e motu corporum, containing his theory of gravitation—presented to the Royal Society James II issues the Declaration of Indulgence Dryden’s The Hind and the Panther Death of Edmund Waller James II reissues the Declaration of Indulgence, renewing freedom of worship and suspending the provisions of the Test Act Acquittal of the seven bishops imprisoned for protesting against the Declaration William of Orange lands at Torbay, Devon James II takes refuge in France Death of John Bunyan Alexander Pope born Reign of William III Parliament formulates the Declaration of Rights William and Mary accept the Declaration and the crown The Grand Alliance concluded between the Holy Roman Empire, England, Holland, and Spain War declared against France King William’s War, 1689–1697 (the first of the French and Indian wars) Samuel Richardson born James II lands in Ireland with French support, but is defeated at the battle of the Boyne John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding Salem witchcraft trials Death of Sir George Etherege Eliza Haywood born George Fox’s Journal Voltaire (François Marie Arouet) born Death of Mary II Congreve’s Love for Love Death of Henry Vaughan War with France ended by the Treaty of Ryswick Vanbrugh’s The Relapse Jeremy Collier’s A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the
1699 1700
1701
1702–1714 1702
1703
1704
1706
1707
1709
1710 1711
1712
xvii
English Stage Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque Congreve’s The Way of the World Defoe’s The True-Born Englishman Death of John Dryden James Thomson born War of the Spanish Succession, 1701–1714 (Queen Anne’s War in America, 1702–1713) Death of Sir Charles Sedley Reign of Queen Anne Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion (1702–1704) Defoe’s The Shortest Way with the Dissenters Defoe is arrested, fined, and pilloried for writing The Shortest Way Death of Samuel Pepys John Churchill, duke of Marlborough, and Prince Eugene of Savoy defeat the French at Blenheim Capture of Gibraltar Swift’s A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books The Review founded (1704–1713) Farquhar’s The Recruiting Offıcer Deaths of John Evelyn and Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem Act of Union joining England and Scotland Death of George Farquhar Henry Fielding born The Tatler founded (1709–1711) Nicholas Rowe’s edition of Shakespeare Samuel Johnson born Marlborough defeats the French at Malplaquet Charles XII of Sweden defeated at Poltava South Sea Company founded First copyright act Swift’s The Conduct of the Allies The Spectator founded (1711–1712; 1714) Marlborough dismissed David Hume born Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (Cantos 1–2) Jean Jacques Rousseau born
CHRONOLOGY 1713
1714–1727 1714 1715
1716 1717
1718
1719 1720
1721 1722 1724 1725 1726
1727–1760 1728
1729
1731
War with France ended by the Treaty of Utrecht The Guardian founded Swift becomes dean of St. Patrick’s, Dublin Addison’s Cato Laurence Sterne born Reign of George I Pope’s expended version of The Rape of the Lock (Cantos 1–5) The Jacobite rebellion in Scotland Pope’s translation of Homer’s Iliad (1715–1720) Death of Louis XIV Death of William Wycherley Thomas Gray born Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard David Garrick born Horace Walpole born Quadruple Alliance (Britain, France, the Netherlands, the German Empire) in war against Spain Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe Death of Joseph Addison Inoculation against smallpox introduced in Boston War against Spain The South Sea Bubble Gilbert White born Defoe’s Captain Singleton and Memoirs of a Cavalier Tobias Smollett born William Collins born Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Journal of the Plague Year, and Colonel Jack Defoe’s Roxana Swift’s The Drapier’s Letters Pope’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey (1725–1726) Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels Voltaire in England (1726–1729) Death of Sir John Vanbrugh Reign of George II Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera Pope’s The Dunciad (Books 1–2) Oliver Goldsmith born Swift’s A Modest Proposal Edmund Burke born Deaths of William Congreve and Sir Richard Steele Navigation improved by introduction of the quadrant
1732 1733
1734 1736 1737 1738 1740
1742
1744
1745
1746
1747
1748
1749
xviii
Pope’s Moral Essays (1731–1735) Death of Daniel Defoe William Cowper born Death of John Gay Pope’s Essay on Man (1733–1734) Lewis Theobald’s edition of Shakespeare Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques James Macpherson born Edward Gibbon born Johnson’s London War of the Austrian Succession, 1740–1748 (King George’s War in America, 1744–1748) George Anson begins his circumnavigation of the world (1740–1744) Frederick the Great becomes king of Prussia (1740–1786) Richardson’s Pamela (1740–1741) James Boswell born Fielding’s Joseph Andrews Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742–1745) Pope’s The New Dunciad (Book 4) Johnson’s Life of Mr. Richard Savage Death of Alexander Pope Second Jacobite rebellion, led by Charles Edward, the Young Pretender Death of Jonathan Swift The Young Pretender defeated at Culloden Collins’ Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegorical Subjects Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe (1747–1748) Franklin’s experiments with electricity announced Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs War of the Austrian Succession ended by the Peace of Aix-laChapelle Smollett’s Adventures of Roderick Random David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des lois Fielding’s Tom Jones Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes Bolingbroke’s Idea of a Patriot King
CHRONOLOGY 1750 1751
1752 1753
1754
1755
1756
1757
1758 1759
The Rambler founded (1750–1752) Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard Fielding’s Amelia Smollett’s Adventures of Peregrine Pickle Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert begin to publish the Encyclopédie (1751–1765) Richard Brinsley Sheridan born Frances Burney and Thomas Chatterton born Richardson’s History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753–1754) Smollett’s The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom Birth of Elizabeth Inchbald Hume’s History of England (1754– 1762) Death of Henry Fielding George Crabbe born Lisbon destroyed by earthquake Fielding’s Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon published posthumously Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language The Seven Years’ War against France, 1756–1763 (the French and Indian War in America, 1755–1760) William Pitt the elder becomes prime minister Johnson’s proposal for an edition of Shakespeare Death of Eliza Haywood Birth of William Godwin Robert Clive wins the battle of Plassey, in India Gray’s “The Progress of Poesy” and “The Bard” Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful Hume’s Natural History of Religion William Blake born The Idler founded (1758–1760) Mary Darby Robinson born Capture of Quebec by General James Wolfe Johnson’s History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia Voltaire’s Candide
1760–1820 1760
1761
1762
1763
1764 1765
1766
1768
1769
xix
The British Museum opens Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759–1767) Death of William Collins Mary Wollstonecraft born Robert Burns born Reign of George III James Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland William Beckford born Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse Death of Samuel Richardson Rousseau’s Du Contrat social and Émile Catherine the Great becomes czarina of Russia (1762–1796) The Seven Years’ War ended by the Peace of Paris Smart’s A Song to David James Hargreaves invents the spinning jenny Parliament passes the Stamp Act to tax the American colonies Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769) The Stamp Act repealed Swift’s Journal to Stella first published in a collection of his letters Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield Smollett’s Travels Through France and Italy Lessing’s Laokoon Rousseau in England (1766–1767) Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy The Royal Academy founded by George III First edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica Maria Edgeworth born Death of Laurence Sterne David Garrick organizes the Shakespeare Jubilee at Stratford-upon-Avon Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses (1769–1790)
CHRONOLOGY
1770
1771
1772 1773
1774
1775
1776
Richard Arkwright invents the spinning water frame Boston Massacre Burke’s Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village Death of Thomas Chatterton William Wordsworth born James Hogg born Arkwright’s first spinning mill founded Deaths of Thomas Gray and Tobias Smollett Walter Scott born Samuel Taylor Coleridge born Boston Tea Party Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen The first Continental Congress meets in Philadelphia Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther Death of Oliver Goldsmith Robert Southey born Burke’s speech on American taxation American War of Independence begins with the battles of Lexington and Concord Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals and The Duenna Beaumarchais’s Le Barbier de Séville James Watt and Matthew Boulton begin building steam engines in England Births of Jane Austen, Charles Lamb, Walter Savage Landor, and Matthew Lewis American Declaration of Independence Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788) Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature & Causes of the Wealth of Nations Thomas Paine’s Common Sense Death of David Hume
1777
1778
1779
1780 1781
1782
1783
1784
xx
Maurice Morgann’s Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff Sheridan’s The School for Scandal first performed (published 1780) General Burgoyne surrenders at Saratoga The American colonies allied with France Britain and France at war Captain James Cook discovers Hawaii Death of William Pitt, first earl of Chatham Deaths of Jean Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire William Hazlitt born Johnson’s Prefaces to the Works of the English Poets (1779–1781); reissued in 1781 as The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets Sheridan’s The Critic Samuel Crompton invents the spinning mule Death of David Garrick The Gordon Riots in London Charles Robert Maturin born Charles Cornwallis surrenders at Yorktown Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason Friedrich von Schiller’s Die Räuber William Cowper’s “The Journey of John Gilpin” published in the Public Advertiser Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses Rousseau’s Confessions published posthumously American War of Independence ended by the Definitive Treaty of Peace, signed at Paris William Blake’s Poetical Sketches George Crabbe’s The Village William Pitt the younger becomes prime minister Henri Beyle (Stendhal) born Beaumarchais’s Le Mariage de Figaro first performed (published 1785) Death of Samuel Johnson
CHRONOLOGY 1785
1786
1787
1788
1789
Warren Hastings returns to England from India James Boswell’s The Journey of a Tour of the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Cowper’s The Task Edmund Cartwright invents the power loom Thomas De Quincey born Thomas Love Peacock born William Beckford’s Vathek published in English (originally written in French in 1782) Robert Burns’s Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro Death of Frederick the Great The Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade founded in England The Constitutional Convention meets at Philadelphia; the Constitution is signed The trial of Hastings begins on charges of corruption of the government in India The Estates-General of France summoned U.S. Constitution is ratified George Washington elected president of the United States Giovanni Casanova’s Histoire de ma fuite (first manuscript of his memoirs) The Daily Universal Register becomes the Times (London) George Gordon, Lord Byron born The Estates-General meets at Versailles The National Assembly (Assemblée Nationale) convened The fall of the Bastille marks the beginning of the French Revolution The National Assembly draws up the Declaration of Rights of Man and of the Citizen First U.S. Congress meets in New York Blake’s Songs of Innocence Jeremy Bentham’s Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legis-
1790
1791
1792
1793
xxi
lation introduces the theory of utilitarianism Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne Congress sets permanent capital city site on the Potomac River First U.S. Census Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Edmund Malone’s edition of Shakespeare Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Man Death of Benjamin Franklin French royal family’s flight from Paris and capture at Varennes; imprisonment in the Tuileries Bill of Rights is ratified Paine’s The Rights of Man (1791– 1792) Boswell’s The Life of Johnson Burns’s Tam o’Shanter The Observer founded The Prussians invade France and are repulsed at Valmy September massacres The National Convention declares royalty abolished in France Washington reelected president of the United States New York Stock Exchange opens Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman William Bligh’s voyage to the South Sea in H.M.S. Bounty Percy Bysshe Shelley born Trial and execution of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette France declares war against England The Committee of Public Safety (Comité de Salut Public) established Eli Whitney devises the cotton gin William Godwin’s An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion and America Wordsworth’s An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches John Clare born
CHRONOLOGY 1794
1795
1796
1797
1798
1799
1800
Execution of Georges Danton and Maximilien de Robespierre Paine’s The Age of Reason (1794– 1796) Blake’s Songs of Experience Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho Death of Edward Gibbon The government of the Directory established (1795–1799) Hastings acquitted Landor’s Poems Death of James Boswell John Keats born Thomas Carlyle born Napoleon Bonaparte takes command in Italy Matthew Lewis’ The Monk John Adams elected president of the United States Death of Robert Burns The peace of Campo Formio: extinction of the Venetian Republic XYZ Affair Mutinies in the Royal Navy at Spithead and the Nore Blake’s Vala, Or the Four Zoas (first version) Mary Shelley born Deaths of Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Horace Walpole Napoleon invades Egypt Horatio Nelson wins the battle of the Nile Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads Landor’s Gebir Thomas Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population Napoleon becomes first consul Pitt introduces first income tax in Great Britain Sheridan’s Pizarro Honoré de Balzac born Thomas Hood born Alexander Pushkin born Thomas Jefferson elected president of the United States Alessandro Volta produces electricity from a cell Library of Congress established
1801 1802
1804
1805
1806
1807
1808
xxii
Death of William Cowper and Mary Darby Robinson Marie Jane Jewsbury and Thomas Babington Macaulay born First census taken in England The Treaty of Amiens marks the end of the French Revolutionary War The Edinburgh Review founded Birth of Harriet Martineau England’s war with France renewed The Louisiana Purchase Robert Fulton propels a boat by steam power on the Seine Birth of Thomas Lovell Beddoes George Borrow and James Clarence Mangan Napoleon crowned emperor of the French Jefferson reelected president of the United States Blake’s Milton (1804–1808) and Jerusalem The Code Napoleon promulgated in France Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell Benjamin Disraeli born Napoleon plans the invasion of England Battle of Trafalgar Battle of Austerlitz Beethoven’s Fidelio first produced Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel Scott’s Marmion Death of William Pitt Death of Charles James Fox Elizabeth Barrett born France invades Portugal Aaron Burr tried for treason and acquitted Byron’s Hours of Idleness Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies Wordsworth’s Ode on the Intimations of Immortality National uprising in Spain against the French invasion The Peninsular War begins James Madison elected president of the United States
CHRONOLOGY
1809
1810
1811–1820 1811
1812
1813
1814
Covent Garden theater burned down Goethe’s Faust (Part 1) Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony completed Lamb’s Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Drury Lane theater burned down and rebuilt The Quarterly Review founded Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers Byron sails for the Mediterranean Goya’s Los Desastres de la guerra (1809–1814) Alfred Tennyson born Edward Fitzgerald born Crabbe’s The Borough Scott’s The Lady of the Lake Elizabeth Gaskell born Regency of George IV Luddite Riots begin Coleridge’s Lectures on Shakespeare (1811–1814) Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility Shelley’s The Necessity of Atheism John Constable’s Dedham Vale William Makepeace Thackeray born Napoleon invades Russia; captures and retreats from Moscow United States declares war against England Henry Bell’s steamship Comet is launched on the Clyde river Madison reelected president of the United States Byron’s Childe Harold (Cantos 1–2) The Brothers Grimm’s Fairy Tales (1812–1815) Hegel’s Science of Logic Robert Browning born Charles Dickens born Wellington wins the battle of Vitoria and enters France Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice Byron’s The Giaour and The Bride of Abydos Shelley’s Queen Mab Southey’s Life of Nelson Napoleon abdicates and is exiled to Elba; Bourbon restoration with Louis XVIII
1815
1816
1817
xxiii
Treaty of Ghent ends the war between Britain and the United States Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park Byron’s The Corsair and Lara Scott’s Waverley Wordsworth’s The Excursion Napoleon returns to France (the Hundred Days); is defeated at Waterloo and exiled to St. Helena U.S.S. Fulton, the first steam warship, built Scott’s Guy Mannering Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature translated Wordsworth’s The White Doe of Rylstone Anthony Trollope born Byron leaves England permanently The Elgin Marbles exhibited in the British Museum James Monroe elected president of the United States Jane Austen’s Emma Byron’s Childe Harold (Canto 3) Coleridge’s Christabel, Kubla Khan: A Vision, The Pains of Sleep Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe Goethe’s Italienische Reise Peacock’s Headlong Hall Scott’s The Antiquary Shelley’s Alastor Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia Death of Richard Brinsley Sheridan Charlotte Brontë born Blackwood’s Edinburgh magazine founded Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion Byron’s Manfred Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria Hazlitt’s The Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays and The Round Table Keats’s Poems Peacock’s Melincourt David Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy and Taxation Death of Jane Austen Death of Mme de Staël Branwell Brontë born Henry David Thoreau born
CHRONOLOGY 1818
1819
1820–1830 1820
Byron’s Childe Harold (Canto 4), and Beppo Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets Keats’s Endymion Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey Scott’s Rob Roy and The Heart of Mid-Lothian Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Percy Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam Emily Brontë born Karl Marx born Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev born The Savannah becomes the first steamship to cross the Atlantic (in 26 days) Peterloo massacre in Manchester Byron’s Don Juan (1819–1824) and Mazeppa Crabbe’s Tales of the Hall Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Comic Writers Arthur Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Idea) Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor and A Legend of Montrose Shelley’s The Cenci, “The Masque of Anarchy,” and “Ode to the West Wind” Wordsworth’s Peter Bell Queen Victoria born George Eliot born Reign of George IV Trial of Queen Caroline Cato Street Conspiracy suppressed; Arthur Thistlewood hanged Monroe reelected president of the United States Missouri Compromise The London magazine founded Keats’s Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems Hazlitt’s Lectures Chiefly on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer Scott’s Ivanhoe and The Monastery
1821
1822
1823
1824
1825
xxiv
Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound Anne Brontë born Greek War of Independence begins Liberia founded as a colony for freed slaves Byron’s Cain, Marino Faliero, The Two Foscari, and Sardanapalus Hazlitt’s Table Talk (1821–1822) Scott’s Kenilworth Shelley’s Adonais and Epipsychidion Death of John Keats, Elizabeth Inchbald and Napoleon Charles Baudelaire, Feodor Dostoyevsky, and Gustave Flaubert born The Massacres of Chios (Greeks rebel against Turkish rule) Byron’s The Vision of Judgment De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater Peacock’s Maid Marian Scott’s Peveril of the Peak Shelley’s Hellas Death of Percy Bysshe Shelley Matthew Arnold born Monroe Doctrine proclaimed Byron’s The Age of Bronze and The Island Lamb’s Essays of Elia Scott’s Quentin Durward The National Gallery opened in London John Quincy Adams elected president of the United States The Westminster Review founded Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony first performed William (Wilkie) Collins born James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner Landor’s Imaginary Conversations (1824–1829) Scott’s Redgauntlet Death of George Gordon, Lord Byron Inauguration of steam-powered passenger and freight service on the Stockton and Darlington railway Bolivia and Brazil become independent Alessandro Manzoni’s I
CHRONOLOGY 1826
1827
1828
1829
1830–1837 1830
1831
1832
Promessi Sposi (1825–1826) André-Marie Ampère’s Mémoire sur la théorie mathématique des phénomènes électrodynamiques James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans Disraeli’s Vivian Grey (1826–1827) Scott’s Woodstock The battle of Navarino ensures the independence of Greece Josef Ressel obtains patent for the screw propeller for steamships Heinrich Heine’s Buch der Lieder Death of William Blake Andrew Jackson elected president of the United States Births of Henrik Ibsen, George Meredith, Margaret Oliphant, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Leo Tolstoy The Catholic Emancipation Act Robert Peel establishes the metropolitan police force Greek independence recognized by Turkey Balzac begins La Comédie humaine (1829–1848) Peacock’s The Misfortunes of Elphin J. M. W. Turner’s Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus Reign of William IV Charles X of France abdicates and is succeeded by Louis-Philippe The Liverpool-Manchester railway opened Tennyson’s Poems, Chiefly Lyrical Death of William Hazlitt Christina Rossetti born Michael Faraday discovers electromagnetic induction Charles Darwin’s voyage on H.M.S. Beagle begins (1831–1836) The Barbizon school of artists’ first exhibition Nat Turner slave revolt crushed in Virginia Peacock’s Crotchet Castle Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir Edward Trelawny’s The Adventures of a Younger Son Isabella Bird born The first Reform Bill
1833
1834
1835
1836
1837–1901 1837
xxv
Samuel Morse invents the telegraph Jackson reelected president of the United States Disraeli’s Contarini Fleming Goethe’s Faust (Part 2) Tennyson’s Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, including “The Lotus-Eaters” and “The Lady of Shalott” Death of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Death of Sir Walter Scott Lewis Carroll born Robert Browning’s Pauline John Keble launches the Oxford Movement American Anti-Slavery Society founded Lamb’s Last Essays of Elia Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833– 1834) Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony first performed Death of Maria Jane Jewsbury Abolition of slavery in the British Empire Louis Braille’s alphabet for the blind Balzac’s Le Père Goriot Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls (Part 1, 1834–1842) Death of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Death of Charles Lamb William Morris born Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales (1st ser.) Robert Browning’s Paracelsus Births of Samuel Butler and Mary Elizabeth Braddon Alexis de Tocqueville’s De la Democratie en Amerique (1835– 1840) Death of James Hogg Martin Van Buren elected president of the United States Dickens’ Sketches by Boz (1836– 1837) Landor’s Pericles and Aspasia Death of William Godwin Reign of Queen Victoria Carlyle’s The French Revolution
CHRONOLOGY
1838
1839
1840
1841
1842
Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1837–1838) and Pickwick Papers Disraeli’s Venetia and Henrietta Temple Chartist movement in England National Gallery in London opened Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s The Seraphim and Other Poems Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby (1838– 1839) Louis Daguerre perfects process for producing an image on a silvercoated copper plate Faraday’s Experimental Researches in Electricity (1839–1855) First Chartist riots Opium War between Great Britain and China Carlyle’s Chartism Canadian Act of Union Queen Victoria marries Prince Albert Charles Barry begins construction of the Houses of Parliament (1840– 1852) William Henry Harrison elected president of the United States Robert Browning’s Sordello Thomas Hardy and John Addington Symonds born New Zealand proclaimed a British colony James Clark Ross discovers the Antarctic continent Punch founded John Tyler succeeds to the presidency after the death of Harrison Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero-Worship Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop Chartist riots Income tax revived in Great Britain The Mines Act, forbidding work underground by women or by children under the age of ten Charles Edward Mudie’s Lending Library founded in London Dickens visits America Robert Browning’s Dramatic Lyrics Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome Tennyson’s Poems, including “Morte d’Arthur,” “St. Simeon Stylites,” and
1843
1844
1845
1846
1847
1848
xxvi
“Ulysses” Wordsworth’s Poems Marc Isambard Brunel’s Thames tunnel opened The Economist founded Carlyle’s Past and Present Dickens’ A Christmas Carol John Stuart Mill’s Logic Macaulay’s Critical and Historical Essays John Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1843–1860) Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, one of the first consumers’ cooperatives, founded by twentyeight Lancashire weavers James K. Polk elected president of the United States Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Poems, including “The Cry of the Children” Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit Disraeli’s Coningsby Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed Edward Carpenter and Gerard Manley Hopkins born The great potato famine in Ireland begins (1845–1849) Disraeli’s Sybil Repeal of the Corn Laws The Daily News founded (edited by Dickens the first three weeks) Standard-gauge railway introduced in Britain The Brontës’ pseudonymous Poems by Currer, Ellis and Action Bell Lear’s Book of Nonsense The Ten Hours Factory Act James Simpson uses chloroform as an anesthetic Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights Bram Stoker and Flora Annie Steel born Tennyson’s The Princess The year of revolutions in France, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Poland Marx and Engels issue The Communist Manifesto The Chartist Petition The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
CHRONOLOGY
1849
1850
1851
founded Zachary Taylor elected president of the United States Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Dickens’ Dombey and Son Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton Macaulay’s History of England (1848–1861) Mill’s Principles of Political Economy Thackeray’s Vanity Fair Death of Emily Brontë Birth of Richard Jefferies Bedford College for women founded Arnold’s The Strayed Reveller Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture William Thomas Stead born Death of Anne Brontë, Thomas Lovell Beddoes and James Clarence Mangan The Public Libraries Act First submarine telegraph cable laid between Dover and Calais Millard Fillmore succeeds to the presidency after the death of Taylor Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese Carlyle’s Latter-Day Pamphlets Dickens’ Household Words (1850– 1859) and David Copperfield Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke The Pre-Raphaelites publish the Germ Tennyson’s In Memoriam Thackeray’s The History of Pendennis Wordsworth’s The Prelude is published posthumously The Great Exhibition opens at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park Louis Napoleon seizes power in France Gold strike in Victoria incites Australian gold rush Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1851– 1853) Meredith’s Poems
1852
1853
1854
1855
1856
1857
xxvii
Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice (1851–1853) The Second Empire proclaimed with Napoleon III as emperor David Livingstone begins to explore the Zambezi (1852–1856) Franklin Pierce elected president of the United States Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna Thackeray’s The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. Crimean War (1853–1856) Arnold’s Poems, including “The Scholar Gypsy” and “Sohrab and Rustum” Charlotte Brontë’s Villette Elizabeth Gaskell’s Crawford and Ruth Frederick D. Maurice’s Working Men’s College founded in London with more than 130 pupils Battle of Balaklava Dickens’ Hard Times James George Frazer born Theodor Mommsen’s History of Rome (1854–1856) Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” Florence Nightingale in the Crimea (1854–1856) Oscar Wilde born David Livingstone discovers the Victoria Falls Robert Browning’s Men and Women Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South Olive Schreiner born Tennyson’s Maud Thackeray’s The Newcomes Trollope’s The Warden Death of Charlotte Brontë The Treaty of Paris ends the Crimean War Henry Bessemer’s steel process invented James Buchanan elected president of the United States H. Rider Haggard born The Indian Mutiny begins; crushed in 1858 The Matrimonial Causes Act Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor
CHRONOLOGY
1858
1859
1860
1861
1862
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh Dickens’ Little Dorritt Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days Trollope’s Barchester Towers Carlyle’s History of Frederick the Great (1858–1865) George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life Morris’ The Defense of Guinevere Trollope’s Dr. Thorne Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities Arthur Conan Doyle born George Eliot’s Adam Bede Fitzgerald’s The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel Mill’s On Liberty Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help Tennyson’s Idylls of the King Abraham Lincoln elected president of the United States The Cornhill magazine founded with Thackeray as editor James M. Barrie born William Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss American Civil War begins Louis Pasteur presents the germ theory of disease Arnold’s Lectures on Translating Homer Dickens’ Great Expectations George Eliot’s Silas Marner Meredith’s Evan Harrington Francis Turner Palgrave’s The Golden Treasury Trollope’s Framley Parsonage Peacock’s Gryll Grange Death of Prince Albert George Eliot’s Romola Meredith’s Modern Love Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market
xxviii
1863 1864
1865
1866
1867
1868
Ruskin’s Unto This Last Trollope’s Orley Farm Thomas Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature The Geneva Red Cross Convention signed by twelve nations Lincoln reelected president of the United States Robert Browning’s Dramatis Personae John Henry Newman’s Apologia pro vita sua Tennyson’s Enoch Arden Trollope’s The Small House at Allington Death of John Clare Assassination of Lincoln; Andrew Johnson succeeds to the presidency Arnold’s Essays in Criticism (1st ser.) Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend Meredith’s Rhoda Fleming A. C. Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon Arthur Symons born First successful transatlantic telegraph cable laid George Eliot’s Felix Holt, the Radical Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters Beatrix Potter born Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads The second Reform Bill Arnold’s New Poems Bagehot’s The English Constitution Carlyle’s Shooting Niagara Marx’s Das Kapital (vol. 1) Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset George William Russell (AE) born Gladstone becomes prime minister (1868–1874) Johnson impeached by House of Representatives; acquitted by Senate Ulysses S. Grant elected president of the United States Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868–1869)
CHRONOLOGY 1869
1870
1871
1872
1873
1874
1875
1876
Collins’ The Moonstone The Suez Canal opened Girton College, Cambridge, founded Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy Mill’s The Subjection of Women Trollope’s Phineas Finn The Elementary Education Act establishes schools under the aegis of local boards Dickens’ Edwin Drood Disraeli’s Lothair Morris’ The Earthly Paradise Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Poems Saki born Trade unions legalized Newnham College, Cambridge, founded for women students Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass Darwin’s The Descent of Man Meredith’s The Adventures of Harry Richmond Swinburne’s Songs Before Sunrise William H. Davies born Max Beerbohm born Samuel Butler’s Erewhon George Eliot’s Middlemarch Grant reelected president of the United States Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree Arnold’s Literature and Dogma Mill’s Autobiography Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds Dorothy Richardson born Disraeli becomes prime minister Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night Britain buys Suez Canal shares Trollope’s The Way We Live Now T. F. Powys born F. H. Bradley’s Ethical Studies George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda Henry James’s Roderick Hudson Meredith’s Beauchamp’s Career Morris’ Sigurd the Volsung Trollope’s The Prime Minister Death of Harriet Martineau
1877
1878
1879
1880
1881
1882
1883
xxix
Birth of Flora Thompson Rutherford B. Hayes elected president of the United States after Electoral Commission awards him disputed votes Henry James’s The American Electric street lighting introduced in London Hardy’s The Return of the Native Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads (2d ser.) Births of A. E. Coppard and Edward Thomas Somerville College and Lady Margaret Hall opened at Oxford for women The London telephone exchange built Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign (1879–1880) Browning’s Dramatic Idyls Meredith’s The Egoist Gladstone’s second term as prime minister (1880–1885) James A. Garfield elected president of the United States Browning’s Dramatic Idyls Second Series Disraeli’s Endymion Radclyffe Hall born Hardy’s The Trumpet-Major Lytton Strachey born Garfield assassinated; Chester A. Arthur succeeds to the presidency Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Washington Square D. G. Rossetti’s Ballads and Sonnets P. G. Wodehouse born Death of George Borrow Triple Alliance formed between German empire, Austrian empire, and Italy Leslie Stephen begins to edit the Dictionary of National Biography Married Women’s Property Act passed in Britain Britain occupies Egypt and the Sudan Uprising of the Mahdi: Britain evacuates the Sudan Royal College of Music opens
CHRONOLOGY
1884
1885
1886
1887
1888
1889 1890
1891
T. H. Green’s Ethics T. E. Hulme born Stevenson’s Treasure Island The Mahdi captures Omdurman: General Gordon appointed to command the garrison of Khartoum Grover Cleveland elected president of the United States The Oxford English Dictionary begins publishing The Fabian Society founded Hiram Maxim’s recoil-operated machine gun invented The Mahdi captures Khartoum: General Gordon killed Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines Marx’s Das Kapital (vol. 2) Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways Pater’s Marius the Epicurean The Canadian Pacific Railway completed Gold discovered in the Transvaal Births of Frances Cornford, Ronald Firbank, and Charles Stansby Walter Williams Henry James’s The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee Rupert Brooke born Haggard’s Allan Quatermain and She Hardy’s The Woodlanders Edwin Muir born Death of Richard Jefferies Benjamin Harrison elected president of the United States Henry James’s The Aspern Papers Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills T. E. Lawrence born Yeats’s The Wanderings of Oisin Death of Robert Browning Morris founds the Kelmscott Press Agatha Christie born Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1st ed.) Henry James’s The Tragic Muse Morris’ News From Nowhere Jean Rhys born Gissing’s New Grub Street Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles
1892
1893
1894
1895
1896
1897
xxx
Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray Grover Cleveland elected president of the United States Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Shaw’s Widower’s Houses J. R. R. Tolkien born Rebecca West and Hugh MacDiarmid born Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance and Salomé Vera Brittain born Death of John Addington Symonds Kipling’s The Jungle Book Moore’s Esther Waters Marx’s Das Kapital (vol. 3) Audrey Beardsley’s The Yellow Book begins to appear quarterly Shaw’s Arms and the Man Trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde William Ramsay announces discovery of helium The National Trust founded Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly Hardy’s Jude the Obscure Wells’s The Time Machine Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest Yeats’s Poems William McKinley elected president of the United States Failure of the Jameson Raid on the Transvaal Housman’s A Shropshire Lad Edmund Blunden and Austin Clarke born Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus Havelock Ellis’ Studies in the Psychology of Sex begins publication Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton and What Maisie Knew Kipling’s Captains Courageous Shaw’s Candida Stoker’s Dracula Wells’s The Invisible Man Death of Margaret Oliphant
CHRONOLOGY 1898
1899
1900
1901–1910 1901
1902
Ruth Pitter born Kitchener defeats the Mahdist forces at Omdurman: the Sudan reoccupied Hardy’s Wessex Poems Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw C. S. Lewis born Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra and You Never Can Tell Alec Waugh born Wells’s The War of the Worlds Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol The Boer War begins Elizabeth Bowen born Noël Coward born Elgar’s Enigma Variations Kipling’s Stalky and Co. McKinley reelected president of the United States British Labour party founded Boxer Rebellion in China Reginald A. Fessenden transmits speech by wireless First Zeppelin trial flight Max Planck presents his first paper on the quantum theory Conrad’s Lord Jim Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams V. S. Pritchett born William Butler Yeats’s The Shadowy Waters Reign of King Edward VII William McKinley assassinated; Theodore Roosevelt succeeds to the presidency First transatlantic wireless telegraph signal transmitted Chekhov’s Three Sisters Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life Rudyard Kipling’s Kim Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit Shaw’s Captain Brassbound’s Conversion August Strindberg’s The Dance of Death Lewis Grassic Gibbon born Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton
1903
1904
xxxi
Arnold Bennett’s Anna of the Five Towns Cézanne’s Le Lac D’Annecy Conrad’s Heart of Darkness Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience Kipling’s Just So Stories Maugham’s Mrs. Cradock Stevie Smith born Times Literary Supplement begins publishing At its London congress the Russian Social Democratic Party divides into Mensheviks, led by Plekhanov, and Bolsheviks, led by Lenin The treaty of Panama places the Canal Zone in U.S. hands for a nominal rent Motor cars regulated in Britain to a 20-mile-per-hour limit The Wright brothers make a successful flight in the United States Burlington magazine founded Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh published posthumously Cyril Connolly born George Gissing’s The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts Henry James’s The Ambassadors Alan Paton born Shaw’s Man and Superman Synge’s Riders to the Sea produced in Dublin Yeats’s In the Seven Woods and On Baile’s Strand Frank O’Connor, William Plomer, Edward Upward and John Wyndham born Roosevelt elected president of the United States Russo-Japanese war (1904–1905) Construction of the Panama Canal begins The ultraviolet lamp invented The engineering firm of Rolls Royce founded Barrie’s Peter Pan first performed
CHRONOLOGY
1905
1906
Births of Cecil Day Lewis and Nancy Mitford Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard Conrad’s Nostromo Henry James’s The Golden Bowl Kipling’s Traffıcs and Discoveries Georges Rouault’s Head of a Tragic Clown G. M. Trevelyan’s England Under the Stuarts Puccini’s Madame Butterfly First Shaw-Granville Barker season at the Royal Court Theatre The Abbey Theatre founded in Dublin Death of Isabella Bird Russian sailors on the battleship Potemkin mutiny After riots and a general strike the czar concedes demands by the Duma for legislative powers, a wider franchise, and civil liberties Albert Einstein publishes his first theory of relativity The Austin Motor Company founded Bennett’s Tales of the Five Towns Claude Debussy’s La Mer E. M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread Richard Strauss’s Salome H. G. Wells’s Kipps Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis Births of Norman Cameron, Henry Green, and Mary Renault Liberals win a landslide victory in the British general election The Trades Disputes Act legitimizes peaceful picketing in Britain Captain Dreyfus rehabilitated in France J. J. Thomson begins research on gamma rays The U.S. Pure Food and Drug Act passed Churchill’s Lord Randolph Churchill William Empson born Galsworthy’s The Man of Property Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma Yeats’s Poems 1899–1905
1907
1908
1909
xxxii
Exhibition of cubist paintings in Paris Henry Adams’ The Education of Henry Adams Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution Conrad’s The Secret Agent Births of Barbara Comyns, Daphne du Maurier, and Christopher Fry Forster’s The Longest Journey André Gide’s La Porte étroite Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island and Major Barbara Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World Trevelyan’s Garibaldi’s Defence of the Roman Republic Christopher Caudwell (Christopher St. John Sprigg) born Herbert Asquith becomes prime minister David Lloyd George becomes chancellor of the exchequer William Howard Taft elected president of the United States The Young Turks seize power in Istanbul Henry Ford’s Model T car produced Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale Pierre Bonnard’s Nude Against the Light Georges Braque’s House at L’Estaque Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday Jacob Epstein’s Figures erected in London Forster’s A Room with a View Anatole France’s L’Ile des Pingouins Henri Matisse’s Bonheur de Vivre Elgar’s First Symphony Ford Madox Ford founds the English Review Ian Fleming born The Young Turks depose Sultan Abdul Hamid The Anglo-Persian Oil Company formed Louis Bleriot crosses the English Channel from France by monoplane Admiral Robert Peary reaches the
CHRONOLOGY
1910–1936 1910
1911
North Pole Freud lectures at Clark University (Worcester, Mass.) on psychoanalysis Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes opens in Paris Galsworthy’s Strife Hardy’s Time’s Laughingstocks Malcolm Lowry born Claude Monet’s Water Lilies Stephen Spender born Trevelyan’s Garibaldi and the Thousand Wells’s Tono-Bungay first published (book form, 1909) Reign of King George V The Liberals win the British general election Marie Curie’s Treatise on Radiography Arthur Evans excavates Knossos Edouard Manet and the first postimpressionist exhibition in London Filippo Marinetti publishes “Manifesto of the Futurist Painters” Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion Bennett’s Clayhanger Forster’s Howards End Galsworthy’s Justice and The Silver Box Kipling’s Rewards and Fairies Norman MacCaig born Rimsky-Korsakov’s Le Coq d’or Stravinsky’s The Firebird Vaughan Williams’ A Sea Symphony Wells’s The History of Mr. Polly Wells’s The New Machiavelli first published (in book form, 1911) Lloyd George introduces National Health Insurance Bill Suffragette riots in Whitehall Roald Amundsen reaches the South Pole Bennett’s The Card Chagall’s Self Portrait with Seven Fingers Conrad’s Under Western Eyes D. H. Lawrence’s The White Peacock Katherine Mansfield’s In a German
xxxiii
1912
1913
1914
Pension Edward Marsh edits Georgian Poetry Moore’s Hail and Farewell (1911– 1914) Flann O’Brien born Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier Stravinsky’s Petrouchka Trevelyan’s Garibaldi and the Making of Italy Wells’s The New Machiavelli Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde Woodrow Wilson elected president of the United States SS Titanic sinks on its maiden voyage Five million Americans go to the movies daily; London has four hundred movie theaters Second post-impressionist exhibition in London Bennett’s and Edward Knoblock’s Milestones Constantin Brancusi’s Maiastra Wassily Kandinsky’s Black Lines D. H. Lawrence’s The Trespasser Death of William Thomas Stead Second Balkan War begins Henry Ford pioneers factory assembly technique through conveyor belts Epstein’s Tomb of Oscar Wilde New York Armory Show introduces modern art to the world Alain Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes Freud’s Totem and Tabu D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers Mann’s Death in Venice Proust’s Du Côté de chez Swann (first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu, 1913–1922) Barbara Pym born Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloé R.S. Thomas born The Panama Canal opens (formal dedication on 12 July 1920) Irish Home Rule Bill passed in the House of Commons Archduke Franz Ferdinand assas-
CHRONOLOGY
1915
1916
sinated at Sarajevo World War I begins Battles of the Marne, Masurian Lakes, and Falkland Islands Joyce’s Dubliners Norman Nicholson born Shaw’s Pygmalion and Androcles and the Lion Yeats’s Responsibilities Wyndham Lewis publishes Blast magazine and The Vorticist Manifesto C. H. Sisson, Patrick O’Brian, and Henry Reed born The Dardanelles campaign begins Britain and Germany begin naval and submarine blockades The Lusitania is sunk Hugo Junkers manufactures the first fighter aircraft First Zeppelin raid in London Brooke’s 1914: Five Sonnets Norman Douglas’ Old Calabria D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation Gustav Holst’s The Planets D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow Wyndham Lewis’s The Crowd Maugham’s Of Human Bondage Pablo Picasso’s Harlequin Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony John Cornford and Denton Welch born Evacuation of Gallipoli and the Dardanelles Battles of the Somme, Jutland, and Verdun Britain introduces conscription The Easter Rebellion in Dublin Asquith resigns and David Lloyd George becomes prime minister The Sykes-Picot agreement on the partition of Turkey First military tanks used Wilson reelected president president of the United States Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu Griffith’s Intolerance Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
xxxiv
1917
1918
1919
Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious Moore’s The Brook Kerith Edith Sitwell edits Wheels (1916– 1921) Wells’s Mr. Britling Sees It Through United States enters World War I Czar Nicholas II abdicates The Balfour Declaration on a Jewish national home in Palestine The Bolshevik Revolution Georges Clemenceau elected prime minister of France Lenin appointed chief commissar; Trotsky appointed minister of foreign affairs Conrad’s The Shadow-Line Douglas’ South Wind Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations Modigliani’s Nude with Necklace Sassoon’s The Old Huntsman Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony Yeats’s The Wild Swans at Coole Wilson puts forward Fourteen Points for World Peace Central Powers and Russia sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk Execution of Czar Nicholas II and his family Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicates The Armistice signed Women granted the vote at age thirty in Britain Rupert Brooke’s Collected Poems Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Poems Joyce’s Exiles Lewis’s Tarr Sassoon’s Counter-Attack Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West Strachey’s Eminent Victorians Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle Charlie Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms The Versailles Peace Treaty signed J. W. Alcock and A. W. Brown make first transatlantic flight Ross Smith flies from London to Australia National Socialist party founded in
CHRONOLOGY
1920
1921
Germany Benito Mussolini founds the Fascist party in Italy Sinn Fein Congress adopts declaration of independence in Dublin Eamon De Valera elected president of Sinn Fein party Communist Third International founded Lady Astor elected first woman Member of Parliament Prohibition in the United States John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace Eliot’s Poems Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence Shaw’s Heartbreak House The Bauhaus school of design, building, and crafts founded by Walter Gropius Amedeo Modigliani’s Self-Portrait Patricia Beer born The League of Nations established Warren G. Harding elected president of the United States Senate votes against joining the League and rejects the Treaty of Versailles The Nineteenth Amendment gives women the right to vote White Russian forces of Denikin and Kolchak defeated by the Bolsheviks ˇ apek’s R.U.R. Karel C Galsworthy’s In Chancery and The Skin Game Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street Katherine Mansfield’s Bliss Matisse’s Odalisques (1920–1925) Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberly Paul Valéry’s Le Cimetière Marin Yeats’s Michael Robartes and the Dancer Edwin Morgan born Britain signs peace with Ireland First medium-wave radio broadcast in the United States The British Broadcasting Corporation founded Braque’s Still Life with Guitar
1922
1923
xxxv
Chaplin’s The Kid Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow Paul Klee’s The Fish D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love John McTaggart’s The Nature of Existence (vol. 1) Moore’s Héloïse and Abélard Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author Shaw’s Back to Methuselah Strachey’s Queen Victoria Births of George Mackay Brown and Brian Moore Lloyd George’s Coalition government succeeded by Bonar Law’s Conservative government Benito Mussolini marches on Rome and forms a government William Cosgrave elected president of the Irish Free State The BBC begins broadcasting in London Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter discover Tutankhamen’s tomb The PEN club founded in London The Criterion founded with T. S. Eliot as editor Kingsley Amis born Eliot’s The Waste Land A. E. Housman’s Last Poems Joyce’s Ulysses D. H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod and England, My England Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt O’Neill’s Anna Christie Pirandello’s Henry IV Edith Sitwell’s Façade Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room Yeats’s The Trembling of the Veil Donald Davie born The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics established French and Belgian troops occupy the Ruhr in consequence of Germany’s failure to pay reparations Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) proclaims Turkey a republic and is elected president
CHRONOLOGY
1924
1925
Warren G. Harding dies; Calvin Coolidge becomes president Stanley Baldwin succeeds Bonar Law as prime minister Adolf Hitler’s attempted coup in Munich fails Time magazine begins publishing E. N. da C. Andrade’s The Structure of the Atom Brendan Behan born Bennett’s Riceyman Steps Churchill’s The World Crisis (1923– 1927) J. E. Flecker’s Hassan produced Nadine Gordimer born Paul Klee’s Magic Theatre Lawrence’s Kangaroo Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus Sibelius’ Sixth Symphony Picasso’s Seated Woman William Walton’s Façade Elizabeth Jane Howard born Ramsay MacDonald forms first Labour government, loses general election, and is succeeded by Stanley Baldwin Calvin Coolidge elected president of the United States Noël Coward’s The Vortex Forster’s A Passage to India Mann’s The Magic Mountain Shaw’s St. Joan G. F. Dutton born Reza Khan becomes shah of Iran First surrealist exhibition held in Paris Alban Berg’s Wozzeck Chaplin’s The Gold Rush John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby André Gide’s Les Faux Monnayeurs Hardy’s Human Shows and Far Phantasies
xxxvi
1926
1927
1928
Huxley’s Those Barren Leaves Kafka’s The Trial O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and The Common Reader Brancusi’s Bird in Space Shostakovich’s First Symphony Sibelius’ Tapiola Ford’s A Man Could Stand Up Gide’s Si le grain ne meurt Hemingway’s The Sun also Rises Kafka’s The Castle D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom privately circulated Maugham’s The Casuarina Tree O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars Puccini’s Turandot Jan Morris born General Chiang Kai-shek becomes prime minister in China Trotsky expelled by the Communist party as a deviationist; Stalin becomes leader of the party and dictator of the Soviet Union Charles Lindbergh flies from New York to Paris J. W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time Freud’s Autobiography translated into English Albert Giacometti’s Observing Head Ernest Hemingway’s Men Without Women Fritz Lang’s Metropolis Wyndham Lewis’ Time and Western Man F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise Proust’s Le Temps retrouvé posthumously published Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse The Kellogg-Briand Pact, outlawing war and providing for peaceful settlement of disputes, signed in Paris by sixty-two nations, including the Soviet Union Herbert Hoover elected president of the United States
CHRONOLOGY
1929
Women’s suffrage granted at age twenty-one in Britain Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Three-Penny Opera Eisenstein’s October Huxley’s Point Counter Point Christopher Isherwood’s All the Conspirators D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover Wyndham Lewis’ The Childermass Matisse’s Seated Odalisque Munch’s Girl on a Sofa Shaw’s Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism Virginia Woolf’s Orlando Yeats’s The Tower Iain Chrichton Smith born The Labour party wins British general election Trotsky expelled from the Soviet Union Museum of Modern Art opens in New York Collapse of U.S. stock exchange begins world economic crisis Robert Bridges’s The Testament of Beauty William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms Ernst Junger’s The Storm of Steel Hugo von Hoffmansthal’s Poems Henry Moore’s Reclining Figure J. B. Priestley’s The Good Companions Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front Shaw’s The Applecart R. C. Sheriff’s Journey’s End Edith Sitwell’s Gold Coast Customs Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own Yeats’s The Winding Stair Second surrealist manifesto; Salva-
xxxvii
1930
1931
dor Dali joins the surrealists Epstein’s Night and Day Mondrian’s Composition with Yellow Blue Death of Edward Carpenter and Flora Annie Steel John Montague and Keith Waterhouse born Allied occupation of the Rhineland ends Mohandas Gandhi opens civil disobedience campaign in India The Daily Worker, journal of the British Communist party, begins publishing J. W. Reppe makes artificial fabrics from an acetylene base John Arden born Auden’s Poems Coward’s Private Lives Eliot’s Ash Wednesday Wyndham Lewis’s The Apes of God Maugham’s Cakes and Ale Ezra Pound’s XXX Cantos Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies Birth of Kamau (Edward) Brathwaite and Ruth Rendell The failure of the Credit Anstalt in Austria starts a financial collapse in Central Europe Britain abandons the gold standard; the pound falls by twenty-five percent Mutiny in the Royal Navy at Invergordon over pay cuts Ramsay MacDonald resigns, splits the Cabinet, and is expelled by the Labour party; in the general election the National Government wins by a majority of five hundred seats The Statute of Westminster defines dominion status Ninette de Valois founds the VicWells Ballet (eventually the Royal Ballet) Coward’s Cavalcade Dali’s The Persistence of Memory John le Carré born O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Elec-
CHRONOLOGY
1932
1933
tra Anthony Powell’s Afternoon Men Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast Virginia Woolf’s The Waves Caroline Blackwood born Franklin D. Roosevelt elected president of the United States Paul von Hindenburg elected president of Germany; Franz von Papen elected chancellor Sir Oswald Mosley founds British Union of Fascists The BBC takes over development of television from J. L. Baird’s company Basic English of 850 words designed as a prospective international language The Folger Library opens in Washington, D.C. The Shakespeare Memorial Theatre opens in Stratford-upon-Avon Faulkner’s Light in August Huxley’s Brave New World F. R. Leavis’ New Bearings in English Poetry Boris Pasternak’s Second Birth Ravel’s Concerto for Left Hand Athol Fugard and Peter Redgrove born Rouault’s Christ Mocked by Soldiers Waugh’s Black Mischief Yeats’s Words for Music Perhaps Roosevelt inaugurates the New Deal Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany The Reichstag set on fire Hitler suspends civil liberties and freedom of the press; German trade unions suppressed George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein found the School of American Ballet Beryl Bainbridge born Lowry’s Ultramarine André Malraux’s La Condition humaine Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and
xxxviii
1934
1935
London Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Peter Scupham and Anne Stevenson born The League Disarmament Conference ends in failure The Soviet Union admitted to the League Hitler becomes Führer Civil war in Austria; Engelbert Dollfuss assassinated in attempted Nazi coup Frédéric Joliot and Irene Joliot-Curie discover artificial (induced) radioactivity Einstein’s My Philosophy Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night Graves’s I, Claudius and Claudius the God Toynbee’s A Study of History begins publication (1934–1954) Waugh’s A Handful of Dust Births of Fleur Adcock, Alan Bennett, Christopher Wallace-Crabbe, and Alasdair Gray Grigori Zinoviev and other Soviet leaders convicted of treason Stanley Baldwin becomes prime minister in National Government; National Government wins general election in Britain Italy invades Abyssinia Germany repudiates disarmament clauses of Treaty of Versailles Germany reintroduces compulsory military service and outlaws the Jews Robert Watson-Watt builds first practical radar equipment Karl Jaspers’ Suffering and Existence Births of André Brink, Dennis Potter, Keith Roberts, and Jon Stallworthy Ivy Compton-Burnett’s A House and Its Head Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral Barbara Hepworth’s Three Forms George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess Greene’s England Made Me
CHRONOLOGY
1936–1952 1936
1937
Isherwood’s Mr. Norris Changes Trains Malraux’s Le Temps du mépris Yeats’s Dramatis Personae Klee’s Child Consecrated to Suffering Benedict Nicholson’s White Relief Death of Lewis Grassic Gibbon Edward VII accedes to the throne in January; abdicates in December Reign of George VI German troops occupy the Rhineland Ninety-nine percent of German electorate vote for Nazi candidates The Popular Front wins general election in France; Léon Blum becomes prime minister Roosevelt reelected president of the United States The Popular Front wins general election in Spain Spanish Civil War begins Italian troops occupy Addis Ababa; Abyssinia annexed by Italy BBC begins television service from Alexandra Palace Auden’s Look, Stranger! Auden and Isherwood’s The Ascent of F-6 A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic Chaplin’s Modern Times Greene’s A Gun for Sale Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza Keynes’s General Theory of Employment F. R. Leavis’ Revaluation Mondrian’s Composition in Red and Blue Dylan Thomas’ Twenty-five Poems Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come filmed Steward Conn and Reginald Hill born Death of John Cornford Trial of Karl Radek and other Soviet leaders Neville Chamberlain succeeds Stanley Baldwin as prime minister
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1938
1939
China and Japan at war Frank Whittle designs jet engine Picasso’s Guernica Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony Magritte’s La Reproduction interdite Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not Malraux’s L’Espoir Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier Priestley’s Time and the Conways Virginia Woolf’s The Years Emma Tennant born Death of Christopher Caudwell (Christopher St. John Sprigg) Trial of Nikolai Bukharin and other Soviet political leaders Austria occupied by German troops and declared part of the Reich Hitler states his determination to annex Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia Britain, France, Germany, and Italy sign the Munich agreement German troops occupy Sudetenland Edward Hulton founds Picture Post Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise du Maurier’s Rebecca Faulkner’s The Unvanquished Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée Yeats’s New Poems Anthony Asquith’s Pygmalion and Walt Disney’s Snow White Ngu˜gı˜wa Thiong’o born German troops occupy Bohemia and Moravia; Czechoslovakia incorporated into Third Reich Madrid surrenders to General Franco; the Spanish Civil War ends Italy invades Albania Spain joins Germany, Italy, and Japan in anti-Comintern Pact Britain and France pledge support to Poland, Romania, and Greece The Soviet Union proposes defensive alliance with Britain; British military mission visits Moscow The Soviet Union and Germany sign nonaggression treaty, secretly pro-
CHRONOLOGY
1940
1941
viding for partition of Poland between them Germany invades Poland; Britain, France, and Germany at war The Soviet Union invades Finland New York World’s Fair opens Eliot’s The Family Reunion Births of Ayi Kwei Armah, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Robert Nye Isherwood’s Good-bye to Berlin Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1922– 1939) MacNeice’s Autumn Journal Powell’s What’s Become of Waring? Ayi Kwei Armah born Churchill becomes prime minister Italy declares war on France, Britain, and Greece General de Gaulle founds Free French Movement The Battle of Britain and the bombing of London Roosevelt reelected president of the United States for third term Betjeman’s Old Lights for New Chancels Angela Carter born Chaplin’s The Great Dictator Bruce Chatwin born Death of William H. Davies J. M. Coetzee born Disney’s Fantasia Greene’s The Power and the Glory Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls C. P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers (retitled George Passant in 1970, when entire sequence of ten novels, published 1940–1970, was entitled Strangers and Brothers) German forces occupy Yugoslavia, Greece, and Crete, and invade the Soviet Union Lend-Lease agreement between the United States and Britain President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill sign the Atlantic Charter Japanese forces attack Pearl Harbor; United States declares war on Japan,
1942
1943
1944
xl
Germany, Italy; Britain on Japan Auden’s New Year Letter James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon Huxley’s Grey Eminence Derek Mahon born Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony Tippett’s A Child of Our Time Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts Japanese forces capture Singapore, Hong Kong, Bataan, Manila German forces capture Tobruk U.S. fleet defeats the Japanese in the Coral Sea, captures Guadalcanal Battle of El Alamein Allied forces land in French North Africa Atom first split at University of Chicago William Beveridge’s Social Insurance and Allied Services Albert Camus’s L’Étranger Joyce Cary’s To Be a Pilgrim Edith Sitwell’s Street Songs Waugh’s Put Out More Flags Births of Ama Ata Aidoo, Douglas Dunn, Susan Hill, and Jonathan Raban German forces surrender at Stalingrad German and Italian forces surrender in North Africa Italy surrenders to Allies and declares war on Germany Cairo conference between Roosevelt, Churchill, Chiang Kai-shek Teheran conference between Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin Eliot’s Four Quartets Henry Moore’s Madonna and Child Sartre’s Les Mouches Vaughan Williams’ Fifth Symphony Peter Carey, David Malouf Iain Sinclair born Allied forces land in Normandy and southern France Allied forces enter Rome Attempted assassination of Hitler
CHRONOLOGY
1945
fails Liberation of Paris U.S. forces land in Philippines German offensive in the Ardennes halted Roosevelt reelected president of the United States for fourth term Education Act passed in Britain Pay-as-You-Earn income tax introduced Beveridge’s Full Employment in a Free Society Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth Huxley’s Time Must Have a Stop Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge Sartre’s Huis Clos Edith Sitwell’s Green Song and Other Poems Graham Sutherland’s Christ on the Cross Trevelyan’s English Social History David Constantine, Craig Raine and W. G. Sebald born British and Indian forces open offensive in Burma Yalta conference between Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin Mussolini executed by Italian partisans Roosevelt dies; Harry S. Truman becomes president Hitler commits suicide; German forces surrender The Potsdam Peace Conference The United Nations Charter ratified in San Francisco The Labour Party wins British General Election Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki Surrender of Japanese forces ends World War II Trial of Nazi war criminals opens at Nuremberg All-India Congress demands British withdrawal from India De Gaulle elected president of French Provisional Government; resigns the next year Betjeman’s New Bats in Old Belfries
1946
1947
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Britten’s Peter Grimes Orwell’s Animal Farm Russell’s History of Western Philosophy Sartre’s The Age of Reason Edith Sitwell’s The Song of the Cold Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited Births of Wendy Cope and Peter Reading Death of Arthur Symons Bills to nationalize railways, coal mines, and the Bank of England passed in Britain Nuremberg Trials concluded United Nations General Assembly meets in New York as its permanent headquarters The Arab Council inaugurated in Britain Frederick Ashton’s Symphonic Variations Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia David Lean’s Great Expectations O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh Roberto Rosselini’s Paisà Dylan Thomas’ Deaths and Entrances Jim Crace and Philip Pullman born President Truman announces program of aid to Greece and Turkey and outlines the “Truman Doctrine” Independence of India proclaimed; partition between India and Pakistan, and communal strife between Hindus and Moslems follows General Marshall calls for a European recovery program First supersonic air flight Britain’s first atomic pile at Harwell comes into operation Edinburgh festival established Discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Palestine Princess Elizabeth marries Philip Mountbatten, duke of Edinburgh Auden’s Age of Anxiety Camus’s La Peste Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux Lowry’s Under the Volcano Priestley’s An Inspector Calls
CHRONOLOGY
1948
1949
Edith Sitwell’s The Shadow of Cain Waugh’s Scott-King’s Modern Europe Births of Dermot Healy, and Redmond O’Hanlon Death of Flora Thompson, Gandhi assassinated Czech Communist Party seizes power Pan-European movement (1948– 1958) begins with the formation of the permanent Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) Berlin airlift begins as the Soviet Union halts road and rail traffic to the city British mandate in Palestine ends; Israeli provisional government formed Yugoslavia expelled from Soviet bloc Columbia Records introduces the long-playing record Truman elected of the United States for second term Greene’s The Heart of the Matter Huxley’s Ape and Essence Leavis’ The Great Tradition Pound’s Cantos Priestley’s The Linden Tree Waugh’s The Loved One Death of Denton Welch Ciaran Carson and Zakes Mda born North Atlantic Treaty Organization established with headquarters in Brussels Berlin blockade lifted German Federal Republic recognized; capital established at Bonn Konrad Adenauer becomes German chancellor Mao Tse-tung becomes chairman of the People’s Republic of China following Communist victory over the Nationalists Peter Ackroyd born Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex Cary’s A Fearful Joy
1950
1951
1952–
xlii
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four Birth of Michèle Roberts Korean War breaks out Nobel Prize for literature awarded to Bertrand Russell R. H. S. Crossman’s The God That Failed T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party Fry’s Venus Observed Doris Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing C. S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956) Wyndham Lewis’ Rude Assignment George Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant Carol Reed’s The Third Man Dylan Thomas’ Twenty-six Poems Births of Sara Maitland, and A. N. Wilson Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean defect from Britain to the Soviet Union The Conservative party under Winston Churchill wins British general election The Festival of Britain celebrates both the centenary of the Crystal Palace Exhibition and British postwar recovery Electric power is produced by atomic energy at Arcon, Idaho W. H. Auden’s Nones Samuel Beckett’s Molloy and Malone Dies Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd Greene’s The End of the Affair Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon Wyndham Lewis’ Rotting Hill Anthony Powell’s A Question of Upbringing (first volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, 1951–1975) J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye C. P. Snow’s The Masters Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress Peter Fallon born Reign of Elizabeth II
CHRONOLOGY
1953
1954
At Eniwetok Atoll the United States detonates the first hydrogen bomb The European Coal and Steel Community comes into being Radiocarbon dating introduced to archaeology Michael Ventris deciphers Linear B script Dwight D. Eisenhower elected president of the United States Beckett’s Waiting for Godot Charles Chaplin’s Limelight Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea Arthur Koestler’s Arrow in the Blue F. R. Leavis’ The Common Pursuit Lessing’s Martha Quest (first volume of The Children of Violence, 1952–1965) C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity Thomas’ Collected Poems Evelyn Waugh’s Men at Arms (first volume of Sword of Honour, 1952– 1961) Angus Wilson’s Hemlock and After Births of Rohinton Mistry and Vikram Seth Constitution for a European political community drafted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg executed for passing U.S. secrets to the Soviet Union Cease-fire declared in Korea Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa guide, Tenzing Norkay, scale Mt. Everest Nobel Prize for literature awarded to Winston Churchill General Mohammed Naguib proclaims Egypt a republic Beckett’s Watt Joyce Cary’s Except the Lord Robert Graves’s Poems 1953 Death of Norman Cameron Birth of Tony Parsons First atomic submarine, Nautilus, is launched by the United States Dien Bien Phu captured by the Vietminh Geneva Conference ends French
1955
1956
xliii
dominion over Indochina U.S. Supreme Court declares racial segregation in schools unconstitutional Nasser becomes president of Egypt Nobel Prize for literature awarded to Ernest Hemingway Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim John Betjeman’s A Few Late Chrysanthemums William Golding’s Lord of the Flies Christopher Isherwood’s The World in the Evening Koestler’s The Invisible Writing Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net C. P. Snow’s The New Men Thomas’ Under Milk Wood published posthumously Births of Iain Banks, Louise De Bernières, Romesh Gunesekera, Kevin Hart, Alan Hollinghurst, and Hanif Kureishi Warsaw Pact signed West Germany enters NATO as Allied occupation ends The Conservative party under Anthony Eden wins British general election Cary’s Not Honour More Greene’s The Quiet American Philip Larkin’s The Less Deceived F. R. Leavis’ D. H. Lawrence, Novelist Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita Patrick White’s The Tree of Man John Burnside and Patrick McCabe born Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal leads to Israeli, British, and French armed intervention Uprising in Hungary suppressed by Soviet troops Khrushchev denounces Stalin at Twentieth Communist Party Congress Eisenhower reelected president of the United States Anthony Burgess’ Time for a Tiger Golding’s Pincher Martin Murdoch’s Flight from the En-
CHRONOLOGY
1957
1958
chanter John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger Snow’s Homecomings Edmund Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes Janice Galloway, Philip Kerr and Kate Thompson born The Soviet Union launches the first artificial earth satellite, Sputnik I Eden succeeded by Harold Macmillan Suez Canal reopened Eisenhower Doctrine formulated Parliament receives the Wolfenden Report on Homosexuality and Prostitution Nobel Prize for literature awarded to Albert Camus Beckett’s Endgame and All That Fall Lawrence Durrell’s Justine (first volume of The Alexandria Quartet, 1957–1960) Ted Hughes’s The Hawk in the Rain Murdoch’s The Sandcastle V. S. Naipaul’s The Mystic Masseur Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night Osborne’s The Entertainer Muriel Spark’s The Comforters White’s Voss Death of Dorothy Richardson Birth of Nick Hornby European Economic Community established Khrushchev succeeds Bulganin as Soviet premier Charles de Gaulle becomes head of France’s newly constituted Fifth Republic The United Arab Republic formed by Egypt and Syria The United States sends troops into Lebanon First U.S. satellite, Explorer 1, launched Nobel Prize for literature awarded to Boris Pasternak Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society
1959
1960
1961
xliv
Greene’s Our Man in Havana Murdoch’s The Bell Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago Snow’s The Conscience of the Rich Greg Delanty born Fidel Castro assumes power in Cuba St. Lawrence Seaway opens The European Free Trade Association founded Alaska and Hawaii become the fortyninth and fiftieth states The Conservative party under Harold Macmillan wins British general election Brendan Behan’s The Hostage Golding’s Free Fall Graves’s Collected Poems Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party Snow’s The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution Spark’s Memento Mori Susanna Clarke and Robert Crawford born South Africa bans the African National Congress and Pan-African Congress The Congo achieves independence John F. Kennedy elected president of the United States The U.S. bathyscaphe Trieste descends to 35,800 feet Publication of the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover permitted by court Auden’s Hommage to Clio Betjeman’s Summoned by Bells Pinter’s The Caretaker Snow’s The Affair David Storey’s This Sporting Life Andrew Miller and Ian Rankin born South Africa leaves the British Commonwealth Sierra Leone and Tanganyika achieve independence The Berlin Wall erected The New English Bible published Beckett’s How It Is Greene’s A Burnt-Out Case Koestler’s The Lotus and the Robot
CHRONOLOGY
1962
1963
Murdoch’s A Severed Head Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas Osborne’s Luther Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie White’s Riders in the Chariot Jonathan Coe, Meaghan Delahunt and Jackie Kay born John Glenn becomes first U.S. astronaut to orbit earth The United States launches the spacecraft Mariner to explore Venus Algeria achieves independence Cuban missile crisis ends in withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba Adolf Eichmann executed in Israel for Nazi war crimes Second Vatican Council convened by Pope John XXIII Nobel Prize for literature awarded to John Steinbeck Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Beckett’s Happy Days Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange and The Wanting Seed Aldous Huxley’s Island Isherwood’s Down There on a Visit Lessing’s The Golden Notebook Nabokov’s Pale Fire Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Kathleen Jamie born Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union sign a test-ban treaty Birth of Simon Armitage Britain refused entry to the European Economic Community The Soviet Union puts into orbit the first woman astronaut, Valentina Tereshkova Paul VI becomes pope President Kennedy assassinated; Lyndon B. Johnson assumes office Nobel Prize for literature awarded to George Seferis Britten’s War Requiem John Fowles’s The Collector Murdoch’s The Unicorn Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means
1964
1965
1966
xlv
Storey’s Radcliffe John Updike’s The Centaur Tonkin Gulf incident leads to retaliatory strikes by U.S. aircraft against North Vietnam Greece and Turkey contend for control of Cyprus Britain grants licenses to drill for oil in the North Sea The Shakespeare Quatercentenary celebrated Lyndon Johnson elected president of the United States The Labour party under Harold Wilson wins British general election Nobel Prize for literature awarded to Jean-Paul Sartre Saul Bellow’s Herzog Burgess’ Nothing Like the Sun Golding’s The Spire Isherwood’s A Single Man Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun Snow’s Corridors of Power Alan Warner born Death of Ian Fleming The first U.S. combat forces land in Vietnam The U.S. spacecraft Mariner transmits photographs of Mars British Petroleum Company finds oil in the North Sea War breaks out between India and Pakistan Rhodesia declares its independence Ontario power failure blacks out the Canadian and U.S. east coasts Nobel Prize for literature awarded to Mikhail Sholokhov Robert Lowell’s For the Union Dead Norman Mailer’s An American Dream Osborne’s Inadmissible Evidence Pinter’s The Homecoming Spark’s The Mandelbaum Gate The Labour party under Harold Wilson wins British general election
CHRONOLOGY
1967
1968
The Archbishop of Canterbury visits Pope Paul VI Florence, Italy, severely damaged by floods Paris exhibition celebrates Picasso’s eighty-fifth birthday Fowles’s The Magus Greene’s The Comedians Osborne’s A Patriot for Me Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown (first volume of The Raj Quartet, 1966–1975) White’s The Solid Mandala Peter Ho Davies born Death of Frank O’Connor Thurgood Marshall becomes first black U.S. Supreme Court justice Six-Day War pits Israel against Egypt and Syria Biafra’s secession from Nigeria leads to civil war Francis Chichester completes solo circumnavigation of the globe Dr. Christiaan Barnard performs first heart transplant operation, in South Africa China explodes its first hydrogen bomb Golding’s The Pyramid Hughes’s Wodwo Isherwood’s A Meeting by the River Naipaul’s The Mimic Men Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight Angus Wilson’s No Laughing Matter Violent student protests erupt in France and West Germany Warsaw Pact troops occupy Czechoslovakia Violence in Northern Ireland causes Britain to send in troops Tet offensive by Communist forces launched against South Vietnam’s cities Theater censorship ended in Britain Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated Richard M. Nixon elected president
1969
1970
1971
xlvi
of the United States Booker Prize for fiction established Durrell’s Tunc Graves’s Poems 1965–1968 Osborne’s The Hotel in Amsterdam Snow’s The Sleep of Reason Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle and Cancer Ward Spark’s The Public Image Monica Ali born Humans set foot on the moon for the first time when astronauts descend to its surface in a landing vehicle from the U.S. spacecraft Apollo 11 The Soviet unmanned spacecraft Venus V lands on Venus Capital punishment abolished in Britain Colonel Muammar Qaddafi seizes power in Libya Solzhenitsyn expelled from the Soviet Union Nobel Prize for literature awarded to Samuel Beckett Carter’s The Magic Toyshop Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman Storey’s The Contractor Death of John Wyndham Hari Kunzru and David Mitchell born Civil war in Nigeria ends with Biafra’s surrender U.S. planes bomb Cambodia The Conservative party under Edward Heath wins British general election Nobel Prize for literature awarded to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Durrell’s Nunquam Hughes’s Crow F. R. Leavis and Q. D. Leavis’ Dickens the Novelist Snow’s Last Things Spark’s The Driver’s Seat Death of Vera Brittain Communist China given Nationalist China’s UN seat Decimal currency introduced to Britain
CHRONOLOGY
1972
1973
1974
Indira Gandhi becomes India’s prime minister Nobel Prize for literature awarded to Heinrich Böll Bond’s The Pope’s Wedding Naipaul’s In a Free State Pinter’s Old Times Spark’s Not to Disturb Births of Kiran Desai, Sarah Kane and Martin McDonagh The civil strife of “Bloody Sunday” causes Northern Ireland to come under the direct rule of Westminster Nixon becomes the first U.S. president to visit Moscow and Beijing The Watergate break-in precipitates scandal in the United States Eleven Israeli athletes killed by terrorists at Munich Olympics Nixon reelected president of the United States Bond’s Lear Snow’s The Malcontents Stoppard’s Jumpers Britain, Ireland, and Denmark enter European Economic Community Egypt and Syria attack Israel in the Yom Kippur War Energy crisis in Britain reduces production to a three-day week Nobel Prize for literature awarded to Patrick White Bond’s The Sea Greene’s The Honorary Consul Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark Murdoch’s The Black Prince Shaffer’s Equus White’s The Eye of the Storm Death of William Plomer Miners strike in Britain Greece’s military junta overthrown Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia deposed President Makarios of Cyprus replaced by military coup Nixon resigns as U.S. president and is succeeded by Gerald R. Ford Betjeman’s A Nip in the Air Bond’s Bingo
1975
1976
1977
1978
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Durrell’s Monsieur (first volume of The Avignon Quintet, 1974–1985) Larkin’s The High Windows Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago Spark’s The Abbess of Crewe Death of Edmund Blunden, Austin Clarke, and Nancy Mitford The U.S. Apollo and Soviet Soyuz spacecrafts rendezvous in space The Helsinki Accords on human rights signed U.S. forces leave Vietnam King Juan Carlos succeeds Franco as Spain’s head of state Nobel Prize for literature awarded to Eugenio Montale New U.S. copyright law goes into effect Israeli commandos free hostages from hijacked plane at Entebbe, Uganda British and French SST Concordes make first regularly scheduled commercial flights The United States celebrates its bicentennial Jimmy Carter elected president of the United States Byron and Shelley manuscripts discovered in Barclay’s Bank, Pall Mall Hughes’s Seasons’ Songs Koestler’s The Thirteenth Tribe Scott’s Staying On Spark’s The Take-over White’s A Fringe of Leaves Silver jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II celebrated Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat visits Israel “Gang of Four” expelled from Chinese Communist party First woman ordained in the U.S. Episcopal church After twenty-nine years in power, Israel’s Labour party is defeated by the Likud party Fowles’s Daniel Martin Hughes’s Gaudete Treaty between Israel and Egypt negotiated at Camp David
CHRONOLOGY
1979
1980
Pope John Paul I dies a month after his coronation and is succeeded by Karol Cardinal Wojtyla, who takes the name John Paul II Former Italian premier Aldo Moro murdered by left-wing terrorists Nobel Prize for literature awarded to Isaac Bashevis Singer Greene’s The Human Factor Hughes’s Cave Birds Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea Death of Hugh MacDiarmid The United States and China establish diplomatic relations Ayatollah Khomeini takes power in Iran and his supporters hold U.S. embassy staff hostage in Teheran Rhodesia becomes Zimbabwe Earl Mountbatten assassinated The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan The Conservative party under Margaret Thatcher wins British general election Nobel Prize for literature awarded to Odysseus Elytis Golding’s Darkness Visible Hughes’s Moortown Lessing’s Shikasta (first volume of Canopus in Argos, Archives) Naipaul’s A Bend in the River Spark’s Territorial Rights White’s The Twyborn Affair Iran-Iraq war begins Strikes in Gdansk give rise to the Solidarity movement Mt. St. Helen’s erupts in Washington State British steelworkers strike for the first time since 1926 More than fifty nations boycott Moscow Olympics Ronald Reagan elected president of the United States Burgess’s Earthly Powers Golding’s Rites of Passage Shaffer’s Amadeus Storey’s A Prodigal Child Angus Wilson’s Setting the World on Fire
xlviii
1981
1982
1983
1984
Greece admitted to the European Economic Community Iran hostage crisis ends with release of U.S. embassy staff Twelve Labour MPs and nine peers found British Social Democratic party Socialist party under François Mitterand wins French general election Rupert Murdoch buys The Times of London Turkish gunman wounds Pope John Paul II in assassination attempt U.S. gunman wounds President Reagan in assassination attempt President Sadat of Egypt assassinated Nobel Prize for literature awarded to Elias Canetti Spark’s Loitering with Intent Britain drives Argentina’s invasion force out of the Falkland Islands U.S. space shuttle makes first successful trip Yuri Andropov becomes general secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist party Israel invades Lebanon First artificial heart implanted at Salt Lake City hospital Bellow’s The Dean’s December Greene’s Monsignor Quixote South Korean airliner with 269 aboard shot down after straying into Soviet airspace U.S. forces invade Grenada following left-wing coup Widespread protests erupt over placement of nuclear missiles in Europe The ?1 coin comes into circulation in Britain Australia wins the America’s Cup Nobel Prize for literature awarded to William Golding Hughes’s River Murdoch’s The Philosopher’s Pupil Konstantin Chernenko becomes general secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist party
CHRONOLOGY
1985
1986
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India assassinated by Sikh bodyguards Reagan reelected president of the United States Toxic gas leak at Bhopal, India, plant kills 2,000 British miners go on strike Irish Republican Army attempts to kill Prime Minister Thatcher with bomb detonated at a Brighton hotel World Court holds against U.S. mining of Nicaraguan harbors Golding’s The Paper Men Lessing’s The Diary of Jane Somers Spark’s The Only Problem United States deploys cruise missiles in Europe Mikhail Gorbachev becomes general secretary of the Soviet Communist party following death of Konstantin Chernenko Riots break out in Handsworth district (Birmingham) and Brixton Republic of Ireland gains consultative role in Northern Ireland State of emergency is declared in South Africa Nobel Prize for literature awarded to Claude Simon A. N. Wilson’s Gentlemen in England Lessing’s The Good Terrorist Murdoch’s The Good Apprentice Fowles’s A Maggot U.S. space shuttle Challenger explodes United States attacks Libya Atomic power plant at Chernobyl destroyed in accident Corazon Aquino becomes president of the Philippines Giotto spacecraft encounters Comet Halley Nobel Prize for literature awarded to Wole Soyinka Final volume of Oxford English Dictionary supplement published Amis’s The Old Devils Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating
1987
1988
1989
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World A. N. Wilson’s Love Unknown Powell’s The Fisher King Death of Henry Reed Gorbachev begins reform of Communist party of the Soviet Union Stock market collapses Iran-contra affair reveals that Reagan administration used money from arms sales to Iran to fund Nicaraguan rebels Palestinian uprising begins in Israelioccupied territories Nobel Prize for literature awarded to Joseph Brodsky Golding’s Close Quarters Burgess’s Little Wilson and Big God Drabble’s The Radiant Way Soviet Union begins withdrawing troops from Afghanistan Iranian airliner shot down by U.S. Navy over Persian Gulf War between Iran and Iraq ends George Bush elected president of the United States Pan American flight 103 destroyed over Lockerbie, Scotland Nobel Prize for literature awarded to Naguib Mafouz Greene’s The Captain and the Enemy Amis’s Diffıculties with Girls Rushdie’s Satanic Verses Ayatollah Khomeini pronounces death sentence on Salman Rushdie; Great Britain and Iran sever diplomatic relations F. W. de Klerk becomes president of South Africa Chinese government crushes student demonstration in Tiananmen Square Communist regimes are weakened or abolished in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, and Romania Lithuania nullifies its inclusion in Soviet Union Nobel Prize for literature awarded to José Cela Second edition of Oxford English Dictionary published
CHRONOLOGY
1990
1992
1993
Drabble’s A Natural Curiosity Murdoch’s The Message to the Planet Amis’s London Fields Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day Death of Bruce Chatwin Communist monopoly ends in Bulgaria Riots break out against community charge in England First women ordained priests in Church of England Civil war breaks out in Yugoslavia; Croatia and Slovenia declare independence Bush and Gorbachev sign START agreement to reduce nuclearweapons arsenals President Jean-Baptiste Aristide overthrown by military in Haiti Boris Yeltsin elected president of Russia Dissolution of the Soviet Union Nobel Prize for literature awarded to Nadine Gordimer U.N. Conference on Environment and Development (the “Earth Summit”) meets in Rio de Janeiro Prince and Princess of Wales separate War in Bosnia-Herzegovina intensifies Bill Clinton elected president of the United States in three-way race with Bush and independent candidate H. Ross Perot Nobel Prize for literature awarded to Derek Walcott Death of Ruth Pitter Czechoslovakia divides into the Czech Republic and Slovakia; playwright Vaclav Havel elected president of the Czech Republic Britain ratifies Treaty on European Union (the “Maastricht Treaty”) U.S. troops provide humanitarian aid amid famine in Somalia United States, Canada, and Mexico sign North American Free Trade Agreement Nobel Prize for literature awarded to
1994
1995
1996
1996
1997
l
Toni Morrison Nelson Mandela elected president in South Africa’s first post-apartheid election Jean-Baptiste Aristide restored to presidency of Haiti Clinton health care reforms rejected by Congress Civil war in Rwanda Republicans win control of both houses of Congress for first time in forty years Prime Minister Albert Reynolds of Ireland meets with Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein Nobel Prize for literature awarded to Kenzaburo Õe Amis’s You Can’t Do Both Naipaul’s A Way in the World Death of Dennis Potter Britain and Irish Republican Army engage in diplomatic talks Barings Bank forced into bankruptcy as a result of a maverick bond trader’s losses United States restores full diplomatic relations with Vietnam NATO initiates air strikes in Bosnia Death of Stephen Spender Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin assassinated Nobel Prize for literature awarded to Seamus Heaney IRA breaks cease-fire; Sein Fein representatives barred from Northern Ireland peace talks Prince and Princess of Wales divorce Cease-fire agreement in Chechnia; Russian forces begin to withdraw Boris Yeltsin reelected president of Russia Bill Clinton reelected president of the United States Nobel Prize for literature awarded to Wislawa Szymborska Death of Caroline Blackwood British government destroys around 100,000 cows suspected of infection with Creutzfeldt-Jakob, or “mad cow” disease Diana, Princess of Wales, dies in an
CHRONOLOGY
1998
1999
2000
automobile accident Unveiling of first fully-cloned adult animal, a sheep named Dolly Booker McConnell Prize for fiction awarded to Arundhati Roy United States renews bombing of Bagdad, Iraq Independent legislature and Parliaments return to Scotland and Wales Booker McConnell Prize for fiction awarded to Ian McEwan Nobel Prize for literature awarded to Jose Saramago King Hussein of Jordan dies United Nations responds militarily to Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic’s escalation of crisis in Kosovo Booker McConnell Prize for fiction awarded to J. M. Coetzee Nobel Prize for literature awarded to Günter Grass Deaths of Patricia Beer, Ted Hughes, Brian Moore, and Iain Chrichton Smith Penelope Fitzgerald dies J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire sells more than 300,000 copies in its first day Oil blockades by fuel haulers protesting high oil taxes bring much of Britain to a standstill Slobodan Milosevic loses Serbian general election to Vojislav Kostunica Death of Scotland’s First Minister, Donald Dewar Nobel Prize for literature awarded to Gao Xingjian Booker McConnell Prize for fiction awarded to Margaret Atwood George W. Bush, son of former president George Bush, becomes president of the United States after Supreme Court halts recount of closest election in history Death of former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau Human Genome Project researchers announce that they have a complete map of the genetic code of a human
2001
2002
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chromosome Vladimir Putin succeeds Boris Yeltsin as president of Russia British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s son Leo is born, making him the first child born to a sitting prime minister in 152 years Death of Patrick O’Brian Keith Roberts and R.S. Thomas In Britain, the House of Lords passes legislation that legalizes the creation of cloned human embryos British Prime Minister Tony Blair wins second term Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin wins Booker McConnell Prize for fiction Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans Trezza Azzopardi’s The Hiding Place Terrorists attack World Trade Center and Pentagon with hijacked airplanes, resulting in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers and the deaths of thousands. Passengers of a third hijacked plane thwart hijackers, resulting in a crash landing in Pennsylvania. The attacks are thought to be organized by Osama bin Laden, the leader of an international terrorist network known as al Qaeda Ian McEwan’s An Atonement Salman Rushdie’s Fury Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang Deaths of Eudora Welty and W. G. Sebald Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter awarded the Nobel Peace Prize Europe experiences its worst floods in 100 years as floodwaters force thousands of people out of their homes Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl kidnapped and killed in Karachi, Pakistan while researching a story about Pakistani militants and suspected shoe bomber Richard Reid. British-born Islamic militant
CHRONOLOGY
2003
2004
Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh sentenced to death for the crime. Three accomplices receive life sentences. Slobodan Milosevic goes on trial at the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague on charges of masterminding ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. Yann Martel’s Life of Pi wins Booker McConnell Prize for fiction Nobel Prize for literature awarded to Imre Kertész Ariel Sharon elected as Israeli prime minister Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez forced to leave office after a nine week general strike calling for his resignation ends U.S. presents to the United Nations its Iraq war rationale, citing its Weapons of Mass Destruction as imminent threat to world security U.S. and Britain launch war against Iraq Baghdad falls to U.S. troops Official end to combat operations in Iraq is declared by the U.S. Aung San Suu Kyi, Burmese opposition leader, placed under house arrest by military regime NATO assumes control of peacekeeping force in Afghanistan American troops capture Saddam Hussein J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth installment in the wildly popular series, hit the shelves and rocketed up the best-seller lists Nobel Prize for literature awarded to J. M. Coetzee Death of C. H. Sisson NATO admits seven new members— Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia Terrorists bomb commuter trains in Spain—al–Qaeda claims responsibility Ten new states join the European Union, expanding it to twenty–five members states total
2005
2006
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Muslim terrorists attack a school in Beslan, Russia, resulting in over 300 civilian deaths, many of them schoolchildren George W. Bush is re–elected president of the United States Allegations of corruption in the election of Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych result in the &ldquote;Orange Revolution” and Parliament’s decision to nullify the first election results— the secondary run–off election is closley monitored and favors Viktor Yushchenko for president A massive 9.0 earthquake rocks the Indian Ocean, resulting in a catastrophic tsunami, devastating southern Asia and eastern Africa and killing tens of thousands of people Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty wins Man Booker Prize for fiction Terrorists bomb three subway stations in London, killing 52 and injuring more than 700 Pope John Paul II dies, marking the end of an era for the Roman Catholic Church. He is succeeded by Pope Benedict XVI Hurricane Katrina hits the U.S. Golf Coast, devastating cities in Louisianna and Mississippi, and killing over 1,000 people. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince sells over 6.9 billion copies on the first day of release in the U.S. alone Nobel Prize for literature awarded to Harold Pinter Deaths of Saul Bellow and Arthur Miller Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is found guilty for crimes against humanity and is executed in Iraq Ban Ki-moon elected the next UN secretary-general International Astronomical Union rules that Pluto is no longer seen as a planet Fleur Adcock wins the Queen?s
CHRONOLOGY
2007
Gold Medal for Poetry Kamau Brathwaite wins the Griffin Poetry Prize for Born to Slow Horses Oil prices skyrocket as a barrel of crude oil tops ninety dollars Record-high mortgage foreclosures and a steep decline in the housing market strain financial industries causing multibillion-dollar losses at major banks and investment firms Seung-Hui Cho opens fire at Virginia Tech University killing 32 and wounding several others before turning the gun on himself
2008
The final volume of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is released
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selling over 8.3 million copies in the first twenty-four hours Nobel Prize for literature awarded to Doris Lessing Barack Obama is elected the first African-American President of the United States A 7.9 magnitude earthquake strikes the Sichaun region of China, leaving 4.8 million homeless and over 68,000 dead Fidel Castro resigns as President of Cuba after a record-breaking 49 years as head of state Georgia launches a military strike against the defected region of South Ossetia, sparking the start of the short-lived South Ossetia War
List of Contributor
PATRICK ABATIELL. Patrick Abatiell received his B.A. from Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont, where he studied English and Italian literature. He has studied at the Università degli Studi di Ferrara in Ferrara, Italy, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in English literature at the University of Virginia. William Godwin
JOSEPH DEWEY. Joseph Dewey is Associate Professor of American Literature for the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of several studies including In a Dark Time: The Apocalyptic Temper in the American Novel in the Nuclear Age, Understanding Richard Powers, and Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don DeLillo as well as many articles on contemporary American literature and cultural studies. Susanna Clarke
CAROLYN ALESSIO. Carolyn Alessio is the recipient of a 2008 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches high school on the southwest side of Chicago. Kiran Desai
JENNIFER E. DUNN. Dr. Jennifer E. Dunn teaches English literature at the University of Oxford and the University of Oxford Department for Continuing Education. She has published articles on twentieth-century women writers, including Katherine Mansfield, Angela Carter, Emma Tennant, and Margaret Atwood. She has also lectured and published on modernism, postmodernism, and literary theory. Michèle Roberts
FRED BILSON. Fred Bilson has taught English, Linguistics and Computer Studies at various universities in England, and is currently researching the sound structure of the Chinese language. Richard Jefferies S ANDIE B YRNE . Former Fellow and Tutor in English at Balliol College, Oxford. Her publications include a number of articles and books on eighteenth and nineteenth-century fiction and twentieth-century poetry. Harriet Martineau
KATHERINE FIRTH. Dr. Katherine Firth is Visiting Research Fellow at Trinity College, University of Melbourne. She has previously published on modernist and 1930s poetry and is currently writing a biography of the cabaret singer Hedli Anderson: Mask, Muse and Mrs. MacNeice. Henry Reed
LAURIE CHAMPION. Laurie Champion is Professor of English at San Diego State University. With a focus on twentieth-century American literature, she has edited or co-edited eight books and published many scholarly essays in prestigious literary journals. Tony Parsons
PATRICIA B. HEAMAN. Patricia B. Heaman, Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, is a Professor of English Emerita at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature. She is the author of numerous articles and reviews, including essays on George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Wollstonecraft, Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, Flannery O’Connor, and William Faulkner. Flora Thompson
A ARON D EVESON . Aaron Deveson is Assistant Professor in the English Department at National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei, where he lives with his wife. He studied English at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, and later wrote his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of East Anglia on the poetry and translation work of David Constantine. He has published articles on both Constantine and translation and has also written about the British poet and philosopher of language, Denise Riley. David Constantine
EDWIN HEES. Edwin Hees has spent most of his academic career teaching film and theatre studies, first as senior lecturer at the English Department and then as Associate Professor at the
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CONTRIBUTORS Drama Department at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. He has also taught related material at the Universities of Salzburg and Vienna in Austria. His publications include several articles and book chapters on the South African film industry, and he has reviewed theater productions for local newspapers and academic journals. He is an Associate Editor of the South African Theatre Journal. Athol Fugard
PAUL SULLIVAN. Paul Sullivan writes for the New York Times and Conde Nast Portfolio. He is working on a book to be published by Penguin in 2010 entitled Clutch: The Moment When The Great Prevail and Some of the Best Fail. He lives in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and holds degrees from Trinity College and the University of Chicago. Nick Hornby
WILLIAM MAY. William May is a teaching fellow in twentieth-century literature at Southampton University, England. He completed a doctorate on the work of the British poet and novelist Stevie Smith at Balliol College, Oxford, and went on to lecture at St. Anne’s College, Oxford and Bath Spa University. He is currently completing a monograph on the work of Stevie Smith and co-edited the book of essays From Self to Shelf: The Artist Under Construction (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007) with Sally Bayley. Future research projects include a study of text-setting and contemporary British music. Jonathan Coe
MARIANNE SZLYK. Marianne Szlyk is an associate professor of English at Montgomery College in Rockville, MD. She earned her Ph.D. in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Literature at Purdue University. Her article on Thomas Duffett’s The Mock-Tempest was published in The Sun Yat-Sen Journal of Humanities. Her book reviews have appeared in Shakespeare Bulletin, the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Lifewriting Annual, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and other periodicals. Her research interests include adaptations of Shakespeare, theatrical and other adaptations of world literature, theater history, gender and genre, and lifewriting. Elizabeth Inchbald
M AUREEN M ANIER. Maureen Manier graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a bachelor’s degree in English. During her junior year she studied in Dublin, being taught courses in Yeats by Eavan Boland, Modern Irish Poetry by Declan Kiberd and Modern Irish Short Story by Seamus Deane. Among the courses’ many guest lecturers were Seamus Heaney, Thomas Kinsella, Paul Muldoon and, the subject of this essay, John Montague. Manier is married with two sons and serves as the vice president of communications for Riley Children’s Foundation in Indianapolis, Indiana. John Monague
TOM WALKER. Tom Walker was educated at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, and Trinity College, Dublin, and is currently writing a DPhil thesis at Lincoln College, Oxford, on the links between Louis MacNeice and the other Irish poets of his time. He has also published work on the Irish novelists John McGahern and Patrick McCabe, and regularly writes reviews for the journals The Cambridge Quarterly, Irish Studies Review and Notes & Queries. Austin Clarke C HRISTOPHER WARNES . Christopher Warnes is Lecturer in Postcolonial and Related Literatures, and a Fellow of St. John’s College, University of Cambridge. His book, Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence was published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2009. Zakes Mda
KWADWO OSEI NYAME JNR. Dr. Kwadwo OseiNyame Jnr. has a doctorate from Oxford University. He teaches at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, where he specializes in Anglophone and Francophone literature as well as African studies. Ama Ata Aidoo
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AMA ATA AIDOO (1942—)
Kwadwo Osei-Nyame, Jnr nialism in Africa alongside a relentless analysis of the condition of women in African societies. Aidoo’s work also includes a discussion of Africa’s relationship with its diaspora and the New World. In Ghana, she has founded a women’s collective called Mbaasem (a FantiGhanaian-African expression that translates literally as “women’s words,” “women’s thoughts,” or “women’s issues”), which is a women writers’ organization and retreat center. Aidoo has described herself as a feminist, but she repeatedly cautions that the concerns of African women are often different from those of Western women and women from other societies because of cultural and historical reasons.
BORN ON MARCH 23, 1942, at Abeadzi Kyiakor in the Central Region of Ghana, the author (Christine) Ama Ata Aidoo has worked in several genres. Her works include two plays, The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965) and Anowa (1970); two novels, Our Sister Killjoy; or, Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint (1977) and Changes (1991); two collections of short stories, No Sweetness Here (1970) and The Girl Who Can and Other Stories (1997; rev. ed. 2002); two collections of poems, Someone Talking to Sometime (1985) and An Angry Letter in January (1992); and two children’s books, Birds and Other Poems (1987) and The Eagle and the Chickens and Other Stories (1986). As an undergraduate student at the University of Ghana, at Legon, between 1961 and 1964, Aidoo was a member of a writers’ workshop, the Ghana Drama Studio, and the university’s School of Drama and Performing Arts. In 1962, her short story “No Sweetness Here” won a prize for literature from the famous Mbari Club in Nigeria. Three decades later, her novel Changes won the Africa division of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. These are only two examples in a long list of academic and intellectual honors. In 1982, Aidoo was appointed minister of education in the Ghanaian government, although she soon resigned the position and left for Harare, Zimbabwe, where she lived for a while in exile.
EARLY INFLUENCES
Ama Ata Aidoo’s father was the Fanti chief Nana Yaw Fama, and she has said that her politicized imagination and the self-awareness in her writing probably came from her family. “I grew up politically interested in what was going on around me,” she told one interviewer (Kwadwo OseiNyame Jnr), and in another interview with Maxine McGregor she suggested that her initiation into the African oral tradition, which she uses copiously in her writing and storytelling, came from the songs and stories she heard during her childhood from her mother, Maame Abba Abasema. It was one of her mother’s stories that she transformed into her celebrated play Anowa, although the play ultimately is Aidoo’s “own rendering of a kind of ѧ legend” (McGregor, p. 23). Aidoo has also paid intellectual homage to her father, whom she described to Adeola James as a “a highly politicised individual and an artist” (p. 13). In Aidoo’s essay “Ghana: To Be a Woman,” she says that by the time she was born,
Aidoo has traveled and taught widely in Africa, Europe, and North America. She grew up in the era of nationalist protest and the struggle for independence and national liberation in Ghana (and Africa generally) and has been greatly influenced by these historical moments. Aidoo’s several plays, novels, short stories, poems, critical essays, and other disquisitions adopt a panAfricanist approach in their critique of neocolo-
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AMA ATA AIDOO her father “had come to consider formal Western education as the answer to the problems of the limitations of the untrained mind” (p. 262). In the same essay, she recounts the influence of an aunt who, when Aidoo was a child, urged her to “get as far as you can into this education” (p. 262). At school, Aidoo discovered Shakespeare, had teachers who encouraged story telling, and a literature teacher who encouraged her greatly, to the point of giving her a typewriter. The most important influences on Aidoo, however, were the politically conscious stories she heard from her parents and other family members. In the autobiographical essay-story “Male-ing Names in the Sun” (1993), Aidoo recounts that one of the stories she heard about her family, while she was a child growing up as a colonial subject, was a harrowing account of the cruelties Africans experienced under colonialism:
lished in 1977, was written when she was a member of the faculty at the University of Cape Coast in Ghana. Combining different literary techniques, it is an admixture of dramatic and poetic forms written in the style of a novelette that also assumes the conventional prose narrative mode of the novel. Early on in the narrative, the story’s protagonist and narrator, a woman named Sissie, talks about the problems “we have / saddled and surrounded ourselves with” and of how we have “blocked our views” and “cluttered our brains” (p. 5). The “we,” a reference to people in the newly independent African nation of Ghana, also extends to other Africans and in particular the African male elite, who took over political power after independence in postcolonial Africa. Sissie, who also appears in Aidoo’s earlier short story “Everything Counts” (from the 1970 collection No Sweetness Here), is a more mature and experienced narrator in Our Sister Killjoy. She speaks with an authoritative and confident voice, and from the perspective of “knowledge gained since” (Our Sister Killjoy, p. 67), as she examines what has gone wrong with Africa and its people after independence. One of the issues she scrutinizes is Africa’s continued economic marginalization and underdevelopment. Thus, she acerbically observes how “IN these glorious times when / Tubercular illiterates / Drag yams out of the earth with / Bleeding hands,” Africa’s satiated “Champagne sipping / Ministers and commissioners / Sign away / Mineral and timber / Concessions / in exchange for / Yellow wheat which / The people can’t eat (Our Sister Killjoy, pp. 56–57).
I also grew up knowing that long before I was born, my father’s father had been arrested with other[s] ѧ for disturbing the “King’s Peace.” They had been sent to the castle prison at Elmina, and tortured. The mode of torture was to force the prisoners to pass cannonballs among themselves, as though they were playing volleyball. Within a week, they were dead, each and every one of them, including my grandfather. No beatings, no bruising. Very gentlemanly, very civilised. (p. 32)
It is against such a historical background that Aidoo’s writing consistently evaluates the debilitating effects of slavery, colonialism, neocolonialism, and postindependence on national disillusionment in Africa. In gauging the impact of both external and internal forces on Africa, Aidoo asserts that “by the way, the fact that these days, our governments are post-colonially (!) torturing and killing Africans does not lessen or justify colonial crimes. It only goes to show how long our people have suffered” (“Male-ing Names in the Sun,” p. 32).
Aidoo refers in these lines to some of the factors that had ensured that, two decades after independence, several African nations continued their dependence on the West. Elsewhere, Aidoo, discussing the plight of the majority of Africans, notes that “the average African in the rural areas of the continent or urban shantytowns” has “no shelter” and “no education for her children,” who are “malnourished” while she herself is “aged beyond her years.” Such an African, Aidoo argues, “has not experienced an
THE NOVELS
The first of Aidoo’s novels, Our Sister Killjoy; or, Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint, pub-
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AMA ATA AIDOO end but a continuation of colonial oppression” (“Conference Presentation,” p. 152) It is in a similar sense that in Our Sister Killjoy, Sissie observes how poor people, and in particular Africa’s farmworkers and laborers, till the soil on such a daily and regular basis that they develop lung diseases like tuberculosis. In the meantime, their visionless leaders and politicians, the middlemen and interlocutors acting on Africa’s behalf in the continent’s dealing with the West, sign unfavorable trade treaties and submit to unbeneficial economic arrangements. Aidoo has also commented in this respect on how “the plunder of Africa’s mineral and other natural resources by multinational corporations and multinational agencies continues unabated” (“Conference Presentation,” p. 152). Our Sister Killjoy, which establishes an ideological intertextual connection between Aidoo’s essays and her fiction, is a scathing criticism of the lack of foresight and stunted consciousness of Africa’s leaders and politicians. In an interview with Ada Uzoamaka Azodo, Aidoo says that in Our Sister Killjoy, she was “dealing with very hard public issues, political issues, like colonization” and “what happened to us as a people” (p. 437). The male critical establishment responded with hostility to the fact that a woman author (through a fictional female narrator) was pointing out so blatantly the flaws and inanities within the newly independent African nations, and they vilified Aidoo for this portrayal. There was a serious attempt to discredit the novel, with the critic Theo Vincent arguing (in the context of an interview with Aidoo) that Sissie’s political consciousness was not something “that will come easily or naturally to mind” (p. 3) for an African women traveling abroad like Sissie does in the novel. Aidoo questioned Vincent’s prejudiced view, asking him: “What makes you think that our men are more politically aware than our women?” (p. 3). Aidoo acknowledged to Adeola James that part of the criticism the novel received was simply because what she was writing about and what Sissie was saying were “things that people will feel uncomfortable about” (p. 15). Many within the male critical establishment saw Sissie as an abnormal character, leading Aidoo to
point out to Vincent that “people are behaving as if a girl like that is a freak” (p. 2). The patronizing attitude of male critics within African literature was something that Aidoo experienced generally within the academic community and within male intellectual circles while she was a teacher at the University of Cape Coast from 1970 to 1982. She has cited the instance of a debate “on a national issue” in which “some professors from another Ghanaian university shouted that I am not fit to speak about public matters. That I should leave politics and such to those best qualified to handle them, and concentrate on doing what I normally do best, which is writing plays and short stories” (“Ghana: To Be a Woman,” p. 265). But then, as we have seen, when it comes even to what she does “best”— her writing, her fiction, and her critical perspectives and viewpoints—she experiences the same continued attempt to subordinate the voice of women that her fiction is attempting to counter. In a 1967 interview with Maxine McGregor, Aidoo asserted that she could not see herself “as a writer, writing about lovers in Accra,” because there were “so many other problems” in Ghana in that era (p. 19). At that point in her career, Aidoo felt the theme of love was not topical enough to be political. More than two decades later she seemed to recant this perspective, informing Adeola James in a 1990 interview that the “love or the workings of love is also political” (p. 14). And in fact, Aidoo had much earlier addressed the political nature of love in her 1970 play, Anowa, especially in the play’s portrayal of the love relationship between Kofi Ako and Anowa. Her 1991 novel, Changes, however, explicitly takes love as its focus, in the relationship between Esi Sekyi and her husband, Oko, and also between Esi and her lover, Ali Kondey. Aidoo clearly had been reflecting on the themes that she explores in Changes for quite a while. In a 1989 interview with Raoul Granqvist and John Stotesbury, two years before Changes appeared, she revealed that while she was living in Harare, Zimbabwe, she had written a radio play about a young African woman coming out of a deteriorated marriage who was looking for “solutions” and who was also having an affair with the
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AMA ATA AIDOO Changes avoids a simplistic portrait of a modern African woman’s free position in society; despite her freedom, Esi also suffers from isolation, and this is not only because of the solitude she faces when her relationship with Ali breaks down. She confesses to Opokuya that she does not earn as much pay as her male colleagues at work and that she has also been passed over for promotion a couple of times. Esi’s revelations mirror problems that Aidoo herself had earlier encountered: “Male colleagues resent your professional standing and punish your presumption in mean little ways,” she says in the essay “Ghana: To Be a Woman” (p. 262). When the narrative has both women agreeing that life is hard on women, it is obvious—despite the different circumstances of their marriage, with Opokuya portrayed largely as an acquiescent wife who gives in to a domineering husband—that Aidoo aims to highlight the extent to which Western-educated African women like Esi and Opokuya suffer problems that their societies seems oblivious to. Ultimately Changes demonstrates that Esi does not find the emotional satisfaction she craves, despite her freedom of choice. Aidoo conveys that the predicament facing Esi “is not a situation ѧ easily resolved,” as she told Ada Uzomaka Azodo. As she argues in that interview, “The African woman who is like Esi, a woman with high education, who has a career, is going to have a hard time of it,” but “what is interesting,” she continues, is that Esi’s “willingness to even struggle ѧ the willingness to even put her emotions out there, her mind, her desires, is in itself a good thing, a positive thing” (p. 440).
managing director of a travel bureau. A similar story line appears in Changes, where Esi Sekyi has an affair with Ali Kondey, who owns a travel bureau. Aidoo’s characterization of Esi Sekyi in Changes makes her representative of the modern African woman’s attempts to deal with changes and transformations within postindependent Ghanaian society. The strong-hearted and Western-educated Esi abandons her husband, Oko, who demands time from her that she cannot provide, in order to focus instead on her career as a government statistician. Esi, who works in a predominantly male urban environment as a government statistician, is a character who allows Aidoo to explore the identity of a woman who does not fit within stereotypical masculine notions of femininity. All of Esi’s traits of character go against the grain of conventional gender roles in her community, beginning with the fact that she has chosen her work over her marital life. In conversation with her best friend, Opokuya, Esi wonders “why life is so hard on the professional African woman” (p. 49). Consequently, in abandoning Oko, Esi defines herself in opposition to the generally held view within her community that “marriage is what a woman was created for” (as Aidoo summarizes bluntly in her essay “Ghana: To Be a Woman,” p. 262). Esi further exercises the personal autonomy to act on her feelings and emotions when she has an extramarital relationship with Ali Kondey, a Ghanaian who is Muslim (a cultural minority within Ghana). Aidoo’s presentation of a strong woman protagonist in Changes is a manifestation of her own beliefs as outlined in the essay “Ghana: To Be a Woman” (p. 262): Aidoo refuses “to consider marriage as the only way to live.” Her portrait of Esi indicates the existence of a new kind of African woman, one who rejects the notion that (as she says further in the essay) “any successful career outside the home is naturally for men, and a few rather ‘ugly’ women” and who challenges the generally held view that “the only way for a woman to be,” even a professional woman, is for her to be also married (p. 262).
THE PLAYS
Aidoo’s 1970 play, Anowa, features a strongminded girl-woman who goes against the wishes of her parents to marry the man of her choice in the Akan community of Yebi. The story, derived directly from the Fanti oral tradition and told to her by her mother, articulates Aidoo’s conviction that “any discussion of African drama must start with the so-called oral traditions, because if African theatre is really going to gain any
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AMA ATA AIDOO strength, some of it is going to have to come from there” (McGregor, p. 22). For Aidoo, oral tradition is the backbone of African theater and drama. The defiant Anowa, a woman of strong personality, leaves the village of Yebi with Kofi Ako to start a new life when her parents, family, and other members of the society frown upon their marriage. Anowa’s family considers her choice of Kofi Ako totally unacceptable. A pauper, Kofi Ako is presumed impotent and called a “watery male of all watery males” (Anowa, 1985 ed., p. 75). However, Anowa empowers the impotent Kofi Ako by sustaining her relationship with him in the face of strong opposition from family members and the community as a whole. Anowa’s powerful presence and image and her resistance to the dominant ideologies of her society is Aidoo’s way of demonstrating that Akan society has historically produced very strong and individually minded women personalities. Anowa’s relationship with Kofi Ako, which is marked at the beginning by a certain sense of equality, of equal sharing of ideas, of consultative decision making and mutual love, soon deteriorates, as Kofi Ako begins to marginalize Anowa in decision making, particularly as he becomes a wealthy African chief. The play dramatically captures what Aidoo describes as men seeing themselves as having a divine right to rule and decide:
tesbury, “some things are accepted as given, and sometimes as God-given, namely that the people who are capable of running things are men, that women basically were created to be wives and mothers” (p. 13). Importantly though, the play also points out that Anowa’s rebellion is largely because she hates the idea of Kofi Ako trading in human slaves. Kofi has lost all sense of moral value, and his power as a chief has gone to his head. After their years of struggling together to make an existence, and after the way she helped him become a man, Anowa’s treatment by Kofi is clearly unfair. Kofi Ako is forced to concede to Anowa in a moment of anger and desperation that “you rake up the dirt of life. You bare our wounds. You are too fond of looking for the common pain and the general wrong” (Anowa, p. 99). It is this “common pain” and “general wrong” with which Aidoo herself is much concerned, so that Anowa becomes the figure through which she relates her own sensitivity to the plight of her community. As she confessed to Adeola James: “I have had to admit that I am too sensitive to our grief, to our pain as human beings, especially as Africans, to the confusions around me” (pp. 13–14). The play provides Aidoo with a means of using a specific Ghanaian situation to depict a problem that pervades the entire African continent. Indeed, Aidoo’s argument is even more wide-ranging and universal than that, in that it speaks to the situation of women worldwide. In the 1989 interview with Granqvist and Stotesbury, Aidoo observed that “what has been wrong is that for centuries women in all societies have been relegated to a kind of marginal existence and been tutored to accept their marginality.ѧ We are really talking about part of the fundamentals of the foundations of contemporary society in the West, in Africa, in Asia, all over” (p. 13; emphasis added). Her portrait of Anowa is in a sense, then, an advocacy and advancement of a particular African feminism that is simultaneously globally self-aware. The feminist questioning in Anowa had been preceded by The Dilemma of a Ghost, Aidoo’s first play, which was published in 1965 and explores the complex relationships between
ANOWA: What I don’t understand, Kofi, is why you want to have so many things your own way.
KOFI AKO [Very angrily] ѧ I don’t think there is a single woman in the land who speaks to her husband the way you do to me.ѧ Why are you like this Anowa? Why? [Anowa laughs] Can’t you be like other normal women? ANOWA: I still don’t know what you mean by normal[.ѧ] (Anowa, p. 113)
Anowa’s questioning of Kofi Ako’s certitude that deference to him would be “normal” is indicative of Aidoo’s own views; in “contemporary society in the West, in Africa, in Asia” and “all over,” she says in the interview with Granqvist and Sto-
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AMA ATA AIDOO Africa and its diaspora. Dilemma provided Aidoo with a means of exploring the remarkable reluctance on the part of Africans to discuss the sensitive issue of slavery. For Aidoo, as she told the interviewer Theo Vincent, not discussing slavery would be like “cover[ing] up history.” History, she contends, is “like a bad wound.ѧ You have to open it up and treat it. The scar would be there but at least it would heal” (p. 7). The Dilemma of a Ghost is about an African intellectual, Ato Yawson, who returns home after his studies abroad in the United States with an African American woman, Eulalie Rush, for a wife. Aidoo uses this situation to address the realities of alienation not only for the Westerneducated African but also for black people of African descent in the Americas. This alienation is partially articulated in the characterization of Eulalie as a displaced woman anxiously seeking to reconnect with her African roots. “Ato, can’t your Ma be sort of my Ma too / And your Pa mine?” she says (1985 ed., p. 9). Arriving in Ghana, Eulalie believes she has “come to the very source” (p. 24) of her identity, to Africa, the original home of her ancestors who were transported across the Atlantic by the ships of white European slave masters.
ily referenced, and easily imagined—but largely in exoticized terms. Eulalie’s stereotypical and romanticized notions of Africa—an Africa of “palm trees, the azure sea, the sun and golden beaches” (p. 9)—reflect some of the imperialist European imagination’s historical clichés of Africa. Eulalie’s assertion that she understands “there is always witch-hunting in Africa” (p. 25) also reveals her Western upbringing. Eulalie has thoroughly internalized what Aidoo has described (in the 1996 essay “Literature, Feminism, and the African Woman Today”) as a consistent and still ongoing image that Western visual media, along with travel agents, vacation package operators, and airlines, present to the world: of Africa as “the land of exotic flora, and vanishing fauna, for example the threatened elephant and the black rhino. Then finally we get the Africa of ‘golden’ beaches, great lakes against crimson sunsets, calm rivers, breathtaking waterfalls, and always white folks having fun!” (p. 156). “The African press” she says later in the same essay, “is no better” (p. 172). And although Aidoo made those comments in 1996, the idea of Africa—the Africa of the “tourist brochure” (The Dilemma, p. 9)— that is crystallized in Eulalie’s imagination was already well established in 1965 when The Dilemma was published. This shows that not much changes over the years in Western misrepresentations and exoticizations of Africa.
The paradox, however, is that Ato’s Ghanaian family views Eulalie herself as a slave, because she is “a daughter of slaves” (p. 19). This is despite Ato’s informing them that “my wife is as black as we all are” (p. 17). Aidoo told Vincent in 1982 that in later years she would not have “had the courage ѧ to confront this whole question of Africa and Black America in those stark terms because the play is very harsh on everybody, both the Africans and the black Americans” (p. 5). That is, had she not written the play when she was still a university student, fears about the play’s potential reception—for its depiction of harsh historical truths involving the realities of the relationship between Africa and its diaspora and the West—would have constrained her. The Dilemma demonstrates other ways in which Africa’s relationship with its diaspora is marked by historical misunderstandings. From Eulalie’s perspective, Africa is easily known, eas-
The character of Ato Yawson comes off badly throughout the play for his failure to mediate skillfully, knowledgeably, and conscientiously between Eulalie and his family. Ato is similar in certain respects to Aidoo’s later character Kofi Ako. Like Kofi Ako, Ato abnegates his responsibility to his community. Ato’s failure in his mediatory role is highlighted in his characterization as a “been-to” and returning Westerneducated African. He is projected as a kind of cultural mediator or interlocutor, thus making his identity symbolic of the newly independent Ghanaian nation and in particular of the vision of its new sons and leaders, who are meant to be moving their community forward. But when Ato’s family comes to ask why he and Eulalie “haven’t started a family,” Ato says evasively, “Nothing ѧ oh!” (The Dilemma, p. 45). The unhappy family
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AMA ATA AIDOO of course does not know that Eulalie had earlier propositioned that they have children, and Ato’s pitiless response had been: “Children, who wants them? In fact, they will make me jealous. I couldn’t bear seeing you love someone else better than you do me” (p. 10). Having children would create enhanced possibilities of integration and relocation for Eulalie into her rediscovered African community while breaking the distance established between the family and Eulalie because of the mutual stereotypes they hold of each other, but Ato’s refusal to have children is antithetical to all of these relationships. Like Kofi Ako, Ato fails to advance the destiny of the race or nation, and both men are therefore symbolic of what Aidoo described in her essay “The African Woman Today” as “the apparent lack of vision, or courage, in the [l]eadership of the postcolonial period.” As she explains in that piece, “‘Leadership’ in this context does not refer” only to “political leadership exclusively” but to “the entire spectrum of the intellectual, professional and commercial elites in positions to make vital decisions on behalf of the entire [African] community” (p. 42). As the play ends, Ato’s mother is seen providing physical and emotional support to Eulalie, in a way that suggests that Eulalie will be finally integrated into the community, but Aidoo’s presentation of the problems of acculturation and her overall ideological disposition avoids a celebratory or triumphalist narrative of independence and freedom. As she told Theo Vincent, Aidoo realized during that first decade of African independence when The Dilemma was published that although there was a general mood of triumphalism within African nations, “the continent as a whole” had “not yet defined its future” (p. 5) in certain important respects.
aspects of the lives of the educated elite within the newly independent Ghanaian nation in which the story is set. “Everything Counts” is a nationalist narrative that seeks to scrutinize everybody’s “role in nation-building” (p. 4). Staking a claim for telling the story of Africa from an insider’s perspective, Sissie says she is presenting her readers with “some ѧ truths she knew about Africa” (p. 1). This perspective reflects Aidoo’s own belief in her “commitment as an African” and the need she feels “to be an African nationalist” (interview with Adeola James, p. 15). This commitment to African nationalism and panAfricanism necessitates a censure of the neocolonial attitudes of the class of Africans who have taken over the reins of government after colonialism. Sissie is “a student of economics” (p. 1) and interested therefore in analysis of the economic consequences of colonization on Africa. She not only worries about “the people at home” who are “scrambling to pay exorbitant prices for secondhand clothes from America” and purchasing “second-hand machinery from someone else’s junkyard” (p. 1), Sissie also blames Africa’s leaders for the continent’s underdevelopment. She questions, for instance, their use of “second-rate experts” employed from Western countries and economies, who give “first-class dangerous advice” to African nations and who compound the problem with their “fifth-rate” opinions (p. 1). Africa’s leaders, moreover, are portrayed as nationalists engaged in empty sloganeering. For although they fail to be original themselves and they fail in their duty as caretakers of the nation, they preach, for example, to Sissie and other women about the “beauty of being oneself” and admonish African women that they should not “struggle to look like white girls,” for instance by straightening their hair (p. 1). Having just returned home from studying abroad to contribute her quota to the nation’s progress, Sissie, an obvious creation and ideological product of Aidoo’s pan-Africanist sensibilities and of her interest in the movement for black liberation, is disillusioned by what she encounters. Most of the women in the university where she teaches wear “wigs—made from other
THE SHORT STORIES
Aidoo’s first collection of short stories, No Sweetness Here, appeared in 1970. In the opening story, “Everything Counts,” the protagonist Sissie, described as “sister, lover and mother” (1979 ed., p. 1), takes stock of herself and her colleagues by examining the physical, material, and spiritual
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AMA ATA AIDOO people’s unwanted hair” (pp. 1–2). In the essay “No Saviours,” published in 1969 (only a year before No Sweetness Here), Aidoo lamented what she described as a “basic weakness Africans have exhibited over and over again” since the “encounter with the West.” No “matter what generation we belong to or what social class we come from,” she stresses, “we have got this unhealthy attraction for” the “very often trashy products of someone else’s civilisation” (“No Saviours,” 1973 reprint, p. 17). As a teacher in a university and as an intellectual and hence as a member of the African middle class—that is, the group of people in charge of the newly independent nation—Sissie provides a narrative that is also selfreflexive. It is significant in this respect that she herself had started off wearing a wig and had only recently started “wearing her own hair” (“Everything Counts,” p. 4). The story is Aidoo’s censure of Africa’s blind mimicry of the West, its lack of initiative, its general unoriginality, and its increasing predilection for a Western-derived consumerist culture.
rule established in Africa. “In all the twenty or so years I’ve been general keeper and cook for this Rest House,” Zirigu asserts, marveling at Kobina’s attitude, “I have not encountered a thing like this” (p. 19). Kobina is aware of the moral and spiritual malaise that the perpetuation of colonialist attitudes signifies for African nations, but Aidoo’s story, sadly, makes clear that Kobina’s attitude is likely to remain unique; he stands out as one of only a few Western-educated men in the nation interested in blowing “the nonsense from our souls” and the “stupidities from our minds” (p. 20). As long as educated Africans continue to maintain outdated and counterproductive colonial structures, Aidoo’s story suggests, it is nearly impossible for patriotic Africans to help “lift the veils off” the eyes of their people, because there are too “many cramped souls” around (p. 20). “In the Cutting of a Drink” explores the deleterious effects of Westernization and urbanization on Africans. Mansa abandons school in her village and heads for the attractions of life in the city. Life in the city is life lived in the fast lane, and the city is presented as a dangerous transitional space. The unnamed narrator goes on a night out with his friend and host Duayaw and discovers that his sister Mansa, the “lost child” (p. 37) of the village for whom he has come to search, is working as a prostitute in the city. The suggestion is that city life—modernization, Westernization—brings with it new human and social relationships, which from the perspective of the rural-urban divide in Africa lead to the weakening of precolonial familial ties and bonds. Consequently, the narrator from the village cannot, for example, contemplate his friend Duayaw’s suggestion of the possibility of his sister Mansa being married and “living in one of those big bungalows” (p. 32) in the city without Mansa’s family back in the village being informed.
“For Whom Things Did Not Change” is another story that explores the devastating legacies of colonialism and neocolonialism in Ghana and Africa. Zirigu, a Gold Coast war veteran who fought for the British in Burma in the 1940s, has worked in all the years since as a cook for white people. Having served most of his life as colonial cook, houseboy, and servant, he intends to cook for Kobina, a Western-educated African, but Kobina detests being treated that way: “Zirigu, I no be white man” (p. 16), he protests. Likewise he refuses to be called “Massa” (p. 19) when he is so addressed, since the title is a relic from the old colonial order and one of the means of institutionalizing master-servant relationships. “‘But all the other Massas, they don’t say make I no call them so?” Zirigu complains in response (p. 20). Kobina’s lack of interest in copying the lifestyles of the former colonial masters makes him untypical of the new class of other Westerneducated Africans, “the big men” (p. 10), most of whom sustain and indulge in the privileges of master-servant relationships and all the other legacies of a class-divided society that colonial
If city life, as a reflection of modernization or Westernization, increasingly fragments older familial ties, “Cutting” also suggests that this process is increasingly related to a decay in social morality. The city provides an exhilarating level of personal freedom, as in the fact that “in the
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AMA ATA AIDOO The mention in “She-Who-Would-Be-King” of the Confederation of the African States is another articulation of Aidoo’s pan-Africanist vision. The hope of continental African unity is a vision that was espoused by Ghana’s first president (and arch pan-Africanist) Kwame Nkrumah; it is significant in this respect that Afi-Yaa is presented as the “President of Africa” (p. 61) and not as the leader of a single nation. Equally significant is the fact that while presenting women as potential liberating agents of the continent, the story also takes a swipe at African dictatorship. African leaders are said to sit on people’s heads “until they rot with old age” (p. 60). As a father and son discuss Afi-Yaa’s presidency, the son suggests, “We are going to have her for the next one hundred years!” (p. 60), an obvious reference to the overstaying tendencies of some African leaders and presidents. The story intimates, though, that because Afi-Yaa is a woman, she might be bearing a fresh vision and behave differently from those “power-hungry old men” and “power hungry young men” (p. 60).
city, no one cares if you dance well or not” (p. 34). Yet, it is this same heady lack of restraint and freedom for the individual that allows the previously conscientious citizen of the nation to participate in any kind of immoral activity. Hence, when the narrator from the village finally encounters his sister Mansa and asks, regarding her work as a prostitute, “Young woman, is this the work you do?” Mansa retorts by screaming angrily, “And who are you to ask me such questions? I say, who are you? Let me tell you that any kind of work is work. You villager, you villagerѧ” (p. 36). In the village, Mansa would have faced greater social censure, because the village does not provide the space for this kind of distancing from questions of morality, which have allowed her to join and mix with other “bad women of the city” (p. 36). The story “She-Who-Would-Be-King,” which appeared in the 1997 collection The Girl Who Can and Other Stories, is one of the most pithy and poignant but powerful articulations of Aidoo’s feminist agenda and vision. It is the year 2026, and Afi-Yaa “has been elected the first President of the newly formed Confederation of African States” (“She-Who-Would-Be-King,” 2002 reprint, p. 59). Afi-Yaa’s election is a dream come true for women; indeed, one of the men in the story had earlier stated with conviction: “I don’t think the men of this country will ever let a woman be their President” (p. 55). Aidoo’s personal view is that “much of the putting down of women that educated African men indulge in ѧ is a warmed up left-over from colonization,” as she says in the 1998 essay “The African Woman Today” (p. 47). Given her contention in the same essay that “men have monopolized leadership positions in Africa” (p. 48) and that the postcolonial male leadership has abused the power it has been entrusted with, “She-Who-Would-Be-King” offers an alternative, hopeful vision for the future of women within society and politics in Africa. The presidency of Afi-Yaa can also be taken, therefore, to reflect Aidoo’s wish that there might be “some African, somewhere, who, one day, would help us solve our problems,” as she told Adeola James (p. 11).
“She-Who-Would-Be-King” also weighs the possibilities of hope against despair, where the situation of women is concerned. In the story, we learn that it was initially the university professor Adjoa Moji, a law faculty dean, who aspired to be Africa’s first woman president. Where the professor fails, her daughter Afi-Yaa, of the next generation, succeeds. Envisaged here is a kind of new political and power dispensation that Aidoo asserts is realizable for women. “We need to intensify our struggle,” she admonishes African women, while also proclaiming a manifesto for the revolution: “If ѧ like men around the world, African men harbour any phobias about women moving into leadership positions, then they better get rid of such phobias quickly” (“The African Woman Today,” p. 48). In the final analysis, “She-Who-Would-Be-King” can be read as a feminist political manifesto, one in which Aidoo represents her belief that “it is high time African women moved onto centre stage, with or without any one’s encouragement” (“The African Woman Today,” p. 48).
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AMA ATA AIDOO In “Nutty,” another story from The Girl Who Can, Aku-Yaa prepares a meal for her American friend Blanche, only to have a very similar meal prepared for her years later when Blanche invites Aku-Yaa to dinner when she travels to America. The incident symbolizes the uncredited appropriation of African resources and culture by the West. When Blanche informs Aku-Yaa that she has discovered “a new exotic recipe,” we learn that “[a] stone dropped into the pit of AkuYaa’s belly” (“Nutty,” p. 50). The reason for AkuYaa’s discomfiture is her awareness of the existence of a whole catalogue of stereotypes relating to the word “exotic.” For, in addition to “strange,” “weird,” and “dumb,” the “exotic” in many a Westerner’s imagination has come to mean
when Aidoo was living in exile in Harare, Zimbabwe. It is divided into two main sections. Part 1 is titled “Of Love and Commitment,” and part 2 is “Someone Talking to Sometime.” There are further subsections, with titles such as “Legacies” and “Tomorrow’s Song.” “As the Dust Begins to Settle” is, for instance, dedicated to “Kojo,” who is obviously some kind of friend or comrade and to whose aid the poet-persona narrator rises in defense when he is criticized, captured, and imprisoned. The narrator of the poem affirms support for someone who clearly has been imprisoned for fighting for his rights. It meditates on the struggle for democratic rights in a postcolonial African nation and is a reference to the atrocious power of the state machinery of terror. That these victims of state injustice are probably innocent is also suggested. The poet-persona leaves the prison yard at the end to join other comrades, who like her are contemplating the commitment of their incarcerated brother Kojo, a situation that suggests that while they support him and his cause, they are not altogether sure if the stance he has taken, which has led him into trouble, is the most useful approach.
both those who dress strangely, as well as the apparel they don, clothes that are described as costumes though worn outside the theatre, and for everyday living; accents that are so thick their owners might as well have spoken in their native tongues and saved themselves and “us” the trouble; entire cultures to which the term modern can ever apply ѧ people who refuse to deal with the Internet. (“Nutty,” p. 50)
The story is also a critique of globalization, in its observation that “African food becomes edible only when it is part of an exotic universal cuisine” (p. 53). When Aku-Yaa had prepared the same meal for Blanche earlier, “Blanche’s face and her manner as they began to eat that meal” had been such that Aku-Yaa thought “someone might drink poison knowingly with better cheer” (p. 48). Thus, despite her earlier disposition, Blanche is now “selling” back to Aku-Yaa an exoticized version of food she had learned about from her without ever acknowledging it. It reminds Aku-Yaa of another form of appropriation she observes on her trip to America, when music by a popular Ghanaian band is played on a Western radio station and its music is described simply as “world music,” as if “crediting the music with Africa would somehow take something away from it” (p. 53).
“Regrets” is about a love relationship but also about the political issue of exploitation. The female persona of the story is reminiscing on her strained love relationship with the absent male protagonist. There is a failure in communication between the two of them. Thus, she reflects both in pain and in hope. Combining love with political commitment, she hopes for another opportunity despite all that has happened to improve her relationship with her lover. “ROUTINE DRUGS I—for Eldred” is devoted tongue-in-cheek to a colleague, who admonishes the narrator, probably Ama Ata Aidoo herself, to “stop shouldering the world’s troubles.” The poet sees this as an attempt at censorship and a refusal to acknowledge the realities of the continent and the problems the women of Africa in particular face. Typically, the poet suggests in response to Eldred, a woman may have to also carry a baby on her back as she struggles through life; women cannot simply laugh and take life easy but must face the dif-
THE POEMS
Ama Ata Aidoo’s first collection of poetry, Someone Talking to Sometime, was published in 1985,
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AMA ATA AIDOO ficulties of the real world. The narrative is therefore reprimanding this “worthy friend” and “loving brother”, whose advice is heard but evidently not welcome.
Declaration of Independence—For Me,” in which the narrator, clearly an alter ego of Aidoo herself, indicates her resentment of the betrayal she has experienced at the hands of her dear friend. The poet-narrator insists that the distance she feels compelled to establish between herself and her former comrade-in-arms has nothing to do with the fact that they might be from different ethnic or cultural backgrounds. “As Always”is also a dirgelike critique of traitors to a common cause. The accusation is direct and unconcealed.
“ROUTINE DRUGS II—” is also about an unsympathetic and irresponsible lover, who asks the injured woman narrator—his partner—how she could be so careless. While the woman, who probably suffered fire burns while preparing food for the family, is concerned about how her children will manage now that she is incapacitated, their father, her revered lover or husband, is more concerned with criticizing her for getting injured. As she awaits her operation, the narrator also criticizes the social system for failing to care for the community; injured patients suffer physical rots of the body for a lack of drugs that are not available in the hospital to which she has been admitted.
In terms of personal relationships, the female narrator of “As Always” is suspicious and distrustful. Thus she refers to her comrade as “my dear, my love” but finally asserts her distance by stating plainly that she can no longer turn up at their meetings. Clearly, the narrator has become disenchanted with the complex and ambiguous relationships inherent to the revolutionary circles she has been part of, with their attendant hazards of hope and betrayal, faith and disillusionment, failure and success. Aidoo reflected further on her own political activism in her interview with Ada Uzoamaka Azodo: “I tried, you know, to even enter what I then perceived as revolutionary politics,” she said, continuing that she believes it is necessary for “the writer and the artist to also be going out there actively participating in the struggle ѧ the committed artist has to be an activist ѧ whether through the mode of writing or other areas” (p. 436). This quest for a deep sense of personal and political freedom can be seen as an ideological blueprint or statement on all kinds of human relationships including cross-cultural and racial ones.
Aidoo’s poems are also deeply personal stories, as evident in “To Him Who Said No to the Glare of the Open Day,” which is dedicated to her twin brother who was still born (Ama Ata Aidoo’s twin identity is indicated by her middle name, “Ata.”). This lament on the brother she lost, however, also incorporates a discussion of economic, cultural, and political issues, as well as referencing the economic hardship faced by people struggling to make ends meet with Ghanaian cedi, the official national currency. There is also the reference to the adoption of foreign culture, of being married in “shrouds”, an allusion to the Western custom—copied indiscriminately by Africans—of wearing white wedding gowns. There is also a satirical critique of a classbased society, and the poem’s reference that criticize intellectualization and armchair theorizing done by those who write about life without actually having experienced life’s fine grainy details. Aidoo’s second collection of poems, An Angry Letter in January, published in 1992, is, like her first collection, a set of powerful and ideologically invigorating verses. The book’s two main sections are titled “Images of Africa at Century’s End” and “Women’s Conferences and Other Wonders.” The collection is prefaced with the highly polemic “As Always, a Painful
“Images of Africa at Century’s End” is the title poem of the section of the same heading. Here, the poet is engaged in revealing how African history is often distorted and Africans marginalized in the Western media and by European writers with vested interests. She points out the way that African historical figures—for instance, queens and kings such Nefertiti and “King Tut” (King Tutankhamen of Nubia-Egypt), as well as the African people—metamorphose in contemporary times into completely different figures. In her essay “Literature, Feminism, and
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AMA ATA AIDOO the African Woman Today,” Aidoo argues that, historically, “the incomparable Nefertiti” was “a veritable Black beauty whose complexion was nowhere near the alabaster she is now wilfully painted with” (pp. 156–157). Thus the contemporary representations of Nefertiti and Tutankhamen—where “Princess Nefertiti” and “King Tut” are being dragged to a beauty doctor”—represent a deliberate attempt to distort their images and consequently misrepresent African history. A year before the appearance of An Angry Letter in January, Aidoo had publicly critiqued misrepresentations of Africa in her “Conference Presentation,” where she discusses how “Egypt was very African and very Black” and she questions the “caucasianization of Classical Egypt that was initiated at the beginning of this century and is still ongoing” (p. 151). In that piece, Aidoo also points out “the whitening of visual images from pre-Pharaonic and Pharaonic times, the thinning and raising of noses, the thinning of lips, and so on” (p. 151). The consequences of such historical distortion, Aidoo suggests, triggers a process of African self-denial—which is addressed in “Images of Africa at Century’s End” as an emerging conflict between black self-pride and black self-abnegation. Aidoo’s poet-narrator asks whether the natural features of black people must disappear to suit others or put them at ease. Ultimately, “Images of Africa at Century’s End” critiques the usurpation of African history by the forces of colonialism, conquest, and subjugation, forces that are not only interested in keeping black people as slave in an effort to control their future.
way back to the transatlantic slave trade, which was organized by some European powers, the poet is equally concerned with recent events in which Africa’s leaders and governments have contributed in insidious ways to destroying the continent. In a sense, these man-made activities create other storms and disasters, which is it suggested are equally as dangerous if not more so than the natural disasters. All storms are dangerous, and the poet is more fearful of these man-made and self-made storms and disasters, even though they are not storms that can be seen and heard around the world. The havoc they wreak cannot be discussed, pointing words at political repression and censorship in Africa’s postcolonial nations.
ASSESSMENT
Given the range of the subjects she engages with, it is easy to see why Ama Ata Aidoo is one of Africa’s leading and most important writers. Apart from demonstrating a constant concern with the position of women in African society, she is interested in the contradictions of identity formation in the Africa of the postindependence era. While many of her stories are located within the context of the changing social order in neocolonial Ghana, her examples are relevant for Africa as a whole. Aidoo now lives predominantly in Ghana but spends time traveling and teaching in other African countries as well as in the United States and Europe. Discussing her activism, she says that it is not meant to exclude: When people ask me rather bluntly ѧ whether I am a feminist, I not only answer yes, but I go on to insist that every woman and every man should be a feminist—especially if they believe that Africans should take charge of African land, African wealth, African lives and the burden of African development. It is not possible to advocate independence for the African continent without also believing that African women must have the best that the environment can offer.
At first sight, the poem “Speaking of Hurricanes”—which is dedicated to the Kenyan writer, nationalist, and pan-Africanist Micere Mugo and other African exiles—simply describes a certain kind of cultural and political displacement, as it laments the ongoing dispersal of Africans. The poem also speaks of the natural disasters associated with the Northern Hemisphere. While the poet shudders over the ruination these disasters leave behind, the deeper political message is in the comparison of these natural disasters with the self-made or man-made ones. While this is a reference that goes all the
(“The African Woman Today,” p. 47)
For her, the struggle for the advancement and improvement of women’s position in society continues. It is also a collective effort in which
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AMA ATA AIDOO African men would have to be more self-aware and more conscientious in their dealings with African women. It is also generally a struggle in which Africa’s erstwhile oppressors, who have reappeared and been reincarnated in many different forms, will also have to begin to deal with Africans on a more equal and fair basis.
the Empire. Edited by Shirley Chew and Anna Rutherford. Sydney, N.S.W.: Dangaroo Press, 1993. Pp. 29–36. “Literature, Feminism, and the African Woman Today.” In Reconstructing Womanhood, Reconstructing Feminism: Writings on Black Women. Edited by Delia JarrettMacauley. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Pp. 156–157. “The African Woman Today.” In Sisterhood, Feminisms, and Power: From Africa to the Diaspora. Edited by Obioma Nnaemeka. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1998. Pp. 39–50.
Selected Bibliography CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Azodo, Ada Uzoamaka, and Gay Wilentz, eds. Emerging Perspectives on Ama Ata Aidoo. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1999.
WORKS OF AMA ATA AIDOO SHORT STORIES, NOVELS, POETRY,
AND
Bryan, Violet Harrington. “Conflicting Identities in the Women of Ama Ata Aidoo’s Drama and Fiction.” In Middle Passages and the Healing Place of History: Migration and Identity in Black Women’s Literature. Edited by Elizabeth Brown-Guillory. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006. Chetin, Sara. Rereading and Rewriting African Women: Ama Ata Aidoo and Bessie Head. Canterbury, U.K.: University of Kent, 1991. Gourdine, Angeletta K. M. The Difference Place Makes: Gender, Sexuality, and Diaspora Identity. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002. Grant, Jane. Ama Ata Aidoo: The Dilemma of a Ghost. Harlow, U.K.: Longman, 1980.
PLAYS
The Dilemma of a Ghost. London: Longman, 1965. Reprinted in the volume Two Plays: “The Dilemma of a Ghost” and “Anowa.” London: Longman, 1985. Anowa. Harlow, U.K.: Longman, 1970. Reprinted in the volume Two Plays: “The Dilemma of a Ghost” and “Anowa.” London: Longman, 1985. No Sweetness Here. Harlow, U.K.: Longman, 1970. Reprint, London: Longman, 1979. (Stories.) Our Sister Killjoy; or, Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint. London: Longman, 1977. (Novel.) Someone Talking to Sometime. Harare, Zimbabwe: College Press, 1985. (Poems.) Changes. Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan, 1991. (Novel.) An Angry Letter in January and Other Poems. Coventry, U.K.: Dangaroo Press, 1992. The Girl Who Can and Other Stories. Accra, Ghana: SubSaharan, 1997. Rev. ed., Oxford: Heinemann, 2002.
Johnson, Merri Lisa. “Self-Colonization and Racial Identity in Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy; or, Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint.” In Postcolonial Perspectives on Women Writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the U.S. Edited by Martin Japtok. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2003. Langley, April C. E. The Black Aesthetic Unbound: Theorizing the Dilemma of Eighteenth-Century African American Literature. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008. (Discussion of Dilemma of a Ghost.)
CHILDREN’S BOOKS The Eagle and the Chickens and Other Stories. Enugu, Nigeria: Tana Press, 1986. Birds and Other Poems. Accra: Pedacoms, 2002.
Larbi Korang, Kwaku. “Ama Ata Aidoo’s Voyage Out: Mapping the Coordinates of Modernity and African Selfhood in Our Sister Killjoy.” Kunapipi 14, no. 3:50–61 (1992). Odamtten, Vincent O. The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo: Polylectics and Reading against Neocolonialism. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994.
ESSAYS “No Saviours.” In African Writers on African Writing. Edited by G. D. Killam. London: Heinemann, 1973. Pp. 14–18. “Ghana: To Be a Woman.” In Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology. Edited by Robin Morgan. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1984. Pp. 261–268. “Conference Presentation.” In Critical Fictions: The Politics of Imaginative Writing. Edited by Philomena Mariani. Seattle, Wash.: Bay Press, 1991. Pp. 151–154. “Male-ing Names in the Sun.” In Unbecoming Daughters of
Osei-Nyame, Kwadwo, Jnr. “Images of London in African Literature: Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy and Dambudzo Marechera’s The Black Insider.” In The Swarming Streets: Twentieth-Century Literary Representations of London. Edited by Lawrence Phillips. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2004. Wilentz, Gay. Ama Ata Aidoo. The Dilemma of a Ghost. In
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AMA ATA AIDOO ine McGregor.” In African Writers Talking. Edited by Dennis Duerden and Cosmo Pieterse. Oxford: Heinemann, 1998. Pp. 19–27.
Gay Wilentz, Binding Cultures: Black Women Writers in Africa and the Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.
Osei-Nyame, Kwadwo, Jnr. Unpublished interview with Ama Ata Aidoo. London, 2002.
INTERVIEWS Granqvist, Raoul, and Stotesbury, John. “Ama Ata Aidoo: African Women’s Writing.” In African Voices: Interviews with Thirteen African Writers. Edited by Raoul Granqvist and John Stotesbury. Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1989. Pp. 12–15. James, Adeola. “Interview with Ama Ata Aidoo.” In In Their Own Voices: African Women Writers Talk. London: James Currey, and Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1990. Pp. 8–27. McGregor, Maxine. “Ama Ata Aidoo Interviewed by Max-
Uzoamaka Azodo, Ada. “Facing the Millennium: An Interview with Ama Ata Aidoo.” In Emerging Perspectives on Ama Ata Aidoo. Edited by Ada Uzoamaka Azodo and Gay Wilentz. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1999. Pp. 429–441. Vincent, Theo. “Ama Ata Aidoo: Ghana.” In Seventeen Black and African Writers on Literature and Life. Lagos, Nigeria: Centre for Black African Writers on Literature and Life, 1982. Pp. 1–8.
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AUSTIN CLARKE (1896—1974)
Tom Walker of whom survived to adulthood. His lowermiddle-class family lived in a northern quarter of inner-city Dublin. Augustine Clarke, his father, started work as a plumber but rose to be superintendent of the Dublin Waste Water Department. Clarke’s memoir of his early years, Twice Round the Black Church (1962), presents his father as a kindly figure. However, it was the stern Victorian morality and religious conservatism of his mother, Ellen Patten Browne Clarke, that dominated the family home:
AUSTIN CLARKE STANDS among the finest Irish writers of the twentieth century. A poet, playwright, novelist, critic, and broadcaster, his work includes eighteen volumes of poetry, over twenty verse plays, thousands of literary reviews, three romance novels, and three volumes of autobiography, as well as numerous critical works and radio broadcasts. Of the Irish poets who rose to prominence after William Butler Yeats, he is less well known outside Ireland than his contemporaries Louis MacNeice and Patrick Kavanagh, and he less obviously influenced the generations of Irish poets who have followed. But the quality of his work ranks him in their company. Deep into the twentieth century, Clarke continued to perpetuate and develop the values of the Irish Literary Renaissance. Drawing on Gaelic mythology and literature throughout his career, he was a technical innovator who strove to transfer the complexities of Gaelic prosody into Irish poetry in English. Clarke’s poetry will probably never gain wide popularity. It stands apart from the work of most of his contemporaries, at once too topical, too historical, and too mythological. On the one hand, his poems draw on aspects of Irish history, mythology, and literature that are unfamiliar to many readers, even in Ireland; on the other, his poems often relate to particular events or moments in the Ireland of his time in specific and obscure, if not outright elusive, ways. But when they strike the right balance and avoid becoming too esoteric or intricate, Clarke’s poems are among the most emotionally moving, intellectually complex, and formally achieved of any twentieth-century Irish poet.
We said the Rosary each evening and when my mother gave out the first half of the Hail Mary to which we said the response, her voice always changed as we came to the last words, “And blessed is the fruit of thy Womb, Jesus.” The pace quickened and she ran them together. When, in turn, we said them, we imitated her rapid sing-song. The sentence was completely incomprehensible to me, but I suspected that it was improper, although it had been first spoken by the Angel Gabriel. (p. 10)
Unlike most of the writers of the late nineteenthand early twentieth-century Irish Literary Renaissance, who were predominately Anglo-Irish Protestants, Clarke’s background was Catholic and Celtic, and his work draws deeply from this cultural identity. The emphasis that his mother placed on sinfulness and religious obligation led to Clarke’s growing up with an abiding sense of guilt and a fear of eternal damnation that haunted him throughout his life and doubtless contributed to the psychological trauma he experienced as a young man. He could never accept the overbearing influence of Catholicism in his own life and in the life of his nation, but neither could he entirely reject its moral and spiritual demands. In 1905, Clarke enrolled at Belvedere College in Dublin, the prestigious Jesuit-run school that James Joyce had also earlier attended. Clarke
EARLY YEARS AND INFLUENCES
Augustine Joseph Clarke was born on May 9, 1896, the eleventh of twelve children, only four
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AUSTIN CLARKE remained there until 1912, though in 1909–1910 he did spend a single unhappy term at another Jesuit school, Mungret College in County Limerick, and it was there that he first discovered poetry, when his English teacher recited verse. Devotion to the intricacies of poetic meter and the speaking aloud of verse were to be central to his work throughout his career. At Belvedere, Clarke had volunteered to learn the Irish language. But it was on progressing in 1912 to University College, Dublin, having won a municipal scholarship, that his enthusiasm for the language and its ancient literature flowered. There he studied under Douglas Hyde, the foremost Irish-language scholar of the day, founder of the Gaelic League, and later the first president of the Republic of Ireland. Hyde’s lectures made a great impression on Clarke:
His student years saw him start to explore other aspects of the literary revival. This included reading the poetry of Yeats, as well as works by AE (George William Russell) and George Moore, for the first time. He often attended the Abbey Theatre, which Yeats had helped to found and where he saw many of the older poet’s plays performed. He also started to move in Dublin’s literary circles, meeting and befriending other poets and writers, including F. R. Higgins, James Stephens, and Stephen MacKenna. In 1915 Clarke was awarded a first-class honors BA in English language and literature, and he reenrolled at University College for a master’s degree. His mentor among the lecturers in the English department was the poet and playwright Thomas MacDonagh, who encouraged Clarke’s verse writing, lent him books, and invited him to visit his suburban Dublin home. MacDonagh was deeply interested in the rhythmic quality of verse, its relation to music, and its potential for development into a distinctive Irish mode—as can be seen in his two critical studies, Thomas Campion and the Art of English Poetry (1913) and Literature in Ireland (1916). Under MacDonagh’s guidance, Clarke began to write his master’s dissertation on the influence of lute music on the English Tudor lyric.
Though I could not always follow the swift rush of Dr. Hyde’s western Irish, I knew from his gestures that he was speaking a living language. When the future president of Eire enacted Casadh an tSugain for us, he took the parts of all the characters, jumping up and down from the rostrum in his excitement, and, as he unwound an imaginary straw rope at the end of the play, found himself outside the lecture room. On the morning of our first term, he spoke of the aims and ideals of the language revival: we were all equal, all united in the Gaelic movement. There was no vulgar competition, no showing-off, no twopence-halfpenny looking down on twopence. Those plain words changed me in a few seconds. The hands of our lost despised centuries were laid on me.
On April 24, 1916 (Easter Monday), the Irish Volunteers seized several major buildings in Dublin and declared the independence of the Irish Republic. When he heard the news, Clarke, who shared the rebels’ nationalist convictions, mounted his bicycle and rode around inspecting their strongholds and makeshift barricades. Many years later, in A Penny in the Clouds: More Memories of Ireland and England (1968), he wrote of the Easter Rising as a “historic hour” existing “with all its secret, countless memories of the past, in and out of itself, so that even the feeling of suspense and of coming disaster seemed to belong to a lesser experience of reality,” and he remembered wanting to be alone to “think of Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet, and the hosts of the dead” (pp. 31–32). But the “historic hour” ended five days later, and MacDonagh, as one of the rebel leaders, was executed on May 3. With his supervisor dead, Clarke was obliged to
(Twice Round the Black Church, p. 169)
In 1893, Hyde’s publication of the Love Songs of Connacht—a bilingual edition of Gaelic folk lyrics from the West of Ireland—had marked a turning point in Ireland’s nascent literary revival. As Hyde outlined in his preface to the volume, his translations endeavored “to reproduce the vowel rhymes as well as the exact metre of the original poems.” In doing so, they revealed a new source from which to develop a distinctively Irish mode in verse in English, through imitating the rigorous technical and aural intricacies of Irishlanguage verse. This was one path that Austin Clarke’s poetry would follow.
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AUSTIN CLARKE change the topic of his thesis, writing instead on the work of the English Jacobean dramatist John Ford. He again gained first-class honors for his MA and found himself, with no doubt a very considerable feeling of guilt, appointed for a three-year term to his dead mentor’s vacant teaching post.
The hot breath of the day awoke her, And wearied of its heat She wandered out by noisy elms On the cool mossy peat, Where the shadowed leaves like pecking linnets Nodded around her feet. She leaned and saw in pale-grey waters, By twisted hazel boughs, Her lips like heavy drooping poppies In a rich redness drowse, Then swallow-lightly touched the ripples Until her wet lips were Burning as ripened rowan berries Through the white winter air.
FIRST PUBLICATIONS AND PERSONAL PAIN
That same year saw Clarke’s first publication, The Vengeance of Fionn. Running to more than six hundred lines, the poem reworks a famous story from Irish mythology, recounting the betrothal of Fionn to the young and beautiful Grainne, who is repulsed by his age. At their betrothal party Grainne puts a “geis,” a kind of spell or compulsory agreement, on Fionn’s younger comrade Diarmuid and forces him to run away with her. Diarmuid has no choice in the matter, and though he loves Grainne, he remains faithful to Fionn, who chases the couple all over Ireland till finally he makes peace with Diarmuid and allows the couple to settle down together as husband and wife. Years later, however, when the two men are hunting together, Diarmuid is fatally wounded by a magic boar, and Fionn does nothing to save him.
(Collected Poems [1974], p. 26)
Clarke’s poem is one of several versions of the lovers’ tale produced by Irish writers during the period. In the late nineteenth century, Samuel Ferguson and Katherine Tynan wrote poems based on the story; George Moore and Yeats collaborated on a play, Diarmuid and Grania, first performed in 1901; and Lady Gregory translated the original tale and wrote another play. The Vengeance of Fionn was a late contribution to the Irish revival’s attempt to draw on Irish myth and Gaelic literature to carve out a distinctive Irish literary tradition in English—a project to which Clarke in many ways remained true throughout his life. But it was Herbert Trench’s little-known poem “Deirdre Wed” (1901) that Clarke cited as his major influence. Trench’s poem attracted Clarke with its energetic realism, which he felt was more faithful in tone to the original Gaelic literature than the dreamlike subjective renderings of such material produced by writers more closely associated with the literary revival. And for all its lyricism, The Vengeance of Fionn, possesses strong dramatic qualities that sustain its narrative. By using concrete detail Clarke is able to transform his mythological figures into recognizably human characters. Near the beginning of the poem, for example, the middle-aged Grainne wakes up late at night “in sweating heat,” tossing her “heavy clothes / Aside” and muttering “O I am hot.” These specificities of her physical discomfort are followed by her hearing Diarmuid cry out in his sleep, in premonitory fear of the hunt to come, and then pulling “him on her hot
Despite its narrative nature, as Padraic Colum notes in his introduction to Clarke’s 1936 Collected Poems, The Vengeance of Fionn “is not so much a story as a prolonged song” (p. 11). The poem begins when Diarmuid and Grainne are middle-aged, on their last day together before Diarmuid leaves to go hunting with Fionn, and it ends on the next day, with a young man and woman talking of the possible treachery surrounding Diarmuid’s death and describing the once-beautiful Grainne now left alone. The majority of the poem between is set in the past, looking back at Grainne and Diarmuid’s youthful love, often in a sustained lyrical mood. Though written mostly in iambic pentameter, the poem sometimes breaks up the meter and digresses into reflective passages of description, such as when Grainne awakes in the woods where the lovers first take refuge:
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AUSTIN CLARKE breasts until he slept” (Collected Poems (1974), pp. 5–6). The poem, aided by dramatic use of shifting time sequences, highlights how these godlike characters are subject to the ravages of time. Youth and age play in counterpoint throughout, with Grainne’s idealized recollections of her former beauty contrasted brutally with a young girl’s description of her at the end of the poem:
the land that Yahweh will give the Hebrews, and in his absence his followers turn once again to worshipping the fertility god Baäl. This was followed later in 1921 by the publication of The Sword of the West, which again drew on Irish mythology, this time from the Táin bó’ Cúailnge, the famous Ulster cycle that centers on the figure of Cuchulinn. Despite moments of lyrical beauty, both poems show a startling loss of control. Yet more descriptive detail impedes the narrative, and adjective-laden lines often employ loose and confusing syntactical structures.
And I saw poor Grainne in the sunlight Wrinkled and ugly. I do not think she slept. My mother says that she was beautiful Proud, white, and a queen’s daughter long ago, And that they were great lovers in the old days— Before she was married—and lived in hilly woods Until they wearied. I do not want to grow so old like her.
In the meantime, Clarke’s personal life had plunged into crisis. Following the death of his father the year before, and in the context of intensifying civil unrest, his mental health collapsed. In 1919 his mother committed him to St. Patrick’s Hospital, Dublin, where he stayed for over a year. Immediately prior to his hospitalization he had met Cornelia Cummins. A welleducated older woman, she had established a career as a journalist and had published short stories and verse under the pseudonym Margaret Lyster; but she was also considered difficult and eccentric. On Clarke’s emergence from the hospital the couple married, but their union lasted only ten days and, as Clarke hints in his later memoir, Twice Round the Black Church (p. 90), it appears to have been unconsummated. To add to his misfortunes, in 1921 Clarke was denied reappointment to his university post as a result of the brief marriage: “I realized that the authorities were embarrassed for it was only after two months of waiting that I learned indirectly that I was no longer on the staff. I could not blame them for I had committed too grave an offence and the penalty, in effect, was banishment” (p. 90).
(p. 40)
On its publication, The Vengeance of Fionn attracted considerable critical acclaim in Dublin and London. Having six months earlier given T. S. Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Poems a brief and hostile review, the Times Literary Supplement in its January 17, 1918, issue considered Clarke’s poem at length and commended it for being “as original in conception as it is refined in execution,” and a few weeks later, on February 2, the Irish Times gushed that “not since Mr. Yeats first put on his singing robes has any Irish poet appeared with such decisive claim to be in the bardic succession.” By contrast, the poem was shortly thereafter attacked by the Northern Irish poet Joseph Campbell, who dismissed it as “a bad book” in his review in New Ireland on March 2, 1918. The controversy that ensued helped to boost the poem’s sales and swiftly led to a second printing. However, Campbell’s criticisms were not entirely unfounded. In particular, the long poem sometimes becomes mired in overabundant descriptive detail, and Campbell’s review offered a hint of the less favorable reception that Clarke’s next two long poems were to receive.
In 1922, the same year in which the Irish Free State came into existence and Ireland was divided, Clarke left for London. He established himself as a literary journalist and ended up spending the next fifteen years in England, writing a vast number of reviews for an array of newspapers and journals. But he returned home at frequent intervals, to see his family and attend the theater, and the focus of his work remained on the island of his birth.
Possibly paralleling Irish history with the struggles of the Hebrew people, The Fires of Baäl (1921) reworks material from the Old Testament that deals with events preceding the death of Moses, when he goes up onto a mountain to see
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AUSTIN CLARKE His next book of verse, The Cattledrive in Connaught (1925), signals a leap forward. A new tone is set by the opening poem, “Induction” (Collected Poems, p. 117), in which the speaker identifies himself with Mannanaun Mac Lir, the Celtic god of the sea. He is identified as the “patron saint / Of merry rogues and fiddlers,” but he also watches the crowd “until the sun is red, / The tide turned, and the drink and horses gone,” and this mixture of comic irreverence and a more melancholy mood is characteristic of the volume as a whole. Split into two sections of lyrics, followed by a final long poem, the collection presents a series of different voices and perspectives, contrasting the real and the fantastic, the present and the past, the personal and the political, and the merry and the mad.
Without praise, without wine, Though he asked me to come to his Castle. (Collected Poems, p. 121)
The Spanish ship might be radiant in the sunshine, evoking Galway’s history of trade with Spain, or it might be in flames, suggesting the Spanish Armada’s unsuccessful attempt in the sixteenth century to invade Britain and the fleet’s loss of some of its ships off the coast of Ireland. The “wise salmon” that the poet shares with Yeats might be the salmon from the Fenian cycle that possesses all the knowledge in the world, and hence be intended as a complement to Yeats’s wisdom, but the poem soon gives way to a jibe at Yeats, as the self-aggrandizing offer to come to his castle (in real life only a small tower) is undercut by his lack of praise and wine—a possible reference to an awkward real-life encounter that Clarke had with Yeats. The poet’s personal experience is thus lightly intertwined with the landscape, its history, and mythology. This playful note contrasts with the six poems in the next section, “The Land of Two Mists,” whose brief narratives and dramatic monologues are more psychologically subtle. One of the most powerful, “The Frenzy of Suibhne,” remolds the Middle-Irish romance Buile Shuibhne, in which a king, whose name is usually translated as Sweeney in English, wanders in madness through a forest. The text of the original is formed of prose passages and poetry written in regular quatrains. Clarke’s compressed poem, which resembles the older one only in spirit, focuses on Suibhne’s anguished interior musings, plunging the reader into his disturbed mind, often using the description of the landscape as a metaphor for Suibhne’s psychological disquiet. However, out of these disjointed snatches of monologue emerges a sense of extreme alienation, which seems to have its source in an undercurrent of sexual loss, such as when Suibhne violently reacts to his wife’s remarriage:
The first section contains several particularly vivid poems, drawing on the poet’s travels in the west of Ireland. But they do more than just recount the excitement of the west’s fishermen and fairs; they show Clarke starting to draw on Gaelic poems in a more subtle fashion than previously, by carrying over into English some of Irish poetry’s common idioms and formal characteristics, and by taking certain kinds of Irish poems as models—such as the curse, the blessing, or the praise poem. Another type of Irish poem is the itinerary poem, and “The Itinerary of Ua Clerigh” (Irish for O’Cleary, the original form of Clarke’s surname) is one of the collection’s most highspirited efforts. Each twelve-line stanza offers a mini-hymn of praise and defiance, relating a memorable experience, as the poet travels across the west of Ireland. But the poem constantly blends the real and the imaginary, as in its playful account of an encounter with Yeats: I saw from Galway A Spanish ship flaming Beyond the phantom isles of Aran; Grey stone for hedges Has bound the green county Around branchy Coole of the manor, Where I halted with Yeats To share the wise salmon He grassed from the Lake of Jewels; I dipped in his plate
A juggler cried. Light Rushed from doors and men singing: “O she has been wedded To-night, the true wife of Sweeny, Of Sweeny the King!” I saw a pale woman
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AUSTIN CLARKE the Ulsterman. Their discussion, under the influence of drink, turns into a drunken squabble, and the poem ends with the leader of the Connaught men threatening that Maeve’s armies “Shall bare these plains with hooks of fire and take / The Bull” (p. 152). In the original Ulster cycle, a war between Connaught and Ulster ensues; but in ending his poem on the brink of this war, Clarke offers a viewpoint from which to reflect indirectly on the present state of Ireland. In 1921, six of Ulster’s nine counties had been established as Northern Ireland, a distinct region of the United Kingdom, separate from the rest of Ireland. When the Irish Free State came into existence in 1922, Northern Ireland chose to opt out of the new state and remain a part of the United Kingdom. Clarke, who held strong nationalist beliefs, was dismayed by this development. However, this poetic response does more than offer a particular diagnosis of the partition’s causes or call for a particular course of action in response. Rather, it reaches back beyond opinion to offer an imaginative space of alternative thought.
Half clad for the new bed: I fought them with talons, I ran On the oak-wood—O Horsemen, Dark Horsemen, I tell ye That Sweeny is dead! (p. 133)
This personal sense of loss and alienation is reconfigured on a national scale in “The Lost Heifer.” Clarke’s note to the poem describes it as “written during a period when our national idealism suffered eclipse” (p. 546), which suggests that it is a response to the partition of Ireland and the civil war that ensued in 1921–1923. It uses the heifer—a young cow that has not yet borne a calf—in the way that seventeenth-century Jacobite poets used it: as a secret symbol for Ireland. As in much of Clarke’s work, the poem employs past poetic subjects and modes ironically, to imply subtle connections between history and mythology and the present state of Ireland. The poem is not quite an allegory; rather it symbolically suggests a complex emotional response, embodying loss and yet hope: “her voice coming softly over the meadow / Was the mist becoming rain” (p. 126). The volume’s long title poem also offers an implicit parallel with the present. Drawing again from the Ulster cycle of Irish mythology, “The Cattledrive in Connaught” starts with an argument in bed between Queen Maeve and King Ailill of Connaught over which of them is wealthier. It grows more heated till Maeve proclaims,
PILGRIMAGE AND OTHER POEMS (1929)
In his next collection of poems, Pilgrimage and Other Poems (1929), Clarke again uses the past as a resource to meditate upon the present. But he has abandoned Ireland’s early myths, the remnants of a pagan culture, and instead turns to what he denotes the “Celtic-Romanesque” period, a synthetic imagining of pre-Reformation Ireland of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries. The Roman Empire had never included Ireland, and the Irish church of this period, only partially in communion with Rome, differed from Christianity on the European mainland. Its monastic life was scattered around small settlements, not in centralized structures like those that characterized the major orders in Europe, and these monastic communities were centers of great scholarship, art, and architecture. But a less attractive side to the medieval Irish church was its extreme monastic asceticism and the sexual sacrifice this entailed, which clashed with the values of the pagan culture that the early church
Now from this minute I will not sleep a foot until our wealth Is gathered round the house and counted fleece By skinѧ. (p. 137)
Ailill leaps out of bed and commands the servants to drive all their cattle in from the hills and fields to count them. Vivid, funny, and sexually frank, it is the best of Clarke’s early longer poems. At the poem’s end, Maeve attempts to borrow a fabulous bull from a ruler in the province of Ulster. Sitting around drinking ale, her delegation of Connaught men starts to negotiate with
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AUSTIN CLARKE displaced. This historic setting allows Clarke to scrutinize and indirectly comment on the new Irish state and, more particularly, the nature of the Catholicism that wields so much power within it. In Pilgrimage it operates like a complex two-way mirror: the church of the period was devoted to learning, art, and cultivated belief, in contrast to the modern Irish Catholic Church; while the church in the past, as in the present, worked against humanity’s natural instincts.
In drawing upon the Celtic-Romanesque period, Clarke was not only finding a form of extended metaphor for the state of Ireland but also revising the methods of the Irish Literary Renaissance. He was finding an alternative historical and mythical territory to the pagan sagas drawn on by Yeats and others earlier in the century. Rather than embodying the heroic fervor of the first wave of the revival, his historical terrain was more relevant to Catholicism and the oppressive realities of the Irish Free State. But the poems in Pilgrimage also show Clarke’s commitment to his native tradition through their technique. The volume marks his first substantial attempt to use assonantal patterns from Gaelic poetry as a means of building a distinctively Irish poetic tradition in English. In a note to Pilgramage, he explained his innovations:
The title poem, “Pilgrimage,” imagines a journey to several religious centers. The pilgrims arrive at Clonmacnoise, a monastery on the banks of the river Shannon, and the poem celebrates the artistic and scholastic achievements of Irish monasticism: Grey holdings of rain Had grown less with the fields, As we came to that blessed place Where hail and honey meet. O Clonmacnoise was crossed With light: those cloistered scholars, Whose knowledge of the gospel Is cast as metal in pure voices, Were all rejoicing daily, And cunning hands with cold and jewels Brought chalices to flame.
Assonance, ѧ elaborate in Gaelic ѧ poetry, takes the clapper from the bell of rhyme. In simple patterns, the tonic word at the end of the line is supported by a vowel-rhyme in the middle of the next line. Unfortunately the internal patterns of assonance and consonance in Gailic stanzas are so intricate that they can only be suggested in another language. The natural lack of double rhymes in English leads to an avoidance of words of more than one syllable at the end of the lyric line, except in blank alternation with rhyme. A movement constant in Continental languages is absent. But by cross-rhyming or vowel-rhyming, separately, one or more of the syllables of longer words, on or off accent, the difficulty may be turned: lovely and neglected words are advanced to the tonic place and divide their echoes.
(Collected Poems, p. 153)
But the poem also acknowledges more negative aspects of monastic Christianity. The perfection of these religious communities conflicts with human nature, as beyond the shimmering stained glass and richly illuminated books of the monastery “a sound / Of wild confession” arises, “Black congregations” are reproved, and souls wail with guilt.
(Pilgrimage and Other Poems, p. 43)
A snapshot of the complexity of these patterns can be taken by analyzing the vowel sounds in the stanza from “Pilgrimage” above. The long “a” sound in “grey” occurs throughout the first four lines: “rain,” “came,” “place,” and “hail.” This gives way to a succession of short “o” sounds: “crossed,” “gospel,” “scholars,” and “knowledge”; then a series of “oi” sounds: “Clonmacnoise,” “cloistered,” “voices,” and “rejoicing.” And the original long “a” then returns to bring the stanza to a close with the lineendings of “daily” and “flame.” The intricate sound patterning is particularly appropriate to the
The next poem in the book, “Celibacy,” builds on these glimpses of the unsustainable astringencies of monastic life. The title points to the celibacy of modern Irish clerics, but the poem takes the reader inside a cloistered hermit’s mind, as he desperately attempts to rid himself of the mental image of a woman. The poem suggests that, although Christianity has supposedly cast out pagan beliefs and practices, in reality desire cannot be suppressed, and trying to do so leads to mental torment.
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AUSTIN CLARKE monastic worlds that the poet is trying to conjure; but it was also to be distinctive to the music of Clarke’s verse for years to come.
and novelists”), continuing his battle against censorship, and he helped organize a Council of Action against censorship in Dublin. The year after he returned to Ireland, he published Night and Morning (1938). The twelve poems in this volume were the first new verse Clarke had published since 1929, and they marked a turn inward toward a private poetry of confession. The Celtic-Romanesque backdrop and the concern with the conflict between sexuality and Christian teaching, mediated through different voices, mostly gives way to a single austere voice, meditating on the conflict between reason and faith. But the concerns of Pilgrimage and Night and Morning are closely connected. Both explore the conflict between man’s essentially sinful nature and the fact that he is responsible for his own salvation, by keeping his soul free of grave sin. Acting according to his reason he may come into conflict with the church’s doctrines. Following his instincts, such as sexual desire, he is likely to lapse into what has been deemed sinful. To fail is to be cast into eternal damnation, and the only comfort is God’s grace and Christ’s death and resurrection, which are in some way redemptive. A humanistic faith in mankind’s reason and capabilities constantly contends with a belief in mankind’s fallen nature and need for moral discipline. The poems in Night and Morning range across different levels of fear and protest, all presenting a divided being trying to give himself over to faith but unable fully to assent and turn his mind from independent inquiry. “Tenebrae” describes a service in Holy Week during which the church commemorates Christ’s passion. It is a solemn time of mourning, and yet the poem’s speaker cannot stop questioning and descending into a quiet internal frenzy:
NIGHT AND MORNING (1938)
After 1930, these “years to come” were spent with Nora Walker, who also had been educated at University College, Dublin, and held strong republican beliefs. Together they raised three sons but did not marry until 1945, after the death of Clarke’s first wife. Walker was bright and well educated; the couple were mutually supportive; and their union was a happy one—though subject to disapproval because of its irregular status, particularly from Clarke’s mother In 1932, along with W. B. Yeats and George Bernard Shaw, Clarke became a founding member of the Irish Academy of Letters. One of the aims of the organization was to resist censorship, which Clarke passionately opposed—and suffered from—all his life. The following year Clarke began serving as a judge at the Oxford Festival of Spoken Poetry, and did that each year until he took his family back to Ireland in 1937. When in 1936 his first Collected Poems was brought out, his reputation seemed assured. However, Clarke’s attempt, begun that same year, to write a biography of Yeats foundered when the older poet’s cooperation was not forthcoming. Following this failed project, Yeats left Clarke out of his Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892– 1935 (1936), an anthology in which Clarke’s poetry should by all rights have been included, and in the process struck a significant blow to the younger poet’s reputation. The following year Clarke and his family returned to Ireland, moving into Bridge House in Templeogue, a suburb of Dublin. Happily he was able to continue reviewing for the British press, while he settled back into Dublin’s literary life. He soon began reviewing for the Irish Times, writing essays for Seamus O’Sullivan’s Dublin Magazine, and broadcasting regularly on Ireland’s national radio station, Radio Éireann. He was also elected president of the Irish chapter of the international writers’ association PEN (which stands for “poets, playwrights, essayists, editors,
I hammer on that common door, Too frantic in my superstition, Transfix with nail that I have broken, The angry notice of the mind. Close as the thought that suffers him, The habit every man in time Must wear beneath his ironed shirt. (Collected Poems, p. 183)
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AUSTIN CLARKE This stanza also demonstrates the stylistic shift in Night and Morning. The voice is often cramped and uncomfortably direct, and the poems are devoid of the rich images, descriptions, and sounds of Pilgrimage.
PLAYS AND PROSE
Night and Morning was to be not only Clarke’s first volume of new poems in nine years but also his last for seventeen. Those decades did not, however, see him lapse into silence, for throughout that time Clarke wrote plays, as well as abundant articles and reviews. The time he spent at the Abbey Theatre as a student had fostered an enthusiasm for poetic drama rooted in Irish tradition, and he went on to write eighteen plays over the course of fifty years. His first, The Son of Learning (1927), is based on the medieval Gaelic poem Aislinge Meic Conglinne (“The Vision of Mac Conglinne”). Comic in style and brisk in pace, it recounts how the wandering poet-scholar Anier Mac Conglinne cures an insatiably hungry king by luring out his “hunger demon”, but then suffers cruel injustice as the clergy take the credit. It irreverently attacks the church and, more particularly, clerical morals, manners, and scholarship. But it is also a poetic manifesto of sorts, with the poet presented as trickster, jester, and conjuror. The play, first staged at the Cambridge Festival Theatre on October 31, 1927, proved popular and was performed under the title The Hunger Demon in Dublin in 1930 at Micheál Mac Liammóir and Hilton Edwards’ newly established Gate Theatre, which went on to rival the Abbey as Dublin’s premier literary theater. In the 1930s Clarke took up writing prose romances, producing two of them before he returned to Ireland in 1937. Clarke described them as “romances” because, though they often read like straightforward historical novels, elements of fantasy are intermixed with realism. The first of these, The Bright Temptation (1932), is set in the Middle Ages and follows the comic adventures of Aidan, an aspiring young monk who in the middle of the night is mysteriously tempted outside his monastery and into the Irish countryside. There he encounters Ethna, the beautiful young woman who is the “bright temptation” of the title, and they travel widely, having natural and supernatural adventures, giving Clarke ample opportunity to regale his readers with rich descriptions of the Irish landscape and the wildlife that dwells therein. As in Pilgrimage and Other Poems, it uses the medieval Irish
But in some poems, Clarke manages a more detached take on these religious dilemmas. One of the finest poems that he wrote is “The Straying Student,” positioned at the center of the book. Aurally rich in its assonantal patterning and rare in adopting a persona, it adapts the conventions of the aisling, a type of poem developed in Ireland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to describe or recreate a vision. In aislings Ireland often appears to the poet in the form of a woman, sometimes young and beautiful, sometimes old and haggard. But Clarke reverses the tradition, as the woman lures the student (a young man studying for the priesthood) away from Ireland. The woman’s attributes and the knowledge she conveys are connected with the dangers and glories of the Renaissance. Mixed with the “light” of Greek philosophy illuminating his “mind” is the bodily temptation of her “throat” and “stirring limbs,” as she releases him from feelings of guilt by “Banishing shame with her great laugh.” His education expands beyond the seminary to include the woman’s humanistic values and a visionary trust in human knowledge: They say I was sent back from Salamanca And failed in logic, but I wrote her praise Nine times upon a college wall in France. She laid her hand at darkfall on my page That I might read the heavens in a glance And I knew every star the Moors have named. (p. 189)
But this confidence drains away in the haunting final stanza, as the speaker’s conscience bites, leaving him in fear. Part of this is fear of being stranded in Ireland, a land “where every women’s son / Must carry his own coffin.” His new knowledge and experience have undermined the narrow religious doctrines that his faith formerly relied on, casting him into a state of profound doubt, terrifying in the context of his own mortality. He complains: “I have no peace now, / Before the ball is struck, my breath has gone.”
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AUSTIN CLARKE past to satirize the present, focusing in particular on the Catholic church’s repression of knowledge and of natural human urges. Within a few weeks of publication, the book was banned in Ireland as sacrilegious, though not in time to prevent the popular first edition from selling out.
unsurprisingly Orla yields to Enda’s charms— although whether their relationship is consummated in reality or only in a dream is left somewhat unclear. A more solemn tone pervades the two plays Clarke wrote in the 1930s. The Flame, which premiered in Edinburgh in 1932, and Sister Eucharia, which premiered at the Gate in Dublin in 1939, are both set in convent communities, the former in the Middle Ages and the latter in the 1930s, and both feature characters who fail to stay within the rules. In The Flame, the novice Attracta confesses to growing her hair, finding it impossible to pray, and having erotic-religious visions. When she refuses to have her hair cut, the sacred flame of Saint Brigid, which the sisters of her order are bound to keep lit, sinks. When Attracta is suddenly able to pray, but only on her own erotic and yet holy terms, the flame seems to disappear completely. The nuns realize that the lamp had not actually been filled with oil, but blame evil spirits that have come that night to tempt them away from their duty. However, when a spark is found to be still lying deep in the lamp, allowing the original flame to rekindle, the Abbess immediately proclaims it a miracle. Similarly, in Sister Eucharia, the life of the convent is upset by the religious visions of Sister Eucharia, who wants to die and go to heaven. When she eventually does die while praying in the chapel, the bell of the convent mysteriously rings, and the Reverend Mother interprets this as a sign of Eucharia’s saintliness—despite the final admission by a lay sister that she had accidentally rung the bell. Both of these plays are kinds of skeptical modern miracle plays. The transgressor appears blessed, but the religious authority that initially condemns such saintliness is lightning quick, after the fact, to appropriate any hint of the miraculous to help itself to remain allpowerful.
The same fate awaited Clarke’s second prose romance, The Singing Men at Cashel (1936). Also set in medieval Ireland, its plot centers on the tragic tale of Gormlai, whose life and marriages Clarke had already considered in the 128line poem “Confession of Queen Gormlai,” published in Pilgrimage seven years earlier. She first marries Cormac Mac Cuillenan, the king of Cashel, who is an ascetic former monk and still a celibate. The marriage remains unconsummated, and Cormac has it annulled when he decides to become a priest. Gormlai’s second marriage is to Cormac’s foster brother, Carroll of Leinster, who is violent and lustful. Happily for Gormlai, he is killed by the Danes within a few years, and she finally finds happiness in marrying her childhood friend Nial Glundubh. This tale is altogether more serious and psychologically subtle than Clarke’s boisterous earlier romance. But it again satirically considers the conflict between religious teaching and human nature, as well as movingly portraying the oppression of women within Irish medieval society, and thus reflecting on the position of women in 1930s Ireland. Clarke’s last romance, The Sun Dances at Easter, was not published until 1952, a span of years during which Clarke had spoken out vigorously against censorship, but even so it too was banned in Ireland. Again set in the medieval period, it is made up of three interrelated narratives. The main plot centers on Orla, the wife of a Connaught chieftain. After two years of marriage she remains childless and undertakes a pilgrimage to the semi-holy well of St. Naal, in the belief that this will enable her to conceive. On the way, she meets a handsome clerical student, Enda, and he tells her two interweaving stories. The main plot and these whimsical secondary stories parallel and mirror one another in a manner that disrupts all attempts to maintain order. Humans rebel against social norms, an atmosphere of comic unreality gains sway, and
In 1940, Clarke set up the Dublin VerseSpeaking Society with Robert Farren (also known as Roibeárd Ó Faracháin). Founded in response to a sense that poetic drama was in decline and that the imaginative aims of the founders of the Abbey were in danger of being forgotten, the society promoted the recitation of lyrical rhythmic
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AUSTIN CLARKE speech, organizing readings of poems and plays. It broadcast regularly on Radio Éireann, presenting dramatic poetry by Robert Browning, G. K. Chesterton, and others, as well as Clarke’s own poetry and dramatic works. As the Crow Flies (1943), set once again in Clarke’s CelticRomanesque period and centering around four monks stranded in a cave, was crafted specifically to be vivid and gripping on the radio.
Following the success of this play and others produced by the verse-speaking society at the Peacock, Clarke and Farren started the Lyric Theatre Company in 1944, which regularly performed verse drama by Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Clarke, and others at the Abbey Theatre until that groundbreaking institution was destroyed by fire in 1951. As well as staging most of Clarke’s earlier plays, the company premiered three of his new ones: The Viscount of Blarney (1944), The Second Kiss (1946), and The Plot Succeeds (1950). The Second Kiss continues the adventures of Pierrot and Columbine, who are joined by Harlequin and Pierrette. This play too is in conspicuously rhyming pentameter couplets and is daringly self-conscious—featuring a play within a play and moments that expose the limits of dramatic illusion. As Maurice Harmon observes in Austin Clarke, 1896–1974: A Critical Introduction, it “deals with illusion and reality, lightly touching upon fears that have a psychological reality, playfully juxtaposing the ideal and the real” (p. 125). The only other of his plays to premiere in his lifetime was Clarke’s longest, the three-act Moment Next to Nothing. Published in 1953 but not performed until 1958, the play dramatizes one of the tales told by the character Enda in Clarke’s romance, The Sun Dances at Easter, published the year before. It concerns a clerical scholar, Ceasan, who has taken a vow of silence and is living alone in the woods. There he encounters Eithne, a pagan goddess returned to earth. Ceasan attempts to instruct Eithne in Christian faith and customs, but, in the words of the critic Susan Halpern,
In the 1940s, Clarke concentrated on writing plays, and it was with the first of these, Black Fast, that he finally made his debut at the Abbey Theatre, on December 28, 1941. It returns to the comic mode, to depict a conflict between factions of the early Irish church about the proper dating of Easter and therefore of the penitential season of Lent that precedes it. Deriving the story from the Venerable Bede’s eighth-century Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Clarke transfers the story to Ireland and turns a serious theological debate into a marital farce between a king and a queen. Scholastic pedantry and pride and the inflexibility of religious ritual are lampooned, exposing the past- and present-day church’s tendency to cloak superstitions with the veil of piety and learning. The following year, the verse-speaking society mounted a production at Dublin’s Peacock Theatre of Clarke’s next play, The Kiss, a loose version of the nineteenth-century French poet Théodore de Banville’s play Le baiser (1887), and the first of what was to become a trilogy, including The Second Kiss: A Light Comedy (1946) and The Third Kiss: A Comedy in One Act (1976). Written in rhyming couplets, The Kiss transfers the stock characters Pierrot and Columbine, from sixteenth-century Italian commedia dell’arte, to a wood outside Dublin. Columbine appears as the legendary hag Uirgeal, whose name, meaning “very bright,” seems ironic at first but who, having persuaded Pierrot to kiss her out of pity, is transformed into a beautiful woman with whom he falls instantly in love. While the play is predominantly a lighthearted and theatrically capricious entertainment, it also characteristically resonates with contemporary social and political issues, such as the Church’s attitude to mixed marriage.
Ceasan’s reactions throughout put into question religion, the vows of silence, time spent alone, and celibacy; Eithne’s adulterous, mysterious behaviour is somehow accepted, ѧ Again, it seems the message of this play is a negation of Christianity—this time because it stifles the creative, the vital.“ (p. 170)
Although Clarke published some further dramatic texts, none were performed in his lifetime, and few of his plays have been performed since then, if for no other reason than verse drama is not popular among theatergoers. In the event that
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AUSTIN CLARKE interest in it is someday resurrected, Clarke’s plays may well merit revival and once again be presented to audiences, for in his finest plays, Clarke’s considerable talent for comedy combines with his profound interest in moral issues to offer work that is distinctive and dramatically effective.
before the gold of their innocence had been tarnished by the soil of the world.” Clarke gives a version of this statement in the third poem: Has not a Bishop declared That flame-wrapped babes are spared Our life-time of temptation? (Collected Poems, p. 197).
The first poem in the series compares the Ireland of Clarke’s day to the Ireland of the past, under the anti-Catholic Penal laws of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Catholic services were held outside and in secret:
SATIRIC RETURN
In 1955, Clarke published, privately under his own label of the Bridge Press, a slim volume, Ancient Lights: Poems and Satires. It was the start of a prolific period, and two more volumes, Too Great a Vine: Poems and Satires (1957) and The Horse-Eaters: Poems and Satires (1960), soon followed, also from the Bridge Press. Such private publication diminished the initial impact of this vigorous new phase in his work, but when these poems were collected together with Pilgrimage and Night and Morning in Later Poems (1961), published by the Dolmen Press and distributed outside Ireland by the Oxford University Press, much of Clarke’s best work became widely available for the first time, and his reputation began to grow.
Better the book against the rock, The misery of roofless faith, Than all this mockery of time, Eternalising of mute souls. (p. 196)
This “roofless faith” of the past is to be preferred to a Catholicism that so devalues life as to say that the death of these “mute souls” was actually beneficial in saving “the gold of their innocence.” The poem’s satirical argument continues with complex wit: “When the first breath is unforgiven” refers to the church’s practice of taking illegitimate children from their mothers and placing them in orphanages, such as the one that burned. But this phrase reverberates beyond this specific practice and implicitly refers to the doctrine of original sin, on which the bishop’s sophistry partly rests. So that when the poem goes on to argue that “charity, to find a home, / Redeems the baby from the breast,” “charity” and “redeems” are blackly ironic. They not only invoke the bishop’s morally repugnant twisting of religious doctrine, but also point to a strain of Catholicism at large in Ireland that neglects the Christian virtues of charity and compassion in the face of perverse antihumanism and disregard for the life of this world. The poem thus not only caustically responds to the bishop’s statement; it questions the theology that lies behind it. Other poems consider different examples of institutional inhumanity and twisted morality and religiosity. Corporal punishment, misled piety, poverty, and punitive attitudes toward sex all are subject to Clarke’s satirical scrutiny. The effect is
These volumes offer a new type of subject matter and a significantly different voice from Clarke’s earlier poetry. As their common subtitle suggests, these books comprise two kinds of poems: short satirical ones, expressing indignation in response to particular events or to a broad range of social and political issues; and long meditative ones that were autobiographical. But if they address society more directly than previously, they also continue Clarke’s concern about the power of the church in Ireland, as well as featuring the same sort of internal complexity, irony, and ambiguity of the private poetry in Night and Morning. The sequence “Three Poems about Children” responds angrily to a fire at a Catholic orphanage for girls, in which thirty-five children had died in 1943. More particularly, it responds to a remark made in the aftermath of the fire by the bishop of Kilmore, who was quoted in the Irish Times on February 26, 1943, as saying: “Dear little angels, now before God in Heaven, they were taken away
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AUSTIN CLARKE cumulative. The series of statements that focus on particular clerical outrages or social injustices build a major statement about Irish society and its morality. And again history is incorporated into Clarke’s method, as he uses it to reflect on the differences between the past and the present. The outlawed Catholic Church or the ideals of those who fought for Irish independence are contrasted with the self-imposed oppressions of church and state now at large. Clarke’s vision of Irish society grows out of his own experience, which is considered in the longer poems of the period. “Ancient Lights” charts the poet’s deliverance from the kind of religious anxiety that he sees being inflicted on Ireland. As a child he “knew the next world better than” this, and he was overtaken by fears at night, such that “darkness / Was roomed with fears.” The poem then describes him at confession, being insistently asked about his sexual thoughts, if he took “pleasure” when alone in an “immodest look” or “unnecessary touch.” Afterward, Jesus on the cross is transformed into a portent of violent damnation:
The sun came out, new smoke flew up, The gutters of the Black Church rang With services. Waste water mocked The ballcocks: down-pipes sparrowing, And all around the spires of Dublin Such swallowing in the air, such cowling To keep high offices pure: I heard From shore to shore, the iron gratings Take half our heavens with a roar. (p. 201)
LATE OUTPOURING
Clarke suffered the first of two heart attacks in 1959, but despite failing health his outpouring continued unabated into the 1970s. He published nine more collections of verse, more plays, and two volumes of memoirs, Twice Round the Black Church (1962) and A Penny in the Clouds: More Memories of Ireland and England (1968), which further illuminated the autobiographical background to his struggles with the Catholic Church and brought yet wider recognition. He also started to collect awards. These included a commission from the British Arts Council in 1961; an honorary D.Litt. degree from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1967; the highest award of the Irish Academy of Letters, the Gregory Medal, in 1968; and the first American Irish Foundation Literature Award in 1972. He was nominated by Irish PEN for the Nobel Prize.
Then shuddered past the crucifix, The feet so hammered, daubed-on blood-drip, Black with lip-scrimmage of the damned. (Collected Poems, p. 199)
A turning point arrives in the middle of the poem as “Nature read in a flutter / An evening lesson above my head.” This image of freedom and flight gives way to a caged bird, now freed, being plucked to death by sparrows. This offers an obvious parallel to a boy, like Clarke, who has been confined and restricted. On another day a bird of prey clutches a sparrow in its claws. Clarke frightens the bird, which drops the sparrow, and the speaker reflects that “Pity / Could raise some littleness from dust.” A mere human being can rescue a sparrow from a great bird, and this gives the poet the courage to shake off his religious fears. The poem ends with Clarke’s being cleansed by rain, absolving himself, “as though I gained / For life a plenary indulgence”; and as the sun comes out, this spirit of freedom widens, extending from the poet, across Dublin and Ireland:
Early among these honors was the Denis Devlin Award for the best volume of poetry published in Ireland over a three-year period, which Clarke received for Flight to Africa and Other Poems (1963), often regarded by critics as his finest volume. As Clarke acknowledges in a note in the Collected Poems (p. 553), all but three of the fifty-nine poems in Flight to Africa were written in a ten-week period after he returned from a 1962 visit to Mount Parnassus in Greece, the mythological home of the muses and thus the mount of poetic inspiration. While the poems in this volume offer similar public themes, the style and tone of Clarke’s satire is different. The voice has become more detached. Caustic scrutiny and tortured self-analysis have relaxed into a wry and tender voice of compassion. This change is ap-
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AUSTIN CLARKE parent in “Martha Blake at Fifty-One,” which revisits the earlier “Martha Blake” from Night and Morning and updates Clarke’s portrait of a pious Catholic spinster. Maurice Harmon says of the poem, “It is a lament for a way of life that brought little comfort and a protest against the life that it realizes with accuracy and care” (p. 193). While the earlier poem is dense with conceits and intellectual imagery, the later poem presents with a detached precision the mundane details of Martha’s daily life and her joyless journey toward death. Clarke writes with sympathy, free from the intrusion of his past psychological turmoil:
sion, as she even forgets the promise of redemption offered by Christ: The fit had come. Ill-natured flesh Despised her soul. No bending Could ease rib. Around her heart, pressure Of wind grew worse. Again, Again, armchaired without relief, She eructated, phlegm In mouth, forgot the woe, the grief, Foretold at Bethlehem. (p. 268)
She daydreams of dying, nursed by kindly nuns, but the reality is medical mistreatment, illmanaged and noisy wards, and coldhearted sisters. Even her faith seems to die as she is denied daily communion and she struggles to pray, leading to a final stanza of calm bleakness:
Then, slowly walking after Mass Down Rathgar Road, she took out Her Yale key, put a match to gas-ring, Half filled a saucepan, cooked A fresh egg lightly, with tea, brown bread, Soon, taking off her blouse And skirt, she restedѧ.
Unpitied, wasting with diarrhea And the constant strain, Poor Child of Mary with one idea, She ruptured a small vein, Bled inwardly to jazz. No priest Came. She had been anointed Two days before, yet knew no peace: Her last breath, disappointed.
(Collected Poems, p. 265)
But this simplicity gives way to a shockingly clear-eyed account of her physical ailments and the severe pain she endures:
(p. 270)
She suffered from dropped stomach, heartburn Scalding, water-brash And when she brought her wind up, turning Red with the weight of mashed Potato, mint could not relieve her. In vain her many belches, For all below was swelling, heaving Wamble, gurgle, squealch.
Implication and seemingly insignificant detail reveal a devastating picture of neglect and inner torment. As Harmon says, “The final word, understated and exact, sums up the poem” (p. 197). Subtle contrasts and precise descriptions allow rage and sympathy to coexist in the poem. Martha emerges as a frail woman to be pitied, but also as a tragic martyr and heroine in the context of Irish society, her specific plight clearly relating to a larger context of church and state. Along with Flight to Africa, the other poetic masterpiece of Clarke’s final years is the long poem Mnemosyne Lay in Dust (1966). Intimately related to his own mental breakdown forty years earlier, the poem begins with the admittance of the central character, Maurice Devane, to a mental asylum, and it goes on to tell the story of his incarceration, treatment, and recovery. Quite how this recovery happens is unclear, and most of the poem’s eighteen sections are taken up with descriptions of Maurice’s dreamy sense of isola-
(p. 266)
Martha’s body and its ailments are contrasted with her piety and spirituality. She looks up to her holy statues and pictures, which offer little consolation. She then daydreams about the lives of mystics and saints in Italy, France, Spain, and beyond, but her knowledge of them seems hopelessly superficial. For instance, because “Teresa had heard the Lutherans / Howling on red-hot spit,” Martha, fearing the fires of hell, “Never dealt in the haberdashery / Shop, owned by two protestants” (p. 267). Martha is unable to sustain such reveries in the face of her body’s physical pain, and the poem calmly captures her confu-
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AUSTIN CLARKE tion and estrangement. But the poem also deals with the brutality of his treatment, describing in uncomfortably frank terms the experience of being force-fed, among other disturbing details. On arriving, Maurice is stripped and plunged into a steam bath, his identity dissolved into a void. The transition is terrifyingly abrupt, as he is drugged and plunged further into madness. The Mnemosyne of the title is the Greek goddess of memory, and Maurice’s main symptom is an inability to remember who he is, and a couple of times a figure appears imploring him to “think!” But he is initially unable to relate to the world around him. The sixth section marks a low point, as he awakes to gray leather walls and the degrading consequences of a particularly disturbed night in his cell:
mental recovery. He goes outside and exercises. He starts to interact with the people round him. When walking in the park with an attendant, he can relate to the particulars of the place and recognize people whom he meets. And in the final section, having been “rememorised,” he leaves the asylum with “his future in every vein” (Collected Poems, p. 351). As a final flourish, Clarke’s last years saw him publish a large body of emphatically erotic poetry. One of the most successful of these is “The Healing of Mis,” from Orphide and Other Poems (1970). Based on an ancient Irish story, it tells of the daughter of the king of Munster, who goes mad after her father’s death in battle and flees into the wild. The girl is finally rescued from madness by a harpist who seduces her. Other erotic poems are based on classical sources, such as “The Dilemma of Iphis,” also from Orphide, and Tiresias (1971), both of which are taken from Ovid’s Metamorphosis and use the classical hexameter line with success.
Early next morning, he awakened, Saw only greyness shining down From a skylight on the grey walls Of leather, knew, in anguish, his bowels Had opened. He turned, shivering, all shent. Wrapping himself in the filthied blankets, Fearful of dire punishment, He waited there until a blankness Enveloped him ѧ When he raised his head up, Noon-light was gentle in the bedroom.
CONCLUSION
(p. 340)
Austin Clarke died of prostate cancer at his home, Bridge House, in Templeogue, Dublin, on March 19, 1974. Shortly afterward the Dolmen Press brought out his Collected Poems, and that year also saw the publication of an issue of the Irish University Review devoted to Clarke’s work. In 1976 the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella edited a Selected Poems, and another poet, Hugh Maxton, produced a further selection, with an excellent introduction and notes, in 1991. Clarke’s work has also attracted the praise of many other Irish poets: to mark the centenary of Clarke’s birth in 1996, his son Dardis edited a volume of essays, reminiscences, and poems that included contributions from Seamus Heaney, Brendan Kennelly, Thomas Kinsella, Derek Mahon, John Montague, Michael Hartnett, and Thomas McCarthy.
The vision offers a way out of the darkness, as he experiences hope at the possibility of entering Eden. He starts to eat again, “tempted by a dish of strawberries sent by his mother” (Harmon, p. 217), and physical strength contributes to his
But a writer as satisfyingly complex as Clarke also demands the attention of scholars, and several book-length critical studies have now been published, along with numerous critical essays. It has become clear that in the years to
(Collected Poems, p. 336)
From this low, the second half of the poem starts to chart Maurice’s recovery. In the ninth section, a redemptive vision comes to him. He overhears the guards as he falls asleep “repeating a tale / Of the Gate, the Garden and the Fountain.” The story grows into a dream of Eden: The words became mysterious With balsam, fragrance, banyan trees, Forgetting the ancient law of tears, He dreamed in the desert, a league from Eden. How could he pass the Gate, the sworded Seraphim, find the primal Garden, The Fountain? ѧ
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AUSTIN CLARKE come Clarke will be remembered for his poetry, rather than his plays or romances, though critics acknowledge his occasional successes in both those genres. As a poet, he is at once profoundly intellectual, religious, satiric, comic, erotic, and political, while his widely diverse body of work is also coherent. His confessional poems of religious doubt lead into his poems that explore human sexuality, which then relate to his socially minded and political work. In his finest poems, such as “The Lost Heifer,” “The Straying Student,” and “Martha Blake at Fifty-One,” the intensity of his lyricism and his scabrous satirical wit have few equals.
A Sermon on Swift and Other Poems. Dublin: Bridge Press, 1968. Orphide, and Other Poems. Dublin: Bridge Press, 1970. Tiresias: A Poem. Dublin: Bridge Press, 1971. Collected Poems. Edited by Liam Miller. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1974; London: Oxford University Press, 1974. (All quotations of Clarke’s poetry come from this edition, cited as Collected Poems.) Selected Poems. Edited by Thomas Kinsella. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1976; Winston-Salem, N.C.: Wake Forest University Press, 1976. Selected Poems. Edited by Hugh Maxton/W. J. McCormack. Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1991; London: Penguin, 1991. (An excellent introduction to Clarke’s poetry. Hugh Maxton is the poetic alias for the Irish academic W. J. McCormack, who is named as the editor of the British edition.) Collected Poems. Edited by R. Dardis Clarke. Introduction by Christopher Ricks. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2008. (Now the authoritative text of Clarke’s poetry.)
Selected Bibliography
PLAYS The Son of Learning: A Poetic Comedy in Three Acts. London: Allen & Unwin, 1927. The Flame: A Play in One Act. London: Allen & Unwin, 1930. Sister Eucharia: A Play in Three Scenes. Dublin: Orwell Press, 1939; London: Williams & Norgate, 1939. Black Fast: A Poetic Farce in One Act. Dublin: Orwell Press, 1941. The Straying Student. Dublin: Gayfield Press, 1942. As the Crow Flies: A Lyric Play for the Air. Dublin: Bridge Press, 1943; London: Williams & Norgate, 1943. The Viscount of Blarney, and Other Plays. Dublin: Bridge Press, 1944; London: Williams & Norgate, 1944. (Also contains The Kiss and The Plot is Ready.) The Second Kiss: A Light Comedy. Dublin: Bridge Press, 1946; London: Williams & Norgate, 1946. The Plot Succeeds: A Poetic Pantomime. Dublin: Bridge Press, 1950; London: Williams & Norgate, 1950. The Moment Next to Nothing: A Play in Three Acts. Dublin: Bridge Press, 1953. Collected Plays. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1963. Two Interludes Adapted from Cervantes: The Student from Salamanca, La cueva de Salamanca; & The Silent Lover, El viejo celoso. Translated and Adapted by Clarke. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1968; London: Oxford University Press, 1968. The Impuritans: A Play in One Act. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1973. (Adapted from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Young Goodman Brown.”) The Third Kiss: A Comedy in One Act. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1976. Liberty Lane: A Ballad Play of Dublin in Two Acts with a Prologue. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1978.
WORKS OF AUSTIN CLARKE POETRY The Vengeance of Fionn. Dublin: Maunsel, 1917. The Fires of Bäl. Dublin: Maunsel & Roberts, 1921. The Sword of the West. Dublin: Maunsel & Roberts, 1921. The Cattledrive in Connaught and Other Poems. London: Allen & Unwin, 1925. Pilgrimage and Other Poems. London: Allen & Unwin, 1929; New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1930. The Collected Poems of Austin Clarke. Introduction by Padraic Colum. London: Allen & Unwin, 1936; New York: Macmillan, 1936. Night and Morning: Poems. Dublin: Orwell Press, 1938. Ancient Lights: Poems and Satires, First Series. Dublin: Bridge Press, 1955. Too Great a Vine: Poems and Satires, Second Series. Dublin: Bridge Press, 1957. The Horse-Eaters: Poems and Satires, Third Series. Dublin: Bridge Press, 1960. Later Poems. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1961. Forget-Me-Not. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1962. Flight to Africa, and Other Poems. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1963. Mnemosyne Lay in Dust. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1966; London: Oxford University Press, 1966. Old-Fashioned Pilgrimage: and Other Poems. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1967; Chester Springs, Pa.: Dufour Editions, 1967. The Echo at Coole and Other Poems. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1968; Chester Springs, Pa.: Dufour Editions, 1968.
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AUSTIN CLARKE Ireland: Text, Context, Intertext. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999. Pp. 18–33.
Selected Plays of Austin Clarke. Edited by Mary Shine Thompson. Gerrards Cross, England: Colin Smythe, 2005.
Garratt, Robert F. “Tradition and Continuity I: Austin Clarke.” In his Modern Irish Poetry: Tradition and Continuity from Yeats to Heaney. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Pp. 103–136.
FICTION The Bright Temptation: A Romance. London: Allen & Unwin, 1932; New York: Morrow, 1932. The Singing Men at Cashel. London: Allen & Unwin, 1936. The Sun Dances at Easter: A Romance. London: Melrose, 1952.
Gillis, Alan. “Patrick Kavanagh and Austin Clarke: In a Metaphysical Land.” In his Irish Poetry of the 1930s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. 62–95. Goodby, John. “From Irish Mode to Modernisation: The Poetry of Austin Clarke.” In The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry. Edited by Matthew Campbell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. 21–41. Halpern, Susan. Austin Clarke: His Life and Works. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1974. Harmon, Maurice. Austin Clarke, 1896–1974: A Critical Introduction. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1989; Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1989. Harmon, Maurice, ed. Irish University Review: Austin Clarke Special Issue 4, no. 1 (Spring 1974).
OTHER WORKS First Visit to England, and Other Memories. Dublin: Bridge Press, 1945; London: Williams & Norgate, 1945. Poetry in Modern Ireland. Illustrated by Louis Le Brocquy. Dublin: Published for the Cultural Relations Committee of Ireland by Colm O Lochlainn, 1951. Twice Round the Black Church: Early Memories of Ireland and England. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962. A Penny in the Clouds: More Memories of Ireland and England. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968. The Celtic Twilight and the Nineties. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1969. Reviews and Essays of Austin Clarke. Edited by Gregory A. Schirmer. Gerrards Cross, England: Colin Smythe, 1995. (Contains almost fifty of Clarke’s reviews and articles, as well as an exhaustive list of his writings for periodicals, totaling approximately 1,500 pieces of literary journalism.)
Mahony, Tina Hunt. “The Dublin Verse-Speaking Society and the Lyric Theatre Company.” Irish University Review 4:137–145 (Spring 1974). McCormack, W. J. “Austin Clarke: The Poet as Scapegoat of Modernism.” In Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davis, eds. Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the 1930s. Cork: Cork University Press, 1995. Pp. 75–102. Montague, John, and Liam Miller, eds. A Tribute to Austin Clarke on His Seventieth Birthday, 9 May 1966. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1966; Chester Springs, Pa.: Dufour, 1966. Ricigliano, Lorraine. Austin Clarke: A Reference Guide. New York: G. K. Hall 1993. (Offers a very full bibliography of secondary criticism on Clarke’s work.) Schirmer, Gregory A. The Poetry of Austin Clarke. Mountrath, Ireland: Dolmen Press, 1983; Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1983. Tapping, G. Craig. Austin Clarke: A Study of His Writings. Dublin: Academy Press, 1981; Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1981.
CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Brennan, Rory, ed. Austin Clarke Supplement, in Poetry Ireland Review, nos. 22–23 (Summer 1988). Pp. 93–176. Clarke, R. Dardis, ed. Austin Clarke Remembered: Essays, Poems and Reminiscences to Mark the Centenary of His Birth. Introduction by Seamus Heaney. Dublin: Bridge Press, 1996. Corcoran, Neil. “The Blessings of Onan: Austin Clarke’s ‘Mnemosyne Lay in Dust.’” In his Poets of Modern
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SUSANNA CLARKE (1959—)
Joseph Dewey IN THE MID-1840S, Nathaniel Hawthorne, an aspiring writer hungry for the rich interior experience that the imagination brings, is compelled by circumstances to make a living in the dull practical world. He is a nondescript bureaucrat, a surveyor in the customhouse for the busy port of Salem, Massachusetts. The job is tedious— weighing incoming freight to assess taxes—but this dreary, circumscribed life has given him, now in his mid-thirties, what he has never really desired: respectability, community identity, routine. A misfit gifted with a high-octane fancy, book-fed and word-fat, he struggles to find fulfillment in practical obligations. One day on a break, as he rummages through musty records in a cobwebby storage room, he comes across a tattered fabric “A” made from sumptuously embroidered scarlet cloth and, despite its evident age, still resplendent. What it is, he does not know, but the chance discovery changes everything. He is suddenly giddy, his imagination, long dormant within the ledger world, inexplicably ignited—he craves to tell its story.
their own story about the mysterious letter. Although the tale he goes on to tell is riveting—a melodramatic parable of illicit love between a weak-hearted Puritan minister and a passionate seamstress, their illegitimate child, and the revenge of the woman’s demented husband—it distracts from the more audacious premise of the narrative exercise: a giddy celebration of a reanimated imagination. And, like a planetarium show that refuses to dim the auditorium lights and thus compels visitors to acknowledge the gaudy instrument in the center of the room, Hawthorne compels readers to be aware of a voice telling the story, and he invites them to delight in the exercise of their own imaginations in a joyous, if accidental, intimacy not between reader and writer but among storytellers. Thus readers finish his gloomy tale convinced not that sin reaps consequences nor that the hyperreligious are hypocritical nor that sexual repression can destroy love—but that the imagination can dazzle and that such tonic excess can be theirs to relish. The story fosters not faithful spouses nor better Christians but storytellers, those wonderfully useless, self-sustaining enchanters, those spellbinding conjurers.
What is this strange letter? But no story will come. Bound within the confines of his workaday existence, he cannot jump-start his imagination—until an unexpected and entirely ironic intrusion of misfortune: he loses his government appointment. Unceremoniously terminated, he happily retreats to the borderland world of his own hearth and there, amid glimmering shadows, spins a richly embroidered tale about that tattered letter. Because publication is uncertain, writing it is an opulent exercise in radical selfishness, an activity that sustains and justifies itself. But before he commences to embroider, he pauses to advise whatever readers he might attract that, rather than getting caught up in his narrative, they go embroider
In the early 1990s, Susanna Clarke, an aspiring writer hungry for the rich interior experience that the imagination brings, is compelled by circumstances to make a living in the dull practical world. She is a nondescript teacher. Britishborn, she has worked overseas for two years, teaching English first to high-powered executives of the Fiat motor company in Turin, Italy, and then to a similar clientele in Bilbao in the Basque Country of northern Spain. Teaching has given Clarke, now in her midthirties, what she has never really desired: respectability, community identity, routine. Gifted with a high-octane
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SUSANNA CLARKE imagination, book-fed and word-fat, she struggles to find fulfillment in such practical obligations.
magical parable about angels in black suits and white shoes who visit contemporary Liverpool, the other a densely structured detective story. Like her undergraduate curriculum, these apprentice works kept separate the fanciful and the real, the otherworldly and the worldly—and, for that reason, although she would not understand why for years, both works foundered. Frustrated, ready for change, in 1989, she pursued teaching opportunities abroad. There, while Clarke was engaged in the regimen of teaching, she chanced to see a jigsaw puzzle, one of those daunting thousand piece-ers. The puzzle was a reproduction of some nineteenth-century painting of three bewigged, obviously British gentlemen reading in a sepia-toned library. As she studied the puzzle’s box, she was entranced by a single image, one of the three gentlemen. Something about his expression, the bend of his waistcoated figure, the look in his bespectacled eyes, the curl of his alabaster hand—a tsunamic something hits her much as the tattered “A” hit Hawthorne. She was suddenly giddy, her imagination, long dormant, inexplicably ignited. She craved to tell his story.
Susanna Mary Clarke was born on November 16, 1959, in the East Midlands, in Nottingham with its evocative medieval atmosphere. Her mother was Janet Clarke and her father was the Rev. Dr. Frederick Stuart Clarke (always known as Stuart), a Methodist minister periodically assigned to new congregations, leading Susanna to live, if briefly, in picturesque and remote locales in northern England and Scotland. She found in such a peripatetic upbringing the deep companionship and sturdy stability of stories. Her reading defied categorization: the parlor comedies of Jane Austen, the sweeping social fictions of Charles Dickens, the fantasy epics of C. S. Lewis and Ursula LeGuin, the delightful alternate histories of Joan Aiken, the intricate ratiocinations of Arthur Conan Doyle, the medieval adventure novels of Rosemary Sutcliff (particularly those about Nottingham’s own Robin Hood). What Clarke relished was the traditional privilege of story itself: the pull of choreographed action, the immediacy of vivid characters, the detailing of scene, the openthrottled engine of suspense. But she was impatient as a reader; she wanted to embroider her own stories—not so much for an audience (she never dreamed of publication) but rather because in storytelling (as she tried to explain to a succession of teachers leery over such ambition) she found the expression of a self-justifying passion.
Who was that gentleman in the library? But the story would not come. Like the surveyor in the customhouse, she could not jumpstart her imagination, not in the sun-baked Mediterranean. Clarke yearned for the romantic dreariness of her coastal childhood. In 1992 she returned to England, to County Durham, to the tumultuous, forbidding stretch of the North Sea coast of her birth. There, like Hawthorne by his fireplace, she settled into an environment fit for reanimating the imagination. The image of the gentleman haunted her. When an illness and consequent bed rest gave her the leisure to enter the sumptuous world of J. R. R. Tolkien’s mammoth Lord of the Rings cycle, it incited her, not to lock herself up within his epical imaginings, but rather to conjure her own epic story about magicians, those towering figures from British folklore whose suprahuman presence upends the very parameters of reality. At the time, fantasy literature, despite its lofty pedigree as a defining literary expression of virtually every culture since Homer, attracted a minority enthusiasm, known for an elegant, if earnest,
Accomplished in the classroom, Clarke graduated in 1981 from the University of Oxford’s prestigious St. Hilda’s College with a bachelor’s degree in politics, economics, and philosophy, an eclectic curriculum that juxtaposed the practical and the theoretical, the worldly and the otherworldly. She was twenty-one. To stay close to the books she loved, she worked for the next eight years in respectable London publishing firms—initially for Quarto, known for highquality glossy coffee-table books, and then as an assistant editor of nonfiction on a range of political and cultural titles for Gordon Fraser—but, like Hawthorne, she grew restless within such a stubbornly horizontal sensibility. Her imagination languished. She started writing two novels, one a
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SUSANNA CLARKE goofiness, a limited genre with a narrow market; it was the quietus before the tectonic impact of the Harry Potter series began in 1997 and Peter Jackson’s ambitious Lord of the Rings film trilogy began in 2001. Fantasy was the marginal enthusiasm of not-quite-serious readers, a reliable if demographically narrow cadre of loyal fans harshly caricatured as nerdy Dungeons & Dragons aficionados, socially awkward types who because of a variety of psychological inadequacies were drawn to flamboyant quasi–comic book adventure tales of fire-breathing dragons and bosomy damsels held captive in lofty towers, rescued by comely knights armed with singing swords while being harassed by menacing dwarves and, all the while, being mentored by bearded wizards inevitably imprisoned, spellbound, in gnarled trees. But Clarke responded to that very dimension of fantasy as it gave itself so completely over to story. After all, Clarke had no childhood traumas to exorcise through fiction; she distrusted didactic narratives that pushed political or social agendas; she was uncomfortable using stories to proffer tidy life lessons; and she found constricting the logic of psychological realism and the iron boundaries of mimetic fiction.
conceived of embroidering nothing less than a fable-myth commensurate to the grandness of England itself, to offer Britain back its greatness, to reenchant a contemporary England, diminished in the post–World War II international scene: its mighty empire inelegantly dismantled, its monarchy trivialized into tabloid fodder, its military living off its comic-opera crusade to the tiny Falkland Islands in 1982, its economy uneasy and reeling, its centuries-old tradition of lofty culture defined since the mid-twentieth century by three-chord rock and roll, BBC sitcoms, and PBS costume dramas. And so Susanna Clarke began a writing project that would consume her for nearly a decade. By day editing cookbooks at Simon and Schuster’s Cambridge office, fact-checking recipes and stage-managing photo shoots of prepared food, by night she imagined herself into a Regency England empowered by the resurgence of magic via the unprepossessing figure of the reclusive bibliophile and magician she had seen on the puzzle box. She delved into the era’s historic records, military archives, and cultural studies, and her imagination soared. She relished inventing dozens of colorful Dickensian characters, detailing elaborate settings of the period, down to the curved spoons and embroidered sofa cushions. She traced out a leisurely story line, branching off into digressions that intrigued her as she conjured a vast landscape of candlelit libraries, windswept moors, chandeliered ballrooms, and snowy London lanes—an embarrassment of story, as over several years the manuscript swelled to ungainly length. She wrote early in the morning, on weekends, on commuter trains; she loved to write at night by candlelight or accompanied by the rhythm of rainfall.
Amid her imaginative peregrinations, in the flashpoint of certainty that is the privileged epiphany of any storyteller, she knew that the tweedy gentleman in the dusty library in that generic puzzle would be her magician, not one of those robed Merlinesque clichés but rather a latter-day magician whose powerful enchantments would bedazzle a very real geography, specifically the Regency era of early nineteenthcentury England that was reflected in the jigsaw puzzle’s quaint costuming, a setting that would license Clarke to revisit Austen and Dickens. She imagined a resurgence of real magic, dormant since the Middle Ages, in the time of the Duke of Wellington and Lord Byron, that last grandly romantic generation before the crushing imperatives of science and industrial capitalism would complete the disenchantment of the universe begun a half century earlier by Sir Isaac Newton. In imagining an England that returns to the spectacle magic of the Middle Ages, Clarke
EARLY SHORT STORY PUBLICATIONS
Certain of her subject but apprehensive about its scope and intricacy, she applied—and was accepted—for placement in one of the writing workshops sponsored by the prestigious Arvon Foundation, intensive five-day retreats at atmospheric countryside residences around England where small gatherings of would-be writers meet
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SUSANNA CLARKE reports only that the two men suddenly decided to return to the Guard.
with published professionals and, in supportive roundtable classes, dissect one another’s writing. Not surprisingly she selected the course in fantasy writing. Her class, team-taught by the seasoned British science fiction novelists Colin Greenland and Geoff Ryman, focused on short fiction and required students to submit a writing sample before the course began. Clarke, deep into what had grown into a massive manuscript, turned in a story, “The Ladies of Grace Adieu,” that drew on situations from her manuscript project.
The story evinces a striking evolution in Clarke’s narrative sensibility since her earlier aborted novels. Rather than maintaining separation between realism and magic, she deftly brings them together, moving with deadpan straightforwardness from detailed realism to the inexplicable. Greenland was much impressed by Clarke’s narrative brio, and, without telling her, he submitted the manuscript for inclusion in Starlight 1, a major anthology of original short works of speculative fiction. The editors accepted the story and notified a stunned Clarke that it would be published.
A creepy tale of Ovidian metamorphoses set in Regency England, recounted in pitch-perfect Austenese, “The Ladies of Grace Adieu” tells of three respectable twentysomething ladies in rural Gloucestershire: a bright but poor woman unhappily married to a fiftyish widower, that widower’s captivating niece, and a beautiful governess of two orphan girls who manages a nearby estate, having been put in charge by a ne’er-do-well distant relative, a captain in the British Guard. Left to her own devices, the governess discovers a magnificent library of ancient magic books (the children’s great-grandfather was a scholar of magic), and together the three women dive into the world of magic. When the profligate captain shows up unexpectedly with a drunken, loutish friend and a mysterious young woman given to teary outbursts (it is hinted she is pregnant by the captain, her reputation in ruins), the governess fears that he has come to lay claim to the children and their trust fund. That night, after the women gather to consult their magic books, the captain meets the governess in a darkened hallway— where they unexpectedly encounter two beautiful white owls. He is determined to shoot them as pesky intruders and calls for his friend to fetch his rifle. When the fellow arrives, the owls screech furiously and descend. The reader is told only that the governess is suddenly alone in the hallway and watches as the owls feast on “something.” The next afternoon at tea, the niece and the young wife both gag and politely cough up into their napkins what appear to be the skin pouches and cleaned bones of two mice. We understand what has happened, but the governess
That was in 1996. Encouraged, over the next several years, even as she continued to work steadily on her manuscript, she tested the lucrative fantasy marketplace with a series of short stories, publishing six in reputable anthologies, one of which, “Mr Simonelli; or, The Fairy Widower,” a quirky frame narrative, was shortlisted for a World Fantasy Award in 2001. Set in the early nineteenth century, it tells of a poor Cambridge scholar turned rural parson who must contend, after he arrives at his new post, with a local fairy whose wife had died in childbirth. Desperate to care for his newborn son, the fairy kidnaps a young village woman who is herself nursing a newborn. In contrapuntal fashion, the story also tells of five flirtatious sisters who each pursue a possible marriage with the eligible parson. To his horror, the parson realizes that he is dealing with a particularly powerful fairy who is determined to secure one of the five women as his wife and lock her away in his enchanted castle. When the fairy agrees to allow the parson first choice among the five women, the parson cleverly gets each girl to accept a marriage proposal on the condition she keep it secret, thus thwarting the fairy. Along the way, the parson discovers that he is himself the bastard son of a roué fairy. The discovery empowers him—and in a dramatic climax, he frees the wet nurse and kills the fairy. The story closes ironically with the parson facing the scandal of having asked five women to marry him. Once again, realism and fantasy collide—not trendy magic realism in
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SUSANNA CLARKE which ordinary events are suddenly upended by the hammer blow of the inexplicable, but rather atmospheric old-school historic realism in which the most fantastic things occur logically— conjured by fairies, witches, and magicians. Clarke had become infatuated with the hip American television series Buffy, the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), in which, in an otherwise ordinary southern California Everytown, legions of assorted supernatural bad guys battle the forces of good, an unpromising collection of high school nerds, only one of whom is gifted with supernatural power, kids who contend with demons from hell along with anxieties over dating and Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores. Clarke’s publishing success, touted on fantasy Web sites, created a buzz about her as a promising newcomer in what had become a crowded field. By this time Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings films had become international phenomena, and the fantasy market was no longer a minority enthusiasm but rather big business (immersed in her own project, Clarke had never read the Potter books). The Potter series publisher, Bloomsbury, encouraged by Greenland’s enthusiastic endorsement (by this time, he and Clarke had developed a personal as well as a professional relationship and were living together), optioned Clarke’s unfinished manuscript and, in late 2003, began its own aggressive marketing campaign.
it novel of the year. Most notably, it was among the early nominees for the prestigious Man Booker Prize. Of course, it dominated discussion in the fantasy field and received both the 2005 Hugo Award for best novel and the 2005 World Fantasy Award for best novel. More surprising was the novel’s market success. Despite Clarke’s being an unknown breaking into one of the most competitive genre-markets, despite the novel’s intimidating heft (nearly eight hundred pages), and despite its experimental hybridity—part comedy of manners, part fantasy epic, and part postmodern game-text—it quickly became an international sensation. Lay readers, fantasy fans, and academics: few postwar novels in British or American fiction had appealed so profoundly to all those constituencies. The novel promised to become a cash cow as it apparently anticipated future installments. Its legions of fans, left suspended among multiple nonendings, were certain of the inevitable trilogy (extrapolated from the fact that Bloomsbury had signed Clarke to a three-book contract) and hyped the “next” volume on Internet sites. Clarke, however, adamantly disavowed that, indicating that her sophomore novel would be set in the same era and echo some of the same situations but would concentrate on an entirely different set of characters, this time from lower echelons of Regency society. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, she insisted, had its own integrity, its own argument. Hailed as the finest expression of fantasy writing since Tolkien, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell nevertheless defies that grand template: Is it a postmodern mimetic fantasy, an ironic realistic fabulation, a mimetic metafabulation? Thus it raised intriguing questions about the nature of its groundbreaking achievement.
JONATHAN STRANGE & MR NORRELL
In September 2004, more than a decade after Clarke had first been entranced by the enigmatic figure in the jigsaw puzzle, her novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, was published simultaneously in America and England. Despite indulging fantasy, long held suspect by readers of “serious” fiction (the story, set in nineteenth-century England, tells of the rivalry between two London magicians and of the imminent return of a powerful sorcerer of medieval England known as the Raven King), Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell received laudatory critical reviews and was shortlisted for a host of major literary awards, including the Guardian First Book Award and the Whitbread First Novel Award. Time magazine named
HISTORIC REALISM
Given Clarke’s admiration for the parlor dramas of Jane Austen and the fin-de-millennium renaissance of interest in Austen’s fiction that elevated her to the status of the hippest nineteenth-century novelist of manners, an approach to the realism of Jonathan Strange must acknowledge its
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SUSANNA CLARKE survives by eating dead birds and mice the cats bring her.
considerable debt to Austen. Clarke carefully— and lovingly—crafts magnificent scenes of glittering ballrooms and snug parlors where characters, driven by selfishness, ironically reveal through apparently bland conversations their nefarious schemes; characters do not fall in love but rather negotiate relationships in divertissements that are as elaborate as they are brutal. As with Austen’s world, Clarke’s world is rife with unseemly gossip disseminated by heartless parlor sharks interested not so much in respectability as with its appearance. Also like Austen, Clarke highlights the era’s custom of brokering loveless marriages with beautiful, intelligent women to secure the prominence or reputation of the man.
But all is not bleak. Much like Austen, Clarke permits the exemplum of a single sterling love: specifically, here, the evolving relationship between the beautiful Lady Arabella Woodhope and the Byronic Jonathan Strange. Arabella defies period stereotype. She is not wealthy—she is the daughter of a curate. The relationship is based not on the pragmatics of economics but on a kind of love at first sight: After the death of his father, Strange visits Arabella’s brother, a longtime friend who is a parson. The attraction to Arabella is powerful and mutual, remarkable given Clarke’s larger context of poisonous marketplace relationships. Far from retiring, Arabella as wife is outspoken and proud of her eccentric husband, and she supports his odd career choice (a frustrated poet, he is now determined to become England’s greatest practicing magician). After Strange establishes his credentials, Arabella will pine for him during a lengthy absence while he uses an arsenal of enchantments to help Lord Wellington defeat the French overseas.
Thus, as in Regency-era courtship novels, Clarke’s women do not fare well. Witness the hastily arranged marriage between the destitute Sir Walter Pole, whose family lives on the reputation of wealth it squandered long ago, and the beautiful, sickly Emma Wintertowne, half his age but heiress to a considerable dowry that can guarantee Pole’s political aspirations. Or consider the itinerant street magician Vinculus, who maintains five wives in five different districts about London, or the dashing, heartless libertine Henry Lascelles, who manipulates the lonely Mrs. Maria Bullworth into an adulterous tryst only to dispense with her callously. And there is Jonathan Strange’s own mother, who had been a vivacious, wealthy Scots heiress: Strange’s father had inherited a ramshackle estate near the Welsh border and needed money to restore it. Compelled by her family to accept exile to dreary rural Shropshire, she died more of loneliness than any physical ailment four years after Strange was born. The widowed Mrs. Brandy, negotiated into a loveless marriage with a decrepit older man looking for a pretty young thing, runs a modest grocer’s shop and struggles to make ends meet. She loves one of Pole’s servants, a magnificent Caribbean butler named Stephen Black, but he is utterly forbidden to her because of social convention. Perhaps most pitiful is the impoverished elderly widow Mrs. Delgado, who has lived for years with more than fifty stray cats in a darkened attic in Venice’s Jewish ghetto and
Arabella and Strange’s commitment is heartfelt, unironic, authentic—and when Arabella comes to be trapped within an insidious enchantment by a malevolent fairy drawn to her beauty, Strange blames himself. Only much later does he discover that her “death,” from pneumonia-like symptoms after she sleepwalks across a snowy moor, had been staged by the fairy, and what was buried in Arabella’s coffin was a piece of enchanted oak wood, while Arabella herself had been whisked away to an enchanted castle in the shadow-kingdom of Faerie. With little regard for his own health, savaged by melancholia, Strange abandons London and relocates to Venice to devote himself entirely to her rescue. To commune with the fairy world, he decides he must become slightly mad. To induce madness, he prepares a potion distilled from dead mouse remains he gathers when he visits the obviously insane Mrs. Delgado. His experimentations eventually free Arabella but ironically trap him within a much greater spell, shrouded in a towering pillar of forbidding darkness.
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SUSANNA CLARKE The novel closes with a poignant faux reunion between Arabella, now freed, and Strange, now imprisoned. Clarke sets an achingly romantic scene: Italy in April, bursting into green. Under a star-splashed sky, the two lovers meet, apart: he is trapped in the powerful enchantment. With heartbreaking sincerity (in contrast to the mercenary negotiations that characterize the novel’s other relationships), Strange promises someday to return and nobly tells Arabella that until then she is to be happy, that he could not bear that she live like a widow. They kiss, and he turns and disappears into the darkness—despite such pain, that very depth of feeling affirms love’s possibility and endows Clarke’s vision of an otherwise decadent upper class with a difficult if reassuring hope.
dowries). Given to bandwagon mentality, they embrace the resurgence of magic as a distracting novelty. Like children, they adore showy tricks and do not apprehend (as Clarke does) the profound cultural implications of magic; rather, they swarm about the two celebrity magicians, Strange and Norrell, with all the dignity of modern paparazzi. Regency society is further driven by class and economic divisions. Servants are treated like —Clarke provides a heartbreaking account of the death of Stephen Black’s mother on a slaves ship from Jamaica. Stephen himself, descended from noble African blood, must contend with routine abuse as he walks London’s streets. The city’s foul prisons overflow with hapless debtors; the insane are isolated like lepers; doctors are witless quacks; lawyers, mercenary cutthroats; preachers, scheming materialists. The king, mad with grief over the death of his youngest daughter, spends long days in isolation under the care of charlatans. The monarchal system—so long the hallowed expression of British integrity and still a generation from the emergence of Victoria—is reduced to parody, an old man dressed in dirty slippers and a nightgown (ironically a regal purple), pounding away on a harpsichord, singing German ditties. Regency England is glitter without substance, its chilling emptiness underscored by Clarke’s wintry London that, like the enchanted Strange, is locked in a perpetual gloom.
Yet to limit Clarke’s realism to a critique of love affairs among the privileged class of libertines, fops, adulterers, and hypocrites is to ignore the novel’s broader indictment of England’s political, religious, and economic structures. The range of Clarke’s withering satire, which reflects with unblinking candor virtually every aspect of an England that has decidedly lost its grandeur (unforgiving mirrors form a motif in the novel), recalls the dark, subversive vision of Spanish painter Francisco Goya, who makes a cameo appearance while Strange helps Wellington. Commercial London has lost its storybook quaintness, blighted by the creeping squalor of industrialization. British government is rife with inept career bureaucrats interested only in preserving their own positions. The smug British pursue a protracted land war against Napoleon when little is at stake save their jingoistic obsession with the French. When Strange is dispatched to the front lines to put magic at Wellington’s command (an offer initially refused by headstrong officers who disdain the idea that they need help), a chaplain tells him that to understand the war he must bivouac with the troops. When he does, Strange gets a sobering lesson in the indignities, discomforts, and routine sacrifices of the lowliest soldiers. By contrast, the decadent and sycophantic upper class is indifferent to such realities. They are culturally shallow (paintings are acquired for show and bartered as part of
Within this realistic narrative, however, Clarke offers a traditional heroic presence, a character who emerges, after significant emotional trial, to establish a moral center: John Childermass, the surly manservant of Gilbert Norrell. In interviews Clarke often cited Childermass as the character who, over the long evolution of the manuscript, came to intrigue her. With his unkempt black hair and his drawn face, uneducated and part of the disdained underclass, Childermass emerges into the psychological complexity that would privilege his position within a realistic novel. The assertion of his growing resourcefulness and his code of compassionate ethics gives a striking democratic feel to a novel otherwise defined by the rigid caste system of Regency England. Early on, Childermass shep-
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SUSANNA CLARKE herds the cloistered Norrell as the magician hesitatingly emerges from his library refuge to engage London’s treacherous social world. Childermass is a facilitator, practical and savvy, a crisis manager navigating the streets of London with Machiavellian assurance. Childermass’ loyalty to Norrell never wavers. When a distraught Emma Pole aims a pistol at Norrell, who had brought her back from the dead only to deliver her into an enchanted imprisonment with a powerful fairy, it is Childermass who takes the bullet in his shoulder.
that assignation produced Vinculus—on whose infant skin the strange markings from the digested book subsequently appeared. Recognizing the import of the markings, Childermass acts heroically to preserve the cryptic writings until a mysterious stranger (an emissary of the Raven King) resurrects the dead Vinculus. In the closing pages of the book, Childermass conducts the resurrected Vinculus to the meeting of the York Society of Learned Magicians, thus ensuring the new era’s magicians access to the most significant book of magic in British history. Resourceful, selfless, courageous, clever, devoted, Childermass might surely serve as Clarke’s narrative hero—if Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell were content to be a realistic novel.
Childermass has an interest in magic and reads futures in cards. He distinguishes himself, however, by the depth of his appreciation-his growing anxiety—over the apparent return of medieval magic. Unexpectedly he is visited by a vision that convinces him that the forces Norrell and his protégé Strange are involved with are far more powerful than either suspects. When Childermass explores an ancient pathway that leads into the Faerie kingdom, he comes upon an enchanted castle where a belligerent guardian challenges him. Understanding the magnitude of the power he confronts, Childermass wisely backs away, an act the villainous Lascelles perceives as cowardice and for which he slashes Childermass’ face with a knife. Appropriately, however, it is the scarred Childermass who assures the transfer of the great knowledge of the Raven King to the contemporary audience. Traversing the Yorkshire countryside, Childermass comes upon the body of the street magician Vinculus, hanged by the same malevolent fairy that enchants both Emma Pole and Arabella Strange. Childermass is intrigued by Vinculus’ skin, tattooed with mysterious writings. They are the only extant copy of the prophecies and enchantments of the legendary Raven King, written more than five hundred years earlier.
FANTASY EPIC
Amid the emergence of the savvy Childermass, Clarke embroiders an entirely invented narrative of ancient magic and fantastic events, of clandestine alliances and cryptic prophecies. At the center of the tale is the imminent return of the Raven King, a legendary fairy monarch from British folklore. In the twelfth century, the story goes, northern Britain had been ruled by a powerful magician known as the Raven King, who, as a child named John d’Uskglass, was the only son of an aristocratic family with a vast estate granted to them in perpetuity by William the Conqueror. When a neighboring baron raided that estate, John’s father petitioned the king for justice. The petition was denied, John’s father was brutally murdered, and the boy, his only heir, was abandoned in a forest to die. But the child was adopted by fairies who recognized that the orphan child had been marked for greatness. Taken to Faerie, the orphan grew into a sorcerer so powerful that, at the age of fifteen, determined to reclaim his father’s lands, he conquered King Henry’s army using dazzling enchantments on the battlefield. He then held sway for more than three centuries over northern Britain, the Kingdom of Faerie, and, most remarkably, a third kingdom on the far side of hell. It was an unparalleled era of peace and stability for northern Britain (historically the begin-
In 1754 a farmer-magician whose family had possessed the ancient book for centuries entrusted Vinculus’ father, an oafish servant, to deliver the book to a neighboring magician. Having no idea of the book’s value, along the way the father indulged in a two-day debauchery at a tavern that climaxed with his eating the book on a bet. Several days later he bedded a servant girl, and
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SUSANNA CLARKE nings of that region’s fierce sense of independence) and, in turn, a golden age for the practice of magic. Roads and bridges connected Britain to Faerie; commerce between the two kingdoms flourished. The Raven King’s disappearance in 1241, as veiled in mystery as his life, had led to centuries of speculation about his return. But when Clarke picks up the story in 1806, magic in England had long been decidedly disenchanted, left in the hands of antiquarians who wrote chalk-dry histories of it, ragged street entertainers in mud-spattered booths who only annoyed passersby, and bogus fortune-tellers who preyed on the susceptible and the superstitious.
down hair. With an oily Mephistophelean subtlety, the fairy bamboozles Norrell, agreeing to resurrect the young bride, but in return requiring her to spend half her life with him. To signify his claim, the fairy demands a memento: the little finger from her left hand. Norrell agrees, assuming the young bride has years before the claim will be made; but after the fairy completes the enchantment, he demands that she spend all her nights with him at the elaborate balls in his enchanted castle, named Lost-hope House—half her life, yes, exacted a day at a time. Thus begins what will evolve into a tangled intrigue centering on the prophesied return of the Raven King. Once Norrell is established in London, he moves to consolidate his position, using his influence to push legislation to ban street magicians and leaving himself London’s only practicing magician. But at the heart of Norrell’s sensibility is his distrust of the legendary Raven King (he suggests the whole thing is a myth); he rails against fairies as amoral and duplicitous, dismisses the Raven King as a monomaniacal usurper of the British throne, and discredits the myth of the golden age of British magic as a counterproductive exercise in hyperinflated nostalgia. But Norrell is challenged by the unexpected emergence of a second practicing magician, Strange, the brash wunderkind whose considerable powers of enchantment come not from long years of study but from an intuitive command of the energy of magic itself.
The practice—as opposed to the study-of magic is reintroduced by Norrell, a recluse whose long interment in his library of books about magic in remote Hurtfew Abbey outside York has prepared him to champion the restoration of British magic. Norrell establishes his credentials by performing a spectacular feat for the edification of the York Society of Learned Magicians, a polite organization of dilettantes who are initially reluctant to accept the unknown Norrell, but he agrees to the demonstration only on the condition that, should he successfully perform magic, the society must disband. Indeed, it is Norrell’s ambition not merely to reintroduce the grandeur of British magic but to control that renaissance. They do agree, and from Hurtfew Norrell brings statues to life at the distant Cathedral of York. When London newspapers run stories about the remarkable occurrences at the cathedral, Norrell leaves behind his monastic life and heads to London to begin his mission. Once the glitterati of London society overcome their disappointment in the unprepossessing figure of the dull scholar-magician (they had hoped for someone with wild eyes and a flame-tipped wand), Norrell reveals his mission: to put magic at the disposal of the British government in its efforts to quash Napoleon. He earns the government’s confidence after he performs a supremely dramatic feat: When Emma Wintertowne dies just before she is to marry Sir Walter Pole, Norrell resurrects her. But to do that, he must strike a bargain (unbeknown to anyone) with a powerful fairy, identified only as the gentleman with the thistle-
Drawn to London as Norrell’s student, Strange comes to believe in commerce with the fairy kingdom, trying spell after failed spell to contact the powerful beings. After Strange is commissioned in 1811 to assist Wellington in the ongoing efforts to defeat the French in Portugal, he assists the British army for nearly three years: laying down transportation routes overnight; terrorizing French troops with visions of avenging angels; moving entire towns and altering the currents of rivers; conjuring meteorological phenomena; rescuing a British ship beached on a sandbar using teams of horses raised from the sand itself; and even resurrecting seventeen dead Neapolitan freedom fighters to ascertain the location of stolen cannons. The Iberian campaign is a stun-
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SUSANNA CLARKE ning exercise in the power of magic, and once British victory is assured, Strange returns to England in 1814 a hero. He will be recalled the following year during Napoleon’s brief resurgence and will play a pivotal role in securing the victory at Waterloo, conjuring heavy rains and giving the muddy roads hands to slow down the French, enchanting a rye field to trip up French troops, moving roads, bringing to life saints from the mural in a country chapel to help extinguish potentially catastrophic fires, and at one point moving the entire city of Brussels temporarily to North America.
Norrell and Strange close the narrative, each bound to the other within the same enchantment, shrouded in impenetrable darkness, planning to abandon England and live in exile on the Continent. The growing friction and uneasy alliance between the obsessively controlling Norrell and the maverick Strange is absorbing, a spectacle of dueling enchanters and daring feats that dispense with the laws of the physical universe. But Clarke, an avid reader of Sherlock Holmes, understands that charged conflict is the fantasy novel’s red herring: the feuding magicians are part of a broader agenda, puppets manipulated by grand forces preparing the return of the Raven King. It is that story that centers Clarke’s fantasy epic, specifically the emergence of Stephen Black.
Throughout all this, Strange remains determined to contact the fairy kingdom. For a magician to deny that legacy, he argues, is like the archbishop of Canterbury’s denying the Holy Trinity. This dogmatic stance draws Norrell’s fury, and when Strange publishes a laudatory history of the Raven King, Norrell peevishly makes all the copies disappear or the print in them vanish—save one copy, of course, for his own library. But when Arabella is abducted to Losthope House by the gentleman with the thistledown hair, Strange earnestly begins his efforts to cross into Faerie. Along the way, he grows increasingly powerful. The gentleman with the thistle-down hair, as an emissary for the Raven King, plots to lure mad King George III into Faerie and thus prepare the throne for the ascension of the Raven King. He visits Windsor Castle and charms the demented king with sweet flute music, but the intervention of Strange thwarts the scheme—and that interference earns the enmity of the powerful fairy. As Strange pursues increasingly potent enchantments, he will ultimately be cursed, enclosed within the massive tower of darkness by the gentleman with the thistle-down hair. Only late in the novel, after Norrell reluctantly agrees to join Strange in an alliance to conjure the Raven King, does the reader get, in one breathtaking moment, a sense of the monarch’s magnificence. As the magicians recite a summoning spell at Hurtfew Abbey, all the library books suddenly turn into a flurry of descending ravens, and a raven’s eye the size of a hillside momentarily peers into one of the tall library windows. The magicians are humbled.
More than Norrell, who comes off badly—he is gullible, deceptive, petty, vindictive, jealous— and more than Strange, whose ego leads to catastrophes and sloppy spells, Stephen Black recalls the prototypical hero of fantasy literature, from Arthur Pendragon to Frodo Baggins: a comely man-child with mysterious origins, whose inherent nobility, intelligence, kindness, and goodness place him at odds with a treacherous world of mercenary self-interest. Despite his lowly condition, he exudes the calm of authority and the aura of nobility. Stephen begins the narrative, as does the reader, bound to a horizontal world, unaware of any grander realm. He is reluctant to accept his destiny—even when the gentleman with the thistle-down hair, as an agent of the Raven King—takes the servant under his wing. Exposed to the realities of the fairy kingdom, Stephen adjusts to the evidence of enchantments, begins to separate himself from the mundane, and is liberated into the powerful realm of magic. His story becomes the bildungsroman typical of the fantasy genre, a coming-ofage quest to reclaim his identity. As Stephen comes to accept his destiny, he represents an uncompromising moral agency, the possibility of redemption not only for shoddy Regency England but also for the realm of Faerie—a desolate wasteland that awaits restoration to greatness. As readers begin to realize that the cryptic prophecy of the return of the Raven King
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SUSANNA CLARKE fits Stephen, that the butler will take part in restoring England’s greatness (his given name means “crown”), they understand the shattering implications, in the closing pages, of Stephen’s killing the gentleman with the thistle-down hair. As Stephen approaches Lost-hope House, where he is expected to lay claim to his royal prerogative, he feels a surging chorus of yeses generated by the rocks, streams, and birds. Emboldened, he uses his powers to drown the villainous fairy in a swollen river and then crush him with huge millstones. In this exhilarating moment of clarity Stephen heads to Lost-hope, which is moss-eaten and crumbling into decay. With new vigor, he passes through the great hall and settles at last upon the ancient throne: “This house ѧ is disordered and dirty. Its inhabitants have idled away their days in pointless pleasures and in celebrations of past cruelties.ѧ All these faults, I shall in time set right” (“The Ladies of Grace Adieu,” p. 769). Stephen’s ascent into his nobility gives Clarke’s fantasy epic its closing turn to the joy that defines the genre (what Tolkien termed the “eucatastrophe”). Is Stephen the promised Raven King or is he a John the Baptist figure? (Norrell has a painting of Salome with the head of John the Baptist.) The reader is left surrounded by mystery, invigorated by anticipation. In the dramatic closing chapters, the English countryside erupts in spectacle: pebbles spontaneously arrange themselves into the words of spells; puddles give way like doors; ravens crowd blossoming tree branches; abandoned roads to Faerie clear themselves of centuries of tangled underbrush. It is surely promising, and the heroic Stephen Black embodies that gift of hope, a stirring vision of the possibility of reclamation that, since King Arthur, has been the privilege of fantasy narratives.
gratuitous judgments and random observations about life in Regency England as well as cites a wide-ranging body of fictitious literature on the history of British magic? The narrator is never identified: Is it one of the stodgy antiquarians of the York Society of Learned Magicians (perhaps John Segundus, who according to several footnotes, authors a twovolume biography of Jonathan Strange); is it perhaps an older Gilbert Norrell, characteristically speaking of himself in a stuffy third-person? Why does Clarke not identify the narrator? After all, when she published her short fiction in The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories in 2006, she prefaced that volume with a chatty introduction written by a fictitious professor of fairy studies who reassures the reader that the “stories” (they are not presented as fictions) function as a primer to fairy culture. In that case the narrator is clearly identified and, once the stories commence, withdraws. But in Jonathan Strange, the narrator is both an abiding presence and an abiding absence, lacking narrative consequence and plot presence and never influencing the action; the narrator lacks any physical dimension, specific background, evident motivation, or telling psychology. Not surprisingly, critical reaction largely ignored the narrator. But the narrator returns discussion of the novel to Clarke’s larger premise, first triggered by that jigsaw puzzle box: the celebration of storytelling. After all, it (we cannot assign gender) is pure function—a voice, simply the means to telling a story. And logistically, because no single character is privy to all the scenes recounted in the narrative, we are dealing with an inveterate embroiderer who, like Hawthorne, indeed like Clarke herself, luxuriously conjures scenes from a blithe anonymity, spinning from the raw energy of the animated fancy. The narrator’s intrusions compel us to be aware of a voice, to hear the story. Remove those intrusions, and what is lost is an intimacy that Clarke valued long ago when as a child she found the reassuring construct of stories. Reading is an isolating and lonely endeavor—by introducing the voice, by insisting on a narrative presence, Clarke taps the ancient consolation of community.
POSTMODERN TEXT
If Clarke juxtaposes the realistic narrative of John Childermass’ evolution and the fantastical tale of Stephen’s ascent, what is to be made of the nearly two hundred footnotes? And why introduce a voice-over narrator who periodically offers
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SUSANNA CLARKE But, if that is so, then surely the footnotes counter such intimacy: they intrude on the story and interrupt the narrative, as they must be read apart from the unfolding plot. The footnotes, sometimes extending across several pages, compete with the story. Indeed, both readers who relish the Austenesque historic realism and those enthralled by the fantasy narrative can dismiss the footnotes as at best amusing, at worst distracting. Here is where Clarke’s third constituency steps forward. Savvy readers, versed in the bravura narrative experiments of postmodernism, can see a twee avant-garde assault on the presumption of narrative integrity and can discern the precedents of Clarke’s strategic upending of narrative in Jorge Luis Borges, John Barth, Vladimir Nabokov, John Fowles, and others. In parodying the research of academics (who are often their only readers), postmodern texts have used footnotes to invent their own context, perhaps to mock themselves, and (given the intrusive presence at the bottoms of pages) compel readers to forego relaxing into the unfolding story—we are compelled to foreground the text-ness of the story, to acknowledge that we are holding a printed thing constructed by a smartalecky writer intent on being a terrorist, dynamiting the textual—edifice even as it is being constructed.
the narrative movement of Moby-Dick toward a sense of the whale as indefinable, Clarke’s narrator tethers the reader’s impulse to give in to the mysterious and the fantastic. Thus, as a student of postmodern narratology, Clarke parodies academic excess to at once expose the realistic tale and disenchant the marvelous one. If that is the case, then surely the narrator with all those footnotes functions like Rupert Giles in the early seasons of the Buffy television series: the snuffcolored school librarian, the joyless guardian of the archives, the dusty buzzkill, who, bunkered amid cartoonishly large leather-bound books, their pages crisp with age, dispassionately delivers pointed historic exposition to counter any potential awe over the obvious evidence of the fantastic. Of course, such a tidy argument, which positions Clarke as a snarky student of avant-garde narrative theory and an ambitious experimenter in narrative technique ignores the obvious: that Clarke is neither and passionately ties her evolution as a writer to her love of story, not storytelling. For Clarke, then, the footnotes offer an alternative text-scape with its own integrity that extends rather than diminishes the book’s narrative sprawl, less a mockery of story than a florescence of it, prodigious, joyful, reckless. With the cheerless deadpan, mossy gravitas, and prissy pettiness of a career professor, the narrator offers entirely invented scholarship, how-to explanations of spell casting, anecdotal evidence of earlier centuries’ magicians, and explanatory (often subtly hilarious) mini-essays on the fabulous golden age of Renaissance magic when the Raven King held sway—indeed, it is in the footnotes that the dimension of the Raven King’s reign becomes evident. And given that the narrator also provides helpful tidbits on a wide range of factual topics—the Regency war cabinet, the queer topography of Portugal, the history of British cathedrals, the career of Lord Byron, as well as definitions of arcane magic terms—the footnotes give the unfolding fantastical narrative an aura of authenticity and coax reluctant readers to buy into the reality of legendary British magic. Much as Hawthorne gives weight to his marvelous tale, which like Clarke’s, freely braids
To professional readers, Clarke, who otherwise seemed an Austen wannabe or a Tolkien knockoff, joined daring contemporary writers reinventing narrative by calling attention to it, usurping the privilege of story, undercutting both the premise of mimesis (footnotes surely prevent readers from sympathetically interacting with characters) and the premise of fantasy. At critical moments when the narrative moves toward abandoning the reassuring parameters of mimetic fiction, the narrative voice, grounded in archival records, mitigates the impact of exposure to the unprecedented by anchoring those narrative events to a lengthy (and often tedious) chain of precedence, asking us to believe in the extraordinary because it is well documented and therefore ordinary. Like Herman Melville’s sub-sublibrarian, whose determined efforts to crossreference the whale into clarification bog down
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SUSANNA CLARKE historic realism with the fabulous by reassuring us that the story is grounded in Puritan historic record, so these footnotes give sturdiness to what is otherwise the fragile construct of a giddy fancy. More importantly, like the tattered scarlet letter, like the jigsaw puzzle, the footnotes stir invention and introduce a range of other stories any one of which might sustain our participatory intervention: Anne Bloodworth, an overworked country wife tired of years of chores, is duped by a mischievous fairy and ends up enchanted in Faerie, condemned to centuries of chores; the innocent glovemaker’s child wanders away from her home and is returned by the benevolent intervention of the Raven King himself, who appears to the child in a flurry of black birds; Margaret Ford, a malicious farmwife, finds a magic ring in a goose she is preparing and uses her newfound powers to hurt neighbors she has never liked and to steal a beautiful baby; Cecily de Walbrook is charmed by a clingy pewtercolored stray cat who insists on sharing her bed, only to find out the cat is actually a randy magician. These are not so much footnotes as they are storyboards, sketches, premises that could be amplified into grand narratives of their own. Indeed Clarke did just that: footnote 2 in chapter 43 mentions three women magicians in the obscure rural town of Grace Adieu; footnote 1 in chapter 63 mentions a resourceful charcoal burner who outwits the Raven King, which Clarke spins into the tale “John Uskglass and the Cumbrian Charcoal Burner,” the only previously unpublished story to appear in her 2006 collection. The footnotes, then, spacious and suggestive, invite the full-dressed expression into form that is the special magic of the engaged imagination.
embroidering impulse itself. Clarke’s novel frustrates simplification into genre. Each narrative strand would make a sufficient read—indeed, initial reviews tended to favor one of the three elements and largely to ignore (or apologize for) the other two. But Clarke collides the premises, denies the narrative a single pedigree, a single path of approach. What are all those hyperserious academics supposed to do with talking fountains and haunted ballrooms spinning with dancing goblins? What are fans of fantasy fiction to do with the acerbic social commentary and the realpolitik of Regency-era courtship? What are readers of psychological and historic fiction to do with the hilarious footnotes and intrusive narrator? Clarke denies her text handy identity— indeed, to laud the text’s Austenesque sensibility, its painstaking historic detailing, its pitch-perfect nineteenth-century prose, and subtle character psychologies but to ignore, for instance, the fabulous journey Strange takes through a mirror or the moment Norrell fashions an intimidating armada of British warships entirely from rain is rather like relishing an exquisite slice of homemade bread by complimenting its flour (this metaphor would not be lost on Clarke, who edited recipe books for ten years as she drafted Jonathan Strange and who understands how parts within a whole concede their integrity). Clarke thus creates an intriguing, sui generis novel that breaks free of the captivity of genre. But why? Recall the jigsaw puzzle that started it all. If thematically Jonathan Strange explores the tension between freedom and captivity, between daring vision and simple reflection, between heroic resistance and meek acquiescence, such themes surely apply as much to the early twenty-first-century imagination as they do to the story of magic in Regency England. And, much as in The Scarlet Letter, it is that daring that promotes the reader to the true heroic center of the text. Traditional genre-bound texts are elaborate pleasure-prisons. In conventional realistic novels, for example, the reader is happily imprisoned by the accumulation of details, recognizable characters, telltale symbols, and decisive scenes, and is pulled into a welcoming symbolic landscape whose characters coax
“THE DARK AND DREAMY HEART”
Historic realism, magic fantasy, postmodern text: Clarke cagily withholds endorsing any of these narrative strands, maintaining an intriguing tension that recalls The Scarlet Letter—which is at once an exquisitely realized Puritan-era historical novel, a fabulous tale of the paranormal, and an early postmodern exercise that celebrates the
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SUSANNA CLARKE those wonderfully useless, self-sustaining enchanters, those spellbinding conjurers: us.
sympathies (although we know they are really ink struck in paper). In fantasy fiction, the reader is similarly imprisoned, happily escaping into astonishment, spellbound by the sweep of alternative worlds, accepting the sweet claustrophobia of secondhand imagining, re-realizing the spectacle that some author has originally conjured. And even in the most audacious experimental postmodern texts, the reader is again imprisoned. Without traditional characters to lavish sympathy upon, or handy symbols to interpret, or clear scenes from which to derive themes, readers happily exile themselves into these labyrinthine textual edifices; against the promise of publishing their analyses, they excavate the text’s obscure allusions, explicate its intricate wordplay, and assess its Byzantine plotlines against arcane language theories. Readers, fans, academics-prisoners each. Because such texts maintain the integrity of genre and offer familiar predictability, readers lapse into a comfortable complacency, a routine that leaves the act of reading moribund. But by bringing the genres together without privileging any one and by suspending the reader within a bewitching matrix of unended endings, Clarke, like Hawthorne before her, frees all three types of readers. Because they cannot read the novel as one thing or another, they must maintain a flexibility, an arch alertness that conventional genrebound novels routinely minimize. At the nonending of Jonathan Strange, we are ushered out, a joyous leap into possibility, invited to conjure from our own resources which have suddenly been startled into animation—all of us, readers, fans, academics. You complete the realistic novel aware of the inequities of British culture in the Napoleonic era; you complete the fantasy tale marveling that cathedral statues come to life or that alternative worlds exist in a mirror, and you eagerly anticipate the next volume in the epic saga of the Raven King’s return; you complete the postmodern text bemused by its savvy parody of academics and eager to theorize about the strategic intrusion of the constructed narrator. But you complete Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell catapulted beyond such limits—the experience of the novel is aggressively centripetal. In the end, it creates not readers but storytellers,
Clarke’s and Hawthorne’s narratives interrogate their own premises, and they demand—in fact, insist with guerrilla boldness—that the reader resist the temptation to surrender to the spell of story. Like The Scarlet Letter, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is at its heart about the imagination that engendered it, and like Hawthorne’s romance, despite its apparent gloominess and wintry gravitas, Clarke’s narrative is an expression of a joyous imagination running full throttle with a story determined to close unclosed. As such, the book functions like the tattered scarlet letter and the jigsaw puzzle—a grand occasion for storytelling. Go invent—after all, Clarke severs her story lines abruptly: Is the Raven King returning? Will Arabella and Strange reunite? Is Stephen Black the promised king or a delusional lunatic? Will the disenchanted Emma Pole succeed in ridding England of magicians? Who is that striking young girl in red velvet who attends the meeting of the reorganized York Society of Learned Magicians? What will happen to Norrell and Strange, now sharing the same enchantment, as they head to Europe? Pick any story line, any character, any twice-told tale in the footnotes—and then, in a novel about the reenergizing of magic, feel quite intimately the resurgence of real magic: your imagination. It is not that Clarke wants to sentence anyone to the enormous labor of gestating a manuscript—in truth, books here are held suspect; libraries are refuges; publication a mercenary enterprise; and the most wonderful notions once cooled into print become contested property— indeed the ambitious gentleman who approaches Norrell, the new sensation of the London scene, to publish his story is blind in one eye. Rather, Clarke rekindles what she herself felt years ago: the joy of storytelling. As such, Jonathan Strange is a book of magic, not a book about magic. Early on, the narrator carefully distinguishes books of magic from the far more common books about magic—books about magic, he explains dryly, merely catalog data on the history of magic, whereas books of magic actually incite spectacle enchantments beyond the parameter of reason.
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SUSANNA CLARKE Surely Jonathan Strange, in triggering imaginative excess, in licensing and sponsoring a conspiracy of competing tales among its readers, is that rarest of things: a book of magic. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell thus is ultimately a captivity narrative. True, many of its characters are held bound within powerful enchantments, and Stephen Black’s subplot recounts the horrors of the slave trade—but the captivity Clarke most frets over is the captivity of her reader bound within a grim and mordant contemporary era (like Regency England and like the Kingdom of Faerie). The contemporary imagination has been manacled by the oppression of sophisticated virtual reality techno-captors: redundant theme parks; new generations upon new generations of video games; puppet-crazy children’s programming; the faux intimacy of Internet sites; harvests of big-budget actionadventure movies; high production commercials, endlessly looped, that routinely feature talking toilet brushes and levitating candy bars; special effects software that enables any savvy twelveyear-old to alter reality; and technology itself in which this morning’s marvelous gimmicks are tonight’s obsolete junk. Collectively Clarke’s early twentieth-first-century readers have languished within the bindings of such secondhand imaginings. For Clarke, such readers suffer from a variation of the Stockholm Syndrome—they gratefully hold the hand that holds them down. Clarke’s readers, by contrast, must revive the reach and energy of their own imagination. Like The Scarlet Letter, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is less flowing than episodic, each chapter shifting character and scene and time, each like a carefully crafted, strikingly visual tableau brought to life (resurrection is a motif in the novel). Each tableau has a feel of being exquisitely conjured with its own delicate integrity (Hawthorne compares his chapter-tableaux to fragile soap bubbles; Clarke is herself a fan of Alan Moore’s landmark graphic novels, and both of her publications are handsomely illustrated). Relish my conjuring, Clarke urges, but test your own atrophied powers.
dreaming heart, just as the flight of a bird comes from the heart” (p. 7), she is talking as much about the most potent form of enchantment: the imagination itself. Although Clarke dismisses as writerly affectation the strategy of planting symbols to carry thematic weight, finding such indulgences cerebral and contrived, an odd image from an early visit to Gilbert Norrell’s massive library at Hurtfew Abbey lingers. Upon a table by a roaring fire (shades of Hawthorne’s surveyor) rests a very old book—but curiously it is only the leather binding, its pages nowhere to be seen. It is then an unbook book, a story anticipating its own conjuring, narrative freed of its binding, a subtle invitation to create our own marvelous stories: that is the authentic magic at the heart of Susanna Clarke’s fictional sensibility.
Selected Bibliography WORKS OF SUSANNA CLARKE Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2004. “The Ladies of Grace Adieu” and Other Stories. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2006.
CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Barron, Neil, ed. Fantasy Literature: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Garland, 1989. Dickerson, Matthew T., and David O'Hara. From Homer to Harry Potter: A Handbook on Myth and Fantasy. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press, 2006. Hume, Kathryn. Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature. New York: Methuen, 1984. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (www.jonathanstrange.com). (Web site devoted to Susanna Clarke and her works.) Mathews, Richard. Fantasy: The Liberation of Imagination. New York: Twayne, 1997. Olsen, Lance. Ellipse of Uncertainty: An Introduction to Postmodern Fantasy. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. Rabkin, Eric S. The Fantastic in Literature. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979. (A landmark study of the genre.) Sandner, David. Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004. Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Fairy Stories.” 1939. Reprinted in his The Tolkien Reader. New York: Ballantine, 1966. Pp. 33– 99.
When Clarke argues in “The Ladies of Grace Adieu” that “magic comes from the dark and
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JONATHAN COE (1961—)
William May bravura set pieces, puns and allusions, cosmic ironies played out on his characters, or the poignant comedy of two people struggling toward intimacy. Although his eight novels, three biographies, and collection of short stories offer narrative experiment, postmodern playfulness, and structural innovation, at their core they are humane comedies and generous satires—What a Carve Up! offers a biting commentary on the former prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s capitalist Britain, yet its most sustained lampoon is of a fictionalized version of Coe himself.
J ONATHAN C OE IS one of the most important modern British novelists, an unparalleled chronicler of English society and culture from the 1970s into the twenty-first century. Whereas his contemporaries and antecedents made the English novel global—Martin Amis’ Money: A Suicide Note (1984) jets between London and New York, and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984) leaps from a Cockney circus to the Siberian desert— Coe’s geographies are determinedly provincial in scope. Although London recurs in his fiction and has been his home since the mid-1980s, it is his native Birmingham that provides the landscape for The Rotters’ Club (2001), the North York Moors that offer the chilling denouement in What a Carve Up! (1994; published in the United States as The Winshaw Legacy), and the rural isolation of Shropshire and Lincolnshire that forms the backdrop for The Rain Before It Falls (2007). His fiction provides a lucid account of England’s places and people that is alive to regional variation and cultural boundaries, and although he is not alone in seeking out rural and provincial England as a setting for the contemporary novel—the East Anglian flatlands are memorably evoked in Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983)—few can match Coe’s range or commitment to England’s less-visited literary corners. Tellingly, the protagonist of The Dwarves of Death (1990) rails at London “because everybody else flocks to it as if it were the only thing worth experiencing on earth” (p. 20) and, despite the Berlin framing narrative or the Danish holidays of The Rotters’ Club, Coe’s characters more often than not disperse to Wales, Sheffield, or Coventry rather than New York or Paris.
His novels examine the relationship between personal and national history, with collisions that are sometimes cruelly farcical—as in The Closed Circle (2004), where Paul, a member of Parliament, decides to vote to go to war in Iraq so that he can keep a free flat in London for his mistress—and often tragic, as in the killing of Lois’ fiancé by an IRA bomb in The Rotters’ Club. Dramatic irony pervades his work; the more his protagonists confess their idealistic expectations to us, the more cognizant we become of the inevitable historical incursions that will derail them. As Coe asserts in his biography of the actor Humphrey Bogart, “we are all of us engaged in lifelong battles against authority, fought in the knowledge that we live at the mercy of influences outside our control” (Humphrey Bogart: Take It and Like It, p. 8). In What a Carve Up! the aristocratic Winshaws take symbolic hold of Britain’s agriculture, government policy, and journalism, making the protagonist and chronicler of their dynasty, Michael Owen, a hapless puppet, whereas in The Closed Circle we see the sparring schoolboy rivalries of The Rotters’ Club played out on the British political stage. Although it is tempting to tie down Coe’s novels to stateof-the-nation fictions for each decade (The
Coe is also separated from many of his British contemporaries by the richly comic thread running through much of his work, whether in
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JONATHAN COE Rotters’ Club depicting the mass unemployment and racial tensions of the 1970s, What a Carve Up! satirizing Thatcherite politics and capitalist greed in the 1980s, and The Closed Circle exploring the murky morals of 1990s Blairite Britain and the specter of the Iraq war), it is a formula that Coe himself seems wary of, as suggested to his fictionalized narrator Michael in What a Carve Up!
discontents and might also help illuminate American cultural reference points in his otherwise determinedly English landscapes. Music too is a key structural and thematic concern: The Dwarves of Death charts the fortunes of a struggling rock band and dispenses with chapter titles to explore the narrative equivalents of “Middle Eight” and “Key Change”; Benjamin, protagonist of The Rotters’ Club, is an idealistic young composer; and a Michael Gibbs track provides the title for The Rain Before It Falls. In part these snatched allusions to the rock singer Morrissey and forgotten indie bands help to vivify a moment in popular culture, but there is a deeper intent behind these historical reference points. Coe has become increasingly interested in the relationship between words and music. As Coe wrote in the Guardian:
“You think you can reduce everything to politics, don’t you, Michael? It makes life so simple for you.” “I don’t see what’s so simple about it.” “Well of course politics can be complicated, I realize that. But I always think there’s something treacherous about that sort of approach. The way it tempts us to believe there’s an explanation for everything, somewhere or other, if only we’re prepared to look hard enough.”
I’ve always loved music more than I’ve loved language.ѧ I write while listening to music, and if I read a particular passage back to myself after a book is finished, I can usually remember the music I was listening to when I wrote it. My own novels therefore have a “soundtrack,” as far as I’m concerned, but it’s an entirely private and interior one, which readers are unable to share.
(p. 354)
This self-questioning reappears throughout his work, creating an oeuvre that is deprecatingly experimental but never arrogant in its innovation. In the absence of a narrator to explain life’s chaos to us, Coe’s bewildered characters often look to national politics to close the gap. If the ethical and formal choices of the fiction writer are under close scrutiny throughout Coe’s novels, he frequently looks to other forms to energize his work. Film, particularly in relation to memory and the subconscious, plays a pivotal role in The House of Sleep (1997) and A Touch of Love (1989); The Rain Before It Falls is structured around a series of twenty photographs narrated to the blind Imogen. What a Carve Up! takes its name from a 1961 comedy-horror film that first appears as a memory of a childhood birthday treat before finally providing the setting for the novel’s gruesome climax. As Graham remarks to Michael in the novel, “any serious modern artist who wants to use narrative ought to be working in film” (p. 276), and the medium, along with the critical and cultish following it inspires, is a constant preoccupation for Coe and his protagonists. His biographies of Bogart and fellow actor James Stewart show an encyclopedic knowledge of mid-century Hollywood and its
(“Moon Tunes,” p. 18)
His 2008 project Say Hi to the Rivers and the Mountains finally revealed one of these hidden soundtracks: it consists of a play written by Coe that was performed alongside an hour-long set by the British experimental group the High Llamas. Music represents the point at which the creative becomes instinctual, offering a salvo for the elaborate techniques and machinations of the novelist. Coe himself plays the piano and composed throughout his teens and twenties. Apart from the music and film, Coe’s literary heritage might be traced back to Laurence Sterne and Henry Fielding, the latter the subject of Coe’s doctoral thesis at Warwick University. These two literary ancestors jostle for supremacy in his works, sparking his interest in society on the one hand and experimental writing on the other. An early love of detective fiction, particularly that of Arthur Conan Doyle, emerges in The Dwarves of Death and What a Carve Up!, but otherwise Coe’s preference is for the individual rather than
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JONATHAN COE the generic. Rosamond Lehmann, the twentiethcentury British novelist, inspired not only the characters and landscapes of The Rain Before It Falls but also its loamy melancholia. Yet perhaps the most important literary reference point is provided by B. S. Johnson, the doggedly avantgarde British novelist of the 1960s who insisted that fiction was telling lies. Coe’s award-winning biography of Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant (2004), not only raised the profile of Johnson’s work but also redefined the genre of biography itself. Knowing the difficulty of coupling Johnson’s experimental aesthetic with a traditional, chronological outline of his life, Coe produced a biography that is playful, poignant, and also profoundly autobiographical. Through navigating Johnson’s life and work, Coe also took on the conflict in his own writing between formal experiment and mimetic integrity. Coe’s 2004 novel The Closed Circle draws on a central metaphor of recurrence and insularity; throughout his work repetition colludes with coincidence. This generates some labyrinthine plots unraveled with Dickensian ingenuity and also a series of protagonists not quite at home in the world and reluctant to take agency. As Michael in What a Carve Up! eyes a beautiful young woman on a train, he longs for a “series of coincidences which would bring us together while usefully absolving me from the need to take events into my own hands” (pp. 262–263). Their subsequent conversation and the eventual revelation that there is nothing coincidental about their meeting both rewards and resists his request. Yet Coe rarely treats his characters with malevolence, and if the satire of earlier novels such as The Accidental Woman (1987) and What a Carve Up! suggests the savagery of Evelyn Waugh, later works give us diffident maturity rather than a set of victims and perpetrators.
as Zadie Smith or Ian McEwan and is yet to be nominated for a Booker Prize. His pellucid prose, his bathetic comedy, and the strain of selfdeprecation and nostalgia running through his work make him an uneasy proposition for the literary judge. Yet if his deceptively simple style is sometimes mistaken as banal by reviewers, as in the puzzled response to The Rain Before It Falls by Erica Wagner in the New York Times, its apparent opacity masks some fiendish plotting and generic dexterity. Whereas Julian Barnes similarly plays with linearity (A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters, 1989), dissects contemporary relationships (Talking it Over, 1991), and pastiches detective fiction (publishing a series of crime novels under a pseudonym of Dan Kavanagh), Coe combines all three in What a Carve Up!, which blends social satire, murder mystery, and Künstlerroman. It is this unique, most often humorous, fusion of tones and style that is both Coe’s strength and the reason for the relative critical silence on his work. His innovations structure and ground his novels rather than subverting their realist qualities. Coe’s narrators, rather than situating him as the postmodern interventionist, allow us to see the author himself as part of the fallibly human fabric making up his novelistic world.
BIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE
Coe quips that he is one of those unfortunate writers with a happy childhood, providing a rich source of contented memories that his fiction attempts to return to rather than a set of problems to resolve, for “few things can be more useless, for practical purposes, than happy memories” (The Accidental Woman, p. 13). Time and again in his work, his protagonists hope to draw on nostalgia to re-create their pasts, but with limited success. As the luckless Maria finds at the conclusion of The Accidental Woman, “the countryside around her called attention to itself, rather than to the memory of that long lost other afternoon” (p. 150). Memories and dreams from Coe’s youth resurface throughout his work, yet always with the resignation that “dreams, as you know, are no sooner described than falsified” (p. 133).
Although Coe has enjoyed sustained commercial and literary success—The Rotters’ Club was made into a BBC television series in 2005, and literary awards have included the 1995 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for What a Carve Up! and the 1998 Prix Médicis Étranger for The House of Sleep—he has attracted surprisingly little critical attention in comparison to contemporaries such
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JONATHAN COE Coe read English at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he spent much of his time cocooned in his room writing and learned “the art of the sweeping, uninformed dismissal” (Like A Fiery Elephant, p. 6). Although he rarely discusses his time there, unhappy undergraduate days haunt the protagonists of The Accidental Woman and The House of Sleep, and Robin in A Touch of Love recalls a studious day of university work “born of panic rather than enthusiasm” (p. 48). Yet it was here that he began to explore a literary heritage outside the prescribed canon and strayed both from the Spenser and Dryden prescribed by his tutors and the new breed of British novelists such as Martin Amis and Ian McEwan being devoured by his contemporaries. Chancing in a bookshop on the distinctive green spines of the British feminist publisher Virago, which had begun to reissue out-of-print twentiethcentury women’s fiction in a Modern Classics imprint, Coe read Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, and F. M. Mayor. Works such as Richardson’s Pilgrimage (1938) “flung open a door on to a new world of possibility” (“My Literary Love Affair,” p. 5). In particular, this window into women’s fiction informed the feminine sensibility in much of Coe’s work. Many of his protagonists are female; one of his plots turns on the sex change of a key character; and several of his male protagonists are sexually ambiguous—Katherine and Ted suspect the sensitive Robin in A Touch of Love of being gay. Coe has often expressed surprise in interviews that he was born a man.
Born on August 19, 1961, in Birmingham, Coe was brought up in a middle-class, conservative household, the son of Roger Frank Coe, a research scientist, and Janet Mary Coe, a primary school teacher. From 1972 to 1979 he attended King Edward’s School in Birmingham, an academic grammar school affectionately fictionalized in The Rotters’ Club. Although his parents were not avid readers, he wrote throughout his childhood and recalls composing a pastiche Victorian detective story when he was eight years old called “The Castle of Mystery.” Yet it was television and film that proved formative influences, from British TV sitcoms such as Fawlty Towers to comedy films such as Kind Hearts and Coronets. His grandfather, with his good-humored encouragement and his love of Sherlock Holmes, had a profound influence on the young Coe, and he recalls his grandfather’s death when Coe was twenty-two as one of the most upsetting episodes in his life. His own fiction returns again and again to the primacy of family bonds and the arbitrary interruption of unconditional love by sudden death. At age fifteen Coe wrote a novel and sent it to the comedian and writer Spike Milligan’s publisher, acknowledging Milligan’s Puckoon (1963) as a direct influence. The work was rejected, and Coe went on to burn it, describing it later as an unholy fusion of Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis. Yet his discovery of Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews at age sixteen marked a turning point in his literary apprenticeship, its interweaving narratives, brisk satire, and depiction of human folly providing a template for the fiction Coe would go on to write. This was balanced by the experimental exuberance of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which, as Coe recalls, showed him that a novel could “deconstruct its own inventions” and prompted the realization that “if you could pull this off while still engrossing the reader ѧ without annoying them too much, without revelling in your own cleverness—then you had done something very special indeed” (“Great Spunky Unflincher,” p. 2). Here Coe identifies the need for fiction to be knowing without being arch.
During his undergraduate years Coe played piano and composed music for a cabaret group named Wanda and the Willie Warmers and briefly considered a career in music. He would go on to form a jazz quintet. In 1984 he received a Master’s of Arts degree from the University of Warwick, and he completed a Ph.D. dissertation there on Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones before staying on to teach poetry. The title of his thesis, “Satire and Sympathy: Some Consequences of Intrusive Narration in Tom Jones and Other Comic Novels,” is suggestive both of the mode and the mood of his literary interests. While the narrator frequently intrudes in Coe’s fiction, or
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JONATHAN COE steps aside to give way to letters, e-mails, or newspaper articles, the notion of consequence itself remains a thematic preoccupation. But if the subject of Coe’s postgraduate work remains central to his fiction, the promises of academia are less fondly recalled: the rootless isolation of doctoral study is depicted in A Touch of Love, leaving its protagonist, Robin, to reflect of a colleague that “anyone who likes universities that much really hates life itself” (p. 44). The lonely campus is a recurring image in Coe’s work, in contrast to the rivalry and bustle that characterize university novels by David Lodge; tellingly, the characters in The House of Sleep return to their student hall years later to discover it has become a clinic for investigating sleep disorders. Coe returned to university in 2006 to collect an honorary degree from the University of Birmingham, but since publishing his first novel in 1987 he has preferred to write fiction rather than teach it. Coe has lived in London since the mid-1980s and married Janine Maria McKeown in 1989. They have two daughters, Matilda and Madeleine.
begins with an introverted Maria being praised by her headmistress for winning a place at Oxford, which she assures her will be “the glorious start of a life rich in achievement and fulfilment” (p. 8). As Maria shuffles her way indecisively through dingy student housing, five years of domestic abuse in a loveless marriage, and rejection by her own child, the narrator offers little in the way of consolation and takes a sadistic delight in informing us at one point that it is “three years later, and it is still raining” (p. 127). If the quasi-Romantic final scene of a lark ascending the hill as Maria contemplates her future suggests a faint possibility of redemption, the narrative is quick to qualify the promise, directing the readers via a footnote to a Prokofiev sonata, which we are assured “achieves a much more concrete version of what I was trying to express” than its verbal equivalent (p. 148). Words in Coe’s first novel are difficult and inadequate, and the narrative is continually correcting itself, halfway between pedantry and integrity. Meanwhile, the narrator and the protagonist struggle through a passive war of who will give up first.
EARLY NOVELS
Although the narrative is conventionally chronological, its continual insertions and qualifications often resemble the filmic rewind and freeze-frame. When we are told Maria’s disastrous marriage comes as “the unfortunate consequence of having to eat gammon on that hot afternoon” (p. 81), the narrator relishes the chance to justify his own seemingly arbitrary causation. The difficulty with such a technique is that Maria’s arbitrary passage through the novel seems callous rather than comic, making it a work that is full of satire but little sympathy.
After collecting a slew of rejection slips, completing three novels that were sent back from a succession of publishers, and burning his fourth, Coe considered abandoning fiction writing until, at last, The Accidental Woman was taken on by Duckworth in 1987 for a fee of £200. He also reviewed fiction for the Guardian and the London Review of Books during this time, but for financial, rather than critical, reasons; he is wary of contemporary novelists passing judgment on their peers. His early work, in retrospect, shows him ironing out the stylistic and formal difficulties of combining a self-conscious narrative style with a novel interested in character rather than construct. Coe has subsequently dismissed his debut, The Accidental Woman, as too cruel, even if the narrator’s indifference to its protagonist, Maria, mirrors her own: “Let’s be honest, I begin to weary of Maria, and her story, just as Maria begins to weary of Maria, and her story” (p. 135). The cynical narrative works both a parody of first-novel clichés and the bildungsroman: it
Coe takes huge leaps forwards with his next two novels, A Touch of Love (1989) and The Dwarves of Death (1990). The protagonists are now comically apathetic and diffident rather than indifferent, and the tension between their own perceived marginality and their centrality to the complex plots that embroil them provides comic mileage as well as transformative possibilities for their hapless meanderings. Robin Grant, the protagonist of A Touch of Love, is a doctoral student unable to complete his thesis and a writer
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JONATHAN COE unsuccessful at publishing his work and, as such, suggests a fictionalized early version of Coe himself. As if to underline the similarities, Coe interweaves four of Grant’s short stories into the main body of the narrative, allowing the reader to assess the similarities between Coe’s style and Grant’s, whose authorial intrusions frequently recall the narrator of The Accidental Woman. Robin’s story, “The Meeting of Minds,” the first to be included in the narrative, breaks off early from its third-person description of a man named Richard to announce:
Depression and death are never far away in this often comic novel, but it is the tension between compassion and detachment, rather than the threat of extinction, that continually haunts its characters. One of Robin’s notebooks quotes Simone Weil’s assertion that the two ways of killing ourselves are suicide and detachment, and, with a Forsterian commitment to social communion, Coe explores the dangerous consequences of the latter. The novel’s postscript by Aparna, the embittered postgraduate confined by the social expectations of her racial identity, is left to conclude that “we should have spent less time talking and less time arguing and less time thinking about our books and more time thinking about each other” (p. 155). Her plea for empathy over intellectualism is suggestive of Coe’s increasingly humanist concerns and his desire for a novel where experiment must come second to experience. Coe shifts from the authorial digression or the readerly address to craft a novel full of overlapping voices—the shifts between Robin’s four stories, Aparna’s postscript, and the unobtrusive omniscient narrator strive for companionship rather than cacophony. If A Touch of Love hovers between comedy and tragedy, The Dwarves of Death is Coe’s first truly exuberant work. The macabre influence of the detective genre makes for dark humor, but Coe’s tonal shifts keep the novel as deft as it is grisly. Its skeletal structure is his most formally innovative, using ten sections of the popular song in lieu of chapter titles, and here music haunts and harmonizes the novel rather than, as in the conclusion to The Accidental Woman, pointing up the failings of verbal expression. Another bashful and reticent protagonist, the songwriter and pianist William wanders through a series of frustrating rehearsals with the band the Alaska Factory, whose members reduce his subtle chord progressions and melodies to chugging guitar rock. A deeply unsatisfying relationship with his girlfriend Madeline is played out in a series of hilarious courting set pieces, recalling the selfdefeating poverty of Gordon Comstock’s doomed relationship in George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936). It is in Dwarves of Death that Coe’s talent for depicting resignation and
I dislike this mode of writing. You pretend to be transcribing your characters’ thoughts (by what special gift of insight?) when in fact they are merely your own, thinly disguised. The device is feeble, transparent, and can lead to all sorts of grammatical clumsiness. So I shall try and confine myself, in future, to honest (honest!) narrative. (pp. 29–30)
Allowing the narrator to express his dislike of his own creation affords him too much power, yet his promise of authorial honesty makes him too apologetic for omniscience. These are difficulties Coe will return to in the biography of B. S. Johnson, who, throughout his own work, battled the same demons; here, by transposing these selfcritical asides from the narrator to Robin, his writer-protagonist, Coe is afforded the space to be both within and outside his own novel. The book opens with a disconsolate Robin being visited by an old Cambridge university friend, the cheerfully myopic Ted, sent on a selfstyled mission to rescue Robin from depression. Coe mines the history of their unhappy undergraduate love triangle for pathos and comedy, and it is a rich seam, emerging through Ted’s blithely unaware reminiscences and Robin’s dissenting monologues. Yet Robin is right to suspect that forces are conspiring against him—as the reader navigates the obsessions and narrative methods of his four short stories, we become aware both that Robin is facing false accusations of child molestation and that circumstances are determined to distract his lawyer, Emma, from devoting her full attention on the case. Coe’s own freelance work as a legal proofreader suggests a mocking self-fictionalizing here too.
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JONATHAN COE failure with such compassionate comedy emerges, from William’s confession that “bickering with Madeline was more desirable to me than making love to any other woman in the world” (p. 25), to the extended complaint on London’s public transport: “standing on a bus stop on a Sunday morning is like going to church: it’s an act of faith, an expression of irrational belief in something which you dearly want to believe exists, even though you have never seen it with your own eyes” (p. 74). William’s first-person narrative gives us his musical world half in verbal description and half in annotated scores as he searches for an elusive melody that will change his fortunes, or tries to hammer out on his keyboard the marriage proposal in musical form that will turn around his troubled relationship with Madeline. The quotations from lyrics by Morrissey that begin each section or the song by John McLennan that serves as the novel’s epigram and thematic center function as props for William to guide himself through the novel’s world.
scope of Fielding’s novels, as well as the style, would Coe reach his literary potential. WHAT A CARVE UP! (THE WINSHAW LEGACY)
The huge critical acclaim and popularity of Coe’s next work, What a Carve Up! (1994) set a blueprint for readers’ expectations of subsequent novels. Under the title The Winshaw Legacy, it continues to be his best-selling novel in the United States, setting up its own sort of literary legacy. The complex narrative tells of Michael Owen, the down-on-his-luck novelist given an apparently chance commission to write the history of the Winshaw family. This is the aristocratic dynasty involved in the symbolic “carveup” of 1980s England from the novel’s original title, with its members’ self-serving roles in arms dealing (Mark), intensive farming (Dorothy), journalism (Hilary), and national health care (Henry), conveyed in powerful and polemic satire. Their relentless greed impacts Michael’s own personal history directly through the political climate they help shape—whether through Dorothy’s convenience foods that lead to his father’s heart attack or the National Health Service cuts that deny his girlfriend a hospital bed. A final ghoulish set piece borrowing knowingly from Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None finds the Winshaws themselves carved up as their embittered father enacts revenge on his merciless children. Here the overly neat causation is set off by the generic fluidity of cinema. A key scene from the 1961 film What a Carve Up! recurs throughout the narrative with what begins as memory but becomes premonition. The constant shifts in the book between cause and effect undermine the direct impact of the Winshaws on British political and cultural life even as it reaffirms them, making the savagery of Coe’s satire selfquestioning. For all the venom reserved for Dorothy’s animal cruelty or Mark’s dealings with Saddam Hussein, it is Michael himself who undergoes the most thorough process of examination and becomes the central figure of the detective story. His characterization might usefully be compared to Martin Amis’ self-fictionalizing in Money
Yet it is only when William inadvertently becomes the prime suspect in a gruesome murder of the lead singer of the Unfortunates (named, tellingly, after a B. S. Johnson novel) that his passivity is challenged; the farcical and rootless existence of the jobbing musician is transplanted into a world of crime and mob brutality. As so often in Coe’s novels, a despondent character is reinvigorated by suddenly being grafted into a different genre. The new rules of this foreign genre (in this case, the detective story) help the protagonist navigate and reassess his or her own moral agency and responsibilities. Critics generally see Coe’s first three works as examples of a novelist learning his craft; the comedy, popular culture references, and nomadic narrations point to his later successes but lack the political and social comment that reviewers would praise in his 1990s output. The brief scope of the early works sometimes borders on the novella. If they achieved favorable reviews on publication, they sold poorly, placing a question mark over Coe’s writing career and making frequent forays into journalism and film biographies a financial necessity. Only by emulating the
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JONATHAN COE (1984), the diffident and beleaguered author drafted to script the life of the protagonist. Yet Michael’s depiction not only makes the author figure a compiler of documents, like the role Coe will later take on in his biography of Johnson, but also a character whose story is being written by those around him. His twin cultural reference points throughout the novel, Orpheus and Yuri Gagarin, the first astronaut in space, find him hovering between the fatal glance backward to the past and the danger of future exploration. Issues of paternity and identity are as fundamental to the novel as its dissection of Thatcherite Britain. Michael’s recurring dream of killing his younger self eventually finds its logical explanation as the complex plot unravels around him, but the image has a poetic poignancy that cannot be explained away by the narrative’s twists and turns. As Michael laments of his childhood obsession with Gagarin and the Cold War preoccupation that shattered it: “I wish that he had remained an object of unthinking adoration, instead of becoming another of adulthood’s ubiquitous, insoluble mysteries: a story without a proper ending” (p. 35).
because she borders on that “unfashionable cusp between the abstract and the figurative; between decoration and accessibility” (p. 174); a fear of being misinterpreted similarly disables her. The critical impediment of Phoebe’s “accessibility” is indicative of Coe’s own struggle with his “readability,” a trait that no amount of formal ingenuity can dampen. This is also the first of Coe’s novels to explore sexuality in depth or, through Michael, its conspicuous absence from the text. Michael’s attempt to write a successful seduction scene after being castigated by his publisher for his passionless prose has been rightly hailed as one of the funniest scenes in contemporary British fiction. The continual gentlemanly come-ons from fellow detective Findlay Onyx also raise questions over Michael’s sexual leanings. Elsewhere a superb passage catches his squeamish embarrassment over an inexplicable erection on a crowded tube train. The links between creative and sexual potency are implicit in other ways too: Michael writes a scathing review of a fellow writer who lacks a certain “brio,” but the word is published as “biro” (i.e., a ballpoint pen) by his newspaper, and the phallic bathos of the typo haunts him throughout the novel. The dialogue from the film What a Carve Up! that visits Michael in dreams is always truncated midway through Shirley Eaton’s disrobing, and only at the novel’s conclusion, through Phoebe, does Michael finally play out the full run of the scene. A fear of intimacy characterizes his awkward relationship with Fiona, and, in the end, illness poignantly forecloses the possibility of consummation. This is reflected in the grieving Michael’s inability to move his language forward: “I suppose none of our conversations had ever been all that special. Especially special, I nearly wrote. I think I must be going to pieces” (p. 207). The self-correcting voice of The Accidental Woman here falters through human concerns, rather than stylistic ones, and Fiona’s lymphoma is similarly held up to verbal scrutiny: “I stared at the word again, stared at it for so long that it stopped making any sense and became a meaningless jumble of letters. How could anything so small, so random as this silly little word possibly
Michael, confronting issues of agency and responsibility throughout the novel, longs for an ending yet attempts to defer it just as Coe does, with his ingenious plotting and series of framing narratives. The ever-circular author closes this ambitious, epic, and compelling work with another beginning: the preface to the Winshaw family history that Michael has been writing and researching throughout. Coe’s final joke is that the subsequent text has been carved up by Michael’s publishers beyond all recognition to feed a public hungry for sensationalist and prurient details—the question of authorship and ethics that haunt the novel are mockingly answered by Michael’s editor, who defends pillaging his text by arguing that “the public has an absolute right of access to even the most disagreeable particulars of such an affair” (p. 498). The compromise artists make by being in the world is also explored through Phoebe, the artist from Leeds who is lured by the promise of gallery shows to sleep with Roddy Winshaw. Her aesthetic makes her paintings difficult to sell
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JONATHAN COE do so much damage?” (p. 406). It is finally only through Michael’s words, and his completion of What a Carve Up!, that he recovers a sense of agency, even if his publisher posthumously qualifies that very agency. This very personal and individual drama sits in deft apposition with Coe’s bolder, satirical streaks. If the savagely mercenary Winshaws are at times more caricatures then enemies, Coe’s political points remain as powerful as they are polemical and, in hindsight, there is a prescient quality to his discussion of Saddam Hussein’s rise to power. Only when Michael’s story has moved from detective comedy to bedside drama do the unscrupulous doings of the Winshaws shade into irrelevance, despite Coe’s insistence that every British individual suffers as a result of the Winshaws’ greed and malevolence. Yet the variety of tones and genres here solve and salvage any internal contradictions, creating a sprawling, vivid, but spry look at 1980s Britain that balances political hostility with cultural homage, and reserves as much affection for its hapless victims as venom for its ruling dynasty.
subsequent generation attempting to summon up the faraway land of the 1970s: “a world without mobiles or videos or Playstations or even faxes. A world that had never heard of Princess Diana or Tony Blair, never thought for a moment of going to war in Kosovo or Afghanistan” (p. 4). Though it builds up a complex cast of supporting characters, its affectionate focus is Benjamin Trotter (or “Bent Rotter,” as his schoolmates call him), the naive and idealistic composer and writer characterized by unrequited love and abandoned sonnet sequences. Although his obsession with the beautiful Cicely takes up much of his daydreaming, his fourteen-thousand-word euphoric monologue sentence at the novel’s conclusion also frets over the rise of the right-wing extremist National Front, future employment prospects, and British race relations: What an indictment, that I could share the same city with these people and yet I had no contact with them in all my eighteen years, apart from Steve, of course, and how difficult it must have been for him, how very surreal and disorientating, to have arrived at King William’s and found that he was the only black boy there and that we all made fun of him and called him Rastus. (p. 384)
THE ROTTERS’ CLUB AND THE CLOSED CIRCLE
Around Ben, Coe crafts a chorus of believable bit players, many of whom write for the school’s magazine, the Bill Board: the socialist Doug Anderton, the prankish Sean Harding, and the guitar-playing Philip Chase. It is only the women characters who perhaps lack dimension at times, although Coe is assiduous in suggesting how the prevailing misogyny of the period might necessitate this vacuum; the pragmatic Claire Newman provides a useful foil to the pedestal prize of Cecily or the empty space of Miriam, yet the loving detail Coe heaps onto even the odious Ronald Culpepper is denied them. By now familiar Coe concoctions light up the prose but with renewed vitality, as in the sleazily flamboyant art teacher, Miles Plumb, who appears as a vibrant reworking of Roddy Winshaw, or the imbedded references to the bands the High Llamas and Hatfield and the North, who provide Coe with the novel’s title. This is as close as Coe has come to an autobiography, and its vivid evocation of befud-
Coe’s follow-up to his first best-seller came three years later, and the novel in question, The House of Sleep (1997), largely dispensed with the political and personal conflicts that had been so central to What a Carve Up! Yet these interests resurfaced in the subsequent Rotters’ Club (2001) and its follow-up, The Closed Circle (2004), which worked as a two-volume distillation of a sequence of five novels Coe had been planning to write chronicling a family through several generations. Taking their nod from dynastic series such as Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, they followed a group of teenagers at a fictionalized Birmingham grammar school before rejoining them twenty years later. Unlike What a Carve Up! there is no aristocratic or political dynasty to bridge the personal and public lives of the characters here. The Rotters’ Club replaces polemic with nostalgia, suggested in the framing narrative, which finds a
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JONATHAN COE dling adolescence is captured with generous and painful humor. The mixture of intensity and banality that characterizes teenage years is suggested hilariously by Ben’s Christian conversion, which, with typically Coe-like logic, stems from his discovery of a pair of swimming trunks in his locker on a day he had forgotten to bring his games kit. Yet politics is as prevalent on the playground and in the prefect’s room as on the country estate, and Ben’s admission of racial segregation holds a mirror up to the older generation—characters such as Bill Anderton, Sam Chase, and Colin Trotter struggle to separate their personal lives from the specter of mass strikes, trade unionism, and the rise of the IRA. It is the IRA Birmingham pub bombing, Coe’s re-creation of the terrifying night of terrorism in November 1974, that leaves the biggest scar on these characters, who, as Coe suggested in an interview with William May, “are trying to get on with small, blameless lives without being flattened by the juggernaut of historical events over which they have no control” (May, p. 69). Written more than twenty-five years after the event, Coe avoids some of the ethical issues of fictionalizing contemporary horrors, but here, as in the conclusion of What a Carve Up!, Coe brings a couple to the point of perfect understanding only to detonate their futures. It is left to Ben, in response to the death of his sister, Lois, to offer up his story of the rescue of Danish Jews as an example of individuals successfully intervening in a historical inevitability, rather than the other way round. As with Robin in A Touch of Love or Michael in What a Carve Up!, Ben is the scapegoat writer-narrator still asking:
graphic structure of The Rain Before It Falls. A more explicit foretaste of Coe’s subsequent fiction is given at the end of the novel itself, which promises a sequel resuming the story in the late 1990s. If The Rotters’ Club balances the carnage of terrorism with the optimism and infinite possibilities of puberty, its sequel, The Closed Circle, is a novel about contemporary politics and complacent, disaffected middle age. The world of the novel has sidelined the idealist Ben, now a bitter accountant struggling with a flawed, ambitious writing project that might combine music and narrative. Stuck in a sterile marriage, he reflects that the world is sick of hearing from the “middle-class, white, public school, Oxbridge male” (p. 259). In Ben’s reluctant absence it is Claire who picks up the narrative strands, providing much of the novel’s energy and direction as she attempts to come to terms with her sister Miriam’s disappearance. The trappings of a culture preoccupied with celebrity and takeaway coffee permeate the prose, while its purchase on modern politics finds Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Britain cynical and dangerously adrift from ideology. As Malvina breezily informs Ben’s brother Paul, now working as an MP: “Irony is very modern ѧ you don’t have to make it clear exactly what you mean any more. In fact, you don’t even have to mean what you say, really. That’s the beauty of it” (p. 53). If this forms one of Coe’s cogent and clear-sighted criticisms of the times, his own work occasionally suffers from the opposite problem. As if to counteract the political tendency toward oleaginous equivocation, much of The Closed Circle is explicit where it might be suggestive. Ben bemoans the difficulty of the contemporary novel by asking, “What about September the eleventh? How do I find room for that kind of stuff in there” (p. 259)— some distance from the subtle satire of What a Carve Up! As Coe confessed to William May:
Does narrative serve any purpose? I wonder about that. I wonder if all experience can really be distilled to a few extraordinary moments, perhaps six or seven of them vouchsafed to us in a lifetime, and any attempt to trace a connection between them is futile. (p. 128)
Thatcherism, even at the time, was a readily identifiable ideology and the issues around it were relatively simple both to grasp and form an attitude towards: with Mrs. Thatcher, what you saw was what you got. Blairism I find more slippery—I still don’t really understand what he or his government stands for, and that sense of disorientation—which
Ben’s question not only points to his interest in creating associative music that can absolve itself of narrative’s linear expectations but also hints that Coe’s causative histories will give way to a fiction centered on moments, as in the photo-
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JONATHAN COE come via cutting a hole in the page to let the readers foresee the death of a character (Albert Angelo, 1964), publishing a novel unbound to allow readers to shuffle chapters and read them in any order (The Unfortunates, 1969), writing a series of competing interior monologues (House Mother Normal, 1971), or dividing a page down the middle to present a character’s speech and thought simultaneously (Albert Angelo). Johnson’s own quizzical autobiography, Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? (1973), called Joyce the Einstein of fiction and insisted that cinema had irrevocably changed the way novels should be written. Still an underrated and marginalized writer, something the biography is at pains to correct, Johnson and his frustrations with the novel form mirrored his anguished struggle with life itself, and, defeated by the need to tell the truth about himself, he committed suicide at age forty, in 1973.
is shared by both me and most of the characters in The Closed Circle—was perhaps more difficult to transform into satisfying fiction. (May, p. 68)
The move away from humor surprised readers; Coe’s more recent fiction substitutes comedy for compassion as the wheel on which it turns. The Closed Circle, far from completing the revolution begun with The Rotters’ Club, is then, in part, a transitional work. If the changes in British government might account for the differences in mood and style between the two halves of this story, the project Coe undertook while writing the second volume, his biography of B. S. Johnson, was to prove a process of authorial catharsis and reconsideration.
B. S. JOHNSON BIOGRAPHY
Throughout Coe’s fiction, picaresque heroes find themselves unwittingly at the center of the novel’s worlds, called on by a mixture of bad luck and contrivance to take up predetermined roles far outside their meager expectations. A similar mixture of serendipity and fate surrounds Coe’s taking on the project of B. S. Johnson’s biography: Coe’s first encounter with Johnson was, typically, as a child and came via television, during Johnson’s appearance in a 1974 documentary on Porth Ceiriad Bay in Wales which was, coincidentally, the Coes’ favorite summer holiday spot; it continued courtesy of an obscure volume handed to Coe by a friend in the 1980s. The biography Like A Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson is a story about Johnson, but it is also a story about Coe and the future of the British novel. Writing in the formally conservative literary climate of 1960s Britain, B. S. Johnson’s approach to the novel was egalitarian, iconoclastic, and staunchly individualist. Scornful of his contemporaries and in thrall to James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, Johnson distrusted the mendacities of traditional fiction; each of his seven novels tries to accommodate or acknowledge Johnson’s mantra that telling fiction is telling lies through typography or structural innovation. This might
Coe, as the introduction to the work confesses, is as distrustful of literary biography as Johnson was of fiction: he argues that “literature is discussed more than ever before; but at the same time, it has never been less valued” (p. 8). Mindful of Johnson’s own commitment to formal innovation, he carves up the conventions of biography throughout the book. Coe eschews chronology for a montage of voices, excerpts, and fragments—rather than attempting to fix Johnson’s character, Coe allows us to see him puzzling over his archive. As in The Closed Circle, we are given e-mail correspondence, transcripts of interviews, reviews and journal articles, and letters. In the biography’s penultimate section, “A Life in 44 Voices,” Coe’s biographical collage approaches literary fugue, and we find competing snippets from friends, critics, and family, each extract underlining its own provisionality. Yet if this technique preserves the subject’s elusiveness, it also builds up a continuing comparison between Johnson and Coe himself. Johnson’s character, as it gradually unfolds, might have been scripted by Coe, hovering halfway between Robin Grant and Michael Owen, with his tortured questions of sexuality, his frustration with academia and the literary establishment, and his tendency to apathy and
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JONATHAN COE belligerence. The mystery surrounding his suicide echoes the unexplained death in A Touch of Love.
As Coe himself remarks of Johnson’s legacy: “Like all heresies, his novels challenge our most fundamental beliefs: our belief in the moral integrity of ‘fiction,’ our belief in the usefulness of storytelling when the daily truths thrown up by our misbegotten world cry out for immediate, practical attention” (p. 454). Yet if “immediate, practical attention” to the world is often demanded by Coe’s work, from What a Carve Up! to The Closed Circle, the other key strain of his writing is that of memory, and the human transformation of the past into narrative. Undertaking B. S. Johnson’s biography—a work that was rapturously reviewed and won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2005—would make Coe reassess his structuring of personal experience as well as his novelistic technique. The darkening tone of his fiction and its preoccupation with the past is caught in two of his most important works, separated by a decade, The House of Sleep and The Rain Before It Falls.
The coincidences are only heightened in the surprising similarities of these two novelists apparently working at polar ends of the modernist divide. Coe’s opening précis of Johnson’s work highlights these continuities: both Coe and Johnson began their careers with novels in which a “veneer of stylistic adventurousness hides a conventional enough Bildungsroman” (p. 14), and Coe, like Johnson, often gives us a thinly fictionalized author as a protagonist. Even their choice of innovations suggests a direct influence, with Johnson’s integration of Joycean musical staves in his writing finding its way into The Dwarves of Death. The blurring of biography, work, and fiction seems to be acknowledged by Coe in the final pages of the book, where he suggests “a real closing of the circle had taken place” (p. 431), hinting at the novel he was at that time still writing. Yet if Coe remains skeptical of Johnson’s aggressive modernism, Johnson’s earnest commitment seems to have rubbed off on Coe’s subsequent novels, which abandon humor even if they retain traditional chronology. Like A Fiery Elephant is part autobiography, part fiction, but it is also structured as a detective story, Coe drawing on the biographer’s goose hunts and paper trails to rewrite Michael Owen’s story in What a Carve Up! with a new sense of personal commitment. Coe fictionalizes his own process of writing a biography and portrays himself as by turns obsessive, industrious, and reluctant. Johnson’s views inspire both repugnance and a sense of kinship in Coe; thus Coe’s affiliation with him also frees Johnson, posthumously, from the solipsism that is the burden of the iconoclast. This intensely human biography also liberates Coe himself: having struggled throughout his career with the need to marry experiment with experience, Coe finds relief in a literary precursor for whom innovation signals integrity rather than artifice. This work tells us much about competing trends in postwar British literature; if we look to Coe’s novels for a snapshot of British politics and popular culture, it is Like a Fiery Elephant that gives us the sharpest insights into its fiction.
MEMORY AND RECONCILIATION: THE HOUSE OF SLEEP AND THE RAIN BEFORE IT FALLS
Thomas in What a Carve Up! is a sexual voyeur and meets his apposite end when his eyes are gouged out by his father at the novel’s conclusion. Ocular obsessions are central to Coe’s remaining two novels. One of the most chilling images from The House of Sleep (1997) is of the fetishist Gregory applying pressure to his girlfriend Sarah’s closed eyes as they make love. He watches her sleep with a sinister intensity. In The Rain Before It Falls (2007), Imogen is blinded by her own mother, an event she wipes from her memory in a bid for self-preservation. Yet despite the intimate violence of these two events, The House of Sleep and The Rain Before It Falls are also Coe’s most contemplative and lucid works. The eye becomes a site for empathy and reconciliation as well as observation and control. The House of Sleep follows four university undergraduates at a seaside campus whose lives are all bound up with sleep and dreaming, from Gregory’s eye fetish and Robert’s insomnia to Sarah’s narcolepsy and her inability to differenti-
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JONATHAN COE ate her vivid dreams from reality. The book has a dual structure—its six sections follow the normal four-stage sleep cycle into REM sleep while its chapters alternate between the early 1980s and the last two weeks of June 1996. The novel’s modern-day sequences show the characters still dealing with the legacy of their time together and, accordingly, sections stop mid-sentence only for the thought to be picked up twelve years away in the subsequent chapter. Meanwhile, their campus has been transformed into a sleep disorder clinic where Gregory, now Dr. Dudden, works as a researcher.
metaphor of Sarah’s narcolepsy—a nation-state sleepily walking to the millennium—might the story lines of this haunting novel suggest social comment. Time, with the promise of reconciliation, also illuminates the narrative of The Rain Before It Falls. The novel startled reviewers on publication. Here was a pared-down work—without humor, narrative complexity, or politics—about female relationships and maternal bonds. The imprint of the novelist Rosamond Lehmann, who gives the protagonist her name and also supplies her with sketchy biographical affinities, is everywhere, revealing the latent simplicity in Coe’s writing. It is also the first of his works to re-create wartime Britain, its narrative looking back to the evacuations of the Blitz and the promise of rural sanctuary.
This is a novel concerned with relations between the sexes, but although the undergraduate Veronica posits this as a political issue with her devouring the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Kate Millett, and her relationship with Sarah struggles to free itself from gender politics, the treatment of sexual identity is elsewhere more poetic. One character undergoes gender reassignment, but the narrative treatment of this situates it as a transformative coincidence rather than an opportunity for essentialist debates.
When Gill’s aunt Rosamond dies and leaves her as executor, her most surprising duty is to pass on a series of tapes to a blind woman named Imogen. On these cassettes, Rosamond describes twenty family photographs and, through her descriptions, a life history as well as the history of domestic photography—a skewed sort of autobiography that even Johnson might have countenanced. Yet if the central conceit is labored, the execution is deft, poised, and elegant: Rosamond’s story, told in sparse prose, is of sibling rivalry, a daughter lacking in maternal love, and the ricocheting consequences of that void.
Blindness and moral myopia are woven into the novel’s scientific debates on sleep and memory. Terry, a film critic, becomes obsessed with a film that no one has ever seen, while Sarah’s condition means that her life, and Robert’s, become predicated on events that have been imagined and recollected but never taken place. The increasingly Jekyll-and-Hyde quality of Dr. Dudden, driven mad by the promise of eradicating the necessity for sleep, recalls B-movie excess—it is no accident that Terry, the film critic, is obsessed with a film dealing with bodily mutilation and schizophrenia. The rhetoric of sleep and dreams refashions Coe’s characteristic interest in coincidence into an exploration of subconscious and associative thought. Yet if there is a Dickensian quality to the intricate and sometimes knowingly convoluted plotting here— Great Expectations is quoted near the novel’s conclusion—it is the Shakespearean coincidence of festive comedy that generates the novel’s warmth and empathy, with its parade of missing sisters, cross-dressing, and relationships transfigured by time. Only in the possible political
On closer inspection, there are some familiar Coe characters here. Ruth’s frustration with her paintings, which were considered “too adventurous and difficult by some people, and too conventional by others” (p. 244), recalls Phoebe from What a Carve Up! The same novel also signposts Coe’s interest in photographs, memory, and family lineage, when Michael recalls the “childish treasures” of his father’s photographs (What a Carve Up!, p. 164). The House of Sleep is also an important touchstone, its preoccupation with false memories and consciousness providing the germ of this novel, just as its lesbian relationship free of male violence prefigures Ruth and Rosamond’s.
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JONATHAN COE The disorientating aspect of this novel for Coe readers is the prose style. Given that it is a narrative attempting to describe the visual without embellishment or subterfuge, it is at pains not to draw attention to itself. Its suggestive economy is far from the acerbic satire of What a Carve Up! or the knowing ironies of The Accidental Woman. Rosamond’s human insights, which are frequent and profound, come in a language stripped of artifice. She remarks of Imogen’s mother toward the end of the novel that she “could no longer afford the risk of looking upon the world”, a phrase resonant with the brevity of understanding (p. 232). It is through these subtle inflections that Coe creates a narrative voice that has grown out of an agenda but is benevolent rather than banal. Despite Rosamond’s insistence that photographs are deceitful things, hers is a voice more preoccupied with the limitations of human memory than the postmodern skepticism about representation and mimesis. One of the most important questions the novel asks is if recollection can bring reconciliation and help us grieve, or whether we must forget in order to forgive.
Capture the Castle (1948), where English eccentricity collides with American efficiency. Yet the situation is also quintessentially Coe, not only in its melding of film, memory, and reality but in the sense that the novel’s characters are both protagonists and extras, memorialized in celluloid or narrative but sidelined by history and its discontents.
CONCLUSION
When Coe, near the beginning of his biography, sums up B. S. Johnson’s limitations as a novelist, he reveals his own ideas as to what the contemporary novel should do: narrative curiosity has remained the “centrifugal force which draws readers back to the novel and therefore keeps it alive,” and the novel should innovate less through form than subject, by “recognizing the multiethnicity of modern Britain and opening itself to influences from other cultures; by tapping back into the energies of popular film, music, television; by turning its back on modernist elitism and rediscovering the pleasures of humour, storytelling, demotic, and so on” (Like a Fiery Elephant, p. 6). Coe’s emphasis on an open, democratic form that rejects highbrow culture seems indicative of much modern British writing, but his qualifying “and so on” is telling, as if he realizes this is a pat generalization. Certainly his eight novels celebrate popular culture, are rich in comedy, and examine the legacy of postwar immigration and its impact on Britain, if from an indigenous perspective. Yet there is a restless self-effacement to his work that could never settle on a formula: even as he acknowledges narrative as a “centrifugal force,” his 2008 collaborative work, which sets music alongside a play, tries to avoid it. The tension opens up other contradictions in Coe’s writing: nostalgia is at once a comfort, necessity, and vice; his England is dominated by its political leaders and yet full of hiding places where his characters can escape detection, even if the country itself can no longer fool the world with its “English irony and English self-deprecation” (The Rotters’ Club, p. 352). Sexuality is a preoccupation in his fiction, but it pivots on the perils
Coe’s maturing style is also evident in the novel’s conclusion; while Rosamond’s descriptions of the final photographs are not without their cruel revelations and denouements, the framing narrative that closes the work is not a device to control the past—as in the The Rotters’ Club—but to make it yet more ineffable. Gill holds to account life’s “patchwork” of coincidences and finds them wanting; the threat of meaninglessness hangs heavy over the last pages (p. 277). Finally denying Gill the “promise of revelation” (p. 278), Coe’s normally bustling narratives at last find the space for silence and ellipsis. There are no politics to satisfy and explain and no detective story to solve. One of Rosamond’s photographs recalls her and Beatrix’s roles as extras in director Michael Powell and writer Emeric Pressburger’s 1950 film Gone to Earth, when the American cast and crew come to film in the village of Much Wenlock in Shropshire. The striking juxtaposition of Hollywood with a forgotten corner of the English countryside brings to mind Dodie Smith’s I
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JONATHAN COE of intimacy rather than the play of gender politics. It might also be worth noticing how many of his supposed-gay characters—Veronica in The House of Sleep, Rosamond in The Rain Before It Falls, and Robin Grant in A Touch of Love—commit suicide. His formal concerns are also difficult to extract from his perception of his audience: his dogged commitment to authorial integrity is coupled with a similar preoccupation with pleasing his readers. This goes beyond the commercial pressures of the mainstream novelist and becomes an aesthetic goal. As he remarked in an interview in 2008, his next novel will be cheerier, because The Rain Before It Falls seemed to disappoint people. His corrective response for subsequent novels also makes it likely that he will explore the male psyche rather than another generation of women. It is perhaps music that points the way to subsequent writing, given his work with the High Llamas. It would be in keeping if it were as much of a return as a voyage out. Coe has described writing as a compulsion, and his fiction is equally compulsive to read. Yet despite Coe’s restlessness, he remains aware that “we are condemned (I am condemned) to explore and revisit the same issues in our fiction, over and over, until ѧ what? Until they are resolved, probably. At which point, we don’t need to write any more (May, p. 73). The elusive conclusion of his most recent novel suggests, luckily for us, that resolution is still far off.
9th & 13th. London: Penguin, 2005. Recording, Tricatel, 2001. The Rain Before It Falls. London: Viking, 2007.
BIOGRAPHIES Humphrey Bogart: Take It and Like It. London: Bloomsbury, 1991. James Stewart, Leading Man. London: Bloomsbury, 1994. Published in the United States as Jimmy Stewart: A Wonderful Life. New York: Arcade, 1994. Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson. London: Picador, 2004.
JOURNALISM
AND
LECTURES
“Great Spunky Unflincher: Laurence Sterne, B. S. Johnson, and Me: The 2004 Laurence Sterne Memorial Lecture” (http://www.asterisk.org.uk/2004Lecture.pdf). June 11, 2004. “My Literary Love Affair.” Guardian, October 6, 2007, pp. 4–6. “Moon Tunes.” Guardian, July 12, 2008, p. 18.
CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Head, Dominic. The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Thurschwell, Pamela. “Genre, Repetition and History in Jonathan Coe.” In British Fiction Today. Edited by Philip Tew and Rod Mengham. London: Continuum, 2006. Wagner, Erica. “Caught on Tape.” New York Times Book Review, April 13, 2008, pp. 27–29. Available online (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/books/review/ Wagner-t.html). (Review of The Rain Before It Falls.)
INTERVIEWS “Jonathan Coe.” In Writers Talk: Conversations with Contemporary British Novelists. Edited by Philip Tew, Fiona Tolan, and Leigh Wilson. London: Continuum, 2008. Pp. 35–55. May, William. “Closing the Circle: An Interview with Jonathan Coe.” In From Self to Shelf: The Artist Under Construction. Edited by Sally Bayley and William May. Newcastle, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007. Pp. 66–73.
Selected Bibliography WORKS OF JONATHAN COE NOVELS
AND
SHORT STORIES
The Accidental Woman. London: Duckworth, 1987. A Touch of Love. London: Duckworth, 1989. The Dwarves of Death. London: Fourth Estate, 1990. What a Carve Up! London: Viking, 1994. Published in the United States as The Winshaw Legacy. New York: Knopf, 1995. The House of Sleep. London: Viking, 1997. The Rotters’ Club. London: Viking, 2001. The Closed Circle. London: Viking, 2004.
FILMS AND TELEVISION SERIES BASED JONATHAN COE
ON THE
WORKS
OF
Five Seconds to Spare. Screenplay by Tom Connolly. Directed by Tom Connolly. Winchester Films, 1999. (Based on The Dwarves of Death.) The Rotters’ Club. Screenplay by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais. Directed by Tony Smith. BBC, 2005.
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DAVID CONSTANTINE (1944—)
Aaron Deveson IF THE WORK of the poet, critic, translator, and fiction writer David Constantine has not yet received the critical attention it deserves, it has, nonetheless, attracted its fair share of passionate and influential supporters, at least among his poetcritic reviewers. The back cover of his Selected Poems (1991) quotes George Szirtes: “Constantine’s imagination moves gracefully within the classical precincts of the pure lyric, a Gravesian Muse poetry tempered with scholarship.” Stephen Knight of the Times Literary Supplement (quoted in 2004’s Collected Poems) comments: “Perhaps his absence from fashionable movements is all that has delayed his recognition as one of the most gifted poets of his generation.” Writing for the same journal, Stephen Burt, in his review of the Collected Poems and a collection of Constantine’s lectures, A Living Language, calls him “the most lyrical of good poets” (p. 3), while in a 2008 review of a multimedia project featuring poems and readings by Bloodaxe Books writers, Frances Leviston declares: “It is especially good to reread David Constantine’s “Watching for Dolphins,” which, with its melancholic grace, feels like a modern classic” (p. 18).
his own work” (p. 865). Schmidt also finds a more contemporary comparison: “What [Andrew] Motion does with his subtle prosodies Constantine achieves through a syntax which, while correct, is the source of his powerful ambiguities and the ‘solvent’ that eases meanings together and apart” (pp. 865–866). Stephen Burt exhibits similar preoccupations in his review, linking what he calls the “expansive, rolling, complex syntax, sometimes with inversions most poets now avoid” to the example of German Romantics (p. 3). Although at one point Burt suggests that, along with Hölderlin, it is the post-Romantic Rainer Maria Rilke and the ancient Greeks who “inform Constantine’s sense of what a poem should be” (p. 3), near the beginning of his review he states quite emphatically, “From the first line on this book’s first page ѧ to the first sentence on its last ѧ Constantine declares himself a Romantic, in almost all the loaded, unfashionable and daring senses that onceomnipresent word can bear” (p. 3). Schmidt is more guarded, by comparison, about Constantine’s “unfashionable” Romanticism: The poems contain extremes: classical intention subverted by Romantic temperament, the poem of praise undermined by anxiety, the political vision run aground on social reality. The present is in danger of slipping away between memory, or loss, and longing, that greatest peril for the radical imagination.
One of the rare references to Constantine’s poetry to have issued beyond the pages of poetry journal reviews appears in the last two pages of a chapter entitled “Beyond Stylistic Irony” in Michael Schmidt’s gargantuan Lives of the Poets (1998). Schmidt writes of this poet that “it is the lives of other people, especially their suffering, that draws him forward,” that narrative has “partly emancipated” him, and he points to Friedrich Hölderlin—whom Constantine “has translated and written authoritatively about”—as the precursor “whose life and ‘madness,’ and whose prosodies, help to define the tensions in
(p. 865)
It may be added that in its attempt to hold on to what was once present Constantine’s poetry manifests a topographical specificity of the sort often found in the poetry of Edward Thomas and other “minor” post-Romantic poets of the British Isles.
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DAVID CONSTANTINE prison and in the adolescent unit of Warneford Hospital. The experience also provided him with some material for his first poetry collection, A Brightness to Cast Shadows, which, in 1980, was one of the very first books published by Constantine’s lifelong editor, Neil Astley, at Bloodaxe.
BIOGRAPHY
Constantine was born in Salford, Lancashire, on March 4, 1944. While Bernard, his father, was away at war, his mother, Bertha Constantine, was able to move the family from Salford 5 to a rented house in the slightly more prosperous Salford 6—a crucial shift in circumstances, in that it made it possible for the young Constantine to attend a primary school that fed into some of the nearby grammar schools, including the famous Manchester Grammar School, where he went after passing his eleven-plus examination. Inspired and guided by his French teacher, Terry John, Constantine discovered the writings of the existentialists, and it was John who encouraged him to apply to Wadham—then, as now, a relatively progressive Oxford University college—where he concentrated in modern languages. Though he felt uneasy among the many privately educated students at the university, Constantine thrived academically. An interest in Hölderlin eventually led to a Ph.D. thesis (dissertation) on that author, which Constantine later published in a revised form under the title The Significance of Locality in the Poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin (1979). He defended his thesis in 1970, by which time Constantine and his wife Helen, who had studied modern languages in the same year at Wadham, had a daughter, Mary-Ann. (They later had a son, Simon.) Constantine also had his first academic job by this time, teaching German (initially the Baroque period) at Durham University, where he remained until 1981. While living in Durham, Constantine became a (secular) volunteer for the Syrenians, which was a branch of the charitable Simon Community, set up by Anton Wallich-Clifford to provide food and assistance to socially deprived ex-miners in the area. As secretary of the branch, Constantine found supervised accommodation for homeless men—the majority of them middle-aged alcoholics with mental health problems—who were encouraged to speak and vote on a fully democratic residents’ committee set up to run the home in which they lived. This idealistic experience established a pattern in Constantine’s life: he would later work as a volunteer at a psychiatric
The following year Constantine returned to the University of Oxford to take up a teaching post at the Queen’s College, where he remained as a fellow in modern languages until 2000. (Short stints as a visiting professor at Rutgers and Liverpool followed.) Oxford gave him the time to pursue his many overlapping academic and poetic passions to great acclaim. In 1983 he published the poetry volume Watching for Dolphins, which won the 1984 Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize and adumbrated many of the concerns of the scholarly work Early Greek Travellers and the Hellenic Ideal (1984), winner of the first Runciman Award in 1986. In 1985 he released a historically based novel, Davies. In 1987 he published what still reads as his darkest poetry collection, Madder. Constantine’s considerable talent as a writer of prose fiction would be further exhibited in his two collections of short stories, Back at the Spike (1994) and Under the Dam (2005). Hölderlin—Constantine’s critical introduction to the German poet—was published by Clarendon and Oxford University Press in 1988 and was followed by a translation, his Selected Poems of Hölderlin (1990), which won the European Poetry Translation Prize. After the publication of his own Selected Poems in 1991 Constantine published an epic poem, Caspar Hauser (1994) and collection The Pelt of Wasps (1998), which included the text of one of his several radio plays, based, in part, on the life of Sir William Hamilton, about whom he later published a major biography. During the same period he translated major works by Heinrich von Kleist, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel, Elective Affınities (published 1994), and Hölderlin’s Sophocles (2001), and also completed collaborative translations from the French of Henri Michaux and Philippe Jaccottet. The poetry collection Something for the Ghosts was published in 2002 and was
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DAVID CONSTANTINE shortlisted for a Whitbread Prize. Further evidence of Constantine’s extraordinary productivity as a translator came in the form of English versions of a Hans Magnus Enzensberger volume in 2002 (winner of the Poetry Society’s first Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation), plays by Bertolt Brecht in 2004, and the first part of Goethe’s Faust in 2005. (The second part was published in 2009.) In 2003, Constantine, who is likely to be remembered as one of the most important Anglophone translators of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, took over, with his wife, Helen Constantine, as joint editor of Modern Poetry in Translation, the magazine formerly edited by Daniel Weissbort and, for a time, Ted Hughes.
sympathies extend a good way into theirs” but adds, “times change, I am writing now, with little ability at my disposal” (The Reader 16, p. 9). The article moves on to the Hölderlinian technique, which he considers one of few “specific practical gains which ѧ translation may deliver,” namely the German poet’s hypotaxis, “the long articulation of thought and feeling through many subordinating clauses” (p. 10). For Constantine, whose own poetic language is often complicatedly hypotactic, this syntactic structure—“expressive, almost without the words ѧ almost without semantic sense”—“produces a developing tension and the possibility of equivalent release” (p. 10). The second of the two articles for The Reader refers to specific occasions in Hölderlin’s poetry when syntax might be seen as the vehicle for ecstatic transformation. There, he writes of “events” along the way of many of Hölderlin’s long poems—“They are arrivals into human life of a deep sense of presence and fulfillment” (The Reader 17, p. 66)—providing the fourteen-line sentence of the second section of “Heimkunft” (“Homecoming”) and the twelfth section of “Der Rhein” (“The Rhine”) as examples. Constantine’s grammatically minded commentary treats these “arrivals” as lyrics in their own right, recording of the first how “through fourteen strictly metrical lines ѧ one long sentence articulates an extensive donation as the sun rises over the snowy Alps and the benefits of light, warmth and water spill into the valley” (p. 66). Hölderlin’s impulse in trying to realize in language this most positive, “plenitude” sort of presence was, at least according to the argument of Constantine’s booklength study, essentially a religious one, but Constantine’s manner of making this point indicates where his own poetics depart from Hölderlin’s:
“A STRAIGHTFORWARD POETICS” AFTER HÖLDERLIN
Despite these commitments Hölderlin has remained for Constantine “the foreign poet I have had the closest dealings with” (Goldsworthy, p. 87) and, in fact, the greatest single influence on his poetics. An intimate and rhapsodic sense of what Hölderlin has been able to offer Constantine unfolds in his scholarly study of the German poet, for whom the French Revolution had been such a source of hope and disappointment: The simple tripartite structure of past, present, and future keeps the poetry in perpetual creative unrest. The dynamism of the poems is longing, and longing is Janus-faced: directed back to a lost ideal and forwards to its resurgence or recovery.ѧ The comparison of past and present is crucial, crucial to our survival as living beings.ѧ It is the poet’s job to persuade his fellow men that benightedness is not their natural and inevitable condition, and he can do so by directing them again and again to look at the Age of Daylight. Poets have to stay awake, and to keep their torpid contemporaries awake also.
To say that feelings cannot be contained in verse and that a poem expressing them should somehow undermine its own achievement and demonstrate its own falling short, would be the grounds of a straightforward poetics. [The “Diotima” poems’] transcendental version has the same premise: elusiveness, the elusiveness of God; and the same impulse: to manifest ѧ we can follow him some way at least via the analogy of an ordinary poetics.
(Hölderlin, pp. 164–165)
Constantine reflects more soberly on the utopianism activated by his own literary dealings in the first of two articles on translation that he wrote for the literary magazine The Reader. Having mentioned Brecht’s Marxism, he declares: “I revere Hölderlin and Brecht and my political
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DAVID CONSTANTINE Better, perhaps, to think of the wish to manifest God, the longing and disappointment this entails, as a subject, indeed as the subject of the poems.
His life is alone and still, his face shines brightly, he seems Leaning to lend us life out of his heights of sky, Creative of joy, with us, as often when, knowing the measure, Sparing us, holding off, knowing our limit of breath, He sends the cities and houses a wellshaped fortune, Mild rains to open the land, teeming clouds and these Familiar breezes and such sweet springtimes as this, Slowly his hands lifting up mourners towards joy again, When he, the maker, renews the times and re-enters Freshly hearts in the stillness of ageing and works Down and down and opens and brightens, which is What he loves and a life starts again here and now, Grace, as it once did, blossoms and into our present comes Spirit, and courage and joy rise on wings again.
(Hölderlin, pp. 128–129)
If to read Hölderlin faithfully, then, is to read him religiously, to follow him—and it is difficult not to read this in the double sense of “understand him” and “use him as a poetic model”—is to make the canonical poet to some extent “ordinary” or all-too-human in his expression of desire. In line with the possibility of discovering “a straightforward poetics” in the often eccentric textures of Hölderlin’s writing is Constantine’s insistence, in a short credo, “Common and Peculiar” (published in 2000 in the Bloodaxe anthology Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry alongside paratextual writings by poets often as different from each other as Seamus Heaney and Louis Zukofsky) on the need to maintain “a decided otherness in poetic language” which is “neither too far away from nor too close to common speech” (p. 227). Constantine’s rhetoric is passionately engagé:
(Hölderlin, Selected Poems, p. 41)
In relation to the most prominent previous translation—in Michael Hamburger’s Friedrich Hölderlin: Poems and Fragments (third edition, 1994, pp. 274–281)—this writing participates in a shift toward “concrete particularity” and “a better realization” which Charlie Louth, a former student of Constantine’s, records as going on in Hölderlin’s own first phase of moderate revisions to the poem’s later sections (see Louth’s Hölderlin and the Dynamics of Translation, pp. 199– 200) but which Constantine only very slightly reflects in his choices of text. Where Hamburger has “so now does life bud anew” for “jetz wieder ein Leben beginnt” (pp. 276–277), Constantine, generally more colloquial and less “poetic,” writes, “a life starts again here and now,” even adding his own demonstratives (“these” and “this”) and dynamic adverbials (“Down and down” for “hinab”) as part of a more thoroughly deictic manifestation of the fundamental spatial relationships and their effects on consciousness. Constantine makes use of line breaks to stress active, existential verbs such as “rests,” “Lives” and the almost excessively alliterative “Leaning to lend us life.” Near the end, his lineation emphasizes the shock of renewal in the estranging syntax at “Freshly” within what is a simultaneously downward and upward thematic momentum in the verse-sentence. All in all, the grammar of Constantine’s language can be seen to attest to
The common, the commonplace, will only be brought home to us by means of a language beautifully and intriguingly and shockingly estranging it. The conditions of modern life are taking us further out of community and reality, into isolation and the merely virtual; actually into insensateness. Poetry is a way of countering that. (“Common and Peculiar,” p. 227)
Constantine’s apparent preference for the “mature,” characteristically hypotactic Hölderlin over the later “mad” and, arguably, more radical Hölderlin of the increasingly paratactic works translated by Richard Sieburth (and admired by John Ashbery, among others) already establishes something of a position on the “mainstream”“avant-garde” spectrum. An examination of Constantine’s published English version of one of the “arrivals” to which he alludes in The Reader reveals the extent to which his translation practice itself conforms to the common-peculiar dialectic (with a slight bias in favor of the common) set out in his credo. Here, then, is Constantine’s necessarily hypotactic (and paratactic) rendering of the god’s work of donation in the second stanza of “Homecoming”:
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DAVID CONSTANTINE the presentness of the present into which Hölderlin’s spirit comes, something that becomes especially clear in the quartet of gerunds in the third and fourth quoted line. What Constantine does not offer here or in any of his translations is the sort of dérèglement (unsettling) Hölderlin himself supplied in the German versions of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Antigone. Louth outlines Hölderlin’s attempt to undo the surface level of the Greek in these translations by, in Hölderlin’s words, “going in the direction of eccentric enthusiasm (exzentrische Begeisterung)” (quoted and translated in Hölderlin and the Dynamics of Translation, p. 64), so as to salvage the Greeks’ “dangerously inflammatory nature”—for Hölderlin, “the Oriental (das Orientalische)”—that had supposedly lain, in Sophocles’ work, concealed by his achieved “Junoische Nüchternheit (Junonian sobriety)” (pp. 62–63). As Louth points out, Hölderlin’s thinking about the function of writing was “always related to readership” and he released his (in this way doubly) corrective translations of Oedipus the King and Antigone to “offset the ѧ staid propensity he considered specific to his time” (p. 65) as part of an intensifying project—“The continual striving after” das Lebendige “(liveliness)” (p. 154)—that also entailed the radical editing of his own poems (p. 155). In the introduction to his English translations of these Greco-German works, Hölderlin’s Sophocles, Constantine corroborates Louth’s account of poetic courage, if warily. Hölderlin, we are told, as a result of his mode of translating from the Greek—“serving, as he thought, the present needs of his own countrymen”—“put himself ever more at risk” (p. 11). Taking his cues from Hölderlin’s poetry of plenitude, Constantine in his own poetry has sought a language to convey some of the extremes of sadness and joy in modern existence without yielding to the destructive forces inherent in the German poet’s most eccentric performances.
presence and absence of the gods, their withdrawal and imminence defined the central and empty space where European culture discovered, as linked to a single investigation, the finitude of man and the return of time” (p. 18), he fills out the historico-cultural significance of Constantine’s risky and belated act of having his first volume of poetry (and the subsequent Selected and Collected Poems) begin in the following way: As our bloods separate the clock resumes, I hear the wind again as our hearts quieten. We were a ring: the clock ticked round us For that time and the wind was deflected. The clock pecks everything to the bone. The wind enters through the broken eyes Of houses and through their wide mouths And scatters the ashes from the hearth. Sleep. Do not let go my hand. (Collected Poems, p. 17)
The poem and thus the various publications just mentioned begin “as our bloods separate,” that is, at the very moment of the loss, or the losing, of what Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls a “consummate reciprocity” (Phenomenology of Perception, p. 413). There is a sense of a very sudden coming into being of absence after a plenitude that has immediately become past (“were,” “ticked,” “was deflected”). It is as if, as readers, we have sleepwalked into the volume and the place of absence, unconscious until “the clock resumes” to a point where there was a time of presence to exit. It is a whole stanza before the noise of time is fully heard as an omnivorous pecking, and yet our reading seems to have been all along complicit with a destructive clock-time: the birth of our reading spelled its fatal return. This poem’s imagining of public clock-time as the enemy to a type of authentic temporal being may seem to link Constantine’s secular poetry to Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. In fact, in the context of the wider oeuvre it introduces, “as our bloods separate” can be seen to announce a swerve away from what Philippe LacoueLabarthe called Heidegger’s “onto-mythological” nationalist account of Hölderlin in favor of a democratically domestic and internationalist transformation of Hölderlin’s themes and structures. The poem’s foregrounded final line
EARLY POETRY
When Michel Foucault, in his essay on Hölderlin, “The Father’s ‘No’” (1962), writes, “The
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DAVID CONSTANTINE Before their time intruded on that place ѧ They hear one calling after love into the black But cannot answer and cannot come back.
broadcasts a fragile lyric voice in dramatized isolation, but it also registers an attempt at an address to those of us reading on the social side of the printed page. “The time of reading may be redeemed,” it seems to say. The poems that follow “as our bloods separate” combine in an endless struggle to reanimate erotic and familial bonds for the sake of a more powerful going out into the wider human and nonhuman environment. The theme of the present “in danger of slipping away,” as Schmidt would later phrase it, continues in the next poem in the volume, “Birdsong,” where the postcoital lyric consciousness now turns its attention upon those who are intent on departing this world despite all the sweet music contained there:
(“All wraiths in Hell are single,” Collected Poems, p. 22)
If, from the volume’s opening we have been in a dürftige Zeit—a “dead time,” as Constantine translates the famous phrase in Hölderlin’s “Bread and Wine” (“Brod und Wein”)—without comrades or the gods’ care for us, now the mythopoeic texture of the book would locate us more specifically in some version of Hölderlin’s defeated Athens in “The Archipelago,” where we find, in Constantine’s translation, “every man nailed / Alone to his own affairs, in the din of work / Hearing only himself” (Hölderlin, Selected Poems, p. 34). The concrete particularity of Constantine’s own time of destitution is waiting for us, near the end of the volume, in a little community of poems having to do with the poor and mentally ill of a recognizably late twentiethcentury Britain. The subjects of these poems—in most cases summoned by the (fictional) names or nicknames in the poems’ titles—seem to have an affinity with the nameless ones who would not be “stayed” by birdsong. The shocking directness with which the “I” of these poems accosts Stuart, Johnny, Dennis Jubb, and others may put the reader in mind of early R. S. Thomas or what Constantine, in A Living Language, called the “openness to the possibility of pitilessness” in the poetry of Keith Douglas (p. 40). In the poem “Jimmy,” we overhear, “Jimmy, your face has the texture of fungus” (Collected Poems, p. 39); in the poem “Billy,” we hear Billy being told, “more / Than ever I should like to put a finger in / The runnels of your face / That wants some beating for cadaverousness” (p. 40), where the proximity of this language of outraged sympathy to a sadistic fascination is part of the way in which the poet shows his awareness of the ethical risks involved in the unequal encounter. The Brechtian matter-of-factness of “But with a history of ECT” is, with its jaunty rhymes, no less disquieting: “Milburn Margaret Mrs,” it is reported, “got no further than the DHSS / And on a Friday in the public view / Lodged on the weir as logs do” (p. 41).
Most are sleeping, some Have waited hopelessly for mercy, Others even by this will not be stayed. But we who have not slept for quantity Of happiness have heard The dawn precipitate in song Like dewfall. We think our common road a choir of trees. (Collected Poems, p. 17)
The power of the last line lies in its refusal to determine whether the lovers’ experience of time as beauty is more than a delusion or desperate creative act. Later, in a poem beginning “In the meantime, in the waiting time,” the movement out of the world becomes a more general condition (“There is no present stay ѧ / we seem / In talk attending to elsewhere,” p. 20). Over subsequent pages, the language of already departed presence will accompany us into the new (and historical) contexts of various underworlds of the mind, so that the proleptic habits and non-connections of “this life,” conveyed particularly acutely by means of the future perfect—“We shall have said nothing, we shall have done / Nothing ѧ” (p. 20)—seem to receive their punishment and true representation in the communicative stasis of the “next”: They suffer most Who violently joined the myriad host, Who angrily to spite love in the face
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DAVID CONSTANTINE The bleak urgency of these poems works cumulatively, but, in their making of an identifiable affective part of the volume’s whole, they also serve to contrast with those moments when the hope of social and imaginative reconciliation is resurgent, when, as Hölderlin describes the rebuilt Periclean Athens in “The Archipelago,” “Flowers have sprung up,” “believing hands / Have greeted the olive again,” “the gods’ / Temples come into being” (Hölderlin, Selected Poems, p. 32) and “above us the light, the light still speaks to mankind” (p. 33). Flowers, hands and the return of a secularized, animating light all have their emblematic role to play in the “contexture” of A Brightness to Cast Shadows (to borrow a phrase of Neil Fraistat’s for the sequencing of poems within the volume). “Trewernick” is a powerful poem of praise for a family dwelling, a kind of democratized and more thoroughly “ecopoetic” version of Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” which honors the eponymous house’s “tact with rooted lives,” the fact that “when the year closed down the house glowed at its core / With the essences your hands put by” (Collected Poems, p. 29). At other moments in the book, the extremes of hope and despair and brightness and shadow are more intimately involved at the level of the individual poem. “For Years Now” moves toward an almost ecstatically sad perception of an absolute distinction between the former life and present death in the features of an elderly loved one, ending: “the lack, the difference, has such nearness / We could almost embrace” (p. 31). In the winding, mimetic syntax of one section of the volume’s longest individual poem, “In Memoriam 8571 Private J. W. Gleave,” the poet is writing autobiographically as the grandson of the fallen World War I soldier and his widow, of whom he asks:
winding syntax enacts a moment of tactile entry into the almost Marvellian realm of a mildly selfparodic, autoerotic Adam solus. As a result of polysyndeton (the breathless repetition of “and”) and an intensification of hypotaxis, Constantine is working to the requirements of the “Poetry of the Present,” as D. H. Lawrence defined it in his 1919 introduction to the American edition of his New Poems (the foundation for a lecture of the same name in Constantine’s A Living Language); which is to say that this is poetry in which “everything [is] left in its own rapid, fluid relationship with the rest of things” (Lawrence, p. 183). The poem develops in a rush of polyvalent sense that seems to lead the speaker and his spectators perilously close to an apprehension of his own dissolution: Hand on either bank and foothold to embrace The reclining falls and rainbowed round to sunder The water like a tree for a breathless space ѧ And for the smell of mud there is in worming under The grasses, the toppled boles are finger-soft And the glimmering rock flakes like the bark of birches. The eyes may be shut with moss in some such cleft, Mouth and nose pressed to in a deep kiss. One I remember climbing from the blue renowned As deepest of all the lakes and verdant black Among lawns and pines the enclosed garden ground To where, between scented equal hills, my back And praising arms brightly arrayed in sun, Wet-lipped from a hoof of sedge the water grew. You will have thought below I’d gone for heaven When I stood there at the sky on the brink of all blue. (Collected Poems, p. 23)
In the manner of Hölderlin’s “tripartite” poetics, where past, present, and future are in constant circulation, Constantine’s early poems would have us live in an often dangerously transitional present. There is the possibility of social and existential change in the direction of past or future ideals in this present but also of failure. The final poem, “I Suppose You Know This Isn’t a Merry-go-round,” holds us in this “meantime” and does so in a strangely declarative language that is able to refer (extra-poetically) to the recently recorded lives lived at the mercy of the State’s psychosocial provision and (more self-
How soon, I wonder, after how many Novembers Did the years begin to seem not paces Interminably around a pit nor steps deserting A place, but slow degrees by which she came Over the curve of the world into that hemisphere His face rose in? (p. 33)
In “Streams,” one of many edgy “walking” poems in A Brightness to Cast Shadows, another
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DAVID CONSTANTINE referentially) to the temporal condition of whoever has become involved in the looping sensuous textures of the unfolding volume thus far:
sexually violative woman he does not name, whom we may know, from her bruised mouth and seal-like cries, as the biblical Lilith, a figure we meet explicitly in New Poems (1991), in a time of “nothing that was alive” (Collected Poems, p. 139). Despite its verb-heavy and graphic energies, Adam’s narration finally brings to presence only exhaustion and vacancy in its contact with another mind:
I suppose you know this isn’t a merry-go-round. The man won’t stop it when you think you’ve had your money’s worth. To get off at all you’ll have to jump And risk breaking your neck And where you fall will appear strange And not where you got on. These have not been flat revolutions On the enduring earth But spirals down. You are lower now. That being so I would almost advise you to stay put. You are in the company of your friends And for a change You can always stagger from a horse to a white elephant. Nobody seems to mind.
My seed ran out of her, cold. On the street Hissing with rain the lamps were extinguished. You, when I woke, lay hooped on my left arm. (p. 79)
In many ways, these different openings set the tone for their respective collections. Whereas the structures of Watching for Dolphins are marked by constant restorations—momentary and partial or lingering—according to which human subjects may experience what one poem calls “passage to one another” (Collected Poems, p. 59), Madder presents a much bleaker extension of the debut collection’s spiraling in a transitional time. The title-poem of the former reimagines Hölderlin’s bid for Hellenic resurgence in a modern-day tourist boat’s passage back to Athens from somewhere in the Greek archipelago. An initially detached speaker narrates his fellow passenger’s increasingly frantic desire, which gradually becomes his own, for a sighting of dolphins (associated, in “The Archipelago,” with the restoration of Athens). Constantine’s poem contains lexical anticipations of his translation of “Homecoming” and also of his unpublished translation of Brecht’s communistic hymn to the workers who built the Moscow Metro (in lecture “The Poet, The Reader and the Citizen”), which results in a multitemporal utopian texture of commingled voices. Though the poem’s very theme and structure body forth the idea of transition (or translation), the sense of a crossing-over begins in earnest in the fourth stanza:
(p. 42)
We are far from the exquisite desolation of the volume’s opening, but the work of reconstruction is apparently just as needed now as it was then. Turning to the opening poems of Watching for Dolphins (1983) and Madder (1987), we cannot fail to be struck by their acts of beginning again in absence. Once again the severance is sexual in nature; the presentation, though, is more immediately mythic. The first of these reopenings, “Mary Magdalene and the Sun,” elides the image of that female figure “waiting in a hard garden / For Sun, the climber, to come over the hill” and, as it turns out, for a risen Christ, with Hero’s reception of a “naked and salt” Leander, as though only by such aggregation might the restoration of quickening life in the last two stanzas—complete with birdsong, irrigation, and the Sun’s fingering open of “the purple sheaths of crocuses”—be seen for the fully earthly overcoming that it is (Collected Poems, p. 45). In a poem whose title makes it very obviously yet another return to beginnings, the voice of “Adam confesses an infidelity to Eve” and begins, “I dreamed you were stolen from my left side” (Collected Poems, p. 79), and recounts the phantasmal appearance—or reappearance—of a
ѧand had they then On the waves, on the climax of our longing come Smiling, snub-nosed, domed like satyrs, oh We should have laughed and lifted the children up Stranger to stranger, pointing how with a leap They left their element, three or four times, centred
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DAVID CONSTANTINE immobility (“Confessional” and “Thoughts of the Commandant of the Fortress of St Vaast-laHougue,” p. 89). The somewhat Georg Heymesque—and yet very British Isles—“Eldon Hole,” a bleak kind of memorial for an otherwise forgotten hanged man, captures the mood and contexture of the whole with its last line: “And everything hurt goes round and round and round” (p. 110). The comparative function of the later volume’s title is instructive about what Constantine’s poetry was becoming, imagistically at least, at this time. A prefatory note claiming “I mean Dyer’s Madder, Rubia tinctorum”—also called “Garance,” which “occurs as a measure of redness in troubadour poetry” (p. 78)—gradually unravels as a strangely elaborate red herring in the face of the wry first-person pathos of “Don’t jump off the roof, Dad ѧ,” for instance, in which a suicidal speaker pictures himself “going for the big sun / ѧ / Beating along Acacia Avenue with a purpose / Towards the park and the ornamental lake” (p. 84).
On grace, and heavily and warm re-entered, Looping the keel. We should have felt them go Further and further into the deep parts. But soon We were among the great tankers, under their chains In black water. We had not seen the dolphins But woke, blinking. Eyes cast down With no admission of disappointment the company Dispersed and prepared to land in the city. (p. 54)
By the agency of dynamic verbs (“come,” “laughed,” “pointing,” etc.) that become momentarily detached from the first clause’s dispirited modality (“had they”), Constantine’s own long hypotactic sentence provides our reading with the material conditions for what we can imagine as the onrush of impossible (dolphin-) presence in the face of an ecological dwindling, despite the sense of worldly failure that awaits us after a second Hölderlinian “strophe-leap” into the last stanza. The second volume’s combination of explicit Hellenism and utopian hope (if always partly via negation) continues with “Atlantis,” which begins, “It dies hard, the notion of a just people; / The wish that there should have been once mutual aid / Dies very hard” (p. 65). It must be conceded that this poem ends with “a scholar, / A believer in Atlantis,” in his attempts to find it, sinking “In depths well known to be unfathomable” (p. 66), but this is followed immediately by “Chronicle” (p. 69), a kind of maritime myth of self-perpetuating sexual and ethnic hybridity that recalls the hopeful lines of Hölderlin’s “Die Wanderung” (“The Journey”), where, in Constantine’s faintly libidinous translation, “Our ancestors, the German people, / Tugged gently by the flow of the Danube / On a summer day encountered / Children of the sun / On the Black Sea” (Hölderlin, Selected Poems, p. 45). Madder, by contrast, seems to find hope substantially only in the occasional memory of past rituals of brightening ceremony (“Oranges” in Collected Poems, p. 94, and “Sols,” pp. 95– 99). Families, in particular, are shadowed-over by the consciousness of devastating global-scale events, the generally more elegiac treatments of life-death transition of A Brightness to Cast Shadows turning to horrific images of death-in-life
An upward turn in the book’s hellish “further and further” circling comes only near the very end, though again in a nostalgic key, in “Christmas” (“Why should not the big ship // After the seven seas / Sail our curdled river / Our stunk canal / And the unlit alley alley-o?,” p. 118). The volume ends equivocally with “Mappa Mundi,” a mythopoeic work in nine sections or tableaux showing a family making its home in the midst of ecological damage, contemplating a new life beyond “the interference / Of fence and throttling wire” (p. 121) and contemplating, besides the vulnerable presences of rivers, the pitying and pitiable forms of fantastical and genetic abnormality: “Dogheads, Cyclops, Elephant Men ѧ // Our children smile at them all. They are glad perhaps, / Our children, not to be unprecedented” (p. 122). Darkly recalling Rilke’s “Adam,” Constantine’s father of the mutating race is looking for a way out of what was “a pleasant place” (Collected Poems, p. 120), but, as at the end of A Brightness to Cast Shadows, the final message of these “unprecedented” forms is one of holding fast to whatever might “come into being like flowers,” to quote from Constantine’s translation of Hölderlin’s “Brod und Wein” (Hölderlin, Se-
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DAVID CONSTANTINE lected Poems, p. 38), exceptionally, in the dead time. The mythic figures continue to proliferate through New Poems (1991), whose title, though a mere convention, turns out to announce a new, somehow oxygenated manner of writing; though here, too, we are exposed to the disappearance of natural habitats, this time in a phase of modernity represented again and again by the underground transport system. The departed presences of “The Forest”—in which a metamorphic episode on the London Tube ends, in the manner of “Watching for Dolphins,” with the train starting “Back for the city, back to its knotted heart” (Collected Poems, p. 135)—are emphatically not divine but “funny folk” and animals “haunted by / Humanity” (p. 134). Another poem, “A Blind Elephant Man in the Underground,” presents the contrasting image of a beautiful girl sunning herself, whose closed eyes gave his look such a blessing, the poem’s speaker reports, that he “wished it down through the roots to cure London” (p. 136). The figure of the sufferer of elephantitis was one that was soon to recur in Constantine’s oeuvre, something that was also the case with “Caspar on the asphalt” in “Under That Bag of Soot,” in which the famous nineteenth-century “Child of Europe” (whose name is more often than not spelled “Kaspar”) emerges as a simile for a man “Released into the community with a shaved head / And the marks of fangs on his temples” who himself is a simile for something found that “had been trying to grow” (p. 133).
meeting the truth about his life would be revealed.” As to the question of why Caspar was imprisoned and murdered in this way, Constantine adds, “Probably, as the jurist Anselm von Feuerbach believed, he had a claim to the throne of Baden” (p. 145). What Constantine calls his “own conception of the subject” emerges with a heightening of tone when the preface refers to the “hopes and longings” that attended Caspar’s “innocence and the extraordinary reactions of his untried nervous system to a life in the daylight” (p. 145). Although the poem as a whole has a complex, critical relationship with such apparently Romantic—or “Rousseauan”—conceptions of primal sensitivity, it is precisely with this conception of Caspar that the first canto begins. Constantine’s tense but supple half-rhyming terza rima locates him “Bang in the middle” of the Nuremberg square—here the site of virginal receptivity to an accumulating presence of natural and human phenomena, one where They burned people and broke them on the wheel And showed their hearts and bowels to other people. He stood there swaying on his sticky feet, His head was bowed, the light had hurt his eyes, The pigeons ran between his feet like toys And he was mithered by the scissoring swifts, Their screams and shadows, then the hour Rolled off an iron tongue in an iron tower And clouted him, like ferrets sound Screwed the discovered burrows of his ears And through the cobblestones Another massive novelty of pains Entered his fork. (p. 147)
CASPAR HAUSER
The nine cantos of Caspar Hauser are preceded by a prefatory note, in which Constantine sets out “The facts of Caspar Hauser’s story which matter for my poem” that “Incarcerated for most of his childhood and adolescence he appeared in Nuremberg at Whitsuntide 1828, able to write his name and say, without understanding it, one sentence: I want to be a rider like my father was” (Collected Poems, p. 145) and that he was “murdered just before Christmas 1833,” having gone to meet a stranger at a monument in the public park in Ansbach in the hope that “at this
The traumatic expansion of Caspar’s world is immediately a socially mediated event, a public epiphany of sorts, when “From all the openings of their ordinary lives / The people stared at their accustomed space // Larger, as it seemed, and quieter and emptier / And all their beams were gathered at the centre / As by a heavy ore, or by a vacuum” (p. 148). Caspar opens others by being, himself, open, or an opening of the world. The language takes on an explicitly religious tenor as Constantine records how “Down the stairways / And down the alleys of their daily
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DAVID CONSTANTINE bread / Blind as a mole he drew them by the eyes // Singly, hand in hand, in families, / Lifting the children up and shoving gently like / The beasts towards Adam, towards this stake, // This tree, this thing blown in by Pentecost, / They inched, already aghast / At all the questions he would make them ask” (p. 148). It is not the full audibility of a speaking-in-tongues at which the Nuremberg Volk is “aghast,” but rather the form of a general self-interrogation, one which involves readers as well: the section of the canto ends there, as if the poem were asking us to mull over what these questions might be. As the preface has already suggested, Constantine’s formal strategy is to allow readers to reflect on the potentiality of Caspar as a dynamic form of the “Offen” (to refer to the Rilkean—and ultimately Hölderlinian—thinking that seems to lie behind such figurative language) by forcing us to consider how Caspar transformed and was transformed by the mentors and admirers he attracted to him. Besides a narrator and the occasional interventions of a vox populi we are given the reconstructed voices of three historical figures of questionable motive. The testimony of Clara Biberbach, the unhappy housewife whose love for Caspar was, we are told, explicitly of the erotic sort, captures the active and passive nature of Caspar’s affective force, as well as the sense in which his absence could itself be a powerful sort of presence:
when we were / In dead time. We fled the centre” (p. 183). But while Stanhope’s interest in the apparently asexual Caspar is presented as a sinister case of mauvaise foi—the stasis of his pre-Caspar life is somehow repeated in the narrative’s movement from a confusing image of the lord “behind a handkerchief sidling away ѧ” (p. 190) to his own partial admission of feeling sexual arousal when “I towelled him dry as any father would” (p. 193)—it is the no less predatory Clara whose desire comes closest to the condition of Hellenic hope. A late reunion with Caspar is “like a field / When the sun comes suddenly” (p. 192), and, earlier, her own section of the poem ends with a temporally disjunctive quasi-coda whose long and increasingly hypotactic and polyvalent sentences record a movement around and beyond the self into public, festive time, with a final protean image of her breezefilled dress lying “Over the bars of Caspar’s respectful arms / Like water, air, fire, or the corpse of me” (p. 182). The transformative potential of Caspar’s exemplary but indeterminate sensitivity to “the inrush of everything” (p. 158)—in Rousseau’s terms, his natural pity, or goodness—as Georg Friedrich Daumer, the first and last of the keepers to speak, testifies to it, reaches beyond both the latter’s attempts at self-congratulation (or self-consolation) and the wider processes of pedagogic formation, classification and administration with which he collaborates. Frantically searching for Caspar’s “being, his origins, his innocence” (p. 156), the retired schoolteacher Daumer and a Doctor Osterhausen “put him to the minerals” (p. 161). The wider context of Daumer’s relations with Caspar are indicated in the breezy, ambiguous news that “Everyone said he was doing very well, / Better than Bishop Fricke’s negro, for example, // Or Lady Amalia’s Huron Indian. Neither lived” (p. 165). But if Caspar is to be imagined as one who “tested the rational precepts of the Aufklärung” (Enlightenment), as Constantine claims Kleist did (Heinrich von Kleist: Selected Writings, p. xxiii), then Daumer is never close to becoming a mere casually callous participant in the paternalistic “dark side” of
ѧ but he Is dead long since and I soon shall be And all I have of him is a patch of blood And depths, depths that in between His murdered childhood and his barely come of age He sank in me. (pp. 180–181)
Melancholia and the pathos of failure attach to all those given a “voice” in this poem to narrate his or her life’s overlapping with the more intense life of Caspar. The aristocrat, Philip Henry Stanhope, who in a sense speaks for all the main characters (including, as we will find out, the poet himself) when he is made to declare, “I open easily” (p. 186), introduces his passion for Caspar with the following dürftig portrait of himself and his siblings: “Nothing could come of us, born
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DAVID CONSTANTINE Enlightenment. He is certainly much more than a mere repetition of the shadowy figure at the scene of Caspar’s incarceration who cruelly imposes the first words on his body and who teaches him to walk by making him walk to Nuremberg. We are told that “It troubled Daumer / That Caspar never made the first person stick [italics added]” (Collected Poems, p. 160). It is Daumer himself, the teacher of grammar and the modes of selfhood that flow from it, who has asked, in the speculative, slightly desperate mode of the would-be poet, “Was Caspar Orpheus?” (p. 159); the poem seems to answer Daumer by presenting him, in Caspar—“Always unsure where he and the outside met” (p. 160)—with a more radically metamorphic Orphic identity than he could have imagined. There is a movement from what is presented first as his safely textual form of exposure at the end of the fourth section of the Second Canto:
So it is that the realized horror is transferred to the person of Daumer by the very textual, pedagogic means by which he has attempted to overwrite Caspar’s chthonic prehistory and openness. The blood imagery continues through the more erotically embodied Clara—“the scarlet woman,” as she is later called by the first-person plural’s popular incursion into Stanhope’s first canto (p. 192). It is her bedroom door that breaks “Open on Caspar” (p. 177), who has accidentally shot himself near the right eye. In similar language to that of the previous account of emergency—in fact, the nostalgie de boue is even more prominent this time—the narrative records how “he smeared and slopped / The day’s light pastel pretty colours and stopped / His brute encumbered crown // Against her lap’s / Deeper and deeper diaphanous soft shelter / And Clara mired her hands” (p. 177). But Daumer, despite his insights, is still hopelessly obsessed with a frigid ideal; at his finale, Constantine has the schoolmaster rising to “watch the snow / Whiten over everything around my house and in the town” (p. 199). In the revelation of Caspar’s murder beginning in the next stanza, the return of the blood image marks not only the dawning of a reality Daumer cannot bear but also the apparent aspiration of the poem itself to become that truth, to become the blooded, lebendig language open to the suffering and joyful feeling of the experienced world, including Daumer’s insufficient portion of it. This is a work which acknowledges its own rhetorical performances as well as the extent to which its hero must always be a reconstruction composed of the historically specific desires and rhetorics of his “keepers,” but such knowledge becomes the spur to more, not less, immediate experience.
He wrote: I stopped shielding my eyes. I saw the radiance Of a life everlasting in the near distance. He meant it figuratively, of course. (p. 164)
Over the border into the fifth section of the canto our narrative guide comments, “Poor Daumer. He was reckoning without / Terror” (p. 164). In the tension of what follows, the magnitude of Caspar’s eminent sensitivity, mixing with what is made to appear an intensifying apprehension of his murder, becomes, for Daumer, something from which no simile or metaphor will protect him: His fear stood Made visible with gloves and bandages like the invisible man And played a measured backhand across his forehead With a heavy razor. That was that. Over the eaves of his eyebrows a downpour of blood. He whimpered, crumpled, lay in the wet. Waking, he seemed to wish to slobber everything: The flags, the stairs, the banisters, the landing, All my house and home. He sullied books Lent him for learning in his room on the first floor
The poetic desire to leave the text—or at least mingle with the intensely extra-poetic—reaches a higher pitch in what is very likely the riskiest section of the poem, the Eighth Canto. Constantine suddenly, perhaps violently, reinstalls us at the moment when, “At the time of the clear-outs and the big shut-downs / The insane appeared among us in great numbers” (p. 207). This is a polemical reference to the underfunded “Care in the Community” mental health policy in Britain
(p. 168)
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DAVID CONSTANTINE in the late 1980s and 1990s. We are introduced to “King Billy,” one of those reemerging from institutions “After a long time hidden” (p. 207), and then given a vision of Caspar himself “entering down the long road / From the upland fields through the plots / Of sunk endeavor and the walled estates” (p. 209), so that our reconstituted protagonist now moves amongst the youthful discontents of our own late capitalism: “Worse than Christ at the whipping-post who knew / The answers, they ask questions worse / Than what is this and what am I to you, // Stranger, passer-by? They ask / What am I to me? And nobody knows” (p. 210). The canto ends with a further intensification of presentness, when the poet himself enters the poem to recount his meeting with a beggar who forced him, with the cock of an ear, “to listen to what it sounds like / Orbiting in the cold” (p. 211). In a gathering tension built upon somewhat Germanic pre-modification, the poet reports: “it sounds // Like falling through eternity, / It is one steady incapable of ceasing, / Diminishing or commingling // Scream” (p. 211). The terror of the encounter is further attested to in the exhausted, shaken parataxis of the very close of that canto:
We should have had him the minute he came out. So much was blurred in the fatal interim By a social life. (p. 216)
In opposition to the surgeons’ unfeeling pursuit of presence of the simple sort (“Off the breastbone / They laid the waistcoat of Caspar’s flesh entirely open / ѧ / Stomach, diaphragm, liver were all mortally hurt,” p. 214), Constantine supplies a view of Caspar’s body as the textual record of learned and emergent modes of animation to argue for a commensurately gradual form of departure: He wore the angel’s mark And the mark of the accident In Clara’s house. Otherwise puzzlement— That was how he had set and would have faded Little by little had he been allowed Time under a shroud— Puzzlement settling finally into dust ѧ (p. 215)
What amounts to a rather crude representation of science in this final canto can, more generously, be read as a way of reaching the sort of humanist, antidualist position Merleau-Ponty occupies in the following passage from The World of Perception:
He would be still there if I ever went that way. I don’t. He frightens me. Best never look. I hear the scream Most nights. I see his bit of card: to whom It may concern. I read my name.
Of course another human being is certainly more than simply a body to me: rather, this other is a body animated by all manner of intentions, the origin of numerous actions and words.ѧ Another person, for us, is a spirit which haunts a body and we seem to see a whole host of possibilities contained within this body when it appears before us; the body is the very presence of these possibilities.
(p. 211)
The coldness carries over into the beginning of the final canto. Caspar is dead, his fascinating body awaiting the arrival of the nine specially qualified surgeons of “the College” charged with performing its dissection. With “time pressing, / Time stoked by their hot breath accelerating” (p. 215), the depth of human flesh, for these men, can only be imagined as being for immediate acquisition and without personal or interpersonal duration. One surgeon is said to have “gone as far as he could into the wound” (p. 214), “every important question / Eluded” Osterhausen (p. 215), who botches even his technical tasks, while another complains:
(pp. 82–83)
What the Academy publicly begins, the marginal and criminal elements of the polis perpetuate more covertly, but in a process of fragmentation that takes the poem toward its close with a Beckettian impulse to “Begin again,” as the previous canto had put it (Collected Poems, p. 211). At the moment of greatest degradation, then, when the human body as the presence of human possibilities seems, in the real world, to have been ignored for the sake of immediate gratification,
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DAVID CONSTANTINE we are in fact on the patient way back to the nourishing and relatively connected forms of life now and what, for some version of Caspar at least, would be an intersubjective and wholly material afterlife:
protean qualities exposed them to fascination of both the well-meaning and the exploitative sort. Like Caspar, Joseph Merrick was gawked at in freak shows but also studied by a conscientious doctor; Emma Hamilton was an artist’s model who became famous for her impersonations of mythological and historical characters, with Sir William as her impresario. Lady Hamilton and the Elephant Man differs from the epic poem in that its eponymous “common and peculiar” protagonists are given voices in which to recount their parallel movements from keeper to keeper and, ultimately, to collaborate in the fashioning of a dreamily counterfactual version of history: Emma offers the multitemporal surfaces of her beautiful remembered body to enact a version of Joseph’s “inner” self as in life it had lain—insufficiently realized “beneath” the elephantitis, as well as, more specifically, written out in his own previously unperformed play. Despite swerving dangerously close to sentimentality at the end, this remains Constantine’s most successful radio play to date—not least as a result of its carefully researched characterizations of the doctor, Treves, and the hedonistic, Goethean classicist, William Hamilton.
The trade in him began, the entity, Such as it was, the unsure First person singular crumbling rapidly He fed through the academies and the common people Into the wide world, changing hands For money one day, love the next, in lands Only discovered since. Collected up The crumbs still lodging here and there would make More bread of life than Caspar ever broke. (p. 216)
LATER POETRY
After Caspar Hauser Constantine has published two more long poetic works. The mysterious Sleeper (1995) (in Collected Poems, pp. 217– 228) seems to imagine the psychophysiological state of a group of refugees or migrants crossing into a European country; the principal speaker’s “sleepy language” (p. 228) moves furtively over the borders of the travelers’ selves in the Lawrentian “allotropic” mode, in such a way as to suggest that a fluidly supranational identity might yet be evolved and allowed on that continent. Lady Hamilton and the Elephant Man is a freeverse radio play, first broadcast in 1997 on BBC Radio 3 (and featuring Fiona Shaw and Tom Hollander) and later published at the end of The Pelt of Wasps (pp. 57–95), on the back cover of which Constantine offers the following direction to readers:
The poetics of “placing things oddly side by side” results, elsewhere in The Pelt of Wasps, in characteristic shifts of mood, from a clump of bleak, somewhat Hughesian poems showing decomposing sheep under a distinctly British “Sky like a Slaughterhouse” (Collected Poems, p. 247) to the surging return of Eros in a Molly Bloomish voice of opening in the volume’s sunlit finale, “Honey from Palaiochora” (pp. 265–266). The poem that gives the book its title, “The Wasps” (p. 233), is a poem of exposure of a more ambiguous sort, involving what, in the context of Constantine’s whole oeuvre, is the emergently consolidating image of the house or dwelling place—that “topography of our intimate being,” as Gaston Bachelard calls it (in The Poetics of Space, p. xxxvi). An opening stanza’s faintly troubled, omnipresent vision of the garden, where the apples in a tree, “racing like hearts,” are “full of wasps” and “The summer pushes / Her tongue into the winter’s throat,” is intensified by the second stanza’s switch to the immediate past and
Lady Hamilton and the Elephant Man belongs properly with the others in this book (and with Caspar Hauser and my novel Davies). In it I have put together four figures, in an underworld, and let them interconnect. Much of my poetics, it seems to me, consists in placing things oddly side by side. Still not so oddly as life does.
The play clearly belongs together with Caspar Hauser as a result of its depiction of physically exceptional historical persons whose special
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DAVID CONSTANTINE the onset there of dental, sibilant and plosive effects that will seem to enact the music of the outside entering a receptive “inner” state: “But at six today, like rain, like the first drops, / The wasps came battering softly at the black glass. / They want the light, the cold is at their backs.” The phenomenological texture of this past is further complicated by a movement into an anterior past which is also a movement into a heart of darkness (or unnatural light):
Constantine’s somewhat Lawrentian short story poems, unfolds the elegiac notion that what might be thought of as an ecologically noble commitment to the presence of the nonhuman world seems to come only at the expense of the quality of our relations in the human sphere. The “Man” in the title “wakes like someone shouted for,” leaving his wife “thinking am I invisible, am I already dead?” “To walk the old road between the sea and the marsh / And listen at gaps and holes in the sand dunes / For what it really sounds like.” The brief narrative draws to a close with an intimate image on the border between house and wild. Seeing her nominal husband returning, “mounted like a scarecrow on the boundary hedge,” the wife, pictured drawing the curtains, “cannot make him a sign of recognition.” Their projected future is one in which “night after night now / Against house and home he will side with the wind” (p. 274).
That morning last year when the light had been left on The strange room terrified the heart in me, I could not place myself, didn’t know my own Insect scribble: then saw the whole soft Pelt of wasps, its underbelly, the long black pane Yellow with visitants, it seethed, the glass sounded. (p. 233)
In the manner of one of his earliest lyrics, an isolated final line’s return to the present simple marks an apparent settlement of self and the world, “inner” and “outer”: “I bless my life: that so much wants in.” This speech act—effectively a restatement of Rilke’s dennoch preisen—leaves the impression of a definitive pressing back of revived “individuality” (to invoke some of Constantine’s own terms from the back cover of The Pelt of Wasps). But the remembered discovery of “insect scribble,” with its combination of human and extrahuman elements, has pointed to a more complicated dispersal of being across time, one in which the natural world has already penetrated the “inner,” subjective, writerly state, and vice versa. There is even the lingering sense that the (terrified) “heart” can be transformed because it was outside from the start—out there with the “racing,” looked-at apples and the proleptic perception of one season being entered by another. If “The Wasps” returns us to the threatened threshold of Constantine’s entire published oeuvre—which is to say, “As our bloods separate”—it gestures more emphatically ahead to the poems of his next book, Something for the Ghosts (his most accomplished single volume to date), and their negotiation with otherness and forms that hover between absence and presence. “Man and Wife” (Collected Poems, p. 274), one of
In another narrative poem, the astonishing “New Year Behind the Asylum” (pp. 303–304), the distance from “Where the people were and it was warm” (p. 303) is, to some extent, shared. A voice records, in breathlessly long sentences, the experience of being taken at night by a man, himself acting from some inner compulsion, far from the “works and churches and the big ships in the docks” (of twentieth-century Manchester) across the “open fields” to hear the inmates of a mental hospital “singing or sobbing their hearts out for the New Year” (p. 303). Since the man’s death the speaker has understood “what he meant was this: / That I should know how much love would be needed” (p. 304)—a discovery that issues beyond the personal drama of this poem and reflects an almost Whitmanesque urge in the volume as a whole to forge a kind of transhistorical virtual community, with the consequence that one poem’s record of fragility adds to another in an accumulating affect of care. There is a concentrated example of this in “Monologue, or The Five Lost Géricaults” (pp. 276–279), a tragicomic group portrait—for the speaker, a kind of self-portrait—of some monomaniacs in a neighborhood. Sometimes the unfolding of attentiveness is of a less troubled sort. The opening
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DAVID CONSTANTINE
Selected Bibliography
poem, “Nude” (p. 269), which originally followed an epigraph to the volume taken from John Donne’s “The Ecstasy” (“To our bodies turn we thenѧ”), presents a modern Anadyomene (apparently modeled on one of Willy Ronis’ photographic subjects) “at a meeting place / Of warm sunlight and loving admiration / And easy feeling both.” Still, the careful enumeration of the woman’s bathroom (“Jug, basin, washstand, towel and chair / The plain nouns”), which recalls Rilke’s famous roll call, in the Ninth Duino Elegy, of the “things” that poets are there to say, prepares us for the unhappy realization in another ekphrastic poem, “Mosaics in the Imperial Palace” (pp. 282–283), that by recording “that it was so,” “man the maker” (p. 283) proves himself a kind of collaborator with “man the hunter” (p. 282), Roman or otherwise. A voracious appetite for phenomena unites them.
WORKS OF DAVID CONSTANTINE POETRY A Brightness to Cast Shadows. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1980. Watching for Dolphins. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1983. Madder. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1987. Selected Poems. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1991. Caspar Hauser: A Poem in Nine Cantos. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1994. The Pelt of Wasps. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1998. Something for the Ghosts. Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2002. Collected Poems. Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2004.
PROSE FICTION Davies. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1985. Back at the Spike. Keele: Keele University Press, Ryburn Publications, 1994. Under the Dam. Manchester: Comma Press, 2005.
The self-referential theme also appears in “The House” (p. 272) and “Fulmars” (pp. 321– 323), where a poet-speaker confronts his own inability to master (poetically or physically) the form of the birds’ flight, declaring, “All I can ever do is say what things are like” (p. 321). This anticipates the unforced epistemological complexity of the fully metapoetic sequence, A Poetry Primer, especially its second poem, “Simile” (p. 326), in which a lover’s epistolary evocation of the maritime scene outside his window is both heightened as singularity and put in jeopardy by a final line which asks, “What is it all like? Love, ask me what love is like.” “Fulmars” also announces a new, syntactically looser, thin-lined, almost journal-like mode that carries over into Collected Poems (2004). The phrasing of “Not Only But Also” (p. 353)—“the signs / Of assembling, of will be, of are and the unbearable / Soon will have been”—signals Constantine’s debt in these poems to the example of Lawrence, who writes in the “Poetry of the Present” of the pursuit, through free verse, of “the very jetting source of all will-be and has-been” (p. 315). Constantine’s phrasing also demonstrates his continuing commitment to the Hölderlinian tripartite poetics that has inspired so many of his finest poems.
TRANSLATIONS Michaux, Henri. Spaced, Displaced: Déplacements, Dégagements. Translated with Helen Constantine. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe: 1992. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Elective Affınities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Jaccottet, Philippe. Under Clouded Skies and Beauregard: Pensées sous les nuages et Beauregard. Translated with Mark Treharne. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe: 1994. Hölderlin, Friedrich. Selected Poems. 2nd ed. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1996. Kleist, Heinrich von. Selected Writings. London: J. M. Dent, 1997. Hölderlin’s Sophocles: Oedipus and Antigone. Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2001. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. Lighter than Air: Moral Poems. Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2002. Brecht, Bertolt. Collected Plays: Eight. Translated and edited with Tom Kuhn. London: Methuen, 2004. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust, Part I. London: Penguin, 2005.
CRITICAL WORKS, LECTURES,
AND
NONFICTION
The Significance of Locality in the Poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin. London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1979.
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DAVID CONSTANTINE Goldsworthy, Vesna, ed. Writing Worlds 1: The Norwich Exchanges. Norwich: Pen & Inc Press and School of Literature and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia, 2006.
Early Greek Travellers and the Hellenic Ideal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Hölderlin. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. “Common and Peculiar.” In Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry. Edited by W. N. Herbert and Matthew Hollis. Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2000. Pp. 226–228. Fields of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001. A Living Language. Newcastle upon Tyne: Department of English Literary & Linguistic Studies, University of Newcastle; Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2004. “The Poet, the Reader and the Citizen.” Unpublished script for spring 2004 Craig Lecture at Rutgers University, 2004. “Translators Who Write: What Can You Learn from Them?” The Reader 16:9–11 (autumn 2004). “Syntax in Practice in a Poem.” The Reader 17:64–67 (spring 2005).
Hamburger, Michael, trans. Friedrich Hölderlin: Poems and Fragments. 3rd ed. London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1994; 4th ed., 2004. Knight, Stephen. “Haunted by Love.” Times Literary Supplement, June 17, 2002, p. 24. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry. Translated by Jeff Fort. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Originally published as Heidegger, la politique du poème (Paris: Galilée, 2002). Lawrence, D. H. The Complete Poems. Edited by Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts. New York: Viking, 1969. Leviston, Frances. “Off the Page.” The Guardian, May 10, 2008, p. 18. Louth, Charlie. Hölderlin and the Dynamics of Translation. Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre of the University of Oxford, 1998.
CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. Originally published as La Poétique de l’espace (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1958). Burt, Stephen. “Glamour and Grief.” Times Literary Supplement, November 25, 2005, pp. 3–4. Deveson, Aaron. “Uncommon Passengers: David Constantine’s Voices.” Norwich Papers: Studies in Translation 15 (2007):35–49. ———. “‘Something is Coming into Being’: David Constantine and the Poetry of Presence.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of East Anglia, 2007. Ellis, Stephen James. “Unsteady Entities: David Constantine’s Caspar Hauser: A Poem in Nine Cantos.” Tabla 4 (1995): 24–26. Foucault, Michel. “The Father’s ‘No,’” first published, 1962, originally translated by D. F. Bouchard and S. Simon. In Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Volume 2. Edited by James D. Faubion. New York: New Press, 1998. Pp. 5–20. Fraistat, Neil, ed. Poems in Their Place: The Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 2002. Originally published as Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). ———. The World of Perception. Translated by Oliver Davis. London: Routledge, 2004. Originally delivered as lecture series, Causeries (1948). Rilke, Maria Rainer. Die Gedichte. 12th ed. Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 2001. Ronis, Willy. Derrière l’objectif de Willy Ronis. Paris: Éditions Hoëbeke, 2001. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Oxford World’s Classics ed. Edited by Patrick Coleman. Translated by Franklin Philip. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Originally published as Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, 1755. Schmidt, Michael. Lives of the Poets. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998. Sieburth, Richard, trans. Hymns and Fragments by Friedrich Hölderlin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.
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KIRAN DESAI (1971—)
Carolyn Alessio ARTICLES ABOUT THE Man Booker Prize–winning novelist Kiran Desai inevitably point out that she is the daughter of the prolific Indo-English novelist Anita Desai (b. 1937), whose mother was a German Jew and whose father was Bengali. The connection between Desai and her literary mother is important on more than a biographical level: Both of these lauded writers address issues of geographic and cultural motherhood and the legacy of British colonialism. “Like mother, like daughter,” wrote the reviewer Zia Jaffrey in the New York Times Book Review, “which is not to say that Kiran Desai hasn’t charted a territory of her own, as indebted to Shakespeare or Virginia Woolf as to Salman Rushdie or her mother.”
ers that more subtle kinds of colonialism still occur. Often colonizers and the colonized share characteristics. In Desai’s second novel, The Inheritance of Loss (2006), Sai, the granddaughter of an upper-class Indian judge, visits a Nepalese museum with her Nepali tutor, who is connected to a growing revolutionary group. While there, they look at mementos from the first successful climb to the top of Mount Everest by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, the sherpa who guided him. Sai’s tutor points out that Hillary’s sherpa never received enough credit for the historic feat. Sai, though, in her musings, offers another, more philosophical perspective: “Should humans conquer the mountain or should they wish for the mountain to possess them? Sherpas went up and down, ten times, fifteen times in some cases, without glory, without claim of ownership, and there were those who said it was sacred and shouldn’t be sullied at all” (p. 171).
Anita Mazumdar married the business executive Ashvin Desai in 1958, and Kiran, the youngest of four children, was born on September 3, 1971, in New Delhi, India. The family emigrated to England in 1985, when Kiran was fourteen years old; in 1986, Anita and Kiran moved to the United States. Like her mother, who taught at Smith College, Mount Holyoke, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kiran Desai traverses continents in her work and specializes in examining subterranean worlds by peeking underneath the social conventions of both the oppressors and the oppressed. Postcolonial hierarchies exist in all communities in Desai’s work, from illegal immigrant restaurant workers living in putrid lodgings in New York City to middleclass anglicized Indian women residing in a rosecovered cottage in the northeastern Himalayas.
Nature permeates Desai’s work, repeatedly disarming people who attempt to conquer or tame it. Both of her novels are set largely outdoors, and even when the characters are inside, they remain beholden to the whims and demands of their natural surroundings. The characters’ interaction with nature reveals information about their backgrounds, their resourcefulness, and even their ambitions. In Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998), Desai’s first and more comic novel, an indolent but clever young man, who was born on the final day of a historic monsoon, pretends to be a prophet. He peddles his mystical wares from atop a guava tree that is also inhabited by a band of drunken monkeys. In The Inheritance of Loss, a more ambitious novel, an orphaned girl is sent to live with her grandfather in an impractical stone house in Kalimpong, high in
With such stark contrasts in settings and social classes, it is not surprising that irony saturates Desai’s two novels. But she rarely allows it only to evoke comedy or bitter commentary. Glaring social inequalities and everyday juxtapositions repeatedly remind read-
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KIRAN DESAI the Himalayan outback on the border of politically troubled Nepal. Scorpions, termites, and snakes continually invade the house and land, and the region is frequently enshrouded in fog. Ambushed by nature and often abandoned by family, culture, and language, the protagonists in Desai’s novels struggle with the most basic question of assimilation: Does striving for personal happiness mean betraying one’s myriad competing cultures—and life narratives? Rather than achieving social status, economic solvency, or love, some of Desai’s most perceptive characters end up yearning for self-exile or obliteration, that “greatest luxury of not noticing [oneself] at all” (Inheritance, p. 293). Comfort comes only rarely and usually in the form or food or books— sustenance often necessary to procure on one’s own. While critics have remarked on Desai’s seemingly nihilistic vision for a global world, Desai herself has said that writing novels can create a realistic, even ethical homeland for stories of fractured, nonlinear lives: “Literature is located beyond flags and anthems, simple ideas of loyalty,” she said in a 2006 interview on the Man Booker Prizes Web site. “In a world obsessed with national boundaries and belonging, as a novelist working with a form also traditionally obsessed with place, it was a journey to come to this thought, that the less structured, the multiple, may be a possible location for fiction, perhaps a more valid ethical location in general.” Kiran Desai’s broad global perspective makes sense. After growing up in India, she lived in England for a year when she was a teenager before moving to the United States. She attended high school in Massachusetts, received a bachelor of arts degree from Bennington College in Vermont in 1993, studied in the writing program at Hollins University in Virginia, and completed a master of fine arts degree at Columbia University in New York City. While writing her novels, Desai has continued to travel, even settling for stretches in Mexico. The author’s literary influences are similarly international, ranging from Kazuo Ishiguro, V. S. Naipaul, and Kenzaburo Oe to Gabriel García Márquez and Flannery O'Connor. The impact is
clear in the way that Desai uses both magical realism and the grotesque, as well as witty insight into social situations. Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard plays with the concept of fables and clever, everyday wisdom. The Inheritance of Loss deals more with realistic, historical situations but provides plenty of grotesque characters and those immersed in extreme situations. Both novels, however, address the gap between traditionally raised parents and their contemporary, more formally educated offspring. Not only do they literally speak different languages, but the younger, often more cosmopolitan generation, is groomed for independent living. In this sense, the younger generation could be compared to post-1947 India, with its seeming independence from the British Empire but also with its remaining ties to family and colonial order. Conflict— cultural, political, and emotional—is inevitable.
HULLABALOO: “HALFWAY BETWEEN TRADITION AND MODERNITY”
A year before Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard was published as a novel, an excerpt from it appeared under the title “The Sermon in the Guava Tree” in the New Yorker and “Strange Happenings in the Guava Orchard” in Mirrorwork, Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West’s anthology of Indian writing from the first fifty years of that nation’s independence, 1947–1997. In Rushdie’s introduction to the book, he hails the work of Desai, the youngest writer in the anthology, as evidence of “the first dynasty of modern Indian fiction,” referring to Desai’s inheritance of her mother’s involvement in the literary world, and as “welcome proof that India’s encounter with the English language, far from proving abortive, continues to give birth to new children, endowed with lavish gifts” (p. xx). Thematically the inclusion in Rushdie’s collection makes sense: Desai’s novel has similarities to the Rushdie’s own work, especially his 1981 novel Midnight’s Children. Sampath Chawla, the protagonist of Hullabaloo, is born at the end of a historic monsoon, while Saleem Sinai, the protagonist of Midnight’s Children, arrives in the world at the precise moment of India’s partition in August 1947. Both charac-
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KIRAN DESAI ters appear to possess otherworldly gifts: Sampath surprises the people of his village with specific insights into their personal lives, and Saleem is telepathic with other Indians who were born at the same auspicious moment. Hullabaloo is set in Shahkot, a fictitious small town south of the Himalayas, “poised,” according to the New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani, “halfway between tradition and modernity.” Its inhabitants, who have scant contact with more progressive settings, generally adhere to traditional customs. Yet, in a theme that Desai explores in greater depth in her next novel, the more conservative, old-world parents urge a complicated kind of advancement in their children, encouraging them to pursue higher education and white-collar professions, yet still wanting them to comply with traditional customs such as arranged marriage and nearby residence to their elders.
multiplied with abandon, run wild by the absence of competition from the rest of the alphabet” (Hullabaloo, p. 23). When Sampath becomes a young adult, showing little inclination to do anything but wander around dreamily in tea stalls, his father helps him secure a low-level position at the post office. But instead of finally proving himself at a job, Sampath spends most of his time reading other people’s mail and gleaning personal information that he later ends up using in his role as a mock guru. Though the rest of the staff at the post office is more industrious, frequently their boss, Mr. D.P.S., requires them to do personal work for him, in particular helping him to prepare for the wedding of his daughter. Sampath, whose name means “good fortune” or “wealth” in Sanskrit, is, Michiko Kakutani says, a “dreamy, introspective fellow torn between his familial obligations and his own desire to be left alone.” Ultimately he gets himself fired in a shocking but hilarious act at the wedding of his boss’s daughter. Standing in the fountain dressed in drag, he sings while doing a striptease. At the end, he moons the crowd. It’s a bawdy kiss-off as well as revenge, or commentary, on his boss’s presumptuous blending of the personal and professional. Publicly shamed, Sampath has few options. His father urges him to find work locally, at banal places like the Utterly Butterly Delicious Butter Factory, but Sampath refuses. Instead he retreats to a guava tree in an orchard that had once been owned by the old district judge of the town before the government declared it part of a national forest. By moving into the tree, Sampath rebels against his family’s dreams but inadvertently brings them local fame and fortune. In a reversal, his father becomes Sampath’s champion and soon turns his son’s guru status into a lucrative tourist enterprise, even building his son a platform and bed, while his mother and grandmother arrange for regular meal service. The tree, which might be considered a metaphor for the tree of knowledge, offers Sampath refuge and perspective: From the guavaladen pedestal, he has an aerial view of his family, his village. His residence in the tree is
Consequently Sampath’s family raises him with conflicting messages. His mother and grandmother indulge him as a child and feed him rich culinary delights. Despite the boy’s tendency to daydream and his general lack of motivation, the women of the family foresee great possibilities in him. Kulfi, his mother, has always walked around in a bit of a trance, but during her pregnancy with Sampath she begins to crave elaborate meals that she has never even seen. Her appetite, ostensibly for food, is also for passion and individuation, and its ferocity alarms others. In contrast, Kulfi’s husband, a government worker, urges caution and studies guides on pregnancy, but he cannot stop his ravenously hungry wife. Soon, as in Desai’s second novel, the wife/mother is essentially written off as foolish. Kulfi, like Nimi, the judge’s wife in The Inheritance of Loss, loses status and is reduced to an inconsequential presence whom no one takes seriously. The narrative hints, though, that these women may have more contact with the spirit world than those around them. Sampath’s father, in almost cartoonish contrast, has traditional dreams for his son. He expects academic achievement, but Sampath’s report cards remain regularly and comically filled with “so many red F’s the letter seemed to have
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KIRAN DESAI reminiscent of José Arcadio Buendía’s situation in García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, bound to a chestnut tree for years because his family and village doubt his sanity. In the beginning of Hullabaloo, a tree also figures prominently: Just as the monsoon begins, ending the drought, and Sampath is born, a Swedish relief plane drops a bounty of supplies in a jamun tree. The villagers mob it, scavenging for sugar and tea, for powdered milk and biscuits that seem to have grown magically from the tree itself. When a crowd gathers to observe Sampath in his guava tree, he first resents the interruption of his solitude. Soon, though, he begins to call down questions to specific villagers, revealing information he had gleaned by reading the mail at his former job. For example, he reveals the whereabouts of a family’s buried jewels and advises a man against continuing secretly using hair oil. Astonished, the villagers begin to regard him as a sage, a baba, or a holy man. People begin flocking to him for advice, for direction in matters ranging from romantic love to handling a son who keeps “bad company.” Sampath’s responses soon become more pensive, often invoking shibboleths, as well as injecting his illicit knowledge of the people’s personal affairs. “Add lemons to milk and it will grow sour,” he tells the mother of a son with corrupting friends. “But add some sugar, madam, and Wah! how good that milk will taste.ѧ You yourself know you behaved just like your son when you were young” (Hullabaloo, pp. 74–75).
good advice, superstition, and genuine spiritual devotion. Desai capitalizes on this by introducing into the carnival “a disguised spy from the Atheist Society (AS) and a member of the Branch to Uncover Fraudulent Holy Men (BUFHM)” (p. 93). Sampath’s father, though initially mystified by his son’s new “profession,” soon capitalizes on his popularity. He generates advertising and cuts deals with rickshaw and bus drivers. After Mr. Chawla rents out the family’s home, he moves them to the orchard and arranges electricity and water. When pilgrims pour onto the site, Mr. Chawla charges for blessings from his son. Soon the enterprising father begins to speak of arranging a marriage for Sampath. It is difficult, considering the circumstances, to produce a potential bride, but they persevere. In a witty homage to Jane Austen, the omniscient narrator observes: It is necessary at some point for every family with a son to acquire a daughter-in-law. This girl who is to marry the son of the house must come from a good family.ѧ She should be fair-complexioned, but if she is dark the dowry should include at least one of the following items: a television set, a refrigerator, a Godrej steel cupboard and maybe even a scooter. (p. 57)
Sampath’s situation poses limits, of course, so his family is able to arrange only for a visit with a dark-complexioned, skinny young woman from a modest family. And in one of the novel’s more far-fetched scenes, the potential bride arrives with her family on a public bus. She bravely climbs up the tree to meet Sampath but startles him with her touch and ends up tumbling down. In contrast to the tentative potential bride, Sampath’s sister Pinky aggressively woos the Hungry Hop Kwality Ice Cream vendor, whom she meets in the orchard. In her enthusiasm she inadvertently injures the object of her affection twice—even biting off his ear. In response, the young man’s family attempts to shield him from the odd young woman, but Pinky perseveres. Her overt aggression contrasts with her brother’s passive flouting of conventions. The siblings make good foils for each other as well as extreme
COMMON WISDOM, COURTSHIP, AND RELIGION
Desai’s clever use of intercepted letters hints of E. M. Forster and even Shakespeare. Both the letters and snippets of common wisdom, inserted like messages into fortune cookies, add a knowing and humorous chorus to the narrative, as well as an outside commentary on the central characters. In this way, Desai demonstrates the role of gossip in a small town as well as the people’s willingness to believe in local figures as vessels of spirit and faith. In the melee, suddenly it becomes hard to distinguish among simple
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KIRAN DESAI examples of modern offspring in traditional Indian families. Pinky also shows a marked contrast to her dreamy mother and embodies more of her father’s general stubbornness. She goes so far as to urge the Hungry Hop boy to elope with her in the final scene but suddenly feels disgust when she believes him to be caught by the army, which is doubling as monkey catchers. Within moments she transfers her affections to a brigadier whose buttocks she finds alluring. Though exaggerated, Pinky is one of the few completely self-assured women in either of Desai’s books. She exudes confidence and refuses to compromise herself for anyone or anything. Perhaps her family’s preoccupation with her brother offers her more liberty. Some critics have expressed preference for Pinky’s unpredictable story over her brother’s, saying that it is more energetic and diverting. At first Sampath and his family seem to control the circuslike scene in the orchard and nearby community, but a band of liquor-loving monkeys soon appears. Cavorting and harassing people—they steal the dentures of Sampath’s grandmother while she is eating ice cream—the silver langurs represent disorder. They purport to protect Sampath, the faux baba, but they end up frightening his family and followers. Soon they bite two men drinking alcohol in the orchard, and an article about rabies appears in the newspaper. The focus shifts from Sampath to the freewheeling and sometimes savage monkeys. A symbol of anarchy or revolution, they adhere to no moral or ethical system and appear to advocate a return to “native” control. Despite the monkeys’ shenanigans, some of the pilgrims at the scene fear for the animals’ safety and assemble a Monkey Protection Society. With the competing concerns of the crowd in the orchard—political, personal, religious, cultural—Desai creates an exaggerated glimpse of small-town India attempting to confront a modern global society. Colonialism still exists but in more subtle, less conventional forms.
army’s headquarters, business dwindles and everyone begins to focus on them and their derailing of Sampath and his supposed mysticism. Desperate, Sampath’s father trains the local army and police to become monkey catchers and to cart them to a distant forest. He even sets a date for them to strike—the last day of April. The district collector, the local administrative official, agrees to the plan chiefly because it “involved no guns, no religious matters, no business interests that he could see” (p. 179). But by this time Sampath has developed a fondness for the monkeys, whom he sees as bodyguards, and he now distrusts the crowd. No longer relishing his interactions with the visitors, who parrot his adages, sometimes out of context, Sampath realizes that he has become as symbiotic with the impish creatures as the tree. “I will not live without the monkeys,” he declares, but nobody seems to believe him (p. 181). He longs for the serene orchard, unsullied by advertisements and garbage. He believes his soul to have been co-opted. In this sense, Sampath has tired of gimmicks and travesty and transformed at last into a man of sincerity. In a graceful epiphanic moment before the monkey catchers arrive, Sampath reflects with true, hard-earned wisdom on his situation and begins to slip into a transcendental state: He could not feel the trunk of his body anymore, but his senses were not numbed. They grew sharper and he was acutely aware of every tiny sound, every scent and rustle in the night: the stirrings of a mouse in the grass, the wings of a faraway bat, the beckoning scent that drew the insects to hover and buzz somewhere beyond the orchard. Underground, he could hear water gurgling, could hear it being drawn into the trees about him; he heard the breathing of the leaves and the movements of the sleeping monkeys. (p. 203)
Sampath’s mother, meanwhile, is captivated by the idea of cooking a monkey. The night before the monkey catchers are due to arrive, Kulfi assembles a simmering cauldron of gravy. Her plan is to direct the fall of one of the monkeys right into the pot, and drown it “immediately away from attention into a delicious gravy” (p. 200). The bewitching aroma distracts the officials as
TRANSCENDENTAL BABA
As the monkeys grow bolder, raiding liquor stores and holding top secret documents ransom in the
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KIRAN DESAI they arrive, and they are not the only characters fixated on food in the final chaotic scene. The Hungry Hop boy, who is supposed to elope that day with Pinky, has recently been introduced to a young woman his family would like him to marry and who physically reminds him of desserts. She is so pale and plump that the Hungry Hop boy thinks of her as “Miss Pudding and Cake” (p. 198).
fantastic. It reads very much like a folktale or a fairy tale so I think it has different sides, different words can be used to describe it.” Though not as layered, expansive, or intricately told as Desai’s second novel, Hullabaloo remains an insightful portrayal of conflict among generations and an insouciant questioning of Indian customs and beliefs, particularly in a time of growing political correctness. The legacy of colonialism and shifting Indian traditions, which Desai explores more realistically and intensely in The Inheritance of Loss, also makes ample fodder for her more satirical and lighter first novel.
Predictably, the army and police bumble their attempts to net the monkeys, but they also run into a greater, more puzzling obstacle: Sampath is missing, or at least he appears to be. When Mr. Chawla ascends to Sampath’s platform in the tree, he finds his son’s cot empty. At least it appears to be, except for an overly large guava with a birthmark on its side reminiscent of Sampath’s own. The monkeys surround the bizarre, weathered guava almost like wise men. Sampath’s grandmother is the first to suspect the metamorphosis, but it’s too late; the monkeys spirit away the transformed Sampath. They travel with him through the trees, eluding the family, devotees, army, and police. Soon the crowd hears a crack, a howl, and a watery splash. They then notice a broken branch above the awaiting cauldron of Sampath’s mother, which contains its spices and seasonings, herbs, fruit, and delicious gravy. Sampath, or his guava manifestation, has likely ended up in the pot. The ending—which disappointed some critics because it departs from Sampath’s consciousness and seems to deny him ultimate purposeful action—borrows a bit from Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”: an unhappy clerk whose family depends on him has retreated into a grotesque manifestation. In heavy metaphorical terms, Sampath, or at least his spirit, has also returned to his mother’s waters and fanciful imagination. According to Desai, the novel’s genesis came from the news story of an actual hermit who dwelled in a tree in India. Though Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard has clear elements of comedy and fable as well as magical realism, Desai, herself, in an interview on the Random House Web site, declines to characterize her first novel as belonging to a particular genre: “It is a comedy and it is satiric in many ways, I think, and it’s
Published when she was twenty-five and on a leave from her master of fine arts program at Columbia University, Desai’s first novel solidly established her literary reputation. In 1998, the Society of Authors gave it the Betty Trask Award for a first novel written by a citizen of the British Commonwealth under the age of thirty-five.
THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS: A “HALF-ANDHALF” NOVEL
The Inheritance of Loss begins with an epigraph, “Boast of Quietness,” a poem written by the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges. “Sure of my life and my death,” says the speaker, “I observe the ambitious and would like to understand them.” The poem, which explores ideas of homeland and identity, makes an apt introduction to the novel. “My name is someone and anyone,” the speaker says near the end, and the sentiment could be applied to several key characters and their situations in The Inheritance of Loss. The novel, which the author spent nine years writing, takes place primarily in three countries—India, England, and the United States—but encompasses others as well. The protagonists, who are initially ambitious, soon have difficulty deciding their allegiances to cultures, language, governments, and even family. Constantly in flux, they find themselves returning to a common feeling of dissatisfaction and longing. As the speaker in the Borges poem says, “My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty.”
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KIRAN DESAI While Sai and Biju narrate mostly from the immediate present of 1986, the older narrators, Justice Jemubhai Popatlal Patel and Panna Lal, his Hindi cook, often come to the reader through memories. Though the aged men hail from different regions and castes, both reflect on the cultural, economic, and religious shifts they have witnessed in their country. The men’s memories provide an often grim history of India. To reassure and inspire themselves, the older men look to Sai and Biju, respectively. The judge, who was modeled in part on Desai’s paternal grandfather, sees Sai as an unexpected kindred spirit, someone he loves second only to Mutt, his coddled red setter. In his granddaughter, the judge hopes to find redemption for the punishing distance he put between his wife and daughter, Sai’s mother. The cook, who was modeled on the longtime cook of the Desai family, has devoted his adult life to raising his son and caring for the judge. Despite numerous setbacks in his own life, the cook hopes that Biju will achieve prosperity in the States and eventually provide him with grandchildren and allow him to retire. As with Sai and Biju, the older men find that their desires are unrealistic, but they, unlike the younger narrators, also end up embarrassed by their naivete, their uncharacteristic lack of caution, and indulgence of hope. All of the characters achieve greater self-knowledge, each at a severe cost, but only two, the cook and his son, find redemption and acceptance. Even their happy reunion, though, at the end of the novel may not be enough to buoy the relentlessly realistic book.
As well as winning the Man Booker Prize in 2006, the novel also won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of Publishers Weekly’s best books of the year. Dividing its time and focus in several key ways, it opens in Kalimpong but, switching regularly to New York, Inheritance also moves between the memories of different Indian generations and social classes. Speaking of the various locales in the novel, Desai herself has called it a “completely half-andhalf book” (Akhond of Swat), but she might as well also be addressing the deft way that she offers different sides of a vital, complicated story. Inheritance has four main narrators—two older and two younger—who serve as parallels and foils for one another. The young narrator with whom the book begins and ends is Sai Mistry, a seventeen-year-old Indian girl who lost her parents to a bus accident when she was seven. Orphaned, Sai was sent from the English convent school, where she had been since she was a baby, to live in the Himalayas with her grandfather, a retired judge. While there in Kalimpong, she becomes involved with Gyan, her Nepalese tutor, in a relationship that enthralls but also disillusions her. The romance ends up teaching her dramatically about the connections of personal relationships to larger, political concerns. Biju, the novel’s other young narrator, who is twenty-two, is the son of the judge’s cook. After managing to wrangle a visa to America, he remains in the country illegally and works a series of degrading jobs with other undocumented immigrants. At the beginning of the book, both Sai and Biju are presented as believing that their passion for travel will allow them to redefine themselves. Sai speculates romantically about her boyfriend and the wider world: One of her favorite books is Wuthering Heights, and a prized possession is an inflatable globe she ordered from National Geographic. Biju, though more practical, still maintains, for much of the novel, ideals about the United States and the possibilities of immigrant life there. Both younger narrators inevitably become jaded, but their early optimism lends energy to the novel, as well as a final sense of pathos.
CULTURAL THEFT AND CIVIL SERVICE
Inheritance opens with a robbery that sets the framework for a story that traces the roots of political and cultural discord. While the bulk of the novel does not contain many overtly threatening situations, its intense reflections and detailed scenes of everyday lives suggest a more insidious kind of struggle—between classes, races, and sexes. At the beginning of the book, one afternoon in February 1986, several young revolutionaries from an Indian-Nepalese liberation group storm
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KIRAN DESAI the Himalayan residence of Sai and her grandfather. They come in search of weapons, the reader learns, especially the judge’s hunting rifles from his days in the Indian Civil Service (ICS), but the rifles, which the young rogues have likely heard of through gossip with Gyan, are badly rusted. The rest of the judge’s possessions prove equally pathetic: a cheap folding chair, back issues of National Geographic; even the liquor under lock and key has turned to vinegar. Frustrated, the “ragtag army” (Inheritance, p. 4) demands tea and mocks the judge. They order the elderly man to say “I am a fool” and to quote the rallying cry of Nepalese power harkening back to the 1700s, “Jai Gorkha.ѧ Gorkhaland for Gorkhas” (p. 8). The verbal harassment might be predictable and even banal, but it has special significance for the judge. Ever since he was a young man, he has been an outsider to most of those around him and even to himself at times. Born Jemubhai Popatlal Patel, young Jemu was raised by his peasant family, who nursed ambitious dreams for their son. While studying at Cambridge (an opportunity financed by his wealthy bride’s family), he regularly suffered racial persecution. Mocked or ignored by most of the British, Jemu studied ceaselessly but internalized his foreign status:
been made “in accordance with attempts to Indianize the service” (p. 129). After the addition, which includes Jemu’s name at the bottom, the new member of the ICS goes back to his rented room and weeps for three days. Relieved and also terrified of the future, Jemu telegraphs home the message: “Result unequivocal.” The phrase confuses his family and village, who believe that all words with the English prefix “un” are negative. The confusion is emblematic: By studying abroad and distinguishing himself, Jemu distances himself from his homeland. In excelling professionally, he seems to undo his status as a true native. For instance, when he returns home, he mystifies his family by using a powder puff to lighten his face. The relatives have never encountered such a thing—there is not even a word for it in Gujerati, his native language. Like Sai, his future granddaughter, the judge discovers over the years that he has no true language. Working for the ICS, for years he heard cases in Hindi, which were recorded in Urdu and translated, in turn, into English by the judge. With all the layers of translation, it is difficult to know how well the matters had been treated: “Nobody could be sure how much of the truth had fallen between languages, between languages and illiteracy; the clarity that justice demanded was nonexistent” (pp. 69–70).
Thus Jemubhai’s mind had begun to warp; he grew stranger to himself than he was to those around him, found his own skin odd-colored, his own accent peculiar.ѧ He began to wash obsessively, concerned that he would be accused of smelling, and each morning he scrubbed off the thick milky scent of sleep, the barnyard smell that wreathed him when he woke and impregnated the fabric of his pajamas. To the end of his life, he would never be seen without socks and shoes and would prefer shadow to light, faded days to sunny, for he was suspicious that sunlight might reveal him, in his hideousness, all too clearly.
The judge projects his self-loathing onto Nimi, his bewildered young wife. Like Kulfi, Sampath’s mother in Hullabaloo, Nimi is dismissed as frivolous by her husband and his family. Having been sheltered by her affluent family, Nimi was married at fourteen to Jemu, who was twenty at the time, but because they married shortly before the future judge left for Cambridge, the couple knew each other only briefly and had their single moment of happiness riding together on a bicycle through cow pastures. After the judge returns from England, Nimi confuses and enrages him. Going through her husband’s things, she discovers his powder puff, a foreign—and fascinating—object to her. She decides to keep it, and the judge decides she has stolen it. The two quarrel, setting up an explosive dynamic from which they never recover. The culminating event in their breakup occurs several
(p. 45)
In 1942, Jemu finally joined the ICS—the first person ever to do so from his region—but the process and announcement were grueling. In a cruel satire of political correctness, the official results of the civil service test do not list Jemu’s name among those to be hired. Then, moments later, an official announces that an addition has
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KIRAN DESAI years later when Nimi unwittingly harms the judge’s reputation by attending a welcome party for Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India. Nimi, who had never heard of the prominent leader in the Indian independence movement, had gone along innocently, at the behest of a local congressman’s wife. Her most vivid memory of the event was being offered scrambled eggs and toast, which she could not eat in all the confusion. The commissioner of the civil service finds out that Jemubhai’s wife attended the controversial event and scolds him, blocking any future promotion. After berating his wife, Jemu beats her: “the anger, once released, like a genie from a bottle, could never again be curtailed” (p. 335).
prayer and is moved, at last, to scour his conscience. His only emotional attachments are to Mutt and Sai and, to a lesser extent, the cook. He once had a friend, Bose, from England, but had been oddly embarrassed by Bose’s campaign to get Indian ICS workers paid the same as white employees. The judge, who plays chess against himself, has refused to relinquish control over much more than the preparation of his tea, and even that he scrutinizes. Yet when the Nepalese thieves make off with souvenirs of his successful days, as well as his granddaughter’s travel trunk, the judge is prompted to remember his own difficult journeys. He has isolated himself not only from his family but from colleagues and neighbors too. Because of his work with several languages and cultural systems, the judge has become impossible for others to categorize. Almost everyone around him views him distantly and sometimes suspiciously. Disdain even follows him to his retirement in the Himalayas.
Fearing that he might kill his wife, the following spring the judge sends her, three months pregnant, to live with her sister and disdainful brother-in-law. Nimi remains permanently with her sister’s family, and the banishment shames them all. When her daughter is born, a telegram is sent to the judge, but he does not invite his wife and daughter back to live with him. The girl, who will later become Sai’s mother, is consigned to convent boarding schools. Eventually, as a college student, she elopes with Sai’s father, who was raised in a Zoroastrian orphanage. Later they travel to Moscow, where Sai’s father, a member of the Indian air force, works with the Indo-USSR space program until he and his wife are run over by a bus filled with craftswomen and their nesting babushka dolls. The couple’s romance and untimely death, though intriguing and probably meant to be humorous allegory, are recounted too quickly to be convincing, one of the few such insufficient passages in the novel.
The judge’s emotional seclusion is mirrored in his house—improbably built by a romantic Scotsman and falling into disrepair under the judge’s residence. In 1986, when the Nepalese rebels invade his house, the judge’s deteriorated status is announced by the shabby state of the once grand mansion. When local police officers arrive at the sprawling postcolonial home, they barely contain their curiosity and scorn as they conduct a desultory inspection: “They surveyed the downfall of wealth with satisfaction, and one of the policemen kicked a shaky apparatus of pipes leading from the jhora stream, bandaged here and there with sopping rags” (p. 13).
By contrast the judge’s rage because of his wife’s accidental attendance at the Nehru event is vividly believable, humiliating him and galvanizing his abiding resentment. We do not learn of this pivotal event, though, until late in the novel, when the emotionally rigid judge reflects on it at an ironic, vital moment: His beloved dog has gone missing, stolen by a beggar family whom the judge refused to help. With the disappearance of the glamorous red setter, the judge kneels in
RECIPES AND MEMORIES
In contrast to the judge, who irritates the police with his arrogance but also intimidates them, the cook at first impresses the local authorities with his modesty and piety. The police notice the outdoor altar the cook has built to ask the pardon of some snakes that had bitten him when he defecated in “their” section of the yard. The police soon lose respect, though, when they
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KIRAN DESAI inspect the Hindi cook’s spare living quarters: “The respect on the policemen’s faces collapsed instantly when they arrived at the cook’s hut buried under a ferocious tangle of nightshade” (p. 15). Known for taking bribes, they realize that the cook, like the judge, will offer them nothing, and they gratuitously ransack the humble man’s meager dwelling. Still, the cook perseveres after the incident, tirelessly preparing meals for the demanding judge, offering company and guidance to Sai, and distilling bootleg liquor. Above all he values his son, Biju, and his efforts in the United States.
ism, screaming slavery, screaming mining companies screaming banana companies oil companies screaming CIA spy among the missionaries screaming ѧ” (pp. 148–149). The cook and his son remind the reader of the urgency of sustenance and nurturing. Desai, whose earlier novel awarded cuisine a primary role, traces her obsession with cooking to her own experience with her family’s cook, on whom she modeled the cook in Inheritance. In “Sacred Chow,” an essay on food and memory in the February 10, 2008, issue of the New York Times Magazine, Desai reflects on her family’s former cook, Saratbhai, and his talents and his fierce dedication to his craft and to her family. Though contrary at times and jealous of the family’s affections, Saratbhai offered tenderness and guidance to the family’s two daughters. When Desai, as a girl, would experiment with difficult dishes such as soufflés, the cook responded with exasperation but also a knowing resignation. Desai notes that her lack of respect for precious resources such as eggs scandalized the man, and his frugality educated the future author about the importance of preparing meals with care. Desai never mastered soufflés, she admits, returning to reading instead, but acknowledges that her early experiences with Saratbhai were formative and later made her into a writer “whose work spilled over with food metaphors, long dinners and difficult cooks—as if she were still desperate to get into the kitchen.”
The cook provides an obvious contrast to the judge. The two have been together for years, though each constantly disappoints the other. The cook had hoped to work for a white man, as had his father, and the judge’s diminished fortune embarrasses him: “He had found that there was nothing so awful as being in the service of a family you couldn’t be proud of, that let you down, showed you up, and made you into a fool” (p. 62). In turn, the judge is never satisfied with the cook’s preparation of tea, but he savors his legendary puddings. In fact, when the judge first interviewed the cook for his job, the cook’s father bragged that his son could make a different pudding for every day of the year. Desai here runs together a list of more than seventy-five kinds of puddings, most of Anglo origin, ranging from “Bananafritterpineapplefritterapplefritter ѧ” to “ѧ peachupsidedownraisinupsidedown” (p. 72). The list, recited aloud by the cook’s father, playfully departs from the generally conventional narrative. Desai employs a similar list in a section focusing on Biju. Landed in New York and moving among poorly paid positions in the restaurant business, Biju does a stint at Brigitte’s in the city’s financial district. In the morning, the owners, Odessa and Baz, drinking Indian tea, read the New York Times, and the international news, with its “overwhelming” range of subjects: “Former slaves and natives. Eskimos and Hiroshima people, Amazonian Indians and Chiapas Indians and Chilean Indians and American Indians and Indian Indians ѧ” (p. 148). The list, in a sly echo of the dessert recitation, even manages to stretch to “Zaireans coming at you screaming colonial-
Reading Desai’s essay about her relationship with the cook translates easily into scenes with Sai and Panna Lal, the cook in the novel. In Inheritance, he eventually admits to betraying the judge by not keeping better track of the dog and skimming off the top of the household income, as well as eating from the same pot of rice as the family. Still, though he is unprepared for Sai’s entry into the household, when she arrives, he welcomes her and comes to offer her the same kind of unconditional love he gives his own son. For her first dinner, he makes a motorcar out of mashed potatoes with tomato slices for wheels. The gesture demonstrates the cook’s attention to detail and the way he communicates love through food. He shows similar focus and
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KIRAN DESAI concern about Biju’s reports of jobs in American restaurants. Though the cook is proud of his immigrant son, he remains circumspect when he hears about his array of jobs, not wanting him to violate basic cultural laws by working with beef or “mixing” with Pakistanis. Panna Lal shows keen interest in his son’s world and in his well-being, knowing nothing of the miserable conditions under which Biju often works. Literally and metaphorically, the cook sustains the people and creatures around him. His own life has been difficult—he grew up in poverty; he lost his wife when she fell from a tree while gathering leaves to feed the goat. It was an accident, but, Desai writes, “it was just fate in the way fate has of providing the destitute with a greater quota of accidents for which nobody can be blamed” (p. 15). The cook manages to maintain his sense of hope and dignity, and this is reflected in his human interactions and pursuit of his craft. In a quiet but telling scene, he goes to buy rice at a local market stall. When he asks the daughter of the owner if the rice is clean, she answers honestly that it is full of little stones. She recommends that he try the atta instead, and the cook thinks contentedly that “money wasn’t everything. There was that simple happiness of looking after someone and having someone look after you” (p. 95). The cook allows himself to dream extravagantly about his son’s future, but at the end of the novel, when Biju returns home penniless and wounded, not quite the Prodigal Son, the cook welcomes him. The situation is harsh and absurd. Biju has been robbed and is clad now only in a woman’s nightgown. At first Sai mistakes him for a beggar woman whom the judge had earlier refused to assist. And the cook has recently admitted his sins to the judge, imploring him for a punitive beating—which the judge characteristically agrees to carry out. But when Biju arrives the cook forgets his endless troubles, his muddled future. “Pitaji?” calls out Biju, meaning “Daddy?” and it is one of the sole uses of an endearment in the novel besides those showered on the dog. As Sai watches, the father and son “leap” at each other, their union seeming to prompt the five
peaks of Kanchenjunga, or Mount Everest, to turn “golden” with “luminous light” and even “truth” (p. 357).
A NEW “GLOBAL” GENERATION
Sai throughout the novel observes the relationship with some jealousy and hungers for sources of hope. She is young and romantic but also bright and insightful. The combination is not always a comfortable one, and she frequently finds herself trying to figure out not just her identity but her larger purpose. Sai, with whom the novel opens as she peruses an old National Geographic article on giant squid, loves to read and longs to travel. Like her grandfather, she lacks a true native culture—she speaks mostly English and some broken Hindi with the cook— and is as inclined to celebrate Christmas as she is the Hindu festival Diwali, an attitude that eventually earns her lover Gyan’s scorn. Young and having had few role models, Sai is vulnerable to the opinions and attitudes of the older people around her. When she is not with the indulgent cook or Gyan, her taciturn tutor, she spends most of her time in the company of four quirky retirees. Wearing her hair in pigtails and sometimes donning a “Free Tibet” T-shirt, Sai accompanies the women and their friends to the local Gymkhana Club and soaks up their myriad opinions on politics and culture. Lola and Noni, two Indian sisters who appear to love all things Anglo, reside in a rosecovered cottage they call Mon Ami. The older women, one of whom has tutored Sai until she could no longer keep up in the sciences, love to banter. Along with their friends Uncle Potty and Father Booty, the sisters often tend toward caricatures. As with some of Biju’s cohorts in New York City, they remain one-dimensional in certain attitudes, and Desai uses these scenes to inject humor and occasional bald satire. In one conversation often noted by critics, Lola dismisses V. S. Naipaul’s novel A Bend in the River, a book that Desai has cited as being tremendously influential but that Lola, her character, denigrates as “stuck in the past,” saying that Naipaul has “never freed himself” from “colonial neurosis.”
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KIRAN DESAI As if to prove that India is fully freed from the effects of colonialism, Lola goes on to mention that “chicken tikka masala has replaced fish and chips as the number one take-out in Britain” (p. 52). Lola offers other opportunities for humorous commentary on the serious themes of the novel. That her daughter, Pixie, is a reporter for the BBC gives her frequent cause to brag. But the omniscient narrator adds slyly that when Indians hear the voice of Pixie or Piyali Bannerji “announced in pucca British accent,” they laugh so hard their stomachs ache (p. 53).
illegally for many years, neglecting to renew his visa. The priest is deported, and his land ceded to a Nepali doctor who plans to open a lucrative nursing home. As Sai angrily observes the deportation of the priest, she blames both the Nepalese insurgency and Gyan, whom she saw the same day marching in a parade of revolutionaries. Father Booty, she decides, has been sacrificed for an angry cause: This was Gyan’s doing, she thought. This is what he had done and what people like him were doing in the name of decency and education, in the name of hospitals for Nepalis and management positions. In the end, Father Booty, lovable Father Booty who, frankly, had done much more for development in the hills than any of the locals, and without screaming or waving kukris, Father Booty was to be sacrificed.
Sai might not always agree with the sisters and their perspectives, but she listens and observes carefully. She also absorbs the opinions of Father Booty, a Swiss priest and former dairy farmer, and Uncle Potty, a neighboring farmer. Uncle Potty is a good-natured alcoholic, and Father Booty often drinks with him. The two are rumored to enjoy dancing together. They regularly accompany the sisters and Sai to the Gymkhana Club, where they dine and check out library books. Desai rescues these characters from flatness by offering them moments of conflict and self-realization. Sai, and Biju in the United States, learn through these moments that they cannot entirely dismiss or idealize the people around them. Even the more florid personalities, they find, resist categorization.
(p. 244)
BURNING OF THE INDO-NEPAL TREATY
The only young person Sai associates with is Gyan. Through him she reluctantly begins to understand the division between classes and cultures. Though the two initially enjoy each other, Gyan grows irritated at Sai’s relative privilege and her seeming lack of cultural allegiance. When the Gorkha movement heats up, culminating in a riot to burn the Indo-Nepal treaty of 1950, Gyan cannot ignore his roots, and he rejects Sai. Heartsick, Sai walks to his home, an hour away from her own. Sai has never pondered her lover’s background and is shocked to discover that he lives in a squatter settlement with a large family—“The house didn’t match Gyan’s talk, his English, his looks, his clothes, or his schooling. It didn’t match his future” (p. 280). She realizes that his whole family has sacrificed for Gyan’s future, as has Biju’s. Sai also begins to understand that her romance with Gyan cannot continue, but not because she is lacking or unattractive in some way: “‘You hate me,’ said Sai, as if she’d read his thoughts, ‘for big reasons that have nothing to do with me. You aren’t being fair’” (p. 285). Sai traces her heartbreak and confusion to the robbery of her house at the beginning of the
Lola, who panics when she hears of the robbery at Cho Oyu and suddenly distrusts her Nepali servant, later has a Flannery O'Connor–style moment of confrontation with potential violence: She and her sister end up “hostessing” by force some revolutionaries in her home when they demand lodging. Lola and Noni survive even this threat, however, and emboldened, Lola spouts off to the police when they arrive later, seeking information. Father Booty also meets with conflict when he is forced from his home and country of many years because of a photograph he took of a butterfly. The priest, who had peacefully run his dairy farm, is stunned when the police confiscate his camera and deem an innocent photograph evidence of a security threat— the butterfly happened to have been on a bridge. When the police raid the priest’s modest home, they discover that he has remained in the country
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KIRAN DESAI novel, but of course the cultural strife dates back long before the incident. By the end of the novel, though, she begins to act more independently and practically. She remembers her hopes and longings, but they recede into echos. Gyan also draws insight from the surprise visit of Sai to his house. Perhaps emboldened by being on his own turf, the young man realizes that rejecting Sai has allowed him a way to “define the conflict in his life that he felt all along” (p. 284).
less than minimum wage because he offers him “free lodgings”—filthy quarters beneath the restaurant. Though happy to work in an establishment influenced by Hindu culture, Biju soon finds that American custom—and capitalism—guide the business first and foremost. At times HarishHarry strives to be fair to his workers and respectful of his own culture, but he wavers when confronted with seemingly progressive American ideals. Harish-Harry even attempts to bridge the cultural gap in Indian and American parenting. When his daughter gets a nose ring and talks back to him, he first slaps her, but the punishment has no effect. Next he attempts encouragement, American-style, saying, “You GO, ghurllll!!!” (p. 165). Harish-Harry represents competing instincts, as his name indicates. Biju learns that his boss supports ventures such as cow shelters, “in case the Hindu version of the afterlife turned out to be true” (p. 164), but he also heeds the call of commercialism and American power and success. The dichotomy makes increasing sense to Biju.
“LUCKIEST BOY IN THE WHOLE WORLD”
Biju, the novel’s other young man, finds New York to be a struggle. When he first receives his visa—on the basis of a fabricated story and falsified bank statement—he believes himself to be “the luckiest boy in the whole world” (p. 205). Walking around in a happy daze in an Indian park, Biju is barely cognizant of the raw sewage being used to water the lawn. In the States, however, he learns about the poverty of developing nations. Working for a string of mediocre restaurants, he observes hierarchies he has never noticed before, and he gains insights into the collective immigrant struggle.
Through Biju’s work with food, he understands the complexities of cultural assimilation. In a scene critics have commented on, Biju delivers food to female Indian college students, who are discussing the merits of getting involved with non-Indian men. They speak flippantly and end up offering Biju two kinds of tips: money and the advice to buy a warm muffler for the winter. Biju does not know if the young women are taunting him or trying to demonstrate cultural brotherhood. He stands on the threshold, feeling a mixture of “hunger, respect, loathing” (p. 57). Desai writes acerbically of the way the college girls flip between cultures: “They were poised; they were impressive; in the United States, where luckily it was still assumed that Indian women were downtrodden, they were lauded as extraordinary—which had the unfortunate result of making them even more of what they already were” (p. 56).
Biju’s living conditions barely exceed those of his father’s hut. Poverty, while not always as obvious as in India, exists everywhere he goes. The main difference between his life in India and in the States during his three years there is the variety of people he encounters, the panoply of ethnicities and cultures. At first Biju is astonished by the array of other immigrants he meets, but he realizes they share the common strife to rise above poverty: “There was a whole world in the basement kitchens of New York” (p. 24). Biju, like Sai, gives up his ideals. He is influenced by the characters around him, but more out of fascination than desire for sustained emotional connection. Harish-Harry and Saeed Saeed, two other immigrants whom he meets, defy the typical trajectory into poverty, and both tend toward caricature. Biju is amazed by their outlooks and the élan with which they avoid common traps for immigrants. Harish-Harry, owner of the Gandhi Cafe, employs Biju but pays him
Saeed Saeed, an immigrant from Zanzibar, struggles less with his self-image and cultural loyalty. Despite having been deported two years
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Selected Bibliography
before during a raid by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, he remains optimistic and enthusiastic about his adopted country. Tall and handsome, he attracts women of many cultures and eventually marries a white woman, not intending to stay with her, and he ultimately achieves citizenship under a false name. Based in part on a former roommate of Desai’s from Zanzibar, Saeed shows both callousness and practicality in his lively character. When fellow villagers arrive in New York and need his support, he is cautious and irritated. Outlandish in ways—Saeed owns twenty-five pairs of shoes, some in the wrong size—he also shows a shrewd and savvy understanding of how to achieve the American Dream. He even reads American selfhelp books.
WORKS OF KIRAN DESAI FICTION “The Sermon in the Guava Tree.” New Yorker, June 23, 1997, pp. 90–99. (Excerpt from Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard.) “Strange Happenings in the Guava Orchard.” Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing, 1947–1997. Edited by Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West. New York: Henry Holt, 1997. (Excerpt from Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard.) Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. London: Faber and Faber, 1998; New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998. (Quotations in this essay come from the Atlantic Monthly Press edition.) The Inheritance of Loss. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006; London: Hamish Hamilton, 2006; New York: Grove Press, 2006. (Quotations in this essay come from the Grove Press paperback edition.)
As with Harish-Harry, Biju does not approve all of his friend’s approaches to values and morality, but through him he learns the relentless determination and self-preservation needed to survive as an immigrant in America. Wounded and worried about his father during the IndoNepal troubles, Biju returns to his home country. He uses his savings to buy gifts to take home with him. After a circuitous journey, he buys a ride back to Kalimpong with soldiers of the Gorkha National Liberation Front. They rob him of the gifts, as well as his wallet, clothes, and shoes, which conceal the remainder of his savings. The soldiers’ predictable theft provides a final reminder to Biju of the indignities of immigration—as well as a return to the beginning of the novel. In the culminating scene, Biju comes back, broken, to a strife-filled fatherland but also to his loving father. The final scene of reconciliation offers a small sense of hope, the suggestion that leaving one’s homeland may not always be a cultural betrayal—or a commercial success. The human connection, the “center,” survives.
NONFICTION “Sacred Chow.” New York Times Magazine, February 10, 2008, p. 83. “Himalayan Beauty in Sikkim.” Travel & Leisure, March 2008, pp. 188–194. “Night Claims the Godavari.” In AIDS Sutra: Untold Stories from India. Edited by Negar Akhavi. Introduction by Bill and Melinda Gates. Photographs by Prashant Panjir. London: Vintage, 2008; New York: Anchor Books, 2008.
CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Hughes, Sarah. “Uncle Potty and Other Guides to the Truth.” Review of The Inheritance of Loss. Observer (London), September 3, 2006, p. 25. Jaffrey, Zia. “The Prophet in the Tree.” Review of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. New York Times Book Review, July 19, 1998, p. 45. “Kiran Desai.” In Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2007. (http://galenet.galegroup.com). (Available only by subscription.) Kirkus Reviews. Review of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. Kirkus Reviews 66:354 (March 15, 1998). Kirkus Reviews. Review of The Inheritance of Loss. Kirkus Reviews 73:1054 (October 1, 2005). Mishra, Pankaj. “Wounded by the West.” Review of The Inheritance of Loss. New York Times Book Review, February 12, 2006, p. 11. Mitra, Arnab. “Her Mother’s Daughter: Kiran Desai.” Business Today, January 13, 2008, p. 196.
Desai’s two novels have markedly different tones but both books focus on protagonists who struggle with issues of personal and political identity. Despite the main characters’ feelings of alientation, their attempts to make sense of their complicated legacies ultimately connect them.
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KIRAN DESAI Stevenson, Helen. “From the Tree of Prophecy.” Review of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. Saturday Comment. Guardian (London), June 6, 1998, p. 10.
National Book Critics Circle. “Critical Outtakes: Kiran Desai.” Critical Mass: The Blog of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors (http://bookcriticscircle. blogspot.com/2006/09/critical-outtakes-kiran-desai.html), September 19, 2006. Pilkington, Ed. “A Hullabaloo: In Hours, Kiran Desai Went from Virtual Unknown to Potential Booker Winner.” Saturday Comment. Guardian (London), September 16, 2006, p. 35. Publishers Weekly. Review of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. Publishers Weekly 245:77 (March 23, 1998). Publishers Weekly. Review of The Inheritance of Loss. Publishers Weekly 252:34 (October 24, 2005). Seaman, Donna. Review of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. Booklist, April 15, 1998, p. 1427. Seaman, Donna. Review of The Inheritance of Loss. Booklist, December 1, 2005, p. 26.
INTERVIEWS “In Conversation with Kiran Desai: Part I.” By Ira Pande. Akhond of Swat (http://akhondofswat.blogspot.com), August 31, 2007. “Interview with Kiran Desai.” Bold Type. (www. randomhouse.com). “Kiran Desai.” Current Biography (www.hwwilson.com), January 2007. “Kiran Desai: Exclusive Interview.” Perspective. (www. themanbookerprize.com). Smith, Dinitia. “A Writer Looks to Her History and Reaps an Award.” New York Times, October 26, 2006, p. E3.
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ATHOL FUGARD (1932—)
Edwin Hees ATHOL FUGARD IS the one South African dramatist indelibly associated with political resistance during the years of apartheid rule in South Africa. He has always insisted on the specifically local quality of his work, yet in 1985 Time magazine referred to him as “the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world” (p. 88). There has always been something paradoxical about Fugard’s life and work. As a privileged white South African in a racist society, he committed himself to giving a voice to the voiceless, disempowered, and disenfranchised majority black population in the country, yet his work has resonated profoundly with audiences all over the world—especially in the United States, where he now lives. The apartheid government withdrew his passport because of his perceived political activism, yet many political radicals during the years of the struggle for political liberation were deeply critical of his work. His plays are written in English—one of the two official languages in South Africa until 1994, the other being Afrikaans—but they have been understood as penetrating explorations of the Afrikaner psyche. The main characters in the plays are often crude, crass, emotionally stunted, deprived, and defeated in many ways—personally, psychologically, socially, politically—yet the thrust of the plays has tended to be hopeful, even if only minimally so and often merely by virtue of their acknowledgment of survival under the most appalling conditions. Being aware of these paradoxes may help to explain the distinctive quality of Fugard’s work. Fugard has never been comfortable with the label of political activist, but inevitably a writer with a social conscience who was writing under conditions of pervasive political, social, and cultural injustice would address the impact of these conditions on the human mind and body, often in completely literal ways.
Fugard’s central position in South African English drama for some four decades since the 1960s is beyond doubt, but his work no longer enjoys the prestige in South Africa that it had until the late 1980s. One partial explanation for this change in stature may be that his groundbreaking work—both in his self-authored texts and particularly in his collaborative workshop productions—made it possible for a vast number of previously suppressed voices to be heard on South African stages and a wide variety of other performance venues. Histories of South African theater (for example, by Martin Orkin, Temple Hauptfleisch, and Robert Kavanagh) all acknowledge Fugard’s influence—sympathetically from a liberal left position, more critically from a neoMarxist perspective—on contemporary theater practice in South Africa. (For a more critical response to the significance of Fugard’s work, see Mshengu [Robert Kavanagh], 1982.) His work has in many respects been in line with the most progressive practices in twentieth-century theater—particularly with reference to Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Peter Brook, and Jerzy Grotowski, for instance—and as such has attracted much critical commentary. The concept of apartheid and the decades of apartheid rule (1948–1994) are fundamental in any consideration of Fugard’s work. Racial segregation had been an integral part of the Dutch slave-owning culture and the British imperial presence in South Africa since the nineteenth century. With increasing industrialization and a rapidly expanding mining sector—the South African goldfields have proved to be the richest but also the most labor intensive in the world— the need for massive quantities of cheap labor increased dramatically, and the various rationalizations of racial inequality were drawn into the
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ATHOL FUGARD service of labor management. In 1948 (when Fugard was sixteen), the National Party came into power on an apartheid platform (the word literally means “separateness” in Afrikaans). Immediately legislation was introduced formalizing the looser segregationist practices already in existence; virtually every aspect of human experience was covered by rigidly defined and strictly implemented laws keeping clearly distinguished official racial groups separate from one another.
ing violence quickly escalating and spreading throughout the country. Fugard’s 1989 play, My Children! My Africa!, draws directly on these traumatic events, but it specifically also raises the issue of the long-term consequences of a collapsing education system. By the 1980s the whole social fabric of the country was under severe strain, and neither international condemnation and sanctions, nor the declaration of successive “states of emergency” (in effect giving the ruling party dictatorial powers), nor the supposed “reforms” introduced by the government seemed to lead to a stabilizing of the situation. By the late 1980s it became clear that the deadlock between a massive, increasingly mobilized but disempowered majority and an increasingly isolated and beleaguered but militarily powerful minority state had to be resolved in some way if a totally catastrophic and self-destructive engagement between these two forces was to be avoided. The early 1990s were years of critical negotiations between the National Party government and the now-unbanned ANC, with the first fully democratic elections that were ever held in South Africa taking place in 1994 and resulting in victory for the ANC.
In theory this was meant to ensure the “separate but equal development” of the respective “cultural” groups, but the injustice of the system quickly became evident in the grotesquely unequal distribution of resources, with the minority white population group drawing virtually all of the benefits of a rapidly expanding postwar economy. The black population groups—by far the majority of people in South Africa—became increasingly disenfranchised and disempowered, so that by the time the first violent resistance to the apartheid regime emerged in the early 1960s (as Fugard was launching his career as a major dramatist), the government was able to quell its opponents with ease; it was during this period that Nelson Mandela was jailed for life and his opposition party, the African National Congress (ANC)—was banned. Fugard and, especially, his black collaborators in the theater faced increased harassment from the security police. During these years, when the state seemed almost invincible, Fugard produced three workshop plays directly addressing the issue of legislation that violated basic human rights—two plays in collaboration with the actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona (Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, 1972, and The Island, 1972) and one with his close friend and associate Yvonne Bryceland (Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act, 1972).
It was actively within this context that Fugard undertook his work in the theater. While there was nothing particularly politically progressive or enlightened about his personal background, he became aware of the twisted nature of his society as a young man and early in his career began directing his energies at addressing the injustices that were now becoming enshrined in legislation. Although his work has been praised by moderate liberals, it has also been chastised by Marxistinspired radicals for not adopting a more overt, targeted, and explicit political stance against this hardening racist social organization. Fugard, however, was less interested in agitprop theater than in “bearing witness” to suffering and injustice; his work demonstrates more debt to the existentialist thinkers in Europe than to the welldeveloped and long tradition of European propaganda and resistance theater—although Brecht is certainly a key point of reference for him. An excerpt (covering August 1968) from his Notebooks, 1960–1977 (1983) captures something of
By 1976 it was becoming ever more difficult for the state to control the growing resistance to apartheid, especially among the black population, despite implementing increasingly repressive and indeed brutal strategies to do so. On June 16, 1976, a demonstration by black scholars in the Johannesburg township of Soweto, protesting compulsory education in Afrikaans, led to an aggressive response from the police, with the ensu-
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ATHOL FUGARD the ambivalence and poignancy of his dilemma as a “political” writer; his political sympathies and orientation were never in doubt, yet they were never expressed dramatically in terms of an abstract ideological system. For Fugard, rather, they were a carnal reality.
he comes to a fuller understanding of the man he became. In “Master Harold” ѧ and the Boys this process of self-discovery is dramatized as traumatic; in Cousins he can also see the past as more nurturing and fertile, not only in terms of the people he engaged with, but the books he read: he writes, for example, “More than anybody else I was to read it was Faulkner who gave me the courage to embrace, uncompromisingly, my identity as a regional writer” (p. 49). And the “regions” depicted in Fugard’s dramatic and symbolic landscapes are very much those of his early life.
BIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE
Stephen Gray’s groundbreaking compilation, Athol Fugard (1982), was the first major sustained study of Fugard as a pioneer in South African theater, and it remained highly influential for many decades. Two later full-length studies of Fugard’s life and work complement one another neatly: Russell Vandenbroucke’s Truths the Hand Can Touch: The Theatre of Athol Fugard (1985; published in South Africa in 1986) contains detailed information on Fugard’s life and specifically the incidents that impacted on his playwriting up to the time of “Master Harold” ѧ and the Boys (1982); Albert Wertheim’s The Dramatic Art of Athol Fugard: From South Africa to the World (2000) covers some of the same ground in the early chapters but takes the commentary up to the production of The Captain’s Tiger (1997) in postapartheid South Africa. The publication of Fugard’s Notebooks 1960–1977 made available an indispensable perspective on the plays written during that period; they were edited and prepared for publication by his longtime friend Mary Benson, who was herself an important figure in liberal resistance politics in South Africa. Benson wrote a memoir titled Athol Fugard and Barney Simon: Bare Stage, a Few Props, Great Theatre (1997), in which she recounts with great joy and satisfaction her friendship with Fugard and the one-time director of the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, Barney Simon. A more detailed personal account of some formative influences in Fugard’s life may be found in his Cousins: A Memoir (1994), in which Fugard describes his sometimes difficult relationships with two cousins in a way that provides a firsthand glimpse into the mind of an aspiring young writer, but it also shows the older dramatist “discovering,” as it were, the seeds of his later work in these early experiences. It is as if, by writing about his past,
Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard was born on June 11, 1932 in Middleburg, a small town in the Karoo, a semidesert region of South Africa that is in many ways the implicit background of almost all the plays. Although the family moved to the more industrialized coastal city of Port Elizabeth when “Hally” was still very young, this rather harsh and bleak physical environment remains a symbolic presence in his work. In his later life he bought a house in the very small and isolated Karoo town of Nieu Bethesda, where Helen Martins, the inspiration for The Road to Mecca (premiered 1984), used to live. The more desolate environs of Port Elizabeth are also the setting for many of Fugard’s major early plays— most notably The Blood Knot (first produced in 1961), Hello and Goodbye (1965), Boesman and Lena (1969), and Sizwe Bansi Is Dead (workshopped in the early 1970s). The later plays, A Lesson from Aloes (1978) and “Master Harold” ѧ and the Boys, are also set in Port Elizabeth, but even in these instances the settings could hardly be described as exuberantly urban: a cold, modest suburban home on which the security police are keeping a watchful and suspicious eye, in the first case, and a deserted little restaurant on a rainy day, in the second. Between 1950 and 1952 Fugard attended the University of Cape Town; his choice of subjects is revealing in the light of his later preoccupations in the theater: philosophy, social science, anthropology, and French. It is possible to trace Fugard’s concern with “bearing witness,” noted above, to his earliest intellectual preoccupations and specifically to the work of the French
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ATHOL FUGARD Algerian existentialist philosopher Albert Camus. Dennis Walder, one of the most consistently perceptive of the commentators on Fugard’s work, continually returns to the significance of this question of “bearing witness”; it is a pervasive theme in Walder’s second full-length study of Fugard (2003). Given Fugard’s attraction to existentialism, it is not surprising that Samuel Beckett is also often invoked to explain the dramatic quality of Fugard’s plays—harsh, bleak, but also deeply compassionate and at times darkly humorous. It is also worth noting that the existentialism of Camus and Beckett did not preclude them from adopting an intensely committed political stance. Despite being relatively successful as a university student, Fugard did not complete his degree, but for the next two or three years he went hitchhiking through Africa, worked on a tramp steamer on a round-the-world trip, and held a job briefly as a freelance journalist and as a regional news reporter for the South African Broadcasting Corporation in Cape Town. In 1956 he married Sheila Meiring, a drama student whom he had met at university, and together they established a theater workshop, the Circle Players, at the Labia Theatre in Cape Town and spent the next few years working with multiracial casts at a time when it was becoming increasingly politically difficult and indeed socially unusual to do so.
areas regarded as their “natural” (tribal) habitat. In other words, black people were treated essentially as dispensable labor units. Failure to comply with the pass laws could mean lengthy jail terms. Fugard’s brief involvement in the systemic processing of human beings as part of the state’s social engineering policies was probably one of the decisive experiences for the future playwright, eliciting both deep anger and profound compassion; he later commented: “I knew that the system was evil, but until then I had no idea of just how systematically evil it was. That was my revelation. As I think back, nothing that has ever happened to me has eclipsed the horror of those few months” (Vandenbroucke, p. 26). While working with theater groups in the black townships in the later 1950s, Fugard wrote two plays reflecting black African life in these deprived communities, No-Good Friday (premiered 1958)—his first full-length play—and Nongogo (1959). Fugard and his wife then left for London in 1959 to broaden their theatrical experience. During this time Fugard also embarked on a significant collaboration with the playwright Tone Brulin in Belgium and started writing the novel Tsotsi, which was not published until 1980 (and was adapted as a film in 2006). The Fugards returned to South Africa the following year, which was also the year that the apartheid state faced its first major crisis. The fatal shooting of sixty-nine Africans demonstrating against the pass laws at Sharpeville, near Johannesburg, in March 1960 made evident the depth of resentment and resistance among the black majority, but it also demonstrated the ruthlessness with which the South African state was prepared to suppress any opposition. What many regard as Fugard’s first major play, The Blood Knot, appeared the next year, at a time when the country was adopting an increasingly defensive stance on its racial policies in the face of growing international condemnation in response to the Sharpeville Massacre. The play dramatized the tragic absurdity of making skin color such a powerful marker of social and personal identity with a frankness and directness that were unique in South African drama. The Blood Knot was immediately recognized as a
It was only when the newly married couple moved to Johannesburg in 1958 that Fugard encountered the true nature of the society in which he was living. To make ends meet he worked as a clerk in the Fordsburg Native Commissioner’s Court in Johannesburg, which dealt mainly with pass-law offenses. One way of controlling the vast black labor force in South Africa at the time (many of the workers were black migrant laborers from neighboring countries) was to issue all people legally classified as black with a passbook authorizing them to live and work in certain areas for certain periods of time, after which they were obliged to return to their designated areas—usually the townships (black residential areas on the outskirts of all South African towns and cities). In some cases, workers might even be transported to distant rural
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ATHOL FUGARD of the night was of necessity played by a white actor. In the years immediately after Boesman and Lena, however, Fugard did the work that stands among his greatest contributions to South African theater, two plays that were collaborative productions workshopped with John Kani and Winston Ntshona: Sizwe Bansi Is Dead and The Island. Fugard had been working collaboratively with black actors for many years prior to this, but no texts or productions with the stature of these two plays emerged from that experience. The fact that the workshopped plays were also fairly highprofile productions, attracting the attention even of the security police during their initial clandestine performances (as they challenged the state’s laws on the pass system and on prisons), and because they toured fairly extensively, helped to make them groundbreaking and influential theatrical events in South Africa. Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act (1972), another collaborative work, this time with Yvonne Bryceland, addressed the issue of sex across the color bar—the notorious Immorality Act prohibited not only mixed marriages but also interracial sexual relationships.
powerful and significant revelation not only of the nature of South African society, but of what was possible in an otherwise convention-bound theater. The play was performed in London in 1963 and in New York in 1964, marking the early acknowledgment of Fugard as a playwright of international stature. Apartheid legislation had made it illegal for mixed-race casts to appear on the stage together—or even to attend the same theaters—so Fugard’s next two plays, Hello and Goodbye and People Are Living There (1968), were written for all-white casts and played in all-white theaters. At the same time, Fugard was promoting a boycott among British playwrights, urging them not to allow their plays to be performed before segregated audiences in South Africa. Increasingly stringent security legislation was passed after the Sharpeville incident, and the state became increasingly militarized, a situation that would continue over the next three decades. Unlike many of his black activist friends, Fugard was never detained, but he was under constant surveillance and had his passport withdrawn from 1967 to 1971, when his international reputation had grown to such an extent that he was being invited to direct and attend premieres of his plays abroad. If Hello and Goodbye and People Are Living There seemed to represent compromise on the part of the dramatist, Fugard was more directly confrontational with his next play, Boesman and Lena, in 1969. Although the play explores a single relationship during one cold night on the mudflats just outside Port Elizabeth, it shows just how devastating the effects of trying to survive in a racist country can be—and incidentally also how fatuous any attempt to separate the “political” from the “personal” can become. In order to circumvent apartheid legislation, Fugard himself played the role of Boesman, a colored man (in South Africa, the term “colored” refers to people of mixed racial descent), and his close collaborator and friend Yvonne Bryceland played the colored woman, Lena. Even the silent black man who mysteriously appears at their ramshackle little encampment on the mudflats in the middle
After these intensely focused political plays came the more abstract Dimetos (1975), which seemed to shift attention away from explicit political engagement toward what was to become in subsequent plays a recurring concern with the processes of creation. But within a few years came the more explicitly political A Lesson from Aloes (1978), perhaps one of the most personally anguished of Fugard’s plays in its exploration of the deep divisions, ambiguities, and ambivalences of having to live in such a conflicted society. It was written in the immediate aftermath of the 1976 Soweto uprising and the consequent social instability in South Africa, which were countered with increasing brutality by the nation’s police and the defense force. Loyalties and principles were being tested to the utmost nationally at the time the play was written, and it was becoming clear that the country was in danger of sliding into civil war—a process the government was determined to halt by increasingly repressive
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ATHOL FUGARD legislation and heavy-handed oppression during the 1980s.
to more explicitly autobiographical material in Exits and Entrances (2005), dealing in a dramatically engaging way with the encounter between an aspiring young actor and his aging mentor. Nevertheless, the critical reception in South Africa of his 2007 play, Victory, which attempted to address the issue of pervasive crime in the country, was largely dismissive. Walder makes the intriguing suggestion that these later plays may come to be read differently in the future, when the political landscape has changed, or more precisely when our reading of the politics of the day is adjusted to focus on current realities:
By this time Fugard was spending more time abroad, especially in the United States, where he had a wide and appreciative audience. In 1982 he decided that the first performance of “Master Harold” ѧ and the Boys should be given at the Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven, Connecticut. The Road to Mecca premiered at Yale two years later, followed by the premiere there of A Place with the Pigs in 1987. Fugard’s standing was increasingly being publicly acknowledged—especially abroad, but also by certain English universities in South Africa— with theater awards, honorary doctorates, small roles in high-profile, big-budget films, and televised versions of his plays on major networks in Britain and America. For his next two plays he returned to South Africa for first performances: My Children! My Africa! and Playland (1992). Both plays premiered at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg—a venue that had been at the forefront of cultural resistance to apartheid from the watershed protest year of 1976. These two plays directly address the dangerously deteriorating situation of civil strife in the country, but Playland in particular raises the possibility of a more hopeful future in its small, final sign of reconciliation. Yet these works are also the plays that began to evoke more sharply divided responses from reviewers and critics as to their dramatic qualities and significance. The usual, perhaps oversimplified, explanation for this reappraisal of his merit has been that Fugard’s particular form of expressing resistance to apartheid had given his work a dramatic focus and intensity that were now no longer possible now that apartheid was being dismantled, gradually and painfully but inevitably. Dennis Walder (2003) constructively suggests that the later works are better read as “memory plays” (p. 79) rather than as explicit political statements, and in this light Walder provides nuanced and sympathetic readings of the plays My Life (1996), Valley Song (1996), The Captain’s Tiger (1999), and Sorrows and Rejoicings (2002). Fugard certainly seemed to be on surer ground (as reflected in critical responses, in any event) when he returned
The representation of the fear of the other—if anything, the issue of our time worldwide— continues as a central theme, as does the struggle to retrieve some hope for the future, after the startling and dramatic changes in his country. To many South Africans, he appears to have sidelined himself from their daily concerns: the concerns of poverty, violence and disease, which have taken over from the horrors of apartheid. Bearing witness as a function of social responsibility seems to have been replaced by a kind of personal witnessing as a function of individual moral responsibility. But have these aspects of his work ever been entirely absent, or separate? I do not think so. (2003, pp. 96–97)
As of 2009, Fugard lives in the San Diego area, but he is a relatively frequent visitor to South Africa, where his contribution to the theater over the past half century is still respected and celebrated.
THE TOWNSHIP PLAYS: NO-GOOD FRIDAY AND NONGOGO
The concept of the “apartheid city” refers to a structural arrangement of urban space in which the central city business districts and the immediate suburban environs are reserved for whites, while on the outskirts of the town or city are the “nonwhite” residential areas—sometimes referred to simply as “locations,” “townships,” or “dormitory towns”—to which black employees return once their work in the “white city” is done. This racialized urban geography had its roots in the segregationist practices of the nineteenth century,
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ATHOL FUGARD and it remains a feature of the South African social landscape to this day. Both No-Good Friday and Nongogo are remarkable in that, even though they are in many respects conventional socially aware “naturalistic” dramas of their time, they address for the first time in South African theater some of the consequences of having to survive—a central preoccupation—in the state of deprivation and disempowerment that is a consequence of this urban geography. Both plays premiered at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre in Johannesburg—that is, not in a “white” commercial or even amateur theater. No-Good Friday specifically targets the question of urban social engineering, as the play is set in the township of Sophiatown, one of the few multiracial districts left in the country but which had recently been declared a “white” area by the government (under the Group Areas Act). The forced removals of Sophiatown residents to the then-desolate black townships on the barren outskirts of Johannesburg—and the bulldozing of their former homes to clear the way for a white suburb ironically called Triomf (“triumph”)— have become iconic images of apartheid in operation on the ground, so to speak. The one white character in the play is Father Higgins, a clear representation of Father Trevor Huddleston, the Anglican priest who spoke out openly about the injustices of the system and who was one of the first people to advocate a cultural boycott of South Africa; not surprisingly, he was deported almost immediately. In this production he was played by “Hal Lannigan”—that is, Fugard himself. When a production was presented before an all-white audience at a segregated Johannesburg theater later that same year, the cast had to be all black, so Lewis Nkosi—one of the Fugards’ many friends in the townships and now a celebrated author in his own right—was called upon to play Father Higgins.
gangsters, musicians, shady politicians—who are caught up in an appalling system from which there seems no escape, but which offers only humiliation and a sense of futility. Tobias, the “blanket-boy” from the rural areas who has come to seek work in the city, is murdered because he cannot function in this environment. It is worth noting that in Fugard’s novel Tsotsi, written soon after (but not published until 1980) and set in Sophiatown, the main character is crushed to death by a wall from one of the houses being bulldozed to the ground during the Sophiatown removals, despite his having achieved a degree of personal redemption. As Dennis Walder points out in his 1984 study of Fugard (p. 42), it is almost as if Fugard could not at that point imagine a future life for people trapped in the townships. Fugard himself has suggested that his experience at the Fordsburg Native Commissioner’s Court at about this time was responsible for his “basic pessimism” (Walder, 1993, p. xix). Nongogo is set in a more undefined space— “one of the townships round Johannesburg” (The Township Plays, 1993, p. 57)—but the physical and indeed moral and symbolic environment is much the same as that of No-Good Friday, except here it is the drunks, pimps, and prostitutes (the demimonde—that is, nongogo, of the title) who are crushed by their environment. The sexual humiliation that forms the focal point of the play stems from a failure to find personal common ground between Queeny, the former “mineworkers’ whore” and now owner of a township shebeen (an establishment that sells liquor illegally to black people), and Johnny, a salesman striving for some form of respectability in an environment that militates against achieving it. Although both of these plays from the late 1950s are occasionally revived (largely, one assumes, because of their historical significance and the promise they suggest of what is to come later from the playwright), they have not drawn the same amount of critical attention as the plays written in the period from 1960s to the 1990s, when apartheid was rigidly entrenched, powerfully challenged, and then painfully dismantled.
The play deals with infighting and conflicts within the township, rather than dealing directly with the crushing weight of apartheid social engineering, although that is obviously the basic premise on which the play is built. The play’s focus instead is on the often abrasive interactions between a wide array of types—intellectuals,
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ATHOL FUGARD potentially farcical situation, however, allows for the intense expression of all their frustrations, anger, and sense of humiliation, and by the end of the play they may have gained some insight but nothing has changed materially for them. Dennis Walder neatly sums up the fundamental issue: “The Blood Knot ѧ suggests the degree to which, in societies with long histories of exploiting constructions of difference to maintain and extend inequalities of power, the sense of identity is not just a matter of ‘negotiation’ (as many literary-cultural theorists would have it), but a site of existential uncertainty and struggle—not to say of life and death” (2003, pp. 32–33).
THE BLOOD KNOT, HELLO AND GOODBYE, AND PEOPLE ARE LIVING THERE
By the time Fugard came to write what most people regard as his first major play, The Blood Knot, he had had some experience working for a large professional theater company in South Africa, the National Theatre Organization. He had also spent time traveling and attending plays in Britain (including early plays of Harold Pinter, Arnold Wesker, and John Osborne in London) and engaged in productive work with Tone Brulin in Belgium before returning to South Africa in 1960, inevitably broadening his understanding of the range and repertoire of contemporary drama. A new element of assurance is noticeable in The Blood Knot that was absent in the more derivative early plays, although Fugard himself soon came to feel that the play was “monstrously overwritten” (Vandenbroucke, p. 63), and he ultimately revised it for more streamlined production (first performed in 1985 as Blood Knot). What made the play both striking and unsettling was the very direct way in which Fugard addressed the question of skin color as an absolutely determinative and fateful social marker in a racist society. The play is set in a little shack belonging to two brothers, Morris and Zachariah. The brothers, very different in temperament, are “coloreds”—in South Africa the term refers to people of mixed racial descent—but Morrie is so lightskinned that he could “try for white,” that is, (illegally) take on some of the roles and even privileges of a white person, while Zach is so dark-skinned that he could be mistaken for being a black African, hence without power, position, or privilege. The sheer absurdity of the situation certainly generates a great deal of grim humor in the play, but at no point are the implications of their racial dispossession underplayed. Their already precarious situation becomes more complicated when Ethel, the white pen pal with whom they are corresponding as an elaborate game—she does not realize that they are not white men—suggests that she come to visit them. All the underlying tensions between the two brothers themselves come to the surface, and Zach even suggests that Morrie should pretend to be a white person and meet with her. This
Yet before he came to write a series of more directly defiant and explicitly political plays, he wrote two further plays, People Are Living There and Hello and Goodbye, exploring the fraught relationships between marginalized characters trying to cope with their own existential anxieties. This was the time when Fugard recorded in his Notebooks his sheer excitement at reading Albert Camus: “Finished Sisyphus. Impossible to describe the excitement, the total sympathy that exists for me with Camus’s thinking. In the harsh but lucid world of his writing I seem to have found, for the first time, my true climate” (p. 105). Fugard had already started to write People Are Living There when he put it aside and wrote Hello and Goodbye, which premiered in 1965. In an important sense both these plays deal with the difficulty of this existential “knowing” and even the desperate need sometimes to evade knowledge. Hello and Goodbye, like The Blood Knot, deals with the relationship between two siblings, this time a brother and sister. Johnnie Smit has remained at the family home in Valley Road, in a poorer part of Port Elizabeth, to look after their crippled father, while Hester years earlier had gone to the faraway metropolis of Johannesburg in the hope of escaping her stifling Calvinist environment and improving her prospects. After fifteen years away from home, she has come to believe that she has been deprived of her share of the “compensation” paid out to her father after his railway accident, and she has returned to claim it. The play then
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ATHOL FUGARD explores the siblings’ respective attempts to come to terms with what have in effect become their wasted, “secondhand” lives—Johnny reduced to a state of neurotic dependence, paradoxically, by having to care for his father (now lying dead in the next room, though Johnny does not disclose this to Hester at first), and Hester pathetically looking for some meaning in her life, having barely survived as a prostitute in Johannesburg. But it quickly becomes clear that Hester has developed a resilience and toughness of mind in coming to understand that there is no “compensation” of any kind, but merely a Sisyphean endurance, while—in one of Fugard’s most darkly comic and ironic moments—Johnny gets onto his father’s crutches, taking the dead man’s “story” and identity for himself with the words:
case partly to “prove” to Ahlers that she does not care about his betrayal. But in their desperation to enjoy themselves—hilarious in production— the sheer misery of their lives becomes increasingly evident. It was while he was working on these two plays that Fugard made the following entry in his Notebooks: “Last night read Gogol’s Diary of a Madman—his ‘laughter through tears’ is of course very close to what I am attempting. Could it be said of me—as is said of Gogol in the introduction—that ridicule and laughter is a type of revenge on Life” (p. 87).
BOESMAN AND LENA
Boesman and Lena is unquestionably the play that cemented Fugard’s international reputation as an antiapartheid dramatist of major importance. When Fugard was asked to direct the play at the Royal Court in London in 1971, it was public pressure on the South African ministry of the interior that led to his passport being returned to him. The play is regularly revived, especially abroad, and has been filmed twice. It is a stark dramatization of the impact of the sharp edge of abstract legislation on human bodies. The “plot” could hardly be simpler: a destitute colored couple have been evicted from their shack, which was bulldozed as part of an apparent slum-clearance operation, and they are now finding a place to settle for the cold night ahead. They are utterly exhausted, and Boesman, resentful and brutal, takes his anger out on Lena. A black man comes out of the darkness, but Boesman refuses to have him close to their fire, because as a colored man he feels superior to the African. Lena tries to befriend the man, who does not speak and who dies during the night. In a panic Boesman collects their meager belongings and commands Lena to follow him. At first she refuses, but having asserted her independence from him, she decides to remain with him. It is immediately evident that they have hardly any physical resources for survival—only “whiteman’s rubbish” that they carry around— and instead the play focuses intensely on their meager emotional and mental resources as they engage abrasively with one another in trying to
Why not? It solves problems. Let’s face it—a man on his own two legs is a shaky proposition. She said it was mine. All of it—my inheritance. These, seeds ѧ and memories. More than enough! They can look now. Shine their lights in my face, stare as hard as they like. I’ve got a reason. I’m a man with a story.ѧ What’s the word? Birth. Death. Both. Jesus did it in the Bible. [Pause] Resurrection. [Pause] CURTAIN
(Three Port Elizabeth Plays, pp. 162–163)
While People Are Living There has always been well received as entertaining and stimulating in its theatrical (and televised) performances, it lacks the focus and complexity of Hello and Goodbye. Milly, the boardinghouse owner in Braamfontein, a somewhat dilapidated suburb of Johannesburg, is resentful at being abandoned by her lover, Ahlers, because she is getting old. She and a motley group of four lodgers—ranging from a henpecked husband to a jaundiced amateurish existentialist—nevertheless decide to celebrate Milly’s fiftieth birthday by having a small party in her rather dingy kitchen, in Milly’s
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ATHOL FUGARD make sense of their experience. Yet it is in their awkward and exasperated attempts to articulate their personal frustration, anger, hurt, shame— Boesman callously truculent and Lena more fretful and querulous—that Fugard dramatizes the fusion of existential distress and political injustice. Boesman’s self-hatred is rooted in his disempowerment; he “needs” the old black man, because the silent man is at least something— hardly a person—to feel superior to. Lena “needs” the old black man so that she can delude herself, even momentarily, that her life is being “witnessed.” But while neither Boesman nor Lena can escape from their condition of total subjection to a political system that they can hardly comprehend, at the play’s end Lena discovers that at the very least she has value as a human being, and she consciously decides to follow Boesman, rather than submit to him passively and numbly. It is hardly a triumphant gesture, but it is an assertion of selfhood in a political environment that devalues her as a person and as a woman. Temple Hauptfleisch draws attention to the specifically theatrical dimensions of what has occurred; whereas the stage had been empty at the beginning, full of possibilities and potential, gradually the characters limit and define the possibilities of this space. Like Milly, Lena discovers to her dismay that the “explanations” of their condition do not explain anything. When Lena has been stripped of everything, however, and Boesman stands before her at the end “grotesquely overburdened” (1985 ed., p. 55), her simple gesture of taking the blanket from him—as a sign that she will join him—has invested this basic action on this bare stage with great dramatic power. The evocation of the myth of Sisyphus could hardly be more explicit.
Kani and Winston Ntshona. They have come to be regarded as pioneering works in South African theater, not only because of their innovative dramaturgy but also because they are each directed at very specific elements of the apartheid system in ways that tested the limits of the law at the time (not to mention social conventions): the Immorality Act (with its obsessive preoccupation with racial purity); the pass laws (one of the most tangible manifestations of the administrative cruelty that apartheid entailed); and the judicial system, specifically laws related to prisons (those spaces where there is the least amount of supervision over the state’s regard for human rights). This was “theatre of defiance” at its most provocative—challenging and risky at the time, in a political as much as in a personal sense for Fugard, Kani, and Ntshona. Yet in his introduction to the set of the three plays published under the title Statements (first published as such in 1974), Fugard writes almost exclusively about exploring a new kind of relationship with his actors rather than about the politics of the day. He acknowledges in particular the work of the Polish director Jerzy Grotowski, in whose nowclassic study, Towards a Poor Theatre (1968), he found both an endorsement of his earlier practice and a stimulus to apply it more systematically and purposefully. This he did in Orestes (first produced in Cape Town in 1971), which he describes as “my most extreme excursion into a new type of theatre experience, in which we tempted to communicate with our audience on the basis of, for us at least, an entirely new vocabulary” (Statements, 1986 ed., p. xi). But of particular significance for the genesis of the Statements plays is what Fugard describes as his “total response to Grotowski’s sense of the actor as a ‘creative’ artist, not merely ‘interpretive.’” “Looking back on the three experiences now,” he continues, “it was as if instead of first putting words on paper in order to arrive eventually at the stage and a live performance, I was able to write directly into its space and silence via the actor” (p. xi).
STATEMENTS
Fugard’s next three plays—The Island, Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, and Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act—originated as performances produced by an established working method for Fugard and his Port Elizabeth collaborators, the Serpent Players, including John
The first of the three plays to be performed publicly, Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act, was commissioned as the open-
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ATHOL FUGARD ing production in 1972 of another politically courageous pioneering venture, a Cape Town theater known as The Space (the forerunner of the Market Theatre in Johannesburg). The play captures the moment that a white librarian, Frieda Joubert, and a colored school principal, Errol Philander, are caught naked by the security police during their furtive, doubly illicit affair— Philander is married, and they belong to different racial groups. The subsequent series of “statements,” both official and personal, then spell out the implications of their deed: its illegality is obviously a serious matter, but Fugard seems as well to want to make a broader point about the force of powerful human drives that come up against ideological systems. In the same year, 1972, Sizwe Bansi Is Dead premiered at The Space. The story revolves around Sizwe Bansi, who has come to look for work in Port Elizabeth to support his family in the rural areas, but he does not have the correct documentation to make him employable. He and his friend Buntu come across the dead body of Robert Zwelinzima and remove the passbook and the work permit from the corpse. Buntu persuades a reluctant Sizwe to take on the identity of a dead man simply to survive—Sizwe Bansi has to “die.” The genial photographer, Styles, sets the scene for this encounter in a lengthy opening monologue by describing how he has managed to attain a small degree of economic independence in a deeply unjust labor dispensation. And it is Styles who finally takes the photograph of “Robert Zwelinzima” holding a pipe and a cigarette that he can send to his family: “Hold it, Robert. Hold it just like that. Just one more. Now smile, Robert.ѧ Smile.ѧ Smile.ѧ [Camera flash and blackout]” (p. 44). Despite police harassment and several attempts to close the play down, it attracted audiences and prompted an invitation to perform all three plays at the Royal Court in London.
though it was widely understood that this play was about Robben Island, at the time a notorious high-security prison for political prisoners (including Nelson Mandela and other high-profile ANC leaders), nowhere is this stated explicitly in the play. This evasiveness may account for the play’s continuing viability long after “the island” became a tourist attraction and museum after 1994; its ultimate subject is not so much Robben Island in particular, but the law and justice in general—and more specifically, finding the appropriate response to “unjust law.” The two political prisoners in the play, John and Winston, are preparing a performance of Sophocles’ Antigone, depicting the classic conflict between state law and “natural” law, which places human dignity and respect above obedience to the state. As with Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, the humor of the play is partly a defense mechanism adopted by the prisoners and partly intended to create an “alienation effect,” of confronting audiences with their own laughter at an intolerable situation. Audiences may have smiled at Winston’s embarrassment at having to dress like a woman for the role of Antigone, but the “trial” of Antigone at the end of the play, when John/Creon has to sentence Winston/Antigone, remains an intensely moving appeal to “honour those things to which honour belongs” (p. 77). Apartheid legislation may have been the immediate stimulus for these three plays and, as such, it dismayed reviewers who expected to see “universal themes” dramatized on stage, but Russell Vandenbroucke quotes tellingly from Albert Camus’s 1947 novel The Plague, where Dr. Rieux explains why he has written his chronicle of the plague; the rationale given there may seem at odds with Fugard’s stated pessimism, yet despite the pessimism, Fugard did participate in recording the experiences depicted in the plays: So that he should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favour of those plague-stricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice and the outrage done them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in man than to despise.
The most enduring of these three plays has proved to be The Island, “devised by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona” (p. 45) and premiered at The Space in 1973. It was illegal to promote any investigation into prison conditions in apartheid South Africa, so even
(p. 170)
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ATHOL FUGARD and intrusive. The controlling metaphor of the play is the aloes, which are particularly hardy shrubs that survive well in drought conditions, but they are bitter, unattractive, and prickly. Gladys, emotionally shattered by her brush with the security police, is irritated by Piet’s new hobby of collecting aloes, which she describes as being “turgid with violence, like everything else in this country” (p. 17), whereas for Piet they seem to be emblematic of an ability to survive under harsh and difficult conditions that seem almost hopeless. The mixed responses to this play may be partly explained by its dominant tone: a pervasive sense of defeat and even paralysis in the face of an apparently intractable political situation. Each of the three characters has been betrayed in some way: Gladys by the violation of her privacy when the security police took away her very personal diaries, partly because they suspect her husband of subversive activities; Piet by the fact that his former friends and comrades in the liberation struggle suspected him of being an informer; and Steve, now leaving the country forever on an exit permit, because his fight for justice brought him nothing but hardship and humiliation. Steve also discovers on this evening of painful personal revelations that his doubts about Piet’s loyalty and devotion were unfounded, and so his profound political disappointments become compounded with irremediable personal regrets.
A LESSON FROM ALOES
Soon after the three Statements plays, Fugard once again adopted a more individual, personal mode in his plays. Dimetos (first produced in Scotland in 1975) could hardly be more different from the previous three plays in its unlocalized, ambiguous, “abstract” depiction of a search for some kind of redemption. Some audiences had qualms about the explicitly political thrust of the Statements plays, but when Dimetos first appeared at the Edinburgh Festival, audiences were confused and astonished at the totally “apolitical” nature of the play, given its immediate predecessors. Fugard has on several occasions noted that the Statements plays, even though important and significant, did not represent his own vision. Even when he does return to familiar territory, geographically and as a playwright, it is the personal and anguished but very specifically regional and historically detailed A Lesson from Aloes (1978) that he writes. A Lesson could be described as a “political” play—or at any rate a play about the impact of politics on human relationships—but it lacks the strong sense of an urgent agenda that impels the Statements plays. At an informal talk at the Yale School of Drama, Fugard discussed the collaborative work: I think, finally, those experiences didn’t give me the opportunity for the very personal statement that I wanted to make. That whole experience coincided with a period when I thought of myself as being very alive, and I’m not being funny when I say I am now becoming conscious of dying, and to the extent that I think I’m dying, I would like to use my words, and my time, and calculate my effect very very carefully.
“MASTER HAROLD” ѧ AND THE BOYS
If A Lesson from Aloes was set in the difficult years of the entrenchment of apartheid in the early 1960s, for his next play, “Master Harold” ѧ and the Boys (first produced in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1982), Fugard goes back even further to his own youth in 1950 in order to “expiate” a particularly offensive personal insult to a black man whom he had loved and needed as a child, and who had in turn provided him with the moral and emotional support that his own invalid and drunken father was unable to offer. It is Fugard’s most overtly autobiographical play; he has described the specific incident that ultimately became the critical moment of the play, and
(Vandenbroucke, p. 204)
The play depicts the events, or rather conversations, of one afternoon and evening as the Afrikaners Piet and Gladys prepare to have a colored friend and former political activist, Steve, over to dinner at their humble Port Elizabeth home. But the simple occasion to celebrate this reunion, occurring after Steve has been released from prison, quickly turns sour as each of the three characters faces up to the personal implications of living in South Africa in 1963, when the apartheid state was becoming increasingly oppressive, confident,
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ATHOL FUGARD which had clearly been a barely suppressed source of guilt and shame for decades (see Vandenbroucke, pp. 257–258). Hally, a somewhat precocious teenager, is spending a rainy afternoon in the family restaurant with the two waiters (the “boys” of the title, even though they are grown men) and is clearly enjoying his position of power over them, which they all enjoy in a goodhumored way. But the play is punctuated by phone calls from the hospital, where his father is about to be discharged, much to Hally’s dismay. As his agitation at having to deal with his sickly father grows, so his behavior to the two black men becomes increasingly obnoxious and crass, until at one point he spits in the face of one of “the boys.” It is an appalling moment for all concerned—even for Hally, who at the end of the play leaves the restaurant feeling miserable and confused. “Master Harold” is undoubtedly one of Fugard’s most accomplished works and has enjoyed virtually universal acclaim. The impact of the play derives from its clear-sighted depiction of the mundane but nevertheless pathological dynamics of racism, which in this instance is not primarily represented as a fear of the other but rather as a manifestation of deep insecurity. These two facets of the phenomenon are obviously not absolutely distinguishable, but here the racist insult is inextricably woven into a desperate love for a surrogate rather than fear of difference.
owls—all seeming to be heading east, the direction of Mecca, which comes to stand for her newfound sense of freedom and exuberant creativity. The people in the village of Nieu Bethesda viewed her as just a mad recluse. In the play, Fugard presents a well-meaning but rather blinkered church minister who wants to place Helen in a home for the elderly, apparently for her own good. But the play then introduces Helen’s feisty young friend from Cape Town, Elsa, who manages to persuade her to continue enjoying her creativity and to resist the pressure to conform. What have come to be known—largely through Fugard’s work—as the Owl House and Camel Yard in Nieu Bethesda have been the subject of a number of studies in the field of “outsider art” (meaning “raw art”), which indicates that Fugard has yet again focused on a marginalized life. In the play, Helen is an outsider in a convention-bound, Calvinist community. Though the play shows her at a moment of crisis and despair in her life, it ends with her affirmation of light and creativity. If there is an autobiographical dimension to the play, it is reflected in Helen’s fear of the loss of her creative powers. The walls on the inside of the Owl House are smeared (in fact and in the play) with finely ground glass to make them glitter in the candlelight; what is most to be feared is the darkness. Fugard has been quite explicit about this: “The Miss Helen of my The Road to Mecca is actually a self-portrait,” Fugard has said. “I used the symbolic vocabulary of the play to understand my own personally dreaded moment of darkness—the extinction of my creativity” (Playland, and Other Words, p. 77).
THE ROAD TO MECCA
“Master Harold” ѧ and the Boys was followed in 1984 by another masterful study of the interweaving of a complex set of personalities. The Road to Mecca draws on the life of Helen Martins, an eccentric old woman who lived in the town that Fugard eventually called home, Nieu Bethesda, in the Karoo. After the death of her husband, and with the help of one of her colored servants, Helen Martins started to make concrete statues in her small back garden representing an array of fantastic figures—camels, peacocks, sheep, bucks, mermaids, ecstatically elongated human figures, and, most famously,
To some extent the play approaches the darkness of the loss of creativity as a political issue, too. It is the totally sincere, even charitable and committed Calvinism of the minister that is responsible for generating the fear of the unconventional among the villagers. This is a fear that leads not only to stones being thrown by the uncomprehending villagers at Helen’s yard, but also to the plight of the apparently abandoned and forlorn young African woman with her baby, to whom Elsa had offered a ride in her car that morning on her way from Cape Town to Nieu
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ATHOL FUGARD Bethesda. Elsa tends to speak of the impact of “you Afrikaners” as somehow accounting for both kinds of injustice. The setting of the play is “autumn 1974,” a time when Helen Martins had already created her cement sculptures, but it is also an era in which the nature of the racist patriarchy in South Africa was still largely intact and uninterrogated. Given that this play focuses so intensely on the experience of women—not only Helen and Elsa but also the black characters, Patience and Katrina—it is worth noting Fugard’s comment on his female characters: “In all my plays, whenever there is a woman and man, the affirmative positive statement is invested in the woman” (Blumberg, p. 39). Helen is redeemed at the end of the play as a consequence of Elsa’s intervention, and the light of creativity offers temporary respite in a mutually trusting relationship. In actual fact, Helen Martins committed suicide in 1976, some years before the play was written, but Fugard makes it clear in his introduction to the play that it is not a “documentary” (p. 11). Like the more cryptic Dimetos, it is in many ways about the compelling need to create in a hostile environment.
ter, Mr. M, holding in his one hand the rock thrown through his window by radical students and in the other hand a dictionary, repository of the precious words of reason—neatly captures a very immediate dilemma of the time: how to balance effective action and rational expression. Temple Hauptfleisch has analyzed the central preoccupation with “the word” in Fugard’s plays as “one of the ways in which Fugard’s characters seek to control and gain an understanding of the reality in the world around them” (1997, p. 142). So when Mr. M is murdered by the black students who think he has betrayed their cause by insisting they choose “books” rather than “stones” in their struggle for justice, Fugard is issuing a challenge to audiences in a way reminiscent of Brecht’s Lehrstücke, or “learning plays,” in which audiences were confronted with dialectical oppositions that they were invited to resolve themselves in an attempt to understand the nature of their society. My Children! My Africa drew sharply divided responses about the quality of Fugard’s work: some found its appeal to civilized values as preserved in “the word” moving and timely, given the state of the country in the late 1980s, while others found the play oppressively didactic and even simplistic. The “war” South Africa fought in and against its northern neighbors who supposedly represented part of a communist onslaught also forms the historical background for Playland, which premiered in Cape Town in 1992. A white soldier and a black night watchman, both psychologically traumatized and in need of healing, meet at a fairground on New Year’s Eve 1989, a critical moment for the country on the verge of a momentous transition. They each describe— “confess” might be a better word under the circumstances—an act of violence in which they were involved: an atrocity during the border wars in the case of the soldier, and the murder of a white man who was trying to seduce his lover in the case of the night watchman. By the end of the play they have come to some kind of mutual understanding of each other, and they walk off together into the first day of the new year. As so often happens in the critical reception of Fugard’s plays, Playland received an extremely mixed
MY CHILDREN! MY AFRICA! AND PLAYLAND
My Children! My Africa! premiered at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg in 1989, a year of worldwide changes that had a direct impact on South Africa. Not only did the fall of the Berlin Wall symbolically mark the end of the cold war, it also finally removed the delusion in South Africa that it was necessary to maintain “law and order” in the country at any cost so that the nation could remain a bulwark against communism. The activists in the liberation struggle always understood that “fighting communism” was a ploy to justify political repression, but in this play Fugard explores some of the darker implications not only of the legacy of apartheid but also, and more daringly, of the liberation struggle. The play consists largely of a series of school debates between a young black boy and young white girl, which accounts for its somewhat didactic tenor. Its emblematic image, however—the schoolmas-
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ATHOL FUGARD response; some praised its barely achieved sense of reconciliation between the white soldier and the black murderer at the end of the play, while others felt this moment was strained, at best, and premature, at worst. For Dennis Walder, the play’s “moral imbalance” diffused its “demand for mutual forgiveness and reconciliation” (2003, p. 86). Playland was Fugard’s last play written during the apartheid period. He has written several works since then, but the critical response to them (in South Africa, at any rate) has been lukewarm—the usual explanation being that he seems to have lost his subject. One reason for this relatively tepid reception is, paradoxically, that his work and influence stimulated a vital and vibrant theatrical culture in South Africa that has in some ways overtaken him. Yet there is no question that, despite his current eclipse, his overall achievement in the field of playmaking merits the greatest respect and he will continue to be acknowledged as one of the key figures of twentieth-century South African theater.
My Children! My Africa! and Selected Shorter Plays. Edited by Stephen Gray. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1990. (Includes The Occupation, The Coat, Mille Miglia, Orestes, The Drummer.) Playland, and Other Words. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1992. (Includes extracts from public addresses by Fugard delivered in 1990 and 1991.) “Master Harold” ѧ and the Boys. Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1993. The Township Plays. Edited and with an introduction by Dennis Walder. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. (Contains No-Good Friday, Nongogo, The Coat, Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, and The Island). Cousins: A Memoir. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1994. Tsotsi. Jeppestown, South Africa: Ad Donker/Jonathan Ball, 1998. The Captain’s Tiger. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2001. Sorrows and Rejoicings. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2002.
BIBLIOGRAPHIES Hauptfleisch, Temple, Wilma Viljoen, and Céleste van Greunen. Athol Fugard: A Source Guide. Johannesburg: Ad Donker, 1982. Read, John. Athol Fugard: A Bibliography. With an introduction by Stephen Gray. Grahamstown: National English Literary Museum, 1991.
Selected Bibliography
CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES WORKS OF ATHOL FUGARD
Amato, Rob. “Fugard’s Confessional Analysis: “Master Harold” ѧ and the Boys.” In Momentum: Recent South African Writing. Edited by Margaret Daymond, Johan Jacobs, and Margaret Lenta. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press, 1984. Pp. 198–214. Benson, Mary. Athol Fugard and Barney Simon: Bare Stage, a Few Props, Great Theatre. Randburg, South Africa: Ravan Press, 1997.
SELECTED EDITIONS The Coat. Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1971. (Also includes Don Maclennan’s The Third Degree.) Three Port Elizabeth Plays. With an introduction by Athol Fugard. London: Oxford University Press, 1974. (Contains The Blood Knot, Hello and Goodbye, and Boesman and Lena.) A Lesson from Aloes. With an introduction by Athol Fugard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. Notebooks 1960–1977. Edited by Mary Benson. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1983. Boesman and Lena. With an introduction by Athol Fugard. Cape Town and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. The Road to Mecca. London: Faber, 1985. Statements. Three Plays. With an introduction by Athol Fugard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. (The title page lists John Kani and Winston Ntshona as coauthors. Includes Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, The Island, and Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act.)
Blumberg, Marcia. “Women Journeying at the South African Margins: Athol Fugard’s The Road to Mecca.” In Southern African Writing; Voyages and Explorations. Edited by Geoffrey V. Davis. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. Collins, Michael J. “The Sabotage of Love: Athol Fugard’s Recent Plays.” World Literature Today 57, no. 3:369–371 (1983). (Discusses A Lesson from Aloes and “Master Harold” ѧ and the Boys.) Hauptfleisch, Temple. Theatre and Society In South Africa: Reflections in a Fractured Mirror. Pretoria: J. L. van Schaik, 1997. (Contains two chapters devoted specifically to Fugard’s work.) ———. “Fugard’s Dramatic Expression of the Freedom
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ATHOL FUGARD Concept in Boesman and Lena.” In Athol Fugard. Edited by Stephen Gray. Johannesburg: McGraw-Hill, 1982. Pp. 179–189.
Walder, Dennis. Athol Fugard. London: Macmillan, 1984. (This early study of Fugard contains critical summaries of the plays.) ———. Athol Fugard. Tavistock: Northcote House, 2003. ———. “Introduction.” In The Township Plays, by Athol Fugard. Edited by Dennis Walder. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Pp. ix–xxxiv. ———. “Resituating Fugard: South African Drama as Witness.” New Theatre Quarterly 8, no. 32:343–361 (November 1992). Wertheim, Albert. The Dramatic Art of Athol Fugard: From South Africa to the World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Wortham, Chris. “A Sense of Place: Home and Homelessness in the Plays of Athol Fugard.” In Olive Schreiner and After: Essays on Southern African Literature in Honour of Guy Butler. Edited by Malvern Van Wyk Smith and Don Maclennan. Cape Town: David Philip, 1983. Pp. 165–183.
Henry, William A. III. “Brothers: The Blood Knot.” Time, September 30, 1985, p. 85. Kavanagh, Robert. Theatre and Cultural Struggle in South Africa. London: Zed, 1985. Mshengu [Robert Kavanagh]. “Political Theatre in South Africa and the Work of Athol Fugard.” Theatre Research International 7, no. 3:160–179 (1982). Orkin, Martin. Drama and the South African State. Manchester, U.K., and New York: Manchester University Press, 1991. Trudeau, Lawrence, ed. “Athol Fugard.” In Drama Criticism. Vol. 3. Detroit: Gale, 1993. Pp. 220–264. Vandenbroucke, Russell. Truths the Hand Can Touch: The Theatre of Athol Fugard. Craighall, South Africa: Ad Donker, 1986.
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WILLIAM GODWIN (1756—1836)
Patrick Abatiell OVER THE COURSE, of a writing career that saw him variously manifested as novelist, critic, political philosopher, dramatist, pamphleteer, essayist, children’s writer, historian, biographer, and publisher, William Godwin was responsible for producing a body of work that constitutes some of the most broadly influential literary production to span the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. Godwin’s was a key voice in the literary correlative to the radical politics that flourished in the 1790s, and his political treatises and the fiction designed to coincide with them not only vigorously shaped contemporary modes of social thought but also proved foundational for future generations of writers and subsequent literary movements. He had a direct influence on the work of personal friends Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as on the writing career of his own daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Godwin’s work proved foundational as well for the social realist fiction that flourished in Britain in the nineteenth century and extended in its consequences even beyond national bounds, visibly inflecting early literature of the United States through the politically charged gothic fiction of Charles Brockden Brown.
literary energy and produced a massive bibliography that spans not only several decades but also an impressive range of genres and literary styles.
EARLY LIFE
Godwin was born on March 3, 1756, in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, the seventh of thirteen children born to Ann Hull Godwin and the Dissenting minister John Godwin. In his memoirs, Godwin writes warmly of his father, although his presentation is also marked by a certain discernable ambivalence. It appears that John Godwin was prone to harshness in his verbal treatment of his son, and William’s childhood was characterized by a rigid structure of disciplined scholarship and religious observance. The value placed on intellectual pursuit descended to William from his paternal grandfather, Edward Godwin, who had been, in his day, an influential Dissenter. John Godwin seems not quite to have measured up, in William’s mind, to the standard for scholarly excellence set by Edward, but education was nonetheless the foundational principle of William Godwin’s upbringing, and he devotes much attention in his memoirs to his relationships with his early tutors and to the quality of his experiences at the various educational institutions he attended in his youth. Godwin returned continually to this preoccupation with education in his published writing as well. He devoted several treatises and essays to the subject, and much of his fiction is driven by inquiries into the effects of certain pedagogical modes on the development of the individual character. Godwin was frail and sickly as a child, and the family struggled financially. Six of the Godwin children perished before reaching adulthood, but William recovered from his childhood ill-
Despite the vastness of his influence, Godwin enjoyed a decidedly mixed critical reception in his own time. His quick rise to the heights of literary celebrity in the 1790s was counteracted in a few short years by a significant shift in national politics that, coupled with a marked change in literary tastes, resulted in a considerable ebb in the popular and critical reception of his works. Despite the tumultuousness of his career and the various personal and financial troubles that dogged him throughout his writing life, Godwin demonstrated a nearly inexhaustible
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WILLIAM GODWIN nesses, primarily under the care of a paternal cousin. Godwin was a precocious reader brought up in a rigid Calvinist household, and his first forays into the world of letters were gloomy and strictly circumscribed by religious doctrine. By the age of eight, he knew the Bible in its entirety and was familiar with several of the day’s most popular religious literary works, like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and James Janeway’s A Token for Children (1671). Godwin’s early affinities toward the religious, literary, and scholarly flourished in the company and under the informal tutelage of Mrs. Southern, his greataunt, with whom the young Godwin maintained a relationship that was both intellectually stimulating and deeply affectionate.
school. Despite Akers’ harshness, Godwin admired him and took pride both in his own success in these scholastic competitions and in the distinction he subsequently achieved in being held among Akers’ favorites. Godwin left Akers’ academy at his own request at the age of eleven, in favor of the tutelage of the Reverend Samuel Newton, a tyrannical and often violent pedagogue and a follower of Sandemanianism, which emphasizes judgment and rational understanding as the central elements of religious practice. After the completion of his education under Newton, Godwin returned to Akers’ school in 1772, this time as a teaching assistant and resident scholar. It was also in this year that John Godwin died. The following year, Godwin entered the Hoxton Academy in London, after an unsuccessful attempt to gain admission to the Homerton Dissenting Academy. Hoxton was one of the most progressive and intellectually forward institutions of its day, due to the leadership of its reformist minister, Dr. Andrew Kippis. Godwin finished his studies there in 1778, though he claims to have all the while disagreed with the academy’s tendencies toward religious and political liberalism. In spite of all his progressive training, Godwin emerged an intellectual and political conservative—a stance that he all but entirely reversed by the time his writing career began.
Sectarian discord in the Wisbech parish required the family to relocate in 1758, so that John Godwin could take up a new post as a pastor in Debenham. Political conditions here, however, were no more amenable than before, and the family remained in Debenham for only two years before popular distaste for the elder Godwin’s views forced the family to move again, this time to the tiny village of Guestwick, where John and Ann Godwin lived out the rest of their lives. A fragment of an unfinished poem that he composed in 1761 seems to confirm for William Godwin that by an early age he had “acquired a facility in the art of writing, that I was a reader of poetry, had a set of notions as to the distinction between that and prose, and was ambitious to be a poet myself” (Collected Novels and Memoirs, vol. 1, p. 16). By the age of seven, he was regularly given to impromptu performances of sermons of his own composing, though Godwin himself attributes this tendency as much to religious fervor as to “the love of distinction” (p. 16), and in his autobiography he muses comically on memories of himself sermonizing from a high chair in his family’s kitchen. At the age of eight, Godwin began attending a school in Hindolveston run by Robert Akers, a man of moderate learning whose pedagogical techniques featured a strict disciplinary regime and the establishment of regular competitions among the young scholars to determine their standing in the
In his earliest years as a practicing minister, Godwin’s reception was tepid at best. He preached first in Ware and later in Stowmarket, where he began reading the works of the French philosophers. In Ware, he became acquainted with the Dissenting minister Joseph Fawcett, whose friendship and intellectual commitments had enormous influence upon the young Godwin. Fawcett’s mentorship helped radically to alter the already shifting politics of Godwin’s thought, inspiring a deep agnosticism in place of his former religious fervor. This intellectual metamorphosis effectively delivered the final blow to Godwin’s career as a minister; in 1782 he resigned his post in Stowmarket and never returned to preaching. Fawcett suggested to Godwin that he might find more success as a writer, and Godwin took this advice to heart. Toward the
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WILLIAM GODWIN end of 1782, he took up residence in London, poised to enter the city’s vibrant literary scene.
nature of governmental institutions and their role in shaping the lives of individual citizen-subjects. Man is free, Godwin argues, by nature, and, consequently, all government is predicated on the consent of the populace. He reasons, therefore, that government can only ever control the outward behavior of its mature subjects, but that during childhood, when an individual does not enjoy the same sort of universal equality to which adult citizens are entitled, governmental and educational institutions can have their greatest effects on one’s “moral dispositions and character” (p. 3). Godwin proceeds to theorize a curriculum best suited to foster this end, and he places emphasis on the study of languages and of history but only insofar as these disciplines are grounded in a certain moral didacticism. He argues that by investigating other cultures and other ages, students are poised to receive instruction in morality and manners. Godwin also addresses the question of particular modes of instruction and suggests a series of reforms that would do away with certain insidious governing paradigms of eighteenth-century British education, such as teaching strategies that encourage learning by rote, and the endemic problem of arbitrary and violent discipline on the part of tutors. On this second point, Godwin is particularly fervent: “There is not in the world a truer object of pity, than a child terrified at every glance, and watching, with anxious uncertainty, the caprices of a pedagogue. If he survive, the liberty of manhood is dearly bought by so many heart aches” (p. 24). These reflections, however, are not brought about only by a personal sympathetic tendency toward the plights of children but, rather, also demonstrate a sincere involvement with a burgeoning philosophical effort to retheorize the role of childhood in the development of the individual. This project occupied Godwin throughout his writing career, manifesting itself not only in his various efforts at the bildungsroman, but as well in his philosophical writing and his later business endeavors as a publisher and writer of children’s books.
LITERARY BEGINNINGS
Godwin’s advent as an author came in January 1783, with the anonymous publication of The History of the Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. The biography opens with a forthright denouncement of the typical posture of impartiality adopted by historians and biographers, and it posits in the place of this disaffected stance a sort of moral rectitude, which allows a written history to act as the ethical judge and arbitrator of the past. For all of its lofty intentions, Godwin’s History suffered a good deal of negative criticism, mostly due to the less-than-scholarly nature of its sources and for the degree to which the style and intensity of his prose were said to have exceeded the subject itself. As one reviewer for the New Annual Register put it, “It is evidently the production of a young man, who, being filled with the greatness of his subject, and desirous of rising to a proportionate grandeur of sentiment and diction, is sometimes guilty of the turgid, when he means the sublime” (quoted in Graham, p. 22). Shortly thereafter, also in 1783, Godwin published his Defence of the Rockingham Party, in Their Late Coalition with the Right Honorable Frederic Lord North, weighing in on a nonpartisan political alliance that had recently caused a good deal of public chatter. In this same year, Godwin wrote and published An Account of the Seminary That Will Be opened on Monday the Fourth Day of August at Epsom in Surrey, for the Instruction of Twelve Pupils in the Greek, Latin, French, and English Languages. This treatise contains several of Godwin’s strongest opinions on education reform and is largely inspired by his study of French political theory, especially that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom Godwin names in the introduction. Though the school that Godwin proposes in the piece was never actually realized, the pamphlet serves as an intriguing insight into Godwin’s developing progressive thought and in its day garnered much positive feedback from critics. It begins with a general treatment of the
Godwin next produced a remarkable piece of parody, The Herald of Literature; or, A Review of the Most Considerable Publications That Will Be
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WILLIAM GODWIN Made in the Course of the Ensuing Winter (1783). The central conceit of the piece is wonderfully ironic, and not only shows Godwin at his most playful but as well marks the beginning of his lifelong propensity for the appropriation and imitation of tropes and styles lifted from nearly every arena of contemporary literature. The introduction to the Herald operates as a nuanced send-up of the critical culture of its day, and Godwin expresses an intention to correct the plaguing problems he sees as endemic to this practice. In order to do so, he offers a series of satirical reviews of literary works, ostensibly based on pilfered excerpts from the works in question. In all actuality, the alleged excerpts are Godwin’s own productions, and the performance is virtuosic. The array of falsified texts includes new volumes in Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; a novel by Fanny Burney titled Louisa; a poem by James Beattie; a rewriting of The Alchemist by Richard Brinsley Sheridan; and two political treaties focused on the United States, one an essay attributed to political philosopher Thomas Paine and the other a speech supposedly delivered by Edmund Burke. Godwin’s treatment of Gibbon is particularly remarkable as evidence of the author’s talent for imitation. The two political parodies are also of great interest, as Godwin will respond to both Burke and Paine in his later essays but never again in the form of literary parody.
all of Godwin’s mature fiction. The story is loosely structured around the amours of two youths, and the scenes of their courtship are rendered in the highly wrought style of the pastoral tradition. Alongside this narrative runs a counterplot that details the intrigues of the aristocratic society of Southampton as it attempts to thwart the intentions of Godwin’s young lovers. These sections are far more satirical in nature and are conveyed through a wry, often self-effacing narrator, who openly criticizes readers for their lack of attention to the story and repeatedly calls attention to the artifice of his own narration. The satirical sections stand out even further in relation to the scenes of pastoral romance insofar as they are peopled by overtly typological and allegorical figures, such as Miss Languish, Mr. Prattle, and the effete suitor Prettyman. This first novella is also significant in the context of Godwin’s political commitments, specifically of his progressive attitudes toward both gender and the institution of marriage. At the climax of the tale, Delia is kidnapped by the libertine Lord Martin, and Damon takes off on a failed attempt to recover her, putting this novel in immediate conversation with the tradition of eighteenth-century captivity narratives, which the progress of this particular tale immediately complicates. Contrary to convention, it is Damon who falls into severe peril because of the pursuit, while Delia’s means of escape is enacted separately from his chivalric attempt at her rescue. The lovers inevitably do reunite, but nevertheless, Damon and Delia ends on a note of profound anticlimax, as Godwin steadfastly refuses to fall back on the conventional fictional conceit of a happy ending instantiated through a scene of marriage. Rather, the novel falls in its final paragraph from the heights of pastoral romance to the quotidian banalities of married life: “For Damon and his Delia, they were amiable, and constant. Though their hearts were in the highest degree susceptible and affectionate; the first ebullition of passion could not last forever. But it was succeeded by the fest of reason, and the flow of soul. Their hours were sped with the calmness of tranquility. When they saw each other no longer with transport, they saw each other with compla-
Between January and July 1784, Godwin anonymously published three novellas, all radically different in style. In his memoirs, Godwin reflects that his work habits were sporadic and that he produced most of his works rather quickly, in sudden bursts, rather than over long, measured intervals. He refers to these years as, however, “probably the busiest period of my life” (Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, vol. 1, p. 44) and claims to have written his first proper work of fiction, the novella Damon and Delia (1784), in ten days. Damon and Delia is a fairly simple affair, but it demonstrates a great deal of promise, particularly in its capable combination of divergent literary modes—a technique that became essential to the political and aesthetic purposes of
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WILLIAM GODWIN cency” (Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, vol. 2, p. 76). All in all, the work was reviewed well and the publisher paid Godwin five guineas.
tish poet who, in 1761, released a collection of his own poetical works disguised as translations from an ancient Scottish bard named Ossian. Godwin’s novella, however, may be just as much a send-up of this sort of literary deception as a reproduction of it, and at various points throughout the novella, the subterfuge, and particularly the debt owed to Milton, is made almost tauntingly transparent. Godwin seems to have thrust himself wholeheartedly into the project of making himself a professional writer, and he was extremely prolific in these years. In 1788 Godwin began to keep a diary of terse memos that record his daily happenings, and he maintained this habit throughout his life. (During this time, he also began teaching, as a means of bolstering his income.) He produced an impressive quantity of journalistic pieces for various magazines, including the Political Herald, the New Annual Register, the English Peerage, and the English Review. This work was well-received by contemporary readers, particularly among English liberals of the time, and even today remains a compelling source of progressive political thought and of insight into the intellectual foundations of Godwin’s 1793 masterwork of political theory, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness.
It was at this time that Godwin began to write for the New Annual Register, a post that he secured through the help of Andrew Kippis, his tutor from Hoxton, and that he held until 1791. He also wrote pieces for the English Review, and there is some speculation that the laudatory review of Damon and Delia that appeared in this magazine was composed by Godwin himself. His next novellas were published in quick succession after the emergence of the first. Italian Letters; or, The History of the Count de St. Julian (1784) was written in three weeks and, of the three early fiction works, is said to have been the best received. An epistolary novel, it follows the correspondence of two members of the Italian nobility, the Marquis of Pescara and the Count de St. Julian, along with a few of their intimate companions. The two correspondents enjoy the pleasures of a close friendship, until that unity is betrayed in an intrigue surrounding a woman named Matilda, originally courted by St. Julian but eventually coerced into marrying the libertine Marquis. If there is any connection to be made between this work and the other elements of the Godwin corpus, it is by means of its careful attention to the capacity of the individual personality to occupy various, often contradictory, permutations and to the effects of a sense of tragic loss on a character’s psychological stability.
POLITICAL JUSTICE AND CALEB WILLIAMS
Over the course of the 1780s and early 1790s, Godwin’s time in London served not only to promote his reputation as a writer but to foster the development of his own intellectual commitments as well. He amassed an influential group of friends over these years and was introduced into several of the most important literary and cultural circles operating at the time. In the wake of the American Revolution, as popular faith in the workings of government began to wane, reform movements in England were given a significant boost, and Godwin’s liberal politics and his stance as a religious Dissenter became strengthened and even radicalized. He found himself in the intimate company of influential reformers like the chemist Joseph Priestly, the
The final major work produced in this period is a tale of the fantastic, titled Imogen: A Pastoral Romance (1784). The story itself is rather simple and tells of a virtuous woman pursued by the nefarious Roderic and repeatedly manipulated by his magic. Its most compelling aspect is its preface, which advertises the work not as an original production but as a translation of an extant romance by the ancient Welsh poet Cadwallo. In reality, it is a work heavily influenced by the romances of the Italian baroque and to an even greater extent by John Milton’s Comus (1634). This ruse regarding the story’s origin may be compellingly considered in the context of the famous case of James Macpherson, the Scot-
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WILLIAM GODWIN playwright Thomas Holcroft, the philosopher Richard Price, and the publisher George Robinson. In November 1791 he met and dined with Thomas Paine at the home of the publisher Joseph Johnson. In attendance as well that night was the writer Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), and the yet unpublished A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (which appeared in 1792). The event did not go well, however; Paine remained resistant to conversation, while Godwin and Wollstonecraft quarreled.
thought. This fact did not diminish, however, the overpowering effects of the book’s release. An Enquiry was reprinted twice in England, in 1796 and 1798, and Godwin revised the text heavily for both editions. It also earned an American printing, released in Philadelphia in 1796. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice takes as axiomatic the notion of the perfectibility of man, and of man’s potential for constant, if not infinite, improvement. For Godwin, it is the human capacity for reason that governs this progress, and the system of justice he proposes is designed primarily to protect and to foster this rational development. In somewhat traditional Enlightenment style, Godwin promotes the ability of an uncorrupted rational faculty to guide individuals toward a supreme moral truth, but he argues that governmental institutions, necessitated by human vice, impinge on this progress. Human society’s ultimate, if not slightly utopian, aim, therefore, is to supersede the necessity of governing bodies and to develop toward a type of society that ensures individual security without encroaching upon individual rights. Godwin recommends in service of this theory a system that replaces a large central governing body with a consortium of small parishes, which are not only immediately responsive to one another but that are also sensitive to the course of public opinion and to shifting individual demands within their own territorial bounds. Alongside this system of political management, Godwin develops a substantiating moral structure, arguing that a society without governmental oversight can only function appropriately if it is backed by a general awareness of the effects of individual action on the community as a whole. To exemplify this moral code, he famously posits a hypothetical situation in which both the archbishop François Fénelon and his chambermaid are trapped in a burning building. Godwin concludes that since the archbishop is a more valuable asset to the community, his life is more worthy of saving, even in the case of a deep personal connection to the imperiled chambermaid. Individuals, he argues, should be able to appeal to a universal sense of justice that transcends any emotional motivations:
The national politics of the period were so sharply bifurcated along the lines of loyalists and reformers that governmental restrictions on written dissent were severely tightened, and several writers, including Holcroft, found themselves in great peril because of their published opinions. Despite this atmosphere of tension and serious legal risk, in 1791, Godwin, having left his position at the New Annual Register, solicited Robinson for financing on a political treatise that he began composing in September of that year. In February 1793, he published the completed work, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness. The essay was an immediate success, receiving high praise from all except the most conservative reviewers and selling wildly, despite the original prediction that, at a cost of three guineas, it would prove too expensive to be widely purchased and therefore too costly to pose any serious political threat. William Pitt himself can be counted among those who initially underestimated An Enquiry’s potential effects, as he recommended to the Privy Council not to concern itself with prosecuting Godwin precisely because of this financial reasoning. The ideas expressed in the book, however, were widely disseminated, both by means of copies purchased (by lending libraries or jointly by groups of individuals) and through simple word of mouth. The theories espoused in Godwin’s Enquiry were not by any means novel, and they strongly bear the mark of the French political philosophers in whose work Godwin was so well versed. Godwin himself cites sources as unexpected as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) as influences on his
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WILLIAM GODWIN Within three weeks of the Enquiry’s publication, Godwin began work on his first and still most popular novel, Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, a work designed to dramatize and further explore several of the concepts set out in An Enquiry. He completed the novel in May 1794, to overwhelming praise and popular appeal. Thematically, it is a study of the horrors of tyranny, and is particularly compelling in light of the intensified field of political dispute contemporary with its release. In May 1794, Prime Minister Pitt suspended habeas corpus, an affront to individual rights that was not corrected for another eight years, during which time several writers stood trial on charges of treason for the works they had produced. These events inspired Godwin to compose the anonymous pamphlet titled Cursory Strictures on the Charge Delivered by Lord Chief Justice Eyre to the Grand Jury (1794), in which he defends those writers imprisoned for their work and condemns the injustices of a political system that continually creates new crimes with which to charge its subjects. Caleb Williams should not, however, be read merely as a straightforward political allegory, and it is perhaps even more interesting for its nuanced treatment of individual psychologies and for its experimentation with narrative forms.
Supposing I had been myself the chambermaid, I out to have chosen to die, rather than that Fenelon should have died. The life of Fenelon was really preferable to that of the chambermaid.ѧ Understanding is the faculty that perceives the truth of this and similar propositions; and justice is the principle that regulates my conduct accordingly.ѧ Supposing the chambermaid had been my wife, my mother or my benefactor. This would not alter the truth of the proposition. (vol. 1, p. 77)
At the same time as Godwin is mindful of the ways in which governmental intervention into processes like education are detrimental to the development of the individual character, he also expresses a good deal of uncertainty about the ability of the individual to develop outside of human society. He insists, rather, that the individual must find a place within the context of society, but in such a way that his experience is not too rigidly circumscribed by the coercive power of the state. Perhaps most famously, he turns his attention to the subject of marriage, which he characterizes as exemplary of precisely this point. Godwin argues that marriage distorts the process of establishing and assessing the affective bonds between two individuals, so that instead of a courtship based on self-reflection and genuine feeling, the method is, for a thoughtless and romantic youth of each sex, to come together, to see each other, for a few times, and under circumstances full of delusion, and then to vow eternal attachment. What is the consequence of this? In almost every instance they find themselves deceived. They are reduced to make the best of an irretrievable mistake. They are presented with the strongest imaginable temptation to become the dupes of falsehood. They are led to conceive it their wisest policy, to shut their eyes upon realities, happy, if, by any perversion of intellect, they can persuade themselves that they were right in their first crude opinion of their companion. Thus the institution of marriage a system of fraud.
The story begins with an autobiographical narration by the title character, Caleb, who recounts his early life, the death of his parents, and his acceptance to the post of secretary and amanuensis for the local magistrate, Squire Falkland, a strange and brooding figure whose odd and occasionally violent behavior goads Caleb’s curiosity. Caleb inquires of a servant, Mr. Collins, for insight into Falkland’s character, and in a narratorial shift that occupies most of the novel’s first volume, Collins recounts the squire’s history. Originally, Falkland had been a man known for his gaiety and charm and one convinced of the power of chivalric behavior to prevail in every circumstance. He becomes inadvertently embroiled, however, in a competition with a neighboring member of the aristocracy, a crude and brutish man named Tyrrel. Initially, Tyrrel’s instigations have little effect on
(vol. 2, pp. 380–381)
Godwin adds to these charges the belief that marriage is primarily a question of property and ownership, and that, contrary to contemporary mythology that posits marriage as an accord based on true love, the institution is actually predicated on motives of covetousness, competition, and property exchange.
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WILLIAM GODWIN Falkland, until the night Tyrrel physically assaults him at a public assembly. The disillusion that results from the absolute failure of the polite modes of behavior in which Falkland had placed so much faith drives him nearly to the point of insanity. Later that same evening, Tyrrel is found dead, and Falkland’s psychological condition continues to decline, even as, a short time afterward, a peasant named Hawkins and his son are arrested for the crime, tried, and hanged. Caleb’s investigations quickly reveal Falkland as the true culprit in Tyrrel’s murder, but this information, confirmed by Falkland’s confession, only drives Caleb into a state of abject servitude to the tyrannical master. He eventually escapes Falkland’s house but is immediately arrested on falsified charges and imprisoned. Godwin is unsparing in his methodical treatment of the mental torments of Caleb’s unmerited confinement, and the novel culminates in a remarkable trial scene, which vividly depicts the complex horrors of tyrannical justice. In the aftermath of Caleb Williams, Godwin’s stock as a literary celebrity skyrocketed, and, combined with the enormous success of An Enquiry, Godwin’s critical and popular reception achieved heights he was never to match in his long writing career. Even at this time he was by no means without his critics, and he took particular heat from the writers at the conservative AntiJacobin Review, who made Godwin one of their favorite targets—an ideal straw man for those writing against the radical politics of the end of the century.
Imlay quickly became rocky. In the spring of 1795, Imlay wrote to Wollstonecraft requesting that she move from Paris to stay with him in London, where he had gone on business. Once she arrived, she was greeted with the news that Imlay had taken up romantically with a young actress. He treated Wollstonecraft coldly, and by the end of that same year, he had altogether abandoned her and her child. According to Godwin’s biography of Wollstonecraft, she endured a year of great anxiety, repeatedly attempting to patch up her broken relationship with Imlay and twice attempting suicide over her failure to do so. It is likely Godwin’s sympathy for precisely this terrible history drew him closer to Wollstonecraft. Godwin had acquired a reputation for awkwardness in company, particularly in his exchanges with women, but his writings on Wollstonecraft, and his reports of their conversations and of their travels together, are warm and intimate, if not a bit marked by a type of stilted formality. Godwin writes, “The partiality we conceived for each other, was in that mode, which I have always regarded as the purest and most refined style of love. It grew with equal advances in the mind of each.ѧ It was friendship melting into love” (Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, vol. 1, p. 128). Godwin relished his role as a source of emotional support for the wounded Wollstonecraft, but the couple remained strangely reticent about admitting their affair publicly. In December 1796, Wollstonecraft became pregnant with a child conceived with Godwin, and the couple married on March 29, 1797. Godwin admits in his biography of his wife that the decision to marry was made with some difficulty, particularly in light of the philosophies on marriage he had published in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, but a combination of a fear of rebuke from their acquaintances and a genuine desire to codify their commitment eventually compelled them to go through with the ceremony. They did not, however, make their union public for another month, when they broke the news to their friends and purchased a house. That same year, Godwin published an assortment of essays on various subjects, including religion
In January 1796, he was invited to dine at the home of the novelist Mary Hays and was informed beforehand that Mary Wollstonecraft would also be in attendance. Their second meeting went far better than their first, and the two remained in frequent contact in the months that followed. The four-year interregnum between their meetings had been tumultuous for Wollstonecraft. She had spent most of that time enmeshed in a complicated love affair with Captain Gilbert Imlay, with whom she had eloped to France and conceived a child, Fanny Imlay, born May 14, 1794. Despite the initial passion of their courtship, Wollstonecraft’s relations with
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WILLIAM GODWIN and education, collected under the title The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature, in a Series of Essays. The marriage seems to have been a happy one, a fact that only serves to augment the tragedy of its brevity. On August 30, 1797, Wollstonecraft gave birth to another daughter, Mary Godwin. The birth was accompanied by severe complications, however, and the family’s sense of domestic happiness was cut short when Wollstonecraft contracted a fever and died on September 10, only twelve days after the delivery.
dication of the Rights of Woman,” which includes Wollstonecraft and Imlay’s private correspondence. This devastatingly negative public response reinforced Godwin’s status as a target for conservative rebuke, which only solidified as the period of radicalism at the end of the eighteenth century began to cool, giving way to a new ethos of reactionary conservatism.
Left with two young daughters and considerable personal grief, Godwin quickly went to work on a book project commemorating his late wife. By the end of the year, his Memoirs of the Author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” was finished, and it was published in January 1798. The book stands as a testament to the reverence with which Godwin considered his companion, and it betrays both Godwin’s deep personal affection for his subject and his sincere respect for her works. This act of veneration, however, did not result in precisely the type of memorial that Godwin had apparently intended. Instead, the book opened the gates for a series of attacks on the personal character of both the book’s subject and its author. It also inspired a new round of criticism for Wollstonecraft’s own writings, and it is said that her Vindication never received such vocal condemnation as after Godwin’s Memoirs were published. This response is due in large part to the frankness of Godwin’s presentation, particularly of those aspects of Wollstonecraft’s character and personal history about which he was, himself, uncertain. He is surprisingly blunt in his treatment of Wollstonecraft’s relationship with Imlay, but he handles far more delicately the question of his own physical intimacy with his future wife. In this way, it is possible to read the Memoirs as Godwin’s own attempt both to work out his rather tangled emotions regarding his recent history and to vindicate the character of Mary Wollstonecraft, not only to the reading public but to himself as well. The public outcry against this work was only augmented by Godwin’s contemporaneous publication of the Posthumous Works of the Author of “A Vin-
This shift in the political and critical climate did not, however, dissuade Godwin from literary production, and in 1799 he published one of his finest works, St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century. An ambitious, sprawling novel, it marks a shift in the concerns of Godwin’s fiction to include a treatment of “feeling”—already an important keyword in eighteenth-century literature and culture. The novel centers primarily on the decline of its eponymous protagonist, originally a French knight, whose life spirals into despair after a mysterious stranger offers him the secrets of the Philosopher’s Stone and a knowledge of alchemy, endowing him with both the gift of eternal life and the promise of infinite wealth. Over the course of the novel, Godwin employs a vibrant and radical concatenation of generic conventions that render St. Leon alternately a chivalric romance, libertine memoir, sentimental travelogue, domestic fiction, gothic tale, and erudite historical novel. St. Leon features several of the themes that drive Caleb Williams, insofar as the novel is still, in a structural sense, primarily a bildungsroman, concerned with exploring the factors influencing the development of an individual character. As opposed to Caleb’s rather hermetic geography and limited set of personal relations, however, Godwin places St. Leon in a far more complex and finely realized context, not only coursing him through a multitude of settings and circumstances, each of which has distinct consequences in terms of his development, but also locating him in a nuanced and historically accurate temporal setting. For all the fantasy that drives the novel, St. Leon still accommodates such
FICTION OF FEELING
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WILLIAM GODWIN historical realities as the decline of the French aristocracy and the horrors of the Inquisition. On this latter event, the novel is especially compelling; St. Leon is brought before a terrifying tribunal and questioned about his newly acquired knowledge, in a remarkable continuation of Godwin’s treatment of the perverse spectacle of tyrannical justice. Additionally, this second novel is far more interested than its predecessor in exploring the significance of human society and its impact on individual character. It offers, therefore, a sort of paradoxical treatment of individual growth; the moment St. Leon acquires the secrets of immortality (and therefore the key to potentially infinite progress), he is thrust into a world of utter secrecy, increasingly secluding himself from the company of others, and therefore effectively consigning himself into a perpetual state of limbo.
the beginnings of a financial crisis that endured for nearly the rest of his life. In an attempt to bolster his income, Godwin turned his attention to producing a work for the stage. This strategy had been exceedingly productive for several members of his literary coterie, especially his friend Elizabeth Inchbald, whom Godwin purportedly attempted to romantically pursue, without much success. In 1800 Godwin composed Antonio: A Tragedy in Five Acts, which proved a resounding failure and ran only once, on the night of December 13. The following year, Godwin wrote another drama, Abbas, King of Persia, which was never performed. His personal life and his health suffered similar setbacks in the beginning of the new century. He courted several other members of his circle without any positive results, until he successfully wooed the widow Mary Jane Clairmont, whom he married in December 1801. Clairmont was already the mother of two children, Charles and Clara Mary Jane (known as Jane). She quickly proved herself to be a terrible stepmother to Fanny and Mary and was profoundly unpleasant in the company of Godwin’s friends. Their financial troubles pursued them and were further augmented by the birth of a son, William Godwin Jr., in 1803. In an attempt to mitigate these concerns, Godwin turned to biography, and produced in 1803 a handsome, two-volume quarto edition of Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, the Early English Poet. As the subtitle suggests— Including Memoirs of His Near Friend and Kinsman, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster: With Sketches of the Manners, Opinions, Arts, and Literature of England in the Fourteenth Century—the book is comprehensive and remarkably well-researched, but it is far more interested in using the figure of Chaucer as a point of reference for a series of reflections on fourteenthcentury British society than it is on delivering a strict biography of the poet’s life. In a certain sense, this biographical project is consistent with treatment of the relationship between the history and the individual enacted in Godwin’s fiction, and Godwin offers, by way of introduction to Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, the justification that “the full and complete life of a poet would
As a counterpoint to this arrested development, Godwin also places the novel in conversation with the extant literary “culture of sensibility,” a movement sought to align the performance of sympathy and sentimentality with altruism and virtue. Godwin depicts here for the first time the sort of sentimental education that will become a hallmark of his later fictional work. The novel both treats the contemporary issue of sentiment and laments St. Leon’s inability to access the set of emotions and emotional responses that had come to typify both human relations and literary representations of individual characters by the end of the eighteenth century. It is in this way, as well, that the novel addresses the issue of marriage. The figure of the noble wife, Marguerite—obviously inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft— serves to hold St. Leon’s family together as its patriarch descends repeatedly into vice and despair. Significantly, however, St. Leon’s ultimate inability to truly appreciate the emotional pleasures of domesticity makes this treatment more of an emendation of the principles outlined in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice than an outright refutation of them. Although this novel sold extremely well and was received favorably, it failed to achieve the same overwhelming critical response Caleb Williams had enjoyed, and Godwin found himself in
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WILLIAM GODWIN tional prototype for the literature of sensibility that was to follow.
include an extensive survey of the manners, the opinions, the arts and the literature, of the age in which the poet lived. This is the only way in which we can become truly acquainted with the history of his mind, and the causes which made him what he was” (p. viii). The biography fell short of Godwin’s expectations, however, selling poorly and garnering a good deal of criticism for an overabundance of imagination and a relative lack of biographical fact.
Godwin’s protagonist is far more complicated than his forbears, insofar as Fleetwood’s virtuous sensibility is not somehow innate or purely given but is painstakingly shown to be, rather, the consequence of a certain combination of natural and institutional pedagogy. Godwin goes so far as to investigate the differences between these two modes of education, marking the sharp transition from Fleetwood’s early romps through the wilds of northern Wales to his university experience as a student at Oxford, where the cruelty of his fellow students complicates Fleetwood’s development toward a state of highly sentimentalized benevolence. The Oxford section is memorable as well for Godwin’s depiction of the peculiar taunting of the young Withers, whose poetic epic on the fifth labor of Hercules (which required the hero to clean the stables of Augeas) is represented in part in the novel and offers a masterful and highly comic parody of poetic intention far exceeding poetic content.
At the same time as he worked to move this biography toward print, Godwin also assembled a book for children, Bible Stories: Memorable Acts of the Ancient Patriarchs, Judges, and Kings, Extracted from Their Original Historians: For the Use of Children, which he published in 1803 under the pseudonym William Scolfield. Despite Godwin’s adamant agnosticism (which, at times, manifested as a genuine atheism), he still admired the Bible as a collection of important literary and historical artifacts, and he considered it an important tool in the instruction of children. This take on the religious text outraged conservative critics, but the book sold successfully.
Godwin’s work is today most notable for precisely what made it least appealing in its own day. He not only examines the highly contingent and culturally produced nature of sensibility, but also goes so far as to represent in his novel the failure of feeling to adequately govern human behavior. As Fleetwood develops, it seems as if all of the pieces are in place for the creation of a fully actualized sentimental protagonist. He even provides space in his autobiographical narrative for a long section devoted to the history of his benefactor, Ruffigny, whose childhood was marked by tragedy; upon the death of his father, Ruffigny was cast into the protection of his jealous uncle and was subsequently sold into labor in the silk factories of Lyon. Godwin’s portrayal of the abuses of the factory system proved extremely influential on the social-realist vein of nineteenth-century fiction, and it provides a stirring application of his theories of political justice to the early conditions of the industrial revolution. Despite all of this instructive personal, pedagogical, and anecdotal experience, the character Fleetwood is marked for tragedy. He struggles repeatedly with his tendencies toward profligacy, and
Godwin published another novel in 1805, titled, Fleetwood; or, The New Man of Feeling, and although its returns were poor, it stands as a profound artistic achievement. Like St. Leon, Godwin’s third novel takes up the questions of sentiment and sensibility, but, in doing so, it addresses itself far less explicitly to the conventions of gothic and supernatural horror than either of its predecessors. Instead, Fleetwood portrays the extremes of emotional experience possible even in the most quotidian forms and instances of experience. It is also far more intensely fixated on representing the process of sentimental education in a methodological and highly nuanced fashion, and Godwin cites a debt to Rousseau in his depiction of the childhood of his protagonist, Casimir Fleetwood. Especially in this regard, the novel stands as both an extension of and a distinct challenge to the era’s “culture of sensibility,” and it is important to consider the character Fleetwood in relation to both the work of Rousseau and of Henry Mackenzie, whose novel The Man of Feeling (1771) was a founda-
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WILLIAM GODWIN he is compelled toward an unfortunate marriage with a woman whose tragic past fills him with feelings of deep pathos but, in all likelihood, not actual love. Their marriage is quickly marred by Fleetwood’s jealous and profound suspicion, and the latter portion of the novel tracks his descent into madness as he contemplates, in solitude, his more or less baseless sense of betrayal. In the absence of both human society and any sort of rational mediation, Fleetwood’s feelings accumulate and eventually destroy him. The point is profound, but Godwin’s attack on the culture of sensibility irked contemporary readers, and the novel sold poorly and suffered much criticism, both for its apparent crassness toward refined feeling and for the seeming incommensurability of Fleetwood’s emotional states with the circumstances that produce them.
troubles; in 1822 he declared bankruptcy, and the Juvenile Library closed. In 1807, he completed and brought to the stage the mildly successful Faulkener: A Tragedy. In 1809 he published an Essay on Sepulchres, which proposes a national initiative to mark the burial places of important cultural icons. Godwin argues that this project would demonstrate England’s status as, in his parlance, an “old country,” and he defines this designation in opposition to so-called new countries, such as those found in Asia and Africa, which bear no visible traces of a given culture’s history. Unmarked, these countries seem new, detached from history, even if they have been occupied by certain societies for generations: “We may stand upon the surface of a new country, and observe the heavens, and penetrate into all the recesses of astronomy. But how much greater is it than this, to revert to the noblest of the creator’s works, and to call up the nations and men who have formerly trod the earth which now I tread!” (pp. 60–61).
In an effort to make financial ends meet, the Godwins frequently borrowed money from their friends. Though frustrated by the lackluster returns of William Godwin’s fiction, the couple was encouraged by the success of his Bible Stories. They decided to go into business for themselves and, after securing a loan from Thomas Wedgwood, opened a bookshop and printing press, called the City French and English Juvenile Library. Their dual intention was to continue the success of their early work producing children’s literature and to appeal to the French émigré presence in London. Godwin produced several pieces for the press under the pseudonyms Theophilus Marcliffe and Edward Baldwin, each of which actually referred to a distinct authorial identity. Marcliffe’s productions were limited to two didactic works for children, The Looking Glass: A True History of the Early Years of an Artist (1805) and The Life of Lady Jane Grey (1806), while the books published under the name Baldwin included several works of history and mythology, notably Fables, Ancient and Modern (1805) and The Pantheon: or, Ancient History of the Gods of Greece and Rome (1806). The venture was, initially, extremely successful, and the shop’s cataloge steadily expanded to include the work of other writers, such as Charles and Mary Lamb. Godwin never completely managed, however, to shake his financial
In January 1812, Godwin received a letter from the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who declared himself a great admirer of Godwin’s work, particularly of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Shelley was then nineteen years old and, despite his affinity for Godwin’s work, had presumed the author to be dead. He was happy to be disabused of this mistaken belief, and his cordial letter sparked a lively, extended, and intellectually exacting correspondence, in which Godwin assumed the role of knowing elder to an eager but impetuous young protégé. They met in person for the first time that autumn, after Shelley returned from Ireland, where he had gone to advocate on behalf of Irish Catholics, and afterward met frequently, quite reveling in the profound dissimilitude of their characters and the liveliness of their political and aesthetic debates. Their relationship was not, however, universally productive. Shelley repeatedly proved himself unreliable. He had initially promised to provide Godwin with funds to stave off his looming bankruptcy but failed to follow through, providing Godwin with significantly less than expected. He also failed to keep appointments.
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WILLIAM GODWIN In the spring of 1814, Shelley met Godwin’s daughter Mary, and the two began an obvious flirtation. Shelley was, by this time, already married to Harriet Westbrook—a frequent visitor to the Godwin household who had taken little pleasure in Miss Godwin’s company—and an angry Godwin forbade Mary any further communication with the young poet. Despite this restriction, the two continued to exchange letters through Mary’s stepsister, Jane Clairmont, and convened secret meetings at the St. Pancras Churchyard, the site where Mary Wollstonecraft was interred, and where Mary and Percy had exchanged their first kiss and their first vows of love. On July 28, the two eloped and left immediately for Calais (along with Jane), outraging the Godwin parents. Mary Jane followed the trio to France, but the girls refused to come home. Godwin was incensed and wrote to Shelley announcing the end of their friendship. He was especially affronted by the fact that Shelley justified these events using pieces of Godwin’s own Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, which Godwin insisted Shelley had radically misread.
detailing this personal and national history, the narration veers into the past, to account for the melancholy character of the uncle, Audley Mandeville, and Godwin presents a familiar tale of thwarted love as the motivation for this character’s despondency and gloom. Returning to primary narrative, we find that the seclusion Charles experiences in his uncle’s charge (where his primary companion is the polemical tutor Hilkiah Bradford) results in an antisocial tendency when he begins attending school. After repeatedly failing to appropriately judge the character of his classmates, Charles falls into trouble when he is falsely accused of possessing a book of antimonarchical illustrations. He blames his woes on an older boy named Clifford, whom he reviles mostly for his artful popularity. Mandeville mistakes his rather arbitrary jealous indignation for a righteous superiority, and the justness of his hatred is confirmed for him years later when Clifford is hired over him as secretary for Joseph Wagstaff. Mandeville is hereby convinced that Clifford is fated to be his nemesis, and he suffers a severe psychological decline when Clifford begins to court Harriet, Mandeville’s beloved sister. The remainder of the novel tracks this character’s intensifying obsession, which ultimately leads to his tragic downfall. Shelley warmly praised the novel primarily for its style and emotional intensity, but these were also precisely the qualities for which Mandeville was criticized and satirized.
This period of domestic turmoil came to a climax in the fall 1816, when Fanny Imlay committed suicide. A few months later, on December 10, the body of Harriet Westbrook Shelley was dredged from the Serpentine; she had drowned herself. On December 30, Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley wed. Mary had already given birth to a son conceived with Shelley and was pregnant with another. Although still enormously displeased, Godwin took some relief in their official union, insofar as it ensured Mary’s future financial stability, and eventually relations began to improve between Godwin and the young couple.
After Shelley’s death by drowning in 1822, Godwin’s relationship with his daughter moved toward a more definite state of amelioration. The two corresponded regularly on literary matters, with Godwin offering a good deal of advice in regard to Mary Shelley’s later fiction. Her frequent visits to her father’s house pleased the aging writer, who at this time was beginning serious work on his four-volume History of the Commonwealth of England, the first volume of which appeared on February 26, 1824, and which proceeded until the release of the final volume in 1828. His fifth novel, Cloudesley: A Tale, was published in 1830, the day after Godwin’s seventy-fourth birthday. It comprises several
In 1817, Godwin returned to fiction-writing with Mandeville: A Tale of the Seventeenth Century in England. Covering much the same ground as Godwin’s earlier fiction, the novel sets the development of its eponymous protagonist, Charles Mandeville, first within the context of the Irish revolt of 1641, to which he is nearly a victim, and afterward within the gloomy environs of his uncle’s mansion in England, where he is spirited for his own safety. Immediately upon
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WILLIAM GODWIN frame stories, beginning with the life of William Meadows, an Englishman who travels to Russia as a sailor and eventually garners the ire of a local magistrate, necessitating his clandestine escape from that country and a return to his homeland. Upon returning, he comes into the employment of the brooding English noble Lord Danvers. Much in the style of Caleb Williams, the novel tracks the sources of Danvers’s melancholy, in an autobiographical narration that occupies the majority of the novel and, in the process, delves back into the history of continental Europe and the wars between the Austrian and Ottoman empires. Danvers chronicles his own degeneration from the heights of militaristic valor to the depths of villainy, beginning when he undergoes a radical shift in character after the death of his brother and the subsequent death, due to complications during childbirth, of his sister-in-law. Danvers conspires with his brother’s ward, Cloudesley—who has himself undergone a severe metamorphosis from the halcyon days of his youth to an adulthood marked by bouts of ardent misanthropy—to fake the death of his brother’s son, thus putting himself in line to inherit his family’s title. Danvers procures the corpse of a recently stillborn baby and buries it alongside his brother’s wife, while Cloudesley spirits the real heir, a baby named Julian, away from England, and he raises the child as his own on the continent. Cloudesley marries, and the family eventually settles in Italy, where Danvers takes his narrative in order to provide the details of Julian’s development. He pays particular attention to Julian’s moral education and the growth of his virtuous character, which flourishes under the guidance of a benevolent tutor and in the company of his intimate companion Francesco.
rescue him, is killed. Danvers is overcome by the murderous consequences that his formerly bloodless plot has brought about, and he plunges into grief as his family is visited by a severe form of supernatural retribution; one by one, his wife and children die off. Meadows is charged with recovering the now direly melancholy Julian, who risks being hanged for his association with the banditti. In typically Godwinian fashion, then, this novel treats the complexities and contradictions implicit in the sentimental and psychological character of the individual. It sketches out several figures whose highly wrought sentimental goodwill is corrupted by the tumults of circumstance and, ultimately as well, repaired with a good deal of effort and several lessons in the power of human compassion. The novel was favorably reviewed, although critical responses regularly mourned the loss of the compelling power of Godwin’s earlier fiction, especially of Caleb Williams. Critics also commented, however, on how little Godwin’s old age had affected his literary capabilities, and they were impressed at receiving such a powerful work from a writer of Godwin’s years. Godwin next set his mind on returning to philosophy, and he completed a collection of essays that he intended as the final summation of his intellectual career. He had difficulty, however, finding a publisher. He made eleven failed attempts to market the collection, until, in 1831, Thoughts on Man, His Nature, Productions, and Discoveries was finally published. The collection failed to scintillate, however, and fell quite short of its intention to update the principles expressed in The Enquirer and An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Godwin’s literary output had hit something of a doldrums, and in 1832, tragedy struck his family once again, when William Godwin Jr. died of cholera. Political circumstances, however, shifted favorably for the aged writer, and the election of the new Whig government in 1833 provided him with an opportunity to allay his financial concerns. He was offered the post of “office keeper and yeoman usher of the receipt of the exchequer,” a post that, however small its responsibilities, paid a stable annual salary of two hundred pounds sterling.
Cloudesley is so taken by his adoptive son’s virtue and the pleasantness of his character that he determines to reveal to him the truth of his origins. This news reaches Danvers, along with the unfortunate continuation of Julian’s tale, which has him absconding with Francesco and eventually joining a group of bandits camped in the forests of northern Italy. Cloudesley himself pursues his prodigal son and, in attempting to
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WILLIAM GODWIN Godwin’s final novel, Deloraine, appeared in 1833 as well and compellingly demonstrates his enduring literary talents. Though its opening tracks similar territory as the rest of Godwin’s novels—introducing, rather schematically, the progress of its protagonist’s development from child to feeling adult—the work balances its several frame narratives well and at every point remains engaging. The narrator Deloraine recounts his ideal marriage to a woman named Emilia, whose death brings a sudden end to a joyful period of domestic pleasure. Grief-stricken, the sullen widower begins traveling, eventually encountering a young woman named Margaret, whose history he narrates for several chapters, detailing her amours with her former lover, William, who is, at the end of the tale, supposedly killed in a shipwreck. Three years have passed since this incident, and Margaret and Deloraine begin a relationship of their own, fueled largely by Deloraine’s deep sense of sympathy for the thwarted romance and as well by a sort of disaffected resignation after the death of his own first wife. They marry, and their life together proceeds genially enough, but Deloraine is troubled by his feeling that, unlike his time with Emilia, his new marriage is not so much a union of intellectual equals as it is a matter of his mere admiration for Margaret’s delicate beauty.
Margaret swoons and, shortly thereafter, dies from the shock. Deloraine flees the country, only to be pursued by William’s former companion, Travers, a Creole from Jamaica, who had met William in St. Domingo and who, in the tradition of intimate male friendship visible in much of Godwin’s fiction, devotes himself to the vindication of William’s wrongful death. The majority of the novel’s conclusion consists of the pursuit, but it is most interesting for the intermittent meditations on the nature of judgment and guilt that are interspersed with the narrative. Godwin’s efforts paid off, and his final novel premiered as a popular success. The last book Godwin put into print during his lifetime was his Lives of the Necromancers: or, An Account of the Most Eminent Persons in Successive Ages, Who Have Claimed for Themselves, or to Whom Has Been Imputed by Others, the Exercise of Magical Power (1834). Though seemingly idiosyncratic in content, this collection of essays deals with the topic of gothic superstition in history, not in order to assess the validity or falsity of any particular set of claims but, rather, to investigate and celebrate the capacity of the human imagination, which Godwin claims is meaningfully evinced through the history of supernatural fantasy. According to Godwin’s introduction, man does not “only see all that is; but he also imagines all that is not. He takes to pieces the substances that are, and combines their parts into new arrangements. He peoples all the elements of the world of his imagination” (pp. vi–vii), and he does this, the text argues, in order to extend his dominion and the dominion of his knowledge beyond the boundaries of the present and into the future. Godwin tracks the history of necromancy beginning with several instances from biblical tradition, and then he returns to the classical world. He pays particular attention to what he isolates as a distinct paradigm shift after the reign of Constantine, when the official toleration of Christianity led to a decline in cultures of necromancy and to a marked change in the discourse of the supernatural. Human understanding after this period came to be mediated through a consideration of Christian theology, which determines that all knowledge not granted by
While he meditates on his sense of disillusionment, news comes to Deloraine that William has actually survived and has spent several years as a captive of the Spanish in the Americas. This information further complicates Deloraine’s reflections on his marriage, and he is awkwardly troubled by his inability to account for the fact that, despite the obvious lack of an emotional bond between him and his wife, he is still strangely possessive of her. He chooses to keep the newly acquired information secret from his wife but suffers from deep anxiety, both over the fear that it will be otherwise revealed and because of the very the fact of his deceit and the secret power that it grants him over the unknowing Margaret. The estranged lovers nonetheless manage to find one another again, but their reunion is interrupted by the melancholy Deloraine, who, in a fit of passion, draws a pistol and kills William.
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WILLIAM GODWIN God is the property and consequence of the devil, and Godwin isolates the rise of this line of thought as the moment of the amalgamation of necromancy (insofar as it represents a sort of prohibited knowledge) with notions of evil. Godwin subsequently treats the history of necromancy in the East and the development, during the period of the Inquisition, of a culture of religious persecution of the supposed practitioners of witchcraft—a project that propagated itself through fear and through the subtle and constant creation of new charges to levy against its unsuspecting victims. As pulpy, then, as the content of Lives of the Necromancers may seem, it is clear that the political and philosophical commitments that motivate the work are precisely those that had always acted as the primary engines of Godwin’s political and social thought. Despite the relative comfort of his final years, Godwin’s age wore on him. His health steadily declined. Shortly after his eightieth birthday, he contracted a brief illness accompanied by a fever, and he died on April 7, 1836. At his request, he was interred at St. Pancras cemetery, alongside his first wife and greatest companion, Mary Wollstonecraft.
Cloudesley: A Tale. 3 vols. London: H. Colburn & R. Bentley, 1830. Deloraine. London: 3 vols. London: R. Bentley, 1833.
ESSAYS, PAMPHLETS,
An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness. 2 vols. London: G. G. & J. Robinson, 1793. (Written anonymously.) Cursory Strictures on the Charge Delivered by Lord Chief Justice Eyre to the Grand Jury, October 2, 1794. London: D. I. Eaton, 1794. (Written anonymously.) The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature, in a Series of Essays. London: G. G. & J. Robinson, 1797. Essay on Sepulchres; or, A Proposal for Erecting Some Memorial of the Illustrious Dead in All Ages on the Spot Where Their Remains Have Been Interred. London: W. Miller, 1809. Thoughts on Man, His Nature, Productions, and Discoveries: Interspersed with Some Particulars Respecting the Author. London: Effingham Wilson, 1831.
WORKS OF WILLIAM GODWIN AND
TREATISES
The Herald of Literature: or, A Review of the Most Considerable Publications That Will Be Made in the Course of the Ensuing Winter: With Extracts. London: John Murray, 1783. (Written anonymously.)
Selected Bibliography NOVELS
AND
A Defence of the Rockingham Party, in Their Late Coalition with the Right Honorable Frederic Lord North. London: J. Stockdale, 1783. (Written anonymously.) An Account of the Seminary That Will Be Opened on Monday the Fourth Day of August at Epsom in Surrey, for the Instruction of Twelve Pupils in the Greek, Latin, French, and English Languages. London: T. Cadell, 1783. (Written anonymously.)
HISTORICAL
AND
BIOGRAPHICAL WORKS
The History of the Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. London: G. Kearsley, 1783. (Written anonymously.)
NOVELLAS
Damon and Delia. London: T. Hookham, 1784. (Novella, written anonymously.) Imogen: A Pastoral Romance. London: William Lane, 1784. (Novella, written anonymously.) Italian Letters; or, The History of the Count de St. Julian. London: G. Robinson, 1784. (Novella, written anonymously.) Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams. 3 vols. London: B. Crosby, 1794. St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century. 4 vols. London: G. G. & J. Robinson, 1799. Fleetwood; or, The New Man of Feeling. 3 vols. London: Richard Phillips, 1805. Mandeville: A Tale of the Seventeenth Century in England. 3 vols. Edinburgh: A. Constable, 1817.
Memoirs of the Author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” London: J. Johnson, 1798. Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, the Early English Poet, Including Memoirs of His Near Friend and Kinsman, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster: With Sketches of the Manners, Opinions, Arts, and Literature of England in the Fourteenth Century. 2 vols. London: Richard Phillips, 1803. History of the Commonwealth of England: From Its Commencement, to the Restoration of Charles the Second. 4 vols. London: H. Colburn, 1824–1828. Lives of the Necromancers; or, An Account of the Most Eminent Persons in Successive Ages, Who Have Claimed for Themselves, or to Whom Has Been Imputed by Others, the Exercise of Magical Power. London: F. J. Mason, 1834.
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WILLIAM GODWIN THEATRICAL WORKS
1992. Includes: Vol. 1, Autobiography, Autobiographical Fragments and Reflections, Godwin/Shelley Correspondence, Memoirs. Edited by Mark Philp; Vol. 2, Damon and Delia, Italian Letters, Imogen. Edited by Pamela Clemit.
Antonio: A Tragedy in Five Acts. London: G. G. & J. Robinson, 1800. Faulkener: A Tragedy. London: Richard Phillips, 1807.
WORKS
FOR
CHILDREN
Bible Stories: Memorable Acts of the Ancient Patriarchs, Judges, and Kings, Extracted from Their Original Historians: For the Use of Children. London: Richard Phillips, 1803. (Written as William Scolfield.) Fables, Ancient and Modern: Adapted for the Use of Children. London: T. Hodgkins, 1805. (Written as Edward Baldwin.) The Looking Glass: A True History of the Early Years of an Artist: Calculated to Awaken the Emulation of Young Persons of Both Sexes, in the Pursuit of Every Laudable Attainment: Particularly in the Cultivation of the Fine Arts. London: T. Hodgkins, 1805. (Written as Theophilus Marcliffe.) The Life of Lady Jane Grey, and of Lord Guildford Dudley, Her Husband. London: T. Hodgkins, 1806. (Written as Theophilus Marcliffe.) The Pantheon; or, Ancient History of the Gods of Greece and Rome: Intended to Facilitate the Understanding of Classical Authors, and of the Poets in General. London: T. Hodgkins, 1806. (Written as Edward Baldwin.)
CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Bour, Isabelle, “Sensibility as Epistemology in Caleb Williams, Waverly, and Frankenstein.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 45, no. 4:813–827 (autumn 2005). Carlson, Julie. England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Clemit, Pamela. The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. ———. “Philosophical Anarchism in the Schoolroom: William Godwin’s Juvenile Library, 1805–25.” Biblion: The Bulletin of the New York Public Library 9, nos. 1–2:44–70 (fall 2000–spring 2001). Dumas, D. Gilbert. “Things as They Were: The Original Ending of Caleb Williams.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 6, no. 3:575–597 (summer 1966). Franta, Andrew. “Godwin’s Handshake.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 122:3 (May 2007) 696-710. Graham, Kenneth W. William Godwin Reviewed: A Reception History, 1783–1834. New York: AMS Press, 2001. Handwerk, Gary. “Mapping Misogyny: Godwin’s Fleetwood and the Staging of Rousseauvian Education.” Studies in Romanticism 41, no. 3:375–398 (fall 2002). Kelly, Gary. The English Jacobin Novel, 1780–1805. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. Locke, Don. A Fantasy of Reason: The Life and Thought of William Godwin. London: Routledge, 1980. Marshall, Peter H. William Godwin. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984.
ADDITIONAL WORKS Posthumous Works of the Author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” London: J. Johnson, 1798. (Editor.) Mylius’ School Dictionary of the English Language: To Which Is Prefixed a New Guide to the English Tongue by Edward Baldwin. London: M. J. Godwin, 1809. (Written as Edward Baldwin.) Outlines of English Grammar, Partly Abridged from Mr. Hazlitt’s New and Improved Grammar of the English Tongue. London: M. J. Godwin, 1810. (Editor, as Edward Baldwin.) The Elopement of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, as Narrated by William Godwin. Edited by H. Buxton Forman. London: Bibliophile Society, 1911.
Monsam, Angela. “Biography as Autopsy in William Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.’” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 21:1 (fall 2008) 109–130. St. Clair, William. The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family. New York: Norton, 1989.
MODERN EDITIONS Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin. 8 vols. Edited by Mark Philp. London: Pickering and Chatto,
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NICK HORNBY (1957—)
Paul Sullivan THE 1990S WERE Nick Hornby’s decade. In eight years the English writer came from total obscurity to become the voice of a generation of men in England and America. Often called the creator of “lad lit,” he has been imitated but never equaled. His subject matter—emotionally immature thirtysomething men who fear relationships, traditional employment, and all manner of responsibilities historically associated with adulthood—may seem facile on the surface. Worse, his books have prompted fans and critics alike to equate the subjects of his novels with his own life. Yet Hornby’s work is deeper than that. If he were the lad he wrote about, he hardly would have the perspective to see that life for what it is—a shield to ward off the onset of adult responsibility and, by extension, the slow slide into the grave.
excessive, and he possesses the perspective to see how detrimental it is to the rest of his life. Yet he can no more let go of this borderline acceptable hobby than he could love one child more than another. Following Fever Pitch, he wrote one blazingly funny novel after another. High Fidelity, his first (1995), examined male stasis through a record store proprietor whose penchant for listmaking shows how deeply knowledgeable he is about music and how equally baffled he is by women and relationships. In About a Boy (1998), he tells the story of an emotionally stilted man who has created “an island life” for himself, free of responsibility, attachments, even employment, with the tale unfolding through the eyes of a boy whose single mother is perpetually depressed. By the end of the decade Hornby used his celebrity to edit a collection of short stories, proceeds from which were to benefit a school for autistic children he founded in 1997 after his first son, Danny, had been born with the disease a few years earlier. In doing so, he not only drew attention and resources to a cause he believed in but also capped a whirlwind decade. Before Fever Pitch was published when he was thirty-five, he worked as a greeter, guiding Korean executives around London while struggling to get his journalism published. By 2000 he was a leading voice in a generation of British writers and a budding international literary star.
Hornby is to “lad lit” what some wits have said Jane Austen, the nineteenth-century author of Emma and Pride and Prejudice, is to “chick lit,” a more popular, lucrative, and imitated counterpart to the lads. She mined the social mores of her time and turned them into tales of women and men struggling to understand and, in some cases, to best each other, and she found a way to connect across generations and to reach far beyond her native England. Likewise Hornby has mined a vein of manhood at the end of the twentieth century with humor, not despair. The picture that emerges is not always flattering, even when he turns a mirror on himself. In his breakthrough memoir Fever Pitch (1992), he gives a warts-and-all portrayal of a soccerobsessed fan, one moment wondering how important a match would have to be for him to miss the birth of his own child and the next excoriating himself for such a deplorable notion. He knows his love of soccer—a sport the British call “football”—of one team in particular, is
With the turn of the century, Hornby did not let up. How to Be Good (2001) took what he had done with stunted men and added a female perspective. The novel pokes fun at the pieties of a woman doctor who believes she is a good person by dint of her profession if not her actions, and her husband, an angry man going through a cultlike conversion to become a better
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NICK HORNBY person. It shows the broadening of Hornby’s palette as he freely mocks the upper middle-class people around whom he found himself. A real stylistic turning point came with his next novel, A Long Way Down (2005), in which he uses an ensemble cast—four disparate people coming together coincidentally to commit suicide on New Year’s Eve by jumping off the same building—to examine something as depressing and disruptive as suicide through the lens of dark humor. He continued to go down new avenues with Slam, a young adult novel published in 2007, which applies his worldview to a fifteen-year-old boy about to become a father, and with writing a screen adaptation of a British journalist’s memoir about being conned as a young girl.
had different expectations. She came from a working-class family in London and had settled into life as a secretary. Orphaned as a boy, he had grown up impoverished in Dorset, on the south coast of England, but had won a scholarship for poor boys to attend an elite public school. By nature, the man was a striver. “My dad grew up poorer than she did, but at the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s he started to motor along and more or less changed class,” Hornby said in the interview. “My mom went along on that ride and got stranded halfway through.” She was stranded in the sense that she was divorced from Hornby’s father in 1968, when the boy was eleven years old. His father moved forward, advancing in the ranks at Mobil before becoming the head of Rank Xerox, the British subsidiary of the international copy machine company. Hornby’s father moved to France after he divorced and joined up with a second family, one that he had started unbeknownst to anyone in the first one. Hornby’s mother remained a secretary and took on the added role of single mother of two children at a time and in a place where divorce was neither understood nor accepted.
Yet, however hip Hornby became among fellow writers and fans, in an interview conducted for this essay on September 23, 2008, he thanked a decidedly traditional influence for his manner of storytelling: John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. “It’s about the characters and the situations they find themselves in,” he said. “It started me thinking about books in a more immediate way.”
CHILDHOOD
This is where, twenty-four years later, Hornby would begin his breakthrough book, Fever Pitch. “My parents were separated by 1968. My father had met someone else and moved out, and I lived with my mother and my sister in a small detached house in the Home Counties,” he writes in a chapter dated September 14, 1968. “This state of affairs was unremarkable enough in itself (although I cannot recall anyone else in my class with an absent parent—the sixties took seven or eight years to travel the twenty-odd miles down the M4 from London), but the break-up had wounded all four of us in various ways, as breakups are wont to do” (pp. 15–16). His father’s departure gave Hornby competing backgrounds— son of well-to-do international businessman versus son of poor suburban secretary—and he chose the humbler of the two. “I didn’t feel that my dad’s way of life had very much to do with me,” Hornby said in the interview. “I was brought up by my mom, and that’s where I lived. I had these exotic holidays with him.”
Hornby grew up in Maidenhead, a working-class town west of London, the type of town in the shadows of the capital that children either dreamed of fleeing forever or accepted as their limited fate. As a child he embraced it as tightly as he could—particularly through soccer—but eventually he found himself farther away from Maidenhead metaphorically, if not geographically, than even the dreamiest child could have imagined. Born in Redhill, Surrey, on April 17, 1957, Nicholas Peter John Hornby was the first child of Derek Peter Hornby and Margaret Audrey Withers. Two years later, his sister Gillian arrived. In the beginning, his parents’ lives were ordinary. His mother, born in 1925, met his father, seven years her junior, at work. She was a secretary, and he, fresh from public school, was the office boy. It was his first job. They married in 1953. While neither had much money, they
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NICK HORNBY After his parents divorced, Hornby saw his father a half dozen times a year, usually only when he had a business reason for coming to England. As he described it, he was living in “an all female household” and looking for a connection to more masculine pursuits. It is clear that he felt greater empathy for his mother than for his father. “She was a single mother, from a working-class family, and she was confused by various things,” he said. “She wanted us to do well at school, but she was a working mom, and she was trying to keep her head above water.” So began his interest in English football— soccer—specifically Arsenal, a rough team that played thirty miles from his home. His father had taken him to his first game in 1969, but his obsession with Arsenal was something he developed on his own. “I think the masculinity of it was incredibly important to me,” he said. “At the time it was pretty much something only men did and most of them were older than me.” His mother supported his interest and allowed him to start going to Saturday afternoon games on his own at thirteen or fourteen. Getting there involved taking a train some thirty miles into London and then crossing the city on the subway. “In the 1970s it was absolutely terrifying,” Hornby said. “You had to negotiate fans of other clubs along the way. You couldn’t wear a scarf or a shirt or carry a program in case you revealed yourself. I didn’t confess to being scared. I didn’t confess to how dangerous it was.” A few years later, he started venturing even farther to attend away games. For Hornby this was a way to define himself, to find a substitute for his absent father in the crowds. Among the fans, he tried to be what he was not but wanted to be: a tough-talking, hardnosed ruffian, the archetypal British soccer fan who has tarnished the country’s image within the game. “I wanted to be a hooligan,” he said. “But I didn’t have it in me. I wasn’t the right size. I didn’t have the right mind-set.” Yet he imbibed the energy of the crowd: “There’s an enormous feeling of power traveling through a town as a pack.” Remarkably, the two halves of his personality coexisted productively. He possessed the
sophistication and conceptual thinking that one would expect from the son of a peer—his father was knighted Sir Derek in 1990—but he wore his pedigree and knowledge lightly, as one would expect of someone who never wanted to appear affected among his small-town fellow citizens. As a boy, he put on a tough-guy pose, among other stunts dropping “h’s” when he spoke in order to seem more like the working-class rowdy he was in his mind (while his sister went the other way, developing an upper-class accent). But for all his faux hooligan behavior and the time he spent memorizing every shred of information about Arsenal, Hornby was admitted to Cambridge University in 1977. “I applied to Cambridge University from the right place, at the right time,” he writes in Fever Pitch, characteristically making light of his success. “The university was actively looking for students who had been educated through the state system, and even my poor A-level results, my half-baked answers to the entrance examination and my hopelessly tongue-tied interview did not prevent me from being granted admission” (pp. 95–96). At the time, admission was almost a disappointment for him. He had wanted his persona to gain him acceptance among the toughest denizens of Highbury, where Arsenal played, not admission to one of the world’s most prestigious universities. Yet going to Cambridge was critical to the development of his hybrid sensibility: He realized he was equally conversant among the rabid soccer fans he loved on Saturdays and the English students he fell in with at college. He could not describe the thrills and agonies of fandom—a thread that runs to some extent through all of his books—with such firsthand expertise nor write about it with such subtle authority and understanding if he did not have a place in both worlds. “At Cambridge I could have reinvented myself if I had been smart enough; I could have shed the little boy whose Arsenal fixation had helped him through a tricky patch in his childhood and early teens, and become somebody else completely, a swaggeringly confident and ambitious young man sure of his route through the
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NICK HORNBY world. But I didn’t,” he writes in Fever Pitch. “In truth I was scared of the place, and football, my childhood comforter, my security blanket, was a way of coping with it all” (pp. 99–100). And “coping” is the best word for his time at Cambridge. He was not a star student—“I attended one lecture in my entire first year” (p. 100)—nor was he involved in the usual pursuits of someone with literary aspirations. He did not work for the student newspaper or any of the literary magazines. He went to films and listened to music. He drank beer. He made friends and dated. He played club-level soccer. No longer close enough to attend home games of his beloved Arsenal, he became interested in the lower-level Cambridge team. In the end, he passed through college without making a mark, his happiest moment being when Arsenal won a major tournament. In May 1979, Hornby got his “mediocre degree without undue alarm,” as he says in Fever Pitch. “I was twenty-two, and the future suddenly looked blank and scary” (p. 116).
After two years he gave up teaching and switched his focus to writing television scripts, having no previous experience with drama. He wrote three, and they were sufficient for a good agent to agree to represent him, though none were produced. The first one was about teaching, the second was a romantic comedy, and the third was about fans of the Beatles. This last is unsurprising, as he had long harbored a desire to be a pop music critic, but he was afraid to attempt to get a job doing it. In the mid-1980s Britain, music critics were larger than life, often overshadowing the bands they critiqued. So, he did not even bother to try. Stasis was setting in. In 1988, at age thirty-one, Hornby was offered a part-time job teaching English to executives at Samsung, a Korean electronics company that was then expanding into the United Kingdom. It was a turning point in his writing, though it hardly seemed that way at first. “I got the job through the person who is now my psychoanalyst,” Hornby said in the interview. “At the time he was the principal of the language school where I was teaching. He told me this Korean company needed a Saturday morning English teacher. It killed me. I was out late Friday, played [soccer] Saturday morning, and watched it Saturday afternoon. It started at eight in the morning and went for two hours but it was good money.”
FALSE STARTS AND ODD JOBS
After he graduated from Cambridge, Hornby the writer labored as much in indolence as in obscurity. He admitted that out in the world he had no ambition until he was twenty-six or twenty-seven. He held a string of jobs typical of someone who was lost. He tended bar. Then he got a teaching certificate in the hope of using his English degree. This was something he realized he had no aptitude for whatsoever. In Fever Pitch, he lays out the case against himself as a teacher hilariously, but his failure comes back to an admission of his own immaturity. When in his second year of teaching one of his students scoffed at his credentials as a fan of Arsenal, he unleashed a nerdish barrage of trivia to prove the student wrong. “On and on I went; the boy sat there, the questions bouncing off the top of his head like snowballs, while the rest of the class watched in bemused silence,” he says in Fever Pitch (p. 139). He made his point and won the boy’s respect—at least for his knowledge of soccer. But the incident left him shaken: What kind of teacher does that? He concluded: one who was deeply immature.
It turned out that the Samsung executives were even more preoccupied. Setting up the English subsidiary was so full of complications that come Saturday morning they were too exhausted to study English. So they offered Hornby a part-time job that entailed coming to their offices every afternoon under the guise of teaching them English in free moments. What actually happened was more interesting and diverse. “The first thing they asked me was to find the plan for Hampton Court Gardens [King Henry VIII’s favorite palace], because they were trying to recreate them in Seoul,” he said. “Their chairman developed an obsession with Jonathan Swift, and I had to write an essay about him. They had an obsession with pedigreed dogs.” At one point they asked him to buy a horse farm. “They said, ‘Today you have to buy equestrian
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NICK HORNBY center’ at 2:15. At four p.m. they asked how I was coming along,” he recalled. “I had to teach them what a can’t-do society England was. The problem was they had an enormous amount of power and money and didn’t know what to do with it.” Yet knowing he would have to work four hours every afternoon focused his writing. He developed discipline to write every morning before going to Samsung. And in 1991, it paid off. He received a modest advance of twelve thousand pounds for what became Fever Pitch and quit. At the same time, his efforts in journalism were beginning to be published. “I thought with a bit of journalism I could make it last a year or eighteen months,” he said. “I was pretty sure I’d have to go back into some sort of work after that. I thought I could do some freelance.” Instead, he wrote an international bestseller that made him the hot new British writer—at age thirty-five.
Arsenal games may seem innocuous. But it is the same compulsion to belong that powers political parties and businesses, boosters and denigrators, clubs of the civic-minded and clans of haters. What he is trying most to do through his obsessive recall of Arsenal’s victories, defeats, and draws is get to the heart of what it means to be obsessed. In his almost excruciating recall of over a hundred matches since childhood, he finds the universality of all obsessions: the desire to belong to something greater than oneself. And he makes clear that absolutely everything in his life is connected to soccer in one way or another. He and his father struggle to relate to each other after the divorce. They spend many winter weekdays with nowhere to go and nothing to do. Then his father takes him to an Arsenal soccer match. That is the connection Hornby was yearning for, and, with his father in France, going to those games by himself comes to mean even more. Likewise what he remembers most about the first time his stepmother—referred to as “the Enemy”—goes to a game with them, in August 1972, is how well Arsensal plays, how team members look more like the great Dutch national team than the feckless strivers he is used to seeing. He is incredulous at its 5-2 win over a superior team. “I was sitting with the Enemy, Arsenal thought they were Holland, and if I had looked carefully, I would surely have seen pigs floating serenely over the Clock End,” he says in Fever Pitch (p. 69). (Ironically, watching Arsenal a decade later was what brought Hornby close to his stepbrother.) Later he dismisses all of the rites of passage that boys go through, except one:
FEVER PITCH
Every time Hornby saw his therapist she asked him how his weekend had been. And every time he replied with the score of the Arsenal match the previous Saturday. When she finally called him on this, asking him why he repeatedly made the same bad joke, he said he had not realized, consciously at least, that he was doing it. But with that the idea was born for his memoir on soccer, fandom, and flailing through life. Fever Pitch, published in 1992, is an obsessive rant about the joys and indignities of being a true soccer fan. Hornby plays the intelligent skeptic who has a literary eye toward the crucial detail (though his exhaustive recitation of soccer matches strains the reader’s patience at times). Soccer could have been replaced with football or baseball and the American fan would have recognized himself, or cricket and the Indian reader would have seen himself as Hornby. It is Hornby’s ability to plumb the depths of what it means to be the truest, most devoted fan that carries the book and gives it such tremendous scope. His desire to belong to something so ultimately trivial as the group of men who go obsessively to
All the things that were supposed to change me— first kiss, loss of virginity, first fight, first drink, first drugs—just seemed to happen; there was no will involved, and certainly no painful decision-making process.ѧ Walking through the North Bank turnstile was the only time I can remember consciously grasping a nettle until I was in my mid-twenties. (p. 74)
While he is speaking of his specific obsession with soccer, the art in what he is doing comes from combining the high and the low, of having perspective on how completely his siding with
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NICK HORNBY Hornby is so amusing throughout—the light tone that belies his serious subject has knocked him out of contention for most literary prizes— that it is easy to forget that the genesis of this book, the whole reason he started going religiously to Arsenal games, was that his parents divorced. Yet that painful connection is one thing Fever Pitch shies away from; it is not a memoir about how divorce affected his childhood. The psychology and sociology in it are directed at the game of soccer and its fans, not a lonely boy in his mother’s house. Any mention of his tough childhood is handled in a light, if not dismissive way. His most poignant discussion of himself comes in an April 1987 entry when the depression he suffered for most of the decade breaks:
Arsenal dominates his life and yet still being an unapologetic fan. His memoir may be conflated in parts, but it is not a pose. “This sense of belonging is crucial to an understanding of why people travel to the meaningless game in Plymouth on a Wednesday night, and without it football would fail as a business,” he writes. “But where does it end?” (p. 64). He understood his limitations. His allconsuming fascination with soccer meant he gained little from studying at Cambridge University beyond an interest in the local soccer team. That was fine by him. He was not a sot. He was properly, if belatedly, horrified by the infamous European Cup final in 1985, when thirty-eight fans, mostly from the Italian team Juventus, were crushed to death by rioting Liverpool supporters. “I should have turned the TV off, told everyone to go home, made a unilateral decision that football no longer mattered.ѧ But everyone I know ѧ stuck with it.ѧ I like to think I have an answer for most irrationalities connected with football, but this one seems to defy all explanation” (p. 157).
Inevitably part of me wishes that it had been something else that effected the cure—the love of a good woman, or a minor literary triumph, or a transcendent realisation during something like Live Aid that my life was blessed and worth living— something real and meaningful. It embarrasses me to confess that a decade-long downer lifted because Arsenal won at Spurs in the Littlewoods Cup [a lesser championship title], and I have often tried to work out why it happened like this. (p. 181)
To his credit, he does not strain to make the hackneyed claim that the game played on the field is a metaphor for life, that the players are doing more than playing a child’s game for big money. He is too shrewd for that. His metaphor is the rabbit hole, because, like Alice in Wonderland, he gets sucked into a world that is as different from his mother’s modest home as he could imagine. Through the looking glass, he trades an average childhood in a nondescript town for the screaming, beery, at times manic energy of the soccer stadium. In obsession he becomes a man. Even toward the end of the book, when his dream of being a published writer is about to come true, he stays firmly, humorously true to himself. “The publishers of this book can’t seriously expect me to write about this kind of neurosis and then ask me to miss a few games to help them publicise it,” he writes. “‘I’m mad, remember?’ I will tell them. ‘That’s what this whole thing is about! No way I can do a reading in Waterstone’s on a Wednesday night!’ And so I survive a little longer” (p. 216).
What he worked out was that he simply stopped feeling unlucky when Arsenal won. Not long after that he started working for Samsung and became a more disciplined writer. “It never occurred to me to go into [the struggles of] those years too deeply. I thought that would be an extremely uninteresting thing to write about,” he said in the interview. “Concentrating on not being successful as a writer and other various failures would lead up blind alleys I didn’t want to go up.” He added by way of explaining the sheer number of games he relayed: “I’ve been to a lot of football matches and didn’t write about all of them. The ones I wrote about were self-selective.” That is the book’s only fault, particularly for readers who are not soccer fans. He may have selected only what he deemed the important games, but it does not feel that way. He makes his point early about obsession and fleshes it out almost too fully. Even though Fever Pitch is his first book, Hornby’s style is clear: the mix of wise com-
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NICK HORNBY mentary about the often unwise male. His best subject will be the man-child, which he explores seriously, wittily, but also compassionately. “I found a bit of paper the other day with my only notes for the book, and it was a list of games,” he said in the interview. From that scrap came a book that connected with England and then the world on a visceral, almost sociological level.
twentieth century could find recognizable. Who has not thought about ex-flames and wondered what they were doing or how life with them would have been different? Add into the story Rob’s two friends—Dick, a shy record geek, and Barry, a hypercritical self-anointed music expert—and Hornby has a character-driven piece of literature that works on two very different levels: It amuses with its clever, quick story, and it enlightens with its commentary on love and relationships. Hornby is focused on the anomie of single, urban living, and he strips away its patina of glamour to reveal the struggles to be independent and true to what one wants while trying to find respite from natural human loneliness. For Rob, his music store is the essence of his struggle in North London; it is a character in the novel as much as any of Hornby’s flesh-and-blood creations. It is what gets him up in the morning—even though he purposely opened it in a place where no one walks by. But it is also what keeps him down. It is a life vest and a dead albatross. The lists he makes through his days at the shop allow him to feel that he is progressing in life. But he does not see how insignificant the lists are or how they have no power to help him with his real problems. High Fidelity was named a New York Times notable book of the year, but a decade following its publication, it became memorable for spawning a genre. It has been given the dubious distinction of being the first “lad lit” book, which made Hornby the patriarch of a lifeless crop of novels. In Hornby’s writing, as opposed to his imitators, there is much more than sex covering up loneliness and irresponsibility masking freedom. Hornby writes about a man adrift in a complex and competitive world. Rob often comes across as a man-child, and his friends seem like buffoons. But these are their shields.
HIGH FIDELITY
Fever Pitch was the book that pulled Hornby out of obscurity, but High Fidelity, which followed three years later, was the one that earned him a wider audience and also showed he was a serious literary talent. The story follows Rob Fleming, a record shop owner, as he tries to figure out why he has so little luck in love. To understand this— and most things that he considers important— Rob, thirty-five and underemployed, makes lists: top five most memorable breakups, top five desert island discs, top five records that let you feel nothing at all, top five dream jobs. List-making is a constant throughout High Fidelity, and it became associated with Hornby, linked more with him as a person than to his fictional creation. Through these lists, most importantly as Rob tries to determine what went wrong with his top five failed relationships, High Fidelity hearkens back to the major theme expressed in the title of Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again. Rob finds that revisiting two decades of past relationships—actually going out and finding the exgirlfriends—is disastrously depressing. While this trip down heartbreak lane causes him to question his own decision making—how could he have dated that girl?—it affords him some clarity: There were valid reasons the relationships did not work out, even the one with Charlie Nicholson, his ne plus ultra of heartbreaking girlfriends. When he goes to a party she hosts, her spell over him dissolves. She is no longer the exotic beauty he felt inferior to for years; she is a vacuous know-it-all. Yet what he needs to resolve most is why his recent girlfriend, the smart, sexy, and very tolerant Laura, left him, and an answer is not so quickly forthcoming. In his first novel, Hornby presents a scenario that any urban man or woman at the end of the
The book’s breeziness, the very quality that makes it widely appealing and that helped it to reach the audience of general readers Hornby aims for, hides its brilliance—and has hurt its critical reception. This proto–lad lit novel provides a universal look at urban mating at the end of the twentieth century. That it is set in London does not reduce it; the setting could be
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NICK HORNBY any global city. In fact, in the film, the location is moved to Chicago, but the story—which Hornby said sounded like the lead actor, John Cusack, was simply reading from his book—is just as powerful. Like Jane Austen, Hornby mines such a specific time and place that High Fidelity speaks to a set of people who live in similar ways in spite of national boundaries and cultural differences: Urban man is at heart the same whither in the world he may dwell.
epiphany. It seems like a small step, but it is what finally moves Rob forward in life.
ABOUT A BOY
Having the gumption to do something, anything at all, is nowhere more evident than in About a Boy (1998). The typical Hornby male lead, Will Freeman, a man well into his thirties, does absolutely nothing and by all outward appearances seems happy. His father wrote a treacly Christmas carol, and the royalties from it give Will the money to fund a chic lifestyle. He has a nice apartment, a sleek car, all the gadgets an aging urban bachelor could want, and no shortage of women. That he does not have a job is no problem. On paper it is an enviable, stress-free life. At the other end is Marcus, a twelve-year-old boy whose life is all stress. He has to defend himself at school, as much for the outfits his clueless hippy mother puts on him as for his general weirdness. At home he has to try to support his mom, now four years into her divorce and flailing at being a single parent. She cries during the day, and he cannot figure out a way to cheer her up. In effect, he is the adult in their apartment, and trying to make her happy and keep her from attempting suicide is the paramount concern in his young, troubled life. With adults seemingly at opposite ends of fortune and despair—one who has everything he needs and does nothing with it, the other who has nothing and cannot find her way out of her situation—Marcus is Hornby’s man of action, the mature fulcrum of the story. That Will comes around in the end is preordained: When characters start so far apart in fiction, they usually move to the middle. In this way the book feels too schematic at times: The older, immature man realizes the error of his ways, while the boy gets to slough off some responsibility and be young. Yet Hornby keeps the novel focused, if just on the edge of soppiness, and it remains enjoyable. Hornby’s hope that critics will not seek autobiographical connections in his fiction is understandable. He is reticent regarding his
Yet its accessibility and popularity caused some critics to devalue Hornby’s creative accomplishment. They read the characters and stories in High Fidelity as cribbing from his autobiography. They compared the substance, not just the style, to Fever Pitch, which is a mistake. In the interview, Hornby said, It’s because the books are all conversational. There’s an intimacy of tone that makes it sound like it’s the author’s voice. I tell people it’s not autobiographical at all. That confuses three-quarters of the people, and there’s the other quarter that doesn’t believe me and says it’s me.ѧ In that character you can see the connection between Rob and the guy who wrote Fever Pitch. But in memoir you have the benefit of hindsight; you’re attempting to use everything at your disposal to be acute. In fiction, you have to deny the character hindsight. He can’t see it, and he can’t see his way out of it.
In other words, if this had been Hornby’s life and he had really been Rob, chances are he would not have had the perspective to write Rob’s character so convincingly and fluidly. Where there is a legitimate similarity in his memoir and first novel is in how High Fidelity fleshes out something Hornby realized only through years of soccer matches: the need to be involved in something greater than oneself if a person is going to achieve happiness and fulfillment. In his memoir Hornby notes toward the end that in addition to his soccer fandom he had played the game as well. He does not intimate that he was particularly good at the sport, just that he understands it and is not critiquing the pros without firsthand knowledge. In the case of Rob in High Fidelity, getting involved by producing a record, instead of criticizing what others have recorded, brings his
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NICK HORNBY mother and father, who is a well-known business leader in Britain. He creates worlds from his experience that are richer and more amusing than his own soccer-obsessed early years. Yet he subscribes here wholeheartedly to the dictum that one should write what one knows. In About a Boy, he writes fluidly about two areas he knew well himself: the loneliness of a fatherless child and the cool comfort of being a bachelor with extra money to indulge his childlike whims. Hornby is attuned to the awkwardness and indignities that divorce places on children. He has written how his rooting for Arsenal, a team 30 miles from his home, made him an object of ridicule throughout his childhood, but who else was he supposed to root for? That was the team his father took him to see. Although Marcus’s problems are different—the boy admits to himself that he is odd—the punishment his peers mete out is what many children do to those who deviate from accepted behavior. Equally, Hornby is comfortable with the joys of consumer electronics, of the hiss, crunch, and whiz of the newest stainless-steel espresso maker. Relishing conspicuous consumption, not to mention using it to define who you are, as Will does, is ultimately empty, a sucker’s game. When will it stop? But that misses the point in a way Hornby does not: It can also be a quick hit of satisfaction and pride, even if it is not deeply rewarding.
apt acronym SPAT) fails to secure him the desperate single mother he dreams of bedding, he finds Marcus following him around. Marcus wants Will to date his mother—something that would never happen and does not here—and comes to his apartment after school to advance his plan. Will has nothing to do, really, so he lets him in. The story hearkens back to Hornby’s model book: Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. With Will as the sweet but stunted Lenny, and Marcus as the small but shrewd George, the story treads a well-worn path. It is clear from the start that Will will teach Marcus to fit in and be cooler, while Marcus will show Will how to care about something or someone beyond himself. That is where the middle ground lies. One man did not have to work because his father wrote a Christmas carol that haunted its creator as it enriched him; the other started working at age eight in the absence of a father to save his mother from herself. Superficiality and earnestness bring them together. Yet, if there is one of Hornby’s books that met with tepid critical reception, if not outright backlash, it was About a Boy. The New York Times called it “humorous fiction with a real heart,” while the New Yorker commended Hornby as “the maestro of the male confessional.” Rousing reviews these were not. Even People magazine was lukewarm—“an amusing male-bonding theme.” This was the time when lad lit was taking hold and critics were looking for someone to blame, and critics who wanted to cite lad lit for devaluing literary culture had an easy example to point to.
As with his study of soccer, Hornby intrinsically understands the plights of Marcus and Will, and that gives him the ability to enliven their characters with telling details that lift the two of them—perilously close to being stock characters—above banality. He is less effective in animating Marcus’s mother; she becomes a type: the well-meaning but hapless ex-hippy who at thirty-eight is only now cottoning on to how the world works. Not only is everyone not a vegetarian, but mothers who kiss their kids at school and shout their love for them across the playground are bound to do them more harm than good.
STORIES FOR CHARITY
The other component of the backlash against Hornby was his growing fame. High Fidelity is a fine example of contemporary storytelling, the novel that will most likely survive him. But what followed it cast a shadow on Hornby’s skills as a writer: In the context of About a Boy, was High Fidelity original and groundbreaking, or was it just a cute story? Hornby said that he did not care what critics thought about him—one of the oldest defenses writers have against harsh
Where Will and Marcus come together is hilarious, if again on the line between sentimentality and serendipity. After Will’s attempt to infiltrate Single Parents Alone Together (with the
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NICK HORNBY reviews. But then he walked the walk. He did his own thing once again. In 2000 he pulled together Speaking with the Angel, a testament to the high regard contemporary British and American writers had for Hornby. In eight years he had gone from being completely unknown, a thirtysomething who wrote in the morning and tried to buy horse farms on behalf of Samsung in the evening, to being a defining voice in contemporary British literature. To raise money for TreeHouse, the school he founded for autistic children such as his son Danny, who was born to him and Virginia Bovell on September 26, 1993, and diagnosed with autism two years later, he solicited short stories from twelve wellknown British and American writers—Melissa Bank, Roddy Doyle, Dave Eggers, Patrick Marber, Zadie Smith, Irvine Welsh, and others.
fortunate and simply wants to help, if he can. Yet the story he wrote for the collection, “NippleJesus,” heavily dialogue-based, took him in a different direction artistically, and he credited it for leading directly to his next novel, How to Be Good.
HOW TO BE GOOD
How to Be Good (2001) builds on the satire that Hornby had laced throughout his earlier fiction and blows it up into a work that pokes a stick in the eyes of well-meaning, upper middle-class liberals—of which Hornby had by then become a full-fledged member. (Between his best-selling novels and their popular film adaptations, he had made millions of pounds.) The key to good satire is to push the descriptions, characters, and actions to the brink of believability without being cynical or snarky. He accomplished this highwire act in the failing marriage of Katie Carr, a doctor who by dint of her profession considers herself a good person, and her husband David Carr, who at first writes a bitterly sarcastic column called the “Angriest Man in Holloway” for the local paper but then connects with a guru who changes his worldview: no more flashing wealth around; time to give it all away. It is an ingenious setup, and without hitting a false note Hornby takes his two characters through an entire reevaluation of how they got to where they are after twenty-four years of marriage and two children. How to Be Good is the first time Hornby lets one of his woman characters narrate a story, albeit a woman with some of the same selflacerating ticks as her male counterparts in his earlier novels. The Carrs’ choice to resolve their marital problems—she, not he, has an affair; and he, not she, finds God (in the guise of a new age DJ)—involves a deft reversal of gender stereotypes. Again Hornby has taken out his looking glass to make black white and up down. The guru seems, at first blush, to have a ripped-fromthe-headlines quality, but the moment of epiphany in Hornby’s hands resonates back to the Greeks. An unhappy couple, fearful of being introspec-
Hornby writes in the introduction that his inspiration had been Bono, the lead singer of the Irish rock-and-roll band U2. In an interview, the internationally famous rock star had said he was happy to use his celebrity to raise a hundred billion dollars to reduce the debt that third world countries owed to the rest of the world. “The interview brought me up short,” Hornby says with typical self-effacement. “I suspect that it would be considerably harder for me to open the door to the Oval Office than it was for him, but even so ѧ” (p. xi). His cause was more personal; he wanted to help a charity unobtrusively, by asking a dozen of his writer friends to contribute original stories to a book and then donate the proceeds to charity. He nearly apologizes to the reader, who bought “a book that you wanted to read, a book containing a dozen or so new stories by some of your favorite authors, and your donation was, I hope, incidental” (p. xii). In his own way, though, Hornby was a millennial phenomenon, a literary novelist with a broad, rock-star-like following. And in the case of Speaking with the Angel, he used his celebrity to further a cause dear to him, helping autistic children. Hornby hoped the proceeds from the book would pay for parents without the financial means to send their autistic children to TreeHouse, the charitable nature of which he plays down throughout the introduction: He has been
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NICK HORNBY tive and honest, looks beyond their relationship for answers—only to come full circle in the end. Despite seven years of marriage that ended in his own divorce, Hornby never gave any indication that he was on anything other than friendly terms with his ex-wife, yet even with the wound of that divorce still raw for him, his writing never comes across as bitter in How to Be Good. The sad subject of Katie and David’s life is rendered with a keen eye for the absurd, and its social commentary is cutting and dead on. Through it he not only makes the obviously serious point of divorce’s impact on kids but skewers upper middle-class pretensions and foibles.
university had been dutiful and boring. I couldn’t get any pleasure from it.” Homing in on the pleasure principal paid off for Hornby. He was long-listed for the Booker Prize for How to Be Good, and he won the W. H. Smith Book Award, which is voted on by British readers, not chosen by critics. And at the end of that year, his second son, Lowell, was born, on November 23, to him and the film producer Amanda Possey, who became his second wife when they married in 2006, following the birth of another son, Jesse, on May 27, 2004.
One of the lines that sets up the tone of the book comes early, when Katie, the narrator, is mulling how she had just asked her husband for a divorce on her cell phone. “Listen: I’m not a bad person. I’m a doctor. One of the reasons I wanted to become a doctor was that I thought it would be a good—as in Good, rather than exciting or well-paid or glamorous—thing to do. I liked how it sounded” (p. 8). This is Hornby at his best, turning on the educated bourgeoisie the same eye he had a decade earlier trained on the soccer fanatic. Her job is to help people: Should she be criticized for having such jaded motivations? Why should we think she is a good person, after she just told her husband over the phone that they should divorce. Yet later Hornby gives her a moment to show how distressed she is by patients who often come to see her even though she and they both know they cannot be helped. “They come in, and sit down, and they look at me, and both of us know it’s hopeless, and I feel guilty and sad and fraudulent” (p. 128). Hornby does not let David off the hook either. His breakdown is a comic romp. He seeks out D.J. GoodNews, an alternative healer, who in no time is living in their house and advising them on how to live better. “It was the reading I did in the eighties that helped me come to that conclusion, that I’d rather write a funny book than a depressing one,” Hornby said in the interview. “I thought Roddy Doyle and Anne Tyler were funny. It made a huge difference to me as a reader. It separated them out. So much of the reading I had done after
A LONG WAY DOWN
With so much recognition and happiness in his life, Hornby did a very Hornbyan thing: He wrote his next novel about four people who decide to jump to their deaths from the same building on New Year’s Eve. Short-listed for the Whitbread Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2005, A Long Way Down is an ensemble narration in which the four people who thought they could simply commit suicide end up together, justifying their reasons for ending their lives. As Simon Hattenstone noted in a 2005 article on Hornby in the Guardian, each character is part of the author’s persona: “Martin is a C-list celebrity, JJ a failed rock guitarist, Maureen a mother whose life has been blighted because her son is severely disabled, and Jess a wastrel with a successful father.” In many ways, though, A Long Way Down is as funny as any novel about suicide could be, which is to say it is strained at times. Hornby, a proponent of wit over sulking, seems to have gone too far here. How funny, really, can a book about such a depressing subject be? He juices the pathos to an unbelievable extent—four very different people all brought together on New Year’s Eve at a spot called Toppers’ House, because it is highly regarded by suicide jumpers? It is too much. And the book reads like Hornby on autopilot—still funny, still sharp, but lazy in his subject matter. Critically and commercially, though, the book was successful. It seemed that the consensus was mediocre Hornby is still pretty good—and it is.
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NICK HORNBY High Fidelity (2000) was shot in Chicago, a city that has more of a passing resemblance to parts of Hornby’s North London. And John Cusack, cast so often as the perennial striver, is the perfect Rob. His comic timing and natural awkwardness contributed to making the film a hit and also broadened Hornby’s audience of readers. It is generally considered the best adaptation of a Hornby book. About a Boy was released in 2002 and teed up to be a blockbuster. It starred Hugh Grant, who had risen to fame through the 1990s starring in a variety of romantic comedies, but Grant was himself in this film, and that troubled many critics. More than Firth in the British version of Fever Pitch, Grant seemed off. He was too smooth and well-known to be convincing, and the movie did not do as well as other adaptations. “About a Boy is an underrated adaptation,” Hornby said. “Hugh Grant was different in that movie. He didn’t do the floppy, stuttering thing. He acted a bit more vulnerable. There were hints that he was growing old unhappily.” But Hornby will not criticize any of the adaptations. “I wouldn’t want to talk about anything that didn’t work, because I felt very close to the people involved,” he said. “I can’t look at them objectively.”
FILM ADAPTATIONS
The most common lament bibliophiles have about the screen adaptation of a beloved novel is “It wasn’t as good as the book.” This is not true in Hornby’s case: Film versions of his books highlight the universality of what he is writing about. With Hornby writing the screenplay, Fever Pitch was made into a film in England in 1997. Colin Firth, the leading man, was criticized for being handsome, while Hornby—short, thin, bald, and his defining physical feature being prominent ears—is considered to be less good-looking. But Hornby brushed away this critique as irrelevant. “Film actors are not realistic looking people,” he said. “Unfortunately you can’t find a lead actor who doesn’t look like that. You have to accept as a given that they’re going to be incredibly handsome people.” Eight years later, Fever Pitch was remade in the United States. In this version, which Hornby had little to do with, the Arsenal soccer squad has been replaced with the Boston Red Sox, a baseball team that in 2004, when the film was shot, had not won the World Series in eighty-six years, but went on, incredibly, to win the series that very year. The filmmaker, Twentieth Century Fox, who had understandably figured the losing streak would continue, had to rewrite the fictional ending when the Red Sox miraculously went in real life from almost certain elimination (they were down three games to none in a best-of-seven series) to World Series champions. This remake further illustrates the universality of Hornby’s book. British “football” is as little understood in the United States (even the term itself is misunderstood) as American baseball is grasped in the United Kingdom. Yet the story works perfectly. Superficially, there were parallels. Like Highbury, where Arsenal plays, Fenway Park is a decrepit, barely functioning stadium that seats half the fans other venues hold, and it is so idiosyncratic in its design that it takes home-field advantage to a higher level. Yet it is a shrine to the sport of baseball just as Highbury is to soccer, and its fans cherish memories of its oddities the way Hornby described the terraces, Clock End and North Bank, at Highbury.
COOL GROWS OLD
In the years since Fever Pitch launched Hornby’s career, he has become an elder statesman for cool, quirky, and obsessive writers, and this renown opened a world to him that was unimaginable when he was a dreamy kid. His childhood fantasy, detailed in Fever Pitch, was to be a music critic. He was afraid to attempt this in the early 1980s, fearing he would be rejected from the various magazines for which he dreamed of writing. However, starting in 2000, the success of his books and his reputation from High Fidelity for being deeply knowledgeable about music landed him a job as the pop music critic for the New Yorker. In an odd twist of fate, he had leapfrogged the music critics of the 1980s—now gone, if not forgotten—to be given among the highest-profile platforms for his thoughts on new
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NICK HORNBY music. If there was an unexpected perk to the fame and respect his books brought him, it was this. He wrote about Steely Dan and Aimee Mann, about Steve Earle and Nick Cave. His most talked about review was a negative one of Radiohead, a beloved band on the intellectualalternative scene. With his occasional columns he was beginning to gain respect in the music world. Then just as quickly he gave up a perch that others would have coveted and clung to for life. “You stopped sounding like yourself,” he said. “There’s a New Yorker voice that you start to get on the seventh edit.” These pieces were collected in Songbook in 2002.
don’t think they will.” He started writing these articles because he missed being a critic, having grown tired of the extensive revisions and editing his pieces went through at the New Yorker. “I wanted to be able to finish something in a week,” he said. “There wasn’t a difference in quality between my New Yorker pieces and my Believer pieces. And I really, really like all of those people at McSweeney’s.” He stopped writing the column in 2008, after five years of doing it, because of other obligations.
Rejecting this respected U.S. literary magazine burnished his credentials with a literary movement spawned by Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) and founder of the journals McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and the Believer. Eggers similarly went from obscurity to fame and wealth with one book, his memoir about raising his brother after his parents died. His friendship with Eggers led Hornby to write for the Believer, a small but influential journal whose main rule is that authors like the books they review. For them Hornby became Rob Fleming from High Fidelity: Hornby began his column with a list of books he bought and a separate list of books he read. The twist, though, was the books were not reviewed; they were the starting point for wide-ranging discussions of life and art. A list that included buying, for example, The Selected Letters of Gustave Flaubert and reading How to Stop Smoking and Stay Stopped for Good was alternately a meditation on the time-consuming nature of parenthood and on new rock bands. He collected these columns into The Polysyllabic Spree (2004), Housekeeping vs. the Dirt (2006), and Shakespeare Wrote for Money (2008). “Polysyllabic Spree” was the name he had given the young writers and editors who surrounded Eggers.
In 2007, Hornby ventured into the realm of the young adult novel. Slam was a Hornbyan undertaking for a market that had not previously read him. The subject is a teenage boy who finds himself on the verge of fatherhood with his much wealthier teenage girlfriend. In many ways, the boy’s struggles are those of any Hornby narrator—in over his head, he needs to figure out a way to stay afloat—but it has specific touches for the young adult market. That year he also wrote the screenplay for An Education, his adaptation of an eight-page essay about an incident in the early life of the respected but acerbic British critic Lynn Barber. Fifteen years after Hornby became famous with Fever Pitch, he was more open than ever to revisiting his past work and exploring new avenues. In December 2006 a musical version of High Fidelity opened on Broadway and ran for thirty-two performances. In November 2007 the city of Vienna gave away a hundred thousand copies of a German translation of Fever Pitch for a citywide reading event. Hornby described these events as “things that have been surreal.” The crowds at the musical’s opening were overwhelming, and what he recalled from the book launch in Vienna was standing on a stage with models sitting inside of two polystyrene pages from his book. Yet Hornby is not resting on his laurels. He continues to test himself as a writer, keeping the potential for failure very much alive. At the end of 2008, he was collaborating with the American singer-songwriter Ben Folds, writing lyrics to be
FAME’S OBLIGATIONS
“That was just to make the point that we don’t read in the way we think we read,” he said of his haphazard columns for the Believer. “Actually the response I’ve had from readers, it’s something they identify with. They spend money on books they don’t read and read books they
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NICK HORNBY set to Folds’s music. “What makes me happiest is the work opportunities fame has opened up,” Hornby said. “What gets me going is doing the stuff rather than writing about the stuff. I’d rather write a movie than write about a movie. I’d rather write a book than be a book critic.” It’s something few of his characters would ascribe to, but it keeps Hornby’s writing fresh and interesting.
The Polysyllabic Spree. San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2004; London: Viking, 2006. (Articles published in Believer magazine over the course of fourteen months; published by Viking under the title The Complete Polysyllabic Spree.) Housekeeping vs. the Dirt. San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2006. (Articles published in Believer magazine between February 2005 and July 2006.) Shakespeare Wrote for Money. San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2008. (Articles published in Believer magazine between August 2006 and September 2008.)
FILM
Selected Bibliography
AND
THEATER ADAPTATIONS
Fever Pitch. Screenplay by Nick Hornby. Directed by David Evans. Trimark, 1996. High Fidelity. Screenplay by D. V. DeVincentis, John Cusack, Steve Pink, and Scott Rosenberg. Directed by Stephen Frears. Working Title, 2000. About a Boy. Screenplay by Peter Hedges. Directed by Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz. Tribeca Productions, 2002. Fever Pitch. Screenplay by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel. Directed by Peter Farrelly and Bobby Farrelly. Twentieth Century Fox, 2005. High Fidelity: The Musical. Music by Tom Kitt. Lyrics by Amanda Green. Book by David Lindsay-Abaire. Directed by Walter Bobbie. First Production: New York, Imperial Theater, 2006.
WORKS OF NICK HORNBY FICTION High Fidelity. London: Gollancz, 1995; New York: Riverhead, 1995. About a Boy. London: Gollancz, 1998; New York: Riverhead, 1998. Speaking with the Angel. Edited with an introduction by Hornby. London: Penguin, 2000; New York: Riverhead, 2001. How to Be Good. London: Penguin, 2001; New York: Riverhead, 2001. “Otherwise Pandemonium.” In McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales. Edited by Michael Chabon and Howard V. Chaykin. New York: Vintage Books, 2003. (Short story.) A Long Way Down. London: Penguin, 2005; New York: Riverhead, 2005. Slam. London: Penguin, 2007; New York, Putnam, 2007.
CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Barratt, Nick. “Family Detective: Nick Hornby.” Telegraph (UK), January 31, 2008. DeMarchi, Tom. “An Interview with Nick Hornby.” Writer’s Chronicle, February 2003. Espen, Hal. “Too Cool for Words.” New York Times, June 28, 1998. Hattenstone, Simon. “Laughing All the Way to the Cemetery.” Guardian (UK), April 23, 2005. Joyce, Cynthia. “Lit Chat: Nick Hornby.” Salon.com, 1999. Moo, Jessica Murphy. “The Younger Side of Nick Hornby.” Atlantic Magazine, November 2, 2007. “Picks and Pans: Pages.” People, June 22, 1998. Weich, David. “Interview: Nick Hornby’s Funny Folk-Pop.” Powells.com, June 15, 2005.
NONFICTION Contemporary American Fiction. London: Vision, 1992; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. (Literary criticism.) Fever Pitch. New York, Penguin, 1992; London: Gollancz, 1993. (Memoir.) My Favourite Year: A Collection of New Football Writing. Edited by Hornby. London: Witherby, 1993. The Picador Book of Sportswriting. Edited by Hornby and Nick Coleman. London: Picador, 1996. Songbook. San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2002; New York: Riverhead, 2003; London: Viking, 2003. (Music reviews. Published by Viking under the title 31 Songs.)
INTERVIEW Sullivan, Paul. Interview with Nick Hornby. By telephone. September 23, 2008. (Called “the interview” in the essay.)
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ELIZABETH INCHBALD (1753—1821)
Marianne Szlyk ELIZABETH INCHBALD WORKED in a variety of genres (novel, drama, translations, criticism, memoirs) during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; assessments of her achievements in these genres have fluctuated over the years. Jane Austen selected Inchbald’s Lovers’ Vows (1798) as the play that the young people at Mansfield Park dare to rehearse. The last of Inchbald’s plays, To Marry, or Not to Marry (1805), was performed throughout the nineteenth century in the United States. The New York Times of February 4, 1900, noted (in the column “Notes of the Foreign Stage”) that the American playwright Aimee (Mrs. Oscar) Beringer had recently commended Inchbald’s play The Married Man (1789) when she lectured in London on “The Renaissance of Women Dramatists.” In his introduction to a twentieth-century edition of Inchbald’s 1791 novel A Simple Story, G. L. (Lytton) Strachey maintained the superiority of the novel while decrying her plays as “so bad that it is difficult to believe that they brought her a fortune” (Project Gutenberg EBook, par. 8). William McKee, author of a 1935 dissertation on her novels, contradicted Strachey; he preferred her plays to her novels. Editor J. M. S. Tompkins takes a more diplomatic position in her introduction to a 1967 edition of A Simple Story, noting the strengths that Inchbald brought from her playwriting. In his 1976 study, The English Jacobin Novel, 1780– 1805, Gary Kelly praised her for blending psychological scrutiny and social critique in A Simple Story, and his discussion of her second novel, Nature and Art (1796), encourages readers to see the common ground between her novels and her socially conscious plays, especially Such Things Are (1787) and Next Door Neighbours (1791).
work in different genres. In Masquerade and Civilization, Terry Castle drew attention to A Simple Story’s empowerment of Miss Milner. Mary Anne Schofield, however, links this character with Agnes Primrose, a character in Nature and Art who is fatally betrayed by her lover, and then associates Inchbald’s novels with Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) as feminist critiques of patriarchy. Other scholars have been more interested in Inchbald’s plays, translations, and criticism. In her 1995 study of female playwrights’ careers in the late eighteenth century, Getting into the Act: Women Playwrights in London, 1776–1829, Ellen Donkin underscores Inchbald’s professionalism. The University of Montreal’s Web site British Women Playwrights Around 1800 has featured a number of articles about Inchbald and her era, and Catherine Burroughs’ anthology Women in British Romantic Theater: Drama, Performance, and Society, 1790–1840, published in 2000, contains three essays that discuss Inchbald’s criticism, one at length, as well as two other essays that focus on her plays. Inchbald’s career is coming full circle now that her plays are being performed once again, mainly by companies recovering the work of early female playwrights. In 2003, New York City’s Juggernaut Theater Company coordinated readings of the plays Such Things Are and Wives as They Were, and Maids as They Are (1797). The Minneapolis company Theatre Unbound performed The Widow’s Vow in February 2005 as part of an evening of short plays written by women. The reviewer Matthew A. Everett remarked in his blog that the performance, with an all-female cast and moved to a modern (1950s) setting, was “the most fun of the evening.” During the summer of 2008, the Halcyon Theater of
With the rise of academic feminism, scholars have produced multiple readings of Inchbald’s
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ELIZABETH INCHBALD Chicago presented a fully staged performance of The Massacre (1792), a tragedy not performed in Inchbald’s lifetime, as part of a ten-play festival of work by female dramatists from various eras. The relatively mainstream venue of Theatre Royal, Bury St. Edmunds, performed Wives as They Were, and Maids as They Are in repertoire with Inchbald’s short farce Animal Magnetism (1788) in September 2008.
that would be characterized today as sexual harassment, her theatrical career began with her marriage to Joseph Inchbald, a thirty-eight-yearold actor and a fellow Catholic. He helped her to speak her lines without stuttering as they traveled on foot to the cities where they would perform; one of her first roles was that of Cordelia to her husband’s Lear. Despite (or perhaps because of) their joint struggles in various companies, their marriage was sometimes difficult. As another Inchbald biographer, the theater historian Roger Manvell, observes, both husband and wife often had cause to be jealous. One cause was certainly Joseph Inchbald’s carousing with companions. Another cause may have been Elizabeth Inchbald’s friendship with another fellow actor and Catholic, John Philip Kemble, who was much closer to Inchbald’s age and who shared her love of learning and writing. Kemble encouraged Elizabeth Inchbald in her effort to write a novel, which may have been an early version of A Simple Story. After Joseph Inchbald’s sudden death in 1779, Elizabeth Inchbald never remarried. She continued her friendship with Kemble even after his marriage in 1787.
LIFE
Inchbald’s life has attracted attention from biographers beginning with James Boaden in 1833. They have all had an incomplete view of her life, however, because she destroyed her memoirs—perhaps on the advice of her confessor, perhaps out of pique that publishers had rejected them. In the 1990s, the scholar Cecilia Macheski argued that Inchbald constructed a visual autobiography through her own portraits because of the stigma that a written autobiography would have carried for her. A full-length biography by Annibel Jenkins, I’ll Tell You What (2003), weaves together the varied strands of Inchbald’s life, and many of the biographical details that follow are taken from there.
Inchbald moved to London in 1780, acting at Covent Garden and the Haymarket Theatre. Her major contribution as an actress may have been to perform with her hair unpowdered, thus creating a fashion for more natural hair. Annibel Jenkins quotes an anonymous reviewer of the time who wrote praising Inchbald’s performance in The East Indian (1782) and noting the absence of her stuttering. Around this time, Inchbald also began to write for the stage. She submitted several farces and comedies before the theater owner George Colman the Elder staged The Mogul Tale at the Haymarket, a summer venue, in 1784. It was quite successful, and her comedy I’ll Tell You What ran at that same theater the next summer for twenty nights, a considerable run. Eight plays followed in the next four years, and all but one were popular. With The Widow’s Vow (1786), Inchbald started translating and adapting French plays to the English stage. By 1789, she was able to retire from acting.
Born on October 15, 1753, to John and Mary Simpson, a relatively prosperous Suffolk farmer and his wife, Elizabeth Simpson, the future Elizabeth Inchbald, grew up in a supportive Catholic family and was among the youngest of eight children. She received no formal education but was an avid reader. Her mother and siblings encouraged her interest in literature and the theater. (Her father died when she was seven.) One of her brothers, George, was also an actor for a time. Several of her older sisters married and moved to London; a younger sister moved there as well. Early on she said she would “rather die than live any longer without seeing the world” (quoted in Jenkins, p. 10). Perhaps she needed this quality of fierce determination, for she stuttered. In 1772, at the age of eighteen, Inchbald left home for London in hopes of achieving her dream. After some false starts, including incidents
In this next stage of her career, Inchbald revised and found a publisher for A Simple Story
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ELIZABETH INCHBALD as she enjoyed male admiration. Her sisters’ illnesses also placed demands on her time. Inchbald began the last stage of her career in 1806 with the writing of critical prefaces to each of the plays in a twenty-five-volume anthology titled The British Theatre (1806–1809). In 1809 she had the task of selecting the contents of a ten-volume set of plays, The Modern Theatre, and of a seven-volume set titled A Collection of Farces and Other Afterpieces. She turned down other writing and editing work after a dispute with George Colman the Younger arising from her remarks on his plays. During this same abortive period in her career, the language of reviewers was becoming more intemperate, making criticism more difficult for a woman, especially one as refined as Inchbald.
(1791). This novel was successful as well, in its final form belying the incredible effort the author must have put into it, if it was in fact the manuscript she had been working on before her husband’s death in 1779. (An anonymous earlier novel, Emily Herbert, is sometimes attributed to her.) At this point, Inchbald’s work became more politicized, reflecting the revolutionary times and her friendships with William Godwin, Amelia Alderson Opie, and actor-turned-author Thomas Holcroft. Yet, as Gary Kelly has indicated, even Inchbald’s earlier plays, especially Such Things Are, demonstrate her political inclinations toward radicalism. Other works from this time were The Massacre, her only tragedy, and her second novel, Nature and Art. This novel was finished in 1794 but not published until 1796, possibly as a result of Holcroft’s indictment and imprisonment on charges of treason (for his activism on behalf of political revolutionaries) in the fall of 1794. Inchbald also complained to Godwin about the effort that writing novels cost her, although, years later, she would wax nostalgic that “the Novelist ѧ lives in a land of liberty, whilst the Dramatic Writer exists but under a despotic government” of audience and the Lord Chamberlain’s office (quoted in Jenkins, p. 317). (Until 1968, Lord Chamberlain had to approve British plays before they could be performed.) Inchbald may have worked on another novel in the early 1800s, but, if she did, it was not published, and its manuscript does not survive.
Her long-time friend John Philip Kemble, meanwhile, who was then the manager of Covent Garden and had staged her most recent plays, faced riots over a rise in ticket prices; disillusioned with theater management, he retired from the theater and moved abroad. About this time, Inchbald returned to Catholicism, having briefly joined a lay sisterhood in 1803, while remaining in London. She began a significant literary friendship with the younger novelist and educator Maria Edgeworth, a fervent admirer of A Simple Story. In the last years of her life, Inchbald worked on a memoir, but she was not successful in finding a publisher for it and in 1819 she destroyed the manuscript. Her biographer Roger Manvell hints at the loneliness of her retirement and her estrangement from friends in this period, but in a letter Inchbald wrote to one friend (the radical novelist and poet Amelia Alderson Opie) her feelings about this solitude seem more ambiguous. “I think every moment lost which impedes my gaining information from holy and learned authors,” she professed (quoted in McKee, p. 115), and in another letter she explains her willingness to sacrifice her well-being for a sister in failing health. After a brief illness, Inchbald died on August 1, 1821. Several decades later, Lytton Strachey—a central figure of the Bloomsbury group, known for its collective literary genius as well as its members’ unconventional sexual relation-
In an increasingly conservative climate, Inchbald returned to writing for the theater, albeit at a slower pace. Her plays continued to be successful despite her politics. She also adapted two of the German playwright August von Kotzebue’s works for the British stage. (She did not know German but worked from French translations.) During this time, she broke with William Godwin over his relationship with Mary Wollstonecraft. She may have felt the other woman to be a rival, for Godwin had proposed to her as well, and Wollstonecraft had written a lessthan-glowing review of A Simple Story; on the other hand, Inchbald was always socially conservative and had fought hard for respectability even
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ELIZABETH INCHBALD ships—observed wryly in his introduction to the 1908 edition of A Simple Story: “It would have been a pleasure, certainly, but an alarming pleasure, to have known Mrs. Inchbald.”
joined with a real or well-counterfeited simplicity, a quick turn of the eye, and an arch smile of the countenance” (p. 15). She also displays the ambivalence of her author toward men. Miss Milner confides in Miss Woodley, her companion, about her feelings for her guardian, Dorriforth (Lord Elmwood), which reflect “all the passion of a mistress, and ѧ the tenderness of a wife” (p. 72). She has attempted to suppress this desire because he has been, until recently, a priest. Yet, after this confession and her engagement to the man she truly loves, Miss Milner defies him because he disapproves of her plan to attend a masquerade. She justifies her actions by asserting that “if he will not submit to be my lover, I will not submit to be his wife” (p. 154). Dorriforth/ Lord Elmwood resembles the actor John Philip Kemble, even to the extent that both studied for the priesthood but never entered it. In the introduction to a 1967 edition of the novel, J. M. S. Tompkins comments that “we may best think of Lord Elmwood then as a performance by Kemble, removed from medieval Narbonne to contemporary England” (p. xv). Gary Kelly finds elements of William Godwin’s character in the Dorriforth (Lord Elmwood) character as well.
NOVELS: A SIMPLE STORY AND NATURE AND ART
Of all Elizabeth Inchbald’s works, probably her best known is A Simple Story (1791), a novel with a curious, two-part narrative structure. A Simple Story follows two women, Miss Milner, a vivacious but willful heiress, and her daughter, Matilda, as each seeks to be loved by Lord Elmwood, Miss Milner’s guardian and, ultimately, her husband and Matilda’s father. The structure of this novel presages that of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). Inchbald sets the first part of her novel in London, and the second part is set in a remote, somewhat gothic, locale. Additionally, Catholicism is very important to the first part of Inchbald’s novel; nearly every character in this part is Catholic. Only Miss Milner and her would-be lover, Lord Frederick, are not. The element of Catholicism is less overt in the second part of the novel. As biographer Annibel Jenkins notes, this absence may reflect that Inchbald wrote this part after her husband’s death and during a period of time when she was not as rigorously Catholic as she would be later in life. Readers have speculated about the autobiographical elements in A Simple Story, especially in the first half. Gary Kelly asserts that these qualities elevate it above Inchbald’s later Nature and Art. Miss Milner clearly resembles her author in some respects. Giving the lie to their apparent frivolity, both women in fact deprive themselves to help others. Likewise, Inchbald felt a lifelong obligation to help her family, including a younger sister Debby, who had been, at one time, a prostitute. Both of the fictional women are described as “lovely” and spirited, with Miss Milner having a “sprightly vivacity, the natural gaiety which report had given her” (1998 ed., p. 13). In a passage evocative of the author’s own selfscrutiny, Miss Milner is characterized as having “the dangerous character of a wit ѧ [for] what she said was spoken with an energy, an instantaneous and powerful perception of what she said,
Another more salient autobiographical element in the novel is Inchbald’s Catholicism. A key character is the Jesuit priest, Sandford, Lord Elmwood’s former tutor and Miss Milner’s staunch enemy. The critic Mary Anne Schofield considers Sandford to be isolated and misguided in his mistrust of Miss Milner. In a dissertation chapter titled “Mrs. Inchbald’s Religion and Its Influence on Her Novels,” William McKee dryly notes that “his principal duties are to quarrel with Miss Milner; to talk with Dorriforth; to inspire Miss Woodley with admiration; to appear and reappear in London” (p. 126). In McKee’s opinion, Miss Woodley, a firm but gentle middleaged woman, represents Catholicism more fully than does either Dorriforth or Sandford. The narrative nonetheless assigns a certain moral authority to Sandford. At the end of the first part of the novel, the priest attempts to resolve the palpable tension between the lovers in the only way that he knows how: “‘Separate this moment,’—cried Sandford,—‘Or resolve
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ELIZABETH INCHBALD never to be separated but by death!’ The commanding, and awful manner in which he spoke this sentence, made them both turn to him in amazement ѧ almost petrified with the sensation his words caused” (1998 ed., p. 190). After interrogating both of them about whether they are able to profess that they love one another, he responds: “I believe you can say so ѧ let me put it out of your power to part” (p. 191). At the beginning of the second part of the novel, he comforts the dying Lady Elmwood. She responds to him as “Father,” signaling not only his vocation as priest but also his role as a moral authority within the novel.
ing, I could not survive” (p. 220). Amid all of this passion, the characters float unmoored from any geographical or social setting. For some readers—especially early-nineteenth-century readers such as Maria Edgeworth and James Boaden but also contemporary critics including Terry Castle—this quality is part of the novel’s power. Other readers have had reservations about the story’s indistinct but restricted setting. Critics such as Strachey have encouraged readers to distinguish between A Simple Story and more conventional English novels and to view Inchbald’s narrowing of her novel’s focus as productive. Like A Simple Story, Inchbald’s second novel, Nature and Art, follows two generations of a family. Here the characters include an older pair of siblings—Henry, who represents nature, and William, who embodies art or cultivation—and later their sons, who each have their fathers’ names. The younger William is responsible for the death of his former lover, Agnes Primrose, and their child. (In earlier editions of the book, Agnes’s name is “Hannah.”) At the end of the story, the younger Henry goes on to found a utopian community with his beloved Rebecca and his father. Unlike A Simple Story, Nature and Art provides much more social context. This novel clearly contrasts the city and the country, recognizing differences between characters’ milieus in England. London is portrayed as an arena where characters struggle and, despite their socioeconomic status, often sink. Agnes’s collapse in front of William’s townhouse is portrayed as “the customary history of thousands of her sex” (2006 ed., p. 96), but he, too, has retreated into his study, a collapse more appropriate to a promising young judge. The novel provides three distinct social environments in the country: William’s deanery; the parsonage of Rebecca’s father; and the cottage of Agnes’s elderly parents, “a prudent hardy couple ѧ the least poor of all the neighbouring cottagers” (p. 45). These may reflect the greater proximity of these settings to Inchbald’s own experience, for she had grown up on a farm and, like the older Henry and William, struggled in London.
Sandford’s role as principled, paternal authority figure continues after Lady Elmwood’s death but in a more limited way. One factor that restricts his role in Matilda’s life is his fear of Lord Elmwood, which he acknowledges to Miss Woodley and later to himself. Another detail that undermines his standing as Matilda’s protector is his (unacknowledged) mistrust of Rushbrook, Lord Elmwood’s heir, a well-meaning young man who pursues Matilda in part because his guardian forbids it. Sandford’s mistrust of Rushbook is not surprising. From the older man’s point of view, Rushbrook is not that different from Margrave, her other suitor. It is not until Margrave kidnaps Matilda and Lord Elmwood is forced to acknowledge his daughter that Sandford begins to trust Rushbrook. A close examination of the moral authority that the narrative grants Sandford may well be key to an understanding of A Simple Story. Inchbald’s novel emphasizes emotional intensity above all else. As Terry Castle points out, Miss Milner is a dynamic figure who responds to prohibition by longing for what is prohibited, but she is not the only character fueled by emotional intensity. Lord Elmwood refuses to acknowledge or even see his oncebeloved daughter because of the pain that his wife’s adultery has caused him. Matilda hungers for her father’s attention to an extreme degree. Upon her arrival at his estate, she confides in Miss Woodley and Sandford: “I am now convinced, from what this trial makes me feel, that to see my father, would cause a sensation, a feel-
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ELIZABETH INCHBALD Nature and Art blends wry observation and an overwrought narrative. The novel begins as the older Henry and William travel on foot to London just as Inchbald and her husband at times traveled on foot. The brothers speak to each other feelingly about their grief for their father, who died in debt, yet the narrator portentously describes London as “that metropolis, which ѧ has bestowed on some coronets and mitres—on some the lasting fame of genius—to others ѧ beggary, infamy, and untimely death” (p. 5). Once in the city, Henry eventually makes a living as a musician, whereas William cannot find work, even as a servant to a clergyman. (He cannot dress hair, so the clergyman does not hire him.) William’s response to his brother’s good fortune (and the offer of fiddle lessons) reveals both his frustration and his cultural snobbery:
cally with a young villager named Agnes, who becomes pregnant. She is nearly illiterate and has difficulty understanding the perfunctory letter of farewell that he writes her. After she gives birth and abandons her son, Henry and Rebecca find the infant. Their decision to shelter him leads Rebecca’s father, a parson, to believe that his daughter has given birth to Henry’s child. To clear Rebecca’s name, Henry convinces Agnes to reclaim her baby; this action makes the parson believe that Henry did not love his daughter. Events lead to Henry’s departure from the village as well as Agnes’s downfall and death. The second of Inchbald’s novels, Nature and Art, has posed difficulties to readers. Gary Kelly provides a sympathetic reading of Nature and Art but regrets the novel’s apparent lack of autobiographical elements and its privileging of Agnes Primrose’s story. In her introduction to A Simple Story, Jane Spencer briefly describes Inchbald’s other novel as “a somewhat over-schematic contrast between different upbringings” (1998 ed., p. xi). By contrast, Shawn Lisa Maurer, the editor of a 2005 edition of Nature and Art by Broadview Press, argues that the novel deserves to be brought out from the earlier novel’s shadow. Answering Kelly’s objections to Agnes’s prominence, which he believes disrupts the narrative’s design, Maurer states that “Inchbald anticipates recent feminist criticism by demonstrating the crucial intersection of gender and class,” that is, Agnes’s betrayal occurs “because she is poor and a woman” (p. 19, italics hers). Maurer agrees that the novel is “both treatise and tragedy” (p. 20), but for her, the first term does not work against the second. She also praises Inchbald for her use of linguistic style as part of a biting critique of social hypocrisy. Nature and Art departs even more from the conventions of the English novel than did A Simple Story; it is best read as a satire.
William [was] full of the great orator [Cicero] whom he was then studying, and still more alive to the impossibility that HIS ear, attuned only to sense, could ever descend from that elevation, to learn mere sounds—William caught up the tempting presents [refreshments from a party] which Henry had ventured his reputation to obtain for him, and threw them all at [his brother’s] head. (p. 7)
The sound of William’s pettish act echoes throughout their relationship. A few years later, after Henry pays for his education and finds him a patron, William responds to his brother’s skillful musical performance, an attempt to placate him, by remarking: “You know I have no ear” (p. 10). Henry, despite his good nature, responds in kind later on to his brother’s sermon, which has been an attempt to impress him. This blend of overwrought narrative and wry observation continues into the next generation. The chapter in which the cousins each fall in love with a young woman begins with this truism: “In the country—where the sensible heart is still more susceptible of impressions” (p. 43). Yet, the narrator adds, “Henry thought himself not in love, because, while he listened to William on the subject, he found their sensations did not in the least agree” (p. 43). Henry platonically shares his beloved Rebecca’s love of learning, whereas his bored cousin William toys romanti-
PLAYS TO 1789
Even though the novel A Simple Story is Inchbald’s most well-known work, she was mainly a playwright. Her experience as an actor both in London and the provinces, as well as the
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ELIZABETH INCHBALD success of her comedies and farces, link her intimately to this field. Furthermore, the plays reflect her political and social concerns as well as her sense of her audience’s preferences and her professionalism. The Mogul Tale (1784), a farce, was the first of Inchbald’s plays to be performed. A farce was a type of short piece that would be performed after a full-length production, which could be either a tragedy or a comedy. At first, George Lillo’s tragedy Fatal Curiosity (1736) preceded Inchbald’s new farce, in which three balloonists stray onto a potentate’s palace grounds in India but return home to London. Two of the characters in her farce, a shoemaker and his pretty wife, fit intriguingly with the tragic, working-class characters of Lillo’s plays. Next a musical comedy, Isaac Bickerstaffe’s Love in a Village (1762), was paired with the farce. Eventually, The Mogul Tale was paired with an opera by George Colman the Younger. Regardless of which type of play preceded it, Inchbald’s farce was a hit that summer and continued to be popular into the nineteenth century.
go but not before asserting that “for your countrymen’s cruelty to the poor [Hindus] has shown me tyranny in so foul a light, that I was determined henceforth to be only mild, just, and merciful” (p. 20). This statement seems to be part of the farce’s world upside down, but one also wonders if the Mogul’s criticism of British imperialism reflects the emerging author’s political inclinations. Inchbald’s next two pieces, the full-length I’ll Tell You What and the farce Appearance Is Against Them (both first produced in 1785), had more “realistic” settings in London, although their characters are closer to those Inchbald played on stage than to people she had actually associated with up to that point. Two married couples are at the center of I’ll Tell You What; Lady Harriet Cypress and Sir George Euston had been married to each other until her indiscretion led to their divorce and her remarriage to Major Cypress. Their London is made up of the “illdefined sitting-rooms” that Lytton Strachey mentions in his introduction to A Simple Story (p. 12). The most notable feature of the set is Lady Harriet’s closet, a common theatrical device that hides first Major Cypress and then her former husband, Euston. One trope in this comedy is characters’ apparent interchangeability. Sir George’s uncle, Mr. Euston, grumbles about his nephew’s divorce and remarriage: “by the time I have taken a turn in the Park, and eaten a mouthful of dinner, you’ll, perhaps, have a new Lady Euston to introduce me to, and I may drink tea with her” (Backscheider, I’ll Tell You What, p. 6). Shortly after his marriage to Lady Harriet, Major Cypress schedules an assignation with Sir George’s second wife, much as other men try to and much as he once did with Lady Harriet before she became his wife. However, the characters are not really interchangeable, and, as Lady Euston admits in her comments to her husband, the pranks that she plays on various would-be suitors are intended to prevent him from risking his death in a duel. A subplot involving another uncle’s son and the wife he has disowned for marrying adds pathos to this froth. The remorse that Lady Harriet shows in the play’s last scene leavens the comedy as does Mr.
The first of Inchbald’s plays to be performed fits neatly into her body of work. She often chose topical subjects, and in 1784, ballooning was all the rage. Two of the three balloonists are a married couple, again a typical Inchbald trope; her protagonists are often married. Johnny and Fan, together with the third balloonist, the Doctor, are very much grounded in the real world of Wapping and Hyde Park Corner. Like many a charlatan, the Doctor claims to be able to subsist on “the pure air that we breath’d while so many degrees above the earth” (Backscheider, The Mogul Tale, p. 3); Johnny, however, reveals to the audience that this claim is far from true. Fan expresses concern for her children at home in London, even though the Doctor has convinced her to disguise herself as a nun (and Johnny as the pope), out of fear of the Grand Mogul. This figure, like many of the exotic rulers in Inchbald’s plays, appears much more dreadful than he is. (Inchbald herself may have played the character who informs the newcomers of this ruler’s ruthlessness.) After the newcomers reveal the absurdity of their disguises, the Mogul lets them
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ELIZABETH INCHBALD Anthony’s appeal to “that inborn virtue [in her] which never perishes” (pp. 87-88). Appearance Is Against Them is more purely froth, whipped up around a shawl that the bachelor Walmsley brings back from India and that several different women, including Miss Angle and her maid, Fish, claim. That play was her first performed at Covent Garden, one of London’s two winter theaters; it was also the first play that she published. Her earlier staged plays appeared in print the next year (1786).
resemble stuttering (a striking detail, as Thomas Crochunis indicates, given that Inchbald herself stuttered). Shortly thereafter, Mr. Haswell, a character based on the prison reformer John Howard, arrives, only to be ridiculed by the Tremors and Twineall. The next scene (act 2, scene 1) introduces Meanright, a supposed friend of Twineall’s. When Twineall later follows Meanright’s advice, he will be arrested for treason, and Mr. Haswell, the man he scoffed at, will rescue him. In this part of the play, the Twineall character serves as comic relief, while Mr. Haswell and the actual political prisoners become the focus. One prisoner, a silent woman, happens to be Arabella, the wife of the Sultan. At the end of this play, in a scene reminiscent of the Mogul’s revelation at the end of The Mogul Tale, the cruel, oppressive Sultan is revealed to be a Christian who impersonates this ruler after, he believes, Arabella is killed. Mr. Haswell reunites husband and wife, and the reappearance of Mr. Twineall brings the play to its close. Such Things Are was exceedingly popular in 1787, and its audience even included members of the royal family. Modern scholars have found the play useful for reading the impact of British nationalism on British literature, and it has also been of interest to scholars reexamining eighteenth-century plays by women. Betsy Bolton, in Women, Nationalism, and the Romantic Stage (2001), discusses the play’s critique of tyranny as well as its ultimate evasion of this critique through its resolution of any hint of difficulty. Angela Smallwood also reads Such Things Are alongside the ongoing impeachment trial of the governor-general of India. Inchbald actually attended this trial only once, but Becky Wells, one of her closest friends and a former actor, covered the trial for Edward Topham’s daily newspaper, the World, and reenacted its speeches for her friends. To complicate the politics of Such Things Are, an earlier draft of the play included anti-French sentiment characteristic of the London theater at that time; these comments, however, could have been ironic, given that, in 1787, Inchbald was able to practice Catholicism openly in France but not in Great Britain. The complexity of Such Things Are has lent itself to
Returning to the Haymarket Theater with her next farce, The Widow’s Vow (1786), Inchbald turned to a strategy guaranteed to increase her productivity as she adapted a work by the French playwright Joseph Patrat (or Patras), L’Heureux Erreur (1783), a play about a countess’s reluctance to remarry. Angela Smallwood’s introduction to the sixth volume of Eighteenth-Century Women Playwrights (2001) indicates the changes in detail and emphasis that Inchbald made to Patrat’s original. Smallwood’s inclusion of The Widow’s Vow with plays like Such Things Are and Wives as They Were, and Maids as They Are (1797) argues for the adaptation’s relevance to an understanding of Inchbald’s plays and, through them, the late eighteenth-century stage (when adaptation was common practice, despite thencurrent beliefs about literary originality). Since this play was an adaptation, when The Widow’s Vow was first published in 1786, Inchbald’s name did not appear on the title page or the author’s note as was customary. Inchbald’s next play was Such Things Are in 1787, an original, full-length work brimming with comical characters and social commentary. It was staged at Covent Garden and has been characterized as her first “serious” play. Set in the colony of Sumatra, the play begins by mocking young Mr. Twineall, who has left England to seek his fortune. His character satirizes the advice contained in Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son, which had appeared in 1774, as Angela Smallwood notes. In the first act, Lord and Lady Tremor, a middle-aged couple, encourage Mr. Twineall to show the current “fashion in England, of speaking without words at all” (Backscheider, Such Things Are, p. 9). This fashion turns out to
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ELIZABETH INCHBALD more openly politicized performances in modern times—for example, the Pregones Theater, a company founded by Puerto Rican artists and activists in the Bronx, staged a reading of the play in 2003.
mon in French literature than in English. Like Miss Milner, Amanthis is in love with her guardian; in temperament and upbringing, though, she is much closer to Matilda. The guardian, Marquis Almanza, is like Dorriforth/Lord Elmwood in that he is austere, but he is not as forbidding. Amanthis and Marquis Almanza’s relationship also prefigures that of Oswin and Hester in Inchbald’s last play, To Marry, or Not to Marry. Even though The Child of Nature is set on a secluded country estate with several “outdoor” scenes, various visitors distract Amanthis and her guardian, much as the main characters, the Classicks, are distracted in The Married Man. First there is young Count Valantia with his wily servant, Seville. Although he is engaged to the Marchioness Merida, he woos Amanthis, nearly succeeding—just as Lord Lovemore does in The Married Man. The marchioness is also a visitor; the marquis has invited her to be the younger woman’s confidante. His elderly uncle soon appears (reminiscent of the uncles in I’ll Tell You What), attempting to dispense what appears to be common sense but failing to do so. The uncle constantly criticizes his nephew’s love for Amanthis and, in an aside, wishes that he would court the older marchioness instead “as nobody else will have them” (Backscheider, The Child of Nature, p. 35). The last visitor is Alberto, Amanthis’s father and the marquis’s friend. He is an authoritarian figure, demanding that his daughter follow him into exile despite her upcoming wedding to the marquis. Like the Grand Mogul and the Sultan, he proves to be less frightening than we are led to expect. In the fouract play’s last scene, he blesses his daughter’s marriage, since his earlier demands were simply a “trial of [her] filial love” (p. 52). With the last play in this period, The Married Man, first produced (at the Haymarket) in 1789, Inchbald returns to an English setting. However, this three-act play is an adaptation of an older French play, Philippe Néricault Destouches’s Le Philosophe marié (The Married Philosopher, 1727). Inchbald also returns to writing about married couples, for the couple at the center of this play, Sir John and Lady Classick, are secretly married. A man of learning, Sir John
The year 1787 was productive for Inchbald. She saw the performance not only of Such Things Are but also two of her other plays, all at Covent Garden. One was The Midnight Hour, an adaptation of the French play Guerre Ouverte (1786), by A.-J. Dumaniant. This time Inchbald’s name appeared as the adaptation’s author, marking her rise in status. The other was All On a Summer’s Day, her first failure. The play was not published until the 1980 edition of her collected plays, in which that volume’s editor, Paula Backscheider, praises its construction—but the play’s treatment of Lady Carroll’s scorn for her husband and her adulterous pursuit of Wildlove may have been repellent to the sensibilities of its eighteenthcentury audience. Two more of Inchbald’s pieces were staged in 1788, again both at Covent Garden and this time to acclaim. The first was a farce, Animal Magnetism, an adaptation of a 1786 French play that had been staged and published in Dublin. Again, Inchbald was listed as the adaptation’s author, but this time the original author’s name was not included. This farce, about an incompetent would-be doctor and his pursuit of his young ward, was subtly topical. It reminded audiences of James Graham, a would-be doctor whose notorious “Temple of Health” featured a “Celestial Bed” and was patronized by figures from high society. The second play, The Child of Nature, was an adaptation of a play by the French educator and radical Madame de Genlis, which had been performed privately but not publicly. Working from a literal translation, Inchbald revised the original significantly, as biographer Annibel Jenkins indicates. Together with Animal Magnetism and her other adaptations, The Child of Nature showed the fascination with French culture that Inchbald and her audience shared. The relationship between a guardian and his female ward occurs in many of her pieces although, as Terry Castle remarks, this eroticized relationship is more com-
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ELIZABETH INCHBALD admits to his friend Dorimant that he has “always made a jest of matrimony, laughed at and ridiculed all husbands; [he is] therefore now ashamed, and blush[es] at the title” (Backscheider, The Married Man, p. 9). His unwillingness to admit that he is married makes his wife vulnerable to Lord Lovemore’s overtures, yet, by the end of the play, he is finally willing to acknowledge her as his wife. With its emphasis on Lady Classick’s dependence on her husband for social respectability and Sir John’s dependence on a wealthy uncle, this short play evokes Inchbald’s next series of questioning comedies.
Charles Euston and his wife or the Sultan’s wife, Arabella, compete with more comic characters like Lady Harriet Cypress, Mr. Twineall, or the Tremors for the audience’s attention. In Next Door Neighbours, Henry and Eleanor’s attempts to avoid destitution are central to the play. They appear in three of the play’s five scenes. In the second act, when Sir George offers Eleanor money to free her father from debtor’s prison and then attempts to seduce her, she threatens Sir George with a pistol. Angela Smallwood (2001) observes that his action “parodies benevolence” even as it presents Eleanor with yet another obstacle to her survival. Sir George, on the other hand, is an ineffectual antagonist who must be rescued by his servant, Bluntly. Instead of abetting Sir George’s schemes, as other servants do in plays, Bluntly is the play’s moral authority. In scene 2, he hovers nearby not to assist his employer but instead to protect Eleanor from losing what Sir George scornfully calls her “virtue.” Earlier in the play, Bluntly criticizes the landlord for failing to repair a cracked window in Eleanor and Henry’s lodgings but offering to fix a similar problem for Sir George. Ironically, Bluntly’s employer ends up being disinherited in favor of Eleanor, who turns out to be his long-lost sister. Sir George must then rely on his fiancée, Lady Caroline, who has bought up his properties to hold in trust for him. Next Door Neighbours reflects the development of Inchbald’s writing and her growing tendency to voice social criticism aimed at the issues of gender, class, and money. The social criticism in Lovers No Conjurers (sometimes titled Young Men and Old Women), an original but less popular farce performed first at Haymarket in 1792, addresses gender rather than class. The characters in this courtship comedy are all from the same social milieu. At the end of the first act, Sir Samuel dresses down his widowed sister, Mrs. Ambiology, in front of her niece, taking advantage of her dependence on him. This woman has just been tricked by Sylvan, a young man who has decided that he does not want to marry Sir Samuel’s daughter, Lydia, after all. To break this engagement, he has taken on another identity, that of a rude young man who
PLAYS 1790–1797
Elizabeth Inchbald gradually retired from acting—her last role was a revival of The Mogul Tale in 1789—and in the 1790s she began a new stage of her writing career. This decade marks the publication of Inchbald’s two novels as well as her close friendships with Thomas Holcroft and William Godwin, and it was a creative period for her overall, in which she produced more distinctive and ambitious work than she had during the 1780s. After a year (1790) in which no new plays of hers were performed, two appeared on the stage in 1791. The first, a farce titled The Hue and Cry, had been rejected by both Covent Garden and the Haymarket, but John Philip Kemble offered to stage it at Drury Lane, where he had become manager in 1788. This play, an adaptation of a French play, was not published in Inchbald’s lifetime. George Colman the Younger, now the manager at Haymarket, did accept Inchbald’s Next Door Neighbours for production in 1791. This play, which drew on two French plays, L’Indigent (1772) by Louis-Sébastien Mercier and Destouches’s Le Dissipateur (1736), is set in a London neighborhood where Sir George Splendorville and an impoverished pair who appear to be brother and sister live next door to each other. Mr. Blackman, their landlord, alternately fawns on Sir George and menaces Henry and Eleanor, his poorer tenants. In this play, the element of pathos is central. In I’ll Tell You What and even Such Things Are, characters such as
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ELIZABETH INCHBALD In 1793, a year in which only two other new plays by women were performed, Inchbald returned to comedy and Covent Garden with Every One Has His Fault. The popularity of this play marked her return to public attention. In its abundance of characters, both the well-off and the destitute, and its London setting, Every One Has His Fault is closer to Next Door Neighbours or Such Things Are than to her two pieces of 1792. Moreover, her characters include married couples, and marriage is central to the comedy. One couple (the ironically named Placids) seek to separate, Sir Robert Ramble and his wife have just separated, and the elderly Solus wishes that he had married. The Irwins are the only couple happy in their marriage, but they are direly poor. In one scene, Mrs. Irwin fears that her husband will commit suicide. Instead, he robs her father, who has disinherited her for marrying Irwin, and the father, Lord Norland, intends to press charges against Irwin—until his ward (actually his grandson) persuades him not to. The well-named Harmony brings all of these characters together, even if he has to misrepresent them to each other. Annibel Jenkins considers the possibility that Harmony’s characteristics can be read as a criticism of Holcroft and Godwin and their rigorous attitude toward truth in social interactions. However, as Jenkins reminds readers, Every One Has His Fault was intended for a wider audience than these men and those who knew of them. Every One Has His Fault was a controversial play. It appeared just as conservatives began to respond to the revolutionary politics of the Jacobins and a year before Holcroft was indicted for treason; the conservative periodical the True Briton attacked the play for its attitude toward authority within marriage and the family and also for its blend of comedy and pathos. Angela Smallwood discounts these attacks in a 2004 essay on this play as the True Briton was the only negative reviewer of this play. Smallwood adds that the play continued to be popular not only in the short term but also into the nineteenth century, and she cites the praise of Inchbald’s contemporary audience members including Anna Larpent, the wife of the government censor, who often helped her husband with his scrutiny of
beats the family’s dog and insults Sir Samuel. The ending is perplexing. On the one hand, Lydia and her maid Kitty trick Sylvan and Knaveston into dressing up as fortune-tellers who are then unmasked by Sir Samuel. On the other, Sir Samuel banishes his sister for being again fooled by Sylvan and gives his daughter to that same young man, concluding, “for Women, there is no Perfection until they are made Wives and Mothers” (Backscheider, Young Men and Old Women, p. 25). This energetic farce leads one not to take the author’s commentary on men’s abuse of their authority over women too far, but this commentary is still present. Inchbald’s next play, The Massacre, a tragedy set in sixteenth-century France, is particularly intriguing. Daniel O'Quinn points out that, despite what is claimed on the title page, this is probably an original play, not an adaptation. Critics have warned against overestimating the extent to which Inchbald’s writing was influenced by Godwin and Holcroft’s ideas. It is interesting to speculate why she chose to write a historical tragedy, a genre that, as Paulina Kewes notes, was considered to allow more scope for a writer’s invention. Moreover, it is not clear why this play was published as an adaptation. Certainly, Inchbald was not the first female playwright to work in this genre. Hannah Cowley, whose comedies are often paired with Inchbald’s, had in fact already written two tragedies, both of which had been staged at Drury Lane in 1779 and 1788. Earlier, Hannah More’s Percy (1777) had been a notable triumph for Covent Garden. O'Quinn suggests that Inchbald intended her tragedy to be a closet drama, published but never performed, and that her intended audience most likely would have been her friends. He compares her play in that respect to Horace Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother (1768), in that each play’s author believed it unsuitable for theatrical representation. Gary Kelly, by contrast, speculates that perhaps Inchbald cancelled The Massacre’s publication because she had begun to censor herself, in the repressive political climate that emerged in England owing to the turmoil unleashed by the French Revolution.
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ELIZABETH INCHBALD play manuscripts. At the same time, one of Inchbald’s most demanding critics was William Godwin, who considered Every One Has His Fault to be an imperfect closet drama despite its popularity with audiences.
compared favorably with her previous success, Every One Has His Fault. Wives as They Were, and Maids as They Are is truly an artful comedy, made for those uneasy times. The prologue emphasizes the author’s gender and the mildness of her satire, reminding the audience, “We have no Socrates to libel here” (Backscheider, Wives as They Were, and Maids as They Are, p. iii). As the title suggests, the play has a double plot. The first part of the title refers to Lady Priory, whose husband sequesters her from society, forcing her to rise before dawn and go to bed before most women of her rank have begun their evening. Even so, Bronzely, a dissolute young man, is inspired to trick her into an assignation. The second part applies to “the maids” Miss Dorillon and her friend, Lady Mary, who enjoy life in upper-class London, attending fetes and gambling—to the dismay of Miss Dorillon’s father, who has returned from India and disguised himself to observe his daughter’s behavior. The ending of this play is unsettling. After Bronzely is unable to tempt Lady Priory, he returns her to her husband. The audience has witnessed Priory alternately blame and praise his wife. Upon her return, she is first too embarrassed to reply to his questions, then she admits her fear of him, and later she refers to herself as her husband’s “female slave” (Backscheider, Wives/Maids, p. 93). Bronzely is nevertheless inspired to emulate Priory, and so he proposes to Lady Mary. Even though Mary has observed the entire scene, she responds in this way: “Any control than have no chief magistrate at all” (p. 95). Having reconciled with her father (who paid her debts) and agreed to marry Sir George Evelyn (who is, admittedly, a kind and caring man), a chastened Miss Dorillon concludes the play with these words: “A maid of the present day shall become a wife like those—of former times” (p. 95). One wonders how this scene, too much like Kate’s last speech in Shakespeare’s The Taming of a Shrew, might be executed in a twentyfirst century performance.
In the year of the Treason Trials (1794), Inchbald’s comedy The Wedding Day, an original two-act play commissioned by John Philip Kemble, was performed at Drury Lane. Kemble had been feuding with his leading comic actress, Dora Jordan. Unhappy with the kinds of plays he preferred, Jordan may have written a comedy, Anna, to provide herself with something more suitable, but that play was acted only once. The Wedding Day was probably then substituted as a peace offering. Perhaps as an antidote to the pessimism that overtook London during the period of the treason trials, perhaps an act of selfcensorship as well as professionalism, Inchbald here offers her audience a spirited comedy instead of a more reflective piece; she seems temporarily to put aside her concerns with politics and class. Lady Contest marries the much-older Sir Adam Contest for purely mercenary reasons. She admits as much, undercutting her older husband’s attempts to save face. Then they learn that Sir Adam’s first wife is in fact alive. After reuniting with his first, more-loved wife, he agrees to give the former second Lady Contest (Dora Jordan’s character) a dowry so that she may marry more appropriately. She concludes the play with this good-hearted speech, referring to the earlier loss of her wedding ring that did not fit: “And my next husband shall be of my own age, but he shall possess, Sir Adam, your principles of honour. And then, if my wedding ring should unhappily fit loose, I will guard it with unwearied discretion: and I will hold it sacred—even though it should pinch my finger” (Backscheider, The Wedding Day, p. 44). From 1795 to the spring of 1797, no new plays by Inchbald appeared on the British stage until Wives as They Were, and Maids as They Are was performed at Covent Garden. This play went through a number of revisions before its first performance, but when finally it was staged in March 1797, it pleased its audience and was performed twenty-four times, a number that
PLAYS 1798 AND AFTER
In 1798, the year that William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published their first edi-
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ELIZABETH INCHBALD tion of Lyrical Ballads and that some literary anthologists have given for the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of romanticism, Inchbald’s first adaptation from Kotzebue, Lovers’ Vows, was performed at Covent Garden. This play came to be among her most popular in its first season, and Jane Austen makes it part of the plot in her 1814 novel Mansfield Park. Lovers’ Vows is very much an adaptation of Kotzebue’s Das Kind der Liebe (The Child of Love, 1790) rather than a direct translation. Inchbald did not know German. Hers was also not the only English version of this play. Anne Plumptre had worked on another, more literal, translation: The Natural Son, a closet play published quickly after the debut of Inchbald’s play. Two other translations followed by 1800, but, as Susan Allen Ford notes, the most controversy was elicited by Inchbald and Plumptre’s versions. In her preface to Lovers’ Vows, Inchbald admits her revisions to three different characters: Cassel, the butler, and (in particular) Amelia. She frames the last set of revisions as necessary to prevent a performance that “would have been revolting to an English audience” (“Preface [to Lovers’ Vows],” p. iii). Ford details the changes made to Cassel, whom Inchbald transformed into a comic figure, and the excision of a “Good Samaritan” scene in which a poor Jewish person and a young peasant girl help Frederick’s mother while a more “respectable” figure abuses her. Nevertheless, the play was contentious, even during its first, spectacular run. Criticism of the actor playing Amelia was especially pointed, possibly provoking Inchbald’s comment in her preface. With the changes that Inchbald made, Lovers’ Vows is a sensitive, provocative play that surprisingly ends happily. Even though the play opens with a landlord expelling the weak, starving Agatha, she is soon reunited with her son, Frederick, a soldier on leave. He tries to rob a wealthy man who, as it turns out, is his father, Baron Wildenham. The baron imprisons Frederick but releases him when he learns of their filial relationship. Furthermore, when pressured by Frederick, Baron Wildenham agrees to marry Agatha publicly. In another plot line that Inchbald
discusses extensively in her preface, the baron is about to marry his daughter, Amelia, to Cassel, an empty-headed count. Amelia is in love with Anhalt, her tutor. She manages to convince both him and her father, with relative ease, that she and Anhalt should be married instead. The play ends with a tableau that involves each member of the reunited family, with Agatha and the baron at its heart. The next year Inchbald adapted a second play by Kotzebue: The Wise Man of the East was again staged at Covent Garden. After a rough start, this play was popular as well, despite growing concern over the supposed immorality of Kotzebue’s plays. Annibel Jenkins describes Wise Man as a “dark comedy” (p. 432). This play also mixes social classes together. Ellen is a lady’s maid, but she is also the daughter of Mr. Metland, a bankrupt merchant. Claransforth the Younger, a not-so-young version of Sir George Splendorville or Bronzely, pursues her; ironically, before Mr. Metland’s bankruptcy, Claransforth the Elder had wanted his son to marry her. As Inchbald points out in her brief preface to this play, she added a wealthy Quaker family to her adaptation. Young Claransforth is halfheartedly pursuing the Quakers’ daughter, Ruth, who loves Ellen’s brother, a young ensign. This play ends more conventionally with spoken dialogue rather than a tableau. However, the Quaker family fits rather oddly into the ending, as they are so purely comic. After asking his daughter how she feels about Ensign Metland, the Quaker father, Timothy, tells his future son-in-law, “Then, take her, young man. But I say unto thee, love her only with that discreet love with which I have lov’d her mother—and which made me content to marry her, and would have made me equally content if I had not” (Backscheider, The Wise Man, p. 79). It is clear that the new couple will not pay attention to him. Inchbald’s next play (and possibly another as well) were not acted. The first was A Case of Conscience (1800), a play that was written for the actor John Philip Kemble and is set in Spain, at some indefinite time in the past, but the work never made it to Drury Lane, perhaps because of the tension between Kemble and Richard Brins-
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ELIZABETH INCHBALD ley Sheridan, the neglectful owner of that theater company. British Women Playwrights Around 1800 lists another play, “The Egyptian Boy,” as an unacted drama that Inchbald completed in 1802. Annibel Jenkins implies that professionally this was a difficult time for Inchbald, as the management of the Haymarket and Covent Garden were no longer staging her adaptations of French and German plays. For reasons that Jenkins does not specify, both companies had turned to other translators, one of them being James Boaden who would later write a biography of Inchbald (1833). Another may have been her once-close friend, Thomas Holcroft. The last play of Inchbald’s that survives is To Marry, or Not to Marry, an original work that continued to be performed into the late nineteenth century in the United States. At the end of her career as a playwright, Inchbald returned to the domestic comedy of manners and a country setting. By this time, she was more familiar with the real-life versions of this setting. The couple in this play is Sir Oswin, an austere middle-aged bachelor along the lines of Dorriforth or The Child of Nature’s Marquis, and Hester, a mysterious young lady escaping from an arranged marriage. Sir Oswin’s older, unmarried sister, Mrs. Sarah, is particularly entertaining as she tries to disinvite Hester and later as she brushes off an unwanted suitor.
both George Colmans, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Joanna Baillie, and Inchbald herself. The other collections, The Modern Theatre (1809, 10 vols.) and A Collection of Farces and Other Afterpieces (1809, 7 vols.), contained works of her choosing but no remarks. Among the plays in The Modern Theatre are Inchbald’s I’ll Tell You What, Next Door Neighbours, and The Wise Man of the East. Her farces, The Child of Nature, The Wedding Day, and The Midnight Hour, appear in A Collection of Farces. She also wrote an essay, “To the Artist,” that was originally published in the Artist (1807) and has been reprinted elsewhere, including in the 2005 Broadview edition of Nature and Art. Inchbald’s Remarks on the British Theatre has drawn attention from modern critics including Katherine M. Rogers (in 1991) and also Marvin Carlson, whose essay “Elizabeth Inchbald: A Woman Critic in Her Theatrical Culture” (2000) provides a useful overview of the remarks, comparing her writings on Shakespeare’s plays with those of Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) and discussing Inchbald’s responses to Johnson’s comments. Carlson notes that at times, as in her remarks prefacing Measure for Measure, Inchbald criticizes his praise for certain plays: “To a delicate critic of the present day,” she wrote, “and one thoroughly acquainted with his moral character, it must surely appear as if Johnson’s pure mind had been somewhat sullied by having merely read” such works (quoted in Carlson, p. 211). Elsewhere she counters his “just attack” on Cymbeline with comments on its power in performance (Carlson, p. 212). In remarks to King Lear, she chides Johnson for preferring Nahum Tate’s 1681 adaptation (in which Cordelia lives) to Shakespeare’s version.
INCHBALD AS CRITIC AND EDITOR
In the last stage of her literary career, Elizabeth Inchbald worked on several collections for Longman Publishers. The first, a twenty-five-volume set titled The British Theatre (1806–1809), involved her writing a series of prefaces to current theatrical editions of plays. Shakespeare’s Tempest, for example, was included as The Tempest; or, The Enchanted Island, with revisions by John Dryden and John Philip Kemble. This collection included a large handful of Shakespeare’s plays, comedies, and tragedies, as well as histories; two plays by the Elizabethan dramatists Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher; Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour; and more contemporary plays by Oliver Goldsmith,
Inchbald comments both directly and indirectly on her own career with her prefaces; Thomas Crochunis points out that Inchbald’s selfcriticism belies the success of her plays Such Things Are and even To Marry, or Not to Marry. This characteristic may also indicate her growing social conservatism as well as her dissatisfaction with the contemporary theater, for she also censures elements of other authors’ plays. In her
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Selected Bibliography
remarks on her own Lovers’ Vows, she defends the play against accusations of immorality and disrespect toward parents, while conversely, she criticizes her last play, To Marry, or Not To Marry, as correct but dull.
WORKS OF ELIZABETH INCHBALD SELECTED MODERN EDITIONS
Her comments on adaptation and plays with European settings are intriguing. One wonders how she regarded her own works such as The Widow’s Vow and A Case of Conscience (both set in Spain), given her dry remarks on Hannah Cowley’s 1783 play, A Bold Stroke for a Husband, a third play set in Spain. She repeats a variation on this opinion several other times, for instance in comments on yet another play set in Spain, Love Makes the Man (1694) by Colley Cibber. Toward adaptations of French and German plays, she appears to be more forgiving, as in her comments on Ambrose Phillips’s The Distressed Mother (1712) and her own Lovers’ Vows. Additionally, her praise of David Garrick’s Country Girl (1766) as well as for Hannah Cowley’s The Belle’s Stratagem (1780) and A Bold Stroke for a Husband indicate her approbation of contemporary playwrights’ adaptations of older, risqué plays. In her remarks on The Distressed Mother, she maintains that these adaptations meet the needs of the impatient modern audience.
The Plays of Elizabeth Inchbald. 2 vols. Edited and with an introduction by Paula R. Backscheider. New York: Garland, 1980. (This is the edition cited in this article. Vol. 1 contains The Mogul Tale [1784]; I’ll Tell You What [1785]; Appearance Is Against Them [1785]; The Widow’s Vow [1786]; Such Things Are [1787]; The Midnight Hour [1787]; All On a Summer’s Day [1787]; Animal Magnetism [1788]; The Child of Nature [1788]; The Married Man [1789]; and The Hue and Cry [1791]. Vol. 2 contains Next Door Neighbours [1791]; Young Men and Old Women (Lovers No Conjurors) [1792]; The Massacre [1792]; Every One Has His Fault [1793]; The Wedding Day [1794]; Wives as They Were, and Maids as They Are [1797]; Lovers’ Vows [1798]; The Wise Man of the East [1799]; A Case of Conscience [1800]; and To Marry, or Not to Marry [1805]. Pagination is not consecutive in these volumes.) Remarks for the British Theatre (1806–1809). Facsimile reproductions of the nineteenth-century first edition, with an introduction by Cecilia Macheski. Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1990. (This is the edition of Inchbald’s prefaces from The British Theatre cited in this article. This volume is not repaginated.) A Simple Story. Edited by J. M. S. Tompkins. With an introduction by Jane Spencer. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. (This is the edition cited in this article.) Nature and Art. Edited by Shawn Lisa Maurer. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2005. Nature and Art. Teddington, U.K.: Echo Library, 2006. (This is the edition cited in this article.)
Her comments on Cibber’s plays reflect her emphasis on theatricality. In her preface to Cibber’s The Careless Husband (1704), she endeavors to restore the playwright’s reputation, which Alexander Pope had destroyed for many readers in making Cibber the “hero” of one version of his Dunciad, an infamous literary satire. Her defense of Cibber may well be a defense of comedy itself against changing theatrical standards.
NOVELS: FIRST EDITIONS A Simple Story. 4 vols. London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1791. Nature and Art. 2 vols. London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1796.
CRITICISM “Preface [to Lovers’ Vows].” In The Plays of Elizabeth Inchbald. Vol. 2. Edited by Paula R. Backscheider. New York: Garland, 1980. Pp. i–iv. “Advertisement [to The Wise Man of the East].” In The Plays of Elizabeth Inchbald. Vol. 2. Edited by Paula R. Backscheider. New York: Garland, 1980. The British Theatre; or, A Collection of Plays, Which Are Acted at the Theatres Royal, Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and Haymarket, with Biographical and Critical Remarks, by Mrs. Inchbald. 25 vols. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1806–1809.
It is unfortunate that Inchbald did not write similar prefaces to the plays she chose for inclusion in The Modern Theatre or A Collection of Farces. However, what remains of her work in many different genres is enough to give us a fuller view of the eighteenth-century literary field and the same era’s theatrical stage, as well as of the possibilities for a professional woman writer in that era.
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ELIZABETH INCHBALD Anonymous. “Prologue [to Wives as They Were, and Maids as They Are] by a Friend.” In The Plays of Elizabeth Inchbald. Vol. 2. Edited by Paula R. Backscheider. New York: Garland Publishing, 1980. (Inchbald did not write her own prologues and epilogues.) Baines, Paul, and Edward Burns. “Introduction.” In Five Romantic Plays, 1768–1821. Edited by Baines and Burns. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. vii–xxix. (Discussion of Lovers’ Vows.) Bolton, Betsy. Women, Nationalism, and the Romantic Stage: Theatre and Politics in Britain, 1780–1800. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Burroughs, Catherine, ed. Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance, and Society, 1790–1840. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
“To The Artist.” Artist, June 1807. (Reprinted in Elizabeth Inchbald: Novelist, by William McKee, and also in the 2005 Broadview edition of Inchbald’s Nature and Art.)
COMPILATIONS
BY
INCHBALD
The Modern Theatre: A Collection of Successful Modern Plays. 10 vols. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1809. (Reprint, New York: B. Blom, 1968.) A Collection of Farces and Other Afterpieces. 7 vols. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1809. (Reprint, New York: B. Blom, 1970.)
DIARIES, CORRESPONDENCE,
AND
MANUSCRIPTS
The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald. 3 vols. Edited by Ben P. Robertson. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007. The Huntington Library holds manuscripts of Inchbald’s plays as part of its John Larpent collection. Several (such as The Widow’s Vow and Wives as They Were, and Maids as They Are) are listed under alternative titles. The Folger Shakespeare Library houses what remains of Inchbald’s diaries (9 vols., 1776, 1780, 1783, 1788, 1807, 1808, 1814, 1820). Other papers are available at the British Library.
Carlson, Marvin. “Elizabeth Inchbald: A Woman Critic in Her Theatrical Culture.” In Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance, and Society, 1790–1840. Edited by Catherine Burroughs. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. 207–222. Castle, Terry. Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century Culture and Fiction. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986.
MODERN PERFORMANCES
Cima, Gay Gibson. “‘To Be Public as a Genius and Private as a Woman’: The Critical Framing of Nineteenth-Century British Women Playwrights.” In Women and Playwriting in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Edited by Tracy C. Davis and Ellen Donkin. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. 35–53.
Juggernaut Theater Company (New York City). “First 100 Years: The Professional Female Playwright” (www. juggernaut-theatre.org/first100years/index.html). (Angeline Goreau wrote a preview article for the New York Times about this series of readings during the 2002– 2003 season, which included Such Things Are and Wives as They Were, and Maids as They Are; see “Theater: These Women Seduced with Wit,” New York Times, March 9, 2003.) Theatre Unbound (Minneapolis, Minnesota). “Girl’s Got Pluck” (www.theatreunbound.com/productions/ past_girls_got_pluck.html). (In February 2005, this company performed The Widow’s Vow along with Dulcitius by the medieval playwright Hrosvitha of Gandersheim and Trifles by Susan Glaspell.) Halcyon Theater (Chicago). “Alcyone Festival 2008” (www. halcyontheatre.org/alcyone08). (During the summer of 2008, this company performed a fully staged production of The Massacre; see www.halcyontheatre.org/ themassacre.) Theatre Royal (Bury St. Edmunds). “Restoring the Repertoire” (www.theatreroyal.org). (This company performed Wives as They Were, and Maids as They Are and Animal Magnetism in September 2008 as part of the Georgian Gems festival. The Web page also includes links to several reviews of earlier staged readings of these plays.)
Crochunis, Thomas. “Authorial Performances in the Criticism and Theory of Romantic Women Playwrights.” In Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance, and Society, 1790–1840. Edited by Catherine Burroughs. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. 223–254. Donkin, Ellen. Getting into the Act: Women Playwrights in London, 1776–1829. New York: Routledge, 1995. Everett, Matthew A. “In My Humble Opinion” (www. matthewaeverett.com/columns/detail.php?articleID=483). (Review of Theatre Unbound’s evening of plays titled “Girl’s Got Pluck.”) Ford, Susan Allen. “It Is About Lovers’ Vows: Kotzebue, Inchbald, and the Players of Mansfield Park.” Persuasions On-Line 27, no. 1 (winter 2006). (Available at www. jasna.org.) Jenkins, Annibel. I’ll Tell You What: The Life of Elizabeth Inchbald. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003. Kelly, Gary. The English Jacobin Novel, 1780–1805. New York: Clarendon Press, 1976. Kewes, Paulina. “‘[A] Play, Which I Presume to Call Original’: Appropriation, Creative Genius, and Eighteenth-Century Playwriting.” Studies in the Literary Imagination (spring 2001). (Available at Bnet, http:// findarticles.com)
CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Anderson, Misty G. Female Playwrights and EighteenthCentury Comedy: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage. New York: Palgrave, 2002.
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ELIZABETH INCHBALD Rogers, Katherine M. “The First English Woman Drama Critic: Elizabeth Inchbald.” In Curtain Calls: British and American Women and the Theater, 1660–1820. Edited by Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991. Pp. 277–290.
Lott, Anna. “Introduction.” In A Simple Story, by Elizabeth Inchbald. Edited by Anna Lott. Orchard Park, N.Y.: Broadview Press, 2007. Pp. vii–xx. Macheski, Cecilia. “Herself as Heroine: Portraits as Autobiography for Elizabeth Inchbald.” In Curtain Calls: British and American Women and the Theater, 1660– 1820. Edited by Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991. Pp. 34– 45. Mann, David D., and Susan Garland Mann, eds. “Chronological List of Plays by British Women Playwrights, 1770–1823.” Université de Montréal Web site, British Women Playwrights Around 1800 (www.etang.umontreal. ca), December 1, 2000. Manvell, Roger. Elizabeth Inchbald: England’s Principal Woman Dramatist and Independent Woman of Letters in Eighteenth-Century London: A Biographical Study. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1987. Maurer, Shawn Lisa. “Introduction.” In Nature and Art, by Elizabeth Inchbald. Edited by Shawn Lisa Maurer. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2005. Pp. 11–31. McKee, William. Elizabeth Inchbald: Novelist. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1935. Moody, Jane. “Suicide and Translation in the Dramaturgy of Elizabeth Inchbald and Anne Plumptre.” In Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance, and Society, 1790–1840. Edited by Catherine Burroughs. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. 257–284. O’Quinn, Daniel J. “Elizabeth Inchbald’s The Massacre: Tragedy, Violence and the Network of Political Fantasy.” Université de Montréal Web site, British Women Playwrights Around 1800 (www.etang.umontreal.ca).
Schofield, Mary Anne. Masking and Unmasking the Female Mind: Disguising Romances in Feminine Fiction, 1713– 1799. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990. Smallwood, Angela. “Introduction.” In Elizabeth Inchbald. Vol. 6 of Eighteenth-Century Women Playwrights. Edited by Derek Hughes. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001. Reprinted at the Université de Montréal Web site, British Women Playwrights Around 1800 (www.etang.umontreal. ca/bwp1800/essays/smallwood_introPC.html; this web version is cited in this essay). ———. “Women Playwrights, Politics, and Convention: The Case of Elizabeth Inchbald’s ‘Seditious’ Comedy, Every One Has His Fault (1793).” Sheffield Hallam University Web site, CW3 Journal 1 (summer 2004). (Online only, at www2.shu.ac.uk/corvey/cw3journal/ issues/smallwood.html.) Spencer, Jane. “Introduction.” In A Simple Story, by Elizabeth Inchbald. Edited by J. M. S. Tompkins. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pp. vii–xx. Strachey, G. L. [Lytton]. “Introduction.” In A Simple Story, by Elizabeth Inchbald. Edited by Strachey. London: Henry Frowde, 1908. Digitalized reprint, Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org), 2007 (cited here). Tompkins, J. M. S. “Introduction.” In A Simple Story, by Elizabeth Inchbald. Edited by Tompkins. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Pp. vii–xvi.
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RICHARD JEFFERIES (1848—1887)
Fred Bilson RICHARD JEFFERIES WAS born on November 6, 1848, in Coate, Wiltshire, the second child and eldest son of James Luckett Jefferies and Elizabeth (Betsy) Gyde Jefferies. During Jefferies’ lifetime Coate would become a suburb of the industrial and railroad town of Swindon, but in 1848 it was a country farming community.
Gyde, brother to Betsy and Ellen and an accomplished artist and engraver, also was a friend and role model to Richard. It was at Sydenham that Jefferies learned to read and to draw. Jefferies returned to Coate in 1858, though he continued to visit Shanklin Villa, even after Thomas Harrild’s sudden death in December 1867. At Coate, Jefferies experienced the misery his father’s poverty and debt brought with them. His schooling was desultory; he spent much of the time exploring the countryside, embarking on a program of nature study that he set himself. His father also allowed him time off for reading, rather than insisting he work on the farm during his free hours. The Jefferieses were not, after all, a country family; they were a town family relocated to the country, and they shared some of the wider interests of the cultured Gyde relations. In later years, for example, Jefferies sent his father Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
James Luckett Jefferies was born in 1816 in London and at the age of twenty-one had travelled to Canada, looking for work as a farmhand. He eventually returned to England, and in 1848 he was tenant of Coate Farm, a forty-acre smallholding. The land was the property of his father, John Jefferies, who had worked in the printing trade in London and made money before returning to run the family mill and bakery business in Swindon. An avaricious man, John Jefferies did not help his son financially. James Jefferies worked hard at the farm, but it did not pay. Both he and his wife were embittered by their circumstances. Following the death of John Jefferies, James was not even left a proper title to the farm in his father’s will. In the end, he gave up the farm and moved to Bath where he worked as a jobbing gardener, surviving his son Richard Jefferies by some ten years.
In 1866 Jefferies began the series of spiritual explorations he describes in The Story of My Heart: My Autobiography (1883), and in the same year he joined the North Wiltshire Herald as a journalist. It was a Conservative Party newspaper and Jefferies was by inclination Conservative. He was later to make a reputation as a supporter of the farmers against the attempts of their laborers to form a union. For some years he freelanced for the Herald, concentrating on articles about country life.
Betsy Gyde Jefferies, born in 1817, was the daughter of John Jefferies’ manager at the London printing works. Two others of the Gyde family were particularly important to Richard Jefferies; one was his mother’s younger sister Ellen Gyde Harrild, who was born about 1827 and married to Thomas Harrild, born 1822, a printer and publisher of children’s books. Jefferies lived with the Harrilds at Shanklin Villa, Sydenham, in South London until the age of ten. Here he lived with a cultured, friendly family who encouraged him in every way; he was much closer to Ellen Gyde Harrild than he was to Betsy Jefferies. Fred
In July 1874 he married Jessie Baden, the daughter of a farmer who lived close to Coate Farm. It was a happy marriage, and the couple had two children, Richard Harold and Jessie Phyllis. Jessie was a very supportive wife, especially during Jefferies’ final illness. From 1881 Jefferies suffered constant ill health as a result of tuberculosis. These later years ironically
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RICHARD JEFFERIES coincided with his period of greatest success as a writer. He died on August 14, 1887, a few months before his thirty-ninth birthday.
They burned the old gun that used to stand in the dark corner up in the garret, close to the stuffed fox that always grinned so fiercely. Perhaps the reason why he seemed in such a ghastly rage was that he did not come by his death fairly. Otherwise his pelt would not have been so perfect.
JOURNALISM
(p. 1)
Jefferies’ material was his own life; he wrote about his experiences often with an urgent immediacy. He is generally present in his writing in his own persona; he tended not to adopt an authorial voice that distanced himself from his material. It is usual to praise Jefferies for his descriptions of nature, and there is indeed an intensity in his writings on plants, animals, wood, field, and water. But he has, in addition, other strengths that have not always been recognized. He understood the infinite gradations of the English class system, and he understood the social and economic pressures that shaped the lives not only of the laborers, but of the landowners, tenant farmers, and even the clergy and newspapermen of the rural community. In his preface to Hodge and His Masters (1880), Jefferies writes, “In manners, mode of thought, and way of life, there is perhaps no class of the community less uniform than the agricultural” (p. v). It is a surprising claim at first sight, until we encounter the variety and detail of his journalism.
It will be clear at once that Jefferies had learned something from Charles Dickens about writing on childhood; the joke about the rage of the fox is Dickensian, as is the refusal to explicate, that mirrors the child’s ability to observe and deduce. (Who are “they”? Does it matter? They are adults who take on the right to burn the gun.) Jefferies describes how he and another boy, probably a brother, whom he calls Orion the hunter, climb up into a garret on chairs and find the old gun, over a hundred years old, and practice aiming it. In time they are discovered, so the chairs are burned, in order to make it more difficult for the boys to climb up into the attic. Later, the gun itself, which they have hidden, is discovered and also burned but for a while they still have the gun to practice aiming and firing. It is a flintlock, so they must find flints for it. In the end, the smell of gunpowder gives them away, and the gun is burned. Later, Jefferies is given another, a more modern single-barrelled gun that has been concealed inside a long-case clock (a grandfather clock). He goes out shooting with it, bringing down a wood pigeon at thirty yards. He is hailed for his prowess and becomes a keen shot. The Jefferies of the opening chapters of the book is keen on shooting, trapping, and snaring, but later there is a change: “The pleasure of wandering in a wood was so great that it could never be resisted and did not solely arise from the instinct of shooting. Many expeditions were made without a gun ѧ simply to enjoy the trees and thickets” (p. 83). So it is as someone with the instincts of a poacher that he comes to discuss how poachers go about their work as they breach the game laws. These rigorous laws had existed in the United Kingdom since the late seventeenth century and protected the birds and animals that might be shot for sport in a prescribed season. In
THE AMATEUR POACHER
The Amateur Poacher is Jefferies’ 1879 collection of essays on country life originally contributed to the Pall Mall Gazette, at times a more radical newspaper than the conservative North Wiltshire Herald. In it, Jefferies writes about game laws as a microcosm of the complex English social system, lending sociological interest in addition to the detailed and poetic description of the English countryside. The book opens with an essay entitled “The First Gun,” which describes how Jefferies found an old gun in the garret of his home and became interested in shooting as a result. He looks back at this childhood incident from the perspective of adulthood:
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RICHARD JEFFERIES Jefferies’ Wiltshire, game meant partridges, pheasants, and hares. The right to shoot game belonged to the local landowner, who could rent out the shooting rights for profit if he chose. Tracts of land called coverts were kept to raise game, and gamekeepers were employed to protect it.
and a half cents) is very cheap—the price of a rabbit—but the mower will not want to take the partridge home, or he might be accused of poaching. Even such an experienced field hand as this mower can stumble on a partridge’s nest unawares, and this leads Jefferies to the question of the eggs. The eggs must be handed over to the gamekeeper, who will rear them in the covert. The mower has kept the dead bird’s eggs for this purpose. The gamekeeper will by custom pay for the eggs—the alternative is that the finders will damage the eggs before handing them over.
Poaching, taking game without the owner’s permission, was punished by local magistrates by fine or imprisonment; the magistrates were generally landowners. Where farmers occupied land as tenants of landowners they were compelled by their leases not to interfere with game, even when the result would be damaged crops. A final legal sanction was that tradesmen and others (even local butchers) could not buy or sell game unless they held a license to do so from the local magistrates. These laws (which are still in place) constituted a defense of the privilege of the landowner. Jefferies shows that, in a typical English compromise, though they were rigorously enforced, the laws led on a day-to-day basis to a series of negotiations, with landowners working with tenants to allow for the cost of preserving game and gamekeepers in effect even arranging with locals to keep poaching in check by a series of understandings. Jefferies’ detailed knowledge of the system derived both from his friendship with a local gamekeeper and from his own studies, especially at Hodson Ground, an area near his home where the game was strictly preserved. Jefferies was befriended by Haylock, the gamekeeper at Hodson, despite the reservations of the owner and Jefferies’ own father.
The men that are so expert at finding partridges’ eggs to sell to the keepers know well beforehand whereabouts the birds are likely to lay. If a stranger who had made no previous observations went into the fields to find these eggs, with full permission to do so, he would probably wander in vain. The grass is long, and the nest has little to distinguish it from the ground; the old bird will sit so close that one may pass almost over her. Without a right of search in open daylight the difficulty is of course much greater. A man cannot quarter the fields when the crop is high and leave no trail. (p. 62)
Jefferies relates how the men on the way to work in the morning notice where the partridges are settling, and then note if in fact they nest and breed. There is a good deal of solitary work in the fields; he mentions bushing, passing over the grass in the meadows with a mass of thorn bushes fixed to a frame and pulled by a horse: “It ѧ leaves the meadow in strips like the pile of green velvet, stroked in narrow bands, one this way, one that, laying the grass blades in the directions it travels. Solitary work of this kind ѧ is very favourable to observation.” The result is that “the searcher knows within a little where the nest must be, and has but a small space to beat” (pp. 63– 64).
The negotiation between keepers and farm laborers is illustrated in the description of the handling of partridges’ eggs. Partridges regularly escape from the land on which they are being reared and nest out in the open fields, but they remain the property of the landowner, and they (or at least their eggs) must be handed over to the gamekeeper. Jefferies describes a chance encounter with a mower who came “sidling up, and, looking mysteriously around with his hand behind under his coat, ‘You med have un for sixpence,’ he says, and produces a partridge into whose body the point of the scythe ran as she sat on her nest in the grass” (p. 62). Sixpence (twelve
Sometimes the laborers enjoy a comparative freedom at the edge of an estate. Jefferies describes a day of hare coursing with a poacher he calls Dickon. Like foxes, hares are hunted by hounds. In this case they are greyhounds working in pairs, which have the advantage of speed over foxhounds. The huntsmen follow on foot, not on horseback:
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RICHARD JEFFERIES white of magpies and the blue of jays alternated. ѧ Hawks filled the third row. The kestrels were the most numerous, but there were many sparrowhawks.ѧ But the last and lowest row ѧ was crowded with owls.ѧ The white owl ѧ the brown wood owls ѧ a few long horned owls .ѧ
Dickon slips the hounds.ѧ It is a beautiful sight to see the hounds bound over the sward; the sinewy back bends like a bow ѧ the deep chests drink the air. Is there any moment so joyful in life as the second when the chase begins? (p. 100)
(pp. 88–90)
In the end, five hares are taken and the party returns to the village, carefully entering it from a different direction than the one chosen by the boy with the returning hounds. Jefferies explains the political system of the village:
The gamekeeper’s gibbet where he nailed the animals and birds he trapped was a feature of country life for some time. Many people thought that the gibbet was an indication of the superstition of country people—as though they believed the sight of the dead birds would deter living predators. In fact, Jefferies makes clear by pointing out the positioning of the gibbet on the path up to the mansion that this was a way of making clear to the owner that the gamekeeper was doing his job, and this slaughter was part of the process of preserving game. The custom led to the near extinction of many of the species gibbeted, even in Jefferies’ own time: “Though numerous here, yet trap and gun have so reduced the wood owls that you may listen half the night by a cover and never hear the ‘Who-hoo’ that seems to demand your name” (p. 91).
The reason of these things is that Sarsen has no great landlord. There are fifty small proprietors, and not a single resident magistrate.ѧ It is a republic without even the semblance of a Government. It is liberty, equality, and swearing.ѧ Almost all the cottagers have votes, and are not to be trifled with. ѧ The mass of the inhabitants are the reddest of Reds. (pp. 101–102)
The hunters respect the coverts; they are: not such fools as to break pheasant preserves in the vale; as they are resident, that would not answer. ѧ But with ferret, dog, and gun, and now and then a partridge net along the edge of the standing barley they excel.
HODGE AND HIS MASTERS
(p. 102)
This 1880 title is made up of essays that had first appeared in the Wiltshire and Gloucestershire Standard. The newspaper’s reach may be seen as an indication of how widely known Jefferies was by this time; with a February 1883 circulation of 180,000, the Standard was then England’s second most-read newspaper, behind only the Telegraph (185,000). It is an indication of his professionalism and consistency that there is comparatively little overlap in terms of theme or content between this collection and The Amateur Poacher. The character Hodge is the agricultural worker, and his masters represent the whole middle and upper class hierarchy that dominates him. Jefferies writes during a period of agricultural depression which “the landowners have felt ѧ to such a degree, in fact, that they should perhaps take the first place” among those who have suffered, for having reduced the rents of
The poachers use nets, but not anywhere; they go to the edge of the standing barley. As Jefferies explains, pheasants are likely to nest at the edge of a field, where there is also no chance of crop being trampled when they have finished. The sheer volume of Jefferies’ detail makes his writing distinctive; it has something of the quality of landscape painting. There is also a grim side to the work of the gamekeeper. Jefferies describes an old shed, erected in a field that has become a covert and is now overgrown: Along the back there were three rows of weasels and stoats nailed through the head or neck to the planks. There had been a hundred in each row.ѧ But the end of the shed was the place where the more distinguished offenders were gibbeted. A footpath ѧ went by this end, and, ѧ communicated with the mansion above.ѧ On the next row the black and
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RICHARD JEFFERIES their tenants by up to 20 percent, they have “no one to allow them in turn a 20 per cent reduction of their liabilities” (Volume I, pp. v–vi). The essays of Volume I concentrate on the masters— Hodge, the ordinary agricultural laborer, appears only incidentally. Jefferies, from his Conservative standpoint, is inclined to present the life of the laborer in the best possible light, but he also sees the cost that work in the fields exacts. Here is an old man being presented with an award after working sixty years for the same employer:
great Filbard wood, rather than of making a bag ѧ and at the same time [it would] give his son some sport” (p. 281). The squire shows extreme care in preserving his resources and at the same time attempts to indulge his son, who must not suffer as a result of the financial sacrifices his father must make. Most of the landowners make rigid economies as they struggle with the depression. Filbard struggles more than most, because, under the terms on which he holds the estate, he must make payments to various relations.
The old man is frosted with age, and moves stiffly, like a piece of mechanism.ѧ He puts forth his arm; his dry, horny fingers are crooked, and he can neither straighten nor bend them.ѧ There is a quick flash of jewelled rings ungloved to the light, and the reward is placed in that claw-like grasp by the white hand of the marchioness.
Rent must be paid by Filbard’s tenants every three months, on four set days; these days are called the quarter days. The squire feels he cannot reduce the tenants’ rents as other landowners do; he simply ignores the unspoken expectations for a reduction as the quarter days pass. Finally Filbard receives a Round Robin, a petition signed by all his tenants asking for a reduction in rent; it is called a Round Robin because they have not signed their names in a list, but in a circle to show they are all equally behind the demand. To give them a ten percent reduction would imply a reduction of twenty-five or thirty percent on the income that comes to him, but he decides to do so: “sprawling and illwritten as many of the signatures were ѧ they were genuine, and constituted a very substantial fact, that must be yielded to” (p. 297). Jefferies ends the essay here. The relationship between landowner and tenants is based on negotiation, and both sides must make concessions. Chapter XIII, “An Ambitious Squire,” begins: “Perhaps the magistrate most regular in his attendance at a certain country Petty Sessional Court is young Squire Marthorne” (p. 298). It had been difficult to find two magistrates to make up the bench, but Marthorne’s regular attendance put an end to that. He comes from an old family, though not a rich one, one that had “rather dropped out of the governing circle” (p. 300). Socially, Squire Marthorne built a reputation as a hunting man with a good horse. When he joins the bench, he defers to the older magistrates, “and the more he endeavoured to learn from them the cleverer they thought him” (p. 301). Marthorne looks around for someone to help him,
(pp. 199–200)
The essays on the landowners justify the claim that rural life displays great variety; two in particular demonstrate this. In “The Squire’s ‘Round Robin,’” a young man is out shooting. He tries for a cock pheasant, but the bird escapes. The shot arches through the boughs of the trees and falls “like pattering hail—and as harmless” (p. 279) upon an aged woman who has just been to collect the bread given by a parish charity that helps support her and her invalid husband. She waits while the young man takes another shot, then comes around the corner with his keeper and an older man. She drops a curtsey, but as she does so, to her confusion, the man’s dog comes up and nuzzles her in a friendly way. The young man smiles at her confusion, but the older man ignores her. This is a good comic scene, and the contrast between the friendliness of the dog and the indifference of the men is pointed. They go on their way as the old woman resumes her journey, musing about the older man, the local squire. “Filbard be just like a gatepost ѧ a’ don’t take no notice of anybody” (p. 280). He is not popular and though he is treated with respect, he is despised by the cottagers. Jefferies, the amateur poacher, recounts what the squire and his son were about. They were “walking round the outlying copses ѧ with the object of driving the pheasants in towards the
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RICHARD JEFFERIES and he befriends the vice-chairman of the Petty Sessions, a man with an aptitude for detail: “With little or no personal ambition, he had assisted in every political and social movement in the county for half a century ѧ [and] he took a liking to young Marthorne” (pp. 303–304). Marthorne undertakes a great deal of committee work and begins to seize every opportunity he can to make a speech that will be reported in the press; he concentrates on repeating the material from past speeches of the leaders of his party. Consequently, his speeches are regarded by associates of the vice-chairman as “extremely good, solid, and well put.ѧ A certain M.P. would retire at the next election; and they asked themselves whom they had to take his place?” (p. 307).
wife, and the old vice-chairman. Each story follows a strong trajectory leading either to a complete reversal of fortune (in “The Squire’s ‘Round Robin’”) or a triumphant gathering together of all the threads (in “An Ambitious Squire”). The political understanding of both is on a par with Anthony Trollope; the ironic timing of the loss suffered by Filbard is reminiscent of Guy de Maupassant. The essays about the agricultural laborers are perhaps clouded by Jefferies’s inability to look clearly at the subject matter. Jefferies would never have been a squire and would probably never have stood for Parliament as Trollope did. (Trollope was a Liberal; his party was possibly more welcoming of the unusual résumé than Jefferies’ conservatives.) But Jefferies’ father was sliding down towards the condition of an agricultural laborer, and Jefferies might well have gone down too, so he was inclined to idealize the life of the laborer, making the Conservative case. Hodge has his wages each week and is not casually employed as the laborer is in town. He has his cottage and his garden. Though he deserves his pint each night, he can avoid drinking too much. In chapter IX of Volume II, Jefferies describes cottage life at its best:
Helped by his wife, whom he had married young for love rather than money, Marthorne acts to build a social profile. The couple makes friends in London during the time of year when they live in the capital for a few months engaging in the social round. But they also work to make their house in the country a fitting place to entertain the powerful: “He selected the wines in his cellar with the greatest care.ѧ The squire paid for the very best wine, and in private drank a cheap claret. But his guests, ѧ when once they had dined with him never forgot to come again” (p. 310). In the end, at a private meeting of his party, Marthorne is introduced as the successor to the retiring M.P. Other men who had hoped for the position give way to the popular feeling. The vice-chairman offers to pay Marthorne’s expenses at the election—the old powerful elite will keep a firm hand on this young man. Even Hodge approves, in comment that contrasts with the old woman’s summing up of Filbard: “‘He beant such a bad sort of a veller, you; a’ beant above speaking to we!’ When the time comes the young squire will certainly” (p. 316) secure himself election to Parliament.
Two new cottages ѧ were erected in the corner of an arable field.ѧ The surroundings were like a wilderness. Heaps of rubbish here, broken bricks there.ѧ Two families went into these cottages, the men working on the adjoining farm.ѧ The rubbish was removed.ѧ A quickset hedge was planted round the enclosure. Evening after evening, be the weather what it might, these two men were in that garden at work—after a long day in the fields. (pp. 209–210)
Jefferies describes the men laying out plots for potatoes, onions, and parsnips, and planting fruit trees, roses, and other flowers. They put in beehives and sties for the hogs: “rude indeed and made of a few slabs—but sufficient to answer the purpose.ѧ Instead of spending their evenings wastefully at [the public house], these men went out into their gardens and made what was a desert literally bloom” (p. 211). There are a number of problems with this sort of writing. Jefferies knew that his own father
These two essays display a detailed knowledge of the workings of English society that came from Jefferies’s work as a journalist coupled with an ability to manage the comic (in the first essay) and the satirical (in the second). There is a firmly established characterization in the depictions of Filbard, his son, the old woman, Marthorne, his
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RICHARD JEFFERIES was working as hard as he describes on his own smallholding. He was making a garden in the desert, but it was not enough; James Luckett Jefferies still faced ruin. Further, there is a condescending tone in this writing that does not show Jefferies at his best (his comments about the sties, for instance). True, the laborers work all the hours they can, but Flora Thompson more successfully shows what that means in her trilogy Lark Rise to Candleford (1945) when she remembers her father and other men living at about this time in a village in Oxfordshire, some miles north of Swindon. They planted their potatoes by the light of the moon, and the potatoes they planted were flavorless, chosen principally to give maximum yield for their hungry families. There is one other fact that affects our reading of these essays. The masters—the landowners, Members of Parliament, journalists—are still with us, behaving in many respects as Jefferies showed them acting in 1879. His work on them retains its interest. But the agricultural laborer is gone. The kind of work he did is unnecessary in today’s modern society, and the only legacy he has left us is a tendency in his descendants to make gardens.
implies not “about my heart” but “that belongs to my heart.” Jefferies called it his autobiography, but it is not a narrative history of his life; it is a history of his intellectual and spiritual life and a statement of his beliefs. That is the meaning of his term “confession.” “The story of my heart commences seventeen years ago,” he begins; that would be 1866, when he would have been eighteen years old. “My heart was dusty.ѧ An inspiration—a long deep breath of the pure air of thought—could alone give health to the heart.” At such times of need he would walk to a green hill about three miles from where he lived; the walk cleared his blood “of the heaviness accumulated at home” (pp. 1–2). What he experiences on the hill is a transcendent feeling of closeness to the world. It is not a mystic experience; Jefferies does not claim any revelation of a being behind or beyond the world, though he continues to search for something beyond and above deity. What he does experience is a heightened sense of his closeness to the physical world: “I was utterly alone with the sun and the earth. Lying down on the grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the distant sea far beyond sight” (p. 4). The intensity of his feelings he describes as prayer: “I prayed by the sweet thyme, whose little flowers I touched with my hand; ѧ that I might touch to the unutterable existence infinitely higher than deity” (pp. 5–6). He names this impulse in himself the soul-life; the term “soul” is tendentious, suggesting a personal immortality. Another place he visits is “a deep, narrow valley in the hills, silent and solitary.” Here “the sun glowed on the sward.ѧ How many, many years ѧ had the sun glowed down thus on that hollow? ѧ I saw back through space to the old time of the tree-ferns, of the lizard flying through the air.ѧ The dragon-fly which passed me traced a continuous descent from the fly marked on stone in those days” (pp. 16–17). The constant desire for beauty is satisfied in the human form. Jefferies describes the true beauty of the human form as “the outcome and end of all the loveliness of sunshine and green leaf” (p. 22); thus art is central to his desire, but in effect only the art of statuary. His desire led
THE STORY OF MY HEART
C. J. Longman, publisher of Jefferies’ The Story of My Heart: My Autobiography, wrote a preface to later editions of the work in which he quotes Jefferies’ explanation of the book’s purpose, written in response to a request to summarize the book for an advertisement: This book is a confession.ѧ [The author] claims to have erased from his mind the traditions and learning of the past ages, and to stand face to face with nature and with the unknown.ѧ He believes that there is a whole world of ideas outside and beyond those which now exercise us. (1912 Duckworth edition, p. ix)
From the start, then, the book claims to be unusual and original. Jefferies thought about this book for nearly half his life, and it was clearly dear to him—it was close to his heart as the title suggests; the phrase “of my heart” probably
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RICHARD JEFFERIES him to formulate a triple resolve, which he called the Lyra prayer, because he made it while watching that constellation. The terms were to exalt the soul, to enable the body to enjoy more pleasure and a longer life, to suffer less pain, and to construct machines to carry into execution the desire of the will. Jefferies was not entirely sure what he meant by his reference to machines, but we may note that, as he worked in journalism and possessed a background in printing, he was perhaps closer to the advancing technology of his age than most. He lived, in any case, in a mechanical age. He concluded, in regard to machines, “For liberty, therefore, let it be included” (p. 29). Sitting by one of the grass-covered tumuli near where he walked, Jefferies thought of the man buried there two thousand years before. As thought could slip back to the days when the man went hunting in the forest, then slip back to the present, so the other man’s spirit could endure from then till now: “Two thousand years being a second to the soul could not cause its extinction” (p. 34). Jefferies discusses at some length whether the soul survives death; in the end, one cannot know, but “while I live—I think immortality” (p. 53). Jefferies theorized that the world is not designed for humans, writing about the stark differences between humans and nature, as well as the earth, sun, and sea’s indifference to humans: “This very thyme which scents my fingers did not grow for that purpose, but for its own.ѧ The stars care not ѧ we are nothing to them” (p. 57). He does not see any beauty in animals; sea creatures are repulsive, the toad is terrible to the touch, even the dog and horse which we love are anti-human: “the shape of the [dog’s] skull to the sense of feeling is almost as repellent as the form of the toad to the sense of sight.ѧ There is nothing human in any living animal” (pp. 61–62). So, Jefferies continues, the force behind the universe is not a deity, but a force without a mind. “Earnestly I pray to find this something better than a god. There is something superior, higher, more good” (p. 66). Jefferies did not believe in evolution or in any design in nature. He argued that species always remain separate,
for although “the gradations between animal and vegetable are so fine ѧ they never change places” (pp. 125–126). He does not seem to have thoroughly understood the theory of evolution, however—it was never claimed by its serious proponents that evolution was a force that worked toward a purpose. Like another great naturalist, Philip Henry Gosse (1810–1888), the leading marine biologist of his day, Jefferies turned his back on evolution. At the end of the book, Jefferies turns to consider society. He claims that “each human being, by mere birth, has a birthright in this earth and all its productions” (pp. 160–161). There is plenty there. The conclusion proclaims: “This our earth produces not only a sufficiency and a superabundance, but in one year ѧ enough to fill us all for many years in succession. The only reason we do not enjoy it is the want of rational organisation.” Jefferies held that a tenth of society’s effort would enable all to live well. The Story of My Heart is a book that divides its readers. It is difficult, repetitive, assertive, and metaphysical. It suffers because it expounds a self-validating view of the universe—Jefferies’ account of the godless universe is true because it is accompanied by the force of truth. But many others have had equally striking, self-validating visions of the immanence of God. In a sense, Jefferies was ahead of his time. It was only in the previous year, 1882, that Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “God is dead.ѧ And we have killed him.” To many, Jefferies’ work was simply eccentric, but to a small minority of his readers he brought a sense of excitement and the promise that life could be devoted to the search for health and fulfilment.
NOVELS
Jefferies had written a number of novels that had met with little success, but in 1882 came the popular Bevis: The Story of a Boy. It describes the idyllic summer holiday of Bevis and his friend Mark; they swim, boat, shoot, and camp on an island. The novel possesses considerable charm and strength in the depiction of the minor
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RICHARD JEFFERIES characters; Bevis’ governor (his father) teaches the boys to swim with infinite patience, but eventually he gets bored and goes off for a swim on his own. Readers learn of Bevis’ mother reading her prayer book, in which she has jotted down some of her child’s comments. But the plot of the novel is formless; it is simply a chain of incidents consisting of the same formula: a problem arises (characters procure a gun and escape from a cellar), and the boys exert their intelligence to solve it. There are no real, threatening problems, nor is there the sense of a moral center within the hero, such as when reading Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.
precludes the interpretation of looking at the England of 1350. We are reading a future history and watching a disaster that has destroyed British society. As in 1350, there are not enough people left to work the land, and a new order asserts itself in the landscape. In the first year, writes Jefferies, the wheat had already been sown but would receive no further attention. In the fall, it was eaten by “clouds of sparrows, rooks, and pigeons.” Then the winter storms blew the grass and the wheat flat. The next spring the wheat grew from the seeds “sown by dropping from the ears” the previous year, as well as “quantities of docks, thistles, oxeye daisies, and similar plants” (pp. 2–3). The coarse, tough plants cover more and more of the available land. They also make new niches for themselves, growing on margins of paths and in the roads and turning the routes green in turn. Larger plants appear—thorns and sapling trees. “By the thirtieth year there was not one single open place, the hills only excepted, where a man could walk, unless he followed the tracks of wild creatures or cut himself a path” (p. 5). The lower-lying land becomes marshy, as the drainage systems fall into disrepair. Gradually the forest grows and spreads.
AFTER LONDON; OR, WILD ENGLAND
This 1885 novel is unusual among Jefferies’ works in that the author’s personality does not stand at the center of the exposition. The novel is visionary in its depiction of the ending of the England that Jefferies and his generation knew and in its replacement by a new and more frightening order. Part I, “The Relapse into Barbarism,” describes the change. Part II, “Wild England,” is a narrative of an adventure of exploration in the new world. The novel begins with a profoundly disorientating paragraph: “The old men say their fathers told them that soon after the fields were left to themselves a change began to be visible. It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the country looked alike” (p. 1). The English landscape in spring is normally a patchwork that contrasts green pasture with red or brown ploughed land. For it to be completely green is wrong, and the wrongness shifts the reference of green; it reminds us that green is not only the color of fresh new growth, it is also the color of unripe fruit and of fields left fallow and untilled for the year. There have been times when this pattern would have been seen in the English landscape. Most famously it would have been seen all over England in the spring of 1350 after nearly half the people had died of the Black Death plague of 1348–1350, and there were not enough people left to till all the land. But the phrase “after London ended”
All of this has its effect on animals and men. Thousands of mice appear to destroy what efforts men are making to grow crops in gardens. They remain a great nuisance; their natural predators— cats and weasels—have increased in number and “there was then some relief, but even now at intervals districts are invaded” (p. 9). Feral cats and dogs still exist, as well as the domestic varieties, “which are as faithful to man as ever” (p. 16). Feral varieties of cattle and sheep have established themselves, but most of the wild animals that escaped from zoos—lions, for example—could not survive the hard winters (the beaver is an exception). “In the castle yard at Longtover may still be seen the bones of an elephant which was found dying in the woods near that spot” (p. 25). Man appears only here and there in this section of Jefferies’ account, and he makes a miserable showing, hacking his way through the
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RICHARD JEFFERIES undergrowth, his garden destroyed by mice. He might well have been found dying in the woods next to the elephant; there would have been nobody to pity him, any more than there would have been anyone to pity the elephant at Longtover Castle. No longer does man have dominion over nature, Jefferies suggests. Man survives only because he finds a place in nature; nature is not there for his comfort and convenience.
races where in the first place was one people” (p. 34). The race generally considered to be the lowest are the Bushmen, descended from those among the ancients “who refused to avail themselves of the benefits of civilization. They obtained their food by begging ѧ exhibiting countenances from which every trace of selfrespect had disappeared” (p. 35). The Bushmen set up camps on the abandoned fields and moved from place to place living on “roots and trapped game.” They make a poison from a substance not known to outsiders with which they kill fish, but do not spoil them for eating (p. 35). “They are depraved, and without shame.ѧ In ordinary times we see little of them. They are the thieves, the human vermin of the woods” (pp. 37–39). The Bushmen are distinguished from the gipsies, who also live a nomadic life, mostly in the south around Stonehenge. The gipsies often launch planned attacks on the settled people, but do not murder individuals as the Bushmen do.
In chapters III and IV, Jefferies turns to the question of how human society would change in response to the disaster. Here his historian character is comically baffled, because he cannot assign one single definite cause for the disaster: “the thing is different, for nothing is certain and everything confused. None of the accounts agree, nor can they be altogether reconciled with present facts or with reasonable supposition” (p. 26). He lists the silting up of ports, the sudden ceasing of the supply of food from across the ocean, and the passing of an enormous dark body through space as possible explanations. What seems certain is that “the immense crowds collected in cities were most affected, and that the richer and upper classes made use of their money to escape. Those left behind were mainly the lower and most ignorant ѧ and those who lived by agriculture.” But these people were so few that “a man might ride a hundred miles and not meet another” (pp. 28–29). In these circumstances, technology is lost; the railroad and telephone are the stuff of legend: “the Romans and the Greeks are more familiar to us than the men who rode in the iron chariots and mounted to the skies” (pp. 32–33). The technology and social organization of the new world are closer to ancient Greek and Roman societies than Victorian England.
The most prosperous communities of the settled areas are found around the great central lake that occupies the country south of Oxford and stretches from the old Thames valley in the east to the Avon in the west. Divided into warring kingdoms and republics, all the communities are prey to mercenaries from Wales and Ireland. Indeed, the Welsh might almost have conquered the whole country had their Irish allies not suddenly turned on them. It is a grim world. “Men for ever trample upon men, each pushing to the front.ѧ Though the population of these cities ѧ is not equal to ѧ a single second-rate city of the ancients, yet how much greater are the bitterness and the struggle!” (pp. 47–48). The final chapter of Part I, chapter V, describes the geography of the new world. A vast inland sea has come into being following the end of London, full of fresh water and navigable with care. At the eastern end, where London had been, sand dunes cut the lake off from the swamps that surround the old city, and Jefferies describes the pollution these swamps emit; so bad is the air that it is regularly fatal. The people regard the swamps with horror and will not enter them. Yet the freshwater lake is a thing of beauty, and the historian ends the chapter with this note:
At first, people lived on the food stored in warehouses, then they hunted animals, and finally they cleared the ground and resumed agriculture. Now they live in small communities: “towns, indeed, we call them to distinguish them from the champaign, but they are not worthy of the name in comparison with the mighty cities of old time.” So isolated are these communities that they tend to have their own government, generally autocratic, and “there came also to be many
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RICHARD JEFFERIES “Never ѧ was there so beautiful an expanse of water. How much must we sorrow that it has so often proved only the easiest mode of bringing the miseries of war.ѧ Yet ѧ in the evening we walk by the beach, and ѧ look over the waters, as if to gaze upon their loveliness were reward to us for the labour of the day” (pp. 78–79). Curiously, in the light of Jefferies’ rejection of evolution, “The Relapse into Barbarism” reads like an explication of the operation of natural selection, and must have been seen as such by many of his original readers.
say. He escapes with his life and continues the journey. Though the journey should be dangerous, it is curiously unexciting. Felix encounters dangers that simply pass. At one point he comes across evidence that a branch of a bush has been broken by a Bushman throwing a hunting club to try to bring down game. It is a parallel with Crusoe finding a single footprint on the shore, but Felix feels none of the alarm that Crusoe did; the incident passes without tangible consequences. All a well-armed man has to fear is an encounter with a superior force of men. Nothing in nature can harm him. The central part of the journey, the episode that gives the book its unique quality, is Felix’s landfall on London (chapters XXII–XXIV). Sailing before a good westerly breeze towards the eastern end of the lake, Felix notices that all the birds fly past him towards the west, surprising behavior because it indicates that the birds abandoned their nests during the breeding season. The fish, too, are swimming west beneath the boat. Finally, there is not a living thing left on either side of him, but he presses on. The trees show signs of distress; they are stunted, with yellow leaves. Finally they too cease, and the land is bare. The water becomes black and smells unpleasant. Felix has nothing to drink. He makes landfall and finds the ground is corrupt, like ash, with pools of a black, oily substance. He passes what look like roofless houses with crystalline walls that collapse at a touch, and he realizes he has arrived at what was once the greatest city in England. This is London. The air is foul, and Felix becomes drugged by it. He finds on the ground white marks that were once the skeletons of people, humans who came to plunder but were poisoned by the air. Among the bones he finds a bracelet with a huge diamond and other valuables, which he keeps. Finally he escapes the area; in a final crisis, the phosphorescence in the air makes him think that his boat is on fire. Explosions can be heard as he goes, probably caused by the sea entering the old cellars and sewers on a high tide. Free, Felix makes his way back to the sweet water of the great lake. It is the westerly that has saved him,
Part II, “Wild England,” is a narrative set in the future described in Part I, one H. G. Wells might call a story of the days to come. Sir Felix Aquila (name meaning “Happy Eagle”) is the eldest son of an aristocratic family living in seclusion under suspicion by the local king. Despised for his lack of prowess in arms, and desperately in love with Aurora (name meaning “Dawn”), the daughter of another local family, Felix resolves to travel to seek his fortune. To travel means to travel by water in this world. Freedom begins, as so often occurs in Jefferies’ works, with making a boat. Felix builds a canoe hollowing it out like Robinson Crusoe. Like Crusoe, he faces failure; Crusoe’s boat was too heavy to be carried down to the water. Using the servants of his father, Felix is able to get his canoe to the water, but it is badly trimmed and dangerous. Felix’s brother Oliver suggests he make it double-hulled by adding an outrigger; this would improve the balance and enable Felix to rig a sail. Daniel Defoe treats the question of defining society by looking at how a man survives without it; Jefferies defines society by noting first how a man needs the contributions of others to compensate for his own shortcomings. On the journey, which he makes alone across the lake in his canoe, Felix encounters other men and finds himself in the middle of a war, where he attempts to advise the king on the conduct of it. At first his advice is welcome—he suggests an improvement in the crossbow used by some of the soldiers (Felix is an expert archer). Later, when he tries to give political advice, he is not listened to; who you are matters in politics, not what you
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RICHARD JEFFERIES blowing away the foul air in front of him as he lands.
ism, and it served as part of the inspiration for his socialist utopia News from Nowhere (1890). In this novel, the conversion of England to socialism comes when a decent conservative editor of the Daily Telegraph prints a straightforward account of what socialism is.
Felix falls in with a group of shepherds who desire to make him their king because he survived the encounter with London. When they are attacked by gipsies, Felix saves the day by killing many of the gipsies with his bow. He persuades the shepherds to let him try to find his way home and propose to Aurora. He sets off, on foot this time, through the forest of oaks, “trees which do not grow close together and so permitted of quick walking” the naturalist notes, “and as the dusk fell he was still moving rapidly westwards” (p. 442).
AMARYLLIS AT THE FAIR
This novel, published in 1887, is the story of a young woman on the verge of her full sexuality. Her relationships with her parents are a succession of episodes of anger and resentment alternating with episodes of real closeness and affection. Although both her father and her grandfather have made a choice of men who in their opinion would be suitable husbands, she will have none of it. She is not yet ready for the transaction and bargaining that goes with courtship; the Fair, of course, is the place for transaction and bargaining, but (despite the title) Amaryllis refuses to go to the fair; she simply passes through it on her own.
There is an intertextual problem about this ending. Part II leaves unanswered the question of whether Felix reached home, but Part I notes that “Until Felix Aquila’s time, the greater portion [of the lake], indeed, had not even a name” (p. 62). This suggests that his explorations were known to the historian of Part I. This novel is of interest in the study of the history of the novel in English. It is the earliest example of a post-holocaust fiction, now one of the most common genre forms in both literature and film. In post-holocaust fiction, some disaster is posited that destroys a society and results in a complete change of the lives of the survivors. Sometimes, as in such novels as George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (1949) or John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffıds (1951), the characters live through their holocaust; sometimes, as in Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960), they look back on it from far in the future, only dimly comprehending what has happened. The genre offers great potential for the analysis of current society; the greatest novel in this genre is probably George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which has provided powerful and lasting models for the analysis of totalitarian trends in society. The term “postholocaust” is preferred to “post-apocalyptic” because an apocalypse suggests a revelation of some truth. The appeal of After London is that it offers no revelation, and each reader can read into the disaster what he or she wishes. To William Morris, it was a parable of the coming destruction of capitalism by revolutionary social-
Amaryllis Iden is the sixteen-year-old daughter of farmer Iden. Both names are literary echoes. John Milton, in Lycidas, asked why the poet should struggle so hard: “And strictly meditate the thankless Muse? / Were it not better done as others use, / To sport with Amaryllis in the shade ѧ ” (Lycidas, lines 66–68). Amaryllis, whom Milton found in Virgil as the type of the country girl, represents the temptation that lures the artist away from his work. The name Iden is Shakespearean. In Henry VI, Part II, the rebel Jack Cade has been defeated by the King’s men and has hidden in a garden in Kent. The owner, Alexander Iden, enters musing: Lord, who would live turmoiled in the court, And may enjoy such quiet walks as these? ѧ Sufficeth that I have maintains my state And sends the poor well pleased from my gate.
Challenged by Cade, Iden at first refuses to fight, on the grounds that Cade is weak and famished:
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RICHARD JEFFERIES the rutabaga). He also insists on his old-fashioned forty-fold potatoes (a variety dating back to the 1830s). After lunch, Iden returns to work; Mrs. Iden thumps him as he goes. Later she goes out into the garden, sees the new daffodil, and tramples it. Then, in her bedroom, she takes from a chest a lavender glove she had worn on her honeymoon and weeps over it. Amaryllis, going out to tell her father his tea is ready, finds the crushed daffodil and weeps in turn. What emerges is a picture of three people made unhappy by their circumstances, not their inclination. Jefferies’ strength in this novel is his ability to show how rapidly the moods of this family can change as its members impact each other. Lady Day (March 25) is the day of the local fair. Amaryllis stands at the garden wall, watching all the young men going to the fair, but none of them appeal to her. One of them, John Duck, a big man like her father, as well as an admirer of him, invites her to ride with him to the fair. She refuses. Amaryllis never actually goes to the fair; she only goes through it. If the fair is the symbol of vanity and a place where even people may be bought and sold, she is not yet engaging in that trade. She walks across the fields to her grandfather’s home. He always gives a dinner on fair day for all his relations, but her father refuses to go. Grandfather Iden gives everyone at the dinner a sovereign, but to the one guest he likes best he gives a guinea; Amaryllis is awarded the guinea. She leaves it on the floor but takes home the sovereign her grandfather had given her as her father’s gift. Grandfather Iden insists that she come with him into the big house, Court, where he has privileged access. He wants Amaryllis to be friendly to the son of the house, Raleigh Pamment, but she refuses. The next day a letter arrives at her home in which her grandfather informs her parents that she is disobedient. Since they hate the senior Mr. Iden so much, the letter only restores her to their favor (they had objected to her losing the guinea). They give to Amaryllis the sovereign, with which she goes out to buy new shoes for herself and her mother. There is some money left over with which she buys
Thy hand is but a finger to my fist, Thy leg a stick compared to this truncheon;
But in the end, Iden kills Cade, beheads him, and buries him in the dunghill (Henry VI, Part II, Act 4, Scene 10). Shakespeare’s historical Iden and Jefferies’ fictitious Iden share the features of loyalty to the established order, physical strength, and a devotion to home and garden—Englishness, indeed, as Jefferies would see it. At the opening of the novel, Amaryllis Iden finds the first daffodil growing near the damask rose (the daffodil is a sign that spring has come in England) and runs to ask her father to come and see it. It is a childlike gesture; she will interrupt him at his work, and he will be reluctant to come. She races through the still-wintry landscape to the garden. He is planting potatoes, feeling with his thumb to make sure they are sound, and planting them a precise distance apart. “The science, the skill, and the experience brought to this potato-planting you would hardly credit; ѧ this care ѧ arose from very large abilities on the part of the planter, though directed to so humble a purpose at that moment” (p. 5). He reproves her: “Haven’t you got no sewing? ѧ Go on in, and be some use on” (p. 6). He then relents and goes to see the flower. He threatens to dig the daffodils up, but again relents and, changing his accent, tells her it was her great-uncle’s favorite flower. Amaryllis “marvelled how he could be so rough ѧ he who was so full of wisdom in his other moods, and ѧ acted as a perfect gentleman” (p. 7). She returns to the house, where her mother asks what she and her father have been talking about. “Don’t listen to his rubbish.ѧ Why doesn’t he go in to market and buy and sell cattle, and turn over money in that way? Not he! He’d rather muddle with a few paltry potatoes” (p. 11). At lunch, despite the two women’s reservations about him, they both defer to the master. There is no talk at the table. Iden eats grossly, taking two helpings and bread with his meal. He has selected the mutton himself, and had the shepherd bring in some “swede tops” (this is dialect for the only green stuff available in March—the sprouts that grow above the soil from the white turnip, not
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Selected Bibliography
bloaters—smoked herrings; her mother loves them and her father hates them. Together the two women enjoy their bloaters and laugh at Mr. Iden.
WORKS OF RICHARD JEFFERIES OCCASIONAL WRITING
The relief that a small amount of money brings is painfully obvious, and the fact it has been wrung from Grandfather Iden emphasizes how much he could do if he cared to, but he is old and avaricious. He has not made a will and therefore may continue to torment his family until his death. He wants his granddaughter to take Raleigh Pamment; clearly he is lending money to the Pamments. “If she could not have been the wife he would have forced her to be the mistress” (p. 138). Her father wants Amaryllis to choose John Duck, and he orders her to ride to the fair with him. But she can still refuse them both, father and grandfather.
AND
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Jack Brass, Emperor of England. London: T. Pettitt & Co., 1873. Reporting, Editing and Authorship; Practical Hints for Beginners in Literature. London: John Snow & Co., 1873. The Story of My Heart: My Autobiography. London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1883; Portland, Me.: Thomas B. Mosher, 1900; London: Duckworth, 1912.
NOVELS The Scarlet Shawl. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1874. Restless Human Hearts. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1875. World’s End. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1877. Greene Ferne Farm. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1880. Wood Magic: a Fable. London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co., 1881. Bevis: The Story of a Boy. London: Sampson Low, 1882. After London; or, Wild England. London: Cassell & Co., 1885. Amaryllis at the Fair, A Novel. London: Sampson Low, 1887; New York: Harper, 1887.
Farmer Iden is chronically in debt. Amaryllis tries to help by submitting sketches to the London magazines, but she has no success. The novel ends with a visit to the farm by Amadis Iden, a cousin, and Alere Flamma, a brother of Mrs. Iden. The family enjoy their company. Amadis is a few years older than Amaryllis, and they enjoyed a relationship that is still simple and childlike, as it had been when they were boy and girl together. Alere Flamma is an accomplished artist who works only enough to get by and to enjoy London.
COLLECTED JOURNALISM The Gamekeeper at Home: Sketches of Natural History and Rural Life. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1878; Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1879. The Amateur Poacher. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1879; Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1879. Wild Life in a Southern County. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1879. Hodge and His Masters. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1880; reprint, 2 vols., Fitzroy ed. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1966. Round About a Great Estate. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1880. Nature Near London. London: Chatto and Windus, 1883; New York: Crowell, 1907. The Life of the Fields. London: Chatto and Windus, 1884; New York: Crowell, 1907. The Open Air. London: Chatto and Windus, 1885. Field and Hedgerow: Being the Last Essays of Richard Jefferies, Collected by his Widow. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1889. The Toilers of the Field. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1892.
Jefferies introduced a first person voice to the novel whose reflections are interspersed with the action. This first person narrator says of London at the end of the novel, reflecting on the life that Alere led there, “If I could only get Alere to tell me all he had seen in Fleet Street, and could just jot it down on the margin of a stained newspaper, all the world would laugh and weep.ѧ If only Victor Hugo were alive and young again!” (pp. 207–208). For London is life, and Jefferies is not tired of London or of life. But it is time to suspend the novel for now. It closes with the following: “I shall leave Amaryllis and Amadis in their Interlude in Heaven.ѧ (I trust but for a little while) ѧ among the long grass and the wild flowers” (p. 260).
CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Besant, Walter. The Eulogy of Richard Jefferies. London: Chatto and Windus, 1888.
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RICHARD JEFFERIES 1952; New York: New Directions Publishing, 1952; reprint, 1969. Salt, Henry S. The Faith of Richard Jefferies. London: Watts & Co., 1906. Thomas, Edward. Richard Jefferies, His Life and Work. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1909.
Leavis, Q. D. “Lives and Works of Richard Jefferies.” Scrutiny 6:435–446 (March 1938). Looker, Samuel J., and Crichton Porteous. Richard Jefferies, Man of the Fields; A Biography and Letters. London: John Baker, 1965. Miller, Henry. The Books in My Life. London: P. Owen,
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HARRIET MARTINEAU (1802—1876)
Sandie Byrne HARRIET MARTINEAU CAREFULLY planned the way in which the facts of her life would be communicated to later generations. In 1855, fearing that heart disease (which she evidently did not have) was soon to kill her (she lived nearly twenty-one years more), she completed the detailed two-volume autobiography which she had begun at the age of twenty-nine and entrusted a friend, Maria Weston Chapman, with the task of adding final touches to it and arranging for its publication. It was published in 1877, one year after her death.
she was nursed by a Calvinist woman who sent her back to her family at three years old a fount of didactic and homiletic phrases. As a remedy for the weakness the poor start to her daughter’s life had produced, Elizabeth Martineau insisted that Harriet’s diet consist largely of bread and cow’s milk. Harriet Martineau found this a great trial, as she may have been lactose intolerant. She reported that for years she had the sense of a heavy lump in her throat which threatened to choke her (Autobiography, vol. I, p. 10). At home in Norwich, Martineau seems to have been the butt of jokes and the recipient of much unkindness and insensitivity on the part of her siblings and her mother. Martineau had a highly developed sense of justice, so the instances of injustice, all too frequent in her life, appalled her. Her posthumously published Autobiography records that justice, particularly in regard to servants and children, was not necessarily a precept practiced in the Martineau family household. Following the not-infrequent instances of injustice she suffered or witnessed in her early youth, she would brood over injuries to herself and others and find the temptation of suicide strong (Autobiography, vol. I, p. 18). In spite of this, Martineau remained fiercely loyal to her family and became terribly homesick when away from them. She admired her brother James, her junior by three years, and dearly loved her youngest sister, Ellen, who was born when Harriet was nine years old.
Martineau was born in Norwich, East Anglia, on June 12, 1802, the sixth of eight children of Thomas Martineau, a wine importer and cloth manufacturer, and his wife, Elizabeth Rankin. The family was of Huguenot descent, as were many of the weavers of Norwich and Norfolk, but Unitarian, that is, members of the Dissentin sect, which believed that the nature of God is unitary and also stressed social responsibility. Martineau’s childhood was unhappy; she was to write that her life had “had no spring.” She never felt loved or valued, and she was convinced of her mother’s preference for her older sister, Rachel. Short-sighted, nervous, uncoordinated, and sometimes clumsy, Harriet was frequently unwell. She lacked senses of smell and taste, and she grew increasingly deaf. But if some of her external senses were blunted, she was also emotionally and nervously hypersensitive, particularly to visual stimuli. Changes of light could terrify her and leave her nauseated. A sickly baby, she was further weakened, her autobiography reports, by being left with a wet nurse who retained her position long after her milk had dried up (Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography, 1983, vol. I, p. 10, hereafter Autobiography). Martineau was then sent to be cared for on a farm where
The happiest interludes of Martineau’s young life seem to have been her two periods of formal education away from home. The first period was two years spent at the small Norwich school run by the Reverend Isaac Perry, which came to an end when the school closed. The second, in 1818, was spent at the Bristol boarding school kept by
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HARRIET MARTINEAU her aunt, Mrs. Kentish. Mrs. Kentish was kind to Martineau, who in spite of her deafness, managed to participate in lessons and to achieve through private study. While in Bristol, she came under the influence of a charismatic Unitarian minister, Dr. Lant Carpenter, by whom, she was to say, she was made highly superstitious, spiritually rigid, and fanatical (Autobiography, vol. I, p. 95). The Bristol stay ended the following year, and she returned to Norwich and her immediate family. Martineau wrote her first article, “Female Writers on Practical Divinity,” when she was nineteen years old; it published in December 1822. It had been written at the behest of her younger brother, James, who ordered her to keep herself busy with different tasks during his absence at college and at one point specified that she should write. The article appeared under the pseudonym Discipulus in a Unitarian magazine, the Monthly Repository (pp. 746–750), and became a cause of acute embarrassment to its author when her brother Thomas read admiringly from the magazine and asked why his sister was so sparing in her praise of the style. Harriet confessed her authorship, and was overwhelmed by his complimentary reaction: “Now, dear, leave it to other women to make shirts and darn stockings; and do you devote yourself to this.” Her autobiography records that this was the first time her brother ever referred to her as “dear” (Autobiography, vol. I, pp. 119–120). An article on female education followed, and Martineau became a regular contributor to the Monthly Repository under its new editor, W. J. Fox. From this beginning came her first fulllength book, Devotional Exercises: Consisting of Reflections and Prayers for the Use of Young Persons, published in 1823, as “By a Lady.” While James Martineau was studying at the Manchester New College in York (his dissenting views meant that he could not be admitted to Oxford or Cambridge), he became friendly with another student, John Hugh Worthington. Worthington visited the Martineaus in Norwich and, Harriet was informed, wished to marry her. He did not offer for Harriet during this first visit, perhaps because of an intervention by James Mar-
tineau, but after the business failure of the elder Thomas Martineau, Worthington honorably returned, and proposed. Harriet seems to have been, at best, ambiguous about the engagement. She describes an entangled state of mind, torn between conflicting duties, and expresses relief that in the end she remained unmarried (Autobiography, vol. I, p. 131). The marriage never took place because Worthington fell ill of something diagnosed at the time as “brain fever,” and died insane. The Worthingtons asked Harriet to visit their son during his last weeks, but Mrs. Martineau refused to give Harriet permission. The rest of the decade, which had begun with the promise held out by her first publication, must have been extraordinarily difficult and painful for Martineau. The death of her brother Thomas was soon followed by those of her father and her fiancé. The family business suffered during the bank failures of 1823 through 1826, and in 1829 collapsed, leaving Mrs. Martineau penniless. While her sister could earn a wage as a governess, Harriet’s deafness precluded such an occupation, but she was able to contribute to the family finances with her needle and her pen. She became a regular reviewer for the Repository and began to write stories. She widened her public readership by entering a competition run by the British and Foreign Unitarian Association, which required essays explaining the precepts of Unitarianism to Jewish, Islamic, and Catholic readers. Martineau entered an essay for each category, and she won them all. In the autumn of 1831, she used her prize money to visit her brother James, then in Dublin. That year, she also began to seek publication of a collection of these stories, but at first she met with indifference. Few publishers agreed with Martineau’s feeling that the reading public needed the lessons she offered, and when she did find a publisher willing to take on the project, Charles Fox, brother of W. J. Fox, her editor at the Monthly Repository, it was on very disadvantageous terms. The 1832 Reform Bill and an outbreak of cholera, it was felt, were together fully occupying public attention, leaving little room or desire for such work. Martineau was forced to find subscribers for her publication, as
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HARRIET MARTINEAU requested, of Brontë’s 1853 work, Villette (Autobiography, vol. II, p. 327).
well as to divide any ensuing profit with the publisher, while taking on most of the initial risk herself. After strenuous efforts which she describes in the Autobiography, the generosity of an uncle enabled the first parts of Illustrations of Political Economy to go to press. Her self-belief, as well as her efforts, was vindicated when the stories became an instant success. They were first published in twenty-four monthly numbers followed by a summary (1832–1834), and subsequently they were collected in nine volumes. With the publication of Illustrations of Political Economy under her own name, Martineau’s fame and means of living were assured. She quickly came to the attention of leading politicians of the day. In 1832, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Brougham, wrote that “a deaf girl in Norwich” was doing more good than any man in the country (Autobiography, vol. I, p. 133). That year, at the age of twenty-nine, Martineau moved to London, where she moved in literary circles, meeting (among others) Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Thomas Malthus, Richard Monckton Milnes, Sydney Smith, and John Stuart Mill. Her mother and an aunt came to London to live with her, initially in a house on Fludyer Street, Westminster.
A likeness of Martineau from this period, painted by Richard Evans and exhibited in 1834, can be seen in Bodelwyddan Castle. It shows a slim, pale-skinned woman with glossy dark hair, wearing a black dress with the enormous puffed sleeves of early Victorian fashion, crossed by a curiously long and thin fur stole, with a faraway look in her eyes. A later portrait, made in chalk by George Richmond in 1849, and now residing in London’s National Portrait Gallery, shows a much larger and older woman, covered to the neck, and wearing a lace cap. Two photographs of Martineau also exist, one by Moses Bowness from the 1860s, and one by Camille Silvy from 1861. Both are displayed in the National Portrait Gallery as well. In 1834, Martineau visited America, as a friend of the abolitionists, to a mixed reception. Initially fêted, once she declared herself for the abolitionist cause, she was the subject of malicious journalism and found many homes closed to her. She anticipated this, but when asked to speak publicly, she felt that she must. One of her hosts was rendered sleepless by concern about the reception her actions provoked, and one of her hostesses, distraught on Martineau’s behalf, begged her to stop doing “such things,” since Boston was in an uproar about them. Martineau remarked with scathing irony that no power availed to put Boston in an uproar about the continued existence of slavery in the United States, and she pointed out that though her American friends could lie awake at night worrying about what their neighbors were saying about her, a relative stranger, they seemed to lose no sleep at all over the wretched conditions of hundreds of thousands of their countrymen (Autobiography, vol. II, p. 327). In 1839, Martineau published Deerbrook, a novel in the characteristic Victorian three-volume form, and embarked upon further travels, this time in continental Europe. She returned from Venice, however, when an ovarian cyst or tumor caused a complete breakdown of her health. This five-year period of invalidism, which she spent in a boarding house in Tynemouth, northeast
Martineau became famous for certain personal idiosyncrasies as well as for her writing. As her deafness increased, she adopted the use of an ear trumpet, and though she had determined at an early age never to make a nuisance of herself by asking anyone to repeat something said, she would occasionally produce a device made of two ivory cups connected by a flexible tube, which might be passed to anyone with whom she wanted to hold a conversation. She grew rather stout with increasing age, and, falling short of the Victorian ideal of beauty, was described in terms ranging from “almost handsome” to “plain” to “the ugliest woman in the world.” She was opinionated, didactic, and, it was said, inconsistent and self-contradictory, but she was also kind, generous, and honest, sometimes to a fault, as when she alienated Charlotte Brontë by giving her true opinion, as her fellow novelist had
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HARRIET MARTINEAU England, to be close to her medical brother-inlaw, Thomas Greenhow, is chronicled in the anonymously penned Life in the Sick-Room (1844). During this time, she also counseled visitors to the sick and convalescent on how to be useful and sensitive to patients’ needs. A published account of her cure, which she attributed entirely to a type of spiritual healing known as mesmerism, led to an estrangement from Greenhow.
was to be on making childhood anything but the burdensome and miserable experience of Martineau’s own. She discusses the nature of children, which she saw as sensitive, reserved, and habitually anxious. Her introduction sets out her doctrine: that all members of a household, including children, servants, and apprentices, should have a share in the family plan. If they do not, those who make and enforce the plan are despots, and those excluded from it are slaves (p. 2). She also insists that parents should not be unwilling to confess ignorance on any subject. She felt that parents should freely admit to not being omniscient, or perfect in knowledge, and should also clearly indicate that neither are they perfect in terms of goodness. Martineau asserts that education should be lifelong; it is the business of everyone to learn something new every day, and to strive to improve continually in both knowledge and morality (p. 3). The educational methods she advocates for children were to be applied equally to girls and boys.
Apparently restored to health, in 1845–1846, Martineau had a house built to her specification: The Knoll, in the Lake District. A number of friends planted trees in its new garden, including near neighbor William Wordsworth, who was offered two young oaks to plant, but who preferred stone pines to mark the occasion. Martineau records that he dug and planted them in expert fashion, and that one of the trees flourished. A more mysterious present appeared in the form of a succession of deliveries of turf, meant to replace the grass cut up by the carts of the builders. The dry summer that followed the disastrously wet winter and spring of 1845–1846 created conditions in which there were no turfs to be had, thus Martineau was astonished to find a heap of them lying by her boundary wall. The last of four loads was accompanied by a note, ostensibly written by two poachers who made the offering to Martineau in gratitude for her Forest and Game-Law Tales (1845–1846). Though she suspected that this was a cover, she never discovered the identity of the donor (Autobiography, vol. II, pp. 233–234). By 1846 Martineau was sufficiently restored for another long trip, this time a visit to Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. She began at least one other novel, which she offered to a publisher in 1851, but she abandoned it and thereafter wrote only nonfiction. Martineau stated that she wrote Household Education (1849) for secular parents who would be unable to find stories and other books for children not stuffed with matter that she considered to be perniciously superstitious. Household Education offers a guide to raising children in an affectionate, supportive, and broadly democratic environment, with an emphasis on kindness, understanding, justice, and love. The emphasis
In the late 1840s, Martineau began to lecture on the subjects of education, history, sanitation, and health, as well as on her travels. A work of popular history, The History of England During the Thirty Years’ Peace: 1816–1846, appeared in 1849. In 1855, she became ill again, and, assuming she suffered from heart disease, was convinced of the imminence of her own death. In fact, she lived for another twenty-one years, nursed by two of her nieces, initially Maria, daughter of Robert Martineau, until her death in 1864, and then Maria’s younger sister, Jane, known as Jenny. Martineau continued to write until the mid-1860s, but never equalled the success of Illustrations of Political Economy. She was offered a civil pension, but declined it on the grounds that receiving such payment could trammel her artistic freedom. Martineau died at home, at The Knoll, on June 27, 1876. She had anticipated her death early and frequently in her writing, evidently without fear, to the extent of humorously noting that certain doctors were clamoring for her ears and her brain. A postmortem examination showed that the condition from which she had been suffering was in fact caused by the ovarian cyst that
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HARRIET MARTINEAU had caused her illness in 1839; it had continued to grow since then, pressing on other internal organs and producing symptoms that were mistaken for heart failure. Any consideration of Martineau’s life should take into account that although we remember her as a Victorian writer concerned with Victorian social and moral issues, she was born during the reign of George III, lived through the Regency of his eldest son, the reign of that son as George IV, and the reign of third son William IV, before that of Victoria. She therefore grew up in a time when Romantic philosophy and radical ideas were current, and, as Shelagh Hunter points out in Harriet Martineau: The Poetics of Moralism (1995), the moral and philosophical underpinning of Martineau’s work has more in common with the writing of Mary Wollstonecraft than we might expect (p. 2). Martineau’s Wordsworthian Romanticism was, however, at first strongly inflected by Christianity, primarily Unitarian Christianity. Unitarianism was supplemented as the bedrock of Martineau’s belief system by the necessitarianism of Joseph Priestley (the view that every choice and every action is ultimately caused by the laws of the universe) and later replaced by atheism and positivism.
earl marries an actress with a social conscience. We should also remember that even Martineau’s last major work of fiction was published in 1846, just before the Brontës began to publish their novels and some years before the first appearance of those of George Eliot. Martineau was a prolific author, producing, for example, more than sixteen hundred pieces of journalism between 1852 and 1866. Among her earliest works were didactic stories for younger readers, including Principle and Practice (1827) and Five Years of Youth (1831). The Playfellow followed in 1841. Martineau was often at pains to attribute her enormous output not to desire for fame or fortune but to compulsion; she said that she could not help but write. “Things were pressing to be said; and there was more or less evidence that I was the person to say them” (Autobiography, vol. I, p. 188). In this, Martineau can be seen to be adhering to the Unitarian precepts of the individual’s social responsibilities and duty to be active for social reform. Her writing, whether fiction or nonfiction, is didactic; it always illustrates social problems and generally advocates social reform.
NONFICTION
Martineau published numerous interventions into issues of public debate, ranging from education, conditions of employment, the treatment of the insane, and prostitution, to abolition and the position of women in British society. She was a regular (and the first female) leader-writer for the London Daily News and contributor to the Westminster Review, and any bibliography of her journalism would extend across many pages. Her early Devotional Exercises: Consisting of Reflections and Prayers for the Use of Young Persons (1823) encapsulated and taught the Unitarian concept of practical divinity, and she took the Unitarian practices of social responsibility and reform into her sociological and didactic writing even after she ceased to follow Unitarian and orthodox Christian beliefs. From the fruits of the success of Illustrations of Political Economy, Martineau began to travel and to document her travels. Eastern Life, Present
WRITING, CONTEXT
Much of Martineau’s writing predates that of the novelists associated with canonical Victorian high realism. It is often said that her earlier stories appeared at a time when no writer could equal writers of the past generation, which included poets Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Lord Byron and novelists Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott, or those of the late 1840s and onward. Reviewers of the period complained that fiction had devolved into the so-called “silver fork novel,” representing life in high society, and the “penny dreadful,” concerned with crime and melodrama. Into this, Martineau published a story in her Illustrations of Political Economy, “For Each and For All” (1832), which resembled a silver fork story, but one whose aristocratic protagonists embody Martineau’s ideals of social reform; the son of an
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HARRIET MARTINEAU and Past (1848) follows her journeys in the Middle East, and Society in America (1837) and Retrospect of Western Travel (1838) followed her American tour. She felt herself experienced enough to publish a guide for other travelers. The series in which the book was published, “How to Observe,” is more or less forgotten, but Martineau’s volume, How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838), laid the foundations for the future discipline of sociological research. Martineau pointed out that whereas few would consider themselves qualified to make pronouncements on the geology of the places they visited unless they had prepared themselves by some study of those subjects, few apply the same proposition to the observation of inhabitants and social behavior (p. 2). Proper preparation and method, she asserted, will enable the traveler to be an effective observer, and effective, sympathetic observation, with intellectual and mechanical aids, will convey to the observer the life of another section of the human race and make that observer a wiser person (p. 238). Martineau’s Letters from Ireland (1852) were first published in the Daily News. Once established in the Lake District, Martineau also encouraged travelers to come to her, and she worked to make The Knoll a spot on the literary tourism trail both during her life and after her death by publishing a number of articles on her home and the surrounding countryside. These include “A Year at Ambleside,” published in Sartain’s Union Magazine (1850); “Lights of the English Lake District,” published in the Atlantic Monthly (1861); and Complete Guide to the English Lakes, a book that was printed in nearby Windermere in 1855.
against the American Constitution and its theoretical principles. Several of Martineau’s articles and books argued for abolition. “The Martyr Age of the United States” was published as an article in the Westminster Review and as a short book in the United States in 1839. Her “Manifest Destiny of the American Union” was reprinted in 1857 by the American Anti-Slavery Society. While visiting the United States, Martineau met the leader of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, Maria Weston Chapman, who became her lifelong friend and who was to be entrusted with the completion of Martineau’s autobiography. Like John Stuart Mill, Martineau drew a parallel between the condition of slaves and the condition of women. Reviewing a work by Walter Scott, she wrote that the best argument for the emancipation of slaves lay in the vices and subservience that the system generated in slaves, just as the best argument for the emancipation of women lay in the folly and complacency demonstrated by many contemporary women (Miscellanies, vol. I, p. 48). As a campaigner for the rights of women, Martineau published articles and supported a number of related causes, including the opening of a college for women, the establishment of nursing as a profession in which women could play an equal part, the reform of the laws concerning divorce, and the repeal of the 1864 Contagious Diseases Act (which empowered the police to arrest any women they suspected might be working as a prostitute and force her to have a medical examination). She was a signatory of the 1866 petition to the Houses of Parliament calling for women to be given the vote, which was, of course, defeated, and thus Martineau did not live to see the enfranchisement of women. Nobody, she wrote, could be further than she from being satisfied with the condition of her sex under the law of Britain as it stood then. She believed, she insisted, that women could obtain whatever they showed themselves fit for, just as men could. If women were educated and their powers cultivated, she asserted, equality could and would follow. Whatever women proved themselves able to do, society would be glad and grateful to see them perform, just as it would in
Martineau’s travel writing, and the sociological works arising from her travels, juxtapose descriptions of the author’s inner state with descriptions of her observations. This hybrid form combines apologetic reflections on her own possible failings as a traveller, vivid description, anecdotes, moralizing, and social commentary. Society in America and Retrospect of Western Travel are much more than travel writing; they are pioneering works of sociological observation which judge social practice in the United States
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HARRIET MARTINEAU the case of men (Autobiography, vol. I, pp. 400– 401). Eastern Life, Present and Past records Martineau’s observation of parallels between biblical stories and myths and stories of other cultures, and she traces the development of the concept of God and the divine. Her waning faith in Christianity and developing atheism are indicated but not explicitly acknowledged. Her correspondence with Henry George Atkinson, published as Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development (1851), form an exposition of his theory of “phreno-magnetism” and Martineau’s view of evolution and human nature. Even here, she does not explicitly deny the existence of a higher being, or force of creation, but she does insist that the existence of any such “first cause” is unproven and unknown. In addition to her original writing, Martineau also translated the work of others. She undertook the monumental task of translating Auguste Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive (1830– 1842), which, published as The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, Freely Translated and Condensed by Harriet Martineau (1853), enabled the positivist philosophy of Comte to become more widely known in Britain. Martineau’s posthumously published Autobiography could rightfully be named the most engaging and entertaining of all her works. The first volume begins with a statement communicating that she felt it was her duty to record her experiences, in part because of the qualities of mind (including a retentive memory) she possessed, and in part because she felt an obligation to record a life that had been “somewhat remarkable” (Autobiography, vol. I, p. 1). She made two separate beginnings, the first in 1831, and the second about ten years later, but she progressed no further than recording her early years until her third attempt (stimulated by her assumed mortal illness) in 1855. Martineau produces an effective characterization of herself at different stages of her life. The recollections of her unhappy childhood are vivid and heartrending, her occasionally caustic criticisms amusing, and her apologia for her methods and aims engrossing. She provides fascinating
vignettes of her contemporaries. Physical descriptions are often minimal (she describes William Makepeace Thackeray merely as one of two men with flattened noses flanking a dinner party hostess [Autobiography, vol. II, p. 375]), but her analyses of character are detailed. She pronounces Thackeray to be cynical and his Vanity Fair unreadable because of the moral disgust she alleged it produced (p. 376). While admiring the satire of snobbery and the snobbish in Thackeray’ writing, she deplored a life that she regarded as having been frittered away and his obedience to what she called “the call of the great” (p. 377). Of Dickens’s writing, she contrasted his representation of a world of things “natural and even true” with his creation of characters who she declared to be “profoundly unreal.” She also expressed concern about an impression of England and English life that might be gleaned by foreigners, upon reading Dickens’ novels (pp. 377–378). Whilst admiring Dickens’ kindliness and energetic espousing of social causes, she complained about his “vigorous erroneousness” on matters of fact; finding his knowledge of, for example, the new Poor Laws and laws of employment very faulty, she asserted that the more “fervent and inexhaustible” Dickens’ kindly impulses were, the more important it was that he should get his facts right, to avoid misdirecting or alienating his readers (p. 378). Writing just before the advent in Dickens’ life of Ellen Ternan, the woman who was to become his mistress, and some years before his alienation from Catherine Hogarth, the wife who had borne him ten children, Martineau gave extravagant praise to Dickens’ domestic virtues. Nonetheless, despite having published some stories in Dickens’ periodical Household Words, she refused invitations to contribute further articles on the grounds of the faulty morality of its editorial policy. Although she documented her own life in great detail in the Autobiography, Martineau required her correspondents to destroy her letters. She emphasized that she believed that publication of her letters could only add to her reputation, and that this belief was supported by the assurances of others, but that in refusing to allow publication she was acting in a way consistent
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HARRIET MARTINEAU with her belief in the sanctity of the privacy of personal epistolary exchanges (Autobiography, vol. I, p. 3). In spite of this demand, a large proportion of her voluminous correspondence survives. A large collection of Martineau’s papers is held by Birmingham University Library, and another, comprising approximately 775 items, is housed in the University of California Library at Berkeley.
proved particularly popular. The intertwined fates of the inhabitants of Garveloch—the energetic and effective heroine, Ella; the wastrel Murdoch family; the well-informed and travelled Angus— illustrate the connectedness of society, and the ways in which actions taken for private purposes have an effect on the community as a whole. The first story is devoted to the causes and effects of the rent system, while the second, in which Garveloch becomes briefly prosperous and populous as a fishing station, but is then devastated by poor catches, failed trade, bad weather, and disease, provides a microcosm of the free market economy and underlines the point that the interests of laboring and labor-purchasing classes are identical. The stories ran to approximately 130 pages per monthly issue, and at a cost of 1/6d (3/4 farthing or 1/6 penny) brought them within the budget of, if not the least, then the less-well-off literate workers of the day, for whom they were designed. A similar series illustrating the effects of taxation (1834), and another on the effects of the Poor Laws, followed. The didactic function of the stories is carried out not only though the actions and fates of the characters, but through overt messages delivered by teachers, mentors, and other authority figures.
FICTION
Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–1834) appeared in the same year of the passing of the first Reform Bill, and the tales illustrate or dramatize social ills that require social reform. The tales teach that the social problems of industrialized nineteenth-century Britain could be explained through the theories of political economists such as Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo. Martineau initially encountered these thinkers’ ideas in Jane Marcet’s Conversations on Political Economy (1816), which she read in 1827. Martineau wrote that after reading this work, she realized that she had already been teaching on the subject in her early writing, and she set out to illustrate the subject principles by exhibiting them “in their natural workings” through “selected passages of social life” (Autobiography, vol. I, p. 183). The stories emphasize the social nature of humankind and the interconnectedness of our lives and fates. They are set in several imaginary communities—a Scottish fishing village, a Manchester factory, and a workhouse—and each explores the miseries generated by industrialization, capitalism, and the exploitation of labor. A number of the stories are set in (to the contemporary British or American reader) exotic locations, and have beguilingly exotic or romantic-sounding titles such as “The Charmed Sea,” “Cinnamon and Pearls,” and “Life in the Wild.” Other titles, such as “A Manchester Strike” and “The Farrers of Budge Row,” suggest commonplace characters set in recognizable English rural or urban life. Two of the Illustrations stories, “Ella of Garveloch” and “Weal and Woe in Garveloch,” both set in a fictional Scottish fishing village,
Martineau’s major achievement in fiction was her novel Deerbrook, which follows the lives of two newly orphaned sisters, Hester and Margaret Ibbotson, who come to stay with the Greys, the family of a cousin, in the village of Deerbrook. Both sisters are attracted to Edward Hope, the local apothecary. Initially Hope is drawn to Margaret, but he is told that he has encouraged Hester to believe that she is his choice, and he feels himself honor-bound to marry her. Trapped in an unstimulating and ill-matched coupling, one far from the marriage of minds he desired, he must endure his wife’s jealousy of his honorable regard for her sister. Margaret attracts the attention of a suitor, Philip Enderby, but almost loses him through the machinations of the Greys’ neighbor, the social-climbing Mrs. Rowland. Edward Hope is a forward-thinking medical man, interested in advanced (for the time) ideas about hygiene, as well as the spread of diseases
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HARRIET MARTINEAU and their cures, interests that conflict with the ignorance, superstition, and prejudice of the local Deerbrook people. His practice falls off, rumors spread (he is believed to be a graverobber, obtaining corpses for dissection), and both his livelihood and way of life are threatened. When some kind of pestilence or plague (possibly an epidemic outbreak of cholera, which was rife at the time) sweeps through the village, Dr. Hope’s skills, patience, and endurance are tested to the full, but he finally achieves success in both the public and private spheres: he gains the respect and trust of Deerbrook society, begins to bring progress to the area, and comes to value and love his wife.
she has used to injure him. She attempts to bribe Mr. Hope by promising to speak for him, recanting her earlier slanders, if he will only exert himself to the utmost to save the life of her daughter. Deerbrook represents another kind of ignorance and prejudice, and it illustrates another relationship between language and the market economy. The poor of Deerbrook set no store in the medicines, Latin prescriptions, or hygienic proscriptions of the doctor, but they purchase a prognosis in language they can understand—from the fortune-teller. An exchange between Drs. Levitt and Hope notes that the villagers are in a state of destitution; yet, at the same time, a mother, despite having only shavings to lie on with her child and existing in a pitiably weakened state, spends the little she has on a fortune-teller for an interpretation of a dream. The fortune-teller predicts the death of the child.
While it is the male characters who wield power overtly in Deerbrook, its women exercise a more covert but equally effective power, not always for good. This covert power is linguistic in nature. Gossip is the currency of the women of the village, and Mrs. Rowland is the banker of that currency. Such is Mrs. Rowland’s obsession with rising in the social hierarchy. Though her nature is not inherently evil, she seems blind to the pain she inflicts as she doles out accumulated debits of slander and coins of small spite. She comes to regard her children merely as gobetweens in a war of attrition with her neighbor and rival, Mrs. Grey, and views even her mother only in terms of how she might affect her own position and social profit. When Mrs. Rowland is moved to perform a seemingly charitable or kindly act, as when she offers a room to the impoverished Maria Young, it is only to better the offer made by her neighbor. She thinks of Margaret and Hester Ibbotson not as pleasant additions to Deerbrook society but as allies of the enemy faction, to be suborned or neutralized by judicious words or, as when she burns a letter of Margaret’s, by the obliteration of their words. The sisters are caught in the crossfire of a kind of war, and they suffer badly from it. Mrs. Rowland is no more fair to or clear-sighted about Edward Hope; she can only see the doctor’s work in terms of the same transactions of market exchange as she conducts. When the life of her daughter Matilda is threatened by illness, she makes the mistake of trying to buy his efforts on Matilda’s behalf with the same kind of coin as
Martineau’s fiction can be seen as constituting a bridge between that of Jane Austen and George Eliot. “A Manchester Strike,” from Illustrations of Political Economy, anticipates the subject matter of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848). Edward Hope may be an ancestor of Dr. Tertius Lydgate from George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872), and Margaret Ibbotson may anticipate Dorothea Brooke from the same novel, as well as Margaret Hale from Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854–1855). Maria Young, bright and educated, but moneyless, and forced into a position between that of family and servant, has much in common with a number of young women characters in the “governess novels” of the Victorian period, including Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Martineau’s next work of fiction was quite different from Deerbrook; it moved out of Britain to Santo Domingo and away from women’s and domestic concerns and love stories to political and social upheaval. The Hour and the Man: A Historical Romance (1841) is a fictionalized biography of the revolutionary and slave-leader Toussaint-Louverture (1743–1803), whom she may have encountered in the sonnet “To Toussaint L'Ouverture,” written by one of her favorite poets, William Wordsworth. In Martineau’s ac-
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HARRIET MARTINEAU count, Toussaint-Louverture is idealized as a dashing hero, an accomplished military leader, and an honorable family man, vastly superior to his opponents and his captor, the Emperor Napoléon I. Martineau herself visited the cell in the Fort de Joux in Franche-Comté, to which Toussaint-Louverture was deported and in which he was imprisoned and died. Though constrained by the essentialist views of race of its time and by Martineau’s emphasis on ToussaintLouverture’s domestic virtues, the novel represented a further apologia for the cause of abolition.
Martineau published a number of journalistic articles anonymously and sometimes slanted the style so as to suggest the possibility of a masculine author. In turn, she was frequently described as masculine, or at least unfeminine, by her critics, and her physical appearance was introduced into critiques of her work. Gaby Weiner, in her introduction to the Virago Classics edition of the Autobiography, quotes “a Mr. MacFarlain” as describing Martineau as “a rampant rationalist, a prophetess of mesmerism, an ill-favoured dogmatizing, masculine spinster” (Boyle, p. 182; Autobiography, introduction, pp. xvi–xvii). Critics were particularly horrified by Martineau’s proffered solution to the problems of urban overcrowding and unemployment: population control. The Quarterly Review referred to her as “a female Malthusian. A woman who thinks child-bearing is a crime against society! An unmarried woman who declaims against marriage!!” (April 1833, quoted in Autobiography, introduction, p. xvii).
In 1851, Martineau began a third novel, the first volume of which she sent to Charlotte Brontë. Brontë, voicing the anti-Catholic prejudice of the time, deprecated the positive representation of the Catholic characters but was nonetheless enthusiastic, and she recommended the work to her own publisher, George Smith, of Smith, Elder and Co. Smith in turn felt that the novel was unpublishable while it contained such portraits, and, Martineau records, implored her to set it aside and send him another novel like Deerbrook. Martineau initially resolved to finish the work, but the impetus faded. Martineau decided that the novel-writing phase of her life was at an end, and she burned the manuscript.
Fellow novelist and short story writer Margaret Oliphant remarked that she could not see how such a commonplace mind could have attained the literary position that Martineau achieved (letter to John Blackwood, March 8, 1877, in The Autobiography and Letters of Mrs. M. O. W. Oliphant, p. 263), but other authors were more generous about Martineau’s mind, writing, and attainment. Martineau seems to have expected that her decision to write a novel would be greeted with delight by publishers, but Deerbrook was not immediately snapped up, nor did it immediately sell in the quantities of Illustrations of Political Economy (contrary to Martineau’s claim in the Autobiography). It did not, however, generate in critics doubts of the suitability of its subject matter. The domestic sphere and romantic strand of Deerbrook were approved, as were its wellrealized central characters, and the novel was compared to the fiction of Jane Austen, in most cases favorably. Critical complaint was now levied at the alleged narrowness of its scope and the thin, unexciting nature of its plot. The Edinburgh Review, though finding that Martineau’s writing had more eloquence, poetry, and (allegedly masculine) vigor than that of Austen,
RECEPTION
Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy justified her own faith in herself, repaid her for the efforts required by her publisher (it was in part financed by subscription), and established her reputation. Critics were divided between feelings of admiration and doubt that the underlying subject matter of the tales was suitable for or likely to be understood by a woman. A number of contemporary reviews praised the characterization, plot, and style rather than the didactic function which Martineau regarded as their primary justification. The Edinburgh Review found the stories so beautiful in the poetry of their language and the vividness of the descriptions that it was loath to begin to praise them, for fear of not knowing when to stop (Empson, pp. 1–39).
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HARRIET MARTINEAU and declaring that her portrait of sisters was the truest to be found, complained of the paucity of larger issues in the novel. The review also complained about the social rank of the characters, who came from the middle classes, a segment of society that it declared to be useful, but unromantic and unpicturesque (Lister, pp. 494– 502). Deerbrook had its admirers, however, and can be seen to have been influential on the writing of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot. With a copy of her 1849 novel Shirley, Brontë sent (as Currer Bell) a letter of admiration that emphasized the moral focus and educational function of the novel: “Deerbrook ranks with the writings that have really done him good, added to his stock of ideas, and rectified his views of life” (letter of November 7, 1849, quoted in Autobiography, vol. II, p. 323). The letter was particularly gratifying to Martineau, and she was very keen to discover the real identity of the writer, since, she wrote, the fictional childhood experiences related in Jane Eyre and her own childhood experiences tallied in so many ways; in fact Martineau had been suspected of being its author (Autobiography, vol. II, p. 324). A subsequent letter and visit revealed Bell to be Brontë, and a tie of admiration and friendship grew between the authors. In 1855 Martineau wrote Brontë’s obituary for the Daily News.
though she remained in touch with his wife and children. Before her death, Martineau’s fame had faded and she was somewhat overlooked. Her posthumously published autobiography was criticized for its unconventional openness (for the time) about the unhappiness of her early years, which she attributed in large measure to the behavior of her mother and her sister Elizabeth, and for its lack of conventional religious piety. In the century following her death, she was chiefly remembered, and subsequently celebrated, as a sociologist and campaigner for social reform, and her fiction was considered somewhat underrated. As late as 1980, Valerie Pichanick, evaluating Martineau’s achievements in Harriet Martineau: The Woman and Her Work, 1802–76, found her fiction the weakest element of her output, lacking personal commitment and containing undeveloped characters, wooden dialogue, and excessive narration (p. 38). Social historians and critics interested in the social problem or “condition of England” novel found resources in both the fiction and nonfiction of Martineau, and feminist criticism and critical theories from the 1970s onward have provided rich and insightful readings of the texts, in particular Vineta Colby’s Yesterday’s Woman: Domestic Realism in the English Novel (1974); Ivanka Kovacˇevic´’s Fact into Fiction: English Literature and the Industrial Scene, 1750–1850 (1975); Margaret Walters’ essay “The Rights and Wrongs of Women: Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Martineau, Simone de Beauvoir” in The Rights and Wrongs of Women, edited by Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley (1976); Ellen Moers’s Literary Women (1976). The 1983 reprinting of Deerbrook and the Autobiography by the Virago Classics series brought Martineau’s work to the attention of a new readership, and a 2004 edition of the novel, with an invaluable introduction by Victorian literature scholar and Martineau specialist Valerie Sanders, has done the same. A selection of her Illustrations of Political Economy, edited by Deborah Anna Logan and published by Broadview Editions in 2004, makes these important texts readily available; Logan’s introduction sets the
Martineau’s atheism and promotion of H. G. Atkinson’s theories and the practice of mesmerism were controversial, and even her favorite brother, James, by then a Unitarian minister, poured scorn on the Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development in a lengthy review published in the Unitarian magazine the Prospective Review. James Martineau publicly lamented that he could remember nothing in literary history as melancholy as that Harriet Martineau should prostrate herself at the feet of such a master, and should at the bidding of Atkinson lay down her earlier faith in moral obligation, in God, and in what he described as the immortal sanctities, and that she should instead revel in Atkinson’s arrogance and scorn. After reading this review, Harriet never saw her brother again,
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Selected Bibliography
tales in their cultural, political, and historical context. Broadview has also republished the first two volumes of the Autobiography in a 2006 edition edited by Linda H. Peterson.
WORKS OF HARRIET MARTINEAU
The bicentenary of Martineau’s birth (2002) generated further interest and study, from which came some of the most interesting and useful theoretical and political reassessments of her writing. These include Michael R. Hill and Susan Hoecker-Drysdale’s Harriet Martineau: Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives, 2002, which won the Distinguished Scholarly Book Award from the American Sociological Association Section on the History of Sociology; Caroline Roberts’ The Woman and the Hour: Harriet Martineau and Victorian Ideologies, 2002; and Mike Sanders’ “From ‘Political’ to ‘Human’ Economy: The Visions of Harriet Martineau and Frances Wright” in the September 2001 volume of Women: A Cultural Review. Deirdre David assesses newer criticism on Martineau in her article “George Eliot’s ‘Trump’: Recent Work on Harriet Martineau” in the autumn 2004 volume of Victorian Studies. The Memorials section of the Autobiography, compiled by Maria Weston Chapman, includes a number of letters that eulogize Martineau’s personality, life, and work. Also included, perhaps surprisingly, is a poem from the Spiritualist magazine. Possibly the most comprehensive and apt summary of her career, and testament to her achievement, however, is the long obituary published in the Daily News on June 29, 1876, and included in the Memorials section. Martineau wrote the obituary herself, twenty years before her death. Writing of herself in the third person, she assessed her original power as the fruit of earnestness and intellectual clarity rather than imagination, of which she said she possessed little, or anything approaching genius. She said that she could sympathize with the views of others but also keep a firm grasp of her own, and she could make her own views understood. This she regarded as the function of her life; to the extent that she fulfilled it, she felt that her life was of use and that her duties were sufficient for her peace of mind.
“Female Writers on Practical Divinity.” Monthly Repository XVII, no. 204:746–750 (December 1822). Devotional Exercises: Consisting of Reflections and Prayers for the Use of Young Persons. London: Rowland Hunter, 1823. Addresses; with Prayers and Original Hymns, for the Use of Families and Schools. London: Rowland Hunter, 1826. Principle and Practice; or, The Orphan Family. Wellington, Shropshire: Houlston, 1827. The Rioters; or, A Tale of Bad Times. Wellington, Shropshire: Houlston, 1827. The Turn-out, A Tale. Wellington, Shropshire: Houlston, 1829. Five Years of Youth; or, Sense and Sentiment. London: Harvey and Darton, 1831. For Each and For All: A Tale. London: Charles Fox, 1832. Illustrations of Political Economy. 25 parts. London: Charles Fox, 1832–1834; reprint, 9 vols. London: Charles Fox, 1834; reprint edited by Deborah Anna Logan, Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2004. Poor Laws and Paupers Illustrated. 4 parts. London: Charles Fox, 1833–1834. Illustrations of Taxation. 5 vols. London: Charles Fox, 1834. Miscellanies. 2 vols. Boston: Hilliard, Gray, 1836. Society in America. 2 vols. London: Saunders and Otley, 1837. How to Observe Morals and Manners. London: Charles Knight, 1838; reprint edited by Michael Hill, New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1989. Retrospect of Western Travel. 2 vols. London: Saunders and Otley, 1838. Deerbrook. 3 vols. London: Edward Moxon, 1839; reprint edited by Gaby Weiner, London: Virago Press, 1983; reprint edited by Valerie Sanders, London: Penguin, 2004. The Hour and the Man: An Historical Romance. 3 vols. London: Edward Moxon, 1841. The Playfellow. 4 parts: The Crofton Boys; Feats on the Fiord; The Settlers at Home; The Peasant and the Prince. London: Charles Knight, 1841. Life in the Sick-Room. London: Edward Moxon, 1844; reprint edited by Maria H. Frawley, Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2003. Letters on Mesmerism. London: Edward Moxon, 1845. Forest and Game-Law Tales. 3 vols. London: Edward Moxon, 1845–1846. Eastern Life, Present and Past. London: Edward Moxon, 1848.
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HARRIET MARTINEAU Boyle, Edward. Biographical Essays, 1790–1890. London: Oxford University Press, 1936. Colby, Vineta. Yesterday’s Woman: Domestic Realism in the English Novel. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974.
The History of England During the Thirty Years’ Peace: 1816–1846. 2 vols. London: Charles Knight, 1849–1850. Household Education. London: Edward Moxon, 1849. With Henry George Atkinson, Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development. London: John Chapman, 1851. Complete Guide to the English Lakes. Windermere: John Garnett, 1855. British Rule in India: A Historical Sketch. London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1857. Suggestions Towards the Future Government of India. London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1858. Health, Husbandry and Handicraft. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1861. Biographical Sketches. London: Macmillan, 1869. Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography, with Memorials by Maria Weston Chapman. 3 vols. London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1877; reprint, Boston: J. R. Osgood and Co., 1877; reprint, without memorials, edited by Gaby Weiner, London: Virago Press, 1983; reprint edited by Linda H. Peterson, Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2006.
COLLECTED
David, Deirdre. “George Eliot’s ‘Trump’: Recent Work on Harriet Martineau.” Victorian Studies 47, no. 1:87–94 (autumn 2004). Empson, William. “Illustrations of Political Economy: Mrs Marcet–Miss Martineau,” Edinburgh Review 57:1–39 (April 1833). Frawley, Maria. “Harriet Martineau, Health, and Journalism.” Women’s Writing 9, no. 3:433–444 (October 2002). Hankinson, Sophia, comp. A Harriet Martineau Miscellany: Articles Contributed to the Newsletter of the Martineau Society, or Given as Short Talks at Its Meetings, Reprinted in Celebration of the 200th Anniversary of the Birth of Harriet Martineau, June 12th 1802. Oxford: Martineau Society, 2002. Hill, Michael R., and Susan Hoecker-Drysdale, eds. Harriet Martineau: Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2002. Hunter, Shelagh. Harriet Martineau: The Poetics of Moralism. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995.
WORKS
Harriet Martineau on Women. Edited by Gayle Graham Yates. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1985. Harriet Martineau: Selected Letters. Edited by Valerie Sanders. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Writings on Slavery and the American Civil War. Edited by Deborah Anna Logan. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002. Harriet Martineau’s Writing on British History and Military Reform. Edited by Deborah Anna Logan and Kathryn Sklar. 6 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005. The Collected Letters of Harriet Martineau. Edited by Deborah Anna Logan and Valerie Sanders. 5 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007.
Kovacˇevic´, Ivanka. Fact into Fiction: English Literature and the Industrial Scene, 1750–1850. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1975. Lister, T. H. “Miss Martineau’s Deerbrook.” Edinburgh Review 69:494–502 (July 1839). Logan, Deborah Anna. The Hour and the Woman: Harriet Martineau’s “Somewhat Remarkable” Life. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002. Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976. Myers, Mitzi. “Unmothered Daughter and Radical Reformer: Harriet Martineau’s Career.” In The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature. Cathy N. Davidson and E. M. Broner, eds. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980. Pp. 70–80.
TRANSLATIONS The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte. London: John Chapman, 1853.
Oražem, Claudia. Political Economy and Fiction in the Early Works of Harriet Martineau. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999. Peterson, Linda H. “Martineau’s Autobiography: The Feminine Debate over Self-Interpretation.” In Victorian Autobiography: The Tradition of Self-Interpretation. Linda H. Peterson, ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986.
ARTICLES “A Year at Ambleside.“ Sartain’ Union Magazine, vol VII, July–December, 1850, pp. 28–32. “Lights of the English Lake District.” Atlantic Monthly, vol VII, 1861, pp. 541–558.
CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES
Pichanick, Valerie Kossew. Harriet Martineau: The Woman and Her Work, 1802–76. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980. Rees, Joan. Writings on the Nile: Harriet Martineau, Flo-
Annandale, Ellen. “Assembling Harriet Martineau’s Gender and Health Jigsaw.” Women’s Studies International Forum 30, no. 4:355–366 (July–August 2007).
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HARRIET MARTINEAU Webb, R. K. Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian. London: Heinemann, 1960. Wheatley, Vera. The Life and Work of Harriet Martineau. London: Secker and Warburg, 1957.
rence Nightingale, Amelia Edwards. London: Rubicon Press, 1995. Roberts, Caroline. The Woman and the Hour: Harriet Martineau and Victorian Ideologies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Sanders, Mike. “From ‘Political’ to ‘Human’ Economy: The Visions of Harriet Martineau and Frances Wright.” Women: A Cultural Review, 12, no. 2:192–203 (September 2001). Sanders, Valerie. Reason Over Passion: Harriet Martineau and the Victorian Novel. Brighton: Harvester, 1986. Thomas, Gillian. Harriet Martineau. Boston: Twayne, 1985. Walters, Margaret. “The Rights and Wrongs of Women: Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Martineau, Simone de Beauvoir.” In The Rights and Wrongs of Women. Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley, eds. London: Penguin, 1976.
OTHER Marcet, Jane. Conversations on Political Economy: In Which the Elements of That Science Are Familiarly Explained. London: Longman, 1816. Oliphant, Margaret. The Autobiography and Letters of Mrs. M. O. W. Oliphant. Edited and arranged by Mrs. Harry Coghill. New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1899.
WEB SITE Martineau Society (http://www.hmc.ox.ac.uk).
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ZAKES MDA (1948—)
Christopher Warnes IN THE FINAL years of the apartheid regime in South Africa, when it became evident that the system of legalized racism that had been official state policy since 1948 was about to be scrapped, critics and poets began to speculate on the future of South African literature. For decades, South African writing had taken its impetus from the antiapartheid struggle. Literature was seen as being able to make a unique contribution to the struggle by conscientizing readers and audiences about the necessity of resisting apartheid by bearing witness to the violent inequalities of South African life, or by exploring the nature and history of oppression. By the beginning of the 1990s, it was clear that South African society was about to change irrevocably. The African National Congress (ANC), the organization that had begun life in 1912 in order to organize resistance against the racist policies of the state, and which had been banned in 1960, was now unbanned. The party’s most famous member, Nelson Mandela, who had spent twenty-seven years in prison, was released, and democracy was on the horizon. What would there be to write about when freedom was finally won?
yet it can also be lyrical and evocative. He has been acclaimed for developing a kind of South African magical realism, although this claim needs qualification. His characters encounter and explore issues that are recognizably South African: violence and deprivation, the legacy of the past, poverty, development, and the function of art. Mda presents his characters with an unusual degree of sympathy, pathos, and humor. His gently ludic style allows him to poke fun at some of the sacred cows of the “new” South Africa: the betrayals of politicians, the dangers of notions of purity, the allure of the city, the quest for commodities and wealth, and the formation of new elites, to name only a few. Above all, the reason why Mda’s novels are so richly valued in postapartheid South Africa is because they powerfully explore the most important theme of the national narrative in the postapartheid period: the search for healing and reconciliation. Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni Mda was born to Rose and Ashby Mda in the small town of Herschel in the Eastern Cape region of South Africa on October 6, 1948, the very year in which apartheid was born as official state policy. Ashby Mda was a lawyer and a founding member of the ANC’s Youth League and, later, the Pan-African Congress, both of which were organizations set up to fight apartheid. This brought the elder Mda to the attention of the South African state, which monitored closely all opposition and did not hesitate to imprison, torture, and even assassinate opponents of its rule. In the early 1960s Ashby Mda was arrested, and, on making bail, he fled the country. His family followed him to neighboring Lesotho, which was at that time a British protectorate and therefore not subject to South African laws. Zakes Mda attended high school and university in Lesotho, first studying law, then
One of the most compelling sets of answers to this question has come from the novelist, critic, and playwright Zakes Mda. While Mda published poetry and plays in the 1970s and 1980s, it has been the works he produced since the end of apartheid—especially the novels Ways of Dying (1995), The Heart of Redness (2000), The Madonna of Excelsior (2002), and The Whale Caller (2005)—that have garnered him a reputation as one of the most important voices in postapartheid literature. In both form and content, Mda’s work introduces new features to South African writing. His narrative voice is uncomplicated to the point of sometimes seeming naive,
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ZAKES MDA humanities, and taking up poetry, painting, and playwriting. In the early 1980s he moved to the United States, where he completed a master’s degree in theater studies at Ohio University. On his return to Lesotho in 1985, he took up a post in the English Department at the National University of Lesotho. While working there, he completed a PhD on theater and development through the University of Cape Town, with a dissertation that was later published as When People Play People (1993). Mda returned to South Africa in 1994 after the country’s first democratic elections.
EARLY PLAYS
Mda’s early theater has much in common with that produced by other dramatists in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. Key similarities include what might be termed these plays’ minimalism; a focus on ordinary, mostly black, working-class characters; their commitment to exposing political injustice; and a shifting, creeping sense of the absurd that sometimes manifests itself. Mda’s plays exhibit these features in different ways. Their minimalism derives from the fact that elaborate props, costumes, and backdrops are simply not appropriate to the communities being represented, nor would there be budgets for such luxuries. In this regard, Mda, like many of his contemporaries in South Africa of the 1970s and 1980s, comes close to producing what Jerzy Grotowski theorized as “poor theater.” The characters in Mda’s plays are invariably struggling with poverty, and the plays always link this poverty to political causes. In many of the early plays, which are mostly set in South Africa, the problem is explicitly revealed to be apartheid and is explored in terms of the ways racism impacts directly on the lives of the black characters. However, this is not always the case: in We Shall Sing for the Fatherland, the setting is an unnamed African country after independence, and the protagonists are two dispossessed former soldiers betrayed by the new elites. Mda’s plays sometimes exhibit a quality of absurdism, which is related to their political concerns. At first glance this observation may appear contradictory: after all, bearing witness to oppression usually takes place via documentary, realistic modes. But for the black South African, apartheid was a kind of nightmare that included effects that would in other contexts appear surreal or absurd. According to the writer T. T. Moyana, “a difficulty for the creative artist in South Africa, especially the black writer” is that “life itself is too fantastic to be outstripped by the creative imagination” (quoted in Ndebele, p. 42). Moyana questions, for example, how a quarrel over a bench in Edward Albee’s 1958 play Zoo Story could startle a reader “in a country where thousands of people have been daily quarrelling over who should sit on a particular park
The many years that Mda spent in Lesotho impacted his work in several ways. Not being subject to the direct intrusion of apartheid gave him the relative freedom to explore topics and themes in his early work that might have led to his arrest in South Africa. His early collection of plays, We Shall Sing for the Fatherland and Other Plays (1980), for example, was in fact banned in South Africa in 1981 precisely because it raised political themes in an overt way. But the history of Lesotho is relevant to Mda’s works in other ways. Lesotho gained independence from Great Britain in 1966, one of many former colonies to win freedom from the yoke of colonial government during this period. However, the promise of freedom and development brought by independence was betrayed in 1976, when the ruling party of Prime Minister Leabua Jonathan refused to accept that it had lost the country’s first postindependence elections. The opposition party leaders were imprisoned, and Jonathan’s party ruled by decree until 1986, when it was forced out of office in a military coup. For many years, the history of Lesotho was one of intervention by South Africa, corruption, and the struggling for power between politicians and the monarch at the expense of the development of the country. These are some of the most important themes of Mda’s early work. They remind us that he already had firsthand experience of both the positive and negative sides of independence and decolonization in Lesotho to draw on when he began to narrate the movement from apartheid to democracy in South Africa in the 1990s.
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ZAKES MDA bench,” and he cites a case in which a white man and a black woman were tried for being caught kissing: “the court got bogged down over the question of whether the kiss was ‘platonic’ or ‘passionate’” and it was suggested Parliament would have to legislate on the matter (p. 42). In such a context, Moyana suggests, the writer does not need to strive for surreal or fantastic effects— they are built into the fabric of realism itself.
up the naked racism of the police, who ignore Frikkie’s culpability for assaulting Charley’s girlfriend, Tšeli, and instead falsely accuse Charley of the attack. Again and again in Mda’s work we encounter this exposure of the consequences of apartheidera racism on black characters in the plays set in South Africa. In Dark Voices Ring (first performed in Soweto in 1979), the dialogue between the characters identified only as “Man” and “Woman” reveals the tragic story of how prisoners forced to work as cheap labor on a white farm rise up against their masters but inadvertently kill a child in the process. The play ends with an explicit call to arms, which sees Man heading north to join the armies of liberation. In The Road (first performed in Athens, Ohio, in 1982), a distinctly Beckettian play, geographical markers are vague, but the character named “Farmer” is specifically identified as “a very tired Afrikaner” (p. 121), while the character named “Labourer” is an itinerant black mechanic. The farmer initially fails to recognize that the laborer is black, but when he does, his manner changes dramatically and the stage becomes the spatial analogue of apartheid South Africa, with the farmer hogging the shade and the laborer exiled into the hot sun. The play ends with the laborer seizing the farmer’s gun and killing the Afrikaner, an obvious and provocative encouragement to violent resistance against apartheid. In Banned, a radio play first produced for the BBC in 1982, a relationship between a social worker, Cynthia, and a former gangster, Bra Zet, ends tragically when Cynthia decides to join the liberation army in exile, and Bra Zet is shot by security police. Joys of War, first performed in Harare, Zimbabwe, in 1989 (and among the most accomplished of Mda’s early plays), continues these themes. It examines the relationship between two soldiers of the liberation army who are awaiting the order to carry out their mission of destroying a state facility. The stage is partitioned, allowing for the separate story of the journey of a grandmother and her granddaughter, Nana, who are searching for Nana’s father. The two women take shelter in the bush, only to stumble on the two soldiers, one of whom turns
In categorizing Mda’s early works, it is useful to consider a distinction between those set in South Africa and those set in Lesotho or in a national African country. It is worth keeping in mind that, although Lesotho has a very different history from South Africa, at the same time it is heavily dependent on South Africa in significant economic, social, and cultural terms. For example, Lesotho derives significant income from the earnings of migrant laborers working in the mines of the Witwatersrand. In his interview with Elly Williams, Mda reminds us that Lesotho had no professional theater of its own, and consequently his early plays had to be performed in South Africa—no easy task under apartheid. The close relations between South Africa and Lesotho are evident in much of Mda’s work, most obviously in his 1979 play The Hill (for which Mda was awarded that year’s Amstel Playwright of the Year Award), which is concerned with the plight of two destitute Maseru men desperate to be recruited to work in the mines. Distinguishing the early plays in terms of setting is useful in order to identify their central themes, and it helps to make sense of how Mda’s revolutionary poetics are mixed up with philosophical and existentialist qualities reflective of the work of the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. That is, Mda’s plays can be examined based on their bifurcated sense of context: those plays set explicitly and implicitly in South Africa reveal a more urgent preoccupation with questions of race and oppression than do those set in Lesotho. For example, in the early work Dead End (first performed in Soweto in 1979), the protagonist is a Johannesburg-based black pimp, Charley, who supplies prostitutes to the white Afrikaner pimp, Frikkie du Toit. The play draws attention to the exploitation of women by men, and it also points
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ZAKES MDA out to be the very man they had been looking for. After one of the soldiers commits suicide, Nana takes up the dead man’s weapon and joins her father in waiting for the signal to carry out the mission. As was the case with the other South African plays after Dead End, Joys of War ends with a call to arms and a salute to the soldiers risking their lives to liberate South Africa from apartheid.
condemned to a wandering, in-between state of life-in-death. Mda’s 1988 play, And the Girls in Their Sunday Dresses, similarly explores the failings of postindependence Lesotho, this time from the points of view of two women—one called “Lady” and the other, simply, “Woman”—waiting in a line to buy rice sold to the poor at a discounted price by the government. As in the 1982 play, The Road, Mda utilizes the Beckettian technique of subjecting the audience to an absurd waiting for an event that never happens. Unlike Beckett, though, absurdity here is not linked with existential questions but rather with political ones. For five days the two women wait, discussing their personal histories, religion, and politics, and squabbling over the single chair that keeps them off the wet ground. The chair comes to symbolize the breakdown in service provision, as Lady makes clear:
The Lesotho-based plays, and those set in unnamed African countries, are governed by different impulses. Most notably, We Shall Sing for the Fatherland, which won Mda a merit award in the Amstel Playwright of the Year competition when it premiered in 1978, and the later play And the Girls in Their Sunday Dresses, first performed in 1988, are both concerned with exposing and exploring an African postindependence environment that would not actually be realized in South Africa until after 1994. In the earlier play, two veterans of a war of independence fought ten years earlier find themselves homeless and destitute, living in a city park in what seems to be a cross between Nairobi and Maseru. The action of the play takes place on a park bench, with the two old comrades bantering about the war, about where to get food, tobacco, and shelter, and planning their next housebreaking expedition. They overhear a conversation between Mr. Mafutha (meaning “fat cat”), who is about to become chair of the stock exchange, and a white banker, who is supporting him for personal gain. The pair of veterans is snubbed by these passersby, a clear sign of the lack of interest in the poor on the part of the new elite, who are interested only in enriching themselves. This rejection is made all the more cutting by the fact that the veterans fought for the right of Africans like Mr. Mafutha to run the country. The pair of veterans is repeatedly ordered to leave the park following a government initiative to clean up the streets. They die of cold, and the play ends with them as ghosts watching prisoners digging their graves while the sounds of Mr. Mafutha’s wellattended funeral can be heard nearby. Even in death the postindependence inequalities persist, with the church funeral of the “fat cat” suggesting he will go to heaven, while the veterans are
When I go to the post office to buy a stamp, I take my chair with me. When I go to the bank to draw money [ѧ] I take my chair with me. Why, because I know there is going to be a lot of waiting there. When I go to government offices for any service whatsoever, I know I have to wait while bureaucrats have endless conversations about their lovers, and the great parties they have been attending lately. You go to these offices, sister woman, and the particular person who has been assigned to deal with your particular case has gone out. No one knows where. So you wait. Or they can’t locate the file. Or perhaps the person has gone to a meeting somewhere. They always go to meetings. So you wait. I tell you, sister woman, all of us spend ninetyfive percent of our waking hours waiting. Sooner or later this nation will learn from me. [Shouting] Bring your own chairs with you, and let’s relax while waiting for something to happen! (p. 10)
In the end, of course, nothing happens. The women never get their rice. They watch trucks owned by corrupt wholesalers and general dealers being filled with bags of rice they will resell for a profit. In a sourly humorous role play, they imagine the Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare they are likely to encounter if and when they get to the end of the line, and they give up, returning home empty-handed. As was the case with the two veterans in We Sing for the Fatherland, these
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ZAKES MDA characters have been betrayed by nepotism, corruption, and complete lack of interest in their predicament on the part of the postindependence elite. Mda’s early plays, then, are very much products of their times, exhibiting a heightened sense of the oppression generated by colonialism and apartheid, the need to resist through concerted political action, and aspects of postindependence disillusionment. They also anticipate in interesting ways the themes, settings, characters, and moods of his later works. Mda turned to writing novels in the early 1990s, a move that coincided with significant political changes in Southern Africa. In 1990, responding to pressure from both outside and inside the country, the president of South Africa, F. W. de Klerk, declared that the ANC, along with other political parties, would be unbanned. Nelson Mandela, the ANC leader who had spent twenty-seven years in prison as a “terrorist,” was to be released, and negotiations were to begin toward finding a new, inclusive way of governing the country. The next four years were extremely violent, as different political parties and factions struggled for ascendancy and as the state sought to destabilize potential opponents. On April 27, 1994, South Africa held its first democratic elections. The ANC won overwhelmingly, Mandela became president, and apartheid was, officially at least, over. Mda was able, after thirty-two years in exile, to return to the country of his birth.
to read—and hence the end of apartheid presented black writers with greater freedom to invest the time required to write novels and also greater “freedom of the imagination” to stretch the established traditions of the novel (p. 69). Mda’s first novel, Ways of Dying, written in 1992 but only published in 1995, is a good example of how the revolutionary and the existentialist strands of Mda’s writing were transformed by the genre of the novel and also an example of how, in turn, his desire to capture the local realities of a South Africa in transition led him to extend some of the conventions of the novel itself. Ways of Dying is set in South Africa, but Mda’s Lesotho is also present in the references to the distant villages from which the character called That Mountain Woman hails. (Mda returns to this Lesotho in his next novel, She Plays with the Darkness.) Most of the action of Ways of Dying occurs in South Africa, either in a large unnamed city or in a rural village. The geography of South Africa is strangely and strikingly distorted in this novel, with the effect that the city seems to be a composite of Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban. This may be interpreted as a response to the fact that Mda wrote the novel in the United States, after not having spent any significant time in the country for many years. Clearly, he wanted to write a novel not about Cape Town but about the generic experience of rural-urban migration in South Africa. The conflation of settings may also reflect his desire to write a novel that deviated from the norms of narrative realism. In interviews Mda has suggested his attraction to nonrealist modes of narration, in his comments about the influence of orality on his work. Orality, broadly, is a name for those modes of transmitting history, information, or stories verbally, without writing them. It is often associated with cultures and worldviews that have a more flexible approach to knowledge than that of Western, literate cultures. This may mean that distinctions between natural and supernatural, for example, are not held to be absolute, or that such cultures have a less individualistic perspective than is the case in the West.
EARLY NOVELS
Mda’s decision to start writing novels was a personal one, but it is worth considering what the novel form made available to him that he may have found lacking in drama and to what extent his turn to the novel coincided with the end of apartheid in South Africa. Mda described the process of writing plays as “agony” by contrast with the “total freedom” he experiences in writing novels (Williams, p. 68). Under apartheid, black writers felt an urgent need to address audiences directly, and this address could best be made through drama or performed poetry. The novel takes longer to write—and indeed longer
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ZAKES MDA Mda captures a sense of orality in Ways of Dying in several different ways. First, he attempts to narrate the novel from the point of view of an omniscient first-person-plural narration to generate a sense of communal ownership of the narrative. This implies a deliberate attempt to contextualize the main characters’ stories within a collective, folkloric dimension. Interestingly though, this voice does not seem to take itself altogether seriously. This narrative voice identifies itself explicitly near the beginning of the novel:
Dying there seems to be a direct intertextual reference to García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (a work that is often considered the epitome of magical realism) in the figure of Jwara, Toloki’s abusive father. Like García Márquez’s character, Colonel Aureliano Buendía, Jwara locks himself in his workshop (where he obsessively makes metal figurines). And, as in García Márquez’s novel, time behaves strangely in this workshop. When “for the first time in years, light invaded the privacy of the workshop,” Jwara is found to be dead, sitting exactly “as they remembered him, but with his biltong-like flesh stuck to bones” (p. 111). This mode of García Márquez–like magical realism clearly attracts Mda because of the way it gives substance to the “village worldview” he is trying to evoke. Thus, for example, Noria has the magical ability to inspire artistic creations with her voice; she has two fifteen-month pregnancies; her second child is the product of an immaculate conception; Jwara is able to communicate from beyond the grave through dreams; Toloki and Noria’s imagining of a better life by gazing at magazine pictures of their dream house has a magical quality to it; and Jwara’s figurines are capable of inducing spontaneous paroxysms of laughter in children. In these and other examples, Mda draws on the superstitious traditions of oral narrative, of gossip, and rumor to give substance to the “village worldview” he is trying to evoke. In many cases, however, Mda’s “magic,” unlike that of the Latin American writer, can be rationally explained. Although Ways of Dying toys with magical realism, there is distinctly more realism in the novel than there is magic. Mda’s plays were obsessed with the impact of politics on the lives of his characters, but his novels continue this preoccupation in different ways. Ways of Dying is very much a novel of “the transition”—of the period between 1990 and 1994 when a new dispensation was being created for South Africa. This period of transition is when Toloki meets Noria in the city, but the novel also includes the stories of how they arrive at this point, starting from when they are children together in their village many years earlier. By going back in time in this fashion, the novel is able to reflect on condi-
It is not different, really, here in the city. Just like back in the village, we live our lives together as one. We know everything about everybody. We even know things that happen when we are not there; things that happen behind people’s closed doors deep in the middle of the night. We are the allseeing eye of the village gossip. When in our orature the storyteller begins the story, “They say it once happened ѧ ,” we are the “they.” No individual owns any story. The community is the owner of the story, and it can tell it the way it deems fit. We would not be needing to justify the communal voice that tells this story if you had not wondered how we became so omniscient in the affairs of Toloki and Noria. (p. 12)
The narrative voice identifies itself here as being in the city, but from the village. Like the novel’s protagonists, Toloki and Noria, this voice has itself made the journey from rural to urban South Africa. And, like Toloki, this voice has learned to retain what was good about the country while surviving in the city. In this sense, this narrative position conforms to what Salman Rushdie has described (in the influential essay “Gabriel García Márquez,” from his collection of essays entitled Imaginary Homelands) as a village worldview, which Rushdie identifies in the magical realist fiction of Gabriel García Márquez. Like García Márquez, and to a lesser degree Rushdie himself, Mda is trying to reconcile the modern and premodern attributes of the cultural milieu he is describing. Mda has commented on his admiration for García Márquez while pointing out that behind the Latin American development of magical realism—a mode of narration that naturalizes the supernatural—lies a strong African influence derived from the legacy of slavery. In Ways of
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ZAKES MDA tions for ordinary black South Africans throughout the era of apartheid.
these funerals he hears the multiple, gruesome stories of the many “casualties of the war that is raging in the land” (p. 140). The novel begins with a funeral of a small boy, Noria’s son, but Toloki is unable to ascertain how and why the boy has died. Only later, through his relationship with Noria, does Toloki find out the truth. The five-year-old, Vutha, having been bribed with food and sweets into betraying the plans of the Young Tigers to the hostel dwellers, was killed for being a traitor. The death is all the more painful to Noria, since she is told by the movement that her son was not without guilt and that any criticism of the movement will strengthen the hand of their enemies. Only through her relationship with Toloki is she able to begin to deal with the trauma of this loss. Although Ways of Dying catalogues the atrocities of the times, it does so with an unlikely degree of levity. It is, in its own way, a tragicomedy. Toloki is a rather ludicrous figure, an eccentric ascetic who models himself on the followers of the South Asian religious sect called aghori sadhu, yet he wears a theatrical costume and dines on Swiss rolls with green onions. The novel is as full of humor as it is of violence. Often the two are mixed in uncomfortable ways. It is never clear exactly how much of a contribution Toloki makes to the mourning process or if the money he receives for mourning is remuneration or charity. At several points in the novel his own delusions of grandeur come face-to-face with other characters’ perceptions of him as a smelly beggar. “Mourning” as a concept in this novel, in fact, suggests less genuine grief or lament, the psychological processing of trauma, as it does a “coming to terms,” a pragmatic response to an extraordinary world. Humor is the mechanism by which Mda’s optimism makes itself felt. Thus, Toloki describes a funeral he mourned at where a “naughty joke” about the deceased led the four funeral processions present at the time to burst into irrepressible laughter. He rounds off the story with the comment: “In our language there is a proverb which says that the greatest death is laughter.” To this Noria replies, “You see! I was right, Toloki, when I said that you knew how to live” (p. 168). Life, death, and
The novel’s main concern, however, is with the violent realities of the 1990–1994 transition. This was an enormously difficult time for the country but especially for black communities. Three main political groupings can be identified in the novel that parallel the main political players in the real South Africa. The first is a white apartheid-era government, along with the racist police who have kept the government in power. The second is the dominant force of opposition to apartheid, referred to in the novel as “the movement”: broadly this corresponds to the ANC, but it is composed of different elements, including the Young Tigers (a reference to the young leaders of resistance against apartheid known as “young lions”) and grassroots community leadership in the form of “street committees.” The third is the figure of the “tribal chief” and his supporters, who are referred to as the “hostel dwellers”: this grouping is a thinly veiled reference to Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi and his Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), a militant Zulu nationalist party covertly supported by the ruling South African government in order to curb the power of the ANC. At the time, negotiations for a new dispensation were in place between these blocks, but it was still uncertain how successful they would be, since the ruling government and the IFP were working in collusion to thwart the progress of democracy that would see the ANC win the elections by a huge majority. In the novel, again as it was in South African reality, the period of transition is characterized by very high levels of violence. It has been estimated that around fifteen thousand people died from political violence in South Africa over the four-year period of transition, and in its very title, Ways of Dying signals that it will be concerned with that situation, which was unfolding in the country as Mda wrote the novel. Toloki, the novel’s protagonist, is a professional mourner, possibly the first of his kind (although in Cion, Mda’s 2007 “sequel” to Ways of Dying, he realizes that in fact this is a very ancient profession). He survives from the tips and retainers he makes by mourning at funerals, and at
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ZAKES MDA laughter are bound up with one another in Mda’s humorous and humane view of the future. She Plays with the Darkness was published in the same year as Ways of Dying, but it is clear from Mda’s interviews and from the dates of events in the novel itself that its composition occurred after Ways of Dying. Considering that by 1995 Mda had left Lesotho, a place of exile, forever behind him, in one sense it is strange that a novel wholly about Lesotho should be written after one set in South Africa. However, the many years he spent in Lesotho, and especially the six months he spent in the small mountain village of Sehonghong gathering data for his PhD, clearly left him with a wealth of memories that he draws upon in this novel. Many of the anthropological insights he attained during this fieldwork, detailed in his 1993 monograph, When People Play People, have found their ways into this interesting and neglected novel. These features include the kgotla, in which the men of the community gather to resolve a dispute (reminiscent in some ways of the courts described in Chinua Achebe’s 1959 novel, Things Fall Apart); representations of various dances and rituals; a folkloric perspective, in which certain men destroy their enemies with lightning or in which rituals lead to love or harm; and also an emphasis (especially through the character called Mother-of-Twins) on development itself—education, the construction of roads and dams, and better farming techniques. Clearly, the novel allows Mda to bring together his academic and practitioner’s interest in theater for development and his love of creative writing. But while She Plays with the Darkness embraces anthropological perspectives, it is equally committed to supplying the historical background that will enable readers to better understand Lesotho politics and society. Chapter titles like “The Coup 1970,” “The Coup 1986,” and “The Coup 1994” make explicit Lesotho’s troubled history and Mda’s commitment to engaging with it in this novel. The omniscient narrator of the novel often supplies historical background to the successive crises that afflict the country. Characters are directly impacted by events, although it should be noted that the novel explores a split between rural and urban life in
Lesotho, and country-dwellers are often less afflicted by changes of political fortune than are the denizens of Maseru. Nonetheless, the thoughts and discussions of different characters reveal different sides of the situation and allow Mda to reflect on the political future of the country. The novel makes amply clear how Lesotho’s woes can in many cases be directly traced back to the fact that this tiny landlocked country is entirely surrounded by a bullying, racist state, South Africa. Reference is made, for example, to South African tanks sealing off Lesotho’s border to prevent governments from supporting the antiapartheid movement. South African helicopters routinely invade Lesotho airspace. Indeed, the novel hints at the fact that a large portion of South Africa, the Orange Free State, was once under the rule of King Moshoeshoe and hence ought still to be part of Lesotho. The novel ends in 1994 on a distinctly optimistic note, the suggestion being that the arrival of nonracial democracy in South Africa will signal a change in fortunes for Lesotho. Intertwined with the anthropological and historical strands of the novel is a humane and humorous narrative of individual foibles and accomplishments, of love and loss, desire and conflict. The novel’s two central characters are the siblings Dikosha and Radisene. Although they are jokingly referred to as twins, these characters could not be more dissimilar. Dikosha, like Toloki, is something of a hermit. Forbidden from being schooled because of her gender, she chooses to withdraw entirely from the life of the village. She prefers to spend time either locked in her hut or secluded in the Cave of Barwa, where she dances in the dark and communes with the spirits of the long-dead San, whose paintings on the walls of the cave are progressively defaced by tourists. Radisene, by contrast, leaves the village at a young age and makes his way into the city, where he becomes fabulously wealthy pretending to be a insurance lawyer, unscrupulously making money out of insurance claims of poor, often illiterate victims. If Radisene has an analogue from Mda’s earlier works, it would be Mr. Mafutha, the fat cat of We Shall Sing for the Fatherland. But Mda portrays Mafutha as a
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ZAKES MDA character to be disdained, whereas in She Plays with the Darkness he remains sympathetic toward Radisene. For example, we learn about Radisene’s unsuccessful relationship with Misti, and the trials and tribulations of his relationship with Tampololo (to whom he loses his virginity) are described in great detail. Ultimately, however, Radisene is punished for his lack of scruples and his arrogance and greed. He is conned by two Nigerian businessmen, who offer him a huge amount of money to help them with an insurance scam. They clear out his bank accounts, and he is left destitute at the novel’s end.
split-time narrative that blurs the boundaries between past and present by showing the recurrence of certain themes, names, and character traits. As it weaves its historical narrative around a contemporary one, however, the novel makes little reference to the years of segregation and apartheid between 1902 and 1994 (which here are referred to as “the Middle Generations,” whose suffering can only be whispered). Mda’s focus in this novel is on the historical tragedy of the Xhosa cattle-killing movement of the 1850s. Mda is himself a Xhosa, born in Eastern Cape. He grew up listening to stories of the teenage prophetess, Nongqawuse, who in 1856, claimed that the slaughter of cattle and the burning of crops would bring about the resurrection of the Xhosa ancestors and a new order would arise in which the invading whites, with whom the Xhosa had been at war since 1789, would be driven into the sea. In the tragedy of the cattle-killing movement, Mda sees a warning about the dangers for rural South Africans of an incautious plunge into modernity.
THE HEART OF REDNESS AND THE MADONNA OF EXCELSIOR
Published in 2000, The Heart of Redness moved Mda’s writing to a new level of success: the novel won the Africa section of the Commonwealth Prize for Fiction and also claimed South Africa’s most prestigious literary prize, the Sunday Times Fiction Award. The novel tells the story of Camagu, who, like Mda, returns to South Africa in 1994 after thirty years in exile. He has a PhD in communications and development, but cronyism and nepotism among the new ruling black elite prevent him from finding a job. He finds banks unwilling to lend him money to start his own business. Worn out by a teaching job, frustrated with the paths down which South Africa’s young democracy is being taken, Camagu decides to return to America. On the eve of his departure, however, he sets off to the Eastern Cape in pursuit of a beautiful woman he has seen singing at a wake. He ends up settling in the beautiful, remote, poor village of Qolorha, where most of the action of the novel takes place. This revolves around his relationships with two local women, his involvement in a long-standing feud between two groups of villagers—the “Believers” and the “Unbelievers”—and questions of how the village should best relieve its poverty by exploiting the natural beauty of the region. In Ways of Dying, Mda related the past to the present through extensive use of the flashback technique. By contrast, The Heart of Redness is a
The Xhosa people at the time of the millennialist cattle-killing movement split into two camps: those who believed in Nongqawuse’s prophecies and followed her instructions (the “Believers”) and those who did not (the “Unbelievers”). Mda represents the conflict between these groups as a family feud dating from the death of Xikixa, killed by the British, who boiled his head in order to take it home as a souvenir. It is suggested that the fact that Xikixa never received the proper burial rites is responsible for the turmoil that follows. Xikixa’s sons, Twin and Twin-Twin, quarrel over Nongqawuse’s prophecies: Twin-Twin is sure that the movement will lead to the destruction of the Xhosa people; Twin is a believer, who maintains that the only reason that the prophecies will not come true is because unbelievers like Twin-Twin refuse to kill their cattle and burn their crops. Mda’s position with regard to these camps is ambivalent. On the one hand, he is a romantic who once told the interviewer Maureen Isaacson that “moved by the vision of a better world coming, [he] would have embraced this vision in the face of the colonialistic swoop on the lands” (p. 19). On the other
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ZAKES MDA hand, he is well aware that the movement was ultimately responsible for starvation and the collapse of Xhosa resistance to British imperialism. Out of this ambivalence comes the novel’s message to its contemporary readers. For while it is impossible for Mda to get wholeheartedly behind Nongqawuse’s prophecies, he sympathizes with their romantic, anti-imperialistic politics and is able to transfer them to the postapartheid context.
trader who has been skeptical of the project throughout, arrives with a court order forbidding surveying and declaring the region a national heritage site on the basis of its history. As the Believing Zim puts it, Nongqawuse has in fact saved the village. Instead of the gambling complex, different, more culture- and environment-friendly ways of attracting tourists are now explored. A cooperative venture organized by Camagu develops a holiday camp and makes clothes and beadwork in the traditional Xhosa style. Dalton sets up a different cooperative, which runs a cultural village for the interest of tourists. Where in the nineteenth century, the Believers were responsible for the destruction of the Xhosa, at the end of the twentieth century, they are responsible for its salvation from the hands of greedy developers, corrupt politicians, and naive believers in progress. The Madonna of Excelsior, published in 2002, is similar to The Heart of Redness in that both are set in small communities, and both exhibit a powerful interest in the legacy of the past. But The Madonna of Excelsior is unusual in that a large proportion of the novel takes place under apartheid, and because Mda’s gaze is directed for the first time toward Afrikaners. In the novel’s fascination with interracial sex, with the white male desire for black women, and with the unequal ways this desire plays itself out, The Madonna of Excelsior returns to the themes of one of Mda’s earliest plays, Dead End. The novel is very different from the play, however, in that it is based on actual historical events—the trial in 1971 of nineteen citizens of the small town of Excelsior, charged with contravening the country’s Immorality Act, which criminalized sex between black and white. It is also able, as the play is not, to provide detailed psychological explorations of the motives of various participants and to place the events of 1971 in a historical context that ends in 2000 with the country under a very different political dispensation, and with many former antagonists having been reconciled.
The key issue facing the people of the present-day Qolorha in the novel is a developmental one. The natural beauty of the village and the dress, food, dances, and traditions of the local people are clearly of interest to potential tourists and outsiders. A plan is in place to develop a hotel and casino in the area, along the lines, presumably, of the real-life Wild Coast Sun farther up the coast. This plan is supported by the group of villagers who identify themselves as Unbelievers, led by Bhonco, a descendent of Twin-Twin. Unbelief is a shifting concept as far as this group is concerned, but it centers on an insistence on the value of modernity and the need for “civilization” to arrive in Qolorha, without regard for maintaining tradition or local customs. The Believers, by contrast, led by Zim, a descendent of Twin, insist on the ecological and cultural merit of the region and are wary of the consequences of the type of development that is being proposed—they especially worry about the resort’s environmental impact and the fact that most of the profit of the venture is unlikely to make it into local hands. Camagu is drawn into the struggle. Initially he is attracted to Xoliswa Ximiya, Bhonco’s daughter, who is the headmistress of the local school and is associated with the Unbelievers. But he finds himself unwittingly drawn to the nondescript Qukezwa, Zim’s daughter, who exerts a powerful, almost magical, force over him. Through Qukezwa he comes to learn the value of the indigenous flora as well as the history and traditions of the region. The conflict between Believers and Unbelievers comes to a head when the local chief, who stands to benefit personally, decides in favor of the development. Surveyors begin to plan the development on the very site where Nongqawuse used to live. Just in time, John Dalton, the local
The Immorality Act, passed in 1950, shortly after the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, was one of South Africa’s most invasive, controversial, and repugnant apartheid-era laws. The
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ZAKES MDA motivation for extending the powers of the police into the intimate realm of personal sexual relationships, as The Madonna of Excelsior makes clear, was an obsession with racial purity on the part of the white lawmakers and a concomitant horror of mixed-race offspring. The problems with imposing such a law, of course, were many. Miscegenation has been a feature of South African life since the 1650s; it is hard to monitor what happens in private; and it is not always possible to ascertain racial identity with absolute certainty. More importantly, the legislation sought to punish parties equally, when— given that inequality was built into the fabric of South African society—it was unlikely, or at least difficult, to be sure that the sexual encounter was consensual. Mda brings this issue into focus by homing in on relations between white male and black female, by showing how questions of consent would be submerged in court by a fixation with race, and by suggesting that in many cases what happened was rape—either by direct physical force or by economic coercion. The tragedy of rape was in these cases compounded by the fact that the victims were then imprisoned and punished by the state. The Madonna of Excelsior deals with these issues with Mda’s characteristic humanism and narrative compactness. A group of local black women are sleeping with white men for money. Niki, the novel’s protagonist, gets caught up in this circle. She is raped by Johannes Smit, and, motivated by a grudge against his wife, sleeps with Stephanus Cronje. Niki conceives by Cronje and gives birth to a girl, Popi. The police are alerted to the number of mixed-race children in the area and start making arrests. The case is eventually dropped, but not before the cruel absurdities of the situation are broadcast to the world. The narrative then shifts forward to 1984, describing the conditions in the town during the worst period of apartheid. Popi becomes politicized after she is badly beaten and left for dead by the police. Her brother, Viliki, joins the armies of liberation and helps smuggle freedom fighters across the border to Lesotho. Tjaart Cronje, Popi’s white half-brother, joins the state army defending apartheid. But the novel does not dwell
on these violent, polarized conditions at the height of the repression. Its final third is set in Excelsior after the end of apartheid. Viliki becomes the town’s first black mayor; Popi is a town councillor, as is her half-brother Tjaart. Even more than he did in The Heart of Redness, Mda in this novel broaches developmental issues characteristic of the postapartheid period: the expansion of public services, housing, and utilities; the relationships between political parties representing very different constituencies; and the creation and support of new business opportunities. The novel ends on a distinctly optimistic note, with burgeoning friendship between Viliki and his erstwhile oppressor, Adam de Vries; between Niki and her rapist Johannes Smit; and between Popi and her half-brother, Tjaart.
THE WHALE CALLER AND CION
The Whale Caller, published in 2005, reflects a movement away from the themes of development, change, and resistance that characterized Mda’s earlier works. The protagonist of the novel, the eponymous Whale Caller, resembles the Toloki of Ways of Dying in many ways: he wears a tuxedo costume, participates in eccentric rituals, is something of an ascetic, and has very particular attachments to certain foodstuffs. Like Toloki, the Whale Caller is a reluctant romantic, and the novel is in fact a love story with a difference, namely that it explores a love triangle between the Whale Caller, a woman named Saluni—and a whale. The Whale Caller initially lives alone, confides his thoughts to a rock rabbit called Mr. Yodd, and lives for the return of his beloved, Sharisha, a southern right whale with whom he communes by blowing on a horn made from seaweed. Saluni’s presence in his life changes his solitary ways, but she soon becomes jealous of the affection he exhibits for the whale—affection that, in magical realist fashion, includes a series of sexual encounters between man and whale. After a particularly bad fight with Saluni, the Whale Caller decides to blow his horn until he
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ZAKES MDA collapses and drowns. Sharisha hears the horn and inadvertently beaches herself while coming to his aid. She cannot be moved off the beach, and rescuers are unable to save her. A short time later, Saluni, too, dies in a bizarre fashion, stoned to death by the twins whose singing she loved so much. The novel ends on a distinctly tragic note with the bereft Whale Caller capable only of walking “from town to town flogging himself with shame and wearing a sandwich board that announces to everyone: I am the Hermanus Penitent” (p. 230).
time about non–South African places and peoples. The novel has been billed as a sequel to Ways of Dying, because its protagonist is none other than Toloki himself. One telling sign of the new narrative direction taken by Mda in this novel is that for the first time he uses the first-person-singular narrative voice. Ways of Dying and The Madonna of Excelsior experimented with the first-person plural in order to generate a sense of communality or orality, and Mda’s other novels have all been narrated in the third person. In Cion, however, Toloki’s thoughts are directly available to the reader, and the action of the novel is mediated through his perspective.
The novel’s tragic, magical realist, and romantic aspects do not mean that it is not also in some respects political, and even satirical. The “rainbow people” of South Africa are described as “walking in a precarious dream that may explode into a nightmare without too much warning” (p. 18). Contrasts between the wealth of the tourists who visit the seaside town of Hermanus and the poverty of some of its inhabitants are repeatedly invoked. “Black empowerment” is revealed to be little more than the enrichment of elites and a small middle class (p. 86), and politicians are roundly mocked. Religion is heavily satirized, especially those elements of Christianity that are homophobic and sexist. But where, for example, Toloki was socialized and politicized by Noria, or where Camagu was educated about the need to respect certain traditions, the Whale Caller undergoes no such induction into the needs of the community, and he remains an outsider to the end. The Whale Caller marks a shift in novelistic register for Mda—away from the societal and the political and toward the personal and mystical.
This shift in perspective makes available some new narrative resources, but it also creates problems for Mda. One of the attractive features of the Toloki of Ways of Dying was his eccentric naïveté. The Toloki of Cion is far more ironic and sophisticated, and indeed he provides a running commentary on his maker, Mda himself, who is referred to as “the sciologist.” The playful, knowing tone of Cion gives an engaging, playful quality to the prose, but at the same time the oral contexts that were so important to Ways of Dying are lost. The many episodes and stories of the earlier novel came either from the rumor and gossip of the village voice or from the stories of death told at funerals. Both of these sources of stories are unavailable in Cion. Toloki no longer attends funerals; instead he learns the stories of the past from imaging the fate of those buried in cemeteries or even from piecing their stories together in archives. Implausibly, he has made “reasonable fortune” from mourning deaths in South Africa—which he now finds “boring”— and so he is now traveling the world, mourning “for the joy of it” (p. 251). Hence he finds himself in Ohio and discovers that in some ways it is not all that different from South Africa. Although in some respects Cion marks a turning point in Mda’s oeuvre, in other respects it repeats and develops key themes from previous novels. Still present is the satire of politics— sometimes casual, sometimes biting—transferred to the American context. The love relation between Toloki and Orpah replicates that of Toloki and Noria, Camagu and Qukezwa, or the
It is possible that this shift is linked to Mda’s move to the United States in 2002 on a year’s appointment as visiting associate professor of African literature, and then his decision to stay on as professor in the Department of English, at Ohio University. Mda had been a student at the same university in the early 1980s, and as he tells Elly Williams, he was struck at that time both by the poverty that he saw and by the richly suggestive history of the region. His 2007 novel, Cion, is a bold attempt to draw together elements of his previous novels while writing for the first
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ZAKES MDA Whale Caller and Saluni. Like most of Mda’s previous novels, Cion exhibits a fascination with art—drawing, music, and most importantly, quilting—and a desire to link artistic enterprise with healing and reconciliation. While Toloki does very little actual mourning in Cion, as a practice of memorializing, processing trauma, and respecting the past the idea of mourning is still strongly valorized. Finally, in Cion, as in The Heart of Redness, Mda engages with history in ways that reveal its interrelation with the present.
others to forge better futures for themselves and their communities. Often it is through the mediating influence of aesthetic endeavors that such realizations are manifest. Aesthetics is not an abstract concept for Mda; it finds its expression through specific practices: drawing, singing, sculpting, painting, sewing. Each time such practices are represented in his novels, broader psychological and cultural issues rise to the surface, provoking processes of memory, healing, and reconciliation for his characters. Mda’s writing does the same for his readers.
The specific history that interests Mda in this novel is that of the “WIN” people of this area of Ohio, mixed-race descendents of whites, Indians, and negroes (Williams, p. 78). The white part of the mix came from a large migration of Irish into the area; the Native American components were the Shawnee and Cherokee who originally peopled the land; the “negro” elements came from slaves escaping bondage in the South via the Underground Railroad to Canada. Through his interest in the tradition of quilt-making, Toloki discovers the stories of the ancestors of the family he is staying with, slaves who fled northward in the early nineteenth century. Sewn onto the quilts used by slaves were elaborate, sometimes metaphorical descriptions of possible routes of escape. Two such quilts are still in the possession of the family, and it is the stories of the slaves who owned them, Nicodemus and Abednego, along with those of a number of other colorful characters, that Mda weaves into his narrative exploration of contemporary America. Cion appears to represent a major shift in Mda’s writing. For the first time, he is writing about his new home, the United States. Nonetheless, many of the features that have made him such an original and interesting writer persist. He retains an idiosyncratic and unconventional writing style that is humorous to the point of being zany. Concealed beneath the humor and the eccentricity is a deep commitment to his characters, and through them, to humankind as a whole. Most notably, this humanism reveals itself in a commitment to historicity and to the idea that change is possible through determination and organization. Mda’s particular gift is to create characters who are outsiders yet who work with
Selected Bibliography WORKS OF ZAKES MDA PLAYS, POETRY,
AND
OTHER WORKS
We Shall Sing for the Fatherland and Other Plays. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1980. Bits of Debris: The Poetry of Zakes Mda. Maseru, Lesotho: Thapama Books, 1986. The Plays of Zakes Mda. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1990. And the Girls in Their Sunday Dresses: Four Works. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1993. When People Play People: Development Communication Through Theatre. London: Zed Books, 1993. Fools, Bells, and the Habit of Eating: Three Satires. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2002.
NOVELS Ways of Dying. Cape Town: Oxford University Press Southern Africa, 1995. She Plays with the Darkness. Florida Hills, South Africa: Vivlia, 1995. The Heart of Redness. Cape Town: Oxford University Press Southern Africa, 2000. The Madonna of Excelsior. Cape Town: Oxford University Press Southern Africa, 2002. The Whale Caller. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. Cion. New York: Picador, 2007.
CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Attwell, Davi., Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History. Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2005.
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ZAKES MDA Van der Vlies, Andrew. South African Textual Cultures: White, Black, Read All Over. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2007.
Barnard, Rita. Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Gorak, Jan. “Nothing to Root For: Zakes Mda and South African Resistance Theatre.” Theatre Journal 41, no. 4:478–491 (1989). Ndebele, Njabulo. South African Literature and Culture: Rediscovery of the Ordinary. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994. Samuelson, Meg. Remembering the Nation, Disremembering Women? Stories of the South African Transition. Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2007.
INTERVIEWS Isaacson, Maureen. “The Free State Madonnas Prevail in Mda’s New Novel.” Sunday Independent, September 22, 2002. Kachuba, John B. “An Interview with Zakes Mda.” Tin House, no. 20 (2004), (http://www.tinhouse.com). Williams, Elly. “An Interview with Zakes Mda.” Missouri Review 28, no. 2:62–79 (2005).
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JOHN MONTAGUE (1929—)
Maureen C. Manier MODERN IMMIGRANT TALES most often end in the country of destination. But for the poet John Montague, his personal and literary journey has remained forever unfinished as he has traveled throughout his life from the United States, the country of his birth, to Ireland, his family’s native land, to France, the home he has often chosen. His sense of physical alienation is compounded by the reality of familial abandonment. The unplanned, unwanted product of a violently disintegrating marriage, he was sent from the United States at the age of four to live with his paternal maiden aunts in Ireland. Plucked from the chaotic streets of Depressionera Brooklyn and dropped into the rural reality of County Tyrone, Montague began the process of what he writes about in perhaps his best-known work, The Rough Field (1972): “with all my circling a failure to return” (p. 11). To follow, even dissect that never-ending, colorfully complicated journey is to come to know one of Ireland’s most prominent modern poets.
Montague home was located, left Ireland in 1925 to work at his brother’s establishment. He left behind his wife, Mary Carney Montague, and two sons, with the promise to send for them when he had a job and a home. Reluctantly, Mary Montague traveled to New York three years later with her sons. She was miserable from the day she arrived: Montague describes his mother’s memories of America in “The Silver Flask” as “a muddy cup she refused to drink.” Into this most unhappy situation, John Montague was born on February 28, 1929, at St. Catherine’s Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, the third son of James and Mary. He spent his early years playing with his brothers outside of the tenement building in which they lived in Brooklyn. Images and memories from those experiences would later appear in his poetry and short stories. The onset of the Depression, the death of his Uncle John, and the continuing turmoil of the Montague marriage prompted the decision to return the Montague boys to Ireland—the two eldest delivered to their maternal grandmother and John sent to live with his paternal aunts Brigid and Freda in his grandfather’s home in Garvaghey, County Tyrone. From New York to a farm on the edge of the Clogher Valley in County Tyrone was definitely a step backward in time for Montague, who was soon trained by his kind aunts in the ways of a normal Ulster farm child. From the beginning, however, he was struck by the difference between what his grandfather’s house was now and what it must once have been. He was gradually learning that his family story was one full of secrets and mystery.
John Montague’s story began, as most do, before his birth when his father, James, left Ireland to join his brother, John, in Brooklyn. Montague’s father and uncle were the sons of John Montague, who had been named a justice of the peace by Queen Victoria. The senior John Montague combined his justice responsibilities with being a schoolmaster, farmer, postmaster, and director of several firms. His position and diligence brought good fortune to the family, only to have those fortunes turn with the onset of the Irish civil war. Eventually the oldest Montague son, John, left Ireland to run a speakeasy in New York. James, having become involved in the post-1916 turbulent national scene, particularly complicated in the border between North and South where the
When Mary Montague returned to Ireland herself three years later she chose to live in her own family home with her elder sons, only visit-
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JOHN MONTAGUE ing John once a year and sending for him to spend occasional holidays with her and his brothers. Other than the unlikely reason to abide by James Montague’s wishes, John Montague never knew why his mother made the choice not to raise her youngest son. As Montague pondered this time later, he wrote, “Every time I stir a genealogical stone a wild ambiguity appears.” Although often haunted by this decision to isolate him from his immediate family, Montague also recognized that time with his aunts as his first acquaintance with stability. Writing in his essay collection The Figure in the Cave (1989), he observes, “I think of those years, four to eleven, as a blessing, a healing.” He also writes about it in his poem “A Flowering Absence.”
were captured in the way she described his difficult breech birth, a description he later quoted in his poem “The Locket.” Sing a last song for the lady who has gone, fertile source of guilt and pain. The worst birth in the annals of Brooklyn, that was my cue to come on, my first claim to fame. (Collected Poems, p. 182)
Finding this letter was a turning point for Montague. Reading those few pages took him from the safety of the life he had found with his aunts and thrust him back to the uncertainty and fear of the toddler had felt when he was placed on a boat with two frightened older brothers to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Notable to the development of his poetic voice, the discovery of the letter from his uncle and the return of his mother to Ireland contributed to the onset of Montague’s verbal stammer, a stammer that literally communicates the complicated maze of emotions and perspectives that he deals with throughout his work. As he writes in The Figure in the Cave, “I have no doubt that the separation from my mother, whatever the reasons for the decision, is at the centre of my emotional life, affecting my relationships with women, shadowing my powers of speech: my stammer broke out for the first time after she returned to Ireland” (p. 17). Montague describes this lifelong struggle of dealing with his family’s story: “There was too much of a backlog of confusion for an early start: Brooklyn-born, Tyrone-reared, Dublin-educated, constituted a tangle, a turmoil of contradictory allegiance it would take a lifetime to unravel” (p. 8). Montague’s feelings for his father, whom he never really had a chance to know, are equally confusing if less emotionally devastating. His father did not return to County Tyrone until 1952, when Montague was a grown man of twentythree. James Montague died only seven years later in 1959. His presence lives in Montague’s work as a tragic figure, a recipient of his son’s pity rather than of his anger.
So I found myself shipped back to his home, in an older country, transported to a previous century, where his sisters restored me, natural love flowering around me. (Collected Poems, p. 180)
In his 1999 collection Smashing the Piano, Montague reflects upon a life of seventy-five-plus years sustained by the love that saved him during that most critical time. Still nourished by her care and love, which never seems to fail, not only through ceaseless prayer but like an attendant angel ѧ (“Still Life, with Aunt Brigid,” p. 17)
Content in his life with his aunts, Montague’s view of his world was disrupted when he discovered a letter written by his late uncle and namesake to his sisters, John’s aunts. Although devastated by its contents, the letter also gave definition to the conflicting feelings Montague had long harbored. On this fateful Sunday, Montague had tricked his aunts into allowing him to stay in the house while they went to Sunday Mass so that he could retrieve a book left behind by his cousin. Instead, he uncovered letters from his Uncle John Montague and learned not only that he was the product of a temporary truce between Mary and James Montague but that his mother’s own conflicting feelings about her young son
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JOHN MONTAGUE degrees. During this time Montague singlemindedly pursued his career and a style of poetry that Honor O'Connor describes as matching “his way of seeing the world and himself in that world” (Well Dreams, p. 29).
My father, the least happy man I have known. His face retained the pallor of those who work underground: the lost years in Brooklyn listening to a subway shudder the earth.
Montague did not belong to the literary “clique” at University College Dublin, which seemed an intentional move on his part. Throughout his career he expressed discomfort and cynicism toward groups he viewed as smug, and he certainly saw the student literary group at UCD that way. He also later described Dublin at this time as a “stagnant fen,” ripe with a bitterness he was glad to evade.
(“The Cage,” Collected Poems, p. 43)
In his later years, Montague revisited his feelings about his father in a poem titled “Sunny Jim,” which portends of what a final meeting, beyond this life, might hold for them. May we sing together someday, Sunny Jim, over what you might still call the final shoot-out: for me, saving your absence, a healing agreement.
In talking about his arrival in Dublin, Montague explains that being from the North, he had led a very different life from that of his southern contemporaries, many of them belonging to the “first middle class of the Irish Free State, already affiliated by birth to one or other of the major parties, Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil.” (The Figure in the Cave, p. 6). As he scoffs, “It could have been Tweedledee or Tweedledum as far as I was concerned,” so removed did Montague feel at this time from the Unionist politics of his classmates. More than their political preoccupation, the self-described “marooned northerner” was mystified by his classmates’ negative gloom and sought opportunities to avoid it in his study and, soon, in his travels.
(Smashing the Piano, p. 78)
Fortunately for Montague, the academic talents he first demonstrated in the country school he attended in Tyrone earned him a scholarship to attend and board at St. Patrick’s College in County Armagh from age twelve to age seventeen. This was a tremendously formative period as Montague was introduced to the rigors of academics and religion, the realities of war, and the confusion of puberty. It was a time when he felt his own alienation deeply but also became aware of his powers of resilience and began to ask the questions he would spend a lifetime exploring. Montague also learned that his intellectual and artistic talents could bring him notice and reward. The teacher who influenced him most during this time was Sean O'Boyle, one of the country’s leading experts on Ulster folk song and Irish poetry. From O'Boyle, Montague learned the tradition of Irish poetry and began to explore his own voice. The music O'Boyle introduced to Montague during this time dramatically affected the lyrical poetry for which he would become known. His academic prowess drove Montague down a road of impressive pursuits. He received a scholarship to attend University College Dublin, where he studied English and history and eventually earned both undergraduate and graduate
Although immediately successful in the academic arena, Montague was at times overwhelmed by how much his new life offered, in spite of being on the outside looking in. “At long last I might find some pleasure, some adventure, and although I had found few companions at the university in my classes, there was the anonymity of the city to lose myself in, slaking my thirst for romance in the artificial light of dance halls and cinemas” (The Figure in the Cave, p. 5). Sheltered by his aunts and by the teachers and priests at St. Patrick’s, Montague was ready for the freedom Dublin brought him, with so many choices for his consideration. He wrote of those feelings in his second poem, “Je vais dévoiler les mystères,” published in the UCD student magazine.
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JOHN MONTAGUE In his memoir The Pear Is Ripe, Montague writes about this period, admitting to being a serial adulterer and to being particularly susceptible to and influenced by his emotionally charged, marijuana-fueled experiences in Berkeley. He was publishing regularly and received some critical notice. But this was also a time of upheaval for him as he sought to find professional and perso
