“The Haunting of Hill House” by Shirley Jackson

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for 80 years and might for 80 more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

So starts The Haunting of Hill House, one of the acknowledged classics of the ghost story genre. And after so striking an opening, how could I not continue?

Given my love of creepy ghost stories, I really don’t know why it has taken me so long to get round to this this one,. I had, of course, seen the marvellous film version from 1963 directed by Robert Wise, as well as, I’m sorry to say, the predictably inept modern remake.

The problem usually with ghost stories of novel length is that the sense of supernatural terror cannot really be maintained over long stretches: it is so fragile a state of mind that the slightest intrusion of reality shatters it. As a consequence, the author generally has to pad the thing out, and the padding usually isn’t very interesting; or, worse, it detracts from the element of the supernatural. (I thought this was very much the case with the most recent example of this genre that I read, The Ghost Writer, which is actually rather fine once you get past the padding.) But Shirley Jackson avoids this issue by making this essentially a novel about a mental disintegration, and relating the supernatural elements to this central theme.

The story, such as it is is slight, and the set-up may be regarded as a bit hackneyed. Hill House is regarded as a haunted house: it has an evil history, and currently lies unoccupied. And here, Dr Montague, anthropologist, conducts an experiment in psychic phenomena. And to do so, he invites to Hill House three strangers – one who has telepathic powers; another who has telekinetic powers; and a third who is a relative of the owner, and is the house’s future owner. These four strangers assemble, and then, weird things start to happen. So far, so familiar: but the plot is never in itself an important element, I feel, in a ghost story. The ghost story is,it seems to me, a somewhat conservative genre: its impact depends not on any innovation, but in doing estalished things well. What matters – what the work must be judged on – is not the plot, as such, but how frightening the author can make it.

The principal character, Eleanor Vance, has been invited to the experiment because of her apparent powers of telekinesis – powers that she herself is not aware of. She is in a state of mental turmoil to begin with, and what she encounters in Hill House could well be emanations of her own mental state. This is not to suggest that the supernatural is illusory: other characters quite explicitly experience the supernatural. But Eleanor possibly does have telekinetic powers, and it is entirely possible that it is she who, albeit unconsciously, is the true source of the haunting. Shirley Jackson very skilfully integrates together a psychological study, and a creepy ghost story, but balancing the two elements does not become an issue, as the two are effectively the one and the same: as the ghostly incidents (although no ghost is ever actually seen) intensify, and become ever more harrowing, so Eleanor’s vulnerable mind becomes increasingly unhinged, as she moves from initial terror to acceptance, and even happiness, and by the end becomes convinced that the house itself is a conscious entity, and that, what is more, the house wants her: for the one and only time in her life, she is wanted.

Eleanor’s mind is the only one the author allows herself to enter. As a consequence, we don’t find very coherent pictures of the other characters, because Eleanor herself find them difficult to understand. Particularly difficult to understand is the other lady invited to the experiment – Theodora, who, it is strongly suggested, is lesbian: at times, Theo appears to Eleanor to be sisterly and affectionate; at other times, cruel and mean. But over the few days over which the story is set, all these characters become, for Eleanor, less significant: what matters is the house itself. Whatever these other people may or may not want, this house, insane, wants her, wants Eleanor. And she is determined to stay.

Quite frequently, the ending is the weakest part of a ghost story, for at the end, issues need to be resolved, and resolution usually requires a revelation in terms of plot; and that detracts from the sense of mystery that is ideally required by the ghost story. But here, the ending – which, to judge from various internet “reviews”, many find disappointing – seems to me perfectly judged: it is a resolution of what had gone before, and seems to me rather shocking. It does not detract in any way from the sense of fear that has so expertly been generated.

***

I don’t know that I should recommend this book to those who don’t care for the genre. I have always loved the creepy ghost story, so this was right up my street, as they say, but I do know there are those who find the genre eminently resistible, and do not find much sense of terror in the thought of what may be lurking unseen in the shadows. And, sadly, there are those also whose sensibilities in these matters are so coarsened by modern horror films that they appear to respond only to the explicit. What frightens one seems to be as unpredictably subjective as what makes one laugh. So I had better restrict myself to saying that this frightened me. And it frightened me consistently, right up to that ending. There is no better recommendation than that for a ghost story.

The enduring chill of Flannery O’Connor

We modern secularists often have a problem with religious art and literature: one the one hand, we cannot deny the greatness of Donne or of Milton, of Giotto or of Titian, of Palestrina or of Bach, as the greatness of these artists is not in any serious question. At the same time, we have rejected the religious ethos that permeates the work of these artists; sometimes, our rejection is so vehement that we even accuse those who do not reject of being somehow intellectually or morally deficient. And this obviously creates a problem when it comes to religious art: how can we exalt those works which project the very beliefs we denigrate? The usual way out of this is to claim that the Michelangelo’s Pietà or Bach’s St Matthew Passion are great despite their religious content. I don’t buy this: the religious belief that informs these works is not an optional add-on – it is central: without it, the works are meaningless. It seems to me, rather, that these works are important to us not despite their religious content, but because of it. We respond to these works because, from their religious perspective, they address issues that remain of vital importance to us, and which possibly cannot even be addressed in secular terms.

“But what issues exactly are these issues?” the sceptical reader may well be justified in asking at this point. And this is where I tend to take Wittgenstein’s excellent advice to remain silent on those matters whereof I cannot speak. But remaining silent is not really a valid option when setting out to discuss works that are so religious as the stories of Flannery O’Connor: to discuss such works, however inadequately, one has to take a deep breath and dive in, and hope that perhaps the odd gag or irreverent comment when matters threaten to become too weighty will allay the suspicion that, underneath my professed scepticism, there lies the devoutness of a true believer.

Flannery O’Connor was a devout Catholic in the Deep South, which was predominantly Protestant. In her relatively short life (she died at 39 from the rare inherited disease lupus) she wrote two short novels – Wise Blood and The Violent Bear it Away – and a startling series of short stories, most of them included in the collections A Good Man is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge. These stories are permeated with her religious faith: and yet, it is hard to discern what the nature of her faith is, for she deplored fiction that is didactic. Her characters are often religious: given these stories are set in the Deep South – “Christ-haunted”, as she once described it – how can they not be? And yet, in her fictional world, there is something missing that is very important. The faith professed by so many of her characters seems inadequate at best, and, often, merely silly. This is not because, as a Catholic, she is looking down on the non-Catholic varieties of the Christian faith: after all, Father Finn, who appears in the story “The Enduring Chill” and who is one of the few explicitly Catholic characters to appear in her work, is hardly an advertisement for the Catholic Church; and in any case, the moral and artistic vision she presents in these stories runs far deeper than mere factionalism. No – the human condition that she depicts is fallen, and, Catholic or Protestant or secular, black or white, man or woman, no-one is exempt from this fallen state.

But what, exactly, is it that is missing? We observe these characters through O’Connor’s unsparing eyes: we see cupidity, self-regard, selfishness, cruelty, violence; we see what we would term “racism”, though O’Connor does not use this term explicitly (and, much to the distress of many liberal readers, neither does she explicitly condemn it); we see a lack of generosity, a meanness of spirit, and a distortion of moral values that is frequently grotesque. But there is no moral lesson explicitly stated, or even implied: there is nothing to point to some trite message such as “Selfishness is a bad thing” or “Racism is not nice” or even “We need to accept Christ into their hearts”: Flannery O’Connor despised fiction with a “message”, and refused to saddle her own with one – even with one that she so powerfully believed in. There is no doubt that the sensibility underpinning these stories is deeply religious; but it is hard, all the same, to put one’s finger on what it is – other than the frequently Biblical imagery – that gives these stories their religious dimension. Perhaps it takes a commentator himself possessed of a religious sensibility to identify it. Here is Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, on Catholic writers such as Flannery O’Connor:

The “religious” dimensions of these fictions lies in the insistent sense of incongruity, unmistakable even if no-one within the fiction can say quite what we should be incongruent with.

- from Dostoyevsky by Rowan Williams, London, 2008

Precisely. The selfishness, self-regard, racism – these are all symptoms of a greater malaise, an incongruity, a state that those of a religious temperament would describe as “fallen”, and for which we secularists must hunt for another word. And in this depiction of a “fallen” humanity, there is an undeniable sense of incongruity; and the question of what precisely it is incongruent with, though never posed explicitly, is, nonetheless, always present.

The danger in presenting humanity as so fallen, in so incongruous a state, is that humanity appear not worth bothering with: if one sees one’s fellow human being as essentially depraved Yahoos, as Lemuel Gulliver did, it is but a short step to wish them destroyed. But that is not Flannery O’Connor’s vision. Depraved and despicable though humans may be, she is not looking down on them from on high: from her religious perspective, humans are, despite everything, creations of God, and as such, they matter, spiritually blind though they may be. “The fiction writer,” she once said, “presents mystery through manners, grace through nature, but when he finishes, there always has to be left over that sense of Mystery which cannot be accounted for by any human formula.” Even in humanity’s fallen, incongruent state, it possesses, in her fiction, a Mystery – the very capitalisation of the word indicating the workings of the Divine – and this Mystery must be respected: it is an indication of the presence of God even in our fallen world.

Up to this point, even a reader such as myself of broadly secular perspectives has little difficulty. But from here onwards, I felt myself struggling – much as I felt myself struggling with the very religious novels of Dostoyevsky. The working of the Divine in a fallen world, the redeeming power of Grace, the wind blowing where it listeth – what does all this mean for me? Very little, I must confess. And yet, I was fascinated by and found almost mesmeric the extraordinary sharp-edged clarity of her prose, the startling intensity of her imagery, and, indeed, that sense of Mystery with which she imbues her characters – a Mystery which holds promise of a greatness not apparent in their daily lives. But her fictional world remains a chilly one. If I were to pick one of the titles of her stories as descriptive of the entire collection, it would be “The Enduring Chill”: despite the sultry Southern heat in which these stories are set, the impression they give is that of a chill – a chill that endures even the workings of Divine Grace. For, in Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, even Divine Grace brings no peace, no serenity – no sense, to use Rowan Williams’ word, of “congruity”. As O’Connor herself once wrote: “Grace changes us and change is painful.” And, try as hard as I might to enter into O’Connor’s imagination, I find myself defeated at this point: if our everyday lives are so morally stunted that the only hope of something better is through the action of Divine Grace; but if that Grace itself is painful, and brings no respite; then what hope is there? What can there be to live for? I can understand an irreligious author such as Flaubert – who appeared to believe in nothing – telling us that all is futile; but how can one accept such a message from a religious writer?

I suppose the answer Flannery O’Connor might have given is that Divine Grace, though painful, is what we must strive to receive; because, after all, strait is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and all that; she might have said that even through the pain that comes with Grace, a pain so intense that it can even destroy our lives, there is a spiritual gain. But of course, she doesn’t say any of this: fiction as a vehicle for proselytising she found artistically distasteful. She merely depicts: what we readers choose to make of it is up to us.

Each of these stories is a little jewel, written in the most precise and striking prose, and polished virtually to perfection. “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, “Good Country People”, “The Displaced Person”, “The Artificial Nigger” (the politically incorrect title of which possibly preventing frequent anthologising), “The Lame Shall Enter First”, “Revelation”, “Everything that Rises Must Converge” – each vying with the others to be regarded as her masterpiece. But, despite the extreme clarity of the presentation, there appears something mysterious at the heart of these stories, something that defies attempts to define – for the very act of defining, after all, is to limit the possibilities. I found myself reading these stories exhilarated by the obvious stature of the artistic achievement, but, nonetheless, puzzled: the very clarity of O’Connor’s writing takes us paradoxically into a world where nothing seems quite clear.

That takes us back to our initial question: how can a reader with secular sensibilities read works so obviously imbued as these are with religious belief? I suppose the workings of Grace we may see in secular terms as “epiphanies”, as Joyce called them, or as Wordsworthian “spots of time” – moments of revelation, when that which had remained hidden are perceived with a sudden clarity. While it is possible to see such moments in religious terms, it is not, perhaps, mandatory to do so. But seeing these stories in purely secular terms is to sideline that which, though not made explicit, lies at their very heart. That these stories had so powerful an effect on me  - even when I failed adequately to understand them – indicates, rather disturbingly, how important to me those issues remain that we in our secular age prefer to dismiss as unimportant, and which we do not, perhaps, even possess the language to articulate.

But for all that, it is difficult to feel any great affection for these stories: they emanate a chill that, long after reading, endures.

“Our Mutual Friend” by Charles Dickens: Book the Fourth – “A Turning”

“Our Mutual Friend” by Charles Dickens: Book the First – “The Cup and the Lip”

“Our Mutual Friend” by Charles Dickens: Book the Second – “Birds of a Feather”

“Our Mutual Friend” by Charles Dickens: Book the Third – “A Long Lane”

London is Dickens’ usual setting – so much so, indeed, that it is hard for many of us to think of the city at all without some Dickensian images coming to mind. Our Mutual Friend had, in the third part, briefly wandered outside London in the scenes surrounding the death of Betty Higden: at the start of the fourth and final part of the novel, we find ourselves out there again – on the Thames to the west of the city, somewhere between London and Oxford. This river flows through the novel, and is among its most potent images: the novel had started on the river, in the midst of the murky darkness of the city, when a corpse had been fished out: now, we are in more pastoral settings, away from the filth of the metropolis.

But the filth of the city has not gone away: we meet again Rogue Riderhood, who is now keeper of the lock; and we meet again Bradley Headstone, obsessively stalking Eugene Wrayburn. Riderhood links together three Mortimer Lightwood, Eugene Wrayburn, and, now, Bradley Headstone: he is not sure exactly how they are related, but he is picking out the links. And if Mortimer Lightwood had been a guvnor, and Eugene Wrayburn ’tother guvnor, then Bradley Headstone becomes, with delicious indifference to the laws of grammar ’Totherest guvnor. In Dickens’ eccentric world, that henceforth becomes Bradley’s name: ’Totherest.

The tension is high. This strand of the novel involving the love triangle of Bradley Headstone, Eugene Wrayburn and Lizzie Hexam is approaching its climax. Possibly, it has developed beyond Dickens’ own expectations: it has about it a passionate intensity that goes way beyond anything Dickens had attempted before. Compared to Bradley Headstone’s murderous passions, previous forays into the psychology of violence – whether with Bill Sikes or Jonas Chuzzlewit – seem merely stagy, written for immediate effect rather than with any great insight into the vicious and impassioned mind. But there’s nothing stagy here. And, given the geniality and the warmth that is apparent in so much of the rest of the novel – which recall Dickens’ earlier work rather than his later, darker novels – one wonders whether Dickens had found himself in this particular strand going into areas that he himself had not anticipated. But be that as it may, once in this area, Dickens doesn’t shirk its implications. Closely observed by Rogue Riderhood, Bradley Headstone, already dangerously near the edge of sanity, seems mentally to tear himself apart. The scene where the rush of blood to Headstone’s head causes his blood to gush through his nose is terrifying: I do not know how accurate this is in medical terms, but, as with Krook’s death by spontaneous combustion in Bleak House, Dickens’ fictional world is one where metaphor can easily become a physical reality.

There are a few other strands to be resolved as well, of course. The Lammles, we had learnt towards the end of the third part, are now all washed up: Dickens brings Giorgiana Podsnap back into the frame here, and tries to enlist some sympathy on behalf of this pathetically dominated girl, but she had been presented earlier in the novel in such grotesque terms that it is difficult to take her seriously now as a real person. Or, at least, if the reader is to take her seriously, Dickens needed to give himself a bit more time and space than he could spare for so incidental a character. There’s also Mr Riah, whose moral scruples force him to leave Fledgeby’s employment (shortly before he receives an unceremonious letter from his employer telling him he is sacked anyway), and whose relationship with Jenny Wren is re-established as previous misunderstandings are cleared up. Fledgeby himself gets his come-uppance as Lammle, as his final act in the novel, given the bounder a damn good thrashing. Modern sensibilities may recoil at such a resolution: physical violence, we feel nowadays, is always to be deplored; but Dickens wrote in, we may say, an age with more “robust” values, and was an admirer of Fielding to boot: he saw nothing untoward in a snivelling cad such as Fledgeby getting his come-uppance in such a manner. This leaves two other major strands: there’s Silas Wegg’s continuing attempts to blackmail Boffin, and this continues agreeably in Dickens’ best comic manner till its predictable, though nonetheless funny, resolution. And, finally, there is the fairy tale thread – the Prince in Disguise testing his Beloved.

And here, Dickens has a problem: having set this as one of the two major plot strands in the novel (the other being the Headstone-Hexam-Wrayburn triangle), he cannot drop it with a quarter of the novel still to go – he has to keep it going to the end; and yet, the strand has already been resolved. Once Bella decides, towards the end of the third part, that she would rather forfeit her fortune than be party to the injustice meted out to John Rokesmith, this particular story is effectively finished: she has triumphantly passed her test, and all that remains is to disclose the identity of the Prince in Disguise so the two can live happily ever after. But – rather surprisingly, given the extraordinarily intricate planning in the earlier Bleak House – Dickens appears to have miscalculated here: the resolution of this story had come too early, and Dickens has to do what he can to stretch this strand through to the end, even though there is no further material to keep it going. As a consequence, the testing of Bella continues quite gratuitously, stretching in the process both probability and psychological coherence. Indeed, it becomes distasteful, as the continuing “testing” of Bella even when she has proved herself can only be seen as tantamount to deliberate cruelty; and, even in the context of a fairy story, her cheerful acceptance of it all when all is revealed makes no sense at all.

Dickens, especially in his earlier work, enjoyed describing good people being happy together: such material is usually eschewed by writers (and not just modern writers) for obvious reasons – the most obvious of which is that it lacks dramatic tension. But there was an aspect of Dickens that made him return to this sort of thing, and it is perhaps surprising that after the darker and more pessimistic views of humanity expressed in Bleak House, Little Dorrit and Great Expectations, he should return again to this. But he does, and does so with a vengeance; and it becomes hard to escape the impression given here of tweeness, and of a forced jollity.

But if, as I suspect Dickens had some inner need to write in this mode – almost as if he needed to convince himself that virtue can triumph, even in a world so wicked as this – the other principal strand shows no sign whatever of compromise. Eugene Wrayburn has tracked down Lizzie Hexam, but is still without much idea of his own intentions; and Lizzie, very understandably, remains apprehensive. If the depiction of the violent passions of Bradley Headstone is a new departure of Dickens – and it is a mark of his artistic restlessness that even in so late a stage in his artistic career he was willing to take the risk of making such departures – then the depiction of Eugene Wrayburn is no less so. Convention – which Dickens has often been happy to accept at face value – would have demanded that Eugene be an innately good and decent man. But while Eugene certainly has in himself elements both of goodness and of decency, he is no spotless hero. On his first meeting with Bradley Headstone Eugene had made full use of the one weapon he had in his possession – the superiority of his social rank over Headstone’s. Headstone was enraged, it is not hard to see why: not only is this man his rival in love, this man also insults him gratuitously purely because, by an accident of birth, he happens to occupy a superior social position. (Indeed, his hatred of Eugene, which has its roots in their first meeting, may well have been as potent a force as his desire for Lizzie in driving him to homicidal madness). And later, when Eugene meets Mr Riah, he does not hesitate to make insulting remarks regarding Mr Riah’s Jewishness. It is a distasteful scene, but perfectly in character.

Eugene lacks any sense of purpose – either in personal or in professional matters; and yet, he feels superior to others, on account of his social class, and also on account of his race. He is obviously attracted to Lizzie, but does not know what to do, how to act, or what to say. Even his close friend, Mortimer Lightwood, worries about what he might do. In such cases, after all, even the possibility of rape on could not be ruled out: as readers of Tess of the d’Urbervilles will know, a man of higher social standing would be unlikely to be called to account for what would have been regarded merely as a “seduction” of a working class girl. Under the circumstances, Eugene’s winning of Lizzie is no mere conventional love story of spotless hero and spotless heroine triumphing over the odds: for, among the hurdles Eugene has to overcome, the most significant is his own mind. Like Bella earlier in the novel, Eugene needs to be educated; and since his story is not a fairy story, as Bella’s is, his education is harsh and painful. It almost costs him his life.

The development of Eugene’s consciousness is among Dickens’ triumphs. Eugene has long been sexual attracted to Lizzie, to the point even of obsession, but he can only develop a healthy relationship with her once he learns to respect her. Each touch in the telling of this story is a touch of a master, and refutes all those allegations of lack of depth or of sentimentality that the latter part of the John Harmon-Bella Wilfer story appears to confirm. After Headstone’s attack leaves Eugene almost dead, it is Lizzie who rescues him, and tends to him. And her heroism is answered by his: he finally decides what is important in his life, and, defying all social conventions, marries her. It is a heroic decision, as he knows full well that this will mean exclusion from the only society that he is acquainted with. But he makes his decision with a fierce pride and defiance. He briefly mentions to his friend Mortimer the possibility of escaping away from society to the colonies, and, when Mortimer suggests that this may be the right thing to do, Eugene reacts passionately:

‘No,’ said Eugene, emphatically. ‘Not right. Wrong!’

He said it with such a lively–almost angry–flash, that Mortimer showed himself greatly surprised. ‘You think this thumped head of mine is excited?’ Eugene went on, with a high look; ‘not so, believe me. I can say to you of the healthful music of my pulse what Hamlet said of his. My blood is up, but wholesomely up, when I think of it. Tell me! Shall I turn coward to Lizzie, and sneak away with her, as if I were ashamed of her! Where would your friend’s part in this world be, Mortimer, if she had turned coward to him, and on immeasurably better occasion?’

Mortimer is indeed surprised: this is not the Eugene he had known – the man with no purpose in life, and who hid his lack of energy and direction under an affected show of languid boredom and indifference; and neither is the Eugene we had known earlier in the novel – the man who had rubbed his unearned sense of superiority over those to whom he had no right to feel superior. Eugene’s blood is up, as he says: we had never seen that before. But now, it is “wholesomely up”: he has grown in moral stature.

The novel ends with a final visit to that demented chorus at the Veneerings, and they are enjoying a good old gossip. That Eugene Wrayburn, who used sometimes to frequent that table, has gone and married a boatwoman of some kind, and one by one, they take turns to ridicule the match, and to express their disgust. Mr Podsnap is so offended and disgusted at this – his gorge rises to such an extent – that he declines to hear anything further about it, and sweeps it away with a movement of his arm. Only one voice in the company remains unheard – that of Mr Twemlow. Throughout the conversation, he has been feeling increasingly uneasy, and, finally, when asked to speak, he overcomes his usual gentlemanly reticence (as with all passages depicting the scenes of society at the Veneerings’ table, this is written in the present tense):

Twemlow has the air of being ill at ease, as he takes his hand from his forehead and replies.

‘I am disposed to think,’ says he, ‘that this is a question of the feelings of a gentleman.’

‘A gentleman can have no feelings who contracts such a marriage,’ flushes Podsnap.

‘Pardon me, sir,’ says Twemlow, rather less mildly than usual, ‘I don’t agree with you. If this gentleman’s feelings of gratitude, of respect, of admiration, and affection, induced him (as I presume they did) to marry this lady–’

‘This lady!’ echoes Podsnap.

‘Sir,’ returns Twemlow, with his wristbands bristling a little, ‘YOU repeat the word; I repeat the word. This lady. What else would you call her, if the gentleman were present?’

This being something in the nature of a poser for Podsnap, he merely waves it away with a speechless wave.

‘I say,’ resumes Twemlow, ‘if such feelings on the part of this gentleman, induced this gentleman to marry this lady, I think he is the greater gentleman for the action, and makes her the greater lady. I beg to say, that when I use the word, gentleman, I use it in the sense in which the degree may be attained by any man. The feelings of a gentleman I hold sacred, and I confess I am not comfortable when they are made the subject of sport or general discussion.’

And on this splendid note, we come to the end of Dickens’ last completed novel. For all the pessimism and darkness that permeate his late works, he ends with the belief that the degree of being a “gentleman” can be “attained by any man”; and that, with human kindness and decency, those barriers that separate us humans one from another may indeed be overcome. Dickens did not, of course, know that this was to be his last completed novel; but, in retrospect, this does seem to me a fine way to bow out.

***

Our Mutual Friend is one of those proverbial curate’s eggs (although, frankly, I’m not too sure what a real curate’s egg is): so much that is merely crude or simplistic or sentimental lies side by side with other elements that remind me why it is I love the novels of Dickens – alongside those of Tolstoy – more than, I think, the novels of just about anyone else. Our Mutual Friend is not so intricately planned as Bleak House, nor, perhaps, as deeply felt as Great Expectations: neither does it have quite the epic sweep of Little Dorrit. There is too much here to provide ammunition to the anti-Dickensian, and even make confirmed Dickensians such as myself regret at times his reversion to some of his bad old ways. But which other novelist could have given us this?

“We’ll hear a play…”

“We’ll hear a play to-morrow,” says Hamlet to the players. Of course, he’d see the play as well as hear it, but “We’ll see and hear a play tomorrow” is far too clumsy a line for Shakespeare to write, and, given the choice between “see a play” and “hear a play”, Shakespeare opted, rather interestingly, for the latter. If an order of importance is to be established, hearing comes before seeing.

It is perhaps not so surprising. It is the words that contain and communicate the drama. And this is perhaps why hearing audio recordings of Shakespeare’s plays is so satisfying a way of experiencing them. And also the most convenient: it is very difficult to catch up on the plays in the theatre – even if one happens, as I do, to live within reasonable distance of theatres putting on these plays. Over some forty or so years, I have seen only sixteen of these plays on stage (although, admittedly, there are some I have seen several times, and many others that I have seen on screen – mainly in the variable, but at times quite wonderful, BBC Shakespeare series). Most of my experience with these plays have been through the printed page rather than through performance, and, while there are those who claim that these plays must be experienced in performance and only in performance, experiencing them on the printed page has proved so enriching over the years that I find it hard to think of reading these plays being in any way a lesser experience than watching them.

But there can surely be no bar to hearing these plays; and in this respect, we are fortunate indeed: there are, currently, many quite excellent audio recordings available of, I think, the entire canon. We have available on CD, or as downloads, many of the classic performances made in the 60s by Caedmon (these are currently issued by Harper Collins ): these include such gems as Paul Scofield as Lear (he re-recorded this part many years later on the Naxos label to celebrate his 80^th birthday), John Gielgud as Leontes, Vanessa Redgrave as Rosalind, Anthony Quayle as Falstaff, Albert Finney and Claire Bloom as Romeo and Juliet, etc. (Some of these Caedmon are still missing from the current catalogue – most notably, Paul Scofield’s extraordinarily intense reading of Hamlet; but presumably, these will eventually be released either on CD or as downloads in the not too distant future.)

And we have also several issues from the excellent edition of the complete plays recorded in the 60s by the Marlowe Society. The casts on this latter sets  were not generally as start-studded as those on the Caedmon recordings, but such performances as Richard Johnson, Ian Holm and Anna Calder-Marshall as Othello, Iago and Desdemona; or Tony Church and Irene Worth as Macbeth and his good lady wife; are unmissable. (Also unmissable in the Marlowe Society series is a recording that has recently appeared on CD of Twelfth Night, with Dorothy Tutin phrasing those lovely lines of Viola with the most exquisite beauty and poise.)

And, more recently, we have three more labels, featuring the finest of the current crop of Shakespeare actors, recording these plays: they are Naxos, Arkangel, and the BBC (I know these BBC recordings exist, but I couldn’t find an online catalogue: so much for BBC’s publicity department!) I have not, of course, heard all of these recordings, but the ones I have heard – with the solitary exception of the Naxos recording of Macbeth which had irritating sound effects providing a constant obbligato to the actors’ voices – have seemed to me excellent.

Last weekend, I had to drive up to Lancashire and back. This is normally a tedious drive which takes me some four dull hours if I am lucky with the traffic, and often considerably longer if I am not. But what better opportunity, I thought to myself, of hearing a play or two, uninterrupted! So, on the way up, I listened to the Naxos recording of Othello ,  with Hugh Quarshie, Anton Lesser, and Emma Fielding all outstanding as Othello, Iago and Desdemona; and on the way back, I listened to the BBC recording of Antony and Cleopatra, with David Harewood and Frances Barber in the title roles. And those otherwise tedious hours in the car passed surprisingly quickly.

Othello is the Shakespeare play that most powerfully engages my emotions. The first half of the play is very deliberately paced, but once the passions begin to grip – somewhere around the middle of Act Three, I think –they don’t let go: the tension tightens unremittingly right up to that gut-wrenching ending. I do not know why it should grip my imagination so: after all, I am myself nothing like any of those principal characters. I think it is perhaps because the drama that is being played out is no mere intrigue involving three individuals, but, rather, the drama of humanity struggling for its very soul: Keats had written about having to “burn through” the “fierce dispute betwixt damnation and impassioned clay”: admittedly, it was King Lear he had been writing about, but those lines could apply just as well to Othello. In destroying the innocent Desdemona (whom, I think, Shakespeare, Pygmalion-like, fell in love with even as he was creating her), Othello loses not merely a heaven in this world, but also the prospect of a heaven in the next: he loses his very soul. And the emotional impact of the poetry that depicts this – especially when delivered by such superb actors – is devastating, even when heard in a traffic jam just outside Birmingham.

The impact of Antony and Cleopatra is entirely different. It does not even aim to engage the audience’s – or the readers’, or the hearers’ –emotions: we may sympathise with Antony and Cleopatra up to a point, but we never empathise with them. And neither are we expected to. The first time they appear, they are shown in a comic light: there they are, the great queen and one of the three rulers of the Roman Empire – whispering sweet nothings into each others’ ears like lovesick teenagers. We wonder and we marvel, and we feel exalted by the sheer opulence of the poetry, but Shakespeare makes us observe these people without becoming emotionally close to them.

When I last read this play, it seemed to me that one of its major themes was the sheer plenitude of life – the infinite variety not merely of Cleopatra, but of humanity in general, the ever-shifting shapes of which make it impossible to pin down. Yes, all that is certainly in there. But listening to it this time, it seemed to me also to revisit a theme that had been explored previously in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – the transforming power of the imagination.  After Antony’s death, Cleopatra imagines him in terms appropriate to a god:

His legs bestrid the ocean: his rear’d arm
Crested the world: his voice was propertied
As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends;
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,
He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty,
There was no winter in’t; an autumn ’twas
That grew the more by reaping: his delights
Were dolphin-like; they show’d his back above
The element they lived in: in his livery
Walk’d crowns and crownets; realms and islands were
As plates dropp’d from his pocket.

She knows well that Antony was never like this. “Think you there was, or might be, such a man as this I dream’d of?” she asks Dolabella. “Gentle madam, no,” comes the courteous but uncompromising answer. “You lie, up to the hearing of the gods,” says Cleopatra: such a creature as Cleopatra describes may not have existed in reality, but exists now in Cleopatra’s imagination. And that is good enough. Of course, Cleopatra knows, even now, what he had been in reality: in plays, she says, “Antony shall be brought drunken forth”: this is because Antony had been, as she well knows, a drunkard – an “old ruffian”, as Octavius had so accurately described him. But in her imagination, now, he has been transformed. And Cleopatra transforms herself too, imagining herself to be the great queen she never had been in life, and living out that part as she dies. Only when she has transformed herself into what she likes to imagine herself as being, does she abjure her “infinite variety” and describe herself as “marble constant”. Her imagination has utterly transfigured both Antony and herself from two deeply flawed and frankly rather ordinary mortals into demi-gods, figures not unbecoming a Shakespearean tragedy.

As with Othello on the way up to Lancashire, the performance of Antony and Cleopatra on the way down left nothing to be desired. Roger Allam as Enobarbus performed his famous speeches (the “Age cannot wither her” speech, and the glorious “The barge she sat on…”) with relish; David Harewood, whom I had seen at the National Theatre as Othello (my wife and I went to see that on an anniversary: now, I ask you – what sort of people go to see Othello on a wedding anniversary?) was a splendid Antony, and Frances Barber I thought was an outstanding Cleopatra, at times caressing those gorgeous lines with her lovely velvety voice, and at other times screeching like the proverbial fishwife: infinite variety indeed. But by the end, once Cleopatra has decided to die like the great queen she pictures herself in her imagination as being, she is indeed “marble constant”: Octavius triumphs in reality, but, perhaps, the imagination triumphs over Octavius. And that’s true too.

And so, the next time you face a long boring drive – or even if you don’t, but have a few hours to spare – I’d strongly recommend hearing play. Especially as there is now such an embarrassment of riches to choose from.

7×7: A blog chain mail

Guy Savage from the blog His Futile Preoccupations has nominated this blog to participate in one of those things called “blog memes”, or “blog chain mails”, or whatever. In this, the nominated party has to:

1) tell everyone something about his or her self that nobody else knows

2) link to a post that fits the following categories: most beautiful piece; most helpful piece; most popular piece; most underrated piece; most pride-worthy piece; most surprisingly successful piece; most controversial piece.

And, finally,

3) Nominate 7 other bloggers to participate – presumably having ensured that they have not already been nominated by some other blogger

What larks!

OK, let’s get started.

1) Firstly, something about me that no-one knows, and, obviously, one that I feel appropriate to reveal on this blog: in my spare time, I enjoy having a go at translating poems by Rabindranath Tagore from Bengali into English. This is not in expectation of publication – let alone fame or fortune – but because I enjoy the immersion in Tagore’s poetry that this exercise involves; and also because in attempting to arrange words on a page in order to create something that may be read as a poem in English, I find myself gaining insights into the nature of poetry itself that I don’t think I would have had merely as a reader.

2) Most beautiful post: I don’t know that any of my writing is notable for “beauty” – however one defines it – but the occasional post in which I allow myself to be nostalgic about my childhood years – such as this one – has associations for me personally for which the word “beautiful” is perhaps not misapplied. Even when it is about Dracula.

Most helpful post: Some years before I started on this blog, I had, on an internet book group that has since become defunct, led a group read of War and Peace; and since I still had on my hard disk the detailed part-by-part synopses I had written, I thought I’d put them up here. The number of hits these posts get, as well as some mails I have received on them, indicate that they have been of some help.

Most popular post: According the the statistics, my musings on Wuthering Heights and Romanticism has had the most hits. I wonder if I should revise this in light of my having changed my mind on certain matters since I wrote this.

Most controversial piece: Given that I frequently use this blog to have a rant about something or other, I am frankly surprised how uncontroversial this blog is, on the whole. But I suppose this post, in which I have a go at certain types of genre writing and at claims made by certain genre writers, aroused a fair bit of controversy.

Most surprisingly successful piece: In one of my above-mentioned rants, I made some quite intemperate comments about the importance of teaching literature in schools. Now, I am certainly no educationalist, and I certainly hadn’t expected, at the time of writing this post, that it would beCome one of the most popular in terms of hits.

Most underrated piece: This entire blog started because, to celebrate (if “celebrate” is the word I am looking for) my 50th year, i decided to read through all of Shakespeare’s plays; and, once I had done that, I found I had written copious notes on each of those plays, purely for my own personal reference. It was then I decided it might be a good idea to polish them up a bit, and stick them all up on a blog somewhere. These Shakespeare posts I thought would be the centrepiece of this blog, but they get very few hits. The post on Othello, especially, I remember spending quite a bit of time on – although, as ever, when I re-read it, I feel I haven’t succeeded in saying all I wanted to say.

Most pride-worthy piece: I suppose it’s this one on Joyce’s Ulysses, in which I think I did manage to say most of what I wanted to say.

3) And now to pick 7 others. So, in no particular order, here they are (they’re not all literary ones):

Obooki’s Obloquy

Somewhere Boy

The Cross-Eyed Pianist

Washtenaw Flaneurade

Tales of a Software Engineer

Seraillon

Caravana de Recuerdos

The problem with putting together lists is that one has to leave so many out! If any of these bloggers have been nominated already, please do let me know, and I’ll revise my list accordingly.

But thanks for nominating me, Guy: it’s been great fun!

“The Night of the Iguana” by Tennessee Williams

I never really got Tennessee Williams. But then again, I don’t think I’ve tried very hard. On the face of it, his works should be right up my street: I love drama, after all, and just about anyone who knows anything about drama rates Williams as among the finest; I love writers of the southern States – William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, different though they all are from each other; and I like works that project emotional intensity. Tennessee Williams cannot be faulted on any of these points.

Yes, it is true that I had once dismissed his works as “overheated melodrama” – but that was in my younger days: now, older and, hopefully, a bit more mature in my judgement, I realise that it shouldn’t bother me if a work is “melodramatic”: as I had argued in an earlier post, it is entirely legitimate for an author to depict extreme and even violent emotions. And as for “overheated” – at what temperature precisely is a work heated to just the correct level? It is one of those glib, undefined terms that one should never, I think, use in literary criticism.

And in any case, my views of Tennessee Williams are mainly based on the film versions of his plays, and, having seen none of them on stage, and having only read a small handful (and that decades ago in my student days), I am not really sure how close these film adaptations are to the original works. The most famous of these films is A Streetcar Named Desire, its impact due to a great extent to the sheer intensity of the young Marlon Brando’s screen presence; but – and this may be due to my shortcomings as a viewer – I couldn’t really understand the central Blanche Dubois character: I could see what she was, but didn’t feel I was given any indication of why she was so – of what it was either in her psyche or in her environment that made her like this. But it is a work held in such high regard, that it’s best to reserve judgement till I’ve reacquainted myself with it.

I remember a few other films also – Baby Doll, Sweet Bird of Youth, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – and The Night of the Iguana. And it was with the last of these that I decided to start off my Tennessee Williams season. Quite often, one gets a good impression of a writer by reading a number of that writer’s work in close succession, and I am hoping that a reading of a dozen or so of his most highly regarded works would help dispel whatever prejudice I might harbour, and maybe even reveal to me a writer of genuine worth. After all, a reputation as high as that of Tennessee Williams could not have emerged from nothing.

I vaguely remembered the John Huston film from the early 60s with Richard Burton, Ava Gardner and Deborah Kerr; and I remember having enjoyed it quite a bit.  The play itself is set in its entirety on the terrace of a run-down hotel overlooking the Mexican coast; the fairly long opening section of the film depicting the coach tour before reaching the hotel appears to have been the invention of the film-makers, strongly suggested though it is by what we find in the play’s exposition.

This exposition itself is very skilfully handled. It is one of the hardest things in a play to write expository dialogue without giving the impression that these characters are speaking these lines purely for the audience’s benefit and not their own; but Williams’ technique, both in this regard and in others, is seamless. Laurence Shannon, a former priest who had been locked out of his own church, is acting as a tour guide for a group of conservative Baptist ladies from Texas, and, as is fairly obvious, he is on the verge of a mental breakdown. He appears to have bedded a very young lady from the group, and the other ladies – quite understandably, it seemed to me – are after his blood. This particular hotel is not on the tour company’s itinerary, but Shannon insists, for reasons not made entirely clear, on keeping them there for as long as he can.

The proprietor of the hotel, Shannon is shocked to hear, has recently died, and his wife, the middle-aged and sexually predatory Maxine, who doesn’t seem entirely heartbroken about her recent loss, is now running the place. The only other guests (cut from the film, perhaps wisely) are a family of caricature Germans, described in the most grotesque terms in the stage directions: they are enthusiastic Nazis listening excitedly to wartime propaganda on the radio (this play is set in the early 40s). What these characters are doing in the play I really have no idea: for all their buffoonery, they seem too sinister to provide adequate comic relief, but too absurd to be taken seriously in dramatic terms.

Into this environment of the grotesque and the near-insane, all drenched by a merciless tropical sunlight, there enters a couple at least as strange as any of the other characters seen so far, but more subdued in their colouring: one of them is Hannah, a middle-aged spinster who makes a meagre living from sketching tourists; and the other is her grandfather, nearly a hundred years old and obviously close to death, who describes himself as the world’s oldest performing poet. Through the rest of the play we hear this aged man attempting to finish – while his mind still holds out – one final poem. One doubts whether this poem would make any list of the great American poems of the century, but the effect of its repetition on stage has about it a sort of incantatory power:

How calmly does the olive branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer
With no betrayal of despair

Some time while light obscures the tree
The zenith of its life will be
Gone past forever, and from thence
A second history will commence … etc.

It succeeds, it seems to me, in dramatic if not necessarily in poetic terms

However, the play itself does have a certain poetic quality to it. Its climactic sequence is not violent, as it might well have been: rather, it comes in the form of a quiet, intimate scene between Shannon and Hannah, in which an offer of moral redemption appears to be made, though not taken.

Perhaps it is no surprise that Tennessee Williams has such complete technical control: the pacing of the drama, the ebb and flow of the tension, the depiction of Shannon’s desperation and of Hannah’s stoicism, or, indeed, of Maxine’s fleshy sexuality, are all admirable, and quite clearly the work of a man who had completely mastered stagecraft. From a noted dramatist, such technical expertise is only to be expected. But the depiction of Hannah goes further than that – it is more than merely admirable: Tennessee Williams imbues her presence with a grace, with a sort of radiance, but without any sense of sentimentality or of the maudlin.

However, I can’t say I was entirely convinced by the play as whole. Too much that is important is left too vague. We can see Shannon’s desperation: like the iguana that has been captured and tied up to be fattened for the dinner table, Shannon is at the end of his tether. But, once again, I needed to know how he got to this stage: what is it in his psyche, in his environment, that has led to this? And similarly with Hannah: what is it that drives her to travel penniless through an inhospitable world with her old and decrepit grandfather? Why is she, too, so lonely? One does not, of course, seek answers to all questions in a work of art: indeed, in any art of any substance, it is essential to convey a sense of mystery, because, after all, the questions of life that can be answered with ease are not really questions that are worth posing. It may well be that there can be no clear explanation for Shannon’s incipient mental breakdown, or of Hannah’s outcast state. But when questions such as these are barely so much as considered, I can’t help feeling that there are major holes in the dramatic texture.

However, the obvious qualities of the play – its sure pacing, its theatrical effectiveness, its marvellously fluid dialogue, its sense of the poetic, and, finally, its hint of a possible redemption – cannot be ignored. I shall most certainly persevere with Tennessee Williams.

On symbols and symbolism

I don’t normally write about football on this blog. (For any translatlantic reader of this blog, I should explain that by “football” I mean what is generally known across the Pond as “soccer”.) This is not because I am not interested in football: I am, and always have been. And, having grown up in Scotland, I remain interested in Scottish football. And anyone who has been following Scottish football will know that momentous events have been happening lately: one of the two dominant teams of Scotland, Rangers, are currently in administration, and possibly heading for liquidation with even the currently confirmed debts well beyond anything they are likely to pay in full. And if the decision of the tribunal goes against them – which, from what I gather, is likely – and they find themselves owing even more in unpaid taxes than they currently do, then a way out seems, to a financial layman such as myself at least, something of an impossibility.

But I do not want to write about this: I know this blog does tend to range quite widely, but finance and football I would like to keep out of bounds – finance because I do not understand its intricacies well enough, and football because even as it is there is no shortage of a cacophony of opinions already on the net – articulate and inarticulate, intelligent and unintelligent, and prejudiced to degrees ranging from the mildly innocuous to the dangerously demented – for me to want to add to it. Yes, I do have opinions on this subject, but I would prefer, I think, to keep these opinions to myself: after all, if a football team thinks it reasonable that taxpayers should subsidise its quest for footballing glory, then why should a mere taxpayer such as myself take exception? Let be, let be.

But I raise this issue here to focus on a point that is perhaps incidental to the main thrust of this story, but which is, for me at least, rather interesting: and this is the part played in all this by the power of symbolism. Now, symbolism is something anyone with even a vague interest in literature has had to grapple with to some degree or other: how can one, after all, pretend to have even the most superficial interest in literature without having at some time or other asked oneself what the white whale symbolises? But, with all due respect, symbolism is not an issue one associates with football supporters (amongst whose ranks, incidentally, I count myself). However, ask any football supporter in Scotland what is signified by “jelly and ice cream”, or by “succulent lamb”, and they will be able to tell you. Those gleeful at the current difficulties of Rangers have long been singing about “having a party”, and enjoying “jelly and ice cream”, when “Rangers die”, and “jelly and ice cream” has now, as a consequence, come to symbolise an uninhibited joy at the current difficulties, or even the possible forthcoming demise, of Rangers: to such an extent, indeed, has this particular piece of symbolism taken root in the psyche of Scottish football fans that stalls have now set up outside Celtic Park selling jelly and ice cream at outrageous prices to enthusiastic customers, while many on the Rangers side of the divide have been known even to deprive their children of this once innocuous dessert because of what it has now come to represent. And “succulent lamb” is the menu item that certain Scottish sports journalists, invited to dinner by Sir David Murray, former chairman of Rangers, had rhapsodised about in what had passed for sports columns, and has now come to symbolise the uncritical and sycophantic commentary that these journalists have, allegedly, indulged in over the years, and continue – again, allegedly – to indulge in even now. Both these items of food, innocent of any association till fairly recently of anything to do with football, have now acquired symbolic resonances to put them on a par even with the white whale. So much for those who think symbolism is no more than an affectation of literary arty-farty types.

We may wonder sometimes why it is that certain writers who make extensive use symbolism should use X to denote Y when they could have used Y in the first place, but thinking in terms of symbols comes to us naturally: few of us, I imagine, will feel comfortable about cutting out the eyes from a photograph of someone we love, even though we know well that it is just ink on photographic paper, and not the real person. Sometimes, the reason we prefer to speak or think in terms of metaphors can be clear: a symbol may represent not merely one thing, but a variety of things that we have learnt to associate together; or a symbol can represent things which we may feel, often feel very deeply, but which our spoken or written language cannot articulate to any satisfactory degree of precision. This, I’d guess, is why symbolism plays so great a part in all our religions. And it is also, I think, the reason why it is so important in our literatures: the finest of our literatures are, after all, attempts to make language express that which is beyond its usual expressive scope.

But there is something about our use of and regard for symbols that goes beyond this. It seems that we humans enjoy symbols purely for their own sake, for some vague aesthetic satisfaction they afford. How else can one explain the jelly and ice cream, and the succulent lamb?

The late greats

Liszt’s famous summary of Beethoven’s career – “L’adolescent, l’homme, le dieu” – accords well with what we perhaps feel ought to describe the career of any great artist: for surely, the more an artist experiences of life, the more profound and wise their vision of it must be; and the closer they are to death the more clearly they must see beyond. Even though a moment’s reflection reveals such thoughts to be sentimental drivel, we find it difficult to escape that vague thought that there is, that there must be, something special about the late works of an artist. We almost imagine that closeness to death confers upon a great artist the ability to glimpse beyond, and we look in those late works for a greater awareness of mortality; a sort of transfigured farewell, of sense of the ethereal, of the other-worldly.

For those readers who have read the paragraph above thinking “Speak for yourself, mate!” I suppose I should offer an apology: it is possibly not “we” at all who look for other-worldly wisdom in late works – it is “I”. But it is not unusual to substitute the first person plural for the first person singular as a means of pretending that one’s personal concerns are of more general interest, and I certainly am not above such a cheap trick. So “we”, I think, remains. We look for transcendent wisdom in late works; and what we look for, not unsurprisingly, we often find.

Take late Shakespeare, for instance: leaving aside those inconsequential late collaborations – Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen – Shakespeare finished his dramatic career with three plays – Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest – that look beyond the tragic towards a state of almost mystical reconciliation in which all losses are restored, and sorrows end. Surely there’s something a bit other-worldly about that, no? Or late Beethoven, when he had entered his dieu stage, according to Liszt’s formulation: who has ever listened to Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas, the Missa Solemnis, or those late string quartets, without hearing sounds that seem to come from some other world? There’s Mozart as well – writing music of transcendent serenity in his clarinet quintet, his last piano concerto, his clarinet concerto, and meditating on death as only a dying man could in his unfinished Requiem Mass. There’s Schubert, who composed a string of masterpieces in his last year when he must have known he was dying, each of these masterpieces haunted by the shadow of death. There’s Mahler, whose Das Lied von der Erde and 9th Symphony seem almost to depict a passage from this world to the next. Ibsen’s late plays, too, seem increasingly to move away from the realism he had himself pioneered into a world where all solidities seem to melt away. Or there’s Tagore, whose very spare, almost minimalist final poems, written in extreme old age on what he must have realised was to be his death-bed, express a spiritual turmoil and an anguish that render them almost too painful to read. All of these artists reacted to death in different ways – but can it be doubted that they were all, in these late works, meditating on their mortality? Similar observations can no doubt be made in the visual arts: could Titian’s Pietà, for instance,have been painted by anyone other than by a man of genius on the point of his own death?

We must, of course, be careful here. Any artist who practises his or her art over a long period of time undergoes changes in style, in approach, or even in themes: this is because we all change over time, we all have new concerns, new perspectives. That an artist’s style in old age is different from that of his younger self is nothing too surprising. Artists renew their art: those who cannot inevitably decline in their artistry, and are eventually remembered primarily or even solely for their earlier work (Wordsworth is a very obvious example of this). And yes, artists may – as, no doubt, we all may – consider death more intently as they closer they come to it, but it is sentimental to imagine that mere proximity to death can give one greater insights into its nature. Yes, it is true that the works of Schubert’s last year, written in the shadow of death, were haunted by it: but then again, so is his D minor string quartet (“Death and the Maiden”) which was written some five or so years before his death when he was still in his mid-twenties. It should really not be surprising that people who think profoundly about life should think profoundly about death also, and that closeness to death is not a necessary condition for the latter. For instance, I cannot think of any novel that more closely concerns itself with death than does Anna Karenina: and yet, it was written in Tolstoy’s vigorous middle age, in his late 40s, when he was in his prime of health and still had another thirty and more years to live.

There are so many other examples one can think of. Beethoven’s late works were written in his 50s, and, as far as I know, there’s nothing to indicate that Beethoven was aware of his approaching death at the time. Indeed, the great slow movement of his late A minor string quartet explicitly celebrates his recovery from illness. (it was composed shortly after recovery from illness, and in the score, the movement is headed  ”Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart“  – A Convalescent’s Holy Song of Thanksgiving to the Divinity, in the Lydian Mode). Neither is there any evidence to indicate that Mozart, aged only 35, was aware of his impending death when composing what we now think of as his late works. And if Mahler’s final works are about death, it is hard to think of any of his works, even his very first symphony, that isn’t. That his late style was different from his earlier style does not necessarily make it more profound: great though that 9^th symphony is, is his magnificent 2^nd symphony any lesser a work of art simply because it was composed earlier?

But despite all that, we – all right, if you insist, I – cannot help but look for that extra wisdom and profundity that we – I – feel ought to be present in late works. Hell, I even listen to Wagner’s Parsifal once in a while to see if this final masterpiece (for masterpiece it clearly is) makes sense this time round. I listened to it again lately: but once again, it eluded me. Obviously the old bore meant something by it all, but I can’t get anything more out of it than a series of extraordinarily beautiful sounds. I tried reading up on it a bit this time: I found buried away in that cluttered little room I call my library Lucy Beckett’s much acclaimed Cambridge University Handbook on Wagner’s Parsifal; and I also came across this very interesting website on the opera. But I must admit, I am none the wiser. Somewhat better informed, perhaps, but none the wiser. (Nonetheless, I do recommend both book and website to those who are more receptive to this strange work than I appear to be.)

But what can one say about a late work, written by an artist approaching his eighties and who knew that this work was to be his last, but which, far from wandering awe-struck into the ethereal shades of the other world, rejoices all the more firmly in the solidity of this one? Of a work written by a man who has known personal grief and tragedy, but who, on leaving life, can only express for it his unreserved love? Who meditates not on what may or may not come, but looks instead to is, and celebrates it with all the vigour and vitality and exuberance and unshadowed joy that one more usually, though perhaps erroneously, associates with youth? Yes, I am thinking about Verdi’s Falstaff. And I am thinking also that I must write a post on this miracle in this blog some day – if only I knew where to begin…

“The Lady from the Sea”: a rich, rare Ibsen

19^th century work about a married woman? File under “Trapped Inside a Marriage”. Emma Bovary, Hedda Gabler, Isabel Archer, Anna Karenina, Dorothea Brooke, Lady Dedlock … They’re all much of a muchness, aren’t they? “Trapped inside a marriage” – that’s what 19th century writers did awfully well.

And if it’s Ibsen, they’re definitely trapped inside marriage! In fact, you don’t even need to read or to see the play. Ibsen, after all, was a past master at this Trapped-Inside-a-Marriage malarkey: if it’s “Trapped Inside a Marriage” you want, then Ibsen’s your man!

***

The Lady From the Sea is among Ibsen’s finest works, written at a time in his career when he seemed incapable of writing anything other than masterpieces. It features at its centre one of the finest and most demanding roles ever written for an actress. And yet, while actresses queue up to play Nora in A Doll’s House, or the title role in Hedda Gabler, The Lady From the Sea is comparatively little-known, and rarely performed. I have been, for several years now, trying to catch on stage as many Ibsen plays as I can, but I only caught up with The Lady From the Sea on stage a couple of weeks ago – in a quite excellent production at the Rose Theatre in Kingston-on-Thames, with Joely Richardson in the central role, and superbly directed with characteristic clarity by Stephen Unwin.

It is hard to understand the reason for this neglect. As Unwin’s production demonstrated, it can hold the stage triumphantly. But, although Ellida Wangel is among the finest of all Ibsen roles, this is, essentially, an ensemble piece, with at least half dozen or so characters holding the stage equally: this is unusual for Ibsen – especially late Ibsen, in which the spotlight usually falls with a disconcerting intensity on only two or three characters at the most – and brings it in many ways closer to Chekhovian drama: but the themes, and the haunting poetic imagery, are unmistakably Ibsenite.

To get the obvious out of the way, Ellida Wangel is, indeed, trapped inside a marriage. But she is very different either from Nora (in A Doll’s House), who had preceded her by about nine years; or from Hedda, who was to follow immediately afterwards. Nora is an intelligent woman who plays the role of a helpless scatterbrain utterly dependent upon her husband because this is the role that is expected of her: she wears the mask that her particular social environment has created for her, but is intelligent enough to arrive at the realisation that the mask doesn’t fit. Hedda, on the other hand, is self-lacerating from the very start; she is also intelligent, but her intelligence merely serves to increase her disgust with herself: she has walked into her soul-destroying marriage with her eyes fully open, almost, one suspects, to punish herself. Ellida is quite different from either Nora or Hedda: she is a woman who remains, for reasons she herself cannot herself quite fathom, alienated from her kindly husband, and from her step-daughters, and longs for a freedom that she knows she has never had.

The respective husbands of these three ladies are also very different from each other. Nora’s husband, Torvald, is a self-deluding egotist, who, like his wife, is also wearing a mask that refuses to fit; Hedda’s husband is merely a nincompoop. But Ellida’s husband, though ageing, is a kindly, decent man. These ladies may all be trapped within their marriages, but  the marriages are all, nonetheless, very different from each other; and the ladies themselves are very different from each other. And, not surprisingly, these three marriages are resolved in very different ways. Nora famously walks out on her husband, but despite the apparent decisiveness of her action, she remains curiously uncertain: she is uncertain as to who she really is beneath her mask, and is determined to discover for herself; Hedda’s energies, on the other hand, become merely destructive, and turn in upon herself in one of Ibsen’s bleakest endings. But in The Lady From the Sea, against all expectations, the ending is joyous and radiant, as sunlight floods the stage. If only those who characterise Ibsen merely as a doom-and-gloom merchant would read or see this play: it is one of the most startlingly moving finales in all drama.

Ellida Wangel herself, the eponymous Lady From the Sea, I can’t help seeing as a sort of corollary to Isabel Archer: in A Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer finds herself having the luxury to choose, but the choice she makes is disastrous; nonetheless, because the choice had been made freely, she faces up heroically to its consequences. Ellida Wangel, on the other hand, has made a good choice; however, the choice had not been freely made, and, for this reason, Ellida cannot accept its validity. Despite her husband’s kindness and gentleness, Ellida has remained aloof: she is alienated not merely from her husband, but also from her step-daughters, who have come to despise her.

Into this naturalistic situation, Ibsen introduces his own brand of poetic imagery, which, in this play, hints at the demonic and the supernatural. Ellida had grown up in the far North, by the sea: even now, she is drawn to the sea, and to all it represents – openness, freedom, even terror – everything that is closed to her in her stolidly middle-class bourgeois marriage. And she is haunted by a memory of the past: she had betrothed herself to a sailor, and, despite this sailor being very likely a murderer, had solemnised the betrothal by tying together two rings, and throwing them into the sea. This sailor had said he will return for her, but he hadn’t: now, it appears, he may be dead. But, precisely half way through the play, this man, who may be dead, returns, and claims her. Ellida, significantly, does not recognise him at first, but when she does, she finds the claims of this ghostly man and all that he represents irresistible. But at the same time, she hates herself for what she desires.

There is a strong element of folklore in all this: Ibsen makes use here of the same legend that had inspired Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” – of the Lady from the Sea who comes to the land, grows land-legs, and finds herself unable to return. But while the Little Mermaid’s failure to return to the sea is tragic, Ibsen considers other possibilities: human beings, after all, are capable of growth, of development: they are capable of “acclimatisation”. In his earlier masterpiece, Peer Gynt had been happy to let his face grow to fit whatever mask happened to be the most convenient at the time, but when he tries to find out who he really is, he finds himself to be like an onion – merely layer upon accumulated layer, with no real centre; but his opposite is Brand, the absolutist, the utterly inflexible, the man who is prepared to destroy what is most dear to him rather than to compromise. Here, in a naturalistic setting, Ibsen ponders upon the possible meanings of the story of the Little Mermaid: is developing land legs necessarily a bad thing? Is not the ability to compromise among mankind’s most remarkable features, and possibly even its saving grace? In short, is the story of the Little Mermaid necessarily tragic?

The subplots – unusual in an Ibsen play – are fully but unobtrusively developed. There’s the younger daughter, Hilde, whom we will see again in the later play The Master Builder: in that play, when it is suggested that she return home, she says “Wild birds do not fly back into their cages”. Here, we see the cage for ourselves, and to be frank, it doesn’t seem so bad. But she is a wild bird, all the same: we see her here fascinated by a young man who is absurdly foolish and self-obsessed, and who doesn’t realize that he is dying; Hilde, however, knows, and, fascinated by his impending death, teases him mercilessly. The older sister, Bolette, is much gentler, but she too has dreams of breaking out of the backwater which is the only world she knows, and coming to terms with the world outside. But the only way she can leave her native backwater is to accept the proposal of Arnholm, who had formerly been her tutor. She does not see him as a husband, but what choice does she have? Earlier in the play, Ellida had told her husband  that he had “bought” her: her husband had been shocked and hurt, but could not deny the justice of the accusation. And now, we see the same pattern repeating itself: Bolette is being “bought” by her prospective husband. But things are not quite so simple as such a bald summary might suggest: Arnholm, like Ellida’s husband Wangel, is a decent and kindly man: possibly, in time, Bolette may “acclimatise” as well.

But acclimatisation cannot, and must not, be taken for granted. Wangel had been hurt when his wife had told him that he had “bought” her, but he must accept the truth of this. And he is duty-bound, as an honest man, to set her free. And this he does in the climactic scene of the play: it is a heroic effort, and such heroism is unexpected in a character who has been presented in generally unheroic terms. But nonetheless, he does set her free: whatever choice she makes now is her own, freely made. Ellida is taken aback, “With all your heart?”she asks in astonishmen. Yes, her husband replies replies in pain, “with all my suffering heart”. And at this point, Ellida knows what her choice is, and it is not what she had expected. She has, despite everything, “acclimatised”.

***

In Ibsen’s very next play, Hedda Gabler, we are back in a human hell. No  longer are we out in the open air by the fjords and mountains: we are stuck, claustrophobically enclosed, in a bourgeois drawing room, in which all passions turn hellish and destructive. This is not because Ibsen had changed his mind about marriage: he was, as ever, exploring new and different facets. Hedda Gabler , powerful though it is, does not negate this rich, rare play in which Ibsen considers the possibility that we humans may, despite everything, pull through together after all.

“The Ghost Writer” by John Harwood

Ghost stories tend to work best as short stories rather than as novels. Or, at best, as novellas, such as The Turn of the Screw. The reasons for this aren’t hard to discern: the point of a ghost story is to evoke fear – to create in the reader a state of mind that is susceptible to suggestions of supernatural terror; and so delicate and fragile is this state of mind, so easily destroyed by even the slightest intrusions of reality, that it becomes virtually impossible to keep it intact across the span of a full-length novel.

John Harwood is aware of the difficulty in his first and much-acclaimed novel The Ghost Writer. He solves it in part by interpolating into his principal narrative various short ghost stories, purportedly written by the Deceased great-grandmother of first person narrator. These ghost stories, we are told, may or may not be related to a dark mystery at the heart of the principal narration. But here, we run into a problem: to maintain the principal narrative over nearly 400 odd pages, Harwood has to present it as something other than a ghost story: he chooses to present it as a mystery story. And, while the ghost story and the mystery story may superficially appear to have much in common, they are very different beasts, and make very different demands.

A mystery story is essentially all about plot. The author may create a strong atmosphere, but ultimately, the whole point is to tantalise readers with unrevealed elements of the plot, and to reveal these elements by the end. The enjoyment is in the unraveling of the plot, and once the plot is unraveled, it is of no greater interest than is a completed crossword puzzle.

But plot generally counts for little in a ghost story. Indeed, many of the finest of ghost stories are virtually plotless. And, far from resolving issues by the end, a good ghost should deliberately leave at least some of them unresolved, or merely hinted at, to ensure that a sense of unease lingers even beyond the final lines. Neat explanations that are essential for a satisfactory conclusion of a mystery story can completely destroy a ghost story; the rationality that resolves mysteries is grotesquely out of place in a context in which it serves but to destroy the fragile susceptibility to supernatural terror.

John Harwood treads a skilful line between the competing claims of the two genres he is attempting to combine, but, looking through various readers’ reactions across the net, I do strongly get the impression that fans of the mystery genre were unhappy that not all plot details were clearly explained, while aficionados of the supernatural genre were unhappy that too much was revealed. Well, you can’t please everyone, I guess, but when two genres have such different criteria of success, it’s possibly best not even to try to combine them.

However, it must be conceded that the mysteries at the heart of the novel are intriguing; and that the sequences of supernatural terror, when they come, really are quite spellbinding. The interpolated stories are variable: M. R. James has been evoked, but he always is evoked when creepy old-fashioned ghost stories are being discussed. Tthe comparison, it must be said, does Harwood no favours, but that’s hardly a disgrace: M. R. James is, after all, almost universally considered the master of the genre, and there is no reason why every practitioner must be compared with the best. But, leaving M. R. James out of it, the short stories interpolated by Harwood into the principal narrative are, on the whole, rather good: I particularly enjoyed one set in the Reading Room of the British Library, and featuring a deeply sinister doll. However, at the centre of the novel is interpolated not a short story, but a novella – “The Revenant”, some 70 pages long – and here, I was less convinced: as ever with narratives of any length, it is very difficult to focus on ghostly matters over the entire span, and so the author has to focus on other matters; and here, John Harwood – or, if you prefer, Viola Hatherley, the fictional author of this story – focuses on the characters, and on the relationships between them. However, since the characters are rather two-dimensional, I found it, I must admit, rather dull: it is hard to be interested in a story of sibling rivalry involving two cardboard cut-out sisters.

This is, I admit, a problem I often have with much popular drama, and popular literature: I really can’t be bothered with the relationships and dramas of characters who are little more than their names. Is Beatrice the nasty one, or is it Cordelia? Which one does Harry really fancy? Why do they all have Shakespearean names? Do I care?

To be fair, this longueur doesn’t last long: after “The Revenant”, we enter into the finest part of the novel, in which the narrator is in London, determined to find out the family secrets his mother had hidden from him. And we are introduced at this stage to that venerable, time-honoured element of a ghost story – an old, abandoned house. Not that there is anything wrong with that: the ghost story is quite a conservative genre, and its effect depends not on introducing radical new elements, but, rather, on doing established things well. And John Harwood does it supremely well. There are several scenes set in that old house, and Harwood very skillfully tightens the tension just that bit further with each successive scene; and the final sequence seemed to me superbly carried off. I wouldn’t recommend reading this section of the novel when on one’s own late at night.

So, despite a few reservations – mainly due to my personal lack of interest in the mystery story genre – I did enjoy this: towards the end, I enjoyed it greatly. Harwood’s follow-up to this novel is The Séance, which, I gather, is a mystery story with supernatural trimmings. It’s a shame he has gone in that direction. Let’s hope that he returns to the full-blown ghost story; and that, this time round, he writes a collection of short stories rather than a novel.