NTMBookClub

Book club selection for November 2011

2011-10-15T23:39:00.001-05:00

The Book Club selection for November is To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Book club selection for October 2011

2011-10-15T23:38:00.001-05:00

The book Club selection for October is The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

Book club selection for September 2011

2011-10-15T23:37:00.001-05:00

The book Club Selection for September is The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

Book club selection for August 2011

2011-10-15T23:36:00.002-05:00

The book club selection for August is The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

Book club selection for July 2011

2011-06-28T20:42:00.003-05:00

The selection is "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" by Stieg Larson.

Book club selection for June 2011

2011-06-28T20:42:00.002-05:00

The selection is "Survival in the Killing Fields " by Hang Ngor with Roger Warner.

Book club selection for May 2011

2011-06-28T20:41:00.002-05:00

The book club selection is "King Lear" by William Shakespeare.

Book club selection for April 2011

2011-06-28T20:41:00.001-05:00

The selection this month is "Into Thin Air" by Jon Krakauer

Book club selection for March 2011

2011-02-13T20:52:00.002-06:00

The book club selection for March is

"Masterpieces of the Orient” by George Lincoln Anderson

Reading at least the following parts:

* Yasdegerd the Sinner * Shakuntala * Soap * In a Grove

Book club selection for Feburary 2011

2011-01-14T18:36:00.001-06:00

The book club selection for February is Billy Boyle, a WWII Mystery by James Benn

Book club selection for January 2011

2011-01-14T18:34:00.003-06:00

The book club selection for January will be The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens. You get to pick if the story is completed, and if so, who completed it.

Book Club Selection for November 2010

2010-10-22T09:06:00.001-05:00

Book club selection for November is Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein

Book Club Selection for October 2010

2010-10-22T09:03:00.001-05:00

The selection for October is The Sudden Guest by Christopher LaFarge

Book Club Selection for August 10

2010-07-27T20:04:00.002-05:00

The book club selection for August is Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman

Book Club Selection for July 10

2010-07-27T20:03:00.001-05:00

The book club selection for July was The Gods Themselves by Issac Asimov

Book Club Selection for June 10

2010-05-14T20:37:00.001-05:00

The book club selection for June is Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

Book Club Selection for May 10

2010-05-14T20:35:00.001-05:00

The book club selection for May is Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. Not too may words have the sequence "rtr" in them

April Book Club

2010-05-14T20:34:00.001-05:00

Selection for April was The Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger

Book Club Selection for March 10

2010-01-24T21:08:00.002-06:00

The book club selection for March is The Bell by Dame Iris Murdoch

Book Club Selection for February 10

2010-01-03T11:14:00.001-06:00

The book club selection for February is Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy.

Book Club Selection for January 2010

2009-12-27T10:50:00.000-06:00

The book club selection for January is Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang.

Book Club Selection for December 09

2009-11-19T20:19:00.001-06:00

Selection for December is Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan

Book Club Selection for November 09

2009-10-02T18:07:00.001-05:00

The book club selection for November is ' Carl Sagan: A Life’ by Keay Davidson .

I guess I'll start out this set of comments (hard for me to call it a review) by saying that I rarely read biographies. Three Cups of Tea was sort of a biography, but it had a notional story line also. I think I mentioned this to someone, but the last biography I read before this one was an autobiography by Allan Sherman. So let's see of I can decipher the little bookmarks I have made in this tome. Overall I liked the book well enough; it was apparent that Davidson did a huge amount of research on Sagan. There were a few stylistic quibbles I had: I got tired of reading early on in the book "more about this later" (there was even one page (130) where the device was used twice...arrgh). Another cliche he recycles is "...a series of misunderstandings..." It is used earlier in the book and on page 385. Perhaps the frequent asides to deliver personal thoughts into the story is commonplace for biographers; Davidson seemed to disrupt the flow of the narrative to take a pot shot at William F Buckley ("strange facial expressions...", p 371) and Ronald Regan ("deep box of newspaper clippings..." p 357).

All in all, a worthwhile read. Someone who reads more biographies can give a better assessment on how it matches others in this genre.

Book Club Selection for October 09

2009-09-30T17:02:00.001-05:00

The selection for October is A Quiet Flame by Phillip Kerr

Book Club Selection for September 09

2009-08-22T16:12:00.000-05:00

The selection for September will be Three Cups of Tea By Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin.

Book Club Selection for August 09

2009-07-12T21:27:00.001-05:00

The selection for August is Shannon by Frank Delaney. New members and guests are welcome at all of our meetings.

Book Club Selection for July 09

2009-07-12T21:26:00.001-05:00

The book club selection for July is The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell

Book Club Selection for June 09

2009-05-03T18:21:00.000-05:00

The book club selection for June will be The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens

Book club Selection for May

2009-04-29T20:54:00.001-05:00

The book club selection for May will be Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder

Book Club Selection for April 09

2009-02-22T21:05:00.005-06:00

The book club selection for April is Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" We will also be viewing the movie, and the meeting will be held at a member's residence.

Book Club Selection for March 09

2009-02-22T21:05:00.002-06:00

The book club selection for March will be Studs Terkel's "The Good War"

Book Club Selection for February 09

2009-01-03T21:51:00.002-06:00

The book club selection for the month is The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie.

Book Club Selection for January 09

2009-01-03T21:50:00.003-06:00

The book club selection for the month is Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen.

Book Club Selection for December

2008-11-05T22:09:00.001-06:00

The book club selection for December is "The Christmas Quilt" by Thomas J Davis

Book Club Selection for November

2008-11-05T22:08:00.002-06:00

The book club selection for November is Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.

It is unfortunate that I'll not be able to attend the book club meeting this month. This is another of the recent books that I really enjoyed. I believed that I had read it when I was younger, but now I am not so sure. I would think I would have remembered it if I had. Clearly Montag is a conflicted character even before we meet him, a closet book hoarder, maybe even a bookworm. He clearly is too much of a thinker to fit in very well in this dystopia. The parallels with actual book burnings is very eeire. The parallels I see here are first with Atlas Shrugged (especially the end), and then as I think of them, the movie "Brazil", and books like "1984" and "A Wrinkle in Time" (Camazotz).

Of course, if we play the outcast line a little further, we end up with the fact that this is a good book for the Mensa book club, where many of us may feel more or less disconnected with the mainstream society. I guess I wonder about the 98% of Mensa-qualified people who do not join. Perhaps they are more adaptable or just do not need the social support network that this organization provides. But I digress.

I hope the copies you read have a "coda" by the author. The copy of the book I have shows the coda added in 1979. In it the author rails against political correctness, censorship and the slippery slope of narrow mindedness, even to the point where Fahrenheit 451 had been edited without the authors knowledge in some 75 spots. Students in a class wrote to tell him of this irony. He did not choose to chronicle his reaction.

Book Club Selection for October

2008-09-28T10:41:00.000-05:00

The October selection is "Infidel" by Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Book Club Selection for Sept

2008-08-23T18:46:00.002-05:00

The book club selection for September will be the classic Silas Marner by George Elliot.

Book Club Selection for Aug

2008-07-17T21:37:00.003-05:00

The book club selection for August will be Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk.

When I first started reading this book, I thought of Kurt Vonnegut. Still do, although I have added a couple of other books this reminds me of, one being F*** YES!, by "rev" Wing F Fing (subtitled "a guide to the happy acceptance of everything"). It also has passages about the Creedish that remind me of John Christoper's classic "The White Mountains." It is an easy to read, cutting take on some elements of modern society.

Book Club Selection for July

2008-07-17T21:24:00.002-05:00

The Eclectic Book Club selection for July will be "Stained Glass" by William F. Buckley. The second of WFB's mystery novels in the Blackford Oakes series, which traces the adventures of a CIA operative in the '50s. The first novel in the series is Saving the Queen. Buckley was employed by the CIA briefly in the '50s. Recommended among his many nonfiction works is Cancel your Own Goddamn Subscription, a collection of the notes and asides columns from his magazine, National Review.

What's happenning this Sunday, June 22?

2008-06-20T17:03:00.002-05:00

It's the 4th Sun- But I didnt see a reference to it. Is it happening? WHAT'S THE BOOK?

Jack C. Ritter

jack@the-empty-set.com

Jack,
We took June off. Sorry we did not include a null entry in the blog.

Bill

Selection for May 08

2008-04-24T19:31:00.001-05:00

The Book Club selection for May will be The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Selection for April

2008-02-29T17:13:00.000-06:00

Book Club selection for April will be Cosmic Jackpot by Paul Davies

Selection for March

2008-02-29T17:12:00.002-06:00

Book Club selection for March is Terrorist by John Updike.

Notes and random thoughts on the Book Terrorist by John Updike:

The first thing that struck me as I started reading the book is that Both Ahmad and Jack “thought” in very similar ways--the way they observed the world seemed similar. I guess this was intentional, but even Beth sounded a bit like them, perhaps a ditzier version of their style of thinking. I guess as I think about it in retrospect, Ahmad and Jack’s similarity may have been intentional…neither one enjoying the life situations they were in very much. …but of course Terry wasn’t a real happy person either…same might be inferred of Beth. I can imagine Beth’s sister Hermione being happy, about being an “important person” and the fact that she had Beth to walk all over on a weekly basis.

I did enjoy the ending a lot. I thought it was very suspenseful. Then I digress and think about Hofstadler in GEB, where he talked about the fact that with a book you know that the end is coming up because the pages are running out. I guess that was part of the excitement. I actually had one book that did fool me, though…it had an extensive appendix/addendum/index or whatever that were the last 50 pages or so. So I found it a quicker read that Zollinger (half the page count and space and a half spacing probably had a lot to do with it). .

Other, even more random thoughts….I wonder why Ahmad thought of his God as lonely….it seems after a little thought that the God already has the company of the other suicide bombers. I wonder if all of Updike’s novels have the people with, uh….one track minds in the gutter. In Ahmad’s case, of course, it is more think about not thinking about it, which provides an interesting contrast.

Selection for February

2008-02-29T17:09:00.002-06:00

February's selection was Not of War Only by Norman Zollenger. Book provided a perspective on the Mexican Revolution in the early 20th century as seen through the eyes of a gringo foot soldier and a wild west lawman acting as a government agent.

Selection for January

2007-12-22T22:35:00.000-06:00

For January the book club will be reading Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco.

Selection for December

2007-12-22T22:28:00.000-06:00

For December we read Dickens' A Christmas Carol

Despite the short length, the piece still had whole scenes that were not in any of the movie versions of the book (e.g., the scene at sea), though the Scott movie version did use dialog almost verbatim from the book.

Book Club selection for November

2007-10-18T21:24:00.000-05:00

Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. A non fiction work for those of you who were wondering when we'd get around to one.

Discussion included parallels in other media, specifically the level shifting in the Woody Allen play "God." Also the concept of consciousness, how a brain could relate to itself and the parallels between neurons, axions, and digital fan-outs.

Book Club Selection for October

2007-10-18T21:21:00.000-05:00

--Life of Pi by Yann Martel The story of a teenager, a tiger, and a lifeboat.

Book Club Selection for September --Nine Stories

2007-08-29T17:13:00.000-05:00

The selection for September is Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger

Book Club Selection for August --Harry Potter

2007-08-11T21:59:00.000-05:00

We're reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for August, and having a Harry Potter themed party to go along with the discussion. See the M-Aura or email me for details.

Bleak House Links

2006-03-08T19:32:00.000-06:00

"Bleak House:
Public and Private Worlds" An essay by Shirley Galloway,
instructor of English literature and composition at College of San Mateo whose
thesis reads: "The suggestion of synthesis (between the two narratives in
Bleak House) is intriguing and I will conclude with a speculative look at
what the novel has to say about 'life as a mystery that must be discovered', the
function of revelation in the text, and the possibility of either social or
individual transformation within this fictional world."

"The
Skimpole Syndrome: Childhood Unlimited" by Paul V. Mankowski, from the
journal First Thing- the Journal of Religion and Public Life uses the
character of Skimpole as a "type" that can be found in modern Christianity - the
eternal child who revels in the importance and innocence of the self, and
possesses a sense of bafflement at the structures the world (or the Church)
impose on them.

"Appreciations and Criticism" by G.K. Chesterton (1911) - Chapter
15, available here, discusses Bleak House as Dickens' most "mature" novel.
Not his best, necessarily, but his most mature and delicately nuanced.

"The
Immortal Dickens" by George Gissing (1929) - Chapter 10 of Gissing's work is
devoted to a very opinionated critical analysis of Bleak House,

both its flaws and its charms, and a description of the
events surrounding the text's creation

"Consequential Ground: The Foot
Passengers of Bleak House" - a lecture given by Steven Connor of
Birkbeck College, London, that examines the role of ambulators in Bleak House's
narrative and how the manner in which characters are described moving reflects,
to a decent extent, their role in Victorian society.

"Bleak House and Little Dorrit: Iconography of Darkness" -
Chapter 6 of Michael Steig's Dickens and Phiz, available through the
Victorian Web project

"Challenging figures: Three of Charles Dickens' Marginal Women" - by Valerie
Kennedy, Faculty of Humanities and Letters, Bilkent University; Ankara, Turkey,
available through the Victorian Web project, this article examines Hortense as
one of three marginalized women in Dickens' various works.

"Bleak House
and the Reign of Metaphor" - by Eiichi Hara - Argues that Bleak
House's metaphors are generally too obvious and unambiguous to be very good,
and that their rigidity undermines their power as satirical devices.
Whatever.

"Bleak
House and Brown's Work: A Gaze upon the Poor" by Takashi
Nakamura - Explores Dickens' presentation of the poor and the powers that
control them, and his awareness of the concept of "public health"

"Bleak House: the
Literary Imagination and Contemporary Housing Policy" - By Tony Manzi -
Examines the role of literature and pop culture in forming housing policy; uses
some of Dickens' works as examples

"Bartleby the Scrivener

and Bleak House: Melville's Debt to Dickens" - by David Jaffe -
Argues that Melville's Bartleby tale owes some of its scrivener characters to
Bleak House, and draws particular attention to the similarities between the
character of Nemo/Harlowe and the mysterious Bartelby

"Differing Opinions: Contemporary Reviews of Bleak House" - By Lowela
Lacson, Susan Hocker, Elizabeth Phan, and Heather Shanks; An exploration
of published critical opinion contemporary to the Dickens' release of Bleak
House

"Chapter 4. David Copperfield and Bleak House: On Dividing the
Responsibility of Knowing" - from Audrey Jaffe's Vanishing Points:
Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience - Takes a look at the nature of
Dickens' dual narrative style in Bleak House and the effect of Esther's
constant self-effacement as a narrative technique

Amazon.com and

Barnes and Noble Reader Book Reviews of Bleak House - Say what you will, but
sites like these let you know what the people are thinking. Power to the
people, especially the 7th graders.

"The Marginal, the Equitable, and the Unparalleled: Lady Dedlock's Case in
Dickens's Bleak House" (Subscription to Project Muse
required, sorry)An article from New Literary History by Dieter Paul
Polloczek,
author of 1993's heralded "Vernetzungsstrukturen: Faulkner, Pynchon, Barthelme"

- This article claims that older texts require re-examination, for reasons that
would require an entire web page unto itself to explain, and takes Dickens'
Bleak House as its sample re-examination text. Requires a fat, fat
vocabulary to understand it.

"Market
Indicators: Banking and Domesticity in Dickens's Bleak House" - (Subscription
to Project Muse required, sorry) by
Gordon Bigelow - Discusses Dickens's evaluation of England's economic systems
through the Central Bank and the family home....

"Sublimation
strange": Allegory and Authority in Bleak House" - By Daniel Hack
(Subscription to Project Muse required, sorry) -
Concerns itself with Dickens' attempt to relate the functionality of allegory
to narrative forms....

Bleak House and Skimpole

2006-03-08T19:27:00.000-06:00

The Skimpole Syndrome:
Childhood Unlimited

Paul V. Mankowski

Copyright (c) 1993 First Things 33 (May 1993): 26-30.

Let me re-introduce you to Mr. Harold Skimpole. Skimpole lives in the pages of Charles Dickens' Bleak House; he made his first appearance 140 years ago, yet those who are acquainted with the principal hierophants of New Age spirituality may receive more than a slight shock of recognition:

He was a bright little creature with a rather large head; but a delicate face and a sweet voice, and there was a perfect charm in him. All he said was so free of effort and spontaneous and was said with such a captivating gaiety, that it was fascinating to hear him talk. . . . Indeed, he had more the appearance in all respects of a damaged young man, than a well-preserved elderly one. There was an easy negligence in his manner, and even in his dress (his hair carelessly disposed, and his neckerchief loose and flowing, as I have seen artists paint their own portraits), which I could not separate from the idea of a romantic youth who had undergone some unique process of depreciation. . . .

Harold Skimpole took a bright disdain for the drudgery of adult life-"I am a child, you know!" he frequently reminds us-and delighted in the innocent pleasures around him. Speaking of himself (far and away his favorite topic) he confessed to

two of the oldest infirmities in the world: one was, that he had no idea of time; the other, that he had no idea of money. In consequence of which he never kept an appointment, never could transact any business, and never knew the value of anything! . . . He was very fond of reading the papers, very fond of making fancy sketches with a pencil, very fond of nature, very fond of art. All he asked of society, was to let him live. That wasn't much. His wants were few. Give him the papers, conversation, music, mutton, coffee, landscape, fruit in the season, a few sheets of Bristol-board, and a little claret, and he asked no more. He was a mere child in the world, but he didn't cry for the moon. He said to the world, "Go your several ways in peace! Wear red coats, blue coats, lawn sleeves, put pens behind your ears, wear aprons; go after glory, holiness, commerce, trade, any object you prefer; only-let Harold Skimpole live!

Thus we are given a prototype of the consummate pluralist, the besotted lover of all creation, the friend of peace, the man who can tolerate anything but intolerance: with malice toward none, with kindness and caring toward all.

The best insight we have into Skimpole's character comes from his encounters with creditors and their agents-what would for another man be called "financial embarrassment"-but of course Skimpole has no capacity to blush for any reason. He lives in the house of a wealthy and indulgent friend; even so, he manages to accumulate spectacular bills. On one occasion the narrator, Esther Summerson, is summoned to Skimpole's room and finds him, to her shock, arrested for debt.

"Are you arrested for much, sir?" I inquired of Mr. Skimpole. "My dear Miss Summerson," said he, shaking his head pleasantly, "I don't know. Some pounds, odd shillings and half-pence, I think, were mentioned."

The sum turns out to be more than twenty-four pounds-a staggering amount for the time, and it devolves on Esther and her friends to satisfy the officer and the debt.

It was a most singular thing [Esther was afterward to reflect] that the arrest was our embarrassment, and not Mr. Skimpole's. He observed us with a genial interest; but there seemed, if I may venture on a contradiction, nothing selfish in it. He had entirely washed his hands of the difficulty, and it had become ours.

Drawing on their own savings, carefully accumulated through much ill- paid labor, Skimpole's acquaintances managed to placate the furious collecting agent, but Skimpole isn't through with him yet. "Did you know this morning, now, that you were coming out on this errand?" Skimpole asked him. "It didn't affect your appetite? Didn't make you at all uneasy?"

"Then you didn't think, at all events," proceeded Mr. Skimpole, "to this effect. 'Harold Skimpole loves to see the sun shine; loves to hear the wind blow; loves to watch the changing lights and shadows; loves to hear the birds, those choristers in Nature's great cathedral. And does it seem to me that I am about to deprive Harold Skimpole of his share in such possessions, which are his only birthright!' You thought nothing to this effect?"

He is assured in emphatic terms that this was not the case.

"Very odd and very curious, the mental process is, in you men of business!" said Mr. Skimpole thoughtfully. "Thank you, my friend. Good night."

Harold Skimpole never quite manages to lose his charm, and yet readers of Bleak House become increasingly appalled by him. He affects unselfishness, but is in reality fanatically, even maniacally, self- centered-existing in the soap bubble of an almost perfect solipsism. He insists in his sunny prattle that he is "a mere child," while he is fact a grotesque parasite: a colossal tick, a leech, a tapeworm with a taste for Mozart, who, it turns out, is childlike in his pursuit of pleasure, but shrewd and willful in his studied neglect of responsibility. His sensibilities are exquisitely tender, and yet he has a talent for causing pain, for making his benefactors feel slightly soiled by their own honest labor. He professes universal tolerance and sweetness to all, though is willing to put his friends through shame, fear, and harm rather than see his own comfort threatened.

The burden of this essay is to demonstrate that the Skimpole Syndrome is alive and well today, particularly (though not exclusively) in the world of religion. I want to show that the churches have been victims of parasites, most often quite charming parasites, and that the exhaustion and despair we see in the faces of our pastors can, to some extent, be attributed to the energy sucked out of their veins by cheerful co- religionists who mock their host even as they grow fat on his livelihood, his patrimony. The difficulty before me-no small one-is to convince you that the good things that our modern-day Skimpoles feast on are as precarious, are bought into being with as much pain and toil, as were the amenities of Bleak House.

The villainy of the Skimpole Syndrome does not consist in its choice of goods: papers, conversation, music, mutton, coffee, landscape, fruit, a little claret-few of us would argue that such things are inherently unwholesome. Nor is genial tolerance-"Go your several ways in peace! . . . go after any object you prefer!"-a bad thing in itself. The problem with Skimpolism is that it ignores, and refuses to acknowledge, the sources and causes of its own good fortune: the enormous human enterprise of toil, commerce, and distribution, the attendant fatigue, risk, worry, and vexation, the requisite virtues of foresight, prudence, honesty, and diligence-all of which are necessary for something as ordinary as a peach or a glove to end up in Skimpole's dining room. For the Skimpoles of this world, the ultimate source of bread is the baker's van, and there is no need to concern oneself with plowing, sowing, weeding, dunging, cutting, threshing, milling, and baking-not to mention the thousands of mercantile transactions, from mortgages to tire rotations-that must be in place, and continually attended to, so that Skimpole might have his honey on toast.

Skimpole believed himself set apart from other men by the fact that his needs were few. Of course, his needs were no fewer than anyone else's; rather, he was distinguished by his ignorance of his debt to prosaic necessities, by his confusing desires with needs, and by pretending that his wants were nobler than those of the multitude.

Consider, then, whether the following list of goods brings to mind a recognizable type: openness, sharing, compassion, diversity, dialogue, peace and justice, wholeness, growth. I am skating on thin ice here, and I know it. I should make it clear that I am not sneering at any of these objects, or the pursuit of these objects, as they are properly understood as components of Christian community. They are good things, and noble aspirations, and brave men and women have made heroic sacrifices so that they might be achieved and preserved. All this I insist on. By the same token, unless I am mistaken, this constellation of desiderata belongs in a special way to the Skimpole Syndrome of our own time, precisely comparable to the claret and newspapers and mutton that, to the mind of our perpetual child, simply came into being as gratuitously as sunshine and birdsong and warm breeze. The modern dream is just as illusory as the old, and decidedly more pestilent.

Take a fairly straightforward element in Christian life, the text of the Bible. Unlike the Book of Mormon, which is said to have been delivered on gold tablets by the Angel Moroni to the nineteenth-century copyist, the Word of God was not presented to Christians in final form. As Bible scholar Jon Levenson reminds us, there was in "biblical times" no such thing as a Bible, in New Testament times no such thing as a New Testament. Rather, the Bible was assembled over a number of years for the Church and by the Church-in particular, through liturgical usage and the ratification of bishops, who had already formed an inchoate hierarchy before the New Testament was itself complete.

Consequently, the Bible in the most physical sense-the written words on the page-comes down to us through two enormous efforts that overlap in practice though they are notionally distinct. On the one hand, the enterprise of copying, correcting, translating, and publishing texts-the business of scholarship; on the other, the enterprise of delivering to the Church an intact Old Testament and a New Testament that conforms to the mind of Christ: this involves setting the boundaries of the canon by choosing and rejecting among rival testimonies, selecting the best text of each canonical witness, suppressing additions and interpolations, suppressing mistranslations, and so forth. The human machinery- scholarly, administrative, legal, theological, editorial, custodial-that is engaged by the Church to put a Bible into our hands is beyond reckoning.

Not all of this machinery is especially gratifying to watch in operation. For example, it involves (and has always involved) censorship: the scrutiny of writings, the interrogation of authors of doubtful work, compulsory retraction of opinions found erroneous, and the suppression of those who refuse to recant their errors. Given the nature of their task, it is doubtful whether censors ever enjoyed great public esteem, but it is not doubtful that they cut poor figures today. Even in the civil sphere, the position of censor is not one that is likely to win invitations to fashionable parties or help to make an advantageous marriage. In an age with a warranted suspicion of bureaucracies and an unwarranted faith in the unconstrained intellect, censorship is seen as among the dirtiest of all dirty jobs, and for that reason alone is scorned by the Skimpoles.

The point is that the much-maligned structures of authority in the Church are as necessary to transmitting our faith as herdsmen are necessary to providing lamb chops. In the absence of censorship (and the sanctions that go with censorship) we would share no Bible, no prayer, no faith at all with the Christians of the Coliseum. Even the denominations that have minimal hierarchy and recognize no bishops have this reason to be grateful for those churches that do. Christians whose rule of faith is "by Scripture alone" are obliged to admit that the very Scripture they cherish not only produced the Church but was produced by it, and this production involved many of the very structures that they, several centuries later, were to find unscriptural.

And yet, the objection is frequently made, isn't it the case, once we have a firm and binding document-a genuine letter of St. Paul or a decree of an ecumenical council-that we can simply rely on the plain sense of the text to give us the teaching we need? This intuition is widely held, but the history of the Church shows us that there is no such thing as the plain sense of the text that is universally acknowledged-at least over time. It is simply impossible to lay the flooring of a document so tightly that someone, at some time, will not manage to fall through the cracks.

My favorite illustration of this point is the decree Omnis utriusque sexus of the Fourth Lateran Council, held in 1215. It holds that everyone, of both sexes, is required to go to confession at least once a year. It was, however, interpreted by a monk named William of Newcastle to mean that yearly penitential duty is incumbent only on hermaphrodites. Now Brother William, obviously, needed someone to point out the error of his ways. His Latin, incidentally, was flawless; the problem with his interpretation is that it was insane.

The upshot is that every article of faith we have, no matter how obvious or how arcane it may appear, has run a gamut of fatal threats throughout the centuries, and has been vouchsafed to us, multa inter alia, by bishops and censors and canonists and judges. As Chesterton points out, if you paint a fence post white, and just leave it alone, it will eventually turn black. In the same way the teachings of the Church have to be reappropriated in every generation-unglamorous work!-and protected from contamination, neglect, and the random predations of those Williams of Newcastle that stalk the pages of the history of doctrine in every age like a recurring nightmare.

In the Skimpole mentality, all the effort required to produce his wants is mere affectation, and as such requires no compensation, and no respect. So Skimpole gives us to understand in narrating a conversation with his unpaid butcher:

"Says he, 'Sir, why did you eat spring lamb at eighteen pence a pound?' 'Why did I eat spring lamb at eighteen pence a pound, my honest friend?' said I, naturally amazed by the question. 'I like spring lamb!' This was so far convincing. 'Well sir,' says he, 'I wish I had meant the lamb as you mean the money!' 'My good fellow,' said I, 'pray let us reason like intellectual human beings. How could that be? It was impossible. You had got the lamb, and I have not got the money. You couldn't really mean the lamb without sending it in, whereas I can, and do, mean the money without paying it!' He had not a word. There was an end to the subject."

"Did he take no legal proceedings?" inquired [Mr. Jarndyce].

"Yes, he took legal proceedings," said Mr. Skimpole, "But, in that, he was influenced by passion, not by reason."

In the same way present-day Skimpoles are fond of saying, "I don't believe in a hierarchical Church. I believe in a God of compassion," suggesting, of course, that the two notions are mutually exclusive. When we ask, "Now how do you know that God is a God of compassion?" they say, "Why, because it says so in the Prophet Amos and the Gospel of Luke!" When we ask further, "But how do you know that Amos and Luke are reliable witnesses to the truth about God, except in virtue of the decisions made by those same authoritative structures you reject?" they reply, astonished by the question, "Because these books speak about a God of compassion!" And so we will have come full circle, while they walk away, shaking their heads over the fact that the orthodox are still guided by emotion, not by logic.

Let me stress again that I do not for a moment sneer at compassion; it is right to rejoice in the knowledge that God is all-merciful. Skimpole's worldview is defective not in the things it includes but in the things it leaves out, and the same is true of his contemporary counterparts. They speak of peace and justice and compassion as if the notions themselves were obvious and spontaneous, springing up in the minds of men with no more trouble than the wine and strawberries that appeared on Skimpole's breakfast tray. What they ignore is the overwhelming struggle, the sheer human sacrifice necessary for the Church to articulate and transmit intact even the most rudimentary truths, as truths.

Has it, in fact, been universally obvious that our God is a God of compassion? Not to those whose religious experience regards forgiveness as weakness-to the Nazis, for example. Jon Levenson has pointed out that, for the Nazis, what they prized as the "Nordic type" was "not only a physical characteristic but a matter of fundamental spiritual posture." "According to them, the true Nordic practices an ethic that is the polar opposite of the ideal of humility, subservience, and nonviolence that has so long been enforced by reference to the authority of Jesus." Their solution was to exalt the book of the Bible they found least offensive as communicating the "true faith" while pruning and cleansing the other parts of Scripture of false ideas. For Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg, the Gospel of Mark provided the true writ, other books having been contaminated by "womanish exaggerations" and "Syrian-African superstition."

More recently, Levenson suggests, feminists have begun to cleanse the Bible in precisely the same manner, based on the same appeal to religious intuitions-although these intuitions are, on the surface, at variance with those of the Nazis. Feminist thealogian Carol Christ sees the God of the Bible as a "God of war [who] stands for too much that I stand against." With regard to Drs. Christ and Rosenberg, Levenson has remarked, "It's hard to escape the conclusion that both are missing something."

Today's Skimpole is more likely to be a feminist than a Nazi, but both are indeed missing something-and not just a balanced picture of God. Both refuse to grow up; both insist on remaining "a mere child." Both have made the move "from the experience of religious authority to the authority of religious experience"; and to appeal to "the authority of religious experience" is a roundabout way of saying, "I like what I like because I like it."

Feminist Skimpoles are able to bring much of the heavy artillery of biblical scholarship to bear on their targets. In their lectures and articles and efforts to sift and winnow the Bible so as to expose the contaminations of patriarchy they may appear very sophisticated; yet once we blow away the smoke we will find that, at bottom, they are in the same intellectual position as a pouting child at the breakfast table picking the raisins out of the bran flakes. "I like what I like because I like it. I hate what I hate because I hate it."

Am I being too harsh? Bring to mind for a moment the people you have seen who conduct New Age weekends, or feminist workshops, or Peace Studies institutes, those who take glee in having "cut the knot" connecting them to patriarchal institutions, to structures of authority, to the unglamorous business of orthodoxy. Then recall the words in which Dickens first lets us glimpse the figure of Harold Skimpole: "He had more the appearance, in all respects, of a damaged young man, than a well-preserved elderly one . . . there was an easy negligence in his manner . . . which I could not separate from the idea of a romantic youth who had undergone some unique process of depreciation."

Skimpoles are, to my mind, a genuine threat to the integrity of the Church today. Their potential for harm comes in large part precisely from the good things in which they take delight. Let's face it: they're more attractive people than most of us, and certainly more attractive than the Vatican inquisitors-at least while the latter are at their tasks. They charm; they enliven; they amuse and provoke. They speak the sweet words of dialogue, tolerance, and innovation, while the authorities are obliged to talk of limits and penalties. They proclaim themselves on the side of freedom, and portray the curiales as friends of ignorance, violence, and repression. They fire the popular imagination, while I would venture the claim that never, in the entire history of journalism, has there been a sympathetic "human interest" profile done on a man who suppresses books for a living. Because they engage so many of our wholesome affections, because they have a media monopoly on the consolations of Christianity, because they are chary of speaking the hard truths of our faith, Skimpoles continue to win support from inside and outside the Church. And just as their prototype had a knack for making his benefactors feel guilty about their earned wealth, so the moderns predictably work to turn their sympathizers against the Church.

Skimpoles are incapable of gratitude toward authority because they can conceive of no error they need to be protected from; like spoiled children-precisely, in fact, like Damaged Young Men-they see all discipline as condemnatory and all condemnation as wicked. And, after all, who is more likely to despise and disparage his father's work: the teenager who bags groceries to supplement the money his father can spare him, or the coddled heir who draws all the cash he needs from a bottomless teller machine?

To stress the necessity of authority is not to say that it hasn't been abused in the past-it has, sometimes hideously-or that it will not be abused in the future. A man is not disqualified from objecting to another man's discharge of some office simply in virtue of the fact that he regards that office indispensable. That a father provides well for his son does not in itself sanctify the conduct of his business. The point of this essay is not to silence criticism, but rather to reawaken the recognition that when we do criticize the ancient structures of authority, we are speaking with our mouths full, and our plates have been piled high by the labors of hands not our own. For a believer to remain "a mere child" may add to his charm, but it deprives him of a prime lesson of adulthood: orthodoxy is no servility; gratitude, no indignity.

Bleak House as Sensation

2006-03-08T19:24:00.000-06:00

Charles Dickens

Similarly, Dickens in Bleak House (1852-1853) also has a murder, circumstantial evidence pointing to one party, and an arrest of the actual culprit. Like other writers in The Early Whodunit tradition, Dickens lays considerable emphasis on the gathering of physical evidence against suspects. Dickens combines this with a look at a police detective, another major strand of early crime writing. The one "Waters" story that is easily available today, "Murder Under the Microscope", also fits in with this approach. Like Dickens, "Waters" emphasizes both police procedure, and physical evidence against suspects. "Waters" has the full building up of motives, and the detailed description and investigation of the crime scene, found in Pelham, as well. Nether Dickens nor "Waters" at all tips their hand early on as to the actual identity of the guilty party; although modern readers will have no difficulty picking out the hidden culprit in "Waters"' tale. This is an improvement over Pelham, where the actual killer is the only other obvious suspect in the story.

Both Dickens' "Three Detective Anecdotes" (1853), and Bleak House (1852-1853) show his depiction of the police arresting subjects in sexual terms. Inspector Bucket's arrest of the woman criminal in Bleak House is compared to Jupiter's kidnap of Io in the form of a cloud, which also preserves the fog metaphor which runs through the book. There are also elements of voyeurism in both works, with the police spying on criminals. Dickens further stirs up the pot by suggesting that arrest gives lower class policemen power over upper class people, something that also must have excited him, and his readers. Despite Dickens' great popularity, his contemporaries do not pick up on these themes.

About Dicken's Bleak House

2006-03-08T19:22:00.000-06:00

Bleak House:
Public and Private Worlds

In discussing Charles Dickens' mature novels, James M. Brown writes, "His social criticism is embodied in a vision of social experience in its generality-the essential quality of everyday social relations throughout the system, and the general possiblities for a fulfilling social life" (14). This seems to me a very apt and succinct description of the themes of Bleak House. Though tremendously dense in plot and varied in character, the novel is remarkably unified in vision and theme. Brown's characterization also points to the novel's unique structure of a double narrative. Though the narratives overlap at times, social and public concerns tend to be related by the third-person narrator, while private and domestic life, and the possibilities for fulfillment, are the prime subjects of Esther Summerson's narrative. Still, Bleak House is much too complex a work to be dealt with fully in hundreds of pages, let alone in fifteen written by a Dickens neophyte such as myself. It has been hard work to simply narrow my analysis approropriately but the double narrative provides an obvious guide. The third-person narration contains the themes of economic interconnectedness and social criticism while Esther's narration emphasizes moral connectedness and individual responsibility. My analysis will explore the parallel narratives and their themetic spheres. Though I'm not sure about Joseph I. Fradin's assertion that the double narrative of Bleak House is "a metaphor of the divided modern consciousness," I agree with his suggestion that the technique "carries the dialectic between self and society" in its expression of both Esther's subjective perception and the third person's objective and ironic social analysis (41). The suggestion of synthesis is intriguing and I will conclude with a speculative look at what the novel has to say about 'life as a mystery that must be discovered', the function of revelation in the text, and the possibility of either social or individual transformation within this fictional world.

The tone of the impersonal third-person narrator is variously ironic, urbane, familiar, detached, witty, and, at times, expressive of real anger. The reader can easily detect the bitter irony in many narrative remarks such as the description of "One ruined suitor...who can by no means be made to understand that the Chancellor is legally ignorant of his existence after making it desolate for a quarter of a century" (7), but also enjoy the humorous portrayals of characters like Mr. Chadband who has "a fat smile, and a general appearance of having a good deal of train oil in his system" (235). The narrator wittily describes Sir Leicester, "He would on the whole admit Nature to be a good idea (a little low, perhaps, when not enclosed with a park fence)..." (12), yet outrage and anger are clear in the announcement of Jo's death, "Dead, your Majesty...And dying thus around us every day" (572). The narrative is in the present tense and the style is often cinematic, functioning like a roving camera that can sweep over a scene as when London is introduced in the opening chapter or that can zoom in on the details of a character like Mr. Tulkinghorn in the second chapter. The narrator also sometimes resorts to a journalistic style, employing clipped sentences and sentence fragments, as in the novel's opening paragraphs which contain sentences like "Fog everywhere" (5), or when relating the events surrounding the discovery of Nemo's body, "Public loses interest, and undergoes reaction" (131). These passages convey a sense of objectivity and detachment, often serving to introduce the reader to a new setting or perspective, thus reasserting one of the third-person narrator's functions in Bleak House: "to constantly remind us of the great scheme of things" (Smith, Charles Dickens: Bleak House, 11). Yet I agree with the critics who maintain that this narrator is only relatively omniscient. There are many instances in which the third-person narrator steps back and pleads ignorance. Speaking of Miss Flite: "Some say she really is, or was, a party to a suit; but no one knows for certain" (7) and in chapter 18, the narrator reports the rumors of Lady Dedlock's flight rather than the actual details (690-1). Jeremy Hawthorn argues that this lack of omniscience in the third-person narrative, or in the combined narratives, makes the reader active in trying to determine the moral conclusions of the novel and that this strategy serves the sense of mystery that pervades the novel (61). I agree and will return to this issue.

Most of the impersonal narrator's commentary concerns the public sphere, especially the three areas of Bleak House society that are central to the plot: Chancery, the aristocracy, and urban poverty as represented by the slum of Tom-all-Alone's. Chancery is introduced in the first chapter and from the opening sentences the Court is linked with the symbols of fog and mud: "Never can there come a fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery...holds, this day" (6). But the Court is not just blind and inefficient, its work is much more sinister: "This is the Court of Chancery...which gives to monied might, the means of abundantly wearying out the right; which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope; so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart; that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give-the warning, 'Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come here!'" (6-7). Obviously this Court has little to do with justice. Rather, "The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings" (482). As Graham Storey asserts regarding the Court of Chancery, "[it is] presented as corrupt and life-destroying, a ghastly parody of a Court founded to administer justice and equity" (18).

The second chapter, 'In Fashion,' introduces the aristocracy in general and the Dedlocks and their place in Lincolnshire, Chesney Wold, in particular. Yet the narrator makes clear that the world of fashion is not unlike the Court of Chancery. "Both the world of fashion and the Court of Chancery are things of precedent and usage" (10); "It is a deadened world" and Chesney Wold is "stagnant," "murky," and "muddy" (11-13). But these links are not only symbolic since Lady Dedlock, who is "at the top of the fashionable tree" (12), is a party to the quintessential Chancery suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Thus the two worlds are connected concretely through plot as well as through symbols and descriptive language. Similarly, it is revealed that the notorious slum, Tom-all-Alone's, "a ruinous place...a swarm of misery [where] decay is far advanced" (197) is also a property in Chancery, part of the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case, and indeed the narrator claims the suit itself "had laid the street waste" (198). Thus, the heart of the Jarndyce case which is the heart of Chancery is Tom-All-Alone's, a site of decay, misery, and disease. The third-person narrator skillfully links these three worlds through plot and complex language early on and continues to intensify these connections throughout the work, reinforcing one of the novel's major themes, the interconnectedness of everyone and everthing in Bleak House's world.

The links established between these various public spheres can best be understood through the symbolic significance of Chancery as representative of the entire society. After all, a Chancery suit is, as Sir Leicester reflects, "a slow, expensive, British, constitutional kind of thing" (15). Likewise Mr. Kenge declares of Chancery, "This is a great system...and would you wish a great country to have a little system? Now, really, really!" (741). Yet the nature of Chancery, its methods and effects, like those of Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit, is to stifle, bemuse, and consume all who come in contact with it. The lawyers of Chancery, like the Barnacles of the Circumlocution Office, work exclusively in their own self-interest and the Court "is simply a socially condoned form of parasitism_as is graphically confirmed by the eventual lot of the Jarndyce estate, which is eaten up in costs" (Daleski, 20). Just as a biological parasite will eventually weaken and destroy its host, the parasitical corruption of a national institution will eventually weaken and destroy the rest of society. Thus, the primary symbol of Chancery and its effect on the society is that of disease resulting from moral corruption and social parasitism with death looming behind. The infectious disease of Chancery becomes the practical way in which Chancery connects the spheres of law, politics, and the high and low classes. Richard Carstone withers away from the moral corruption of Chancery while the disease bred in Nemo's burial ground and Tom-all-Alone's infects Jo, then Charley and Esther, and probably contributes to Lady Dedlock's demise. As Jeremy Hawthorn writes, "Disease is such a powerful symbol for Dickens in Bleak House because it involves different kinds of expressive connections: it arises from specific, concrete and material living conditions, living-conditions which are themselves the cause of particular social realities, and it also links the poor with those rich who wish to disclaim any relationship with or responibility for them" (67). The social and physical disease created and spread by Chancery becomes a metaphor for the corruption of the entire society.

The deadening effects of the corruption and disease that infect Bleak House society can be seen most vividly in the portrayals of various key characters. The descriptions of Krook and his Rag and Bottle Shop are meant to function as a grim moral parallel with the Lord Chancellor and Chancery. Mr. Krook attests, "I have so many old parchmentses and papers in my stock. And I have a liking for rust and must and cobwebs...And I can't bear to part with anything once I lay hold of or to alter anything, or to have any sweeping, nor scouring, nor cleaning...that's why I've got the ill name of Chancery. I go to see my...brother pretty well every day, when he sits in the Inn...There's no great odds betwixt us. We both grub on in a muddle" (50-1). Krook's shop, in its filth and horror, exemplifies in a concrete, physical way the true moral nature of the Court. Likewise, the lives of those who work within the Court like Mr. Tulkinghorn and Mr. Vholes have been infected with spiritual decay but of a predatory kind. Tulkinghorn is "a dark, cold object" (508) and "like a machine" (512) who jealously guards aristocratic family secrets and has become rich administering marriage settlements and wills (13). Mr. Vholes looks at Richard "as if he were making a lingering meal of him with his eyes as well as with his professional appetite" (485). This inhuman parasitism extends out through the society to characters like the Smallweeds whose "God was Compound Interest. [Their patriarch] lived for it, married it, died of it" and who are also variously described as animals of prey such as "a money-getting species of spider, who spun webs to catch unwary flies" (257). The link between lawyers of Chancery and the Smallweeds as social parasites is rendered exact by the analogy of "lawyers [who] lie like maggots in nuts" (119) and Mr. Smallweed's grandfather who valued only "grubs" and "never bred a single butterfly" (257).

The corruption of Chancery is mirrored in another institution, the hilarous parody of politicians in Parliament. Rather than properly exercising the duties of their offices, the politicians, like the lawyers, are concerned exclusively with either dividing power among themselves (145) or winning elections through bribery (502). Sir Leicester, as representative of the aristocratic class, sanctions such corruption when he contributes money he knows will be used for bribery to the campaign (501) but he would not think of reforming any national institution for this "would encourage some person in the lower classes to rise up somewhere" (16). The Dedlock political satire serves to emphasize "the close fit between the class system and the political system" (Brown, 69). The two parasitical systems reinforce each other resulting in the same deadness that pervades Chancery. Lady Dedlock is usually "bored to death," the Dedlocks are childless, and Chesney Wold is "a deadened world" (11).

Such a pervasive system of disease, decay and death cannot be without its victims. Miss Flite, Gridley and Richard form the inner circle that demonstrates "the human waste and suffering generated by the Court" (Smith, Dickens, Money and Society,131). But Jo is also a victim of both Chancery and of the society at large. Of these four, only Miss Flite is still alive at the novel's end, her insanity providing an ironic protection from the greater insanity of Chancery. But her caged birds, symbolizing the victims of Chancery, and her many prescient comments serve as omens of Richard's fate. And her concern with the "Great Seal" suggests that in this society true justice may only be had in the after-life. The same is true of Gridley who indignantly rails against "the system" of Chancery and vows "I will accuse the individual workers of that system against me, face to face, before the great eternal bar" (193). Yet Gridley's impotent rage only hastens his death.

The deaths of Richard and Jo are strangely counterpointed in that both are essentially born and bred in Chancery. But Richard's abilities and advantages are not enough to save him. Though Woodcourt diagnoses that Richard's illness is not physical, he still "consumes himself with the care and suspense and distrust and doubt engendered by Chancery" (Daleski, 31). At the other end of the social spectrum, Jo is a victim from the start. Dreadfully poor and uneducated, he can only react to his circumstances in this parasitic society. But the disease that is bred in Tom-all-Alone's, the ultimate effect of society's corruption and neglect of the most unprotected, both causes and revenges Jo's suffering and death, thus exacting justice of a different order. The third-person narrator makes this clear: "There is not an atom of Tom's slime...not one obscenity or degradation about him, not an ignorance, not a wickedness...but shall work its retribution, through every order of society, up to the proudest of the proud, and to the highest of the high" (553). Though the biblical overtones of this passage suggest Miss Flite's pronouncements, Tom's Revenge does not wait until the next life.

In introducing Jo to the reader, and of course through Jo's subsequent fate, the third-person narrator makes explicit one of the major themes of the novel. He asks, "What connection can there be between the place in Lincolnshire...and the whereabouts of Jo the outlaw?...What connection can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together?" (197). The ultimate answer is that we are all part of the human family, but in the world of Bleak House, where many labor under the delusion that their lives and destinies are separate from each other, this point must be reiterated through plot, symbolism, parody, and imagery. Yet what links everyone in the society of Bleak House are just those things that shouldn't: greed, corruption, disease, and death. The law as represented by Chancery, "which gives monied might, the means of abundantly wearing out the right" (6), "is the visible symbol behind which lurk the forces of greed and privilege spinning their labyrinthine webs of corruption" (Johnson, 24) and these threads extend out to the rest of society. Chancery represents the twin evils of dehumanizing bureaucratization and the power of money with its attendant vices of greed and self-interest since a large part of its business has to do with wills and wills are about money. Brown believes this increasing commodification, "this shrinking of the whole of life to be encompassed in a narrow, sterile, business mould is seen by Dickens as unforgivable" (26). In tandem with this process of rapid industrialization and the growth of cities, 19th century British society also increasingly organized into bureaucratic structures. Smith contends that Dickens' "continuing concern was with the ways in which these bureaucratic structures, despite the best of motives, obscure face to face contact between individual human beings" (Charles Dickens: Bleak House, 45). The dehumanization of so many of Bleak House's characters and their portrayals as various animals, indicating they have regressed to a more bestial or selfish nature, supports the views of both critics. Indeed, Bleak House insightfully explores one of the paradoxes of modern life in an industrialized economy; as economic centralization proceeds and people become more economically interdependent, they also become morally and spiritually isolated and disconnected from each other as every aspect of their lives tends to become absorbed into "the system."

But though the system may indeed be dehumanizing at best, evil at worst, the individuals who give in to and/or endorse the system contribute to that evil through abdication of personal responsibility. From the High Court of Chancery, which does not take responsibility for dealing adequately with the cases brought before it, to the Parliament's laxity in dealing with urban poverty, to Mr. Smallweed's cruelty at the behest of his fictitious "friend in the city," the public world of finance and power claims either 'no one' or 'someone else' is to blame. But these institutions are composed of individuals who unfortunately "participate willingly in their own human impairment" (Smith, Dickens, Money, and Society, 29). This seems to me the deeper issue that Bleak House raises, that regardless of how monolithic the system, individuals can still choose how to live and react within its strictures. One needs to remember that the Chancery cases of Bleak House "have all originated in family quarrels-the Jarndyces', Miss Flite's, Gridley's" (Scott, 109). As Esther's parallel narrative indicates, "The struggle of the individual against that system, the vital being against the debilitating machine, is the protest of life against death" (Manning, 106) and is the struggle every person in Bleak House must undertake to be fully human.

Esther Summerson's first-person narrative begins in the third chapter, composes approximately half of the novel, and concludes the book. It is her personal account of her own life related in the past tense from her present point as a happy wife and mother. Compared to the tone of the anonymous narrator, Esther's tone "is uniformly delicate, self-disparaging, often painfully hypersensitive" (Storey, 21) and her opening sentence sets this tone, "I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I am not clever" (17). Esther's narrative tone counterpoints that of the third-person narrator in that her voice is subjective, optimistic, and sympathetic in contrast to his objective, intellectual, and ironic voice, and her concerns are primarily personal and domestic whereas his are public and social. However, as Jacob Korg points out, the general opinions of the two narrators are similar: "Both sympathize with the poor and helpless, oppose burdensome traditions, and favor benevolence over abstract humanitarianism as a means of solving social problems" (15). I think it's clear that Esther is also the moral center of the Bleak House. Her conduct, reactions, and ultimate fate function as a standard of morality in an overwhelmingly corrupt and diseased world.

Besides being a narrator, Esther is also a character in the novel and her story, especially the discovery of her parentage, is central to the plot. Further, she "supplies the central observation point, because relations are measured according to their nearness or farness from her" (Donovan, 39). Though many have criticized her character as too idealized and her narrative as dull, I agree with Robert Donovan that her sensibility is due partly to the demands on her as a narrator: She must be simplistic, even transparent, so the reader trusts her judgments and doesn't feel her impressions are colored too much by her own personality (44). Other critics claim that Esther does not develop at all but that she is consistently "static, passive...and good" (Harvey, 149). I disagree, and think that Esther does grow and develop in awareness and maturity, but her experiences do not make her bitter or cynical. Rather, they reinforce her commitments to those she loves. Indeed, her "progress" towards full maturity, which includes both harsh experience and surprising discoveries, comprises most of the vital action of the novel; the larger society of the third-person narration is much more static and timeless. And her journey towards self-definition and discovery ties many of Bleak House's themes together in both illustrating how people are damaged by a corrupt society and how they can live successfully in spite of it.

The reader learns from the outset that Esther has endured a cold and emotionally deprived childhood. Told by her godmother from her earliest memories that she has a blight on her existence, that she "is set apart" from other children (19), she finds her only comfort is her doll. As she reflects, "my disposition is very affectionate" (18) and she would confess to her doll, "I would try, as hard as ever I could, to repair the fault I had been born with (of which I confusedly felt guilty and yet innocent), and would strive as I grew up to be industrious, contented, and kind-hearted, and to do some good to some one, and win some love to myself if I could" (20). Because of her childhood vows, Esther is zealous in her loyalty, affections, and duty but she also has difficulty in believing in her own lovability. Thus, Esther's constant harping on her own deficiences and the goodness of others in attributing virtue to her, as well as the strong need to give and receive love, grows "organically out of Esther's upbringing" (Smith, Charles Dickens: Bleak House,18). Consequently, much of Esther's psychological development in the novel centers around the issues of identity and self-definition. Joseph I. Fradin explores this aspect and points to two nightmares that Esther has in which she feels her sense of identity is in peril (61-2). The first is when she falls asleep at the Jellybys' with Caddy's head in her lap, "I began to lose the identity of the sleeper resting on me...Lastly, it was no one and I was no one" (45). The second is when she is blind and ill with fever, "Dare I hint at the worse time when, strung together somewhere in great black space, there was a flaming necklace, or ring, or starry circle of some kind, of which I was one of the beads" (432). Fradin argues that these two examples of Esther's inner landscape "confirms her need to define her relationship to herself and to the community, to establish her identity," in order to act not just out of instinctive goodness but with knowledge about herself and others (61). Her illness proves a turning point for Esther. Not only do the pock-scars resulting from her illness help Esther learn that she is still loveable though she no longer feels "outwardly lovely," but while recovering in Lincolnshire she learns that Lady Dedlock is her mother and she begins to redefine herself with knowledge instead of from ignorance. She reaffirms her sense of innocence and independence; "I saw very well how many things had worked together, for my welfare...I knew I was as innocent of my birth as a queen of hers...I renewed my resolutions...feeling that the darkness of the morning was passing away" (454-5).

Esther is only one of several orphans in the book and this fact reinforces one of the novel's major themes, the abandonment of parental responsibility, a theme that is analogous to that of the third-person narrative, the institutional abandonment of social responsibility. In different ways Jo, Esther, Charley, Richard, and Ada are abandoned children. Mrs. Jellyby, Mrs. Pardiggle, Harold Skimpole, and even Mr. Turveydrop also abandon their children in some sense. Thus, just as Chancery is at the center of the third-person narrative, the central problem of Esther's story is that of an absent or lost parent. The chaos, disorder, and disease in society are reflected in the domestic sphere by broken families, neglectful parents, and the loss of love, nurturance, and security. Or, as Andrew Sanders puts it, Dickens "allows us to appreciate that an avoidance of due responsibility, in whatever sphere men and women act, is a threat to the well-being of society, and a general symptom of a general moral and social decay" (141). Esther is the main connecting point between the public and private worlds but they are connected themetically and rhetorically as well as in this passage from the first chapter: "Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit" (8). Also, since the Court of Chancery serves as guardian for Richard and Ada, it too can be viewed as a bad parent (Hawthorn, 36). Indeed, since Chancery is responsible for the ruin of Tom-all-Alone's, and Jo was "bred" by the "ruined shelters," Jo can also be considered a ward of Chancery. The overall impression that emerges from those parts of Esther's narrative that recount her personal interaction with children and the victims of Chancery is that there are overwhelming private consequences for public inaction that extend all the way through the society to the most helpless. As a result, everyone is damaged by this society. Esther witnesses the plights of Miss Flite and Gridley, unsuccessfully tries to help Jo, and cannot prevent Richard's decline. Mr. Jarndyce does manage to help Charley and her siblings but this is fairly exceptional. And indeed the damage to individual lives engendered by social conditions extends to the next generation. Caddy and Prince Turveydrop's child is deaf and dumb, and Ada and Richard's child will be raised without a father. The connection betwen the two narrative spheres is clear: "The system which destroys families is run by people who belong to unhappy families themselves: the system reproduces itself by means of the miseries it creates" (Hawthorn, 70).

Abandoned and neglected children are necessarily the result of absent or neglectful parents. And not surprisingly, most of the novel's neglectful parents seem to be infected by the same socially pervasive disease of parasitism. Harold Skimpole is perhaps the clearest example of this. Continually portraying himself as an "eternal child," he both escapes the responsiblities of adulthood and parenthood but also does a tremendous disservice to the real children around him. The prime example of this behavior is his betrayal of Jo for a bribe. Regarding the incident he protests to Esther, "You know I don't pretend to be responsible. I never could do it. Responsibility is a thing that has always been above me..." (727). Yet Mr. Bucket's insight about Skimpole is more to the point; "Now, Miss Summerson, I'll give you a piece of advice...Whenever a person says to you that they are as innocent as lambs in all concerning money, look well after your own money, for they are dead certain to collar it..." (682). Skimpole's willingness to betray his relationships for money and material pleasures differs little in essence from Vholes' predatory intentions toward Richard, who was introduced to Vholes by Skimpole for a five-pound note! Likewise, Mr. Turveydrop, who has for years been supported by his wife and then by his son, extends this arrangement to include Caddy as Prince's wife. Yet, neither Caddy nor Prince had healthy relationships with their parents in which they were allowed to enjoy their childhoods, so when Mr Turveydrop consents to their marriage, Caddy and Prince "were as much overcome with thankfulness as if, instead of quartering himself upon them for the rest of his life, he were making some munificent sacrifice in their favour" (294). Finally, both Mrs. Jellyby and Mrs. Pardiggle, in their misguided schemes of philanthropy, not only myopically overlook such needy orphans as Jo who is right under their noses and "is not one of Mrs. Pardiggle's Tockahoopo Indians, [or] one of Mrs. Jellyby's lambs, being wholly unconnected with Borrioboola-Gha" (564), but alienate and neglect their own children. Yet though their motives may be pure but misguided, their methods indicate they are also infected by the greater society's concern with money and business. "Mrs. Jellyby, always 'full of business,' treats her daughter, Caddy, as a clerk or employee, and makes her home into an office" (Brown, 63) and she simply ignores her husband and her other children. Mrs. Pardiggle is noted for her "rapacious benevolence" (93) and demonstrates a "mechanical way of taking possession of people" (99) yet also demands charitable contributions from her "weazened and shrivelled" children (94). Through their blindness and neglect and failure to understand that 'charity begins at home,' both women help insure that their children will be among another 'damaged' generation.

There are some characters who do exhibit a sense of reponsibility towards children and each other. The Bagnets are perhaps the only intact and happy family yet they are also willing to help their friend George when he needs them. Mr. Jarndyce benevolently takes in Richard, Ada, and Esther, and rescues Charley Neckett and her younger brother and sister. Yet Esther as the "little woman" and "Dame Durden" best represents the novel's ideal of responsible womanhood as exhibited through efficiency, nurturing, and tenderness. Even Skimpole tells her, "You appear to me to be the very touchstone of responsibility. When I see you, my dear Miss Summerson, intent upon the perfect working of the whole little orderly system of which you are at the centre, I feel inclined to say to myself...that's responsibility" (468). From the outset, children are naturally attracted to her. Esther's early days at Greenleaf (27) her first meeting with Peepy Jellyby (40), Caddy's inclinations to place her in the role of a mother (167), and Jo's instinctive devotion (383) are only a few of the instances in which young people are drawn to her. In all cases she responds with sincere interest and loving compassion. Her unpretentious concern with others' welfare contrasts sharply with the self-serving benevolence of a Mrs. Pardiggle and with the parasitical, calculating attitude of the many characters who reduce people to monetary objects. Esther's motherly warmth finds an echo in Mrs. Bagnet's stout devotion to her family, Mrs. Rouncewell's concern for her son George, and even Lady Dedlock evinces a motherly impulse that, though long-suppressed, still emerges in her attachment to her maid, Rosa. As Sylvia Bank Manning argues, "The characters in Bleak House who engage our sympathy are those who fight against becoming inhuman and rigid" (121-2) and the majority of these figures happen to be women. Mr. Jarndyce, Mr. Boythorn, and Mr. Woodcourt are the notable exceptions yet their best qualities are also those of compassion and service that are not inharmonious with the traditional "feminine" virtues.

Thus, the themes of Esther's narrative are not unrelated to those of the third-person narrative but are simply many of the same issues viewed from a different perspective. The effect is to perhaps underscore the novel's most significant theme of all, the interconnectedness and interdependence of all persons in society, regardless of geography, class, or profession. As the reader goes back and forth between the narratives, observing and experiencing the various characters and locations from various viewpoints, the realization is forced on one's consciousness that the public and private worlds are, in essence, two sides of the same world. At base, they are indivisible. Yet, at the same time, Esther's "progress" of self-discovery and her search for meaning and fulfillment emphasize how incumbent it is for each individual to be as fully human as they can be, to choose and to act as much as possible according to their highest aspirations and ideals regardless of the values and tendencies of the larger society. Bleak House powerfully asserts through Esther's example that the struggle to live even within an atmosphere of death is still a worthwhile and noble struggle.

Bleak House shares a number of structural elements common to the mystery novel genre, a fact noted by many literary critics. These include the obvious importance to the plot of the facts and connections that are revealed and/or discovered. In Bleak House, discoveries occur either through individual efforts, as in the cases of Mr. Tulkinghorn, Mr. Guppy, or Mr. Bucket, or they occur by chance. In most instances, revelation comes about through a combination of both. Yet through the process of reading, the reader also participates in the unraveling of Bleak House 's mysteries. Thus in this highly complex and multi-faceted novel, many reader response critcs have pointed out another layer of meaning, one that highlights some of the novel's existential implications. For myself, as a reader and a critic, many of these implications underlie what the text has to say about the need for, and the possibilities of, transformation in both the novel's public and private worlds.

Jeremy Hawthorn credits Dickens' double narrative technique with causing the reader to "continually 'reset' his or her attitude to what is depicted... as we shift from the anonymous narrator to Esther, and back again, we keep being faced with problems of reconciling their viewpoints and values, and this makes the reader an active searcher after meaning rather than the merely passive recipient of an authorial or narrative 'truth'" (60). One result of this process can be that the reader comes to recognize the deeper ways in which mystery and chance are endemic to the human condition. This is another reason why it is essential the reader sympathize with Esther. As she explores her world and her discoveries justify her innocence, her commitments to those she loves increase and she leads the reader as far from the influences of the bleak world around her as she can (Sanders, 43). And the reader both explores with Esther and is privy to knowledge that she isn't through the third-person narrator. Thus the larger point is made about the real world: it is both causal and random, connected and contigent, and we are both free and determined beings (Harvey, 155). Yet Hawthorn makes the important distinction between being a first-time reader for whom the mysteries of the novel are new, and a second or third-time reader in which we can more easily see the well-crafted "connections, parallels, [and] patterns" (54). In these cases one reads more critically and the world that is revealed, for Esther and the reader, is indeed a "bleak" one. By the novel's conclusion, Chancery, the political and class systems, and urban poverty continue, these conditions seem to be in the very nature of Bleak House society. What possiblities for transformation exist in such a singularly life-denying world? Of course, there are the obvious examples of Esther and her small circle but the text also points to two other possibilites within the public sphere, social revolution and the rise of an industrial middle-class as represented by Rouncewell.

The references to social revolution in the novel are numerous. One of Sir Leicester's recurrent and secret fears is that the lower classes will again rise up somewhere led by a "Wat Tyler," leader of the Peasant's Revolt of 1381 (16). An analogy between disease and revolution is suggested in a description of Tom-All-Alone's, "Verily, what with tainting, plundering and spoiling, Tom has his revenge" (553). Brown points out that this theme is related to a pattern of imagery, "the image of the springing or exploding of a mine or bomb" (71). In another passage describing Tom's, " Twice, lately, there has been a crash and a cloud of dust, like the springing of a mine, in Tom-All-Alone's; and, each time, a house has fallen...the next crash in Tom-All-Alone's may be expected to be a good one" (197-8) the possibility of social upheaval is implied. And the effect of a revolution on the upper classes is likened to the effect the truth about Lady Dedlock has on Sir Leicester when Bucket reveals it in the chapter titled "Springing a Mine." The Victorian fear of revolution and the horror with which the British viewed the French Revolution is alluded to when Hortense, Lady Dedlock's French maid, is described as "a bodily spring" (517) and she appears to Esther like "some woman from the streets of Paris in the reign of terror" (286). Yet the most imaginative image of revolution is Krook's death by spontaneous combustion. In his identification with the Lord Chancellor of the High Court, Krook dies "the death of all...authorities in all places under all names soever, where false pretences are made, and where injustice is done...it is the same death eternally-inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself" (403). By analogy, the warning is clear. If things do not change, if society does not address the suffering and needs of its citizens, the society will explode in revolt.

Rouncewell's success in business and politics is presented as a viable and desirable alternative to revolution. He is a self-made man who has both educated himself and built up a business that provides jobs and opportunities for others in his class. He successfully runs for Parliament and aims to educate his daughters so that they are "worthy of any station" (353). Compared to the Dedlock class which is "in decline," Mr. Rouncewell represents a new spirit in the land in which "many great undertakings are in progress" (351). The Dedlocks have no heir whereas Rouncewell does have a son and heir , indicating where the future of Britain lies. That Rouncewell's class will eventually predominate over Sir Leicester's is brought home by the fact that Rouncewell's son is named "Watt," recalling Wat Tyler and his revolt. But the transfer of power and money from the landed classes to the industrial classes has been proven by historical hindsight to be peaceful and productive, probably because it was a gradual process that extended hope for a better life to those who were willing to work hard in the new industries and it was an increasingly prevalent alternative to violent change.

In the private sphere, Esther's move up north with her loved ones provides the moral analogy to Rouncewell's successful ironworks and illustrates the possibilities for personal transformation. That salvation is possible is suggested at Jo's deathbed where, led by Woodcourt in prayer, Jo finds a light "upon the dark benighted way" (572). As the ultimate victim in the novel, surrounded by disease, ignorance, and death, Jo receives a final comfort through Mr. Woodcourt's compassion. After her bout of illness and her discovery of her birthright, Esther too is resurrected or transformed through her reaffirmation of her innocence and of her commitment to those she loves. She and Allan marry and have children, they share a home with Ada and her son, and they all gladden the old age of Mr. Jarndyce. But Esther and Allan do not forget the needy around, they minister to those in pain and suffering (769). Woodcourt is a doctor for the poor in the industrial north, and "his capacity to communicate with members of the working class... implies that not only will he improve the quality of life for working men in that area but will also help to break down the 'iron barrier' between classes" (Brown, 81). As a helpmate to Allan, Esther also brings to bear her understanding of the interconnectedness of her life with those around her and asserts that what shall connect them is love and mutual responsibility, not the default links of money, tradition, and self-interest. That this view is meant to be the moral message of the novel is suggested by the structure in which the reader must follow Esther as she negotiates her way through the dark maze of Bleak House society to emerge in a place where she at last creates a happy life that is yet very connected to the lives around her.

Many critics have viewed Esther's establishment as the mistress of the new 'Bleak House' as an unconvincing escape out of the dark world of the novel from which the reader is yet constantly reminded that there is no escape. Brown argues, as do many critics, that this is "a basic contradiction within the structure of the novel" (65), but I disagree. Bearing in mind that all of the Bleak House characters are surrounded and shaped by social, political, and economic forces, that everyone in this world is both determined and free, Esther's life is clearly not idealized. She suffers as an illegitimate orphan, is marred by smallpox, and must construct both an identity and a life for herself that has meaning and purpose. Total success in Bleak House is impossible and Esther is far from completely successful in her aims and hopes. She and Mr. Jarndyce fail to save Richard and spare Ada a life as a single parent. She tries but cannot help Jo and she can do little to ease the hardships of the bricklayers' lives. She cannot save Caddy Jellyby from a marriage that brings with it much sacrifice on Caddy's part. She fights the battle of affirming life within a world of death but it is an uphill battle. Esther's triumph and that of those whom she loves, is that she can still perceive the possiblities of life within death and allow them to change and transform her. In this respect, she can be said to escape in a spiritual sense since she does not become entrapped like other characters in rigid ways of living and rigid states-of-mind but I would not characterize her move north as an escape. She bears the marks of past suffering and is still involved with those in her greater community.

Yet those who do who characterize the conclusion of Bleak House as an unrealistic escape from the all-encompassing world Dickens has taken such pains to construct are, I think, operating from certain assumptions about what a novel of "social criticism" should do or advocate. Certainly it's natural to want to see a corrupt system overthrown, if not in real life then in one's fiction, but it is a tribute to Dickens' commitment to his style of realism that he doesn't do this in Bleak House. Esther's fate may be an example of a "romantic side of familiar things," but Esther's predicament is indeed "the predicament of [human beings] in modern industrial society" and the novel expresses the result of this predicament, "the fragmented individual" (Harvey, 156). All we can do, like Esther, is perform our duty, and a certain amount of personal freedom lies in the recognition of that necessity. And contrary to the views of some, Esther's destiny is not without political import. Rather than dealing with a powerful and corrupt system head-on, sometimes the smartest (or only) thing people can do is to start changing conditions and relationships in their local communities. Such an approach is the least centralized form of democratic action and it helps people reclaim those aspects of their lives that they can control. This can also reconnect people in more genuine human relationships, the lack of which so outraged Bleak House's third-person narrator. One should not underestimate the potential of this approach. Esther's life in the new 'Bleak House' "opens up a promise for the future which lightens the encircling gloom" (Sanders, 164), and since all things are connected, perhaps Esther's solution can also spread and transform the world.

Bibliography

Brown, James M. Dickens: Novelist in the Market-Place. Totowa, new Jersey: Barnes & Nobel Books, 1982.

Collins, Philip. A Critical Commentary on Dickens' 'Bleak House'. London: Macmillan & Co Ltd, 1971.

Daleski, H.M. "Bleak House." In Critical Essays on Charles Dickens' Bleak House. Ed. Elliot L. Gilbert. Boston, Mass: G.K. Hall & Co., 1989.

Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. New York, N.Y: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1977.

Donovan, Robert A. "Structure and Idea in Bleak House." In Twentieth Century Interpretations of Bleak House. Ed. Jacob Korg. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968.

Fradin, Joseph I. "Will and Society in Bleak House." In Critical Essays on Charles Dickens' Bleak House. Ed. Elliot L. Gilbert. Boston, Mass: G.K. Hall & Co., 1989.

Harvey, W.J. "Chance and Design in Bleak House." In Dickens and the Twentieth Century. Ed. John J. Gross. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962.

Hawthorn, Jeremy. Bleak House. London: Macmillan Publishers, Ltd, 1987.

Johnson, Edgar. "The Anatomy of Society." In Twentieth Century Interpretations of Bleak House. Ed. Jacob Korg. Englewood Cliffs, N. J: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968.

Korg, Jacob. "Introduction." In Twentieth Century Interpretations of Bleak House. Ed. Jacob Korg. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall, Inc.,

Manning, Sylvia Bank. Dickens as Satirist. New Haven and London: Yale University Press,1971.

Sanders, Andrew. Charles Dickens: Resurrectionist. New York, N.Y: St. Martin's Press, 1982.

Scott, Peter James Malcolm. Reality and Comic Confidence in Charles Dickens. London: The Macmillan Press, Ltd., 1979.

Smith, Grahame. Dickens, Money, and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968.

________. Charles Dickens: Bleak House. London: Edward Arnold Publishers, Ltd., 1974.

Storey, Graham. Charles Dickens: Bleak House. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

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Bleak House - Published in monthly parts Mar 1852 - Sep 1853

Bleak House Dickens' ninth novel, illustrated by Phiz, was intended to illustrate the evils caused by long, drawn-out suits in the Courts of Chancery. Dickens had observed the inner workings of the courts as a reporter in his youth and observed that "The one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself". Bleak House is often considered Dickens' finest work although not his most popular.

Mini Plot:
The case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, in the High Court of Chancery, has been going on for a long time. The current Jarndyce, John, owner of Bleak House, has little hope of gaining anything from it. On her aunt's death Esther Summerson is adopted by Jarndyce and becomes companions to his wards, Ada Clare and Richard Carstone. Carstone has hopes that the chancery case will make his fortune.

As the story unfolds it is revealed that Esther is the illegitimate daughter of Captain Hawdon and Lady Dedlock. When the Dedlock's lawyer, Tulkinghorn learns of this, and tries to profit by the information, he is murdered by Lady Dedlock's former maid. Lady Dedlock flees and later dies at the gates of the cemetery where Hawdon lies buried.

John Jarndyce has fallen in love with Esther and asked her to marry him. She consents out of respect for Jarndyce but during the engagement she falls in love with Allan Woodcourt. When Jarndyce learns of her feelings for Allan he releases her from the engagement and she marries Woodcourt. The chancery case comes to a close with court costs eating up all of the estate. Carstone, who has married Ada, dies in despair.

Principal Characters:
Esther Summerson
Miss Barbary
Mrs Rachael
John Jarndyce
Mr. Tulkinghorn
Kenge
William Guppy
Lady Dedlock
Sir Leicester Dedlock
Volumnia Dedlock
Ada Clare
Richard Carstone
Miss Flite
Krook
Gridley
Harold Skimpole
Snagsby
Rev Chadband
Mrs. Jellyby
Caroline (Caddy) Jellyby
Mr. Turveydrop
Prince Turveydrop
George Rouncewell
Phil Squod
The Bagnets
Mrs. Rouncewell
The Badgers
The Smallweeds
Neckett
Charlotte (Charley) Neckett
Rosa
Tony Jobling (Weevle)
Jo, the Crossing Sweeper
Jenny
Hortense
Allan Woodcourt
Vholes
Mr. Bucket
Nemo (Capt Hawdon)

Bleak House Locations

1. Lincoln's Inn - Kenge and Carboys offices, Jarndyce and Jarndyce heard at Lincoln's Inn Hall, also at Westminster Hall
2. Cursitor Street: Sol's Arms Tavern
3. Cursitor Street: Krook's Rag and Bottle Shop - Miss Flite, Gridley, Nemo (Capt Hawdon), and Tony Jobling (Weevle) residence
4. Cooks Court: Snagby's Law Stationer Shop
5. Thavie's Inn - Jellyby's home
6. Hatton Garden - Jellyby's home after bankruptcy
7. Lincoln's Inn Fields - Tulkinghorn's residence
8. Symond's Inn - Vholes' office, Richard and Ada's residence after marriage

Preston Jones

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JONES, PRESTON ST. VRAIN (1936-1979). Preston St. Vrain Jones, playwright, was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on April 17, 1936, the son of James Brooks "Jawbone" and Maud Gwinn (St. Vrain) Jones. Jawbone Jones served two terms as lieutenant governor of New Mexico, from 1943 to 1946. Maud was a grandniece of Col. Ceran St. Vrain, a contemporary of Christopher C. (Kit) Carson.^qv Jones attended St. Michael's, a Catholic boys' school in Santa Fe, and received his diploma from Highland High School in Albuquerque in 1954. He graduated from the University of New Mexico in 1958 with a teaching certificate in speech. After teaching high school speech in Tucumcari for a semester, he returned to the University of New Mexico to take theater courses while applying for graduate school.

In 1961 he went to graduate school at Baylor University because Paul Baker, who also commuted to Dallas to direct the Dallas Theater Center, was teaching there. After working for a semester with Baker, Jones was invited to join the company at the Dallas Theater Center. When Baker left Baylor in 1963 in a dispute over staging Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night and began commuting to Trinity University in San Antonio, Jones also transferred. For his master's thesis (1966) under Baker, Jones adapted Davis Grubb's novel The Night of the Hunter (1953) for the stage.

During summers in undergraduate school Jones had worked for the Texas Highway Department in Colorado City, the prototype of the mythical town of his plays, Bradleyville. He was married briefly there and had a daughter. At the Dallas Theater Center he met Mary Sue Fridge, an actor, director, and set designer, who soon became his second wife and was an important influence on his work.

In 1972 Jones became the managing director of Down Center Stage, Paul Baker's fifty-six-seat workshop theater. When Jones found that the plays submitted by local playwrights were unsatisfactory, he decided to write his own. His first play, presented as part of the Theater Center's festival of local plays in 1974, was a major success. In the audience were Audrey Wood, the literary agent who discovered Tennessee Williams, and Alan Schneider, the director who took John Houseman's place as head of the Juilliard drama division. Wood became Jones's literary agent, and Schneider helped plan a Washington performance.

Thus Jones's career was under way. His trilogy of plays, Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander, The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia, and The Oldest Living Graduate, were presented in repertory at the Kennedy Center in Washington to enthusiastic audiences and reviews. His picture was on the cover of Saturday Review and Smithsonian. His Broadway reception, however, was in marked contrast. The reviews were mediocre, and the trilogy closed after only sixty-three performances. Jones returned to Dallas, where he wrote three more full-length plays: A Place on the Magdalena Flats (1975); a farce, Santa Fe Sunshine (1977); and Remember (1979).

He continued acting at the Dallas Theater Center as well. In September 1979 in rehearsal as the Duke of Norfolk in A Man for All Seasons, directed by his wife, Jones began suffering from bleeding ulcers and underwent surgery. He unexpectedly died from complications on September 19, 1979. His premature death was particularly ironic because his plays examined the impermanence of life and the destructiveness of time.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Patrick Bennett, Talking with Texas Writers: Twelve Interviews (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1980). Mark Busby, Preston Jones (Boise: Western Writers Series, 1983).

Mark Busby

Additional Chandler Resources

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Chandler Resources:

Philip Marlowe in Film, Radio and Television
http://www.thrillingdetective.com/marlow2.html#anchor1848210

A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page
http://members.aol.com/MG4273/chandler.htm

Authors and Creators – Raymond Chandler
http://www.thrillingdetective.com/trivia/chandler.html

Reviews from CrimeSpreeMagazine.com
http://www.crimespreemag.com/issue6reviews.pdf

Further Reading

Raymond Chandler: Later Novels & Other Writings
Frank MacShane, Editor
This companion highlights Chandler's later years. The darker, more anguished Philip Marlowe character characterizes this period. Also included, Chandler's long-unavailable screenplay for Double Indemnity, adapted from James M. Cain's novel, and a selection of essays in which Chandler muses on his pulp roots and letters about the worlds of writing, publishing, and filmmaking.

Hardboiled Mystery Writers: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross MacDonald
Matthew J. Bruccoli and Richard Layman, Editors
Amply illustrated, this volume provides a documentary chronicle of the life beyond and the work of some of the most masterly detective novels in popular American literature. Correspondence and interviews record the literary tastes and intents of Chandler, Hammett, and Macdonald as well as their responses to judgments of their work in reviews of their books and the movies based on them.

Raymond Chandler: A Biography
Tom Hiney
Hiney's access to unseen personal papers, as well as previously unrecorded accounts of those who knew Chandler throughout his life, gave him an uncensored look at Chandler's life as an author, a husband, a screenwriter, and occasional rogue. Hiney evokes the strange years before Chandler was a writer, brings alive the dangerous glamour of the Hollywood era in which he flourished, and puts his screenwriting in the context of the organized crime and corruption of Los Angeles during Prohibition.

Collected Stories
Raymond Chandler
These 25 stories are where Chandler honed his art and developed his vivid underworld, peopled with good cops and bad cops, informers and extortionists, lethal blondes and redheads, and crime, sex, gambling, and alcohol in abundance. In addition to his classic hard-boiled stories, Chandler also turned his hand to fantasy and even a gothic romance.

Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909-1959
Tom Hiney and Frank MacShane, Editors
Because he lived a quiet existence darkened by his wife's recurring illnesses and his struggles with alcoholism, Chandler's letters were his sole connection to his friends, fans, publishers, and fellow writers from Ian Fleming to Somerset Maugham. Here, new selections of his correspondence -- much of it never before made public -- reveal all aspects of his powerful personality, artistic sensibility, and broad intellectual curiosity.

Online Resources

The Raymond Chandler Web Site

Twists, Slugs and Roscoes: A Glossary of Hardboiled Slang

Dark City: Film Noir and Fiction

The Gospel According to Raymond Chandler

2005-09-06T10:41:00.000-05:00

According to the Gospel....
No attempt to unravel the private eye can ignore Raymond Chandler's essay The Simple Art of Murder (November 1945, The Atlantic Monthly). It's the most-quoted non-fiction piece on the genre, so why should this site be any different? Chandler's focus is on the eye himself, not so much where his literary forbears are, but who he is. Here's just an excerpt: "In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor -- by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.
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"He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man's money dishonestly and no man's insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks -- that is, with a rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.
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The story is this man's adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.

Barnes and Noble Begin Raymond Chandler Class

2005-09-06T07:50:00.000-05:00

Lesson 3: The Big Sleep -- The Birth of Philip Marlowe

"I am ... by tradition and long study a complete snob. P. Marlowe and I do not despise the upper classes because they take baths and have money; we despise them because they are phony."
—Raymond Chandler, in a letter to editor Dale Warren, dated 1945

In this lesson, we'll begin our in-depth analysis of what many consider to be Chandler's best novel, The Big Sleep. We'll study its plot, characterization, definitive style, and themes. In Lesson 2, you learned to trace Chandler's evolution as a writer through his development of the hero. In this lesson, as we anaylze The Big Sleep, we will pay particular attention to Philip Marlowe, Private Eye, the most significant character in all of Chandler's fiction.

Themes in The Big Sleep

As we’ve seen in previous lessons, historical events occurring contemporaneously with the development of hard-boiled crime fiction had a major influence on that development.
Marlowe is continually depicted as the modern moral knight, embodying antiquated virtues of honor, chivalry, and courage.

On the other hand, it was, nevertheless, a fairly common practice for mystery writers of this era to avoid topical references in their work. For example, in Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason novels, all of which appeared between 1933 and 1970, there is rarely a reference to current events, such as Prohibition, the Depression, the War, the Red Scare, or the Cuban Missile Crisis. Consequently, Mason and the rest of his cohorts can be featured in dozens of novels over nearly four decades without aging noticeably, and a Mason novel written in the 1930s doesn’t seem much different from one written in the 1960s. Discerning readers, of course, may detect differences in style, social norms, slang expressions, and so on, but these are details that tend to occur under the surface. The Mason books have a deliberately timeless quality that has helped keep them continuously in print during Gardner’s lifetime and beyond (which was precisely Gardner’s intent).

By contrast, other writers made a point of taking note of social events. Author Rex Stout, for example, allowed his characters, Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, to participate in the repeal of Prohibition, World War II, the McCarthy Era, and, in the final novel of the series, Watergate. All this time, Wolfe and Goodwin didn’t age a single day.

Chandler steered a middle course, at least in The Big Sleep. Certain details definitely suggest a particular era. For example, Rusty Regan is described as not merely a former criminal, but as a former bootlegger, clearly indicating that Prohibition is still a recent memory. But while Chandler included topical references, he did not depend on them for his central plots.

Chandler built his stories not around current events, but around universal themes. For example, one of the themes in The Big Sleep is corruption—both the corruption of officials and the corrupting influence of wealth. In the opening of The Big Sleep, Marlowe informs us that he’s wearing his best suit because he’s "calling on four million dollars." Marlowe distrusts the wealthy, and his characterization of a potential client by nothing more than the amount of money he has at his disposal, without regard to any other qualities he might possess, suggests that he’s preparing himself to dislike his new employer sight unseen. Significantly, we will see that Marlowe is repeatedly described as a worker (a $25-per-day laborer), and Chandler continually places him in direct contrast to the rich, immoral, leisure-seeking clients he serves.

In Lesson 1, we discussed the prevalence of official corruption in Chandler’s early stories; in Lesson 2, we looked at Chandler’s use of setting and how he used it to enhance the atmosphere of corruption. Now we are beginning to see the fullness of this theme in Chandler’s work, and how he used many techniques to paint a portrait of the unsavory, the sordid, and the immoral.

Although the term wasn’t in vogue in 1939, Marlowe’s clients, the Sternwoods, are a textbook example of what is now called a "dysfunctional family." Marlowe’s job in this novel is as much to get the family functioning correctly as it is the suppression of a blackmailer or the unearthing of a missing person. He’s almost as much a therapist as he is a detective. Dysfunctional families are a device as old as literature. One need go no further than the story of Cain and Abel in the Bible’s Book of Genesis for an early example. Other instances can be found in Greco-Roman mythology, Shakespeare, Dickens, Dumas, and, not surprisingly, Hammett. One of Chandler’s most devoted disciples, Ross Macdonald (sometimes referred to as the "Holy Spirit" of hard-boiled private eye fiction, to Hammett’s "Father" and Chandler’s "Son"), made the untangling of familial messes something of a specialty in his Lew Archer novels.

Now that we’ve discussed some of Chandler’s overarching themes, bear them in mind as you continue your reading, and notice the ways in which he continually introduces these themes into his work. In the Discussion Questions section of this lesson, you will have a chance to share your ideas about some of Chandler’s other themes with your fellow classmates. In the next topic, we’ll look more closely at the character of Philip Marlowe; as we will see, he himself was the embodiment of some of Chandler’s main themes.

Lecture 2
Lesson 3: The Big Sleep -- The Birth of Philip Marlowe

The Hero: "A Man Fit for Adventure"

Another recurring theme is Marlowe’s tendency to emulate the knights of old. He seems to be beholden to a powerful personal code of ethics, and he feels a responsibility to protect the helpless and innocent. We’ve seen this inclination in the short stories, and we’ll see it to a greater degree in the novels.

In the last topic, we discussed the prevalence of corruption in Chandler’s work. The corruption in Chandler’s fictional world does not go unchallenged; his hero stands as a brave and independent soldier fighting the good fight on the side of morality, honesty, and fair play. Chandler’s choice of a name for his hero was telling: "Philip Marlowe" evoked the English Renaissance poet Christopher Marlowe, as well as the influence of Chandler's classical education. This character is central to Chandler’s body of work, and we’ll devote this lesson to studying him. As Chandler said, "He is the hero, he is everything."
Pay particular attention to the discussion of the stained glass window in the opening scenes of The Big Sleep, as it sums up many of the significant themes in the novel.

It was significant to Chandler that his hero embody the chivalrous qualities of a knight. He described him as "a man of honor, by instinct, inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it." Within the urban chaos, depravity, and lawlessness of Chandler’s stories, the moral center remains intact because of his hero.

Notice the opening of The Big Sleep. Marlowe examines a stained glass window in the rich man’s house that depicts a knight rescuing a damsel in distress. "I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying," Marlowe says. Note the implied self-reliance, the expectation of valor and bravery. As literary critics have pointed out, Chandler created a popular rule of crime fiction that has become a mainstay of the genre: We expect the individual hero of the story to mete out justice and save the day, rather than expecting the law or the community to provide it.

At the same time, Marlowe seems to poke fun at his own identification with knightly virtues, sensing that those kinds of ideals might be out of place in gangster-ridden Los Angeles. His remark about the stained glass window seems to simultaneously mark his habit of identifying with knightly characters, and humorously dismiss the idea as inappropriate. Later on, he’ll be even more acerbic, cynically noting that the game he’s playing "isn’t a game for knights." Yet despite his outward cynicism, Marlowe’s chivalric characteristics always shine through.

It’s also significant that in this longer form, Chandler is able to further develop Marlowe’s character and offer more insight into him. When introduced to his new client, General Guy Sternwood, Marlowe is perhaps a bit surprised to find himself liking the irascible old man, crippled and near death, but still full of inner strength and a defiant attitude. Perhaps he sees in Sternwood a kindred spirit. As he gives the General a brief résumé of his career, and admits that he was fired from his position as a DA’s investigator for talking back to his superiors, Marlowe tells him, "I test fairly high on insubordination, General." The General replies, "I always did myself, sir." They are, as Marlowe suspected, kindred spirits.

This exchange with the General marks the first time we’ve heard that Marlowe once had a career in official law enforcement, a career that was derailed by his own refusal to try to fit into an institutional structure. This glimpse into Marlowe’s past explains much that was left unexplored in the short stories that we examined in the last lesson. First of all, we now know where Marlowe learned his trade. There is nothing too surprising there; a man has to learn the rudiments of his profession somewhere, and if your profession is detective work, you can gain your on-the-job training either as a policeman or as an employee of a large detective agency. Because of Marlowe’s stubborn refusal to conform, he was unable to succeed as a member of a team. He is a loner, from his first appearance in print to his last.

As The Big Sleep unfolds, we’ll see a few examples of official corruption (although it’s a fairly minor element in this novel compared to some of Chandler’s later works). Consequently, we may be tempted to infer that Marlowe’s steely integrity rebelled at the ethical compromises he had to make as a policeman. But Chandler also shows us tough, straight cops, like Marlowe’s friend and former colleague, Chief Investigator Bernie Ohls (who we met in "Finger Man" in the previous lesson), or Captain Gregory, head of LAPD’s Missing Persons Detail. Characters like these, and like Lieutenant Ybarra in "Red Wind," suggest that, in Chandler’s world, while it may be difficult for an honest man to be an honest cop, it’s not at all impossible. But it is impossible for Marlowe, despite his obvious talent as an investigator, to succeed in law enforcement. This is due less to his integrity than to his stubborn refusal to do things anybody’s way but his own.

This is a key insight into the kind of man Marlowe is. He isn’t just uncompromising on matters of ethics, but on nearly everything, with a prickly pride that’s easily ruffled, a sharp tongue always ready to counter any perceived insult, and a pair of ready fists if an adroitly phrased wisecrack doesn’t silence an adversary. This insistence on being his own man, coupled with a failed background in police work, make Marlowe the template for the scores of fictional ex-cops-turned-PIs who will follow in Marlowe’s wake. (We’ll examine this point at greater length later in the course.)

Marlowe was Chandler’s consummate hero, as we’ve seen, and Chandler once described the mystery story as the protagonist’s "adventure in search of a hidden truth." He went on to say that the story "would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure." Marlowe, he said, is a man who "has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right because it belongs to the world he lives in."

Marlowe is a man to whom things happen, and he is a man who makes things happen. He attracts trouble and he causes trouble. But whether he causes it or attracts it, he can always handle it, because, as he tells us in a story we covered in the last lesson, "Trouble is my business." In The Big Sleep, he has plenty of trouble. In just the first half, he’s faced with two definite murders, one suspicious death that may or may not be a murder, one missing person who might turn out to have been murdered, and at least two murderers working at cross-purposes.

As we’ve already seen, Marlowe has an unyielding pride that causes him to be sarcastic, overbearing, quick to take offense, and impatient to the point of alienating others, even clients. He takes no man’s insolence, but he dishes out plenty of his own.

All of this is part of the shield he must put up to survive in the world in which he lives. He has to be hard and unyielding. As he puts it in Playback, "If I wasn’t hard, I wouldn’t be alive." And that hardness, that steely resolve, is part of what makes him a man "fit for adventure."

But only part. Marlowe can also be tender. In that same book, he goes on to say, "If I couldn’t ever be gentle, I wouldn’t deserve to be alive." Marlowe is a compassionate man. He sees his mission, whether he puts it this way or not, less as solving puzzles than as helping people. He likes the General, partly because he sees in the General something of himself, but also because the General is someone who’s helpless, someone who needs the kind of help a man like Marlowe can provide.

In our next lesson, we’ll see the tension between the detective as puzzle-solver and the detective as compassionate rescuer of the helpless come to a head, as Marlowe uncovers the solution to Rusty Regan’s disappearance and gets the General and his family out from under the thumb of a vicious gangster.

Lesson 3: The Big Sleep -- The Birth of Philip Marlowe

The Evolution of The Big Sleep

Chandler used an interesting method to develop the plots for his novels: He recycled and combined the plots of his previously published short stories. By developing his novels in this manner, he was able to take what he’d already learned about plotting and storytelling in the pulps and apply it to a new form that allowed greater space for the kind of tough yet lyrical style that would become his hallmark. In this topic, we’ll take a closer look at that method as it was used in The Big Sleep.

The practice of taking a previously published short story and expanding it to novel length was certainly not unheard of in crime fiction by the time Chandler wrote The Big Sleep. Early examples include R. Austin Freeman’s 1912 novel The Mystery of 31 New Inn, which was expanded from a short story called "31 New Inn" published the previous year, and Marie Belloc Lowndes’s 1913 fictionalization of the Jack the Ripper case, The Lodger, a full-length version of a short story that had appeared in McClure’s in 1911.

The Method

Since Chandler was striking out on new ground by attempting book-length fiction, it must have seemed logical to use material with which he was familiar. In the case of The Big Sleep, he combined and expanded two Carmady stories from Black Mask, "Killer in the Rain" (January 1935) and "The Curtain" (September 1936). Chandler called this process "cannibalizing."

In "Killer in the Rain," Carmady is hired by oil millionaire Tony Dravec to free his adopted daughter, Carmen, from the power of a shady blackmailer. The blackmailer turns out to be a pornographer who operates a rental library of high-class smut behind the facade of a rare books shop, but before Carmady gets too far on the case, the blackmailer is killed. Now Carmady must solve a murder in order to keep his client out of trouble.

In "The Curtain," Carmady is hired by a wheelchair-bound retired general to find his missing son-in-law. The son-in-law had apparently grown weary of his marriage to the General’s daughter, and of being a surrogate father to the General’s grandson, and had taken up with the wife of a local mobster. Since the mobster’s wife is also missing, it appears as though the two might have simply run off together. But when Carmady traces the wife to an out-of-the-way mechanic’s garage in nearby Realito, he finds that the truth behind the disappearance is very different.

As you’ve no doubt surmised, what Chandler does, in broad terms, is combine the blackmail investigation from "Killer in the Rain" with the missing persons investigation from "The Curtain" to create the plot of The Big Sleep.

Investigation:
Uncovering Corruption

In your close reading of the text, find an additional instance in which you can directly trace Chandler’s continuing commentary on corruption in The Big Sleep. Post your findings to the message board, and discuss with other students.

Redundant characters are jettisoned. Hence oilman Tony Dravec is eliminated, and the actions he performs in "Killer in the Rain" are assigned to the General, whose role is appropriately expanded. Similarly, the grandson from "The Curtain" is excised, and the General is instead given a younger daughter—Carmen from "Killer in the Rain"—whose role is likewise expanded so that she performs both her own actions from "Killer in the Rain" and the grandson’s from "The Curtain."

In constructing the novel, Chandler lifted scenes, virtually intact, from one story or the other, and expanded those scenes into chapters for the book. Since the two stories have completely different, unrelated plotlines, Chandler also wrote new, wholly original chapters, fusing those separate plots into a cohesive entity.

To help you understand Chandler’s so-called "cannibalization" method, let’s compare two paragraphs, one from "The Curtain" and its expanded version from The Big Sleep. Both describe the steamy greenhouse where the detective meets his client, the General.

In "The Curtain" the passage appears this way:

The air steamed. The walls and ceiling of the glass house dripped. In the half light enormous tropical plants spread their blooms and branches all over the place, and the smell of them was almost as overpowering as the smell of boiling alcohol.

Set free from the space constraints of the short story, the expanded passage in The Big Sleep appears this way:

The air was thick, wet, steamy and larded with the cloying smell of tropical orchids in bloom. The glass walls and roof were heavily misted and big drops of moisture splashed down on the plants. The light had an unreal greenish color, like light filtered through an aquarium tank. The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men. They smelled as overpowering as boiling alcohol under a blanket.

As Chandler scholar Philip Durham points out in an introduction to a posthumous collection of Chandler’s short fiction, "Both passages are intense and vivid." The paragraph from the short story, showing the influence of Hammett, "achieves its effectiveness though terseness..." while the passage from the novel "create[s] a mood through the use of hyperbole and striking simile." In lessons to come, we’ll continue to explore how this method contributed to the development of Chandler’s style and his gift for setting atmosphere through description and dialogue.

Chandler’s Misgivings

Chandler would ultimately write two more novels using the same method—Farewell, My Lovely, which we will examine in upcoming lessons, and The Lady in the Lake. However, he was never really comfortable with writing novels in this fashion, as his term for the process, "cannibalization," indicates. As mentioned in the previous lesson, it was for this reason that Chandler rarely allowed his cannibalized stories to be reprinted during his lifetime. They were all deliberately excluded from his "official" short story collection, The Simple Art of Murder.

It was not until five years after his death that these stories were finally preserved between hard covers in the collection Killer in the Rain and Other Stories. Philip Durham edited the book and wrote an introduction (from which his comments above are quoted) in which he described Chandler’s mixed feelings about the stories he developed into books.

However Chandler felt about the process, it became a model subsequent mystery writers would follow in later years. For example, Lawrence Block’s award-winning short story about New York City private investigator Matt Scudder, "By the Dawn’s Early Light," was expanded into the Scudder novel When the Sacred Ginmill Closes. John Lutz’s "Ride the Lightning," which, like Block’s story, won the Edgar Award for best short fiction from the Mystery Writers of America, was expanded into an identically titled novel featuring St. Louis PI Alo Nudger. And perhaps no contemporary mystery writer has used the Chandler method of short story expansion more often than pulp fan and award-winning novelist Bill Pronzini, most recently in the San Francisco-set private eye novel Bleeders, deriving from "The Big Bite" and "Home Is the Place Where." As we have seen, Chandler’s method, as much as his actual work, became a template for mystery writers who came after.

In this lesson, we’ve studied Philip Marlowe’s emergence and development as the central character in Chandler’s oeuvre, and we’ve seen how Marlowe has contributed to the development of the modern detective hero. In the next lesson, we’ll continue our analysis of The Big Sleep, and learn about some of Chandler’s other contributions to the genre, including the use of recurring characters.

Discussion

Please post your responses to the topics below on the message board.

1. Now that you know that The Big Sleep’s blackmail plot derived from one story and the missing persons plot from another, it may seem obvious that the novel was constructed from two unrelated pieces of fiction. If you didn’t already know this, do you think it would have been as obvious? Why or why not?

2. Once Chandler decided to make Marlowe an ex-cop, why do you think he chose the specific position of DA’s investigator as the PI’s former law enforcement position? Why not a former LAPD officer or a former deputy sheriff?

3. Chandler once said that he thought novels, rather than short stories, were his natural medium. Having read the first half of this novel and seven of his short stories, do you agree or disagree with Chandler’s self-assessment? Explain.

4. We’ve discussed themes in The Big Sleep. In your reading of the novel, did you identify additional themes that seemed significant? Share your ideas on the message board.

Lesson 4: The Big Sleep -- Between the Lines

"The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective."
—Raymond Chandler, in a letter dated 1951

In our last lesson, we examined the first half of Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Our study of this novel in these two lessons will lead us to a fuller understanding of Chandler, both as an artist and as a significant figure in contemporary American fiction.

The Big Sleep is often described as Chandler’s best novel. As Chandler scholar Robert Moss said, "The story is structurally and thematically unified, the characters fully developed, and the style distinctive and sharp. . . Chandler's style and technique would be widely admired and imitated; his work would help establish the conventions of the genre that persist (in both detective novels and movies) to this day."

Social and Literary Contexts
Goverment agents are shown confiscating liquor during Prohibition. The movement had widespread influence on the culture, and the fiction, of the times.
Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

In Lesson 3, we watched as Marlowe became engulfed in a crooked town in a case involving blackmail, murder, pornography, and organized crime. As we’ve learned, the logistics of plotting were never Chandler’s strong suit, and, more importantly, plot was not central to Chandler’s aesthetic. Unlike the formulaic mysteries of the Golden Age, which featured a satisfying and obligatory "whodunit," the unraveling of the mystery in The Big Sleep is almost (although not quite) beside the point. Chandler was much more interested in commenting on the corruption of the modern world, moving the story along through fast pacing, creating powerfully atmospheric settings, and using language in exciting and effective ways.

As Chapter 19 opens, Marlowe has, for practical purposes, completed the assignment given to him by General Sternwood: He's removed the threat of blackmail from Sternwood's younger daughter, Carmen, and retrieved the blackmail material. Along the way, he solved a couple of murders, but that was incidental. Nonetheless, former bootlegger Rusty Regan, husband of Sternwood's older daughter, Vivian, is still missing, and so is Mona Mars, wife of racketeer Eddie Mars. It's commonly believed that Regan and Mona ran off together.

The General had developed deep affection for his son-in-law, and his sudden, unexplained disappearance has grieved him deeply. And, though he didn't come right out and say so, he was afraid that Regan might have been involved, behind the scenes, in the blackmail attempt. Marlowe tries to uncover the truth, in part to set the General's mind at ease.

Marlowe learns that Eddie Mars seems to have some kind of hold over the Sternwoods, and no one—not Vivian Regan, not Eddie Mars, not local law enforcement—seems to want him looking into Regan's disappearance. Although finding Regan is not his assignment, everyone seems to assume that's what Marlowe is doing.

All Carmen seems to want is a roll in the hay with Marlowe. She even bribes her way into Marlowe's apartment, and climbs into his bed naked, certain that the tall, handsome detective will succumb to her charms. When he throws her out of his home, she doesn't take it well.

A man named Harry Jones tells Marlowe he knows where Mona can be found, and offers to sell the information to Marlowe. Before the deal can be closed, however, Jones is killed by Mars's enforcer, Lash Canino, while Marlowe watches helplessly from an adjoining room. Marlowe is able to get the information about Mona's whereabouts from Jones's girlfriend, and is soon on his way to the rural town of Realito, where Mona is hiding out in a country garage, in the care of Canino.

Marlowe is recognized by Canino and captured, but, with the help of Mona, he escapes, retrieves a gun from his car, and kills Canino in a shootout. Marlowe reports all this to the General, who tells him that, whether or not he's been warned off by the cops, he should stay on the case until Regan is found.

Carmen, still furious at Marlowe for his rejection of her sexual advances, tries to kill him. She's not successful, but Marlowe suddenly realizes that the same thing must have happened with Regan. Carmen made advances; Regan rejected them; Carmen, in a fury, tried to kill him. In Regan's case, her attempt was successful.

Vivian, as we learn, knew this all along. She arranged with Eddie Mars to dispose of the body, and this is what put her under Mars' thumb. Marlowe gives Vivian an ultimatum: If, in the next three days, Vivian gets Carmen into a hospital, he will, for the General's sake, keep quiet about Regan's murder. Vivian agrees. Marlowe, now "part of the nastiness" growing out of the cover-up, walks off the Sternwood estate and out of their lives.

Now that we've concluded the novel in this lesson, we can recognize the ways in which Chandler uses his characters to help set the mood, create atmosphere, and convey his artistic vision to readers. And, as we’ll see, Chandler’s use of characters helped to establish some of the conventions of crime fiction, including the use of recurring characters and significant character types.

"Sordid" is a word that frequently comes to mind in describing Chandler’s world, and an analysis of the text shows that it is not just the plot elements (pornography, drug use, gambling, grifting, murder, and so on), but also the cast of characters that fosters this impression. Chandler was extremely effective at creating characters who served his greater artistic vision. Consider the following descriptions of characters in The Big Sleep.

Carmen is described as "small and delicately put together, but she looked durable," with "little sharp predatory teeth." Her father says she is "a child who likes to pull the wings off flies," and she’s compared to "a bad girl in the principal’s office." Her laughter "ran around the corners of the room like rats behind the wainscoting." Later, we’re told that "Carmen was crawling around on her hands and knees, still hissing." These references, which draw comparisons between Carmen and a wild child or an animal, both foreshadow her actions and create a vivid portrait of recklessness and wildness.

Notice the differences between Carmen and Vivian. Vivian is introduced as more poised and adult than her sister, but no less dangerous. Marlowe tells us, "She was worth a stare. She was trouble." Meeting Marlowe for the first time, Vivian reclines with her slippers off, in sheer silk stockings, showing her legs above the knee. Such sexually suggestive body language, although tame by modern standards, was meant to instruct readers about Vivian’s character; nice matrons in pre-World War II America did not receive strange men in private quarters while displaying their legs and drinking liquor. Note the difference in Chandler’s description of Vivian’s maid: "She looked like a nice old horse that had been turned out to pasture after long service."

Chandler doesn't resort to clichéd descriptions. For example, instead of telling us that Carmen is unintelligent, he writes, "She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her." Marlowe recounts his fight with young Carol Lundgren and tells us that "a pansy has no iron in his bones, no matter what he looks like." Geiger is described as "that queen" and "like Caesar, a husband to women and a wife to men." (Note that with this sly allusion to Caesar, Chandler tips his hat to his elite education.)

From this vantage point in history, we can see that Chandler was an artist who was later emulated and copied (to the point of parody). In upcoming lessons, we’ll look at some of the writers who walked in his footsteps. It may be surprising to realize that when Chandler was writing, his influence and significance were not acknowledged or understood. When The Big Sleep was published, The New York Times Book Review said, "Most of the characters in this book are tough, many are nasty and some of them are both." It is interesting to note that many of Chandler’s critics did not initially acknowledge him as a writer of significance. Although the book’s popular appeal and sales were strong, it would be years before The Big Sleep received the critical acclaim that it deserved. Some modern critics have suggested that as much as Marlowe was at heart a chivalrous knight out of place in a corrupt modern world, Chandler saw himself as a poet, underappreciated in the world of genre fiction.

Lesson 4: The Big Sleep -- Between the Lines

The Supporting Cast: Recurring Characters

The recurring character, the series character, is the bulwark of crime fiction. Of course, there are successful and highly acclaimed mysteries that feature a lead character who appears in only one book or story, but the series character, appearing in tale after tale, has been the rule since detective fiction was first conceived. Arguably, the series character predates crime fiction. Shakespeare, for example, wrote a trilogy of plays about England’s King Henry V, two set during his tenure as the Prince of Wales, and one during his reign as king. James Fenimore Cooper wrote four novels about heroic frontiersman Nathaniel Bumpo.

One reason for the use of a recurring hero is, of course, commercialism. A character who is popular in one book, play, or story, is likely to be popular in sequels. Another reason is the opportunity to explore different facets of the lead character.

The mainstay of a crime fiction series is, of course, that continuing lead character. This tradition, as we said, goes all the way back to the very beginnings of crime fiction, with the lead character of Edgar Allan Poe’s pioneering trilogy of mystery short stories, an amateur detective named C. Auguste Dupin. Dupin debuted in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (generally regarded as the first genuine mystery story) and returned in two sequels, "The Mystery of Marie Roget" and "The Purloined Letter."

Through these stories, Poe set the precedent that the main character in the mystery series has a network of recurring supporting characters. A nameless first-person narrator shares living quarters with Dupin and performs much of the legwork, allowing Dupin to focus on solving the crimes, and providing a model for later characters like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Dr. Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories, or Agatha Christie’s Captain Hastings in the Hercule Poirot stories. Dupin’s law enforcement contact is Prefect G-, the head of the Paris Police, prefiguring characters like Conan Doyle’s Inspector Lestrade or Dorothy L. Sayers’s Inspector Charles Parker. After all, detective characters who are not part of official law enforcement will, of necessity, come in contact with police officers in the course of their investigations, and it makes sense for them to have regular contacts.

It also makes sense for lead characters to be backed up by a regular supporting cast, to give them people with whom they can regularly interact. For example, despite his name, the Lone Ranger was given a partner, "faithful Indian companion Tonto," largely so he would have someone to talk to.

Hammett certainly followed this trend. His most frequently used series detective, the Continental Op, is backed by a fairly large number of recurring characters. Some of these include "The Old Man," his boss at the San Francisco Office of the Continental Detective Agency; fellow Continental Operatives, such as burly Irishman Mickey Linehan and rookie PI Bob Teal (whose murder the Op avenges about halfway through the series); and the Op’s SFPD contacts, Sergeant O’Gar and Detective Pat Reddy.

Brett Halliday’s long series of novels and short stories featuring Miami PI Mike Shayne also include a large, well-developed supporting cast of recurring characters. Shayne, a tough, hard-nosed sleuth in the Hammett-Chandler mold, made his book-length debut at roughly the same time as Marlowe, in 1939’s Dividend on Death. Among the many supporting characters are love interests Phyllis Brighton and Lucy Hamilton; Shayne’s friendly law enforcement contact, Miami Chief of Police Will Gentry; his unfriendly law enforcement nemesis, Miami Beach Chief of Detectives Peter Painter; and his reporter buddy, Tim Rourke of the Miami Daily News.

Investigation:
Researching Character

In your close reading of the text, find an specific instance in which you see Chandler effectively using a character to set the mood and create atmosphere. Post your example to the message board, and discuss your findings with other students.

Unlike his contemporaries, Chandler didn't rely on many recurring characters in the Marlowe stories. Anne Riordan, who we’ll meet in the next lesson, is a pretty cop’s daughter who occasionally assists Marlowe in his investigations (and, it is hinted, is an occasional romantic interest of Marlowe’s). She is introduced in 1940’s Farewell, My Lovely, and doesn’t reappear until 1959 in Chandler’s final Marlowe entry, "The Pencil." Linda Loring, a beautiful, wealthy divorcée who falls in love with Marlowe, first appears in 1953’s The Long Goodbye, and, while not actually appearing onstage (unless you count a phone call), is something of a gray eminence in the final completed Marlowe novel, 1958’s Playback. (In Chandler’s uncompleted and possibly abandoned Marlowe novel, Poodle Springs, Loring and Marlowe are married.)

Another recurring character in the series is Bernie Ohls. A tough, straight, instinctively honest and uncomplicated cop, Ohls makes his first appearance in the 1933 short story "Finger Man," which we covered in Lesson 2. We meet him again in The Big Sleep. He’s mentioned in Farewell, My Lovely and The High Window, but he doesn’t actually appear again until 1953’s The Long Goodbye, and later in the 1959 short story, "The Pencil." Although Ohls appears in two novels and two short stories, we learn almost nothing about him personally apart from the somewhat prickly friendship he and Marlowe share, and yet, aside from Marlowe, he is the most frequently recurring character in the saga.

Chandler’s vision of Marlowe as the consummate loner may be the main reason he resisted the trend of introducing recurring supporting characters to his series. Nevertheless, he apparently found he couldn’t eliminate them completely, and it’s interesting that his last completed Marlowe project, "The Pencil," includes two recurring characters. It’s as if, at the end of his career, Chandler had finally succumbed to the trend.

In today’s series mysteries, with their emphasis on relationships and the private lives of the main characters, the use of a large supporting cast is more common than ever. Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, for example, whom Parker has been entirely forthright about describing as, essentially, "Marlowe in Boston," has a regular girlfriend, Susan Silverman, and two police contacts, Lt. Quirk and Sgt. Belson. Most significantly, he has a contact in the criminal underworld, a professional thug named Hawk who sometimes assists Spenser on his cases, doing the nasty, violent things that Spenser is too virtuous to do.

Lesson 4: The Big Sleep -- Between the Lines

Character Types: Setting the Trend

While Chandler usually avoided repeating the same characters, he liked using recurring character types, or similar types of characters with different names. Crime fiction stories, like any other kind of literature, have recurring character types that can be found in almost any typical example of the form. The Big Sleep has its share of such characters. Indeed, it might be argued that Chandler established the use of certain character types in The Big Sleep, and that he set the standard for later writers who used the Chandler mold. Let's explore some of the recurring character types that Chandler used, and trace their legacy in other writers’ work.

The Big-Time Mobster

The big-time mobster was among Chandler’s favorite characters. He was fascinated by what he called the "hoodlum empire that infests this country." In a letter to James Sandoe, the mystery critic for the New York Herald-Tribune, Chandler talked at length about the 1951 U.S. Congressional investigation of organized crime, presided over by Senator Estes Kefauver and televised across the country. "Obviously nothing that a mystery writer could dream up could be more fantastic than what actually goes on," he wrote.
Al Capone was only one of the many real-life big-time mobsters depicted in fictionalized noir characters.

Chandler’s work reflected his times, and, in The Big Sleep, Eddie Mars is a prime example of the big-time mobster. Mars, like most incarnations of the type, is well-dressed and almost courtly in manner, but ruthless in business. Other examples of the big-time mobster appear in short stories like "Finger Man," "Trouble Is My Business," and "Spanish Blood." The type appears In Farewell, My Lovely as Laird Brunette, in 1949’s The Little Sister as "Weepy" Steelgrave, and in The Long Goodbye as Mendy Menendez.

We are introduced to Mars with this description: "He was a gray man, all gray, except for his polished black shoes and two scarlet diamonds in his gray satin tie that looked like the diamonds on roulette layouts." Mars is a hard man, but not rough; he’s articulate and sometimes polite, with a "nice easy smile" and gray eyes that twinkle. Mars is a professional: He uses a team of henchmen to carry out his crimes, but he doesn’t get his hands dirty himself. "I knew Eddie Mars would bleed me white," says Vivian, and she warns Marlowe: "He’ll try to kill you."

In later fiction, we don’t have to look hard to find the offspring of Chandler’s crime boss character. The most famous are, of course, Don Vito Corleone and his son, Michael, in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. We can also include Dixie Costello, the head of organized crime in a series of Manchester-set police novels by retired British cop Maurice Procter; Philadelphia’s top mobster, Mike Lagana, in William P. McGivern’s hard-boiled classic, The Big Heat; and California Mafioso "Flip" Fazzini (a loose fictionalization of real-life gangster Jimmy "The Weasel" Frattiano) in Final Notice, by former San Francisco private eye Joe Gores.

The Aristocratic Client

The aristocratic client is another recurring character type in Chandler’s fiction, and although Marlowe considers himself a working class stiff, he manages to find wealthy, aristocratic clients quite frequently. This character type always acts a bit huffy and superior, and tends to come off second best when matching words with the prideful Marlowe. The aristocratic client is a necessary character, as he gives the hero entrance to a world of money, power, and high-stakes crime. Examples include Old Man Jeeter in "Trouble Is My Business," Mr. Grayle in Farewell, My Lovely, and Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock in The High Window. Sometimes these characters are unremittingly unsympathetic; occasionally, they turn out to be downright sinister.

The Big Sleep’s General Sternwood, however, is a fairly benevolent specimen of the type. Although moneyed and mannered, the crippled old man is, at heart, tough as old shoes. Despite his wealth, a condition of which Marlowe is always suspicious, Sternwood is somewhat redeemed by his past military career. When the General detects in another the heart of a warrior, what his servant calls "the soldier’s eye," he sees that person as having worth, whatever his economic class. Therefore, Sternwood instinctively likes Marlowe, and Marlowe instinctively likes him, and does his best for him.

A more malignant example of the aristocratic client can be found in Dashiell Hammett’s 1928 novel, Red Harvest, the first book-length appearance of the Continental Op. Here the Op is hired by Elihu Wilson to clean up the gangster-ridden small town of Personville. Wilson, a ruthless mine owner who is himself responsible for the town’s infestation by gangsters, having brought them in to break a strike, is as morally corrupt as any of the gang elements the Op pits against each other, but is similar to the General in that he is elderly, rich, and frail.

The Spoiled But Likeable Rich Girl

Chandler frequently used characters that fit the mold of the spoiled but likeable rich girl. Recall that Chandler was a product of the Depression, when the differences between rich and poor were as striking as at any point in American history. The spoiled but likeable rich girl character certainly struck a chord with Chandler’s readers. Marlowe, the epitome of the working class guy, is often put in direct contact with the moneyed, immoral upper class, creating some of the most interesting conflicts in Chandler’s fiction. We’ll see the spoiled but likeable rich girl character again when we meet wealthy heiress Linda Loring. Marlowe despises the easy luxury Loring’s wealth has always brought her, and she, in turn, despises the shabbiness of his lifestyle and business. Yet they each recognize enough worth in the other to, at least for a time, reach across the boundaries that separate them and become a couple.

In The Big Sleep, the spoiled but likeable rich girl character appears as the General’s older daughter, Vivian Regan: a beautiful, wealthy, pampered babe who’s been spoiled by the privilege in which she’s been raised. She’s promiscuous, drinks too much, gambles too much, and generally lives an aimless and pointless life. Yet she’s protective of her family, and she’s discerning enough to be attracted to Marlowe, despite the fact that she can’t really control him. Marlowe recognizes something worthwhile in her as well.

Brett Halliday’s first novel about Miami PI Mike Shayne, 1939’s Dividend on Death, features one of the most likeable of the spoiled but likeable rich girls: client Phyllis Brighton, who combines an appealing vulnerability with her wealth and likeability. She returns in the second book in the Shayne series, The Private Practice of Michael Shayne, and by the third book, The Uncomplaining Corpses, is married to Shayne, which is ironically the same fate Chandler had in mind for Marlowe in his uncompleted novel, Poodle Springs, in which Marlowe married Linda Loring. Just as Chandler would apparently decide that marriage was not for Marlowe, and put the Poodle Springs manuscript aside, unfinished, Halliday would discover that, for commercial reasons, a married hard-boiled detective was difficult to sell. He ruthlessly killed Phyllis off between books, replacing her with secretary Lucy Hamilton, towards whom Shayne feels romantic inclinations, but never marries.

The Hired Muscle

The hired muscle character was a necessary figure in Chandler’s work; menacing, brutal thugs-for-hire were a staple in his stories, and always on hand to present an obstacle to the hero. As we’ve seen in this course, Chandler’s world is an uneasy place, and Marlowe must necessarily face, and overcome, serious difficulties. Fittingly, Marlowe runs into more than his share of hoods in the employ of one of the big boys. Among them are Poke Andrews, the hired gun he and Ohls shoot it out with in "Finger Man," the sibling gunmen, "Waxnose" and "Frisky," from "Trouble Is My Business," and the mysterious Eastern Seaboard hit men from "The Pencil."

First among equals is Eddie Mars’ top gun in The Big Sleep, Lash Canino. One of the most sinister figures in the entire Marlowe canon, Canino seems almost like a force of nature, there whenever Mars needs him and nowhere to be seen when he’s not needed. Sinister details like his dark, monochromatic wardrobe, and his off-handedly cruel way of dealing out death, add to his stature as an opponent for Marlowe, and when Marlowe kills Canino in the gunfight at the Realito garage, we know it’s an accomplishment that means something.

Hawk, the aforementioned professional thug who sometimes assists Parker’s Spenser, is actually introduced as an opponent of Spenser’s in the 1974 novel Promised Land. In the employ of the main villain (an Eddie Mars-like mobster), he seems, like Canino, to be almost a force of nature, and the question of who might prevail if it comes to a face-to-face showdown between Spenser and Hawk is doubtful. Thankfully, it doesn’t come to that, as Hawk, finally disgusted by his employer’s cowardice, changes sides, setting up the uneasy "partnership" that prevails in subsequent entries in the series.

The Cop Buddy

In most crime fiction, and particularly in private eye fiction, a cop buddy serves as a helpmate to the hero, offering advice, inside information, and sometimes access to crime scenes or other necessary resources. Chandler relied on the cop buddy character type less frequently than other writers. As we’ve seen in The Big Sleep, Marlowe is a loner who interacts with a network of friends and acquaintances only rarely. Chandler went to some lengths to keep Marlowe both autonomous and unconnected, thus bypassing the common mystery device of the recurring cop buddy. Marlowe merely approaches having a full-fledged cop buddy in the character of Ohls.

Ohls is the DA’s chief investigator and he apparently trusts Marlowe; he’s good in a shootout, and he’s honest. As mentioned earlier, we learn in The Big Sleep that Marlowe was once a DA’s man himself and that he and Ohls once worked together. Although Ohls appears again in several short stories and novels, we learn little about him except that he’s a tough cop whom Marlowe respects, and who seems to regard Marlowe as a friend (or at least as much of a friend as a cop and a PI can be).

The cop buddy character type is particularly ubiquitous in private eye fiction. In addition to the aforementioned O’Gar in the Op series, Gentry in the Shayne series, and Quirk and Belson in the Spenser series, famous examples include NYPD Homicide Captain Pat Chambers in Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer series, LAPD Sergeant Dennis Becker on TV’s The Rockford Files, and legendary real-life federal agent Eliot Ness in Max Allan Collins’s series of historical mysteries featuring Depression-era PI Nate Heller.

There are other stock character types found in The Big Sleep and, indeed, throughout Chandler’s work. We see them in "The Police Nemesis," "The Faithful but Mysterious Family Retainer," "The Two-Bit Grifter," and so on. Chandler’s talent isn’t that he uses stock characters, but that he imbues each with enough individuality to keep them from seeming to be the clichéd, overused figures they might be in lesser hands. A skillful turn of dialogue, a neat bit of character description, a personality-revealing piece of action—all serve to make a familiar type of character seem fresh and new.

Lesson 4: The Big Sleep -- Between the Lines

Media Adaptations

The Big Sleep, perhaps Chandler’s best-known and most popular novel, has been the basis for one of the best-known and most popular private eye movies in cinema history. It was also the source material for an ill-advised remake of that classic film more than 30 years later, and, somewhat nostalgically, for a radio drama produced long after the heyday of radio drama had passed. In this section, we’ll discuss who played what roles, how changing times affected the manner in which the book was adapted, and other stylistic changes.

The Gold Standard

Chandler was quite pleased with the 1946 film adaptation of The Big Sleep. "Bogart is so much better than any other tough guy actors," he said. "[He] can be tough without a gun." More than any other actor, Humphrey Bogart, in fedora and trench coat, is identified with the figure of the hard-boiled private eye. Indeed, it’s hard to believe that he played private eyes only twice. But when one of those private eyes is Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon and the other is Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, twice is enough.
Chandler was pleased with the 1946 film version of The Big Sleep, starring Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart.

The film also featured Lauren Bacall as Vivian, and the script by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman followed the original plot and dialogue quite closely.

Some changes, however, were necessary. Bogart, though superb as Marlowe, was not well matched physically to the character as described in the book, and some dialogue reflects the differences. In the book, Carmen greets Marlowe with the line, "Tall, aren’t you?" To which Marlowe replies, "I didn’t try to be." In the movie, the first line of the exchange becomes, "Not very tall, are you?" And Bogart’s reply becomes, "I tried to be."

Some details also had to be softened to get past the censors. Geiger’s pornography shop can only be hinted at, and Carmen (Martha Vickers) is no longer naked in Geiger’s house or Marlowe’s apartment; she’s fully clothed. Rusty Regan, renamed "Sean Regan," is a paid companion employed by General Sternwood, rather than his son-in-law; we are told that he and Marlowe were once friendly enemies on different sides of the law during Regan’s bootlegging days. Vivian is renamed "Mrs. Rutledge," and the number of times she’s been married is reduced, presumably in another concession to the censors.

The biggest changes actually came after principle photography ended. Ms. Bacall’s star was on the rise, and the studio wanted to exploit the well-publicized romance between her and Bogart, so the film’s release was delayed to give the director, legendary filmmaker Howard Hawks, time to reshoot several scenes, and to include new scenes designed to enhance Ms. Bacall’s role. Accordingly, Vivian appears in a lengthened version of the scene in which Marlowe drives Carmen home from the murder scene at Geiger’s house. Toward the end of the film it is Vivian, rather than Mona Mars, who assists Marlowe in the shootout with Canino. And, in an entirely new scene, Marlowe and Vivian exchange suggestive horse-racing banter. Significantly, Bogart’s Marlowe accepts Vivian’s romantic overtures, as both characters admit that they are in love with each other.

London Calling

While Chandler was pleased with the 1946 adaptation of The Big Sleep, we don't know what he would have thought of the 1978 remake starring Robert Mitchum as Marlowe. This was Mitchum’s second appearance as the detective, following his well-received performance in 1975’s Farewell, My Lovely.

Inexplicably, this version of The Big Sleep is set in late 1970’s London. Aside from the dissonant setting, the film is actually a fairly faithful adaptation of the book, more so in some ways than the Bogart version. Oddly, in many respects, this is not to its advantage. In free and easy 1978, for example, it seems ludicrous for a pornographer to be operating behind the front of a rare bookshop. The film’s counterparts to Carmen’s nude scenes from the book actually show Carmen (renamed Camilla for no apparent reason, and played by Candy Clark) nude in the 1978 film, but, curiously, are far less erotic than the fully-clothed scenes with Martha Vickers three decades earlier.

On the Radio

In 1977, just about a year before the release of the Mitchum version of The Big Sleep, BBC radio broadcast a five episode Philip Marlowe radio series starring Ed Bishop in the title role. Where the bulk of the episodes from the NBC and CBS radio shows of the 1940s had been original stories utilizing the Marlowe character, with a small number adapted from Chandler’s short stories, the episodes of the BBC series were all based on Marlowe novels, and the first broadcast was an adaptation of The Big Sleep. Produced by John Tydeman and written by Bill Morrison, the series was well-received in both the UK and in the radio drama-deprived U.S. However, in the United States at least, radio drama was basically a nostalgic memory, and the series, though popular, didn’t have a major impact. Its initial broadcast in Britain, where radio drama remains a regular feature of popular entertainment, did little other than to further cement the appeal Chandler had always had with British audiences.

In this lesson, we’ve seen how Chandler developed and perfected the character types that would become a mainstay of the form. In Lesson 5, we’ll discuss his next novel, Farewell, My Lovely, which Chandler believed was the best of his books. We’ll continue to assess Chandler’s lasting contributions to the genre in terms of language, setting, and pacing, and we’ll decide whether we agree with Chandler’s own judgment of Farewell, My Lovely.

Discussion

Please post your responses to the topics below on the message board.

1. After reading The Big Sleep, what strikes you as most significant about this novel? What did you enjoy most about it? Why do you think critics today consider it an important work?

2. In the 1946 film version of The Big Sleep, Marlowe manages to arrange things so that Eddie Mars gets what he deserves, but in the book, though Canino is taken care of, Mars pretty much walks off free. Which ending do you find more satisfying? Which is more honest?

3. In this lesson, we’ve discussed the importance of character as it relates to our readings. Can you think of other characters in literary fiction that you believe are descendants of Chandler?

4. Now that you have a solid understanding of Chandler’s style, can you think of other authors who owe a debt to Chandler? How will your study of Chandler influence your reading of crime fiction in the future?

Lesson 8: Chandler’s Legacy

"For the basic art of the motion picture is the screenplay; it is fundamental, without it there is nothing. Everything derives from the screenplay, and most of that which derives is an applied skill which, however adept, is artistically not in the same class with the creation of a screenplay. But in Hollywood the screenplay is written by a salaried employee under the supervision of a producer—that is to say, by an employee without power or decision over the uses of his own craft, without ownership of it, and, however extravagantly paid, almost without honor for it."
—Raymond Chandler, "Writers in Hollywood," Atlantic Monthly, November 1945

The period between 1939 and 1943 was Chandler’s most productive as a novelist. From then until his death in 1959, he would only write three more novels. Yet those seven novels (and in particular the first four) set a pattern that mystery writers, especially private eye writers, have faithfully followed ever since. In this lesson, we will examine how Chandler became so influential. We will discuss his work as a screenwriter, and analyze how the screen adaptations of his first four Marlowe novels may have contributed as much to his influence as his prose. We will also trace his legacy in crime fiction by looking at some of the contemporary writers who have followed in his footsteps.

The Aesthetic of Noir

We have studied Chandler’s work, style, and aesthetic, and we have analyzed the evolution of hard-boiled fiction. Now we will discuss the evolution of noir, and learn that while noir and hard-boiled share some similarities, they are not necessarily synonymous. As we've discussed, the French word "noir" has been used most commonly in this country to refer to film. A particular type of gritty, sinister mystery movie is often referred to as a "film noir."

Its use in the context of crime fiction originated with the prestigious French publishing company Gallimard, which, in 1945, began publishing a mystery line called Serie Noir. Serie Noir’s editor, Marcel Duhamel, was an expert in American literature. Consequently, many of the books published under the Serie Noir logo were translations of American hard-boiled crime novels by authors such as Hammett, Jonathan Latimer, and W.R. Burnett. Three of the earliest Serie Noir books were written by Chandler.
Notice the visual style in this poster for The Killers: Is it any surprise that French critics dubbed the new aesthetic "noir"?

Many American crime films produced during and just after the War began to make their way to France. French film critics were struck by the way movies like This Gun for Hire and The Killers effortlessly captured the dark underbelly of urban America. Perhaps because the source novels for many of these films had been published under the Serie Noir imprint, they were eventually dubbed film noir. It’s not precisely clear who first coined this term. At least two well-known French film critics, Nino Frank and Jean-Pierre Chartier, have been credited with originating the phrase. In any case, it was soon a commonly used term among French critics.

Films classified as noir ran a fairly wide gamut of subjects. They included private eye films like The Maltese Falcon and The Dark Corner, gangster films like The Asphalt Jungle and Johnny Eager, semi-documentary cop films like The Naked City and He Walked by Night, "message" pictures like Crossfire and No Way Out, and even romantic suspense movies like Laura and The Spiral Staircase.

These films have in common certain visual flourishes. Invariably black-and-white, noir films tended to use light and shadow in ways that heightened the sense of dread and desperation that characterized the stories. The term began to be used commonly in the United States during the 1970s, nearly a decade after the last films generally regarded as part of the "noir cycle" were released. Driving the end of the noir period in film was the fact that after the mid-1960s, few black-and-white commercial American films were being released. The ambience of noir required the kind of imagery most easily achieved in black-and-white. The popular American recognition of noir films soon led to a re-evaluation of the novels and stories that these films were often based on, and to a new appreciation of the source material.

Literary Noir

In recent publishing jargon, noir has come to be used as a synonym for "hard-boiled," perhaps in the belief that the hard-boiled sub-genre is passé and difficult to sell. But noir, evoking modern European intellectualism, has more appeal.

This may be sound business thinking, but it’s not precisely accurate. As we’ve seen, not all noir fiction, either in prose or in film, is hard-boiled. Nor is all hard-boiled fiction noir. They’re certainly not mutually exclusive, but nor are they precisely identical.

Scholars have noted that many of the films in the noir cycle, particularly those based on the works of James M. Cain, end with the protagonist doomed and lost after a making a series of increasingly unfortunate and ill-advised choices. This suggests that to be truly noir, the story must feature a protagonist who is destined to meet a bad end. But plenty of film noirs, and plenty of the books from which they derive, feature heroes who overcome their obstacles and triumph in the end. So, while doom and pessimism is clearly an element in many stories correctly labeled noir, those can’t be regarded as defining elements because they are missing from too many stories which are also labeled noir, and rightfully so.

For our purposes in this course, we’ve adopted a much simpler definition. If, in the film medium, noir can be defined as a crime movie that achieves a dark, sinister atmosphere through its visual style, then, in literature, noir is a crime story that achieves that dark, sinister atmosphere through prose.

Chandler’s Efforts

As noted in earlier lessons, Chandler always tried to imbue his fiction with what he called "the smell of fear." So, before the term noir had even been coined, Chandler was making a concerted effort to convey the style of noir in his stories and novels. After your extensive reading of Chandler in this course, you can probably think of dozens of passages and scenes that prove him a master of noir. However, particular examples spring to mind.

An obvious example is the opening passage of the short story "Red Wind," in which Chandler sets the mood for the rest of the piece by his description of the hot, dry Santa Ana that runs as a motif through the entire tale. Indeed, in no other work is everything else—plot, character, logic—so subordinated to the atmosphere Chandler is trying to create.

Another prime example is the hospital sequence from Farewell, My Lovely, in which Marlowe must fight his way out of a drug-induced haze to escape the sinister medical facility. Here, Chandler does not quite sacrifice plot and character to atmosphere, as he did in "Red Wind." Indeed, in this sequence, plot, character, and atmosphere are admirably balanced, so that we gain insight into the kind of man Marlowe is, and see the plot move forward in a logical manner, while simultaneously marveling at Chandler’s ability to evoke that fearful scent. Compare the sequence from the novel with its counterpart in the short story, "The Man Who Liked Dogs." Notice that the short story version is effective, but the same sequence in the novel is much richer and more atmospheric.

To many of us, noir is a term better suited to film than to literature. An argument could be made that Chandler, for all his sure-handedness with noir elements in his prose work, is regarded as the master of noir less because of his novels and stories than because of his screenplays. In the next topic, we will discuss Chandler’s screenplays, and analyze how he furthered his stylistic ambitions in this new medium.

Lesson 8: Chandler’s Legacy

Chandler’s Influence

In 1943, Paramount acquired the screen rights to a novel by James M. Cain (another Serie Noir author) called Double Indemnity. In that story, a bored wife and her lover conspire to murder her husband for his life insurance. The project was turned over to director/screenwriter Billy Wilder, who liked the book very much. Unfortunately, Wilder’s most frequent screen-writing partner, Charles Brackett, did not; he refused to have anything to do with the project. As Cain himself was unavailable, the producer suggested bringing in Chandler, a writer whom he thought was similar to Cain, as a collaborator for Wilder.

Chandler would probably have bristled at the notion that he and Cain worked in the same tradition, since he had expressed intense dislike for Cain’s work. In a letter to his publisher, Chandler once described Cain as "a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things, but because they write about it in a dirty way."

But Chandler hadn’t yet earned the income that he’d hoped for from his novels, and he accepted a lucrative offer from the studio: $750 per week, for as long as it took to get the script written. Chandler and Wilder were not happy collaborators, as their work styles and personalities were very different. Years later, Chandler described the process of collaborating with Wilder as "an agonizing experience [that] has probably shortened my life," though he added that he had "learned from it as much about screenwriting as I am capable of learning."

Much of the material in the script, by the standards of the day, shouldn’t have gotten past the censors. It is a testament to the skill of Wilder and Chandler that they were able to write about the frank details of a plot in which the main characters were a pair of adulterous murderers in a way that the censors found acceptable. The script that emerged from that collaboration was a winner, as was the film made from it. Directed by Wilder, it starred Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, and Edward G. Robinson. Enthusiastically received by critics and audiences alike, both the film and the screenplay were nominated for Academy Awards.

Double Indemnity is one of the most famous and best-regarded films of the noir cycle. It launched Chandler’s career as a screenwriter, and made him the flavor of the month in the film industry. As a result, his books were suddenly quite valuable as potential film properties. Between 1945 and 1947, all four of the Marlowe novels written to that point were filmed as "A" pictures.

The Blue Dahlia
Chandler completed his Oscar-nominated script for The Blue Dahlia during a now-famous drinking binge.

Over the next two years, Chandler wrote two more screenplays for Paramount. One was a romantic soap opera called And Now Tomorrow, and the other was a horror film entitled The Unseen. Both were adaptations of popular novels, and neither was the kind of material with which Chandler was identified. But they completed his contractual obligations to the studio.

While working on The Unseen, Chandler developed a close friendship with producer John Houseman. Like Chandler, Houseman had been educated at British public schools, and Chandler sensed that they were like-minded "English gentlemen." Late in 1944, Houseman was given the assignment of quickly putting together a vehicle for Paramount’s number one star, Alan Ladd. It had to be started and completed while Ladd was enjoying a fairly short leave from military duty. Houseman pulled strings and, within two weeks, Chandler was given a $1,000-a-week contract for an original screenplay.

Chandler completed the first half of the script fairly quickly, and shooting commenced immediately. Suddenly, Chandler developed writer’s block. As an incentive, the studio offered an additional $5,000 bonus if Chandler could deliver the completed script on schedule.

The offer had an effect precisely opposite of what was intended. As Houseman described it in an article he wrote entitled "Lost Fortnight" (The World of Raymond Chandler), the offer upset Chandler in three ways. First, Chandler’s faith in himself was destroyed. Secondly, Chandler felt insulted by what he considered a dishonor: to be offered an additional sum of money for the completion of an assignment that he had every intention of fulfilling. And finally, according to Houseman, Chandler was enraged by the suggestion that he should make a deal behind Houseman’s back, in effect betraying a friend.

Chandler did finish the script, in a strange episode of binge drinking. He worked at his house rather than at the studio office. Chauffeurs and secretaries were available around the clock, and nurses were on hand to give him vitamin shots while he wrote and drank.

The film was released to both critical and commercial success, although Chandler was not altogether pleased with editorial changes made to placate the Navy. Moreover, he was critical of some of the cast members, including Ladd. In his more charitable moments, he referred to Veronica Lake as "Miss Moronica Lake." Of the director, George Marshall, he said "[he] had been thirty years in Hollywood without ever doing a first class job," though he did admit, "in fairness," that he’d never done one that was truly bad, either.

In the end, with what seemed like weary resignation, Chandler pronounced The Blue Dahlia "no classic, but no dud either." He earned a second Academy Award nomination for his script, and The Blue Dahlia, like Double Indemnity, is now considered a benchmark in the history of film noir.

Other Screen Projects

The Blue Dahlia completed Chandler’s contract with Paramount. He then went to MGM to work on an adaptation of his own novel, The Lady in the Lake, but said he disliked the process of adapting his own work to another medium because working with familiar material was boring; this is ironic, considering that three of his four novels had been cannibalized from his short stories. Chandler wasn’t able to finish the script before his contract expired, and it was turned over to journeyman screenwriter Steve Fisher to complete. Chandler was very displeased with the planned treatment planned for the film, in which Marlowe, in effect, would become the camera. When the film was released, Chandler was credited with authorship of the source material, but he refused credit for the screenplay. Fisher alone received credit for the script.

Chandler was later approached by Warner Brothers about adapting Patricia Highsmith’s novel, Strangers on a Train, for legendary director Alfred Hitchcock. In the interim, he had written the fifth Marlowe novel, The Little Sister, which is perhaps the most searing depiction of the film industry to be found in his fiction. His distaste for Hollywood had not abated, but he accepted—partly, he later said, for the chance to work with Hitchcock. The collaboration was not a happy one. Hitchcock and Chandler were different kinds of storytellers, and their styles did not mesh. In the end, Chandler was replaced with Czenzi Ormande (with whom he eventually shared screen credit). According to some sources, though he was credited as a co-writer, little of his script survived after Omande’s revisions. Neither Chandler nor Hitchcock spoke of the other with fondness after their stint of working together.

Chandler’s Final Years

Strangers on a Train was Chandler’s last screenplay. In "Writers in Hollywood," an article published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1945, Chandler described the indignities suffered by screenwriters in the most caustic of terms. "The making of a picture ought to be a rather fascinating adventure," he wrote. "It is not; it is an endless contention of tawdry egos, some of them powerful, almost all of them vociferous, and almost none of them capable of anything much more creative than credit-stealing and self-promotion." It’s unlikely that his experiences with either the unproduced script for Playback, or the produced but severely altered scripts for Lady and Strangers, changed his opinion for the better.

Over the next few years, Chandler nursed his wife Cissy, who was slowly dying of a debilitating illness, while simultaneously working on his most ambitious novel, The Long Goodbye. This book, the first Marlowe novel in a half-dozen years, appeared in Great Britain in November 1953 and in the United States the following January. A bit more than a year after the book’s British publication, Cissy passed away. The years after Cissy’s death were marked by a tragic cycle of drinking binges, suicide attempts, and joyless affairs.

After The Long Goodbye, Chandler was able to complete one more book, a thin 1958 volume entitled Playback. This was a novelization of the unproduced Universal screenplay into which he inserted Philip Marlowe. The book ended with Marlowe making arrangements for a romantic encounter with Linda Loring, the wealthy divorcée he’d met in The Long Goodbye. It is generally regarded as the weakest entry in the series.

Chandler started one more book, Poodle Springs, in which (apparently at the suggestion of English mystery writer Maurice Guinness) he married Marlowe off to Loring, but evidently thought better of it. After four chapters, Chandler put the manuscript aside, writing to Guinness in February of 1959 that "a fellow of Marlowe’s type shouldn’t get married, because he is a lonely man, a poor man, a dangerous man, and yet a sympathetic man, and somehow none of this goes with marriage."

Instead of saddling Marlowe with Loring in a novel, Chandler wrote a short story, eventually published as "The Pencil," in which he brought back Anne Riordan, the "nice girl" from Farewell, My Lovely, as a potential romantic partner for Marlowe. After a nearly two decade absence, she was still only 28 (and still a virgin). This was the last Marlowe project Chandler managed to complete. On March 23, having contracted pneumonia, Chandler was admitted to the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, California. He died there three days later.

"The Pencil," published under the title "Marlowe Takes on the Syndicate," appeared the following month in the London Daily Mail. Philip Marlowe had managed to outlive his creator.

Lesson 8: Chandler’s Legacy

Mysteries Today

Chandler has been called the most influential mystery writer of the 20th century, not without justification. Certainly, he is the most influential, or at least the most emulated, in the mystery subgenre of the hard-boiled private eye story.

However, when one considers that he was not the first private eye writer, and that at least one of his predecessors, Hammett, was, arguably, just as superlative a talent, the depth and breadth of Chandler’s influence might seem a bit difficult to explain.

"The Marlowe Paradigm"

One of the most obvious manifestations of Chandler’s influence is Marlowe’s emergence as the archetype of the private eye. Consider the following character traits: unmarried, male, American, ex-cop, 30 to 40 years old, owns and operates his own one-man agency, works in a large American city, and tells his stories in the first person.
Humphrey Bogart, as Marlowe in The Big Sleep, embodied many of the characteristics we now think of as central to the tough, lone private eye character.

That’s a pretty good encapsulated description of Marlowe. Significantly, it’s also a pretty good capsule description of most of the hard-boiled private eye characters created since Marlowe. Conservatively, we can estimate that 60 percent of all fictional, post-Marlowe private eyes fit that eight-point description in every respect, and most of the rest fit that description in all but one or two respects.

Some might argue that these are only surface details, that Chandler’s true influence lies deeper, in his attempt—his largely successful attempt—to turn a fictional genre held in low esteem into a vehicle for truly artistic writing. And there’s justice to this assertion.

But influence manifests itself in surface details, and it’s remarkable that the archetype of what a hard-boiled private detective is comes to us not from Hammett, who was the innovator, who was arguably just as talented, and who actually knew what being a private detective was really like, but from Chandler, who came later and who had no first-hand experience in the profession.

When we think of a private eye, it’s not the operative of a large world-wide agency that comes to mind; it’s the lone wolf in his shabby office barely eking out a living. It’s not the spare, stripped-down ruthlessly objective third person style that we associate with the PI; rather, it’s the more personal, elegiac, poetic first-person style. It’s not the hard-nosed professional who can sleep with a woman one day and turn her over to the cops the next that’s our prototype of the private eye; it’s the slightly tarnished modern-day knight errant, forever on the lookout for a damsel in distress to rescue.

Perhaps Marlowe’s status as the PI archetype stems from this last point: his embodiment of the knightly virtues of chivalry and honor. Hammett’s protagonists might do heroic things, but they do them because it is their job. They might operate by a code, but it is largely unspoken, and on the rare occasions when attempts are made to explain it, they are as remarkable for what is left unsaid as for what is said. The Op might say, "I’m a detective because I happen to like the work." Sam Spade would say, "When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it." By contrast, Marlowe agonizes over his chosen profession not being "a game for knights." The Op and Spade are concerned with getting the job done; we could say that they’re results-oriented. Marlowe is concerned with doing the right thing; we could say that he’s more process-oriented.

Heroism is a more attractive quality than professional competence, and this might explain why Marlowe, rather than the Op or Spade, is the model subsequent writers have tended to follow.

At the Movies

In a 1948 letter to fellow mystery writer Cleve F. Adams, Chandler remarked on the fact that he seemed to have replaced Hammett as the leading proponent of hard-boiled crime fiction.

Since Hammett has not written for publication since 1932, I have been picked out by some people as the leading representative of the school. This is very likely due to the fact that The Maltese Falcon did not start the high budget mystery picture trend, although it ought to have. Double Indemnity and Murder, My Sweet did, and I was associated with both of them. The result is that everybody who used to be accused of writing like Hammett may now be accused of trying to write like Chandler.

Chandler made an excellent point here. Movies have a more immediate and farther-reaching impact on popular culture than novels. It’s very likely, for example, that more people have seen the film Gone With the Wind than have read Margaret Mitchell’s novel, and few who read the book now can do so without having the film cast in mind as they conjure images of the book’s characters.

And Chandler, as he says, was associated with high-budget films. The films made from his books were made as "A" pictures. And because of the way he sold those books, one at a time rather than all in a group, different studios bought the rights to different books, and subsequently made different Marlowe pictures.

This was in sharp contrast to the way most mystery film series featuring a continuing character were made at the time. The common practice was for a studio to buy the rights to all the books featuring a character, as well as rights to the character himself, and release a series of quickly made, low-budget "B" films featuring the same cast in picture after picture. Warner Oland was identified with 20th Century Fox’s Charlie Chan, Basil Rathbone with Universal’s Sherlock Holmes, Ralph Bellamy with Columbia’s Ellery Queen, and so on. When the studios ran out of original material to adapt, they’d simply commission original screenplays featuring that character, having bought the rights to the character as well as the stories in which he appeared.

The films made from Chandler’s four Marlowe novels followed a different, and unique, path; produced by different studios, they each used a different actor in the pivotal role of Marlowe. Between 1945 and 1947, audiences did not see several low-budget movies with a single interpretation of the Marlowe character, but four very different high-budget interpretations of that character. At the same time, each of the films, 1945’s Murder, My Sweet (RKO), 1946’s The Big Sleep (Warner’s), and 1947’s The Lady in the Lake (MGM) and The Brasher Doubloon (Fox), adhered, with a fair amount of faithfulness, to Chandler’s vision of the character.

Investigation:
Analyzing Noir

In this lesson, we’ve discussed Chandler’s contributions to the aesthetic of noir. Illustrate your understanding of the concept by thinking of an additional example of noir fiction. You may choose literature or film. Post your choice to the message board, and explain your reasons for selecting this work.

Seeing the same character being given different, but still valid and faithful, interpretations over a short period of time probably went a long way to creating in audiences the expectation that a hard-boiled private eye character was a character who was supposed to be just like Philip Marlowe, because the movies showed that a character could be just like Philip Marlowe and yet be different. Writers, in a variety of mediums, created PI characters (very often deliberately) in the image and likeness of Marlowe.

Marlowe’s Disciples

Of course, the best of the private eye writers who followed in Chandler’s wake were able to use that paradigm as a launch point. Bart Spicer’s Philadelphia PI, Carney Wilde, meets all of the eight-points in the pattern described above, but Wilde added two additional traits: ambition and business savvy. Science fiction writer Milton Lesser, who adopted the Chandlerian pseudonym Stephen Marlowe for his private eye novels (and eventually took it as his legal name), also followed the paradigm in every respect, adding in an element of world travel. Thomas B. Dewey’s Mac added compassion for children; Ed Lacy’s Toussaint Moore was the first black private eye in fiction, predating Ernest Tidyman’s John Shaft by more than a dozen years. Michael Collins’s Dan Fortune was physically handicapped. Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder struggled with alcoholism and guilt from a bad shooting back in his cop days. But, at least in the beginning, they all followed the Chandler pattern.

The Chandler pattern was so pervasive in PI fiction that, in 1988, an anthology of new Marlowe stories was proposed; they would be written by contemporary PI writers as an homage to celebrate Chandler’s centenary. One critic wryly observed that writing Marlowe stories seemed to be what most of the contributors were already doing anyway.

One of the most interesting things about that anthology, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, edited by Byron Preiss, is the degree to which the contributors approached Marlowe as a blank slate on whom they could impose their own notions of characterization, themes, and storytelling techniques. Hence, Max Allan Collins, who writes historical private eye novels based on famous real-life crimes, fictionalized a real life crime and had Marlowe solve it. Midwestern law professor Francis M. Nevins wrote a story in which Marlowe travels to the Midwest and gets involved in a case that turns on an interpretation of probate law. Native New Yorker Robert J. Randisi brought Marlowe to the Big Apple for an adventure set in Manhattan’s Grand Central Station, while Mexican mystery writer Pablo Ignacio Taibo II brought Marlowe south of the border. Edward D. Hoch, best-known for short stories featuring classically skull-crushing puzzles, involved Marlowe with a classic puzzle. And Roger L. Simon, whose Moses Wine novels are marked by an unabashedly left-wing sensibility, wrote Marlowe into a story promoting his political views. Marlowe’s iconic status had allowed him to become whatever those writers wanted him to become.

Ross Macdonald

As we mentioned earlier in the course, Hammett, Chandler, and Ross Macdonald are considered the triumvirate of authors of hard-boiled fiction. (It became such a cliché for reviewers to refer to a private eye novel as being written "in the tradition of Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald," that the idea was even spoofed by Charles Schulz in his Peanuts comic strip.) Ross Macdonald (the pen name of Kenneth Millar), is the author of the acclaimed Lew Archer novels.

Like Chandler, Macdonald became fascinated by the literary possibilities in American colloquial language. But where Chandler had been inspired by Hammett, Macdonald was inspired by Chandler. Indeed, he admitted that Lew Archer "was patterned on Chandler’s Marlowe." (Though, in a tip of the hat to Hammett, he named his detective character after Sam Spade’s murdered partner, Miles Archer.)

Robert B. Parker

Currently, the single most successful private eye writer is former literature professor Robert B. Parker, whose doctoral dissertation was devoted to Hammett and Chandler. And the most successful fictional detective is Parker’s creation, Boston PI Spenser. Parker, like Macdonald, was completely upfront about his debt to Chandler, admitting that he started writing the Spenser novels because Chandler hadn’t written enough Marlowe novels.

Parker has actually written two Marlowe novels. He completed Chandler’s unfinished novel, Poodle Springs. Reviews were mixed, but the book was successful enough that Chandler’s estate commissioned Parker to do a second, wholly original, Marlowe novel the following year. 1990’s Perchance to Dream was a direct sequel to The Big Sleep, involving Marlowe a second time in the troubles and travails of the Sternwood sisters.

Loren D. Estleman

Parker may have been the man the Chandler estate tagged to continue Marlowe’s adventures, but many would have said that the best-qualified was former journalist Loren D. Estleman. His novels about Detroit PI Amos Walker, beginning with 1980’s Motor City Blue, have probably come closer to approximating Chandler’s gift for vivid writing and crisp dialogue than any other contemporary mystery writer. His depiction of contemporary Detroit and the surrounding metropolitan area rivals Chandler’s portrait of Southern California. A former art student, Estleman was impressed with Chandler’s ability to draw striking imagery through the use of similes and metaphors. And perhaps no current writer is as adept at the use of Chandler-like imagery as Estleman. Also, like the characters Archer and Spenser, Walker follows the paradigm in every respect.

Estleman, like Macdonald and Parker, has been totally forthright about Chandler’s influence. "I continue to reread all his fiction," he has said, "using it as a sort of lodestone to remind me where I came from and how far I have to go."

Max Allan Collins

Max Allan Collins is perhaps best known for writing the Dick Tracy comic strip for a dozen years, and for writing the graphic novel Road to Perdition. Of course, this is the same story on which the critically acclaimed gangster picture Road to Perdition was based. One of the first successful mystery writers of the "Baby Boom" generation, Collins has garnered his best critical notices for a series of historical private eye novels, set from the Depression through the early 1960s, featuring Chicago private investigator Nate Heller. Each book or short story involves Heller in a famous real-life crime or mystery, such as the Lindbergh kidnapping, the hunt for John Dillinger, the assassination of Huey Long, and the disappearance of Amelia Earhart. Collins’ stated purpose in the series is to explore these factual incidents through the prism of a Chandler-inspired private eye, "a Philip Marlowe type," as he put it. In his first appearance, 1983’s True Detective, Heller follows the Marlowe paradigm in every respect save age (he’s only 25 in that novel). Fittingly, the decades that Heller spent in the detective business, from the early 1930s to the late 1950s and early 1960s, roughly parallel the decades that Chandler spent writing about Marlowe.

Sue Grafton

The most noteworthy change in private eye fiction over the last two decades has been the introduction of female characters. Tough, hard-nosed, thoroughly professional but female detectives like Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone, Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski, and Maxine O’Callahan’s Delilah West have become forces to reckon with in PI fiction. It’s possible that more PI novels currently being published feature female characters rather than male ones.

What’s most interesting about these woman sleuths is how many of them, while appearing to be wholly innovative, nevertheless follow the Marlowe paradigm in every respect save gender. Perhaps the most popular of the female PI’s, Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone, is a case in point. Unmarried, in her early 30s, and a veteran of stints on both the Santa Teresa Police Department and the Investigation Division of the Santa Teresa County Public Defender’s Office, Milhone operates her own, one-woman agency in a town that, if not quite a major metropolitan center in its own right, is part of the huge Southern California megalopolis that has Los Angeles at its center. "Santa Teresa," by the way, is a slightly fictionalized version of Santa Barbara, and was so dubbed by Ross Macdonald in the first Lew Archer novel, The Moving Target. By using that name for Milhone’s base of operations, Grafton pays homage to those authors who have gone before her. Finally, Milhone tells her story in a highly engaging first-person style, deliberately reminiscent of Chandler and the rest of his disciples.

Media Adaptations

In 1969, Chandler’s iconic sleuth returned to the big screen, in color for the first time, in an adaptation of The Little Sister entitled Marlowe, released by MGM. James Garner, a close physical match to the character with a wry sense of comic timing that suited Marlowe’s ironic demeanor, stepped into the detective’s shoes for this outing.

The Little Sister was also adapted for the comic book medium in a 1997 publication written and illustrated by Michael Lark. Set in the 1940s, the graphic novel is a more faithful version of the novel, retaining much of the original narration and dialogue.

United Artist’s 1973 release of The Long Goodbye is the most unusual adaptation in terms of approach. Starring Elliot Gould and directed by Robert Altman, the script was written by Leigh Brackett. Marlowe is no longer presented as a slightly tarnished knight errant; he’s an ineffectual, impotent nebbish. As the film was being prepared, Altman reportedly described his approach this way: "I see Marlowe [as] . . . a loser . . . a real loser, not the fake winner Chandler made out of him. A loser all the way." That’s precisely how the film depicts him. For that reason, many Chandler aficionados roundly despise the film. But it does have its defenders, and a surprising number of them are also Chandler devotees.

Now that we’ve read and analyzed Chandler’s novels and short stories, his style, his aesthetic, his poetic sensibility, his characters, and his major themes, we can see all of the ways in which he has contributed to noir fiction. Chandler remains important not just for what he wrote, but for the effect that his writing had on those who came after him. Every mystery writer who ever sent a tough private eye on an adventure down a city’s mean streets in the search for hidden truth owes a debt to Chandler. So complete is Chandler’s influence that it’s become almost subliminal, part of our collective "pop culture" DNA.

Significantly, every mystery writer working today owes a debt to Chandler for all he did to raise a genre that was so debased to a level of literary respectability. Chandler set a standard of excellence to which all crime writers, whatever their subgenre, can aspire.

Discussion

Please consider the following questions, and post your responses to the message board.

1. In your opinion, is Chandler’s pervasive influence on the private-eye genre positive or negative? Does it continue to inspire writers to do their best, or does it lock them into a straitjacketed format?

2. Did Chandler’s particularly visual prose style serve him well as a screenwriter?

3. Is Chandler’s particularly visual prose style the main element in his ability to set mood, to imbue his stories with a dark and sinister atmosphere? Please share your thoughts.

4. After studying these lectures and Chandler’s books, along with other crime fiction with which you may be familiar, how would you define noir?

Robert B. Parker - The Spenser Novels

2005-02-11T19:22:00.000-06:00

Spenser and Hawk:
A Study of Good and Evil
in the Fiction of Robert B. Parker
Essay by Gerald So

Although detective stories use surprise and suspense, their success actually relies on meeting a reader's expectations: all mysteries can be solved; order can come out of chaos; good can conquer evil. Hard-boiled mystery writers cloud these conventions by placing them in a polluted society. In Richard Slotkin's words, this allows the reader "to play imaginatively at being both policeman and outlaw." (Slotkin, 100).

In his essay, "The Simple Art of Murder," Raymond Chandler gives the hard-boiled novel the following setting:

A world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket. Where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as a means of money making. Where no man can walk down the street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practicing. It is not a fragrant world, but it is the world you live in.
(Slotkin, 92)

While traditional fiction escapes human limitations, the hard-boiled novel exposes them. When the masks of good and evil are pulled away, the men behind them look very much alike. Robert B. Parker follows this premise to create his similar yet opposing characters, Spenser and Hawk. Through them, one is allowed to play Slotkin's dual role.

The hard-boiled style identifies closely with the human condition, imposing several limits on the reader. The most basic limit is setting. Seeming to confine its characters to a bleak atmosphere, Chandler's setting actually makes the hard-boiled fantasy all the more real.

To further engage in this fantasy, many writers draw on personal experience to create their detective heroes. In his profile of Robert B. Parker, David Geherin writes:

One learns not surprisingly that Parker, like Spenser, is a gourmet cook; that he is a large and powerfully built man who enjoys jogging and weight-lifting; that he frequently quotes poetry and has a quick and irreverent wit; that he has little patience with pretentiousness; that he is sensitive, capable of responding emotionally despite the outwardly stalwart image he projects.
(Geherin, 8)

Parker's Spenser distinguishes himself from the genius detectives of the past, saying that linear thinkers "want to know why and how come and what the source of a problem is and how to work out a solution to it." By contrast, he says, "A lot of what I do is a gut reaction." (Promised Land, 90-91)

In Chandler's world of social decay, a detective cannot solve problems with pure, rational thought. His own thoughts and feelings are products of this setting. First-person voice limits the reader to Spenser's perception of events and people while allowing intimate knowledge of his inner workings.

Unable to rely solely on powers of reason, the detective is forced to train himself physically. At six-one, one hundred ninety-five pounds, Spenser has been a state cop, a soldier, and a boxer. Currently, he calls himself a "professional thug." (Promised, 58).

A changing environment changes the face of crime. Modern crime is more than a series of mind games and mysterious thefts. To stay effective, a hero must adapt to his opponent's tactics. The new sleuth must be ready to meet murderers one on one. The professional thug is seen as the only man who can move freely through a hard-boiled setting.

Spenser's self-description may be flippant, but it raises a serious concern. In looking the part of a villain, the hero can easily slip into this role. Spenser's only protection against total decay is a code of behavior. Despite its human limitations, the hard-boiled mystery remains fiction. Parker must somehow meet reader expectations. Spenser's code allows him to do this.

Spenser explains to Susan Silverman "...all I have is how I act. It's the only system I fit into. Whatever the hell I am is based in part on not doing things I don't think I should do. Or don't want to do."(Mortal Stakes, 325-26)

Raised by his carpenter father and uncles, Spenser's code is the product of an honest, working background. A man's actions define him. Spenser earns his hero status by acting with honor; he loses it by acting dishonorably. Spenser's creator believes in the same code. (Geherin, 8)

Even with its simple, solid foundation, the code does not subvert Spenser's weaknesses altogether. Parker keeps the final outcome in doubt. The code operates on what Spenser thinks he should do; however, being human, Spenser's reason is not always at its best. Society colors his thoughts. His gut reactions sometimes ignore proper thinking. In fact, Spenser's explanation from Mortal Stakes comes after he has ambushed and killed two men to stop a blackmail scheme.

Spenser also describes his code as "jock ethic." (324) Fair play really matters to him. He may have won the day, but his victory is tainted because he "cheated." Thanks to first-person voice, the reader is caught in Spenser's moral dilemma. Like the listening Susan, one may have his own opinion on the justice of Spenser's actions. After all, on one level, the ending lives up to expectations: the hero kills the villains. At the same time, one cannot separate himself from Spenser's remorse over the ambush and his use of deadly force.

In Promised Land, the novel directly following Mortal Stakes, Parker introduces Hawk. As Spenser's dark counterpart both metaphorically and physically, Hawk is a stiffer test for the code than any situation the writer can imagine. In his first appearance Hawk is working for King Powers, a well-known crime boss. While Spenser tries to help people, Hawk is paid to hurt them. Given Spenser's blackmail scenario, Hawk would have no qualms ambushing the two men.

The reader may want to draw a distinct line between the good and the bad; however, Parker does not let him do this. As Hawk observes:

"Maybe he aiming to help. But he also like the work. You know? I mean he could be a social worker if he just want to help. I get nothing out of hurting people. Sometimes just happens that way. Just don't be so sure me and old Spenser are so damn different, Susan."
(88)

When Spenser's code fails in Mortal Stakes, he turns to Susan. At the end of the book, he jokes about letting her into his system. In Promised Land, she is indeed part of his system. Spenser retreats from Hawk's analysis, assuring Susan, "I don't beat people up for money. I don't kill people for money. He does." (89)

As much as the reader wants to believe Spenser, he must also empathize with Susan. Hawk's speech comes after she has seen Spenser goad Hawk's henchman into a fight. In doing this, he has again skirted the line between hero and thug.

One gains further insight into Parker's characters by revisiting Chandler. Having established the hardboiled setting, Chandler describes the man fit to survive it:

He will take no man's money dishonestly, and no man's insolence without due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man, and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.
(Slotkin, 94)

Here Chandler is discussing the detective hero, but Parker applies this description to both Spenser and Hawk.

Hawk believes Spenser's code complicates life. He often makes fun of Spenser for being a "straight-ahead man." (82) Thus, one may be surprised to learn that Hawk has his own sense of honor, and that the evidence for this comes from Spenser.

Other characters fear Hawk and--by Spenser's own account--the reader should fear him as well. Still, Spenser is just as quick to defend Hawk, saying Hawk "won't say yes and do no." (152) This is another example of how an author's chosen viewpoint can cloud morality. As first-person narrator, Spenser has gained the reader's trust. Now, over the opposition of several characters, the reader is inclined to believe Spenser's respectful assessment of Hawk.

Spenser's faith in Hawk is another manifestation of his code. It is tested by every insult against Hawk, by Susan's questions, and finally by Spenser's own doubts. Faith motivates Spenser to keep Hawk out of a police sting.

Promised Land ends with a confrontation between Hawk and Spenser. The code has apparently backfired again. King Powers orders Spenser killed, calling Hawk a "nigger" in the process. Hawk refuses the order, instead forcing Powers to fight Spenser hand to hand. As one might expect, Spenser wins. Susan asks Hawk to explain his sudden mutiny, and he responds:

"Me and your old man there are a lot alike. I told you that already. There ain't all that many of us left, guys like old Spenser and me. He was gone there'd be one less. I'd have missed him. And I owed him one from this morning."
(218)

In this response, Parker has managed to uphold the code and satisfy the reader's expectations.
Spenser and Hawk's current relationship draws on their common past as boxers. It is based on mutual respect. Each may not like the other's chosen profession, but both men know they are good at what they do. Hawk is indeed a proud man and--because Spenser maintains his respect--they do not fight.
Both Spenser and Hawk are in the business of "crime," and both have codes of behavior, so just how are they different? Parker's use of first-person limited voice helps answer this question. While first-person restricts the author to one perspective, it allows him to explore that perspective completely:

Driving back to Boston, I thought about my two retainers in the same week. Maybe I'd buy a yacht. On the other hand maybe it would be better to get the tear in my convertible roof fixed. The tape leaked.
(The Godwulf Manuscript, 61)

Chandler may have portrayed Marlowe as a solitary, driven figure, but Parker shows Spenser to be a man of his time with everyday problems.

Spenser also has an active social life. The reader not only gets to see Susan as professional good listener, but also in private as Spenser's lover. In Ceremony, the eighth book in the series, Spenser goes so far as to say "[Hawk] and I are part of the same cold place. You aren't. You're the source of warmth. Hawk has none. You're what makes me different from Hawk." (127)

With Spenser's declaration above, Susan becomes another important test for the code. Parker puts their relationship in doubt with the next book. Spenser has loved Susan intensely through eight books before the hint of trouble in The Widening Gyre. The couple actually separates in Valediction, and the impact on Spenser shows during a fight with gang members.

Spenser describes the fight as "force expanding in a kind of ecstasy, a frenzied release." In his depressed state, physical violence is more tempting. He is beginning to enjoy violence. Parker saves him by showing his building regret. "It was over too soon," Spenser says. "A shame in a way to waste the energy." He closes the scene by observing that "The Incredible Hulk doesn't have a girlfriend either." (73-74)

The reader, of course, wants Spenser and Susan to reunite. He knows they belong together. Having clouded these expectations over three books, Parker finally fulfills them in A Catskill Eagle. Spenser literally rescues Susan from her overprotective lover. The staging of Spenser's drama shows the light and dark sides of his code. Spenser's intense love drives Susan away. That same intense love, in a different light, brings her back.

Using first-person limited to show Spenser's many dimensions, Parker gives the reader ample opportunity to identify with him. By contrast, one cannot identify very well with Hawk.
The reader can only see what Spenser sees. As close as they are, Spenser has never been able to read Hawk the way he reads other people:

In fact, in all the time I'd known Hawk I'd never seen him show a sign of anything. He laughed easily and he was never off balance. But whatever went on inside stayed inside. Or maybe nothing went on inside. Hawk was as impassive and hard as an obsidian carving. Maybe that was what went on inside. (The Judas Goat, 89-90)

Hawk is a creature of control, not allowing anyone to see his real self. The reader can respect Hawk the way Spenser does, but he cannot know him as well as he knows Spenser.

To illustrate this point, Parker pits Hawk against love in Double Deuce. While he and Spenser probe a gangland murder, Hawk becomes involved with Jackie Raines. Jackie is a television producer doing a series on gangs. Hawk has known her for most of his life, and she shows a genuine interest in him.
To set up a showdown with Hawk, the Double Deuce gang kidnaps Jackie. The gang leader tries to use her to make Hawk kowtow to him. Instead, Hawk neutralizes the gang member guarding Jackie with an incredibly accurate shot. Jackie is shocked that Hawk remains so cold with her life in the balance. This shock leads her to leave him.

When Spenser asks Hawk whether he loved Jackie, he answers, "It never seemed a good idea to believe in [love]. . .. Always seemed easier to me to stay intact if you didn't." Hawk admits he has paid "a big price" to survive the mean streets. (220)

The real difference between Spenser and Hawk is revealed in comparing their codes. Spenser's code keeps him human. It sustains his relationship with Susan through a long trial. Conversely, Hawk's code makes him a deadly weapon by depriving him of love or any visible emotion at all.

Parker shows detective and enforcer as products of the same society. They look the same physically and, at first glance, either role is tempting to the reader. With a closer look, one can see Parker's style tilting light on Spenser while leaving Hawk in the dark.

When Parker offers the choice to play either character, readers lean toward the hero. Spenser is well rounded, and more of his motivation is seen in the text. With a skillfully subtle touch, Parker meets expectations in both individual stories and the larger picture. Mysteries are solved. Order is made from chaos. Good triumphs over evil.

WORKS CITED

Geherin, David. "Robert B. Parker." Sons of Sam Spade: The Private Eye Novel in the 70s. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980. 5-82.

Parker, Robert, B. The Godwulf Manuscript. 1973. New York: Dell, 1987.
---. God Save the Child. 1974. New York: Dell, 1987.
---. Mortal Stakes. 1975. New York: Dell, 1987.
---. Promised Land. 1976. New York: Dell, 1987.
---. The Judas Goat. 1978. New York: Dell, 1987.
---. Ceremony. 1982. New York: Dell, 1987.
---. The Widening Gyre. 1983. New York: Dell, 1987.
---. Valediction. 1984. New York: Dell, 1988.
---. A Catskill Eagle. 1985. New York: Dell, 1988.
---. Double Deuce. 1992. New York: Berkley, 1993.

Slotkin, Richard. "The Hard-Boiled Detective Story: From the Open Range to the Mean Streets." The Sleuth and the Scholar: Origins, Evolution, and Current Trends in Detective Fiction. Ed. Barbara A. Rader and Howard G. Zettler. New York: Greenwood Press, c. 1988. 91-100.

The Purpose of Fiction

2004-08-25T02:19:00.000-05:00

The Purpose of Fiction

by Clayton Meeker Hamilton
from A Manual of the Art of Fiction
originally published in 1918

Fiction a Means of Telling Truth.—Before we set out upon a study of the materials and methods of fiction, we must be certain that we appreciate the purpose of the art and understand its relation to the other arts and sciences. The purpose of fiction is to embody certain truths of human life in a series of imagined facts. The importance of this purpose is scarcely ever appreciated by the casual careless reader of the novels of a season. Although it is commonly believed that such a reader overestimates the weight of works of fiction, the opposite is true—he underestimates it. Every novelist of genuine importance seeks not merely to divert but also to instruct—to instruct, not abstractly, like the essayist, but concretely, by presenting to the reader characters and actions which are true. For the best fiction, although it deals with the lives of imaginary people, is no less true than the best history and biography, which record actual facts of human life; and it is more true than such careless reports of actual occurrences as are published in the daily newspapers. The truth of worthy fiction is evidenced by the honor in which it has been held in all ages among all races. "You can't fool all the people all the time"; and if the drama and the epic and the novel were not true, the human race would have rejected them many centuries ago. Fiction has survived, and flourishes today, because it is a means of telling truth.

Fact and Fiction.—It is only in the vocabulary of very careless thinkers that the words truth and fiction are regarded as antithetic. A genuine antithesis subsists between the words fact and fiction; but fact and truth are not synonymous. The novelist forsakes the realm of fact in order that he may better tell the truth, and lures the reader away from actualities in order to present him with realities. It is of prime importance, in our present study, therefore, that we should understand at the very outset the relation between fact and truth, the distinction between the actual and the real.

Truth and Fact.— A fact is a specific manifestation of a general law : this general law is the truth because of which that fact has come to be. It is a fact that when an apple-tree is shaken by the wind, such apples as may be loosened from their twigs fall to the ground: it is a truth that bodies in space attract each other with a force that varies inversely as the square of the distance between them. Fact is concrete, and is a matter of physical experience: truth is abstract, and is a matter of mental theory. Actuality is the realm of fact, reality the realm of truth. The universe as we apprehend it with our senses is actual; the laws of the universe as we comprehend them with our understanding are real.

The Search for Truth.—All human science is an endeavor to discover the truths which underlie the facts that we perceive: all human philosophy is an endeavor to understand and to appraise those truths when once they are discovered: and all human art is an endeavor to utter them clearly and effectively when once they are appraised and understood. The history of man is the history of a constant and continuous seeking for the truth. Amazed before a universe of facts, he has striven earnestly to discover the truth which underlies them—striven heroically to understand the large reality of which the actual is but a sensuously perceptible embodiment. In the earliest centuries of re-corded thought the search was unmethodical; truth was apprehended, if at all, by intuition, and announced as dogma: but in modern centuries certain regular methods have been devised to guide the search. The modern scientist begins his work by collecting a large number of apparently related facts and arranging them in an orderly manner. He then proceeds to induce from the observation of these facts an apprehension of the general law that explains their relation. This hypothesis is then tested in the light of further facts, until it seems so in-contestable that the minds of men accept it as the truth. The scientist then formulates it in an abstract theoretic statement, and thus concludes his work.

But it is at just this point that the philosopher begins. Accepting many truths from many scientists, the philosopher compares, reconciles, and correlates them, and thus builds out of them a structure of belief. But this structure of belief remains abstract and theoretic in the mind of the philosopher. It is now the artist's turn. Accepting the correlated theoretic truths which the scientist and the philosopher have given him, he endows them with an imaginative embodiment perceptible to the senses. He translates them back into concrete terms; he clothes them in invented facts; he makes them imaginatively perceptible to a mind native and indued to actuality; and thus he gives expression to the truth.

The Necessary Triple Process.—This triple process of the scientific discovery, the philosophic understanding, and the artistic expression of truth has been explained at length, because every great writer of fiction must pass through the entire mental process. The fiction-writer differs from other seekers for the truth, not in the method of his thought, but merely in its subject-matter. His theme is human life. It is some truth of human life that he endeavors to discover, to understand, and to announce; and in order to complete his work, he must apply to human life an attention of thought which is successively scientific, philosophic, and artistic. He must first observe carefully certain facts of actual life, study them in the light of extended experience, and induce from them the general laws which he deems to be the truths which underlie them. In doing this, he is a scientist. Next, if he be a great thinker, he will correlate these truths and build out of them a structure of belief. In doing this, he is a philosopher. Lastly, he must create imaginatively such scenes and characters as will illustrate the truths he has discovered and considered, and will convey them clearly and effectively to the minds of his readers. In doing this, he is an artist.

Different Degrees of Emphasis.—But although this triple mental process (of scientific discovery, philosophic understanding, and artistic expression) is experienced in full by every master of fiction, we find that certain authors are interested most in the first, or scientific phase of the process, others in the second, or philosophic phase, and still others in the third, or artistic phase. Evidently Emile Zola is interested chiefly in a scientific investigation of the actual facts of life, George Eliot in philosophic contemplation of its underlying truths, and Gabriele D'Annunzio in an artistic presentation of the dream-world that he imagines. Washington Irving is mainly an artist, Tolstoi mainly a philosopher, and Jane Austen mainly a scientifically accurate observer. Few are the writers, even among the greatest masters of the art, of whom we feel, as we feel of Hawthorne, that the scientist, the philosopher, and the artist reign over equal precincts of their minds. Hawthorne the scientist is so thorough, so accurate, and so precise in his investigations of provincial life that no less a critic than James Russell Lowell declared the "House of the Seven Gables" to be "the most valuable contribution to New England history that has yet been made." Hawthorne the philosopher is so wise in his understanding of crime and retribution, so firm in his structure of belief concerning moral truth, that it seems that he, if any one, might give an answer to that poignant cry of a despairing murderer,

"Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain, And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart?"

And Hawthorne the artist is so delicate in his sensitive and loving presentation of the beautiful, so masterly both in structure and in style, that his work, in artistry alone, is its own excuse for being. Were it not for the confinement of his fiction-its lack of range and sweep, both in subject-matter and in attitude of mind—his work on this account might be regarded as an illustration of all that may be great in the threefold process of creation.

The Art of Fiction and the Craft of Chemistry.—Fiction, to borrow a figure from chemical science, is life distilled. In the author's mind, the actual is first evaporated to the real, and the real is then condensed to the imagined. The author first transmutes the concrete actualities of life into abstract realities; and then he transmutes these abstract realities into concrete imaginings. Necessarily, if he has pursued this mental process without a fallacy, his imaginings will be true; because they represent realities, which in turn have been induced from actualities.

Fiction and Reality.—In one of his criticisms of the, greatest modern dramatist, Mr. William Archer has called attention to the fact that "habitually and instinctively men pay to Ibsen the compliment (so often paid to Shakespeare) of discussing certain of his female characters as though they were real women, living lives apart from the poet's creative intelligence." [It is evident that Mr. Archer, in saying "real women," means what is more precisely denoted by the words "actual women.") Such a compliment is also paid . instinctively to every master of the art of fiction; and the reason is not hard to understand. If the general laws of life which the novelist has thought out be true laws, and if his imaginative embodiment of them be at all points thoroughly consistent, his characters will be true men and women in the highest sense. They will not be actual, but they will be real. The great characters of fiction—Sir Willoughby Pattern, Tito Melema, D'Artagnan, Père Grandet, Rosalind, Tartufe, Hamlet, Ulysses—embody truths of human life that have been arrived at only after thorough observation of facts and patient induction from them. Cervantes must have observed a multitude of dreamers before he learned the truth of the idealist's character which he has expressed in Don Quixote. The great people of fiction are typical of large classes of mankind. They live more truly than do you and I, because they are made of us and of many men besides. They have the large reality of general ideas, which is a truer thing than the actuality of facts. This is why we know them and think of them as real people—old acquaintances whom we knew (perhaps) before we were born, when (as is conceivable) we lived with them in Plato's Realm of Ideas. In France, instead of calling a man a miser, they call him an Harpagon. We know Rosalind as we know our sweetest summer love; Hamlet is our elder brother, and understands our own wavering and faltering.

Fiction and History.—Instinctively also we regard the great people of fiction as more real than many of the actual people of a bygone age whose deeds are chronicled in dusty histories. To a modern mind, if you conjure with the name of Marcus Brutus, you will start the spirit of Shakespeare's fictitious patriot, not of the actual Brutus, of a very different nature, whose doings are dimly reported by the chroniclers of Rome. The Richelieu of Dumas père may bear but slight resemblance to the actual founder of the French Academy; but he lives for us more really than the Richelieu of many histories. We know Hamlet even better than we know Henri-Frédéric Amiel, who in many ways was like him; even though Amiel has reported himself more thoroughly than almost any other actual man. We may go a step further and declare that the actual people of any age can live in the memory of after ages only when the facts of their characters and their careers have been transmuted into a sort of fiction by the minds of creative historians. Actually, in 1815, there was but one Napoleon; now there are as many Napoleons as there are biographies and histories of him. He has been recreated in one way by one author, in another by another; and you may take your choice. You may accept the Julius Caesar of Mr. Bernard Shaw, or the Julius Caesar of Thomas De Quincey. The first is frankly fiction; and the second, not so frankly, is fiction also—just as far from actuality as Shakespeare's adaptation of Plutarch's portraiture.

Fiction and Biography.—One of the most vivid illustrations of how a great creative mind, honestly seeking to discover, to understand, and to express the truth concerning actual characters of the past, necessarily makes fiction of those characters, is given by Thomas Carlyle in his "Heroes and Hero-Worship." Here, in Carlyle's method of procedure, it is easy to discern that threefold process of creation which is undergone by the fiction-making mind. An examination of recorded facts concerning Mohammed, Dante, Luther, or Burns leads him to a discovery and a formulation of certain abstract truths concerning the Hero as Prophet, as Poet, as Priest, or as Man of Letters; and thereafter, in composing his historical studies, he sets forth only such actual facts as conform with his philosophic understanding of the truth and will therefore represent this understanding with the utmost emphasis. He makes fiction of his heroes, in order most emphatically to tell the truth about them.

Biography, History, and Fiction.—In this way biography and history at their best are doomed to em-ploy the methods of the art of fiction; and we can there-fore understand without surprise why the average reader always says of the histories of Francis Parkman that they read like novels, even though the most German-minded scientists of history assure us that Parkman is always faithful to his facts. Facts, to the mind of this model of historians, were indicative of truths; and those truths he endeavored to express with faultless art. Like the best of novelists, he was at once a scientist, a philosopher, and an artist; and this is not the least of reasons why his histories will endure. They are as true as fiction.

Fiction Which Is True.—Not only do the great characters of fiction convince us of reality: in the mere events themselves of worthy fiction we feel a fitness that makes us know them real. Sentimental Tommy really did lose that literary competition because he wasted a full hour searching vainly for the one right word; Hetty Sorrel really killed her child; and Mr. Henry must have won that midnight duel with the Master of Ballantrae, though the latter was the better swordsman. These incidents conform to truths we recognize. And not only in the fiction that clings close to actuality do we feel a sense of truth. We feel it just as keenly in fairy tales like those of Hans Christian Andersen, or in the worthiest wonder-legends of an earlier age. We are told of The Steadfast Tin Soldier that, after he was melted in the fire, the maid who took away the ashes next morning found him in the shape of a small tin heart; and remembering the spangly little ballet-dancer who fluttered to him like a sylph and was burned up in the fire with him, we feel a fitness in this little fancy which opens vistas upon human truth. Mr. Kipling's fable of "How the Elephant Got His Trunk" is just as true as his reports of Mrs. Hauksbee. His theory may not con-form with the actual facts of zoological science; but at any rate it represents a truth which is perhaps more important for those who have become again like little children.

Fiction Which Is False.—Just as we feel by instinct the reality of fiction at its best, so also with a kindred instinct equally keen we feel the falsity of fiction when the author lapses from the truth. Unless his characters act and think at all points consistently with the laws of their imagined existence, and unless these laws are in harmony with the laws of actual life, no amount of sophistication on the part of the author can make us finally believe his story; and unless we believe his story, his purpose in writing it will have failed. The novelist, who has so many means of telling truth, has also many means of telling lies. He may be untruthful in his very theme, if he is lacking in sanity of outlook upon the things that are. He may be untruthful in his characterization, if he interferes with his people after they are once created and attempts to coerce them to his purposes instead of allowing them to work out their own destinies. He may be untruthful in his plotting, if he devises situations arbitrarily for the sake of mere immediate effect. He may be untruthful in his dialogue, if he puts into the mouths of his people sentences that their nature does not demand that they shall speak. He may be untruthful in his comments on his characters, if the characters belie the comments in their actions and their words.

Casual Sins Against the Truth in Fiction.—With the sort of fiction that is a tissue of lies, the present study does not concern itself; but even in the best fiction we come upon passages of falsity. There is little likelihood, however, of our being led astray by these: we revolt instinctively against them with a feeling that may best be expressed in that famous sentence of Ibsen's Assessor Brack, "People don't do such things." When Shakespeare tells us, toward the end of "As You Like It," that the wicked Oliver suddenly changed his nature and won the love of Celia, we know that he is lying. The scene is not true to the great laws of human life. When George Eliot, at a loss for a conclusion to "The Mill on the Floss," tells us that Tom and Maggie Tulliver were drowned together in a flood, we disbelieve her; just as we disbelieve Sir James Barrie when he invents that absurd accident of Tommy's death. These three instances of falsity have been selected from authors who know the truth and almost always tell it; and all three have a certain palliation. They come at or near the very end of lengthy stories. In actual life, of course, there are no very ends: life exhibits a continuous sequence of causation stretching on: and since a story has to have an end, its conclusion must in any case belie a law of nature. Probably the truth is that Tommy didn't die at all: he is living still, and always will be living. And since Sir James Barrie couldn't write forever, he may be pardoned a makeshift ending that he himself apparently did not believe in. So also we may forgive that lie of Shakespeare's, since it contributes to a general truthfulness of goodwill at the conclusion of his story; and as for George Eliot—well, she had been telling the truth stolidly for many hundred pages.

More Serious Sins Against the Truth.—But when Charlotte Brontë, in "Jane Eyre," tells us that Mr. Rochester first said and then repeated the following sentence, "I am disposed to be gregarious and communicative to-night," we find it more difficult to pardon the apparent falsity. In the same chapter, the author states that Mr. Rochester emitted the following remark: —"Then, in the first place, do you agree with me that I have a right to be a little masterful, abrupt, perhaps exacting, sometimes, on the grounds I stated, namely, that I am old enough to be your father, and that I have battled through a varied experience with many men of many nations, and roamed over half the globe, while you have lived quietly with one set of people in one house?"

Such writing is inexcusably untrue. We cannot believe that any human being ever asked a direct question so elaborately lengthy. People do not talk like that. As a contrast, let us notice for a moment the poignant truthfulness of speech in Mr. Rudyard Kipling's story, "Only a Subaltern." A fever-stricken private says to Bobby Wick, "Beg y' pardon, sir, disturbin' of you now, but would you min"oldin' my 'and, sir"?—and later, when the private becomes convalescent and Bobby in his turn is stricken down, the private suddenly stares in horror at his bed, and cries, "Oh, my Gawd! It can't be 'im !" People talk like that.

The Futility of the Adventitious.—Arbitrary plotting, as a rule, is of no avail in fiction: almost always, we know when a story is true and when it is not. We seldom believe in the long-lost will that is discovered at last on the back of a decaying picture-canvas; or in the chance meeting and mutual discovery of long-separated relatives; or in such accidental circumstances as the one, for instance, because of which Romeo fails to receive the message from Friar Laurence. The incidents of fiction at its best are not only probable but inevitable: they happen because in the nature of things they have to happen, and not because the author wants them to. Similarly, the truest characters of fiction are so real that even their creator has no power to make them do what they will not. It has been told of Thackeray that he grew so to love Colonel Newcome that he wished ardently that the good man might live happily until the end. Yet, knowing the circumstances in which the Colonel was enmeshed, and knowing also the nature of the people who formed the little circle round about him, Thackeray realized that his last days would of necessity be miserable; and realizing this, the author told the bitter truth, though it cost him many tears.

The Independence of Created Characters.—The care-less reader of fiction usually supposes that, since the novelist invents his characters and incidents, he can order them always to suit his own desires: but any honest artist will tell you that his characters often grow intractable and stubbornly refuse at certain points to accept the incidents which he has foreordained for them, and that at other times they take matters into their own hands and run away with the story. Stevenson has recorded this latter experience. He said, apropos of "Kidnapped," "In one of my books, and in one only, the characters took the bit in their teeth; all at once, they became detached from the flat paper, they turned their backs on me and walked off bodily; and from that time my task was stenographic-it was they who spoke, it was they who wrote the remainder of the story."

The laws of life, and not the author's will, must finally decide the destinies of heroes and of heroines. On the evening of February 3, 1850, just after he had written the last scene of "The Scarlet Letter," Hawthorne read it to his wife—"tried to read it, rather," he wrote the next day in a letter to his friend, Horatio Bridge, "for my voice swelled and heaved, as if I were tossed up and down on an ocean as it subsides after a storm. But I was in a very nervous state then, having gone through a great diversity of emotion while writing it for many months." Is it not conceivable that, in the "great diversity of emotion" which the author experienced while. bringing his story to a close, he was tempted more than once to state that Hester and Dimmesdale escaped upon the Bristol ship and thereafter expiated their offense in holy and serviceable lives? But if such a thought occurred to him, he put it by, knowing that the revelation of the scarlet letter was inexorably demanded by the highest moral law.

Fiction More True Than a Casual Report of Fact.—We are now ready to understand the statement that fiction at its best is much more true than such careless reports of actual occurrences as are published in the daily news-papers. Water that has been distilled is much more really H2O than the muddied natural liquid in the bulb of the retort; and life that has been clarified in the threefold alembic of the fiction-writer's mind is much more really life than the clouded and unrealized events that are reported in daily chronicles of fact. The news-paper may tell us that a man who left his office in an apparently normal state of mind went home and shot his wife; but people don't do such things; and though the story states an actual occurrence, it does not tell the truth. The only way in which the reporter could make this story true would be for him to trace out all the antecedent causes which led inevitably to the culminating incident. The incident itself can become true for us only when we are made to understand it.

Robert Louis Stevenson once remarked that when-ever, in a story by a friend of his, he came upon a passage that was notably untrue, he always suspected that it had been transcribed directly from actual life. The author had been too sure of the facts to ask himself in what way they were representative of the general laws of life. But facts are important to the careful thinker only as they are significant of truth. Doubtless an omniscient mind would realize a reason for every accidental and apparently insignificant occurrence of actual life. Doubtless, for example, the Universal Mind must understand why the great musical-director, Anton Seidl, died suddenly of ptomaine poisoning. But to a finite mind such occurrences seem unsignificant of truth; they do not seem to be indicative of a necessary law. And since the fiction-writer has a finite mind, the laws of life which he can understand are more restrictedly logical than those undiscovered laws of actual life which pass his understanding. Many a casual occurrence of the actual world would therefore be inadmissible in the intellectually-ordered world of fiction. A novelist has no right to set forth a sequence of events which, in its causes and effects, he cannot make the reader understand.

The Exception and the Law.—We are now touching on a principle which is seldom appreciated by beginners in the art of fiction. Every college professor of literary composition who has accused a student of falsity in some passage of a story that the student has submitted has been met with the triumphant but unreasonable answer, "Oh, no, it's true! It happened to a friend of mine!" And it has then become necessary for the professor to explain as best he could that an actual occurrence is not necessarily true for the purposes of fiction. The imagined facts of a genuinely worthy story are exhibited merely because they are representative of some general law of life held securely in the writer's consciousness. A transcription, therefore, of actual facts fails of the purposes of fiction unless the facts in themselves are evidently representative of such a law. And many things may happen to a friend of ours without evidencing to a considerate mind any logical reason why they had to happen.

Truthfulness the only Title to Immortality.—It is necessary that the student should appreciate the importance of this principle at the very outset of his apprenticeship to the art. For it is only by adhering rigorously to the truth that fiction can survive. In every period of literature, many clever authors have appeared who have diverted their contemporaries with ingenious invention, brilliant incident, unexpected novelty of character, or alluring eloquence of style, but who have been discarded and forgotten by succeeding generations merely because they failed to tell the truth. Probably in the whole range of English fiction there is no more skilful weaver of enthralling plots, no more clever master of invention or manipulator of suspense, than Wilkie Collins; but Collins is already discarded and well-nigh forgotten, because the reading world has found that he exhibited no truths of genuine importance, but rather sacrificed the eternal realities of life for mere momentary plausibilities. Probably, also, there is no artist in French prose more seductive in his eloquence than René de Chateaubriand; but his fiction is no longer read, because the world has found that his sentimentalism was to this extent a sham —it was false to the nature of normal human beings. "Alice in Wonderland" will survive the works of both these able authors, because of the many and momentous human truths that look upon us through its drift of dreams.

Morality and Immorality in Fiction.—The whole question of the morality or immorality of a work of fiction is a question merely of its truth or falsity. To appreciate this point, we must first be careful to distinguish immorality from coarseness. The morality of a fiction-writer is not dependent on the decency of his expression. In fact, the history of literature shows that authors frankly coarse, like Rabelais or Swift for instance, have rarely or never been immoral; and that the most immoral books have been written in the most delicate Ianguage. Swift and Rabelais are moral, because they tell the truth with sanity and vigor; we may object to certain passages in their writings on esthetic, but not on ethical, grounds. They may offend our taste; but they are not likely to lead astray our judgment far less likely than D'Annunzio, for instance, who, although he never offends the most delicate esthetic taste, sicklies o'er with the pale cast of his poetry a sad unsanity of outlook upon the ultimate deep truths of human life. In the second place, we must bravely realize that the morality of a work of fiction has little or no dependence on the subject that it treats. It is utterly unjust to the novelist to decide, as many unreasonable readers do, that such a book as Daudet's "Sapho" must be of necessity immoral because it exhibits immoral characters in a series of immoral acts. There is no such thing as an immoral subject for a novel: in the treatment of the subject, and only in the treatment, lies the basis for ethical judgment of the work. The one thing needful in order that a novel may be moral is that the author shall maintain through-out his work a sane and healthy insight into the soundness or unsoundness of the relations between his characters. He must know when they are right and know when they are wrong, and must make clear to us the reasons for his judgment. He cannot be immoral unless he is untrue. To make us pity his characters when they are vile, or love them when they are noxious, to invent excuses for them in situations where they cannot be excused, to leave us satisfied when their baseness has been unbetrayed, to make us wonder if after all the exception is not greater than the rule—in a single word, to lie about his characters—this is, for the fiction-writer, the one unpardonable sin.

The Faculty of Wisdom.—But it is not an easy thing to tell the truth of human life, and nothing but the truth. The best of fiction-writers fall to falsehood now and then; and it is only by honest labor and sincere strife for the ideal that they contrive in the main to fulfil the purpose of their art. But the writer of fiction must be not only honest and sincere; he must be wise as well. Wisdom is the faculty of seeing through and all around an object of contemplation, and understanding totally and at once its relations to all other objects. This faculty cannot be acquired; it has to be developed: and it is developed by experience only. Experience ordinarily requires time; and though, for special reasons which will be noted later on, most of the great short-story writers have been young, we are not surprised to notice that most of the great novelists have been men mature in years. They have ripened slowly to a realization of those truths which later they have labored to impart. Richardson, the father of the modern English novel, was fifty-one years old when "Pamela" was published; Scott was forty-three when "Waverley" appeared; Hawthorne was forty-six when he wrote "The Scarlet Letter"; Thackeray and George Eliot were well on their way to the forties when they completed "Vanity Fair" and "Adam Bede"; and these are the first novels of each writer.

Wisdom and Technic.—The young author who as, pires to write novels must not only labor to acquire the technic of his art: it is even more important that he should so order his life as to grow cunning in the basic truths of human nature. His first problem—the problem of acquiring technic—is comparatively easy. Technic may be learned from books—the master-works of art in fiction. It may be studied empirically. The student may observe what the masters have, and have not, done; and he may puzzle out the reasons why. And he may perhaps be helped by constructive critics of fiction in his endeavor to understand these reasons. But his second problem—the problem of developing wisdom—is more difficult; and he must grapple with it without any aid from books. What he learns of human life, he must learn in his own way, without extraneous assistance.

It is easy enough for the student to learn, for instance, how the great short-stories have been constructed. It is easy enough for the critic, on the basis of such knowledge, to formulate empirically the principles of this special art of narrative. But it is not easy for the student to discover, or for the critic to suggest, how a man in his early twenties may develop such a wise insight into human life as is displayed, for example, in Mr. Kipling's "Without Benefit of Clergy." A few suggestions may, perhaps, be offered; but they must be considered merely as suggestions, and must not be overvalued.

General and Particular Experience.-At the outset, it may be noted that the writer of fiction needs two different endowments of experience: first, a broad and general experience of life at large; and second, a deep and specific experience of that particular phase of life which he wishes to depict. A general and broad experience is common to all masters of the art of fiction: it is in the particular nature of their specific and deep experience that they differ one from another. Although in range and sweep of general knowledge Sir Walter Scott was far more vast than Jane Austen, he confessed amazement at the depth of her specific knowledge of everyday English middle-class society. Most of the great novelists have made, like Jane Austen, a special study of some particular field. Hawthorne is an authority on Puritan New England, Thackeray on London high society, Henry James on cosmopolitan super-civilization. It would seem, therefore, that a young author, while keeping his observation fresh for all experience, should devote especial notice to experience of some particular phase of life. But along comes Mr. Rudyard Kipling, with his world-engirdling knowledge, to jostle us out of faith in too narrow a focus of attention.

Extensive and Intensive Experience.—Experience is of two sorts, extensive and intensive. A mere glance at the range of Mr. Kipling's subjects would show us the breadth of his extensive experience: evidently he has lived in many lands and looked with sympathy upon the lives of many sorts of people. But in certain stories, like his "They" for instance, we are arrested rather by the depth of his intensive experience. "They" reveals to us an author who not necessarily has roamed about the world, but who necessarily has felt all phases of the mother-longing in a woman. The things that Mr. Kipling knows in "They" could never have been learned except through sympathy.

Intensive experience is immeasurably more valuable to the fiction-writer than extensive experience: but the difficulty is that, although the latter may be gained through the obvious expedients of travel and voluntary association with many and various types of people, the former can never be gained through any amount of deliberate and conscious seeking. The great intensive experiences of life, like love and friendship, must come unsought if they are to come at all; and no man can gain a genuine experience of any joy or sorrow by experimenting purposely with life. The deep experiences must be watched and waited for. The author must be ever ready to realize them when they come: when they knock upon his door, he must not make the mistake of answering that he is not at home. But he must not make the contrary mistake of going out into the highways and hedges to compel them to come within his gates.

The Experiencing Nature.—Undoubtedly, very few people are always at home for every real experience that knocks upon their doors; very few people, to say the thing more simply, have an experiencing nature. But great fiction may be written only by men of an experiencing nature; and here is a basis for confession that, after all, fiction-writers are born, not made. The experiencing nature is difficult to define; but two of its most evident qualities, at any rate, are a lively curiosity and a ready sympathy. A combination of these two qualities gives a man that intensity of interest in human life which is a condition precedent to his ever growing to understand it. Curiosity, for instance, is the most obvious asset in Mr. Kipling's equipment. We did not need his playful confession in the "Just So Stories"_____

"I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew)
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who"

to convince us that from his very early youth he has been an indefatigable asker of questions. It was only through a healthy curiosity that he could have acquired the enormous stores of specific knowledge concerning almost every walk of life that he has displayed in his successive volumes. On the other hand, it was obviously through his vast endowment of sympathy that Dickens was able to learn so thoroughly all phases of the life of the lowly in London.

Curiosity and Sympathy.—Experience gravitates to the man who is both curious and sympathetic. The kingdom of adventure is within us. Just as we create beauty in an object when we look upon it beautifully, so we create adventure all around us when we walk the world inwardly aglow with love of life. Things of interest happened to Robert Louis Stevenson every day of his existence, because he incorporated the faculty of being interested in things. In one of his most glowing essays, "The Lantern-Bearers," he declared that never an hour of his life had gone dully yet; if it had been spent waiting at a railway junction, he had had some scattering thoughts, he had counted some grains of memory, compared to which the whole of many romances seemed but dross. The author who aspires to write fiction should cultivate the faculty of caring for all things that come to pass; he should train himself rigorously never to be bored; he should look upon all life that swims into his ken with curious and sympathetic eyes, remembering always that sympathy is a deeper faculty than curiosity: and because of the profound joy of his interest in life, he should endeavor humbly to earn that heritage of interest by developing a thorough understanding of its source. In this way, perhaps, he may grow aware of certain truths of life which are materials for fiction. If so, he will have accomplished the better half of his work: he will have found something to say.

December Selection - Dylan Thomas' Quite Early One Morning

2004-08-25T00:35:00.000-05:00

The December selection will be Quite Early One Morning by Dylan Thomas with special emphasis on A Child's Christmas in Wales. A review follows:

This book is a compilation of Thomas' sessions at the BBC. There are poems in prose and in verse. His style transmits nostalgia for his native Wales. Some of the best parts are his sketches of other Welch poets. A highly recommendable book by one very good poet, the same one who died in New York at the Chelsea hotel, after having more than 40 scotchs with soda. His poetry is rhythmical and clear, very imaginative and precise.

A Child's Christmas in Wales

New Directions Publishing Corporation

Dylan Thomas. Ellen Raskin.

More than a Christmas story.
Scaring sleeping uncles by popping balloons. Getting a hatchet by mistake. Snowballing cats. Dylan Thomas has captured the perfect Christmas. Without any moral, very little plot, and a concern only for the child's perspective, this little piece sticks in my mind better than any other Christmas story I've ever read. Between drunk Auntie Hannah singing in the backyard and the haunted house down the streets where a group of mischievous carollers get the living hell scared out of them, "A Child's Christmas in Wales" is everything Christmas should be: funny, happy, poignant, a little sad, and fattening. Keep a bowl of candy nearby when you read it.. A child's christmas in wales is a more than a christmas story..

Essential
Just finished with the annual tradition of reading this fine work aloud to the whole household, & although Dylan Thomas's perfect (if sometimes tongue-twisting) prose cannot be improved upon, nonetheless, Trina Schart Hyman's illustrations do enhance the story, & make the Welsh poet's vivid reminiscences even vivider. A marvel of beauty, both lyrical (Thomas) and visual (Hyman); a joy to peruse. Make this edition of "A Child's Christmas in Wales" part of your collection, and part of your Yuletide tradition!. A child's christmas in wales is a essential.

The Best Christmas Book EVER.
I really cannot say enough wonderful things about this book and the audio tape of Dylan Thomas reading it. My Christmas seasons have been enriched beyond measure since a loved one gave me this book. It is the most evocative and beautiful Christmas tale I've ever read and reading it aloud on Christmas Eve has become a beloved tradition in our family. It even inspired my husband and me to spend Christmas 2 years ago in the Cotswolds (England, not Wales... I realize), but we yearned for a more traditional "old world" holiday season and found it in the countryside not far from Wales. If you love the spirit of Christmas, this book is truly essential....such beautiful words with amazing soul, you will be enchanted.. A child's christmas in wales is a the best christmas book ever..

November Selection - Robert Asprin's Another Fine Myth

2004-08-24T17:47:00.000-05:00

Another Fine Myth by Robert Asprin
fantasy/humourous
First published: 1978
Review scribbled down on the 27th of April 1999

You can find other peoples opinions of this book at Amazon's websites:
This book at Amazon.co.uk: Another Fine Myth (Europe)
This book at Amazon.com: Another Fine Myth (USA)

This is the first book in Robert Asprin's Myth-series. Published in 1978 and one fun piece of humourous fantasy.
Skeeve is the ex-thief, now apprentiece that has his doubts about the real use of magic. Naturally his master decides to teach him a lesson and he summons a demon to show the power of magic. In the middle of the summoning, an assassin sneaks into the cottage and kills the magician, luckily the magician manages to kill the assassin before he dies. This leaves Skeeve with two corpses and one nasty-looking demon and a great amount of "I-wish-I-were-somewhere-else"-feelings.
Things are seldom what they seem to be, and a demon is simply someone from another dimension. The demon Aahz is from the dimension Perv, but it doesn't make him a Pervert, it makes him a Pervect as he points out often and with very little effect on other peoples way of looking at him. Together they sets out on an adventure for revenge, and will find themselves ending up in many humourous events and dimensions.
This book ended just like that, I read it in no time. I'm glad I got the omnibus since I could dig into volume #2 of the series right away. If you like humourous fantasy, and who doesn't? know what I mean, nudge, nudge. say no more, you'll surely like this one and since Asprin was one of the first of the new bunch of humourous sf/fantasy-authors you should get your hands on a copy of this book.
I give this book four and a half happy dragons out of five.

The Myth-ing Omnibus (consists of the first three novels):
This book at Amazon.co.uk: The Myth-ing Omnibus (Europe)

October's Selection - Three Men in a Boat

2004-08-16T23:19:00.000-05:00

Below is a review of Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat

The Unsinkable Jerome K. Jerome
by St. Clair Carr,
literary editor, NEW IMPROVED HEAD

You may recall that a few weeks ago I noted that I was re-reading Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome (Penguin, 185 pages, $9.99 Cdn.). I have been surprised to learn that many devoted readers of my acquaintance have not read this rewarding book. So here's a review of it.

Jerome K. Jerome was born in Staffordshire in 1859, grew up in London, and left grammar school at 14. As a youth and young man he worked as a railway clerk, an actor, a freelance journalist, a private secretary, a purchasing agent, a parliamentary agent, and a solicitor's clerk. In 1889, when Three Men in a Boat was published, he had only recently become successful as a journalist and author.

Three Men in a Boat is an account of a boating trip on the Thames undertaken by three male friends – Jerome, Harris, and George – and a fox terrier, Montmorency. It features several expertly written comic setpieces (for example, an account of trying to open a tin of pineapple when one has forgotten to bring the can opener but really wants to eat some pineapple) and several expertly written meditations, ranging from the mystical to the informative and solemn, on life and history. Jerome's style is masterful, and he uses it to create a strong sense of good humour, benevolence, and well-being.

Three Men in a Boat is commonly regarded as a comic masterpiece, which is true as far as it goes. The book is often comic, and it is a masterpiece, so therefore it is a comic masterpiece. But Three Men in a Boat is more than that.

What struck me most about the book during my most recent re-reading of it was that it had the character of a post-modernist book, although it was written by a pre-modern. If Jerome's autobiography is to be believed, the literary establishment of his day certainly thought Three Men in a Boat was different from the usual run of books. According to him they execrated the book, castigating it as impertinent and vulgar – two accusations which seem bewilderingly unfounded in this the last year of an impertinent and vulgar century.

These charges probably arose from Jerome's treatment of events – the idle recreations of young men – which would have been beneath the notice of most serious writers of the day, and from his frank materialism. Here's an example of the materialism, which even today would probably offend many people:

How good one feels when one is full – how satisfied with oneself and with the world! People who have tried it, tell me that a clear conscience makes you very happy and contented; but a full stomach does the business quite as well, and is cheaper, and more easily obtained. One feels so forgiving and generous after a substantial and well-digested meal – so noble-minded, so kindly-hearted.

Then there was his comment about a poor single mother whose corpse the three friends pull from the river, and whose story they later learn: "Six shillings a week does not keep body and soul together very unitedly." Suicide was of course considered in those days to be a result of grave moral weakness, and attempting it was a crime. Blaming it only on lack of money and, as Jerome did, on the failure of the woman's family and friends to support her was probably far too lax morally for the professional protectors of public virtue who flourished in the Victorian era, as in ours.

Instead of being moral, as writers of his day tried to be, Jerome chose to be adult. He did not encourage the reader to pay homage to a severe moral code which was a poor approximation of the true values of society. Instead he wrote a book in which people have failings and other people forgive them because they realize that they, too, have failings. As he wrote of the suicide: "She had sinned – some of us do now and then." And, as we have seen, he argued that the world had failed the sinner, not that she had failed the world.

Three Men in a Boat was probably also considered vulgar and impertinent because of Jerome's use of a style which was much closer to conversation than most writing of the day. His writing is, though, the glory of the book. He writes with exceptional facility in many tones ranging from the broadly comic to the reverent.

The book is in fact primarily a virtuoso display of writing. Perhaps in their day Jerome's comic pieces were novel and refreshing, but over a century later many are all too familiar. Nevertheless, thanks to Jerome's accomplished handling of them, they remain highly entertaining.

Jerome also used his mastery of style to accomplish a goal which would be considered postmodern in a contemporary book. Three Men in a Boat is full of engagingly written passages in which Jerome persuasively imputes deep significance to mundane events but eventually reveals that he is less than serious. These exercises demonstrate the limited validity of both fictional and non- fictional accounts of human undertakings.

Along the same line, in his introduction Jerome asserted that Three Men in a Boat was a work of "hopeless and incurable veracity," even though the reader quickly realizes that it is in fact at least in part a fabrication. Nevertheless, Jerome was not lying. The book is true.

It is true in that it is not propagandistic, as the literature of the day tended to be. Three Men in a Boat is an honest account of honest feelings which Jerome and his friends doubtless had, and of beliefs which they doubtless held. This honesty, expressed in elegant and limpid style, produced a book which a hundred and eleven years after its publication thrusts the reader into the lives of Jerome and his friends with an invigorating immediacy and verisimilitude which make the humour of the story richly entertaining. That is why people who read this little book tend to read it again and again.

September - Trinity by Leon Uris

2004-08-16T20:02:00.000-05:00

Reviews of Trinity by Leon Uris

September's Selection for the Eclectic Book Club

Trinity by Leon Uris

Review by Rowland Croucher

“Each annual holidays I try to read a well-researched historical novel. Reading 'Trinity' - sometimes acclaimed as Uris' best book - was the highlight of a week in Bali (courtesy of a generous friend). (PS. There's really no reason to go to Bali unless you've never experienced a two-thirds world culture - or you can do a cheap stopover. You certainly wouldn't go there for the unhygienic beaches).

I should have read this blockbuster (890 pages) about the history of the Irish 'troubles' long ago. It's a powerful commentary on our inhumanity to others, as depicted in the fortunes (or, generally, misfortunes) of three Irish families, from the Famine of the 1840s to the Easter Rising of 1916.

Uris' scathing diatribes target the injustices of British imperialism, Roman Catholic medievalism, dehumanizing industrialism, and the religious hucksterism associated with both Catholic and Protestant fundamentalisms. What's he _for_? Political liberalism, I guess.

There's a speech on page 808 that summarizes the book's message: 'Let me tell you that Ulster Unionism is nothing more than Protestant materialism. Your epoch of greed has gone on for three hundred and ten infamous years of classic misrule and classic injustice. You have bled and raped Ireland. You have imposed abnormal taxation. You have manipulated to keep the Irish farmer the most impoverished in the Western world and the Irish laborer the most underpaid in Europe. You have destroyed the vitality of the land so as to expose it to cancerous famine. Why, you've driven more Irishmen out of their own country than populate it today. You and your entire parasitic band are in it for the pound sterling. I suggest you have been milking a big fat tit, sir. All of this has been done while nobly wrapping yourself in a Union Jack.'

Says one Irish revolutionary to another: 'You know, Seamus, nothing ever happens here in the future. It's always the past happening over and over again' (p.787). It's a recurring echo in the book of Eugene O'Neill's well-known line from 'A Moon for the Misbegotten': 'There is no present or future - only the past, happening over and over again - now!'

I won't spoil it for you by commenting further. If you don't want to be profoundly disturbed or if you don't want to de-sanitize your school history, read something else. But if you want a graphic narrative backdrop to the contemporary version of the 'Troubles' read it. And ask: how can such evils triumph while all sides invoke the same Deity?”

Review from Random House

“The "terrible beauty" that is Ireland comes alive in this mighty epic that re-creates that Emerald's Isle's fierce struggle for independence. Trinity is a saga of glories and defeats, triumphs and tragedies, lived by a young Catholic rebel and the beautiful and valiant Protestant girl who defied her heritage to join him. Leon Uris has painted a masterful portrait of a beleaguered people divided by religion and wealth--impoverished Catholic peasants pitted against a Protestant aristocracy wielding power over life and death.”

From the New York Times Book Review

"Leon Uris is a storyteller, in a direct line from those men who sat around fires in the days before history and made the tribe more human."

Suggestions for future books.

2004-08-16T18:14:00.000-05:00

Please add yours to the list.
Quite Early One Morning with emphasis on A Childs Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas for December
Another Fine Myth by Robert Asprin
The Texas Trilogy by Preston Jones with special emphasis on The Oldest Living Graduate
The Cornish Trilogy by Robertson Davies
The Depford Trilogy by Robertson Davies
Study War No More by Joe Haldeman
Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein
Have Spacesuit, Will Travel by Robert Heinlein
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Burglar in the Library by Lawrence Block
A Light in August by William Faulkner
Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
The Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison
Scuba Duba by Bruce Jay Friedman
Snow White by Donald Barthelme
Sadness by Donald Barthelme
The Caine Mutiny by Herman Woulk
Quite Early One Morning by Dylan Thomas
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog by Dylan Thomas
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Giles Goat Boy by John Barth
Nine Stories by J.D. Salenger
The Hairy Ape by Eugene O'Neill
Night of the Iguana by Tennesse Williams
Millinium by John Varley
Travelin' Lady by Horton Foote
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Moon Maid by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Black Spring by Henry Miller
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
I will add more later - please put in some of your favorite books. -- Tom

Any new comments on Marching Morons?

2004-08-16T18:13:00.000-05:00

Comments:

Any new comments on Atlas Shrugged?

2004-08-16T18:12:00.000-05:00

Comments:

Any additional comments on The Cat Who Could Read Backwards?

2004-08-16T18:10:00.000-05:00

Comments:

Archy and Mehitabel by Don Marquis

2004-06-10T08:24:00.000-05:00

Add you comments about Archy and Mehitabel

Discussion Group for NTM Eclectic Book Club

2004-06-10T08:20:00.000-05:00

This is a new way to participate in the NTM Eclectic Book Club. Enter your comments and read those of others.