BOOK: Leon Battista Alberti, "Dinner Pieces"

Leon Battista Alberti: Dinner Pieces. Vol. 1. Edited by Roberto Cardini. Translated by David Marsh. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 97. Harvard University Press, 2024. 9780674295742. xxxi + 363 pp.

Leon Battista Alberti: Dinner Pieces. Vol. 2. Edited by Roberto Cardini. Translated by David Marsh. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 98. Harvard University Press, 2024. 9780674295742. vi + 359 pp.

By now we've seen several works by Alberti in the I Tatti Renaissance Library (his Biographical and Autobiographical Writings; Momus, a novel; and Philodoxus, a comedy) and there's definitely a pattern here: nearly all these works of his are (supposed to be) comical, or satirical, or humorous, and at pretty much no point have I been able to appreciate the comedy, satire or humour in them; in fact most of the time I couldn't quite see the point of such writings at all, so that I can only conclude, with considerable regret, that I'm missing the point of Alberti's work completely and that I'm definitely not part of the intended target audience for it.

The present work, Dinner Pieces, is a collection of about 50 short pieces, the shortest of which are less than a page long, the longest run to maybe twenty pages or so, and most are toward the lower end of this range. Some are short stories or fables, many are dialogues and a few almost resemble one-act plays. In his preface Alberti hopes they will be “read over dinners and drinks” (vol. 1, p. 3), hence the title; I didn't try to read them over dinner, but I suspect that Alberti had a longer and more leisurely banquet in mind, and most of his dinner pieces would be too long for my dinners :)

A lot of the pieces are allegorical in a rather ponderous and drawn-out way. For example, 1.4 is a philosopher's dream in which human souls are struggling in a river, some on planks, some on boats, some with floats; the river, of course, is called Life. 3.1 describes a long series of alegorical paintings of virtues and vices. In 3.7, Truth and Reason uproot a monstrous plant called Suspicion. In Appendix 2.2, the protagonist (a stand-in for Alberti himself) has crafted twelve rings with various allegorical designs, whose meaning is then described at great length; they show how to live a virtuous life. On a somewhat related note, 8.2 is a long list of enigmatic teachings by ancient philosophers, along with their supposed interpretations, many by Alberti himself; for example, we are told that Plutarch “interprets the saying [by Pythagoras] ‘Abstain from beans’ to mean that we should shrink from public office” (¶12). It's nonsense like this that gives philosophy a bad reputation :(

4.1 is a dream-journey into a bizarre underworld; there's a river of human faces; lost things — empires, authorities, favours, the narrator's brain; crossing the river by riding an old hag while she swims on her back.* If there's any allegory behind all this, it's quite impenetrable to me. But it's insane enough that it might very well be based on an actual dream :)

[*This part of the story features one of the most hilarious passages in the whole book; it's like something straight out of an incel forum: “You can't imagine how loudly I laughed as I swam across this river. Men are ferried across by old women condemned to this task because as girls they acted haughty and cruel, and as hags practiced sorcery and witchcraft. [. . .] What's more, women's heads are completely empty, and thus provide an excellent means of crossing a river.” (¶39–40, 47) :)))]

Some pieces espouse Stoic ideas that were no doubt fresh back in Ancient Greece when the world was young, but are less so today (though they are no less true); some are more in the Cynic vein, content to mostly just show people at their worst. In 1.6 we see a group of recently enslaved Scythians giving their various opinions about their future life in capticity; they conclude that the little babies have it best, as they never knew life in freedom. In 2.4, we see an astrologer and his assistant collecting money from customers and then making worthless predictions. In 3.3, gods are looking for Justice, but she is not to be found anywhere on earth. In 4.2, various characters desire a garland from the beautiful maiden Praise, but are mocked by her ugly chaperone Envy; none are found worthy. In 4.3, a Cynic, advising Phoebus on which animals to change various groups of human souls into, vituperates them all mercilessly (in the end, he, too, is turned into an animal, a “gold-winged fly”). In 4.4, a group of talentless writers tries to enter the Temple of Fame (chaos ensues). In 4.6, a philosopher argues that the slave is really more free than his master, who is burdened with responsibility for his whole household and thus is himself a slave to Necessity; I hope that this is sarcastic, but it's honestly hard to tell :)) — and it reminded me a little of the arguments by modern-day capitalists (and their bootlickers), who like to pretend as if their life and work were harder and more stressful than that of their workers.

But the most sustained example of grim cynical pessimism is Appendix 2.1, where Neophronus, recently deceased, finds that his spirit is now able to move freely at will, and promptly experiences one disappointment after another. His wife laments him in public, but cheats with his steward... during his funeral :))) (¶67); his son is overjoyed at his death (¶117); his servants gather in his cellar, drinking his fine wines (¶139); his kinsmen curse him for not remembering them in his will, and rifle through his library in search of hidden valuables (¶174), destroying his manuscripts, the fruit of a lifetime's worth of literary study (¶250). All his actions in life had been in vain (¶361); “life is an evil to be shunned” (¶370); thoroughly disgusted with human nature, he is content to be and remain dead (¶392–7). — None of this is exactly wrong, but it's grim stuff nevertheless. Alberti shows people at their worst, but they aren't actually always as bad as this, though he might pretend otherwise.

A few of the pieces are critical of religion in what was probably a fairly daring way in his time. 1.2 is a dialogue in which one of the two interlocutors espouses boldly Stoic ideas about how gods don't intervene in the world and certainly don't listen to human prayers. In 2.6, priests argue which god to worship, but finding a coin on the altar, decide to worship that henceforth. In 3.6, the priests have “always revered and loved the wicked”.

Many pieces have some sort of moral lesson which, for the most part, is fairly conventional, neither particularly original nor particularly insightful. 1.5: have patience, but only as long as necessity requires it; 2.2: find a good middle path between frugality and avarice; 2.5: it's better to be thought a miser than to be thought poor; 3.2: flowers that, driven by ambition, came from the ground too early in spring, found themselves frosted by a cold wind; 3.4: how to treat captured enemies in war? he recommends keeping them as hostages, a middle road between killing them and releasing them; 3.5: an allegory in which stones come to regret their “eagerness for revolution”; 9.1: rely on yourselves and hope rather than despair (this particular piece also has the good feature of looking at least somewhat like a reasonably straightforwardly told story, as opposed to being just a pile of allegories like so many other pieces in this collection); 10.3: bend rather than break; 10.4: stick with established institutions.

I enjoyed 3.2, a short fable: a cock, realizing they are being fattened up for slaughter, refuses to eat; but then the farmer, seeing him all scrawny, thinks he is sick and slaughters him even sooner, to prevent the disease from spreading :))

Book 10 is almost entirely on political subjects. I liked 10.1, set in a community of birds; the Owl proposes that birds of prey, “who cannot scratch the ground for food”, should be provided with food by others; the Duck argues against this with arguments that are *exactly* like those of modern-day libertarians (tAxAtIoN iS sLaVeRy etc etc.). This argument carries the assembly, and the birds of prey then decide to take by force what has thus been denied them. The moral of the story is not exactly uplifting: “There are some citizens whom it is better to support with deference, rather than at peril to your life” (10.1.50); but I guess this made sense in the turbulent environment of renaissance Italy, with its constant risk of coups by powerful cliques and the like. Anyway, the part of this story that I found the most interesting was the libertarian-like arguments of the Duck, since they are so similar to ones made today. An important difference, of course, is that in the story it is the most powerful (i.e. the birds of prey), rather than the weakest, class of society that would be the recipients of the proposed system of welfare; it is easy to oppose that system while being in favour of the present-day welfare systems; but the Duck's libertarian arguments apply equally to both, and I despise those arguments regardless of the merits of the specifical welfare system under consideration.

In 10.2, a community of clouds asks Jupiter to assign them a king; he tells them to elect one themselves, and they promptly break into factional violence. Jupiter smiles, knowing this is a good way “to restrain and repress their aggressiveness” (10.2.48).

In 10.5, a community of fish and frogs living in a lake descends into factional conflict and even invites two outside rulers: the fish invite a snake, the frogs an otter, and both then rule as tyrants. Eventually the fish and frogs manage to mend their relations, overthrow the tyrants and live in harmony. (I guess this was of great contemporary relevance to Alberti, when foreign rulers were meddling in Italy's countless wars and occasionally were even invited to administer this or that city-state for a limited time.)

He has some favourite topics that he freqently returns to, and that we've already seen in the earlier ITRL volumes of Alberti's works, such the unprofitability of studying literature (though he persists in it anyway; 1.1, 4.5, Appendix 2.1, Preface to Book 4), or his distrust of women and marriage (7.1, 7.2, 11.2).

Several of the books have short prefaces, in which Alberti espouses some surprisingly reasonable and moderate ideas. In the preface to Book 7, he points out that many now wish to be good orators, but instead of practicing their own oratory, they waste time by criticizing others. Alberti thinks we can't expect everyone to be great orators, and should be content with what contemporary writers are able to accomplish. In the preface to Book 10, he calls for more “goodwill and affection” between scholars, and less detraction; they all strive for “virtue and glory”; and they can bond over hating the “ignorant masses” :)

*

Unlike with many other ITRL volumes, the translation (by David Marsh) in the present edition isn't new, but a reprint of a translation first published in 1987; at first sight it seems identical but I didn't compare it all that closely, so I guess that some minor changes have perhaps have been made to bring it in line with the Latin text (which is from Cardini's edition of 2010). Having taken a glimpse at the 1987 edition of Marsh's translation, I think that I find his introduction more useful and informative than Cardini's introduction in the present volume, but when it comes to endnotes it's just the opposite. I couldn't help feeling, while reading the introduction to the present edition, that Cardini has immersed himself so deep, and for so many decades, in the study of Alberti's work, that he wasn't able to write his introduction at the level needed by a reader completely unfamiliar with these things, such as me (and there's nothing wrong with that, of course; I'm not *really* the target audience for these books).

For example, I must be blind, but I couldn't even find any explanation as to why Book 4 of the Dinner Pieces is immediately followed by Book 7. What happened to Books 5 and 6? The answer, according to Marsh's introduction (pp. 1, 9 in his 1987 edition), is that the work was not printed early on, like most of Alberti's works have been, and has survived only in a few manuscripts, none of which happens to include Books 5 and 6. (Incidentally, the first printed edition, from 1890, is available on archive.org, but contains only about half of the material now known.) Anyway, I thought this was quite interesting; I vaguely remembered Alberti as a 15th-century figure, and I thought of the 15th century as already within the age of printing; but I guess it stands to reason that printing got established only gradually over the course of that century, and manuscripts still remained important for a while.

Nevertheless some parts of the introduction were very interesting. For example, it points out that for earlier humanists such as Petrarch, humanism was mostly about reading and writing of books: “Petrarch placed architects, painters, and sculptors among the practitioners of the ‘mechanical arts’ ” (vol. 1, p. xv); by contrast, Alberti promoted a “nonbookish concept of humanity” in which “painting and sculpture, music and goldsmithing, astronomy and astrology, mathematics and geometry” (ibid.) had an equal part with reading and writing. I guess this helps explain why he keeps ranting about how useless the study of literature is :)

I was also interested to learn that Alberti's real name was Battista; Leone was just a pen-name (p. xxvi). He was an illegitimate child but later obtained a papal dispensation for it, which allowed him to progress in his career (p. xxvii).

As for the English translation, it has one very interesting characteristic: in nearly all the other ITRL volumes, the English translation is a good deal longer than the Latin original, but here the English translation is shorter by about the same amount. I'm not suggesting that we should accuse the translator of omitting anything; in the present edition, every sentence is numbered (both in the Latin and in the English text) and accounted for. I guess that Marsh simply uses a more efficient style, and from time to time I couldn't help wishing that the other translators in the ITRL series would follow his example.

But I have to protest against Marsh's use of “zombie friend” (4.6.27) to translate cadaverosum hospitem. It feels very anachronistic, since you can't help but be reminded that in Alberti's time, the Europeans hadn't even discovered America yet, let alone colonized Haiti, populated it with African slaves and waited for zombie folklore to emerge there.

The editor's introduction to the present volume has an interesting remark that “[t]he Latin of the Dinner Pieces is a delicious mélange” (vol. 1, p. viii), mixing many different styles, but I can't say that I noticed this in the translation; but perhaps I just don't have a sufficiently sensitive ear for style to notice it.

A funny tidbit from the notes: in 1441 Alberti sponsored a competition “for the best poetic composition in Italian. [. . .] the jury, made up of Latin-writing humanists, spitefully refused to pick a winner” :)) (vol. 1, p. 344).

*

Anyway, what to say at the end? Alberti's Dinner Pieces were not really my cup of tea overall, but readable enough in small quantities; and since I wasn't expecting anything more from the book, I can't say that I was in any way disappointed by it.

BOOK: "Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee"

Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (Dee Goong An): An Authentic Eighteenth-Century Detective Novel. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Robert van Gulik. New York: Dover Publications, 1976.* (First ed.: privately printed in Tokyo, 1949.) 0486233375. xxiii + 237 pp.

[*Obviously my copy is from a later printing, but it doesn't indicate the year anywhere. I bought it in 2008 and it was new then. The RRP on the back cover is $8.95; as of this writing, in 2024, the price on Dover's website is $17.95. Ouch!]

I cannot claim to be a huge reader in the genre of detective stories, but I have read, and enjoyed, Poe's stories about Dupin and Doyle's stories about Sherlock Holmes, several times in fact, and I also listened to a lot of audiobooks of Agatha Christie's stories about Poirot; and I was vaguely aware that Poe's Dupin stories, from the first half of the 19th century, were pretty much the beginning of the detective story as a genre. So naturally, I was greatly intrigued when, years ago on a book fair, I came across a book subtitled “An Authentic Eighteenth-Century Detective Novel”. It turns out that, while Poe's stories may have been the first detective fiction in the West, something very much resembling detective stories and novels had existed in China several centuries earlier than that (p. iii). I bought the book right away, but only got around to reading it now.

As it turns out, the book has very many excellent features — and one or two horrible downsides, but we'll get to these in due course. The translator, Robert van Gulik, was evidently both an excellent Sinologist and a keen connoisseur of crime fiction, both Western and Chinese, and he provided the book with a very interesting introduction and an appendix with some notes; he introduces us to Chinese detective stories, points out a few ways in which they differ from Western ones, and explains the minor adjustments he made in the process of translating the present work to make it more accessible to Western readers. Many of these novels are very long, have a confusingly large cast of characters, reveal the criminals up front, and feature prominent supernatural elements — characteristics which the Chinese audiences expect and like, but which Western ones wouldn't; van Gulik chose to translate the present novel precisely because it is one of the few without these downsides (p. v).

The protagonist of the Chinese detective novel isn't exactly a detective as we would understand the term now, but the “district magistrate”, an imperial official in charge of an area typically consisting of “one fairly large walled city, and all the countryisde around it, say for sixty or seventy miles” (p. ix). When people reported crimes or brought lawsuits before him, it was his job to act as investigator, prosecutor and judge, all in one person; so he has a wider range of things to do than the Western detective, and we get to see him do all these things in the present novel as well. The Chinese readers expected to see the criminals not only discovered, but also tried and executed, the more gruesomely the better.

Judge Dee was a real person, a prominent official at the Imperial Court in the 8th century (p. xiii); but the present novel, written in the 18th century, shows Dee in his early days as a district magistrate. Apparently, although the author didn't go out of his way to avoid anachronisms, there were very few of them anyway since the Chinese law and administration had changed so little in the intervening thousand years (p. xx); moreover, the translator removed one or two more blatant anachronisms, such as the occasional use of firearms (p. 229).

Dee solves three cases in this novel, but they aren't presented as three separate stories; the second case opens up while he's still working on the first, and the third case intervenes later (but is solved quickly). I rather liked this idea, though it made it slightly harder to keep track of what is going on and which character belongs where. There is a pleasing variety in the cast of characters: one case involves travelling silk-merchants, one involves gentry and one mostly involves relatively poor town-dwellers. And moreover, there is also a pleasing variety in the contents of the cases. One isn't a criminal case at all, but turns out to be a combination of a unfortunate accident and of suspicions which prove to be unfounded; one is a fairly straightforward murder case, but the problem is how to find the murderer and prove his guilt; and one is a case that Dee discovers purely by coincidence, and only gradually does it turn out that a crime has been committed at all.

Dee has several assistants whom he occasionally sends out to gather information, watch suspects and so on, but they are mostly just the muscle* while he is the brains of the operation. Sometimes he travels around in the pursuit of his investigations, either in his official capacity as the magistrate or in various disguises; sometimes he conducts hearings and interrogations in his own tribunal. Supernatural elements, which are apparently common in Chinese detective stories, fortunately have a fairly minimal presence here; on one or two occasions, Dee receives hints from ghosts and dreams, but they are mostly very vague hints, some of which he only comes to understand after he has solved the case by conventional means. Apparently it is also common in this genre for the criminal's spirit to find itself in the underworld, judged by a tribunal of infernal demons, but the present novel features a nice inversion of this trope: there is a scene like that, but it turns out to be just Dee and his assistants wearing masks and costumes, trying to trick a suspect into making a confession (and it works).

[*Occasionally we even get ‘action scenes’ in which these characters practice some sort of boxing or martial art. Evidently this art had a rich vocabulary of technical terms for every possible move, and the author loves to deploy them to construct a sort of detailed step-by-step account of the fight: “a tiger clawing at a sheep”, “enticing the tiger out of his forest”, etc. (pp. 104–5). I suppose the original readership of these novels must have relished this sort of thing; I for one was simply glad that in the present novel such scenes are short and few in number.]

So, as far as detective work is concerned, this was all pretty neat and interesting and made for an enjoyable read. But now we come to the downsides. In the Western detective fiction I've read so far — which, as I have already admitted, is fairy limited — the detective isn't really a very powerful figure; he relies on his wits, not on having a position of power over other people. You don't generally see Holmes or Poirot yelling at people, and you certainly don't see them having people flogged and tortured. But for an ancient Chinese district magistrate like Dee, that is a routine part of his work. Unless some higher-ranking imperial official comes for a visit, Dee is the most important person in his district. People who appear in his court are on their knees all the time, knocking their heads against the floor and referring to themselves as ‘this insignificant person’ when talking to him. He can, and does, have them tortured to extract information or confessions from them.

Now, to be sure, you could advance many extenuating circumstances on Dee's behalf. He lived in the 8th century. If you were to set such a story at the same time anywhere west of China — say in the Frankish Empire, in the Byzantine Empire, in the Caliphate — I daresay the tortures would have been just as bad and just as easily forthcoming, possibly more. We even see a scene where Dee is urged to torture a suspect but refuses to do so because there is no evidence against him, only mere suspicions (p. 159). Moreover, Dee is labouring under a supremely idiotic constraint which is not his fault: “it is one of the fundamental principles of the Chinese Penal Code that no one can be sentenced unless he has confesed to the crime” (p. xviii) — of course torture is rife in such a system, otherwise why would anybody ever bother confessing? How could anybody ever have thought that having such a principle in your legal system is a good idea? I suspect that people who came up with it didn't really care about justice in the sense of finding out who was actually guilty, punishing him and avoiding harming the innocent; probably to people who designed this system, it was enough if for each crime, someone — anyone — was found who could be made to confess to it, and who would then get punished for it; a surface appearance of justice was thereby maintained, so that people wouldn't complain too much about crimes not getting investigated and punished, and for this purpose it didn't matter if they got the right person or not.

The translator, in his introduction, tries to point out various factors that, at least in theory, worked to discourage magistrates like Dee from abusing their powers too much (pp. xx–xxiii); and he quotes this opinion of a British official: “As regards then the criminal law of the Chinese, although the allowance of torture in the examination of prisoners is a blot which cannot be overlooked, although the punishment for treason and parricide is monstrous, and the punishment of the wooden collar or portable pillory is not to be defended, yet the Code—when its procedure is understood—is infinitely more exact and satisfactory than our own system, and very far from being the barbarous cruel abomination it is generally supposed to be”.

Well, I don't know. To my mind all this sounds a little bit too much like ‘Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?’ Sure, if you disregard the torture and the inhumane punishments and the vast potential for abuse in the hands of corrupt officials — if you disregard all that, it was probably a fine system. But all that was actually a routine part of the system, so... it *was* a barbarous cruel abomination. The most that can be said for it is that Western systems were also barbarous cruel abominations until a comparatively recent time.

As far as I'm concerned, this aspect of the novel prevented me from enjoying it. I can be intrigued by a detective as he uses his wit and logical skill to solve a puzzling case; I might even admire him if, at the end, he gathers everyone into a room and explains how he did it. But for the judge, who acts as if he were better than other people, who demands deference from them, who presumes to pass judgment on them — for him I can have nothing but the liveliest contempt. They have a very easy job with all these powers vested in them. If they wanted me to respect them, they'd have to lay down all their powers *and then try to accomplish anything* — that would impress me, to do something when you have no power over people; but the way it is now, they should only be despised.

The fact that the criminals in this novel suffer tortures and execution also caused me to transfer all my sympathy to them and away from the victims. Sure, the fact that Shao killed one of his fellow silk-merchants and also a random passer-by who might otherwise have become a witness isn't exactly commendable; but the very essence of a merchant's work is to screw people out of their money; from that to murdering them for their bales of silk is but a small step; we allow them to do the former, so why not also the latter?

And sure, the fact that Mrs. Djou killed her husband in the hopes of subsequently marrying her lover isn't exactly commendable either — and yet I can't really find it in me to object to it all that much. He's long dead and buried, so what good can punishing her now possibly accomplish? Besides, it's not her fault that divorce isn't easily available in ancient China. The same applies a fortiori to Hsu, her lover, who doesn't seem to have been guilty of anything more than adultery.

It would be easier to sympathize with the victims if we had got to know them first; but in this novel we never get to know them as individuals, we only hear about them once they are already dead, and so it is easy to write them off without feeling sorry for them. I lay the blame for this squarely at the feet of the author; there are eight billion people in the world, and I cannot care very much if a random stranger gets murdered; Mrs. Djou is a human being whose sufferings and death I have many reasons to care about, but her late husband and victim, Bee Hsun, is just a name to us, and we have no reason to care if he lives or dies.

So to me, this novel felt like a tasty dish sprinkled with broken glass. Theoretically, there's still a tasty dish in there somewhere, but practically it's ruined beyond repair. Perhaps other readers, if they are able to ignore Dee's judicial violence better than me, will enjoy the book better than I did. In any case, this doesn't change my admiration for the translator, who did an excellent job of making the book as accessible as possible even to a reader like me, who knows next to nothing about China, its administration, its legal system and the like.

ToRead:

• Robert van Gulik, the translator of the present volume, went on to write a series of some sixteen volumes of ‘Chinese detective stories’ of his own, with Judge Dee as the protagonist. I don't know if they manage to avoid torture and execution scenes or not; but if they do, they sound like they should make for quite enjoyable reading.

BOOK: Evelyn Waugh, "The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold"

The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. Volume 14: The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold: A Conversation Piece. Ed. by Barbara Cooke. Oxford University Press, 2023. 9780198717836. xcv + 221 pp.

This is a very unusual novel, but I liked it better than I had expected. Already in my post about Waugh's A Tourist in Africa I remarked how early Waugh seemed to get old, or at least started to feel old. We see yet more examples of this in the editor's introduction to the present volume: at the age of 50, “as well as toothache he [i.e. Waugh] was suffering from insomnia and rheumatism, and found alcohol effective in dulling all three. He took bromide and chloral as sleeping aids, but also used them as painkillers during the day.” (P. xxxiv.) He began suffering from false memories (“My memory is not at all hazy” but rather “sharp, detailed & dead wrong”, p. xxx) and aural hallucinations, hearing voices that existed only in his head. In early 1954, he wanted to vacation on Ceylon for a few weeks, and boarded a ship bound for Colombo, but his condition got bad enough during the voyage that he was disembarked at Port Said and, with the help of another passenger, sent to Colombo by airplane instead (p. xxxviii). Waugh's problems continued there as well as after his return home, and he even consulted a priest, thinking it might be a case of demonic possession (p. xl). Eventually a doctor realized that “Waugh had been poisoned by his preferred combination of soporifics, anti-depressants, and alcohol” (p. xl), and he got better after switching to different drugs.

Waugh then decided (with some encouragement from his doctor) to write a lightly fictionalized account of these experiences, and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is the result. It is remarkable how closely Pinfold's experiences in the novel match Waugh's experiences in real life, though he did of course change enough details that nobody could feel libelled. Gilbert Pinfold, the eponymous protagonist of the novel, is a successful middle-aged writer; conservative by temperament and a Catholic; he lives with his wife in the countryside, surrounded by declining gentry; he is afflicted by a growing set of health problems — all, in short, exactly like Waugh in real life. Even some of the more bizarre details are taken from life: one of Pinfold's neighbours has a quack medical device called “the Box” which “exercised diagnostic and therapeutic powers” (p. 3), again based on such a device owned by one of Waugh's neighbours (p. lxii).

Pinfold books a passage to Ceylon on a ship, partly to escape the English winter for a few weeks and partly to finish a novel he's been working on. But he is clearly in a bad way, and between his drinking and his narcotics, he becomes “intermittently comatose” and drowsy (p. 13) even before boarding the ship. You can't help feeling how unwise it is for him to travel alone in this condition.

But it is after boarding the ship that things start getting really wacky. In his cabin, Pinfold starts hearing all sorts of sounds, noises, loud music, snatches of conversation between other people. He figures this must be due to some communications equipment that had been used on the ship during the WW2 and then left behind in a state of unpredictable malfunction (pp. 24, 31). At no point does he seem to doubt that the things he hears are real, but when he alludes to them in conversations with other passengers, nobody seems to have heard of them. Consequently Pinfold starts to believe that they are all in league against him, playing pranks and mocking him behind his back. Some of the things he hears are even more disturbing, e.g. an accident in which a sailor was badly injured, and another where the Captain and his mistress tortured another sailor to death (pp. 28–30, 35–7).

Pinfold begins to hear what are apparently BBC programmes in which critics and comedians savage him and his work (pp. 39, 53); and he hears the voices of several young passengers accusing him of all sorts of things such as being a Jewish refugee named Peinfeld, an impotent homosexual, a bad writer on the brink of bankrupcy, and the like. He wonders if all that he's been hearing are radio plays put on by his enemies.

Things get still more bizarre when the ship nears Gibraltar. Due to some dispute over that territory, Spanish officials insist on boarding the ship and inspecting it. Pinfold overhears their conversation, and later hears the Captain discussing the situation with a few other passengers and hatching a plan. The Spaniards are apparently looking for a secret agent that is travelling aboard the ship, and the Captain intends to throw them Pinfold with some false papers to make them think he is the man they're looking for. [In Waugh's manuscript the Captain was even more hostile to Pinfold; see the cut passages on pp. 126–7.] Pinfold hears the Spanish navy ship approach, but then steps out of his cabin and sees no trace of it. He briefly wonders if he is going mad, but concludes that it's all just radio plays (p. 64).

Pinfold hears people gossiping about him all over the ship, but when he tries to deny some of the rumours in conversation with other passenges, they are merely confused. One of the recurring characters whose voices he hears, a young woman named Margaret, is apparently fond of Pinfold and persuades him to let her come to his cabin. He hears her at the door, but when he opens it, she is nowhere to be seen.

Pinfold's chief tormentors are a family of four, but when he complains to the Captain, there turns out to be no such people on the passenger list. Pinfold concludes that the leader of his enemies is a BBC technician named Angel, one of the crew that did an interview with Pinfold shortly before his departure for Ceylon. Angel and his associates are ludicrously well organized and track Pinfold's every move (p. 85). Apparently Angel has a device similar to the aforementioned ‘Box’ and is using it to brainwash Pinfold; but their power over him is waning since he stopped taking his sleeping drugs. Pinfold even turns the tables on them: realizing that they cannot help but hear his thoughts, he torments them by reading boring books and the like :))

To get away from his enemies' influence for good, Pinfold disembarks at Port Said and continues to Colombo by plane. It turns out that he can still hear his enemies' voices; Margaret tells him there's just three of them — she, her brother Angel, and Angel's wife, whom Pinfold has nicknamed “Goneril” after a villain from King Lear. By now Pinfold simply ignores the latter two, but he still talks to Margaret from time to time, as she has always been nice to him.

At the urging of his wife, Pinfold returns to England and things are finally cleared up. Her inquiries at the BBC revealed that Angel has been in England all this time, not on Pinfold's ship; and a priest whom she consulted at Pinfold's request assured her that there is no such device as ‘the Box’. Pinfold finally realizes that he has been talking to himself all this time, and the voices stop; his physician explains it was probably due to the combination of drugs he had been taking. Pinfold puts his half-finished novel aside and begins writing a new one based on his recent ordeals.

*

I'm glad that the book has a reasonably happy ending, with Pinfold in a much better condition, both physical and mental, than at any earlier point in the book. How could you not sympathize with the unfortunate man throughout his ordeal, and cheer on him as he tries to figure out what is happening and how to face the enemies who constantly assail him! It must be terrifying to have your mind play tricks on you like that. But I also couldn't help being surprised, and slightly disappointed, by the fact that it took him so long to realize that he had been hallucinating all this time. Waugh took care that the reader constantly receives signs that the voices Pinfold hears exist only in his head, but Pinfold never notices those signs, and he stubbornly avoids grappling with the possibility that the things he hears are delusions.

Even his initial idea, about malfunctioning WW2-era communications equipment, is implausible; and it is completely impossible that any such equipment could explain why he eventually hears voices all over the ship, not just in his cabin. By then he has switched to the other explanation, of ‘the Box’ which communicates with him telepathically; but that, of course, is even more implausible. His total lack of skepticism is disappointing;* it should have been obvious to him that his attempts to explain his experiences with some external source like that did not work. Moreover, there is a distinct lack of motive — it's just not plausible that the whole complement of passengers aboard the ship would be in league against poor Pinfold, or that some random BBC technician would go to so much trouble to organize a vast conspiracy against him.

[*But perhaps I shouldn't be disappointed; Waugh, after all, is someone who converted to Catholicism as a grown-up — surely not something that a skeptically-minded person would be likely to have done.]

Despite this minor downside, this was a surprisingly enjoyable novel; its subject was something quite new and fresh to me, and I kept wondering, as the story progressed, what crazy stunt the voices in Pinfold's head would pull next. I was almost a little disappointed in the end when it turned out that it all has a simple medical explanation, an unfortunate combination of alcohol and drugs; the world would be a slightly more charming and fantastical place if the grand conspiracies and vicious pranks that Pinfold is subjected to were real.

Miscellaneous

Waugh joked in a letter to a friend: “everyone over 40 is dotty in England now. I am sure they used not to be. It ought to secure a sympathetic reception to my work in progress” (p. xli). :))

A similar idea appears in a passage removed from the manuscript version of the novel: when deciding to write up his experiences at the end of the book, Pinfold says “it might amuse a certain number of people. To judge by what the papers say, very nearly half the inhabitants of the kingdom are more or less barmy at one time or another.” (P. 219.)

I was surprised to see, from the critical apparatus (appendix B), how censored the American edition of this novel was. The characters in the novel frequently refer to Middle Easterners as “Wogs”, surely fairly tame stuff as far as ethnic slurs go, at least by 1950s standards; and yet in the American edition, more or less all instances of this word were replaced by something neutral and inoffensive (see e.g. two instances on p. 132). I found this all the more surprising since, as far as I know, “wog” was hardly used in American English at all, so they shouldn't have had any reason to find it particularly offensive. The American edition also tones down some of the anti-Semitic rhetoric that the voices in Pinfold's head abuse him with (pp. lvi, 124). The editor's introduction says that “such practice had been commonplace in the United States for some time” (ibid.) and gives two examples of novel titles being censored: Agatha Christie's Ten Little Niggers (1930) appeared in America as And Then There Were None (1931); and The Coloured Countries (a 1930 travel book by Waugh's brother Alec) appeared in America as The Hot Countries.

A funny anecdote about Harold Macmillan, the British Prime Minister: “In 1974, he told Muriel Spark about a visit to Moscow during which he and Krushchev had talked in the garden to avoid bugged offices. Macmillan was perfectly aware that the trees were bugged too.” (P. lxi.) This reminded me of the old joke about the material that the Soviets used to build foreign embassies. It was called microconcrete: 10% concrete, 90% microphones :)

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Waugh was apparently on friendly terms with John Heygate, the man for whom his first wife had left him; here we see Heygate writing a letter to Waugh, praising Pinfold as “all too true and altogether convincing” (p. lxxi, n. 140).

Bizarrely, a composer named Nicholas Nabokov offered to write “a short opera” based on this novel; but Waugh wasn't keen on the idea (“Nabokov may make an opera if I may sing in it & design the scenery”, p. lxxiii), and nothing came of it.

I enjoyed this description of Pinfold's grumpy conservatism, and had much sympathy with it: “His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sun-bathing and jazz—everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime.” (P. 4.) In his manuscript, Waugh initially added the wireless, the telephone, aeroplanes, psychiatrists, popular newspapers, and Corbusier to this list (p. 145). I like Mr. Pinfold better and better! :))

I feel compelled to record a particularly disgusting case of hyphenation: “teleg-|raphist” (p. 29), but apparently it isn't wrong.

Pinfold remembers an old acquaintance from his club who said: “Poor old Nailsworth, his mother was a whore, so's his wife. They say his daughter's going the same way. . .” (p. 69). My god, how the money rolls in :)))

Pinfold is arguing with the voices in his head: “ ‘You're driving me mad.’/ ‘No, no, Gilbert, you are mad already,’ said the duty-officer. ‘We're driving you sane.’ ” (P. 89.)

Waugh on experimental literature: “Experiment? God forbid! Look at the result of experiment in the case of a writer like Joyce. He started off writing very well, then you can watch him going mad with vanity. He ends up a lunatic.” (P. 107.)

Apparently Waugh received a lot of mail with questions from students of literature “who are writing about one & want one, virtually, to write their theses for them”, and simply replied with a printed refusal (p. 108).

Waugh's wife Laura was so devoted to her farm that her son “later insinuated that she preferred her cows to her children” :)) (p. 108). One time she even used her neighbour's ‘Box’ (the pseudo-medical device) “on an ailing cow, which immediately recovered” (p. 109).

I was interested to see Waugh use the word unattested in the sense ‘not certified/approved by some authority’ (p. 7, l. 247; see also the note on p. 112). This is the only sense which the corresponding word has in Slovenian (neatestiran), but I haven't encountered it in this sense in English yet — so far I've only seen unattested as ‘not proven, by some sort of records, to have existed’.

Waugh once said in an interview “that ‘real’ painting ‘stopped with the French Impressionists’ ” (p. 113). Once again I am happy to agree with him :]

Waugh in a letter to Ann Fleming: “My sexual passion for my ten year old daughter is obsessive [. . .] I can't keep my hands off her” (p. 129). :)))

When King Farouk of Egypt was deposed in 1952, much of his property was auctioned off by the government, including “Geiger counters, a signed photograph of Adolf Hitler, and one of the world's largest collections of pornography” (p. 133) :)

Poor Pinfold is being slandered by the voices in his head: “ ‘[he] gives the most peculiar parties at Lychpole.’ — ‘Not when his wife is there?’ — ‘No, but the moment she goes away. Absolute orgies.’ — ‘I've never been to an orgy. I often wonder what really goes on at them.’ — ‘Better go to Lychpole when Mrs Pinfold's away. You'd soon find out there.’ ” :)) (P. 195, in a manuscript passage omitted from the final version of the novel.)

In my posts about previous books in this series, I often complained about errors and misprints; but this time I noticed only two of them, so it's only fair that I praise the publishers for that. There's “Krushchev” on p. lxi (should be “Khrushchev”); and on p. 128, the entry for 69.159–66 refers to pages “lxi–lxii” instead of “xli–xlii”.

ToRead:

• Cyril Connolly: The Missing Diplomats (1952). A book about British diplomats who turned out to be working for the Soviet Union. Mentioned here on p. 128; the author was a friend of Waugh.
• Charles Kingsley: Westward Ho! “Deeply conservative, anti-Catholic, and imperialist 1855 novel [. . .] about a sixteenth-century seafarer” (p. 132). Pinfold reads it slowly to harass Angel and his gang, who can't help but hear his thoughts (p. 92).

BOOK: Evelyn Waugh, "A Handful of Dust"

The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. Volume 4: A Handful of Dust. Ed. by H. R. Woudhuysen. Oxford University Press, 2023. 9780198703150. c + 424 pp.

This is Waugh's fourth novel, and a bit longer than the other Waugh books that I've read so far. It is well-written and I enjoyed reading it, but there were also some things I didn't like that much about it. It is not as light-hearted as Waugh's Vile Bodies, which I read earlier this year (see my post about it); there is still humour in it, but it stays more in the background; what satire there is, is more bitter, and overall it is a sad story with an unhappy end.

<spoiler warning>

Tony and Brenda Last are around 30 years old and have been married for some seven years (p. 14). They are rich, but not extremely rich; Tony inherited some £6000 a year (p. 122) and a sprawling, neo-Gothic mid-19th-century country house (whose architecture is everything that the modernists liked to turn up their noses at; p. 11), where he and Brenda live. Paying off the inheritance taxes and maintaining the house, with its staff of 15 servants (p. 28), consumes more than 5/6 of Tony's income (p. 123), and they have to be careful about their other expenses, at least by rich-people standards (early in the book we even find Brenda travelling to London on a third-class train ticket; p. 30). Clearly they are a fairly advanced example of the decline of the traditional British upper class. Tony would be wise to sell the house (Brenda's family used to have a similar one but had sold it some years before), but he is too sentimentally attached to it and to his quiet life there.

Alas, after seven years of marriage, Brenda got bored of it, and I suspect also of their lifestyle; she has a bunch of friends in London, women who seem to be richer than her, and she would probably prefer to live closer to them where there's more things going on. She also finds the country house “all, every bit of it, appallingly ugly” (p. 28); later we see her institute large redecorations in a modern style blatantly at odds with the original spirit of the building (“white chromium plating”, p. 65).

Brenda starts an affair with John Beaver, a man a few years younger than her (and a distant acquaintance of Tony's). You might say that he is a still more advanced case of upper-class decline; we are not told who or what his late father was, but we do see that his mother, Mrs. Beaver, now has to support herself by running a real-estate and interior design business, and that Beaver himself had been to Oxford and then worked in an advertising agency until he lost his job in the great economic crisis. Since then he has been unemployed (which I guess means several years; the novel appeared in 1934); he lives with his mother (in a house “crowded with the unsaleable furniture of two larger houses”, p. 4 — another sign of decline) and sits eagerly by the phone every day, hoping that some friends will invite him to a party or a dinner (as indeed they often do) and thereby provide him a free meal. In short, he is a harmless parasite that I couldn't help feeling more pity than contempt for.

Over the years of their marriage, Tony, as we are told on more than one occasion, “got into a habit of loving and trusting Brenda” (pp. 102, 107), and she takes full advantage of his trusting nature. She persuades him to rent a small flat for her in London, and announces that she will start taking economics classes at the university there. Soon she seems to be spending less time at home than in London, seeing Beaver in her flat or enjoying social life with her friends (all of whom know about the affair and rather approve of it, or at least consider it harmless; they mostly look down on Tony anyway, p. 54). Tony clearly misses her during these increasingly long absences, and it's a testament to his trusting nature — or should we say his naïveté — that at no point does it seem to occur to him to ask her anything about economics, or to ask to see her course materials.

But I suppose it's no use; from what we've seen of their marriage dynamics, even if he did ask, she'd dismiss him with some vague excuse and make him feel guilty for having posed the question at all. For instance, on one occasion, Tony tries to make a surprise visit to her in London, but she simply refuses to see him: “He's got to be taught not to make surprise visits.” (P. 55.) This leads to a funny episode where Tony and a friend get increasingly drunk, keep calling Brenda on the phone and eventually end the night chatting and dancing with two tarts in a nightclub.

At one point Brenda, apparently figuring that Tony would mind her absences less if he had an affair of his own (p. 67), even tries to introduce him to one of her friends, a bizarre creature named Jenny Abdul Akbar, apparently the estranged English wife of some Moroccan grandee. Tony shows no interest in her and the experiment is not a success, but Brenda agrees with the conclusion of another of her friends: “Anyway, this lets you out. You've done far more than most wives would to cheer the old boy up” (p. 76) — because obviously, staying with Tony and not cheating of him is not an option. A good example of the rather bitter sarcasm that is not uncommon in this book.

Tony and Brenda have a son named John Andrew; he is presumably about seven and I have to commend the author for representing the child's manner of speech very convincingly (e.g. see the excited, breathless sentence on p. 42, ll. 1257–63); I found it annoying, just as I probably would if I heard him speak in real life. Brenda doesn't seem to miss her little son very much, but fortunately he has a nanny to look after him. His main interest is riding and fox-hunting, in which he is encouraged by the Lasts' groom, Ben (we see a similar situation in the early parts of Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) — perhaps Waugh was inspired by that book?).

Then tragedy strikes: John Andrew is killed in what I guess technically counts as a traffic accident, caused by a combination of unfortunate coincidences that nobody is really to blame for. Evidently Brenda's son was the only thing still linking her with Tony;* now she announces that she is moving to London for good and demands a divorce from Tony. Friends advise him to refuse and wait a little, since Brenda is sure to lose interest in Beaver soon enough; but he is disappointed with her and doesn't want her back (p. 121).

[*And not very strongly either. Upon being told that John is dead, Brenda initially takes it to mean John Beaver, her lover, and is actually rather relieved when it turns out to be John Andrew, her son (p. 96). Probably this short but important scene is why the author adopted the otherwise inconvenient idea of giving two characters the same first name.]

This leads to a very curious episode. At that time, divorce was only possible for certain sufficiently good reasons, such as if one partner (but not both; p. lii) had been unfaithful; so Tony has to take a prostitute to a seaside hotel for a weekend and order breakfast in bed so that the hotel staff will be able to testify that they saw him in bed with her. (The fact that Tony and Brenda both agreed on a divorce and colluded to make these arrangements would also, if it became known to the authorities, result in the divorce not being granted; pp. li, 107.)

Initially Brenda and Tony agree that she is to receive £500 a year in alimony, but then, influenced by Beaver and also by her elder brother, Brenda begins to demand £2000 a year, even though she knows that this would force Tony to sell his house. Tony finally realizes how wrong he was to trust her; he decides to leave the country for half a year and then give Brenda the choice between divorce without alimony or no divorce at all.

Tony joins an explorer named Dr. Messinger on an expedition to South America, searching for a lost city deep in the jungles of the Amazon. Eventually their Indian attendants refuse to go any further, insisting that the next tribe are “bad people” (p. 147). Tony and Messinger continue on their own, but then Tony falls sick with fever; Messinger goes on alone, hoping to reach the next village and bring help, but drowns in a boat accident. Tony, more dead than alive, reaches the farm of one Mr. Todd, who nurses him back to health. Todd is illiterate but loves Dickens's novels, so he asks Tony to read them aloud to him every day. Months pass and Tony slowly realizes that he is effectively Todd's prisoner; he can't reach civilization without Todd's help, and Todd clearly intends to keep him there until one of them dies. (He had at least one victim in a similar arrangement years before; p. 178.) At one point a party of Englishmen arrive in search of Tony; but Mr. Todd, either by dint of good luck or by being forewarned of their coming, has arranged for Tony to spend the day drunk and asleep in a nearby Indian village, and has meanwhile convinced the search party that Tony is dead, so that no further rescue attempts are likely to be made and Tony's fate is sealed.

The novel ends with a short epilogue. Beaver seems to have lost interest in Brenda, and has gone to America with his mother (p. 151). Tony has been declared dead; Brenda married his friend Jock, a local MP; and Tony's country house is now in the hands of his cousins, who are just as fond of it as he was, but who have better financial sense than him. They have shrunk the staff to six servants to reduce expenses, and are operating a fur farm to bring in some money; whereby they hope eventually to restore the estate to its former glory.

</spoiler warning>

I've found this novel to be skilfully constructed and there are many things in it; my poor plot summary above is very far from doing it justice. I liked how Waugh often divides the story into fairly short ‘scenes’ (separated by an empty line), resulting in an effect similar to that of a movie. He often uses this to switch between two or more strands of the story, effectively presenting them in parallel (e.g. between Tony in Brazil and the other characters in England).

Another example of a well-constructed scene is the one where Brenda receives the news of her son's death. We hear she has been worrying all day that something might have happened to Beaver, who went on a trip to France (p. 94); meanwhile, Brenda is at a party with a number of her women friends, and at the moment she is having her fortune told from her foot, by what you might call a ‘sole reader’ or a ‘podomantist’ as opposed to a ‘palm reader’ or ‘cheiromantist’. Brenda seems to be taking the podomantist's ominous pronouncements (“Four men dominate your fate” etc.; p. 95) at least half seriously. When her session is over and Jock shows up to tell her that John is dead, she initially thinks it's John Beaver and not John Andrew: “ ‘John . . . John Andrew . . . I . . . Oh thank God . . .’ Then she burst into tears.” (P. 96.) I guess she is herself shocked at her expression of relief that it is her son that got killed, and not her lover. And at the end of that scene, we hear the podomantist telling the fortune of the next woman, *saying the exact same things that she said to Brenda*.

I liked Waugh's attention to little details that show the sentiments of his characters. At one point Brenda invites a bunch of her women friends to spend the weekend at her and Tony's country house. Tony, following his usual Sunday morning custom, buys carnations for all the ladies to wear in their buttonholes. The guests head back to London early on that same day, trashtalking Tony's house and commiserating with Brenda who has to live there: “ ‘My poor Brenda,’ said Veronica, unpinning her carnation and throwing it from the window into the side of the road.” (P. 67.) You can't help feeling that Tony, his whole lifestyle and everything he holds dear, are being thrown away in just the same careless, contemptuous manner.

Another thing I liked about this novel is the abundance of interesting minor characters. I particularly liked Revd. Tendril, the local vicar (p. 25; or rector?, p. 75) whose services Tony attends on Sunday mornings (though Tony isn't really religious himself and is only doing it out of a sense of tradition; you might say he is sort of LARPing how a traditional country squire is supposed to act). Tendril started his career as a military chaplain in India some thirty-odd years before and has been recycling the exact same sermons ever since, complete with references to “our dear ones far away” and “our Gracious Queen Empress in whose service we are here” (p. 25; confusing some of his audience, who do not quite realize that he's talking about Victoria). Another interesting minor character is Mrs. Rattery, a friend of Jock's, who at one point visits Tony's country house by flying her own airplane and landing it in a nearby park (p. 79).

*

Speaking of religion, apparently it holds a greater significance in the novel than meets the eye of a naive reader like me. We read in the editor's introduction (long and interesting, as always in this series) that “Waugh is deeply critical of Tony's taste and of his morals” (p. liv), e.g. because “Tony's church attendance is merely a social rite” (p. lv); later the editor summarizes Waugh's views thus: “Man without religion will seek after strange and false gods (fortune-telling, psychoanalysis, economics, lost cities); these will fail him, and he will find himself in a world where nothing makes sense. Good in the world can only derive from God, and without religion, man is ‘either bestial or a child’.” (P. lx.)

This may well be how Waugh saw things, but from the perspective of a non-religious person like me, this line of thinking seems completely incomprehensible. It is true that the world makes no sense, but what good does it do to make up a fictional answer to your questions? And surely it is obvious that plenty of people without religion somehow manage to be not much more bestial, nor much more childish, and not even much less good, than religious people are. And moreover, even if Tony had been genuinely religious rather than merely performing it as a social rite, what good would that have done him? How would it have prevented the fact that he and Brenda are incompatible in terms of how they want to live, and that therefore their marriage is doomed to fall apart or, if persisted in despite their incompatibilities, make at least one of them, and possibly both, deeply miserable? If Tony were religious, his marriage would still fail, his wife would still despise his beloved house, and her friends would still look down on him as a stuffy old square.

So perhaps for Waugh this novel was about the lack of religion in modern man's life, but for me it's first and foremost a sad story of incompatibility. How unfortunate it is that it took Tony and Brenda seven years of marriage to discover that one of them wants to live a quiet life in his ponderous neo-Gothic house, putting on the role of a country squire, while the other wants to stay in London and flit from party to party in an endless merry-go-round of socializing with her friends! Neither of these two things is bad in itself, it's just that people with such different tastes can't very well live together without being unhappy.

*

The thing that bothers me the most about this novel is how hard it is on Tony, and unfairly so. He hasn't really done anything bad as far as we can see, and yet he loses everything — his son, his marriage, and ultimately his life. In terms of Tony's circumstances, the whole novel is a story of non-stop decline. His Amazonian expedition, too, is in some sense a matter of non-stop decline: at first, Tony and Messinger travel with a group of (English-speaking) Guyanan blacks; then with a group of Indians, with whom it is nearly impossible to communicate; then it's just the two of them; and finally Tony is left alone. And then, when Tony gets into captivity under Mr. Todd, Waugh positively toys with his fate like a cat with a mouse: he was so close to getting rescued, and yet in the end he is as good as buried alive. And back at home, nobody particularly sympathizes with him or has any real appreciation of the sort of lifestyle that he would like to lead.

The only thing that prevents the end of the book from being a total and unmitigated disaster is the fact that Tony's cousin who inherits his house cares about it much like Tony did, and intends to preserve and restore it. And, dare I say, there is just a tiny glimmer of hope even for Tony. We do not, after all, leave him at the end of the book in any worse a state than he had been in for the past many months as an unwilling guest of Mr. Todd. He managed to hand a message to a passing prospector once (p. 178); conceivably a similar opportunity could occur again, and lead to a renewed rescue attempt. Moreover, Todd is almost sixty years old (p. 171), so it is only a matter of time before he dies or falls seriously ill, and the influence which he exerts over the local Indians (p. 177) could then cease and Tony might be able to get them to make him a boat. We do not know much about Mr. Todd's security arrangements but they do not seem to be very high; so it also seems possible to me that Tony might at some point attack and overpower Todd, perhaps get access to his gun, and then threaten Todd and/or the local Indians into helping him. I suspect that Waugh wouldn't think highly of any of these probabilities, but I at any rate am not willing to write off Tony completely just yet.

Interesting things from the editor's introduction

There's an interesting section on real-life influences on this or that element of the novel. For example, Waugh's first wife left him for a man named John, and Brenda in the novel also leaves her husband for a man named John (Beaver) — probably not a coincidence (pp. l, lx). And apparently Waugh himself said that the dog owned by Brenda's sister in the novel is based on a real dog owned by Phyllis de Janzé (pp. lxii–lxiii) — who, incidentally, was the English sister-in-law of Frédéric de Janzé, the author of two books which we encountered on the pages of this blog before (Vertical Land and Tarred with the Same Brush).

But the most interesting result of real-world influence on the novel, in my opinion, is the whole Amazonian episode. In fact it came as a complete surprise to me; when Tony and Brenda's divorce negotiations founder, there was nothing in the book up to that point which could lead one to expect that Tony would suddenly go on an expedition into the jungles of South America (indeed it comes as a result of a chance meeting in one of Tony's clubs; p. 132). Obviously, Waugh was inspired to send Tony to that part of the world because he himself had travelled into the interior of Guiana in 1933 (and described the trip in a travel book, Ninety-Two Days; see my post about it from last year).

Many little details in the Amazonian episode of the novel are based on Waugh's experiences from that journey; for instance, foodstuffs such as farine and tasso (p. 178), or the drinks cassiri (p. 144) and piwari (p. 179), the preparation of which involves chewing on cassava root and spitting it into a bowl; even the mechanical mice with which Dr. Messinger hopes to win over the uncooperative Indians (p. 156) — all these things were already mentioned in Ninety-Two Days. The character of Mr. Todd was inspired by one Mr. Christie (pp. lxxiv, 422), a reclusive rancher and bizarre religious fanatic whom Waugh described in chapter 3 of Ninety-Two Days.

Waugh also took some inspiration from Peter Fleming's journey to Brazil in 1932 (p. lviii–lix), which Fleming described in articles in The Times and then in his book, Brazilian Adventure (1933; see my recent post about it).

And Dr. Messinger and his quest for a lost city in the Amazonian jungle were surely inspired by Percy Fawcett, the famous explorer who disappeared in 1925 while on a quest for just such a city. But I have to admit that Messinger struck me as being more of a scientific type (at least he has a doctorate), while Fawcett was more purely an adventurer (and a military officer by occupation).

But I was shocked and almost hurt by this remark from the editor's introduction: “Fawcett's lack of experience, competence, and common sense is matched by Dr Messinger's; both share messianic tendencies and are, like the leader of the expedition in Fleming's Brazilian Adventure, Major Pingle, essentially frauds and untrustworthy.” (P. lix.) Now, it has been almost twenty years since I read Exploration Fawcett, Fawcett's posthumous autobiography edited by his surviving younger son; but surely, he had been on numerous expeditions into the interior of South America prior to that fateful one in 1925, and he impressed people by his ability to traverse difficult terain quickly while still drawing good-quality maps, to say nothing of his seeming imperviousness to tropical diseases. To say that such a man lacked experience and competence strikes me as completely bizarre. [But see this 2017 article, which suggests that he may have actually been a good deal less competent than I thought.] Nor was he a fraud; by all accounts he sincerely believed in the lost city he was looking for (and, let's not forget, he was willing to stake his life on it) — he may have been badly wrong about that city, but he was no fraud.

And for that matter, I didn't get the impression that Dr. Messinger in the novel is inexperienced or incompetent either, just the contrary in fact; and he struck me as no fraud, but honest in his quest, just as Fawcett had been; my only complaint about Messinger is that he is perhaps a tad too optimistic in his plans. It is shameful to compare these two honest people, the fictional Dr. Messinger and the real Col. Fawcett, to Major Pingle, who really was untrustworthy, for he deliberately lied to Fleming for weeks about his willingness to search for traces of Fawcett's expedition in otherwise unexplored territory (and not just to lead a casual shooting and fishing party).

Incidentally, the whole idea of Tony becoming a sort-of prisoner of Mr. Todd bears a distant resemblance to some of the theories that were being floated in the 1920s or 30s about Fawcett's fate, as people claimed that he was still alive as a captive of the Indians, or perhaps that he became a sort of cult leader amongst them. But I think that Waugh's idea is far more interesting and original than any of those theories. Anyone can imagine Fawcett becoming a captive of the Indians; but to imagine Tony becoming the captive of an illiterate, reclusive rancher with an obsession of having someone read Dickens's novels aloud to him — that takes some real creativity. My hat's off to Waugh for coming up with that one.

*

The editor's introduction also has an interesting account of the publication history of the novel, and I couldn't help but be impressed by how Waugh tried to get as much use out of his material as he could. His trip to Guiana was the basis of his travel book, Ninety-Two Days; it also inspired a short story, “The Man Who Liked Dickens” (which he actually wrote during the journey itself, in Brazil; p. 402), which appeared in Cosmopolitan (p. xxxiii; it's in the September 1933 issue)* and in Nash's—Pall Mall Magazine (pp. .403–4; in the November 1933 issue). Waugh then reused this short story, with some minor changes, as a chapter in A Handful of Dust (about Tony's captivity with Mr. Todd). The material about Tony's and Dr. Hessinger's expedition is mostly new in the novel, however; in the short story that part is dealt with very briefly. (An interesting difference: instead of Dr. Hessinger there is a Prof. Anderson and he dies of malaria rather than in a boat accident.)

[*Waugh grumbled to his agent: “If those Americans wrongly called Cosmopolitan take it there must be no monkeying with the text.” :)) (P. xxxvi.)]

Moreover, before the novel was published as a book, a slightly earlier version of it was serialized in Harper's Bazaar under the title “A Flat in London” (p. xxxvi). However, the chapter that had previously appeared in Cosmopolitan and Nash's couldn't be included here, because of copyright reasons, so Waugh wrote a new and happier ending in which Tony and Brenda apparently get reconciled (ibid.)! This alternative ending was later included as an appendix in the fourth British edition of A Handful of Dust, but, to my disappointment, it is not included in the present volume; apparently it will be published in vol. 5 (pp. xlix, lxxxvii, 414). The same volume will also include the original version of “The Man Who Liked Dickens” (p. xxxiii).

Nevertheless the present volume does include a couple of interesting appendices: there's one with illustrations from the serialization of the novel in Harper's Bazaar (pp. 414–17) and one with a preface which Waugh wrote for the 1964 reprint of the novel (p. 422) and in which he explains his inspiration for the character of Mr. Todd.

Miscellaneous

Waugh supposedly said that “anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen, paper and no telephone or wife.” (Pp. xlix–l.)

Waugh apparently thought that flats “were essentially un-English” and that the English people have a “love of own front door”; flats were also seen as “a sign of the isolation of modern urban life” (p. xlvi). It's not that I disagree with any of that — I think that ideally every human settlement should look like Hobbiton at the start of the first Lord of the Rings movie — but considering how many people there are nowadays, and how many of them have to live in cities, it's inevitable that most of them will end up in flats.

Tony's butler, Albert, says “clucking like a 'en” on p. 92. I was intrigued by this; I guess it means that when people drop an h at the start of a word, the article a before it does not change into an even if it is now followed by a vowel; the dropped h still exerts a sort of posthumous influence.

One reviewer complained that Waugh's literature is too formulaic: “Waugh, he said, ‘has mixed one of his usual literary cocktails. His recipe is as follows:—One-quarter Ernest Hemingway, one-quarter Michael Arlen, one-quarter Anthony Powell, one-eighth crude caricatures of London personalities, one-eight local colour (tropical for preference). Add a catchphrase, stir to a light froth, and serve very cool.’ ” (P. lxix.) Nevertheless the novel “was clearly a great success” in Britain (p. lxiv), though less so in America (p. lxix).

Brenda reading the newspaper (p. 13): “Two more chaps in gas ovens. . .” I didn't realize that this was such a common method of suicide. Perhaps it is a nod to one of Waugh's previous novels, Vile Bodies, where Lord Balcairn commits suicide in this way?

Brenda complains of the many people involved in maintaining their country house: “[...] odd little men constantly popping in to wind the clocks and cook the accounts and clean the moat, [...]” (p. 28). I love how cooking the accounts is included so casually in that list :) Interestingly, it was omitted from the serialization in the U.S. edition of Harper's Bazaar (p. 263).

Tony and Jock having a chat with two tarts (p. 60): “ ‘What d'you do?’ / ‘I design postmen's hats,’ said Jock. / ‘Oh, go on.’ / ‘And my friend here trains sea lions.’ ” :))

A few interesting instances of racial terminology: Brenda says that Jenny Abdul Akbar is “[n]ot black but married one” (p. 68) — her husband was actually a Moroccan nobleman and surely an Arab rather than what we would call a black now; so I guess this shows that in Waugh's time the word ‘black’ was applied more widely. (Jenny describes her husband and his men as “pure Semitic type” on p. 71, contrasting this with “negroes”.) Later in the book, when Tony and Dr. Messinger travel with a group of actual blacks (from Guiana), they are referred to as “niggers” on p. 144 (ll. 594, 615), but “negroes” on p. 147 (l. 746).

Seven-year-old John Andrew is quite fascinated by Jenny. “ ‘Back to bed,’ she said, ‘or I shall spank you.’ / ‘Would you do it hard? I should't mind.’ ” :))) (P. 72.)

Tony has to take a prostitute to Brighton to provide fake evidence of infidelity for the divorce; but his lawyer tells of an even more bizarre case: “Lately we had a particularly delicate case involving a man of very rigid morality and a certain indifference. In the end his own wife consented to go with him and supply the evidence. She wore a red wig. It was quite successful.” (P. 107.) On a related note, another lawyer says later: “Judges in their more lucid moments sometimes wonder why perfectly respectable, happily married men go off for weekends to the seaside with women they do not know.” (P. 119.) Still, it seems that for the most part this silly stratagem worked to get people the divorce they wanted.

“England was east of America so he and Dr. Messinger got the sun later. It came to them at second hand and slightly soiled” (p. 143). Ewww, what an image :))

I learned from the notes (p. 198) that the name Daisy is a “[l]ate 19th-century form of Margaret”. I hadn't thought of that, but it makes sense, because the equivalent of “Margaret” is used as the word for a daisy (the flower) in many other languages (it seems to have started in French).

Interesting: Waugh had a habit of mentioning the same minor characters in several of his books, e.g. Margot, Lady Metroland (p. 201), or Lord Monomark (p. 227, which also explains the etymology: a monomark was “a short alphanumeric sequence used in place of a postal address” (wiktionary)).

“Make love” in its older sense, which we already encountered in one of Waugh's other books, appears again here (p. 36); the note on p. 203 adds: “the more modern and, initially US, sense of having sex with someone is first recorded by OED in 1927”.

I was interested to learn, from a note on p. 208, that the name Jenny “is a variation of Jane and popular in the 19th century”, although we think of it as a variant of Jennifer nowadays. But what is really strange is that the note says it is “correctly pronounced ‘Jinny’ ”. Maybe if you're a New Zealander... Neither the wikpedia nor the wiktionary nor the OED suggest that it should be pronounced with /ɪ/.

Interestingly, Waugh spells “Thibetan” with an h (p. 93). The note on p. 213 says that this spelling “remained current at least until the 1960s”. However, some editions of the novel use “Tibetan”: the serialization in the British Harper's Bazaar, the reprint in the Albatross Modern Continental Library (1935), and the Penguin edition of 1951 (p. 328). According to Google n-grams, the h-less forms were more common since at least the late 19th century. I suspect that the Th spelling started in an effort to indicate aspiration /tʰ/, perhaps in French, where this might well have made sense; but in English, where such a T is inevitably aspirated anyway, the presence of the h probably causes more harm than good, as it might mislead some people into pronouncing it with /θ/ instead.

I learnt a new word from p. 139: fête, which is the same as a name-day. But it seems to be more French than English.

Honi soit qui mal y pense: “In Guiana, he [i.e. Waugh] traded a Woolworth necklace for a black cock” (p. 226).

Interesting things from the critical apparatus

We've encountered the abbreviation 'ld (for would) instead of 'd in Waugh before (in Vile Bodies), and here it appears again in Waugh's manuscript (p. 287), though not in any printed edition of this novel.

On a few (but only a few) occasions the critical apparatus contains interesting additional material that did not make it into the final version of the novel. See e.g. the additional information about the Old Hundredth club on pp. 289–90 (note to 58.210–12); and their supposed fancy champagne was actually “distilled upstairs by the youngest Miss Weybridge” (p. 291, note to 58.233–59.235).

When Jenny says to the Revd. Tendril: “I could see from your sermon that you knew the East, Rector. [. . .] It has an uncanny fascination, hasn't it?” (p. 75), in early versions of the text the priest replied: “It had—before your day, young lady. You used to meet some of the finest types there. But it's not a white man's country any more.” (P. 307.)

At one point, when Tony and Messinger fail to get the local Indians to tell them the name of the rivers they have crossed, there are a few more lines of conversation between them in the first U.S. edition, but not in the British ones (p. 375, note to 150.856–7). They are not of any great importance, but I still don't see why Waugh thought it necessary to remove them.

Errors

This volume seems to have much fewer errors than some of the earlier ones in this series.

• The comma after “In,” at the start of n. 112, p. lxiv, is redundant.
• “Boa Visa” at the top of p. lxxiv should be “Boa Vista”.
• On p. 196 (note to 16.196), there is a semicolon after “slang)”, but it should be a comma.
• On p. 214 (note to 94.1635) there is a comma instead of a full-stop at the end of the sentence (after “Berkshire”).

But the printers have to be commended on the good job on “İzmir” (p. 222), which is a marked improvement from the embarrassing failure of “I˙zmit” in Helena (p. 133). :)

BOOK: Florence Farr, "The Dancing Faun"

Florence Farr: The Dancing Faun. London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1894. vi + 149 pp.

I first heard of this short novel because it was mentioned in passing in Nina Antonia's The Greenwood Faun, which I read recently (see my post about it). Nor had I heard of the author, Florence Farr, before, but judging by her biography on the wikipedia she must have been quite an interesting person; an actress and activist very much at the heart of the British fin de siècle, she later took an interest in occultism and published a number of books and papers on that subject.

In principle, you could hardly imagine a more 1890s book than the present volume: it was published by Elkin Mathews and John Lane of the Bodley Head in their famous Keynotes series, with a cover design by Aubrey Beardsley, and when I had a look at the first couple of pages of the novel on archive.org I saw that it opens with the sort of epigram-laden conversation that would not look out of place in a work by Oscar Wilde. Unsurprisingly, I decided to read it without delay :)

On the one hand, it was a pleasant read, and short enough to be read at one sitting (about 150 pages, and not too much text per page); on the other hand, it wasn't really quite the sort of decadent novel that I had imagined. There was entirely too much of people talking about their feelings, especially love, in much too conventional a manner. Nothing particularly decadent is actually done at any point. There weren't any fauns in the novel either. In short, I was something of a victim of my own misplaced expectations, expectations which I shouldn't have formed as I had had no real basis for forming them. Ultimately, I enjoyed the book, and probably anyone else who is keen on the 1890s will enjoy it as least as much as I did.

<spoiler warning>

Lord Kirkdale, a young aristocrat, has recently become friends with George Travers, a charming, witty and cynical man of no very clear provenance. Kirkdale's mother, the widowed Lady Kirkdale, has some doubts about Travers, so she invites him for a visit to to meet the rest of the family (and so they can size him up). At the start of the book we find Travers in conversation with Kirkdale's youngest sister Geraldine, effortlessly spewing Wildesque epigrams of the sort that certainly look very clever, but on closer look make you wonder if they really mean anything much at all. Travers invites Kirkdale, Geraldine and their mother to visit him at the house he is renting in the country.

As we learn soon afterwards, George Travers isn't quite what he appears. The son of a noted actor who died early, he was raised in comfortable circumstances by an adoptive father, who then also died and left Travers with nothing. Trying to remain in high society without having the money for it, Travers resorted to cheating at cards, but was discovered and had to flee to America. Now, years later, he has returned, hoping his old scandal has been forgotten; and he is scheming to become rich again and get back into society. He lives in a tiny garret with his young wife Grace, a former actress; the country house has been let to him temporarily by a friend he made while in America.

To the Kirkdales, Travers pretends that he is not married, and gets his wife to pretend that she is just a relative of the owner of the house. Soon, Geraldine falls in love with Travers, and Kirkdale with Grace. Grace is of two minds; the honest and straightforward Kirkdale appears to her as a prospect of comfortable domesticity, and forms a big contrast with her mysterious, scheming husband. For now her feelings of romance for Travers still prevail,but she dislikes the fact that he is preventing her from returning to acting.

Soon Kirkdale finds out about Travers's past, and confers with an older and more experienced family friend, Mr. Clausen. They agree that Grace could become a great actress, and want to get her away from Travers's influence so she can return to the stage.

Travers gets caught cheating at cards again; but to Grace he makes the excuse that he was framed. Seeing that he does not trust her with the truth, Grace no longer loves him, and insists on returning to the stage. Her old theatre in London would be happy to have her back, but Travers proposes to promote her as an actress in America instead, presumably because he sees her potential and figures he could make some money off her that way.

Meanwhile Geraldine is madly in love with Travers, and even the reports of his card-sharping and his being married do not change her mind. She exchanges several letters with him, and offers to help him in his “money difficulties”. Eventually they meet and consider their options; they could elope abroad, and live very miserably on Geraldine's £800 a year. [Very miserably by the standards of the super rich, of course; otherwise it would actually be quite comfortable.] Travers asserts that he could make more than that by touring America with Grace; he no longer loves her, but genuinely wants to mentor her as an actress. He did, however, vaguely hope to get some money out of Geraldine anyway, as the initial capital for his American venture.

Without much further ado, Geraldine pulls out a gun and shoots Travers dead! She makes some half-hearted efforts to make it look like Travers broke into the Kirkdales' house, stole a gun and later committed suicide with it. Fortunately for her, Clausen, who after some preliminary investigation quickly realizes that Geraldine murdered Travers, helps her cover up her tracks a little better, and Travers's death is pronounced to have been suicide. The novel ends with a conversation between Geraldine and Grace, both of whom are relieved that Travers is dead and that they are free of his contaminating influence.

</spoiler warning>

I have to say, to the author's credit, that Geraldine's killing of Travers came as a total surprise to me — I wasn't expecting it in the least. (The book had been all talk until then, so how could you not be surprised to finally see some action?) I can't say that I approve of that murder; Travers doesn't seem to have done, or planned to do, anything nearly heinous enough to deserve to get murdered over it. Geraldine herself admits that she did it “just to gratify my mad injured pride” (p. 143), and I can sympathize with that — murder out of passion, fair enough — but I can't sympathize when she then tries to justify the murder lamely: “he would have sneaked and lied and shivered through life [. . .] it is a good deed done, and I am glad I did it.” (P. 143.) Gosh, talk about high standards. If everyone who indulges in a bit of light conmanship was going to be shot like a dog, the world would be a *very* different place. I wouldn't want to see Geraldine hanged or even imprisoned over the murder, but I'm not glad that she got off completely scot-free and isn't even sorry for killing him. I guess if there's any real element of decadence in this novel, it's this — that Geraldine and Grace should be so happy and relieved after Travers was murdered over such a small matter.

The author should have done more to present Travers as really villainous if she wants us to sympathize with Geraldine's point of view — but perhaps she doesn't want that.* After all, we see that Mr. Clausen, the most sober-minded and well-balanced character in the story, does not understand Geraldine's perspective, even though he helped hide the evidence of her guilt (p. 143); and Geraldine herself seems to feel that she is in some significant sense worse than most people: “I am my father's daughter. People like him and me belong to a race apart; we are only mortal clay, while you and mamma, and Maisy and all the rest of you have immortal souls.” (P. 144. We don't actually know anything much about her father, except for a passing mention from page 4: Geraldine's mother “had the experience of life only given to those ladies whose husbands are thoroughly and brutally immoral”.)

[*There is in fact also a scene which seems to have no other purpose but to make us view Travers as less villainous, namely when he plays with Pierre, the little son of his housekeeper (pp. 41–4).]

Incidentally, another way in which Geraldine is unconventional is her support for the ‘New Woman’ ideas: “it is only within the last few years that women have dared show their womanhood. At last they are permitted to possess a small quota of human nature; they may be something more than waxen masks of doll-like acquiescence” (pp. 59–60).

I wish we were told a little more clearly what exactly Travers's nefarious plan was in the first place. I guess he hoped to seduce Geraldine, or he hoped that Kirkdale would fall in love with Grace — or both — but what next? The fact that Travers and Grace are married would surely stand in the way. Is he just hoping to get more blackmail material, seeing as that seems to be his mode of operation, though he doesn't like to call it by such a blunt term (pp. 26–7, 82–3)? Did he deliberately marry Grace in the hope of using her as bait in some scheme like that? (Because otherwise, it isn't obvious why marrying a talented but so far penniless actress would do his plans any good; then we would have to conclude that he must have married her for love.)

Admittedly there is also one detail which speaks against Travers. On p. 25, when Grace asks him to let her start acting again to earn some money, he says: “what would five pounds a week be to a man like me?” But on p. 128, talking to Geraldine, he says that Grace and he would easily make “one hundred pounds a week between us”. He is either lying or he's wildly optimistic about Grace's earning potential.

Ultimately, the main reason for my sympathies for Travers is this: he is trying to get rich by unfair means; but other characters in this novel are already rich, and there is no way to be rich except by unfair means. So they have no basis to complain against him, as far as I'm concerned; they are no better than him, only luckier because their money is already made. For instance, where is Geraldine's £800 a year coming from? Either farmers paying rents for land that Geraldine owns, or companies paying dividends on stocks that she owns, or interest on bonds that she owns. That's money that, of right, ought to belong to those farmers and to the workers of those companies — there's no sane reason under the sun why any of that money should end up in Geraldine's pockets, except that the sheer lunacy of our legal and economical system happens to be on her side. We hear that Travers “had discovered the art of living upon other people” (p. 40); yet what is Geraldine's £800 a year, if not her living upon other people? Without lifting a finger, she robs people of £800 every year, yet she is regarded as a decent and normal person; but when someone like Travers tries to get some money out of people, everyone calls him a villain. And yet they are both doing the same thing, it's just that those holding power in our society have arbitrarily decided that some forms of theft are acceptable (and they get to be called by other terms, like ‘rents’ and ‘profits’ and the like) while others aren't (and they get to be called ‘card-sharping’ and ‘blackmail’ and the like). In fact Travers's way is less objectionable, because he was trying to extract money from the rich, while Geraldine's way extracts it from the poor.

By the way, I wonder what to make of the title of the book, The Dancing Faun. Apparently there is a famous statue of that name at Pompeii. There are only two mentions of the Dancing Faun in the book; one is on p. 58, in a passage that explains why Grace prefers Travers over Kirkdale: Kirkdale “was an extremely well made young man [. . .] but to a woman who had taken it into her head to adore the type of man represented by the Dancing Faun, no Hercules, however laboriously devoted, need apply.” And on p. 100 Geraldine herself uses the term when explaining why she prefers Travers over other men: “If I think of other people, it is only to think of the difference between him and them. He is so graceful, they are so proper. He always has something charming to say, they always say the things one has heard over and over again. He is like the Dancing Faun, they are like a tailor's block.” So the Dancing Faun is a metaphor for the type of person that Travers is; charming though not classically beautiful; characterized by a certain nimbleness, both mental and physical; and perhaps a little wild and unpredictable.

*

A few passages that I particularly liked:

Lady Kirkdale on Geraldine's singing lessons: “I insisted on her singing at Sautussi's reception, just the same as the other pupils. I think it is the greatest mistake to make distinctions of rank in matters of art. In art all are equal.” :)) (P. 3.)

On Travers's parasitical ways: “He had discovered the art of living upon other people with as much grace as if he belonged to the highest circles; none of the bourgeois arrogance of the parvenu or the middleman was perceptible; he took other people's money, their property, and their affections, with equal grace and admirable cordiality.” (P. 40.)

I liked the contrast between conversation and chatter here: “Here the rest of the party came up, conversation ceased, and chatter reigned in its stead.” (P. 122.)

On Geraldine: “Mediocrity was her bugbear, just as it has been the bugbear of thousands of other mediocre people, and she was ready to take the most desperate measures to escape from it.” (P. 123.) Hey, I resemble that remark! :P

Speaking of mediocrity, here is Grace about her late husband: “Almost the last time I talked to him, I remember feeling as if it would be a glorious thing to be a great criminal, and that if you could not rule by fair means, you should rule by foul. George [i.e. Travers] had such a horror of mediocrity.” (P. 148.)

The obligatory fin-de-siècle trope of artists being apart from the world: “In real life you get an emotion which masters you; in art, in acting, in all works of genius, I suppose, you master an emotion. That is why artists are set apart from the rest of the world; they cannot enjoy the common emotion long, they demand too much from it.” (Grace on p. 146. The author, Florence Farr, was herself a prominent actress, so I guess she speaks from experience here.)