Each of the guests was moved by the beauty of the scene - the art of Fontane

So now I will ignore everything I wrote yesterday and assume that we all actively enjoy fiction set in times and places when and where we not understand every detail; that we even prefer fiction full of things we – I – did not know, by itself one reason to read Theodor Fontane.

The title character of Schach von Wuthenow (1883) is a cavalry officer, a perfect gentleman, a Prussian ideal.  He is courting a woman older than himself, a great beauty, or perhaps her daughter, who lost her beauty to smallpox, although people still remember the effect she made at her debut.  The confusion of the situation causes trouble.  Prussia is small enough at this point, 1806 – this is real historical fiction – that the romantic problems of a cavalry officer are of interest to the King, who is a minor character.

Schach is one of those stories where everyone gets what they want, but in a horribly ironic way, like a perverse genie has given them a wish.  As Fontane novels go, it gets quite exciting near the end.  A nasty shocker.

Here the cavalry officers watch a sunset:

Each of the guests was moved by the beauty of the scene.  But the most beautiful sight was the numerous swans which, as everybody was looking up to the evening sky, were approaching in a long single file from the direction of Charlottenburg Park.  Other swans had already taken up a forward position.  It was obvious that the entire flotilla must have been attracted by something to have come so close to the villa, for as soon as they were level with it, they wheeled around military fashion to form an extension of the front line of those which, still and motionless with bills buried in their feathers, were riding at anchor, as it were.  Only the reeds were gently swaying behind their backs.  A long time went by in this way.  (p. 57)

Jenny Treibel (1892) is a dissection of Berlin class differences.  Tiny class differences.  The title character is a grocer’s daughter who almost married a professor but instead jumped to a merchant of higher distinction.  Can she possibly allow her weak-spined son to marry that professor’s daughter?  “’One might be able to get into a ducal family, but not into a bourgeois family,’” the professor says (289).

Terms as crude as upper or middle class are wholly inadequate.  Even geography matters – the Berlin merchant outranks the Hamburg merchant, who are such snobs because their business is international, so that the Hamburger “really believes seriously that we can’t distinguish between sole and turbot here, and is always using the English for lobster, and treats curry powder and soy sauce as the utmost secrets…” (241).  That is the title character, who can be awfully funny, not always intentionally.

The first half of the novel covers one day – a dinner party and another social gathering.  The next quarter is occupied with another party, a picnic, a good place for the marriage proposal that spurs such plot as the novel has.  The last chapter is a party scene, too, at a wedding.  Fontane is like Proust, here.  Most human activity worth documenting takes place at parties, or just before, or just after.

More Jenny Treibel – she is a married woman with adult children, and has just told the professor that although her life is wonderful of course she should have married him:

Schmidt nodded in agreement and then uttered a simple “Oh, Jenny…” with a tone in which he sought to express all the pain of a misspent life.  Which he did succeed in doing.  He listened to the sound of it and quietly congratulated himself that he had played his little part so well.  Jenny, despite all her cleverness, was still vain enough to believe in the “oh” of her former admirer.  (239)

Little insights, little ironies, little beauties.  And some bigger ones, too, but much of the art of Fontane is in moments like this one.

"He can pick it up like a macaroni" - some novels of Theodor Fontane that are harder sells

Theodor Fontane was a Prussian of French descent who could see his world – it classes and follies – from just a little bit outside of it.  He pulled advanced French fictional techniques (in shorthand, Flaubert) into German, almost alone as far as I can tell.  He was a journalist who did not turn to fiction until he was almost sixty.  He nevertheless had a twenty-year career as a fiction writer, long enough to have identifiable stages.

The esthetically unappealing but useful German Library series includes two novels in Short Novels and Other Writings (1981), one early, one late, so to speak, Schach von Wuthenow (1883, tr. E. M. Valk) and Jenny Treibel (1892, tr. Krishna Winston).  Both novels are full fine insights into the characters, beautiful little touches, descriptive and psychological, and a great sense of how the people live and act within the constraints – tight constraints – of their world.

Boy, are they dense with information.  A tough sell, I fear.  I have seen plenty of good readers have trouble with Effi Briest (1895), and these are both denser.  Fontane does much of his work with small talk, pages of it, so they are both denser yet often in a given moment quite trivial, especially when I have only a light acquaintance with foreign policy problems of Napoleonic Berlin, which is how Schach begins.  “’We may be equal to dealing with the Poles perhaps, but the Hanoverians are a fastidious breed’” (p. 4), etc. etc. etc.  The stories of real interest in both novels are marriage stories, love affairs.

Or look at the long, very German passage in Jenny Treibel in which a young woman and her beloved housekeeper discuss the astringent properties of pears.  Papa prefers the peel, core, stem, and all – this is with cooked pears:

“He can pick it up like a macaroni and hold it up and eat it all up from the bottom…  He really is a peculiar man…”

“Yes, that he is!”  (282, ellipses in original)

A full page on pears, before the conversation turns to the woman’s impending – or now maybe not – marriage, all of this while she is grating stale rolls for a bread pudding.

Or look at the title of Schach von Wuthenow.  The translator changes it to A Man of Honor, which is fits the story, at least.  Cavalry Captain von Schach’s ancestral estate is in Wuthenow.  The chapter where, in emotional turmoil, he revisits his old home and messes about in a boat is a lovely thing.  But for the reader without German, that title is too much of a mouthful.

I’m trying to get the negatives out of the way in this post.  In Jenny Treibel, so little happens – a series of parties – that the idea of plot moves towards abstraction.  A Man of Honor is, for Fontane, almost a thriller, so much happens, even a sex scene.  See if you can spot it:

Oh, these were the words her heart had been yearning for, whereas it had sought to don the armor of defiance.

And now she was listening to them in a daze of silent and blissful abandon.



The clock in the room struck nine and was answered by the church clock outside.  Victoire, who had been keeping count of the strikes, smoother back her hair and stepped up to the window and looked out into the street.  (64)

It is deliberately missable, even given the constraints on what can be described in a novel of the time, given later events in the story meant to have readers paging backwards – “Wait, when did that happen – oh.”

The terrible prose of the first line should be assigned to Victoire, not the narrator; unused to sexual attention, she has to resort to clichés she has picked up from a book.  That kind of subtlety is artful, but a hard sell.

Often I get up in the middle of the night and stop all the clocks - Hofmannsthal's melancholy Mozartish Cavalier of the Rose

The Cavalier of the Rose (1911), better known as Der Rosenkavalier, was written by Hugo von Hofmannsthal as a libretto.  Strauss had wanted to follow the intense Salome (1905) with something more light and fun and Mozartish.  Instead, working with Hofmannsthal, he did the intense and in many ways quite similar Elektra (1909) as his next opera.  They saved the farcical romantic comedy for next time.  I doubt I would guess, blindfolded, that the music was by the same composer, although the many waltzes might let me guess it was Austrian; I would never guess that the cross-dressing hero and fast-moving physical comedy came from Hofmannsthal, who is admittedly a pretty blank slate, at least not until the great act of renunciation in the last act of the opera.

PRINCESS: There’s many a matter here on earth
nobody could ever believe
did they but hear the story told.
But the one it happens to, that one believes and knows not how…  (Act 3, p. 524)

The princess, the tragic figure of the comedy, begins the play in bed with her young lover, the 17-year-old Octavian, who is so beautiful that everyone he meets, female and male, falls in love with him.  When the grotesque and foolish Baron intrudes on the boudoir, Octavian disguises himself as a female servant.  The Baron is smitten; the comedy is ready to begin – a duel, disguises, pranks, waiters dashing about, like that.  In the next act, Octavian meets his female counterpart Sophia, coincidentally engaged to the vulgar Baron.  There’s the romance.

But wait, didn’t the play begin with Octavian in love with – sleeping with – the Princess?  Didn’t he burst into tears when she suggests that “sooner or later” he will leave her for “one younger and more lovely than I” (427)?  Hofmannsthal includes the necessary frothy, sparkling romantic plot, but he puts this sadder love affair behind it.

PRINCESS:  Time is a strange thing.
While one just lives for the moment, it is nothing.
But then all at once
we feel nothing else but it,
it’s all around us, it’s right inside us,
it trickles away in our faces, it trickles in the mirror,
in my temples it flows away.
And between you and me it is flowing too.
Soundless, as an hour-glass.
Ah Quinquin [Octavian’s nickname]!
Often I hear it flow incessantly.
Often I get up in the middle of the night
and stop all the clocks.  (Act 1, 428-9)

Or as she says earlier, “It’s all a mystery, so much is mysterious” (424).  She is such an unusual character that as beautiful as her part is, she is absent for most of the rest of the opera.  There are hints that she is the Empress of Austria.

Another unusual feature of the libretto is that it only occasionally looks like a libretto, employing choruses and refrains and set-piece arias and so on, although it has all of those at times.  It mostly looks like a play.  The dialogue mostly looks like conversation.  It is highly readable.  Thus, I read it.

Christopher Holme did the version in Selected Plays and Libretti.

For him who is happy as we, be silent and dance! - Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Electra

When Hugo von Hofmannsthal was nineteen, he was widely known as Austria’s greatest living poet.  He brushed against Stefan George’s German circle, which was devoted to pure lyric poetry and private artistic expression.  Somehow this (or that, or the other) led him to abandon the lyric and then fiction – to abandon private art.  See “The Lord Chandos Letter” for details, maybe.

He turned instead to public art, collaborative art, to the stage, co-founding the Salzburg theater festival and most famously writing libretti for Richard Strauss.  Temperamentally, their partnership makes little sense, but that difference in aesthetics and approaches must have been what Hofmannsthal needed.

My taste for Strauss is weak.  I am listening to Elektra (1909) as I write this, and when I am not paying attention it recedes into shrieking backed by strange orchestral sound effects.  “She broke into howls  and threw herself / in her corner” (p. 8).  With attention – well, I would love to see it performed someday.

The libretto – or really the play, first performed in 1903 – is highly readable on its own.  I am looking at Alfred Schwarz’s translation, in Selected Plays and Libretti (Bollingen, 1963).  It is not presented as an original play but as an adaptation of Sophocles, so again, explicitly collaborative.  It is adapted not so much into German as into Freudian.

Electra – in the translation she is Electra – her father is murdered, “driven away, down into his cold pit” (11), by her mother Clytemnestra and her no-good bum of a stepfather.  Her older brother is missing, perhaps dead.  Her younger sister Chrysothemis just wants a normal life.  The closest thing to a love duet is between Electra and her sister:

ELECTRA:  As you struggle against me, I feel what arms
they are.  You could crush whatever you clasp
in your arms.  You could press me, or a man,
against your cool firm breasts with your arms
and one would suffocate!  Everywhere
there is such strength in you!  It flows like cool
pent-up water from the rock.  It streams down
with your hair upon your strong shoulders!

CHRYSOTHEMIS:  Let me go!

The mother, Clytemnestra, is in just one scene, but it is spectacular.  She is superstitious, “completely covered with jewels and charms” (22), terrified of her daughter’s insanity, which she fears is witchcraft, and haunted by guilty nightmares “[s]o that the marrow dissolves in my bones” (29).

As events move towards their inevitable happy ending, the play requires music as much as the opera, something to which Electra can do her “nameless dance”:

ELECTRA:  Be silent and dance.  All must
approach!  Here join behind me!  I bear the burden
of happiness, and I dance before you.
For him who is happy as we, it behooves him to do
only this: to be silent and dance!   (77)

Or maybe this is weirder with no music, Electra dancing only to whatever tormented sounds are in her head.

A horror play no theatre will produce - Frank Wedekind's Lulu plays

More than Henry James’s ghost stories, my Halloween reading was the Lulu plays of Frank Wedekind – The Earth Spirit (1895), Pandora’s Box (1904), and the odd coda Death and the Devil (1905) – which at this distance are still lust-crazed nightmares, climaxing in the murder of much of the cast by Jack the Ripper.  Spring Awakening (1891) is a children’s play by comparison.

That last act of Pandora’s Box must be deeply uncomfortable to see performed.  Merely reading it was unpleasant.  I have not seen the 1929 G. W. Pabst film adaptation, nor have I seen a stage performance, but I assume that anything goes, and the more Expressionist and crazy the production the better, to distract the poor audience from the horror at the heart of the plays.

RODRIGO:  You’ve written a horror play with my fiancee’s calves as the two leading characters and that no theatre will produce.  You crazy fool!  You miserable worm!...  I’ll pollute the whole auditorium with my stink.  (Pandora’s Box, Act One)

That’s about right.  The great struggle in the play is between Lulu, who is a human woman of ordinary intelligence, depth, and character cursed with such strong sex appeal that she becomes a kind of living embodiment of sex to everyone who meets her.  Men compete for her, cheat each other, kill themselves, etc. to possess her.  They all rename her as a primary act of possession – “As you know, I christened her Nelly in our marriage contract” (Erdgeist, Act One).  Three of the four acts of Earth Spirit end with the death of one of her husbands, which is comic but increasingly disturbing.  Pandora’s Box starts high and ends at the end, fulfilling Lulu’s dream of escape:

LULU (as though telling a fairy tale):  Every other night I used to dream I’d fallen into the hands of a sex-murderer.  Come on, give me a kiss.  (Pandora’s Box, Act One)

It’s a George Grosz illustration brought to a simulation of life.

For all of the creeping horror, Wedekind’s humor is pervasive.  Here Rodrigo the trapeze artist is making his escape from Lulu, or at least trying:

RODRIGO:  Besides that, she loves me for myself.  She’s interested in more than just obscenities, unlike you.  She has three children by an American bishop; and all of them show the greatest promise.  The day after tomorrow we’ll be married by the registrar.

LULU:  You have my blessings.  (Pandora’s Box, Act Two)

The irony is that in the previous scene Lulu barely evaded being sold to an Egyptian brothel.  She may be shallow, but it is everyone else who keeps returning to obscenity.

Earth Spirit begins with an animal trainer in front of a circus tent.  Lulu, “dressed in a Pierrot costume,” is silent, carried around like a beast, exhorted not to “dislocate our views.”  But the trainer, armed with a whip and pistol, does not use his weapons on her.  No, he fires into the audience.

I read the Carl Richard Mueller translations, which did their job.

Stefan George's poems - The brief beholding makes me glad

Was it going to be worth reading the poems of Stefan George in translation, I wondered?  Lyric poems in the tradition of Goethe and Heine, known for their singular beauty and innovative use of German; images derived from a semi-private mysticism; translations by a disciple of the poet.  Maybe the last worried me most, for some reason.

But no, everything is fine.  Poems (Pantheon, 1943), translated by Carol North Valhope and Ernst Morwitz, at least, is good, worth reading.  Instructive. There are later volumes by Morwitz, working with other collaborators, that contain more poems (good), but the one I had available was first singularly ugly, an insult to a poet as deeply concerned with the aesthetics of his books as William Morris, and second lacked the German poems (very bad).

The early poems, in German, are exquisite.  Even an ignoramus like me can hear it.

Sieh mein kind ich gehe.
Denn du darfst nicht kennen
Nicht einmal durch nennen
Menschen müh und wehe.

See my child, I leave,
You must not behold,
No, nor yet be told
How men toil and grieve.  (pp. 62-3)

In the second stanza, Morwitz has to bend English for a rhyme (“Over you I gloom”), but that hardly violates the spirit of the poem.  The third stanza ends with a repetition of the first line.  A poem for a child.

George brings French Symbolism into German, and thus in English often sounds like an English Decadent, colorful:

The wasps with scales of golden-green have gone
From folded cups of flowers, and we swerve
Within our boat in widely sweeping curve
Around the isles of leaves in bronze and fawn.  (p. 71, from “Now do not lag in reaching for the book”)

Here he describes a Fra Angelico painting, or really his method:

The gold from holy chalices he took,
For yellow hair, the ripened wheaten stalks,
The blue from women washing at the brook,
The pink from children coloring with chalks.  (p. 41, from “An Angelico”)

The above poems are all from the 1890s.  As George aged he became more of a sage, a prophet, with a “circle” that would issue pronouncements – theater is bad, music is bad, that kind of thing.  Baffling.  His poems take a turn to the abstract and esoteric, some of the ideas embodied, and then disembodied, in the figure of Maximin, a blond boy who died young.  Think Death in Venice, I guess.  I do not understand the more abstract ideas in these later poems, yet to his last book in 1928, George continued to write perfect lyrics, like “Seelied (Seasong),” where the old poet watches a Maxinim-like figure play on the beach while the sun sets:

Mit gliedern blank mit augen klar
Kommt nun ein kind mit goldnem haar,
Es tanzt und singt auf seiner bahn
Und schwindet hinterm grossen kahn.

With naked limbs, with cloudless eye
A goldhaired child now passes by,
It sings and dances as it nears,
Behind the boat it disappears.

I watch it come, I watch it go,
Though never words for it I know,
And never speech for me it had,
The brief beholding makes me glad.  (pp. 234-7)

Reading George in English is also a kind of “brief beholding” of a great poet.

File this one under German Literature Month.

I recognised the signs - The Turn of the Screw is what it absolutely is not

Nothing was more natural than that these things should be the other things that they absolutely were not.  (Ch. 6)

Yesterday I suggested what I called the second-most productive way to read The Turn of the Screw.  The most productive way is to read it as exactly what you want it to be.  If you want ghosts, you can have them.  If you prefer madness, there is definitely that, of several varieties.  Maybe the ghosts drove the governess mad; maybe her sexual hysteria creates the ghosts.

That quotation up above does a lot of good work.  The text is naturally deconstructionist, my favorite example being the long passage in Chapter 13 where the governess explains how the absence of the ghosts proves their presence:

I recognised the signs, the portents – I recognised the moment, the spot.  But they remained unaccompanied and empty, and I continued unmolested; if unmolested one could call a young woman whose sensibility had, in the most extraordinary fashion, not declined but deepened.

Edmund Wilson, when he created his meticulous Freudian exorcism of the story’s ghosts, built his theory in part on a complete reading of Henry James, pulling in evidence from across his writing. Any text became fair game to explain this text.  Why he needed all that for a Freudian reading of, for example, the first time the governess sees the ghosts, atop the house’s towers, I don’t know.  Thoroughness.

I admired them [the towers], had fancies about them, for we could all profit in a degree, especially when they loomed through the dusk, by the grandeur of their actual battlements… (Ch. 3)

Or when the governess thinks that she and the ten-year-old boy are like

some young couple who, on their wedding-journey, at the inn, feel shy in the presence of the waiter.  (Ch. 32)

I reach for just one other story, a recent one, “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896), which is directly about searching through literary texts in search of solutions to imaginary puzzles, or even to real puzzles to which the author has deliberately omitted necessary clues.  Other stories from the same period – “The Way It Came” (1896) and “The Real Right Thing” (1899), for example – pursue the theme.

James appears to be working through not just an aesthetic but a metaphysics of ambiguity, writing stories where the density of signifiers is so thick that real and false clues are indistinguishable.  Readers hack their way through the thicket with the strongest tool they have, their freedom to ignore any detail that gets in the way of moving forward.  Ignoring the frame, or the odder features of the governess’s prose, or the amusing abruptness of the story’s ending, the ending that seems designed to baffle all theories.

As I work on a Jamesian puzzle, is my sensibility deepening, or declining?  Again, though, it is not that the figure in the carpet is not there – it is in an important sense there if I see it – but rather that it is so hard to get anyone else to see it.

We lived in a cloud of music and love and success and private theatricals.  (Ch. 9)

I am not sure why the Turn of the Screw has become the single most famous and most cited James story, but I suppose it is partly because it can be made to do whatever is needed.

jokes perpetrated in higher spirits than ever - the dreadful dreadfulness of The Turn of the Screw

Henry James and his friend Douglas are guests for an extended time at a country house Christmas gathering, the old-timey English kind where ghost stories are told every evening.  James and Douglas collaborate on a hoax, a prank, whereby Douglas tells the guests that he knows a ghost story which is true and has never been told and blah blah blah and makes a great show of sending for the manuscript and so on.  James, who of course wrote the story, eggs everyone on as needed.

“Nobody but me, till now, has ever heard.  It’s quite too horrible.”  This, naturally, was declared by several voices to give the thing the utmost price, and our friend, with quiet art, prepared his triumph by turning his eyes over the rest of us and going on: “It’s beyond everything.  Nothing at all that I know touches it.”

“For sheer terror?” I remember asking.  [See?]

He seemed to say it was not so simple as that; to be really at a loss how to qualify it.  He passed his hand over his eyes, made a little wincing gesture.  “For dreadful – dreadfulness!”

The most dreadful kind of dreadfulness of all, dreadful dreadfulness.  Ghost stories are hilarious.  Delays are introduced to turn the screw of the audience’s tension, thus the title.

The whole thing took indeed more nights than one, but on the first occasion the same lady put another question.  “What is your title?”

“I haven’t one.”

“Oh, I have!” I said.  But Douglas, without heeding me…

James about gives away the game there.  The manuscript, the story follows.  At this point, readers simulate joining the audience, which is now listening to a ghost story written by James that they believe is written by a character in the story, although if they had any sense of literary style they would be deeply suspicious:

But there was everything, for our apprehension, in the lucky fact that no discomfortable legend, no perturbation of scullions, had ever, within anyone’s memory, attached to the kind old place.  (Ch. 6)

I mean, “perturbation of scullions,” it’s like a signature.  Meanwhile, the reader knows full well the whole thing is a fiction created by James but generally pretends that the longer story, in which a deranged governess in an isolated country house has her fun scaring the hell out of a superstitious housekeeper and two bizarrely perfect, demon-haunted children, is true.  “They performed the dizziest feats of arithmetic, soaring quite out of my feeble range, and perpetrated, in higher spirits than ever, geographical and historical jokes” (Ch. 18).  Weird kids.

The text has been picked to pieces in search of clues to solve various puzzles, to prove that the ghost is “real” and the governess crazy or that the governess is merely crazy – surely no one, given this text, thinks her sane.  After this reading, I am mostly convinced that the second-most productive way to read The Turn of the Screw is to work through the ghost story for clues - winks, jokes – that solve the puzzle of the frame story.

they perfectly availed to make what he saw portentous - later Henry James ghosts

Be warned, there’s some scary stuff in this post.  It’s about “The Third Person,” a Henry James ghost story from 1900.

Miss Susan Frush and Miss Amy Frush are second cousins and old maids of the not-so-old variety.  They inherit a house and decide rather than to sell it and split the money to live in it together.  They get along well, except that Miss Susan takes her naps at the wrong time and Miss Amy hogs the sofa cushions.

Does the house come with a ghost?  “Yes; the place was h----- but they stopped at sounding the word.”  A figure with a strange tilt of the head has been appearing in Miss Susan’s bedroom, perhaps an 18th century ancestor who was “’Hanged!’ said Miss Amy – yet almost exultantly.”

Poor Miss Amy, the younger cousin, has not seen the ghost at this point.  The older Miss Frush has, in her bedroom, looking at her, with his oddly bent head.  “’It breaks their neck,’ she [Miss Amy] contributed after a moment.”  Amy begins to sound a bit bloodthirsty, but this is a gentle story of ghostly jealousy.  Poor Amy wants to see the ghost, too.  Why won’t her cousin share it?

Perhaps Amy does not possess the same degree of sublimated sexual hysteria as Susan.  I can imagine a critique of the old maid clichés of this story, but again, the overall effect is gentle.

“The Third Person” ends with an exorcism of the ghost that bookish folk, and who would read this, ought to find pretty funny.  It turns out James was writing a shaggy dog story about international copyright.  Pretty scary!

“The Jolly Corner” is from 1908, but is practically from a different writer.  The style of Late James is fully deployed:

It had belonged to that idea of the exasperated consciousness of his victim to become a real test for him; since he had quite put it to himself from the first that, oh distinctly! he could “cultivate” his whole perception.  (Ch. 2)

And also the Late James concerns, the “Beast in the Jungle” theme.  The ghost in “The Jolly Corner” is the protagonist’s other self, who he would have been if he had stayed in New York City rather than abandoning America for Europe thirty years ago.  He searches for this other self – and encounters it – by prowling around in his childhood home.  This all sounds autobiographical, except that the character for some reason imagines he would have been “monstrous,” and would have damaged eyesight, and would be missing two fingers from his right hand.  Well, maybe that is exactly what James imagined.  It is a very specific vision.

As abstract as the concept might be, the story is actually frightening in the manner of ghost stories, or at least the protagonist is frightened he spends eight or nine pages in the middle absolutely freaked out because a door that he thinks ought to be open is closed.  He nearly throws himself out of a window, he is so scared.  The thickness of the prose meant that I felt like I was with the character, in this condition, for a long time.

It was with these considerations that his present attention was charged – they perfectly availed to make what he saw portentous.

Yes, they do; they did.

They should never cheat her back into happiness - Trollope's suffering martyrs

The political plot of The Prime Minister is almost entirely free of ideas, of ideology.  Yet the novel turns out to be a kind of study of ideology, but the ideologue is over in the story about the bad marriage.  The husband is the con man, who believes whatever is useful at the moment.

His wife, Emily, though, is a true believer.  She believes in Victorian wifely duty.  Much of Emily’s side of the novel is spent with her thoughts on her wifely duties, her commitment to be the perfect, diligent, obedient wife.  As her marriage collapses, and her husband proves to be a bad man, even abusive (verbally, when he says “damn,” or I guess “d---,” which in context – Ch. 47 – is not ridiculous), Emily moves away from him, but slowly, by inches.  So these interior monologues or internal arguments are not only aggravating because they justify a sympathetic character’s suffering but because they are highly repetitive, the same arguments again and again with a slight change with each repetition.  Trollopian repetition in the service of psychology.

By the end of the novel, everyone – family, friends, author, and likely reader – is against Emily as she refuses to accept a happy ending, armed with “nothing but the stubbornness of her own convictions” (Ch. 79).  Should I be cheering her on or begging her to drop her martyrdom?  “They should never cheat her back into happiness…” (Ch. 70).

This is all psychologically and ethically insightful, but for long stretches it is no fun.

Meanwhile, the most powerful man in the world, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, is being put through a parallel story, which is hilarious and perhaps the most ingeniously crafted aspect of the novel.  He suffers as Prime Minister first because as head of a coalition government he is not allowed to do anything, and he was never more than a technocrat, Trollope’s way of diminishing his perfect gentleman and Great Man.  As he persists in the position, though, he stubbornly begins to enjoy his suffering as a sign of his great virtuousness.

A novel of martyr complexes.

My favorite passage in the political story comes from his wife, the former Lady Glencora, the Duchess, when she describes how she would behave as PM, entirely credibly.  The Prime Minister is effectively an argument for having women in Parliament.

“I begin to see the ways of government now.  I could have done all the dirty work.  I could have given away garters and ribbons, and made my bargains while giving them.  I could select sleek, easy bishops who wouldn’t be troublesome.  I could give pensions or withhold them, and make the stupid men peers.  I could have the bog noblemen at my feet, praying to be Lieutenant of Counties.  I could dole out secretaryships and lordships, and never a one without getting something in return.”  (Ch. 56)

She would be more successful because more corrupt, less perfect.  I believe every word of it.

My favorite passage in the marriage story involves hats and umbrellas (Ch. 69).  The political plot is mostly abstract, the Wharton marriage much more concrete, with more clothes, meals, furniture, streets, all of that.  Curious.  A good subject for a post I’m not going to write.

In a sense he was what is called a gentleman - Trollope's long concern with con men

Trollope had been working on con artist-like characters at least since Framley Parsonage (1861) – maybe since Barchester Towers (1857) if Slope counts – but the explicitly public face of the Palliser novels concentrated his attention.  The con man in Can You Forgive Her? (1865) briefly becomes a Member of Parliament.  The most prominent one in The Way You Live Now (1875) – not a Palliser novel but written amidst them – creates a financial bubble.  Lizzie Eustace, the greatest of them all (The Eustace Diamonds, 1873), is merely a celebrity, I guess, but one reason she is the best is because she knows how to ride over difficulties to get to the next con.  Also, she’s enormous fun.

Ferdinand Lopez is, in this company, incompetent.  He peaks early in The Prime Minister, creating enough glamour and smoke to cause a lot of damage, especially to Emily Wharton, who marries him, and, by a chance shot, to the Prime Minister of England.  Lopez tries to get into Parliament, but fails.  He tries to corner a market, but fails.  He marries wealth, but fails to get his hands on much of it.

He believed in the guano and he believed in Mr. Wharton, but it is a terrible thing to have one's whole position in the world hanging upon either an unwilling father-in-law or a probable rise in the value of manure! (Ch. 25)

The bit I bolded was surprisingly earthy, and direct.  Lopez’s value is directly tied to the value of manure.  And at least manure is good for something – it is another speculation, in kauri gum, a “substitute” for amber, that really does him in.  The other nice point in this quotation is the word “believed,” which is what makes him a real, if mediocre, confidence artist.  He believes in his own con, at least at any given moment, as necessary.

“To give him his due, he did not know that he was a villain” (Ch. 54).  That line comes early in a great chapter where Lopez tries to work his magic on Lizzie Eustace, not knowing, apparently, that you can’t con a con.  At least a worse con won’t beat a better.  The chapter is humorously ironic for readers of The Eustace Diamonds and likely a little baffling for others, but who is reading The Prime Minister who has not read The Eustace Diamonds?

The con man character, in its male form, is a distillation of Trollope’s long-running critique of and unease with the idea of the “gentleman.”  Trollope cleverly misdirected me early in the novel by emphasizing the prejudices of Lopez’s enemies – that Lopez is foreign (a Portuguese father), or that he is Jewish (without evidence) – prejudices that are all too gentlemanly.  Only later does he reveal that Lopez is a sham.

In a sense he [Lopez] was what is called a gentleman. He knew how to speak, and how to look, how to use a knife and fork, how to dress himself, and how to walk.  But he had not the faintest notion of the feelings of a gentleman. (Ch. 58)

The Duke, the Prime Minister, the other male protagonist, is the epitome of the English gentleman.  In his story, it is the strength of his gentlemanly feelings that cause him to suffer, that in fact provide his side of the novel’s plot.  Trollope finally, in The Prime Minister, draws a line.  The gentleman should be like this to prevent that – the rise of the Lopezes.  We need the standards.  We are too easily fooled.

He began to foresee that he had a bad time before him - Trollope's Prime Minister had me worried

The first quarter of The Prime Minister (1876), the fifth of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels, had me worried for the first quarter or so.  Was this one going to be merely ordinary?

Trollope had spent the first quarter of The Way We Live Now (1875), his previous novel, introducing characters – so many characters – and enough subplots that I wondered, at the three-quarters mark, how he was going to wrap them all up.  But here, there are only two plots, two parallel stories.

One has Plantagenet Palliser, who Trollope introduced way back in The Small House of Allington (1864), become Prime Minister – see title – as head of a coalition government, a clever device because it completely strips politics of any relation to policy.  The politics become as pure as possible.  The only function of the Prime Minister is to remain Prime Minister.  The only goal of politics is the continuation of politics.  It is the perfect environment for Trollope’s game of Fantasy Parliament, and suggests why this is one of the few great novels about politics and also why there are so few novels about politics that are any good at all.

The other plot is – why it’s just a Victorian marriage plot! again! – charming, handsome, risk-loving, exotic Ferdinand Lopez wants to marry the lovely, incidentally wealthy Emily Wharton.  His charm and other gifts mean his star is on the rise, but Emily’s father is prejudiced, her family is against her, etc.

At about the quarter mark, the obstacles disappear, the couple marries, and the marriage plot turns into a plot about marriage, a bad marriage.  Trollope, that enemy of suspense, openly declares the husband a con man:

Ferdinand Lopez was not an honest man or a good man. He was a self-seeking, intriguing adventurer, who did not know honesty from dishonesty when he saw them together.  (Ch. 24, “The Marriage”)

The marriage is much more interesting than the courtship.  The main characters – Lopez, Emily, and her father – are much more interesting within the marriage story than the courtship story.  The marriage story has the disadvantage of being quite unpleasant, a painful story.  But it is interesting.

At the same time, the political story became less about politics and more personal, more about the psychological effects of the powerful role on the PM and his wife, one of Trollope’s greatest characters.  They’re not so happy, either.

Nor is The Prime Minister especially funny.

Because the novel is well over 900 pages long, a quarter of the novel is a long stretch.  I would guess that readers who have found other Trollope novels slow and repetitive will lose patience with this one.   I wondered, around page 200, if I would have anything to say about this book.

He began to foresee that he had a bad time before him.  (Ch. 9)

And he – Mr. Wharton, the father – does.  But I did all right.  A day or two more on The Prime Minister, then.

I’m a gull. No, that’s wrong - Chekhov's Seagull - Empty, empty, empty. Ghastly, ghastly, ghastly.

I had never seen or read Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull (1896), for no good reason, but now I have read it.  Now as of a few minutes ago.  It is hard for me to understand how radical the play was.  A writer, an actress, a doctor, etc., mill around a country estate.  They talk about art and talent quite a bit, talent more than art.  They fall in love with each other in combinations unlikely to bring much happiness.

MEDVEDENKO.  How come you always wear black?

MASHA.  I’m in mourning for my life.  I’m unhappy.

I understand that part of the revolutionary effect of the play came from Konstantin Stanislavky’s direction, which made the play slow, atmospheric, and symbol-heavy.  Played differently, though, the way I have become used to seeing Chekhov, those lines, the first lines of the play, are hilarious.  The first laugh of the play.

NINA.  Chilly, chilly, chilly.  Empty, empty, empty.  Ghastly, ghastly, ghastly.

Those are from the horrible, “decadent,” abstract play within the play from Act I, a play so bad that the playwright becomes offended when his mother laughs at it.

ARKADINA.  He told us beforehand that it was a joke, so I treated his play as a joke.

SORIN.  Even so…

ARKADINA.  Now it turns out that he wrote a masterpiece!  Pardon me for living!

I felt like Chekhov was constantly anticipating me.

One of these miserable people, a young woman who wants to get out of the boonies, as an actress, or anything, takes the shooting of a gull – the sad corpse of the thing is hauled around onstage – imagine the ragged old gull in the prop closet of theater companies around the world – as symbolic of something in her life.  What does the gull symbolize?  By God, she is going to make it symbolize something if she has to martyr herself to the symbol.

NINA.  I’m a gull.  No, that’s wrong…  Remember, you shot down a gull?  By chance a man comes along, sees, and with nothing better to do he destroys…  Subject for a short story.  That’s wrong… (Rubs her forehead)  (Act IV, ellipses in original)

Never mind exactly what the gull means.  If it were not the gull, something else would serve as the symbol.  The important thing is to live symbolically, which may be miserable but is not so dull.  In the same act, most of the other characters play Bingo, onstage.  “The game’s a bore, but one you get used to it, you don’t mind,” says one character.  Another spends most of the scene shouting out random numbers.  “Seven!  Ninety!”  All right, this really is getting close to a recognizably avant garde theater.  Do what you can to get out, you poor characters.

Wonderful stuff.  In the middle of writing the world’s greatest short stories, Chekhov was also able to do this.

Laurence Senelick is the translator and more importantly editor of the Norton Critical Edition, pointing out the context of every stray fragment of a song and also identifying his own shocking mistranslations and substitutions, replacing “Lovelace” with “Casanova” and so on.

there are strange strange things in being - Hardy's Moments of Visions

Byron’s poems of 1816 would be the next logical post, but I need to reread them.  It was a big year for him.

So, to something different, something I just read, a book from a century later, Thomas Hardy’s Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (1917).  Maybe I should stick to badly remembered Byron, though, because I do not feel I read Moments of Vision well.  The poems are, in general, too good.  Good poem after good poem, page after page.  The verse forms vary, the subject matter varies, the tone varies.  Yet some bad poems would have helped me see the better ones.

A code contains a bundle of political poems, tossed off for the war effort or refugee relief, with titles like “An Appeal to America on Behalf of the Belgian Destitute.”  These poems are weak enough that when I came to “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’” I could see it for what it was:

                    1
Only a man harrowing clods
  In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
  Half asleep as they stalk.

                    2
Only thin smoke without flame
  From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
  Though dynasties pass.

                  3
Yonder a maid and her wight
  Come whispering by:
War’s annals will cloud into night
  Ere their story die.

And I call Hardy a pessimist!  This is about the cheeriest thing I have ever seen from him, an “earth abides” sentiment.

The main body of poems include a number about the courtship and early years of Hardy’s first marriage, a look back to the 1870s, but not in a way that creates a narrative, but rather a lot of movement in time.  Plenty of poems could be versified bits of theoretical Hardy novels. “The Head above the Fog,” for example, is exactly the kind of image I most enjoy in his fiction:

    Something I do see
Above the fog that sheets the mead,
A figure like to life indeed,
Moving along with spectre-speed,
    Seen by none but me.

The approaching woman, “[m]ere ghostly head as it skims along,” is either the woman the poet loves or her ghost – with just a head, and “hat and plume above / The evening fog-fleece” it is hard to tell.  Scene, or memory of a scene?

“Midnight on the Great Western” is another vivid poem:

In the band of his hat a journeying boy
        Had a ticket stuck; and a string
Around his neck bore the key of his box,
That twinkled gleams of the lamp’s sad beams
                Like a living thing.

Why it’s Little Father Time from Jude the Obscure!  Run for your life!  No, here he is just a boy taking a train trip by himself, “[b]ewrapt past knowing to what he was going.”

I was struck by “He Prefers Her Earthly” in part because I had just read Shelley’s “Alastor,” where a real woman is rejected for an ideal.  The narrator of this poem knows that is foolishness.  He sees a lost love in a sunset – presumably she is dead:

This after-sunset is a sight for seeing,
Cliff-heads of craggy cloud surrounding it.
    – And dwell you in that glory-show?
You may; for there are strange strange things in being,
                Stranger than I know.

But however beautiful or perfect she may be as a “firmament-riding earthly essence,” he wishes she were here, now, “as the one you were.”

If I were serious about Hardy, I would write a squib about each poem, as my only hope at remembering them.

Songs consecrate to truth and liberty - Shelley's first book of poems

Another bicentennial landmark: Alastor; or The Spirit of Solitude: and Other Poems (1816) by Percy Bysshe Shelley, his first book of poems, although hardly his first book.  His first good book; his first great poems; at the time, barely noticed, badly reviewed and completely misunderstood.

I had not read the book as such until a few minutes ago.  I had trusted the editors of my selected Shelley, the Norton Critical Edition Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, which includes the 700-line “Alastor” and the lyrics “Stanzas. – April, 1814,” “Mutability,” and “To Wordsworth.”  I don’t like Shelley that much.  Before writing this note, though, why not glance at a facsimile of the original, and thus I discover that two of the poems, including the only other long one, are chunks of Queen Mab (1813), reworked, but still, I've read it, one is a worthless political poem about Napoleon, and the whole thing could easily be published in forty pages – so just read it – which I did.

Thus I discover “Sonnet. From the Italian of Dante,” a translation that I would have assumed was an imitation, a parody, if I didn’t know otherwise:

Guido, I would that Lappo, thou, and I,
Led by some strong enchantment, might ascend
A magic ship, whose charmed sails should fly
With winds at will where’er our thoughts might wend,
And that no change, nor any evil chance,
Should mar our joyous voyage…

Dante then wishes that their lady friends were also with them on the magic ship.  It is the emphasis on the “magic ship” that is perfectly Shelleyan – Rossetti’s version sounds totally different – the great dream of the Shelley whose great non-intellectual hobby was folding paper boats, setting them aflame, and launching them onto Italian lakes.  Plus, I know, the irony, the lines are about what eventually killed him.

I didn’t notice anything else this good in the book, but I just read it, so who knows what I missed.

“Alastor” is about a poet – The Poet – who rejects real beauty for ideal beauty, a real woman for a dream girl, community for solitude, and likely a number of other oppositions, and it kills him.  As Shelley writes in his Preface,

He seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception.  Blasted by his disappointment, he descends to an untimely grave.

I enjoy the poem mostly for its wild landscapes, the scenes of the poet’s fruitless search:

The waves arose.  Higher and higher still
Their fierce necks writhed beneath the tempest’s scourge
Like serpents struggling in a vulture’s grasp.

“To Wordsworth” is a sonnet as literary criticism, or maybe just literary complaint, one we have all expressed in less poetic form at some point.  You used to be so great – how sad that your new book (in this case, The Excursion (1814)), the one other people are saying is so good, stinks so badly.

In honored poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty, -
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.

Although Shelley’s case reminds me that there are other ways to cease to be, and other ways to grieve for a poet.

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail - the great poetic event of 1816 - new Coleridge poems! Old new poems.

In the fall, my thoughts turn to books written two hundred years ago.  I even read them sometimes, revisiting books I read let’s say ten years ago, before Wuthering Expectations emerged from my forehead.

Goethe’s Italian Journey is an 1816 book about a trip taken in 1780s.  Its appearance after thirty years must have been a surprise.  The biggest surprise of the year, though, has to have been the appearance of a little book by Samuel Taylor Coleridge titled Christabel; Kubla Khan: A Vision; The Pains of Sleep.  The book contains exactly those three poems, something less than eight hundred lines, although the first two also have long prefaces.  The “Kubla Khan” preface is longer than the poem, and more interesting.  Not a knock – it must have been astonishing.

My understanding is that there had not been any new Coleridge poems, not in a book, since the 1798 Lyrical Ballads.  And suddenly here are three great ones, including what are now two of the three most famous Coleridge poems.  The joke is that “Kubla Khan” was written in 1797 or so, “Christabel” abandoned in 1801, and “The Pains of Sleep” written in 1803. Why the delay?  I don’t know.  Coleridge had a long rough patch in there.  In 1816, he launched into one of his most productive periods as a writer.

Because “Christabel” is unfinished, the narrative abandoned when it has barely begun, I can never remember what it is about, even when I have just read it.  Christabel meets the mysterious Geraldine in the woods.  Geraldine is the victim of some obscure crime, or perhaps a fairy, or a demon, anyways trouble.  The accentual meter – four accents per line, no matter the syllables – give the poem an antique feel – or no, like Coleridge has translated it from German:

A little child, a limber elf,
Singing, dancing to itself,
A fairy thing with red round cheeks,
That always finds, and never seeks,
Makes such a vision to the sight
As fills a father’s eyes with light…

“Christabel” has room for sleep and visions, which link it to the opium dream of “Kubla Khan” and the “contrast,” the “dream of pain and disease” (“KK” preface) of “The Pains of Sleep.”  I finally noticed the second vision in “Kubla Khan,” after the pleasure done and all that wild stuff, in the third stanza, where the poet yearns for the “symphony and song” of a “damsel with a dulcimer” who he saw in an earlier vision.  It is that music that he needs to describe the “sunny dome” and “caves of ice” of the second vision.  “And all who heard should see them there” – heard the music of the one vision to see the subject of the other.  Then the poet could be safe, then he could imagine himself as having “drunk the milk of Paradise.”

Two stanzas of magnificent stuff, lines among the most famous in English, and then one stanza that is a lament that the poet has failed.  What he really saw was much more wonderful.  If he could only – something.  He is left with his “[h]uge fragments.”

The poet can complete the visions of torment in “The Pains of Sleep,” though:

The third night, when my own loud scream
Had waked me from the fiendish dream,
O’ercome with sufferings strange and wild,
I wept as I had been a child…

The poet feels that he is experiencing the sufferings of the guilty and remorseful, but what has he done?  He does not know his sin.

Such griefs with such men well agree,
But wherefore, wherefore fall on me?
To be beloved is all I need,
And whom I love, I love indeed.

Poor Coleridge.  A rough patch.

Christabel &c. was the poetic event of 1816, setting aside some other candidates.

I dream of flying to the moon but give no thought to fame or fortune - enjoying Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac

Some works of art turn out to be beginnings; some are more like ends.  In the 1890s, The Master Builder (1892), Spring Awakening (1891), The Seagull (1896), and, heaven help us, Ubu Roi (1896) look like the future.

Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) is like a culmination of the French theatrical tradition before the madmen blow it up.  Corneille, Molière, Marivaux, the Romantics – they all lead to this “heroic comedy.”  Meaning, I sure enjoyed it.  And it is not really even the end of a tradition, not at all, but its descendant is Schönberg and Boublil’s Les Misérables, not Ionesco’s Rhinoceros.  Eh, like I know anything about 20th century French theater.

A big cast, a huge lead part, an onstage battle scene, an onstage theater scene, duels, an entire act set in a pastry kitchen (and, thus, to a gluttonous critic, among the greatest acts in theatrical history).  I wondered if Roxanne, the female lead, was a little thin, but she roars to life in Act IV.

I own a strange edition of the play, a Signet Classics paperback translated by Lowell Bair that includes a DVD of the 1950 Michael Gordon film, or should I say José Ferrer film, since all anyone cares about is his performance.  I haven’t watched it; I should.  My understanding is that it is, like the original, in verse.  The translation I read was all prose, except when Cyrano is dueling – he composes impromptu verse when dueling – or the poetically ambitious pastry chef is reciting a versified recipe.

RAGUENEAU.   There’s something lacking in this sauce.

THE COOK.  What shall I do to it?

RAGUENEAU.  Make it more lyrical.

I suppose I should read a version – Anthony Burgess’s? – that makes Cyrano more lyrical, but I was happy with this one.

Cyrano is an ideal man of the 17th century, brilliant, brave, adept in all useful skills – poetry and swordsmanship – and also, to use an anachronism, the epitome of cool, limited only by his ugliness, meaning his enormous nose.  His love for his cousin Roxanne is channeled into a successful attempt to win her for another man, a handsome idiot.  The jealousies of another character adds some complications to the plot.  Most of the play is done for laughs, but the pathos of the short final act, a kind of coda, is earned.

Cyrano is worth knowing for his own sake.  He declaims a long statement of purpose in Act II, Scene 7, (a response to the suggestion that he “temper [his] haughty spirit a little”) much of which applies as well to Rostand’s time as to his.

But what would I have to do?...  Dedicate poems to financiers, as many others do?  Change myself into a buffoon in the hope of seeing a minister give me a condescending smile?  No, thank you…  Attend councils held in taverns by imbeciles, trying to win the honor of being chosen as their pope?  No, thank you.  See talent only in nonentities?  Be terrified of gazettes, and constantly be thinking, “Oh, if only the Mercure François will say a kind word about me?”  No, thank you…  I dream of flying to the moon but give no thought to fame or fortune.  I write only what comes out of myself, and I make it my modest rule to be satisfied with whatever flowers, fruit, or even leaves I gather, as long as they’re from my own garden.

Is this the great hero of the 17th century or the 19th?

El Folk-Lore Filipino by Isabelo de los Reyes - an early instance of the encyclopedia novel, a compendium of worldview.

The great Caravana de Recuerdos, as part of Spanish Literature month, asked me to recommend criminally overlooked Spanish-language works.  I gestured towards medieval and early modern literature, which would be my answer for Italian, French, and English literature, too.  I don’t remember writing the answers to Ricardo’s questions, but they sound plausibly like me.

Of course no actual crime is involved.  That is a rhetorical device.

Rise, author of the extraordinary In lieu of a field guide, offered El Folk-Lore Filipino (1889) by Isabelo de los Reyes:

It may be a "folklore novel" and perhaps an early instance of the encyclopedia novel.  It is revisionary and revolutionary in intent, a compendium of local fables, customs, and traditions set off against Spanish colonialism.  More than a sociological and cultural curiosity, it is a compendium of worldview.

The first half of the book has been translated by Salud C. Dixon and Maria Elinora Peralta-Imson – university of the Philippines Press, 1994 – and the university library on which I lean impressed me by owning a copy.  So I can take one small step towards rectifying the crime.

The book is both what it says it is, an early work of anthropology, and something else.  Isabelo is collecting folklore, mostly from the northern region of Ilocos, the home of his family, but he also wanders in other directions.  The folklore is interesting, but I began to look forward to the digressions.  Most charming is a long section devoted to the poetry of the author’s mother, who was a master of the occasional poem.

Often the folklore is more than interesting.  A demon, the “pugot,” is described as a cat or dog or black giant:

Imagine him, my dear readers, seated on the window sill of a house, 18 meters high, his feet touching the ground. The common people say the pugot smokes giant-sized cigars.  (57)

The author is more hard-headed, a skeptic about the supernatural.  But he reports it all with enthusiasm.  It was odd, and enjoyable, reading Folk-Lore Filipino while reading about Dada.  The riddles, for example:

What cake cannot be sliced with a knife? – Water on a plate.

What well is deep and strewn with sharp weapons? – The mouth and teeth.  (491)

The riddles of my culture are amusing kid’s stuff; everyone else’s riddles are surrealist weirdness.  Maybe even stranger, because it is given as ordinary behavior of the Ilocanos:

They have dreams, even ridiculous ones like wishing they were taller but realizing the hopelessness of this, they discard the idea.  (197)

Running through, or underneath, the folklore is the Spanish culture that is after hundreds of years of colonial governance deeply tangled with older Philippine traditions.  It is startling to see a supernatural guardian described only as “like a European” (115) or that certain illnesses during pregnancy are “a sign that an anti-Christ will be born” (113).

Most surprising was the short story that ends the English volume, and is thus in the middle of the Spanish, a piece of “Administrative Folklore?” (question mark in the original) that describes an honest man’s journey through corruption, political power, mysticism, godhood, and revolution.  It’s the Philippine version of “The Man Who Would Be King” (1888).  As it ends, it seems to slip backwards in time, into history, concluding with this footnote:

Since these names and dates have no bearing on the administrative problems that are the concern of this article, we would appreciate it if our readers do not try to check their veracity, because they may have been distorted by my imagination.  (615)

Yes, what exactly is this book?

Rise’s essays on Philippine literature – see this annotated list of books that have made it into English – are like a glimpse of another world.

Two more Henry James ghost stories - previewing "The Turn of the Screw" in "The Way It Came"

Two Henry James ghost stories that, unlike the last two I read, are ghost stories.  Or they are closer.

The strangeness in “Owen Wingrave” (1892) is less the ghost, or its possibility, than the number of elements unusual for James.  Wingrave is some kind of pre-cadet, from a long line of military men.  He is being trained by something like a crammer, except that the preparation is not for Oxford but for a military academy; a tutor for new military officers.

Wingrave decides that he will discontinue his cramming, perhaps due to a new pacifism.  He “despises” “’I think, military glory.  He says we take the wrong view of it’” says a friend who may well have no idea what he is talking about.  “’He hates poor old Bonaparte worst of all.’”

Wingrave’s family, incapable of understanding a principled objection, fears cowardice.  Luckily their country house features a ghost, an angry old officer, allowing Wingrave to prove that he is courageous.

I can imagine James working backwards when thinking about this ghost story: ghost – fear – cowardice – bravery – battles (wait, don’t know enough about that) – military – etc.  “Owen Wingrave” is the closest thing I have seen to a James ghost story written to solve as much of a commercial as an artistic problem.

James can lay it on amusingly thick:

She characterized it as “uncanny,” she accused her husband of not having warned her properly.

And:

As she confessed for her own part, in the dreadful place, to an increased sense of “creepiness,” they spent the early part of the night in conversation…

This, quotation marks and all, from a minor character who is very much an outsider in the story, looks like James winking at his readers, or at himself.

“The Way It Came” (1896), later retitled “The Friend of the Friends,” is a whole ‘nother critter.  A man and woman both saw visions or ghosts of their dead parents, a common enough ghost story, friends, including the narrator, think they should meet.  Is this perhaps a romance story, with ghosts as the meet-cute?  No, the characters somehow never meet, at least while they are both alive.  At the woman’s death, the man claims that he finally did see her.  He is by this point engaged to the narrator, who is jealous of the dead woman.  Is her fiancé having an affair with a ghost?  Is the woman just jealous of his gifts, his visions?

I should have supposed it more gratifying to be the subject of one of those inexplicable occurrences that are chronicled in thrilling books and disputed about at learned meetings; I could conceive, on the part of a being just engulfed in the infinite and still vibrating with human emotion, of nothing more fine and pure, more high and august than such an impulse of reparation, of admonition or even of curiosity. That was beautiful, if one would, and I should in his place have thought more of myself for being so distinguished.

The narrator writes a little bit like middle-period James.  But not quite.  When she goes for a scene, for dialogue, she sounds just like James, but when describing events more generally, or when describing her impressions, something is off about her.  It is possible that she is nuts.  None of the characters have names, which in a James story is as odd as anything else.  The story begins with a frame where an editor, or James, says that the story is unpublishable – “can you imagine for a moment my placing such a document before the world.”

The tale James published before this one was “The Figure in the Carpet.”  The next one would be “The Turn of the Screw,” with its frame, odd narrator, etc.  Boy am I glad I read this one.

“People don’t care for what you write” - some Henry James ghost stories of the non-Halloween variety

How are imaginary readers doing with my imaginary readalongs?  Great, I imagine.  I’ve taken Goethe to Sicily in Italian Journey, where he is horrified by the Villa Palagonia, a baroque folly near Palermo.  “[Y]ou will sympathize with anyone who has to run the gauntlet of this lunacy.”

As for Henry James, I thought I would cover a couple of his ghost stories now, gentle ones, though, not scary, completely inappropriate for Halloween, “The Private Life” (1892) and “The Real Right Thing” (1899).  Both are examples of James using ghosts to literalize a metaphor.  Both are about – what else – writers.

The earlier one may be the least ghostly ghost story ever.  The conceit is that people can be different in private and in public, which is true.  One character has no private self.  When not with people, he vanishes.  Another, a successful writer, is so different that he simultaneously exists in private and in public.  While his public self is socializing, his private self is back in his room, writing.  “[B]ut why was he writing in the dark?”  Because the private one is the supernatural creature, I guess.

The emphasis on the mechanics of the supernatural activity, once it is discovered by the Jamesish narrator and another character, an actress, is what makes the story a real ghost story.  They take the business seriously enough to learn how it works and then cynically exploit it.

“I wish you’d let an observer write you a play!” I broke out.

“People don’t care for what you write: you’d break my run of luck.”

And this is before James had his smashup writing for the theater.  There’s quite a bit of good self-deprecating writer comedy in “The Private Life.”

“The Real Right Thing” is of an entirely different hue, black to be specific.  This is the deceased author’s wife:

her large array of mourning – with her big black eyes, her big black wig, her big black fan and gloves, her general gaunt, ugly, tragic, but striking and, as might have been thought from a certain point of view, “elegant” presence.

Middle James is transforming into Late James here, isn’t he?  Mrs. Doyne wants the young writer Withermore (!) to write a biography of her husband:

It alarmed Withermore a little from the first to see that she would wish to go in for quantity.  She talked of “volumes” – but he had his notion of that.

Some writer humor here, too, although this story’s tone is generally sad.  Because Doyne is so recently deceased, all of his papers are in his study, so that is where the biographer works.  He feels at times that he is in the presence of the dead writer, is even assisted by him.  This “fancy” is so strong that he finds himself “waiting for the evening very much as one of a pair of lovers might wait for the hour of their appointment.”  On the one hand, the biographer is so immersed in his task that he feels he is in the presence of his subject, on the other, he is having an affair with his subject’s ghost.

Unlike in “The Aspern Papers,” where the biographer becomes an outright villain, it is never clear in this story what “The Real Right Thing” might be.  Should the biography be written or not?  Is there really a ghost, or is the biographer’s experience all psychological?  If there is a ghost, it is a gentle, undemonstrative one, who just wants to be left alone.  This is a ghost story where the only fear (“’he makes us dim signs out of his horror’”) is experienced by the ghost.