baroque and dramatic – Kate Macdonald

Comic books and Spider-Woman: a little rant

I heard an episode of the Double X Gabfest podcast the other day in which Noreen Malone of New York Magazine claimed that superhero movies were only made for teenage boys, or nerdy men, and that women didn’t go to see them. (Even though she lives in Brooklyn! That just seems improbable.) Superhero movies are for everyone, and I for one have never stopped loving them.

On the other hand, I’ve lost touch with superhero comics, because the flood of titles is too bewildering to make sense of in a crowded basement comic-book shop full of teenage boys and aggravating booming-voiced hipster idiots bent on impressing their rolling-eyes female companion with their dudey-frood bearded sneery nonsense about ‘all that Wonder Woman shit’ (I paraphrase). I visit Forbidden Planet periodically to browse the shelves but rarely buy comics, because most of their cover art all looks much as it did when I sold the things in Aberdeen’s first comic-book shop in the 1980s.

spider-woman-oldlook I’m also put off by the incessantly pneumatic mammary glands that have been de rigueur for comic book cover art since the 1950s, when the Marvel artists saw Jayne Mansfield and Jane Russell on screen and thought, ‘that’ll bring the boys in’. In that respect, yes; most comic-books are drawn for those attracted by flimsily-covered bouncing female secondary sexual characteristics. The rest of us: BORED. Look at the old 1972 Spider-Woman costume, which is basically a naked woman in body paint. It makes me irritated, especially as it was drawn by a woman, whose brief must have been ‘breasts’, not ‘action hero’. Don’t these artists realise how much cantilevering these female superhero costumes must need to support so much weight? And how impossible it must be to run, swing, thwack, rebound, and leap with a double weight of monstrously outsized cannon-balls suspended from the chest by straining muscles and spandex? Asking for logic in a superhero world feels pointless, like wondering how Banner finds his trousers again when the green guy disappears.

spidey 4 So, if the cover art doesn’t pull me in, the story doesn’t stand a chance. I look for the clear-line style that Hergé invented, which continued all the way to the Hernandez Brothers with Love and Rockets, and in the new Spider-Woman series. I love what Javier Rodriguez and Veronica Fish do with the new(ish) Spider-Woman universe to make it clean, frightening, compelling and focused. I also love Spider-Woman’s new look, originally designed by Kris Anka: neat, practical, washable, undistracting, and unsexualised. Obviously she fills it with curves, but they’re in proportion, there’s nothing to get in the way of vigorous, physical crime-fighting activities, or swinging from skyscrapers.

spidey-2 The uniform also comes in a maternity version, because Jessica Drew – for it is she – is a single mother crime-fighting superhero. I’ve written about her here and here on Vulpes Libris. Go take a look. And then write to Kevin Feige and ask him when Spider-Woman can join the Avengers on screen.

Laura Riding’s Progress of Stories

Here’s a conversation I had with Brad of The Neglected Books Page, about Laura Riding’s short story collection Progress of Stories (1935). This American author is most well-known for her marriage to the poet Robert Graves, and for her own poetry.

KM: I didn’t like them. Well, I did like quite a lot about quite a lot of them, but her style did not work for me. The book was republished with an additional 13 stories in 1994, with not one but two prefaces by the author, both largely incomprehensible. And that’s the problem; you have to really buy into Riding’s reputation and oeuvre to enjoy these stories. They are modernist, surrealist fairy tales, written in a flat, disassociated style that hides wonders and makes the remarkable ordinary. Leonora Carrington did something similar with her collection The Hearing Trumpet (1960), but her prose is magnetic. I didn’t find that reading Riding. Her style is mannered and determined to keep the reader off-balance. At least, that’s what I thought.

BB: Like you, I have mixed feelings about this book. There are a handful of stories that I consider just stunning in their refusal to be like anything else I’ve ever read (I must confess that I’ve not read Leonora Carrington’s stories). Certainly there is that deliberately abstract and absurdist approach that we all know from Kafka, where a man transformed into a cockroach overnight is taken at face value. But unlike Kafka, Borges, and others, Riding has no problem inserting herself into the story, commenting upon the narrative, at times almost poking at it like some odd specimen she’s examining with her magnifying glass.

I’m thinking in particular of the long story, ‘Reality comes to Port Huntlady’, where she interrupts her narrative with such asides as:

Exactly what the business between Cards and Lady Port-Huntlady was, then, is a matter standing in the way of your ultimate enjoyment of this story as a thing of your own. It is—how shall we say—the pious tediousness of the author, who, in telling a story, must always observe the fiction that to tell a story is to persuade people of something entirely true, or publicly actual; this side of a story is called its verisimilitude.

It is, of course, obvious that to tell a story is to persuade people of something almost false. We are all aware that there is no such place as Port Huntlady. It may well be that there is a place to which Port Huntlady stands as a lie stands to the truth. In fact, this is not far from being the case. And this is why some matters secondary to the story must be brought in, such as the business between Cards and Lady Port-Huntlady, to make the story seem true as well as, quite frankly, a story.

I find these asides rather marvelous and funny. On the one hand, Riding is both reminding us that we are engaged in an illusion – reading about these characters in this strange town called Port Huntlady – and shattering that illusion. It’s a bit like telling yourself you are speaking while you are speaking: many people find this quite disconcerting, sometimes so much that they can’t go on speaking. On the other hand, it’s also in the fine tradition of Sterne in Tristram Shandy, where the author provides a running criticism of his own work.

The many prefaces and other commentaries by Riding that clutter up the collection are truly awful, though – or perhaps I am insufficiently abstract in my reasoning to reach whatever ethereal plane she was operating on. I found, however, by coincidence, something she wrote in the mid-1950s for her entry in Twentieth Century Authors that may offer a clue to what she was trying – and help explain why it’s unlikely that it would make sense to anyone but herself:

We did not fully understand the character of the mental operation required for definitions of the kind we wished to make until we perceived that we must liberate our minds entirely from the confused associations of usage in which the meanings of words are entangled – and that, for us, the act of definition must involve a total reconstituting of words’ meanings. Much of our work has been done upon our minds, rather upon words directly: and we have proceeded very slowly, in consequence.

I would imagine that this would be a particularly difficult challenge when one has chosen writing as one’s profession.

Did you manage to extract any sense from the prefaces or did you skip them entirely, as I quickly decided to?

KM: I could not be bothered after the fifth page of garbled nonsense in the first preface. It didn’t tell me anything other than she had a lot of mixed feelings about the process and intent of writing, but neither preface was interesting enough to try to untangle.

I have to say that I don’t share your amusement at ‘Reality comes to Port Huntlady’: that was the first story I gave up on. I quite liked the fable about Miss Banquett creating the world in her own image, but it palled. I liked ‘Socialist pleasures’ a lot, and found ‘Schoolgirls’ very interesting, but less enjoyable. ‘Three times round’, about the extraordinary life of Lotus which the narrative voice is deathly bored by, is a story you have to read by effort of will.

It’s Riding’s narrative style that kills the pleasure for me. It’s determined to BE stylised, and uninterested in the fiction. Aggravating and irritating, saved from complete annoyance by the brilliance of the subjects and small things slipped in unexpectedly, like fireworks during a boring play at the theatre. So the effect is to make the reader sit up and ask ‘Wait, what was that?’, and then IGNORE the reader’s needs. It’s a contemptuous way to tell stories.

Brad will be posting a more detailed post on Progress of Stories sometime next week. I don’t have anything left to say!

Naomi Mitchison’s The Blood of the Martyrs

This time, in the Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up, I’m in Ancient Rome, rereading Naomi Mitchison’s excellent novel about very early Christians in the reign of the Emperor Nero, The Blood of the Martyrs, from 1939. You can probably guess the ending already from the clues in the title, but, trust me: it may be a weepy, but it is an outstanding philosophical and theological thriller. It’s set around the beginnings of the Pisonian conspiracy of AD65, which tried but failed to assassinate Nero. The novel’s main protagonists have no idea that a plot is being hatched, because they’re mostly slaves or Romans struggling to earn enough to eat, and the real-life plot only emerges when the main plot of the novel is thundering to its climax.

It’s typical of Naomi Mitchison’s fiction to concentrate on the lives and ambitions of the working-classes and those without power. She was a Scottish socialist novelist who first began to be published in the 1920s and 1930s, and who died in 1999. She published over 90 books, and is most famous for her epic novel The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931), which was about prehistoric fertility rites in Anatolia, heavily influenced by J G Frazer’s The Golden Bough, and Jane Harrison’s pioneering studies of classical Greek myth and religion. Mitchison took research seriously. She wrote many novels set in prehistory and early classical and Roman history, and was a pioneer in using a pure and undateable vocabulary spoken in a modern style so her characters sound unalienatingly familiar. No hists and thous for her: her Roman matron chatters like an English society lady of the 1930s, and figures from the New Testament sound like normal people.

This plot is about slaves and the very poor in Rome who are or who have become Christian, and are struggling to maintain their tiny Churches in an increasing atmosphere of suspicion. The economy of the Roman Empire is based on slave labour, and must continually acquire more slaves to replace those who die from starvation and ill-treatment. Slaves are not considered to be human, though some of their more benign masters, such as Flavius Crispus in the novel, do see the benefit of treating their property with care to have a better return for their investment in long-term service. Sometimes the worn-out slaves who can no longer carry a litter, say, or who have lost a hand in an accident, are not thrown out or sold, but given light work or retired to the family farm as a useful labourer. But most slaves get sold again once they’ve outlived their use to one master.

Another category of non-Roman citizen were the captured children of enemy nobles, who were brought up as fosterlings in nice Roman homes, until the day came when they needed to be put out of the way, perhaps into the army, or married off to someone who would be grateful. The novel begins in a sultry post-coital scene between Beric, a captive Gaulish prince who has grown up in the house of Flavius Crispus, who has just been doing what he’s been told to by his foster sister Flavia, a beautiful, spoiled and very nasty young woman, who hasn’t yet told the besotted Beric about her betrothal, to be announced that evening. Thus the novel begins with an uneven demonstration of power, between the Roman citizen and the non-citizen, between the emotionally cold and the hopelessly dreamy, and between a young woman with a very assured manner and young man who doesn’t know how shaky the certainties of his life are becoming. We can sense his vulnerability right from the first page, and can tell that things are not going to go well.

As Flavius’s de facto son, Beric runs the house for him, and manages the slaves. But once she’s established his life for us, Mitchison changes tack and begins to tell another story, of Manasses and Josias who were captured in a raid, and grew up as slaves in Rome. Their father had known Jesus’s younger brother James, so they were brought up as Christians, and by luck have managed to find other Christians while in captivity. In a third chapter we hear about a beautiful Persian girl born into slavery and taken from her mother (that’s the second girl the poor woman has lost) when she’s old enough to sell. She becomes Flavia’s newest and most tortured maid. And so on. Each chapter in the first half of the novel puts you inside the experience of sixteen slaves or freedmen and women, and gives you their stories in their own words or from their perspective. This technique of multiple voices isn’t nearly as confusing as you think it might be because Mitchison’s control of her material is absolute, and very subtle.

Reading these chapters, and learning how each story fits into the others, and how their tiny Church grew, is a bit like walking around the outside of a building with many windows. Each time you look through a window, or read a chapter, you see characters you’ve already met, or will meet, doing something slightly different or new or in the past or future, so that the composite picture becomes more detailed, and more nuanced. Some of the characters are already Christian when they arrive in Rome; others become convinced that Jesus’s words are for them, to give them something to live for. It’s quite acceptable at this point in the story to look out a New Testament, to read Paul’s letters to the Romans, to the Corinthians, to the Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians, Thessalonians, Timothy, Titus and Philemon. The tiny group of worshippers that Manasses serves as its deacon is the kind of Church that St Paul was supporting by letters on his travels. He’s in the novel too, in Part Three, when they’re all waiting for the lions, but we’ll get to that.

Every narrative voice in the novel belongs to a character. There is no third-person omniscient narrator, no authorial voice who knows more than the characters or the readers. It’s an egalitarian way to tell a story, which fits beautifully with the Christian ethos that the story illustrates, that everyone is equal and that every person is as important as each other. It’s also a technical tour de force, brilliantly executed, because it’s hard to spot the seamless change in perspectives from one character to another, when – zip – you’re out of Eunice’s bakery and back into Crispus’s house, or into the cellar where the Church meets to worship and receive strength from their beliefs. For a 1930s novel it is also egalitarian in gender and sexuality. Some characters love each other and happen to be men, and also love women: later fans of Mary Renault would have appreciated the delicacy of Mitchison’s touch, who wrote this novel when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain. Women too have equal status in the Church. A dancing girl called Lalage is a deacon alongside Manasses, because those who are strongest in the spirit become leaders, and she is strong.

When Beric is suffering most from the crumbling of his world’s foundations, he becomes aware that some of the slaves that he commands in Crispus’s household have some kind of belief that gives them strength. He joins their Church just as Nero arranges for some areas of Rome to be set on fire to clear the way for his latest architectural experiments. The blame for the fire falls on the Christians, who are enthusiastically rounded up by Praetorian chief Tigellinus, who is also seducing Flavia, now that she is a safely married and under-occupied woman. One by one the members of this small Church are arrested, beaten up, released, and then arrested again, because Nero and Tigellinus want to please the Roman crowds with a really spectacular Games, featuring burning women, chariot races, Christians and wild beasts and animal hunts. Other Churches exist in Rome as well as Manasses’ Church, but they are widely scattered, and rightly cautious about making contact in case they are betrayed by a smiling stranger. The novel ushers or pulls all the characters towards the Coliseum, some of them towards the spectator seats, and some of them towards the cells as the entertainment.

I mentioned that The Blood of the Martyrs is a philosophical and theological thriller. Many of the conversations are between characters trying to explain to each other what Christianity is, and what you do when you are one. In the third part of the novel Paul is in prison with the other characters, and is arguing with them about what needs to be done, and how baptism should be performed. He dictates his letters to other churches to Luke, the doctor who does his best for the prisoners after their torture, but really there is very little he can do for a raped woman who is about to be torn apart by tigers. Stoics and Epicurian characters are also present in the prison, political prisoners lofty in the knowledge that their intellectually superior beliefs do not let them in for such degrading and brutal treatment. But they are shaken by their inability to watch another person suffer and remain unmoved. By witnessing the deaths in the arena, people begin to be converted, and the seed of belief is transmitted by example and by loving kindness. It is a very moving image, drenched with sadness.

Underneath these small stories is our historical awareness of the Christian church at its beginnings, and of the other faiths prospering in Rome at the same time. The Roman Jews do not receive the persecution meted out to the Christians, but when Mitchison was writing this novel, the Jews were being persecuted mercilessly in Nazi Germany, and worse was to come. It’s pretty clear that Mitchison intended this novel to be read as a parable for the contemporary persecution of the Jews as well.

When I began to reread The Blood of the Martyrs I knew that I had not carried it with me through countless house moves for nothing: it is a marvellous, gripping read. But I also knew why I had not wanted to reread it for over twenty years; it is desperately sad, and full of tragic moments you can see coming, agonisingly, several pages off. Find your handkerchief.

John Buchan’s Jacobites

Rebellion, or Uprising? In this Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up I’m in the middle of the British eighteenth century, looking at the ‘1745’, otherwise known as the Jacobite Rebellion, or Uprising, depending on which side you were on. This was the second attempt by the exiled Roman Catholic monarchy of Britain to reclaim what they thought was their rightful kingdom, so let’s have a wee bit of history to fix us in time and space, before I get on to John Buchan’s fascination with the subject.

The United Kingdom of England, Wales and Scotland had been inherited by James II and VII from his elder brother Charles II, in 1688. Unfortunately James’s open adherence to Roman Catholicism did not go down well with the Protestant government, and in due course he was forced to leave Britain for the Continent, and his daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William of Orange took the throne as the ‘Protestant Kings’, William III and Mary II. They were the penultimate Stuart monarchs, and their successor and sister, Queen Anne, was succeeded in 1714 by the Protestant Hanoverian dynasty, brought over from Germany. In 1715 James II’s son, James Stuart, called the Old Pretender by his opponents and James III and VIII by his supporters, attempted to lead an uprising against the British government and Hanoverian monarchy from Scotland. He was disappointed by his lack of supporters, fell ill and went back to France. He died in exile in 1766.

Thirty years later his elder son Charles Stuart, most famously known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, or the Young Pretender, attempted an uprising in 1745 by landing on the west coast of Scotland. He successfully gathered the clans to support him, including some senior Scottish noble families, and marched with a large army as far south as Derbyshire, about halfway down the island of Britain. But then the common sense of his military leaders took over, dismayed by their own dwindling support and rumours of Government troops massing to meet them, and he was forced to withdraw back to Scotland. The Uprising was decisively destroyed in April 1746 at the Battle of Culloden, near Inverness in the far north, and Charles Stuart escaped the British army – very famously – in disguise as Flora Macdonald’s maid. He landed back in France in September and never troubled the British government again.

So that was the Jacobite Rebellion, or Uprising. Like Flora, I am a Macdonald, descended from Clan Macdonald of the Isle of Skye. However, this took place over several centuries and follows the genealogy of only one of my many ancestors, so it’s a very selective way of claiming a heritage. I’ve never been convinced by the heady romanticism of the cult of Jacobitism. The idea of the glamorous prince from over the water, the tragedy of Culloden and the lost cause, and the resulting oppression of the Highlands, have produced a deliberate nurturing of Scottish nationalist sentimentality about English oppression and the nobility of lost Scottish causes. This can be uplifting, in very small doses, but is disturbingly divorced from historical fact. Vast numbers of novels have been written about the Jacobite theme. Until the mid-twentieth century it was one of the most important subjects in Scottish fiction, first made popular by Sir Walter Scott with his novel Waverley of 1814, and continued by, among thousands of others, John Buchan, about whom I’ve posted several times. Looking at Buchan’s Jacobite novels and how he treated the theme is a useful antidote to some of the glutinous and unhistorical nonsense that has been published about this military, political and dynastic disaster.

One of Buchan’s earliest short stories – a tiny fragment called ‘Afternoon’ published in 1896 – is written in the style of Kenneth Grahame’s Dream Days, about a little boy playing at Jacobites who has a private adventure. It’s not very much, but it’s indicative of the sentimental hold that the theme had even in the fin de siècle. Three years later another story – ‘The Earlier Affection’ of 1899 – copies part of the Waverley plot. Its about an English traveller who meets his cousin, a Jacobite fugitive, and finds himself fighting with him for the Jacobite cause just because of a few rousing words spoken in Gaelic, which sums up the sentimental mythology of the Uprising, or Rebellion.

Buchan’s third novel was A Lost Lady of Old Years, also of 1899, so we can see what his preoccupation was at this time in his writing life. It takes a very different approach to the ‘45 than is or was usual. The ‘Lost Lady’ of the title is Mrs Murray of Broughton, the wife of Mr Secretary Murray who was hanged for his part in the rebellion, though she escaped. The ‘Old Years’ means of times past: she herself was young and beautiful. History apparently records that she was a bad lot, but Buchan romanticises her spectacularly. His Mrs Murray is pure, perfect and brave in her unswerving support for the Prince, despite the treachery of her husband whom she is beginning to suspect. The main protagonist of the novel, a teenage delinquent called Francis Birkenshaw, is saved from a life of crime because Mrs Murray catches him breaking into her house, mistakes him for the Jacobite messenger for whom she is waiting, and gives him a highly secret political message to deliver to one of the great Jacobite leaders in the Highlands, Lord Lovat.

Miraculously, the trust she mistakenly places in Francis restores his wavering sense of honour and duty, and he decides to turn away from the path of petty crime down which he had been sliding, and to struggle back to being a gentleman again. He takes the message to Lovat, but he is too late, delayed by illness, and getting lost. He returns to Edinburgh to find the Cause also lost – for by now Francis is as devout a Jacobite as Mrs Murray had expected him to be – and he devotes his efforts to keeping her safe, and to getting her away to France after the execution of her husband. The story is desperately romantic, and cleverly patched in alongside the facts of history so nothing factual is disarranged very much. Francis meets the Prince, and Lovat, and other real figures, but they are all where they should be, and do what they ought to be doing at that time. Mrs Murray is too unimportant a figure in the male-centred version of how history should be written for it to matter how Buchan rewrites her character: there is simply very little known about her. A Lost Lady of Old Years is a rather good novel, for the splendid urgency that drives Francis on his quest, and the sense of redemption that the reader feels after his recovery from a life of arrogant, petty crime. Buchan doesn’t tamper with the Rebellion or Uprising at all, and is really most respectful of the facts.

His next Jacobite outing was a short story, ‘The Company of the Marjolaine’ in 1909. It combines two unrelated facts – that shortly after the American War of Independence the new nation of the United States of America was encouraged by Benjamin Franklin to look for its own king; and that Bonnie Prince Charlie was still alive, and hoping to be offered a throne. It’s a sad story of greatness come down in the world, since the Prince is now an alcoholic living thinly-veiled poverty, attended by his illegitimate daughter the Duchess of Albany and a single servant, as they travel about the Continent to no purpose. It’s also a story about endurance, about how it might have been for Charles Stuart to exist for a further forty years, the best years of his life, as a failed Pretender to a throne and country that did not want him. The story that lies behind Buchan’s iteration is of the Duchess of Albany herself, required to use this title to acknowledge her father’s claim to royal status, but denied ever finding a place for herself because her illegitimacy bars her from polite society, and her nobility requires her to withdraw the hem of her garments from anyone else.

Buchan’s best Jacobite novel is Midwinter, of 1923, because it is a very plausible story – Dr Johnson (yes, THE Dr Johnson) tries to stop an anti-Jacobite plot at the moment of the Jacobite army’s decision to march away from Derby, and helps to save the marriage of a young girl married to a traitor. It is brilliantly plotted with really memorable characters. We all have a vague idea of Dr Johnson, the grumpy and superior lexicographer sitting in state at a tea-drinking at Mrs Thrale’s house, a figure of importance. This Dr Johnson is a much younger man, and a humble but doughty tutor to the gentility. Whether he was at tutor at this point in his life is unimportant: Buchan makes Dr Johnson live, just as he makes the Jacobite cause live, and all the historical characters are fleshed out with life and vigour. There is also the heroic, romantic Jacobite clansman, Alastair Maclean, and Claudia, the woman he loves who is being so sadly betrayed by her treacherous young husband, and the great Duchess of Queensberry, and a fascinating underground network of outlaws and disguised Jacobite supporters whose reach stretches from Oxfordshire to Yorkshire. The plot is packed with action and high drama, with spectacular dramatic set-pieces of duels, struggles to escape deadly traps, creepings along corridors, long journeys undercover: it really is one Buchan’s best thrillers, drenched in the anguish of the lost Jacobite cause.

Borrowed fire at sea: Mark Twain and Arthur Ransome

Missee Lee (1941) is an adventure novel in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series, one of the two novels in the series whose extraordinary places and events really could not have happened. I don’t know how the Arthur Ransome Society would feel about this theory, but I’ve always held that Missee Lee, like Peter Duck (1932), is a story told by the children to each other, off the page, whereas their many sailing adventures in the Lake District, the Norfolk Broads and off the mud near Harwich, are realistic events that could happen to anyone, which is half of their charm.

In Missee Lee these six children in their early teens, their parrot and Gibber the monkey sail around the world with Captain Flint, the uncle of the two of the children, in a two-mast schooner, the Wild Cat. The ship is burned at sea, and the two life-boats, the Swallow and the Amazon (this really proves that this is a fantasy: nobody would have transported two elderly Lake Coniston sailing dinghies to Portsmouth, or wherever, as lifeboats for a voyage around the world: come on) are separated during the night. The story of how the two parties land on the Chinese coast, get mixed up with pirates, mandarins, the slave trade and Latin lessons, in an interwar China wholly unlike the People’s Republic of China of the time, is one of the most magical and satisfying of all of Ransome’s novels.

Ransome 2 The loss of the Wild Cat at sea by fire is a quickly described but searingly detailed episode, a rare moment where the children’s lives are threatened by spectacular events told in Arthur Ransome’s signature flat style. The most intense feelings, the most desperate moments, are given power by the quietness with which we are told the details. Something I don’t think anyone has noticed before (but Ransomeites can prove me wrong: I don’t have access to the Arthur Ransome Society’s publications) is that Ransome borrowed this episode from a newspaper account by Mark Twain of a real-life disaster at sea, nearly eighty years before.

In 1866, the clipper ship Hornet sailed from New York, around Cape Horn, and was heading for Australia across the south Pacific, when it was lost at sea by fire. The crew and passengers escaped in three boats but were separated at sea, and only one boat, containing thirteen men and two teenage boys, made landfall, drifting ashore at Hawaii after forty-three days at sea. [1] Mark Twain was at that time working as a journalist for the Sacramento Union, and had decided to spend some time in Hawaii, from where he had been filing reports in the form of letters to the Union since March. On hearing of the arrival of the shipwrecked sailors, Twain interviewed the Hornet’s third mate John S Thompson, and some of the men. His account of the loss of the Hornet was the first account to be printed, in June 1866 in the Sacramento Union, and shortly afterwards in other North American periodicals. [2] This disaster at sea and the survival of some of the shipwrecked sailors became a well-known story in nautical history.

Twain 1 On reading Twain’s account and immediately recognising its similarities with the episode in Missee Lee, I did some literary detection. It seems clear to me that Ransome borrowed freely from the account as Twain gave it, and from which subsequent accounts of the disaster were drawn. Twain’s account may not have been reprinted in the twentieth century until 1939, in Letters from Honolulu, although this was in a limited edition of 1000 copies by an American publisher, unlikely to have come Ransome’s way. [3] It is most likely that Ransome first read about the Hornet’s end in a secondary publication from the nineteenth century, but the closeness of his account to Twain’s makes me think that whatever he read pretty much repeated Twain’s account in its details and structure. Both disasters happen on a day of no wind and tropical heat; both are caused by an ‘open light’ igniting flammable liquid in the hold. The last correlating point, of the emotion felt by the sailors on seeing their ships slip underwater, is particularly telling. Twain positioned this as a natural observation in his linear account, as did Ransome, and both conclude their dramatic, realistic accounts to remind us that to sailors, ships are people too.

The evidence is given below in two columns, in the order given in Twain’s account, and in the novel.

*Mark Twain, ‘Honolulu, June 22 1866’, Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii* (1966), ed. A Grove Day (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1975), 137-60**	*Arthur Ransome, Missee Lee* (1941) (Harmondsworth: Puffin, 1976), 27-37.**
	The crew are dozing on deck in the long tropical afternoon heat, on their way from Japan to the China coast.
Chief mate and two men go down to the hold to draw some ‘bright varnish’ from a cask. Captain tells them bring the cask on desk as it’s too dangerous in the hold. The mate disobeys this order and draws the varnish in the hold first	Captain Flint ‘was passing full petrol tins up through the forehatch’. The crew help him pour the petrol from the cans into the engine tank on deck.
The liquid ignited from the ‘open light’ in his hand	Gibber grabs Captain Flint’s lit cigar, and, chased by the crew, dives down into the hold through the forehatch opening. ‘A sheet of flame shot upward.’
The ship goes up in flames very quickly	The ship goes up in flames very quickly
The crew and watch were idling in such shade as they could find, ‘and the listlessness and repose of morning in the tropics was upon the vessel and her belongings’
Captain Mitchell ordered the three (life)boats to be launched instantly	Captain Flint orders the boats to be launched immediately.
One boat’s bottom was stove in in the hurry, but was patched with a blanket *
‘Not a thing was saved, except such food and other articles as lay about the cabin and could be quickly seized and thrown on deck’	‘There was time to save very little’
‘Forty minutes after the fire alarm, the provisions and passengers were on board the three boats, and they rowed away from the ship’	‘Get the boat clear,’ shouted Captain Flint […] ‘Pull clear,’ shouted Captain Flint angrily.
‘Twenty minutes afterward the two masts I have mentioned, with their rigging and their broad sheets of canvas wreathed in flames, crashed ito the sea’	‘Deckhouse and galley were gone. The mainmast rose out of a mass of flames, its shrouds hanging loose, their lanyards burned through. There was a loud crack and then another. The mast swayed …’
‘The sea was illuminated for miles around and the clouds above were tinged with a ruddy hue’	‘The sun was dipping now below the sea in the west and the sudden dark of the tropics was sweeping out of the east. The Wild Cat flamed against the dusk like a row of torches. ‘Two sunsets at once’, said Titty.
‘the ship went down, and the crew of the Hornet were alone […] “We felt as if somebody or something had gone away – as if we hadn’t any home any more”’	‘There was a long drawn hiss as the sea swept through her and the last flame went out as the little schooner disappeared for ever. John, Susan and Roger heard Titty’s gasping sob and hoped it had not been noticed by the others.’

* Notice the shared event with Swallowdale (1931).

Christina Hardyment gives an account of two notes written by Ransome during his planning of Missee Lee as he was writing it from 1939 onwards. The first rough outline includes a shipwreck and Gibber with an oil can. The second, dated February 1941, notes ‘the dreadful burning of the Wild Cat’, which differs from the ‘shipwreck’ in the earlier, undated note. [4] By then Ransome had clearly firmed up his outline, and perhaps had come across Twain’s account, and used it to create the defining moment in Missee Lee that generates the plot.

If anyone has written further on this point, I’d be glad to hear about it.

[1] Mark Twain, ‘Honolulu, June 22 1866’, Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii (1966), ed. A Grove Day (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1975), 137-60, 137, 139.

[2] A Grove Day, ‘Introduction’, Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii (1966), ed. A Grove Day (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1975), v-xvii, x.

[3] Day 1966, xvii.

[4] Christina Hardyment, Arthur Ransome and Captain Flint’s Trunk (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984), 170, 174.

Dornford Yates’s Gothic melodramas, in Anthony Lyveden & Valerie French

Prepare for high-stakes romantic melodrama, early 1920s style. This Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up is about Dornford Yates’ first two novels. Anthony Lyveden was published in 1921 and its sequel, Valerie French, appeared in 1923: they were written after he had made his name with several collections of brilliant and witty short stories about London life among the aspirational gentry. Both novels are passionately intent on making the reader feel dreadful about the plight of the unemployed ex-officer. They are romantic love stories, with ghosts, and a possessed Gothic forest. Their plots depend on misunderstandings and how the workings of Fate might ruin the hero’s life.

They are also novels about a kind of metaphorical shell-shock, a form of amnesia brought on by supernatural influences, that represents the horrors endured on the Western Front, and how these experiences prevented soldiers from having a normal life, post-war. They’re intense novels, and very, very opinionated: you won’t miss the author’s own views about how class and social rules matter in society. They will exasperate you as the hero and heroine continually have near misses, fail to tell each other crucial pieces of information, fail to ask the right question, and don’t realise that a vital letter has got burned in a railway accident. They give the workings of Fate good value for money.

The eponymous hero of Anthony Lyveden is an former British Army officer who suffered no particular wounds or damage, but, one or two years after the First World War had ended, is desperately looking for work. How can this be possible? He’s a gentleman. Gentlemen don’t need to look for work. They have lands, and estates, and invisible income sources. Not this one: he was orphaned early in life, brought up by an uncle, and then his uncle’s will gave him all the uncle’s large fortune, with the prior condition that to receive the estate he had to have achieved a knighthood. Anthony has not been offered a knighthood, of course. Yates expects his readers to learn from this that if you are a gentleman you don’t angle for such an honour (are you listening, Nigel Farage?), and to wangle a knighthood to acquire a fortune is to demonstrate your own unworthiness. If Anthony wants a fortune, he will have to make it himself, just like the rest of us. Thus the novel instructs early 1920s society on how to behave in the matter of knighthoods and fortunes, with, Yates hoped, a trickledown effect on other matters of social usage.

The novel opens when Anthony is on his way to be interviewed for a post as a footman. He succeeds, and enters domestic service for the first time as footman to a couple of the grossly exaggerated lower-class war-rich. Mr Slumper is a financier and his wife is a really horrible woman with no education, looks, manners or saving graces whatsoever. The rest of the servants in the house are greedy and grasping, so Anthony is the only one to give the couple any kind of honest service at all. When Mr Slumper comes home in a state knowing that his business is about to fail spectacularly, Anthony does not abandon his employers, but gets them to the train station, and his reward for faithful service is some of his due wages. Lesson no. 2: always give good service, no matter who it’s for, and your example will rub off onto even the vilest of people.

Anthony’s next job is with a titled family, which means less agony for him in serving the unworthy, but more agony because these are people he would have avoided socially because they are cold, ungenerous and unpleasant. Yates is really keen for us to realise the horror of such things now being possible. The vile son of the family bullies Anthony in a shockingly lower-class, caddish way, until Anthony knocks him out after one insult too many. The father applauds this event, but has to let Anthony go. Some things just can’t be forgiven.

So you see, this novel is beginning to look like the Pilgrim’s Progress, with the perfect hero undergoing trials of temper, pride, and self-control, and coming out in the right every time. Anthony’s third post is a put-up job, since Anthony has met The Girl. He owns a dog (most Yates heroes own and worship their dogs), which he boards in kennels in the countryside while he’s in service, and goes to visit at weekends for long walks in decent gentlemanly solitude. His dog gets into a fight with another dog, which Anthony breaks up very efficiently (moral: a man who can separate two fighting dogs is admirable), but he accidentally offends the other dog’s owner, while falling head over heels in love with her at first sight. She secretly returns his feelings, but when they accidentally meet again, he is handing the visibly appalling Mrs Slumper into her carriage, while The Girl is awaiting her own servants and carriage.

But it’s OK: Yates does not intend Valerie French (for it is she) to knowingly fall in love with a footman. (He has already written a really vicious short story about the hell that awaits a girl of good family who marries beneath her, which is truly fiendish in its revenge on the erring victim. He did not approve of mésalliances.) Valerie can tell instinctively that Anthony is a man of her own class. Luckily she has friends who are also working in service, in a very cushy job indeed, so she arranges for Anthony to get a job there too, and he is at last in a safe haven. He has friends of his own class, the work is light, decent and honourable, and the employers are delightful, grateful lower-class darlings. They know their place, and the other servants are paid to make sure that these upper-class footmen and housemaids can eat separately, on a table they don’t need to lay or clear themselves. Some things really matter.

The inability of the ordinary demobbed soldier to get work after the end of the war is pretty much ignored in this novel, because Yates is very keen to draw out the agony of how awful it is for a gentleman to suffer this fate. He artificially twists the plot to increase the humiliation, suspense, tension and reversals of fortune that the perfect ex-officer without a job must undergo. But why? In both Anthony Lyveden and Valerie French Anthony undergoes starvation, is enslaved by an enchanted forest while working as a kind of deranged Forestry Commission worker, loses his sanity, loses a girl, is nearly seduced by another girl, has to perform increasingly demanding tests of noblesse oblige, and constantly displays extraordinary exhibitions of loyalty to his dog. These ordeals of chivalry increase our sympathy for the ex-officer hero, and present these injustices as evidence of the national disloyalty to those who fought in the War and are yet unrewarded. At the very least, we are expected to feel indignation at the state of the post-war nation which can’t look after its gentlemen.

Is Anthony worth it? His heroism and natural leadership is typical for 1920s popular fiction, as the British ex-officer working with demobbed Other Ranks. At the beginning of Valerie French, the reactions of the demobbed Other Ranks to Anthony the starving and desperate ex-officer in need are extraordinary: not only do they feed him, they take him in their lorry to a pub, where the landlord, on hearing Anthony’s accent, immediately offers him unlimited credit, and then the lorry drivers slip Anthony twenty shillings, pretending the notes had fallen out of his coat. Shortly after this, Anthony inadvertently helps a thief steal a spare wheel off a car, meets a stupendously shouty barrister called Sir Andrew Plague, is instantly trusted despite the evidence, and is rescued from court simply because he looks and sounds like a gentleman. All this demonstrates the importance of class loyalty.

With Sir Andrew, Yates really lets rip with his trademark lexical exuberance and repetitive allegorical word games. For some readers these can be wearing. But the constant cranking up of the tension through both novels (often over very trivial things) is more stressful. It has the effect of cliff-hangers wandering around the plot looking for the cliff: are we really expected to get worked up about Valerie’s hysterics about her rigid codes of honour in every chapter? Is it such a drama to choose between telling or not telling Anthony his past when he recovers from ‘brain fever’ without his memory? This illness is a metaphor for shell-shock. After Anthony has been rescued from the utterly bizarre psychotic wood called Gramarye, a malign enchanted ecosystem that can twist time and space, his mental condition is precarious, and he needs to be nursed, unable to be a whole man again without long and careful recovery. In contrast, Valerie’s histrionics of honour because Anthony cannot remember who she is are tedious.

But overall, both these novels are very satisfying. There are spectacular plot twists, there are large helpings of useful instruction on how to perform noblesse oblige, there are some excellent dramatic characters, who are practically eating the carpets while screaming at each other. Anthony himself is a curiously inactive and passive character, perpetually tossed by fortune. He is given things by everyone who meets him, and he has a ridiculous chivalric habit of sacrificing himself to extraordinary lengths so as to not to embarrass a lady or allow her name to be maligned.

Thankfully there are characters with good comic value, since Yates understood the purpose of sparring and invective, to relieve this stiff-upper-lip tension. There are constant misunderstandings of motives and reasons through upper-class inarticulacy. There’s a girl called André, who I think must be modelled on Theda Bara, who slinks and smoulders, but has to shout to get the attention of the astonished gentlemen about to murder each other for her honour (Yates concerns himself a lot with a lady’s honour). There is a spectacular three-way fist fight between Sir Andrew, Colonel Winchester and Anthony, resulting in a broken leg and a broken door. What with the whips, it’s like a medieval cat fight, with honour sticking it to everyone in sight. Thankfully, the story ends with a return to classic British values of the period: Anthony finally recovers his memory when Valerie is attacked by a less than human foreigner whom he has to strangle. These are epic novels of drama and nightmares, but they are also delightful, if you leave your sense of proportion at the door.

I write a great deal more about these novels and Yates’ other works in Novelists Against Social Change (2015).

Pratchett on bigotry

From time to time I binge on Discworld. This week, on holiday, I’ve been rereading some of the Terry Pratchett novels that tackle bigotry and racism. They are deeply satisfying combings from the beard of his invention. They don’t offer a unified theory of how people could be nice to each other, but they are superb as reflections of the human condition.

Feet of Clay (1996)

This one has a very high joke count, including the immortal ‘We can rebuild him, we have the pottery’, which only readers of 50ish will ever appreciate fully. * Feet of Clay is The One About The Golems, in which Lord Vetinari is incapacitated by a mysterious poison, Nobby Nobbs is raised to the peerage, Cheery Littlebottom is encouraged to express her feminine nature with illicit lipstick, jewellery and high heels, though she refuses to shave her beard off, and dwarf bread makes its terrifying entrance as a fighting weapon.

Cheery transitions from a standard if slightly nervous male dwarf demeanour to a more feminine self-presentation with the help of a well-established non-human, Delphine Angua von Uberwald, the only werewolf on the Watch. It’s not just because they’re both minority females in a professional milieu full of males, but they are both struggling with how to reconcile their natural feelings. Cheery wants to be able to wear a skirt and not be shouted at by male dwarfs who think openly-displayed femininity is disgusting (we’ll find a much more precise sandblasting of this mindset in The Fifth Elephant). Angua would like to not have to hear (muttered) jokes about what and who she eats. Pratchett’s deft slicing apart of the layers of social prejudice is done with the sharpest of filleting blades. Class, sex, lineage, race, species, deadness, aliveness: all participate in a complex plot jostling with remarks about how it’s normal to hate different people because They and Everybody says so.

The golems show this most concisely, since a golem is a not a person, and is not legally alive. Yet how can a machine be accused of murder? Once the religious confraternity have begun fighting among themselves on this question, one golem learns to speak, develops self-awareness, and develops the financial acumen to work out how to free the other golems by earning enough to buy them. This is a rather nice result from a pyramid chain, since Carrot started it by buying Dorfl for one dollar: one good turn produces an autonomous new species. We are only left with the problem of who organised the poisoning.

* The Six Billion Dollar Man? Steve Rogers? Blonde man with permanent sun-squint runs very very fast in slo-mo? YOU remember ….

The Fifth Elephant (2000)

The One In Which Vimes Goes to Uberwald. I love this novel because it has the Igors, the traditional servants of the vampires who are accomplished surgeons and recyclers of body parts. Vimes goes to Uberwald to represent the city-state of Ankh-Morpork, and to solve the crime of the stolen Scone of Stone, without which the Low King of the dwarfs cannot be crowned.

The Lady Margoletta (is that an echo from Arthur Ransome’s Coot Club …. surely not) is a vampire on the wagon, a modern vampire lifestyle about which we will read a great deal more in The Truth. She goes to mutual support groups and drinks a nasty red drink that probably tastes like cough mixture, but otherwise has a keen interest in sporting events involving werewolves chasing Vimes through the snow. Angua’s father, the Baron, is clearly almost completely wolf, while her mad brother Wolfgang is a Nazi with fangs. Pratchett puts black and silver fascist insignia on Wolfgang’s racial purity nonsense to ram that point home: fascism is beastly and savage, and does not belong in civilised society. Wolves, and other dogs, are completely civilised and natural within their own ecological niche. Werewolves are simply terrorists of nature.

The dwarfs have an internal problem, traditionalists versus reformers, and their hardcore deepdowners refuse to look at sunlight or even go above ground. These traditionalists call Cheery Littlebottom some very foul names because she wears a skirt, but under pressure even they are forced to use the feminine pronoun. This is a dark novel, due to the fundamentally uncompromising nature of fanaticism, but accommodations can be made as you step around the bodies.

The deep vein of sardony (from which Pratchett mines his sardonic) can be seen in the plot twists around the stolen, faked and mysterious Scone of Stone. It is a fundamentally silly thing, a super-toughened lump of dwarf dough, carrying the echo of our own dear Stone of Scone, upon which the monarchs of Britain are crowned. Tradition bestows truth and meaning on the most ridiculous and ordinary objects, like a stone and like bread, and people die if these are disrupted or changed. Pratchett’s genius lies in moving his narrative from comedy to tragedy in the flip of an adjective.

Thud (2005)

The One With ‘Where’s My Cow?’ When you need dramatic tension, you add a baby, psychotic fundo dwarves with flamethrowers, race riots and the steadiest werewolf on the Watch attacked by class consciousness and sexual jealousy. This one has everything. The anniversary of the Battle of Koom Valley is approaching, a historic conflict between dwarves and trolls, but no-one knows who won. Dwarves are being murdered underground, and there’s finally – finally! – a vampire on the Watch, and she can hear heartbeats in the next room. The phenomenally attractive but very innocent pole-dancer Tawnee is taught the facts of life, and her choices, by three friendly non-human female Watch officers in a night of dubiously named cocktails. Trolls do drugs, dwarves do religion, and everybody has to show a little bit of adaptation and compromise if we’re going to make progress. Vetinari even uses italics for emphasis, something I don’t think we’ve seen before.

The central idea of the plot – that the historic antipathy between trolls and dwarves is being exploited by somebody or something – is beautifully expressed in the central metaphor of the game of Thud, a board game with two halves. You play your opponent either as a dwarf or a troll, and then you play it again from the other side’s perspective. This seriously brilliant concept leads to young dwarves and trolls playing peace games in a cellar, learning about each other’s culture and mindset. The older generation haven’t done this, and they’re the ones who cause trouble, and keep Vimes from getting any sleep for what seems like a week.

As Pratchett matured his art, his themes became more universal and more perfectly expressed to model human behaviour. I really do think Thud is one of his finest novels, up there with I Shall Wear Midnight (community responsibility and male aggression), and possibly also Lords and Ladies (power and violence do not a ruler make). The debate is open.

I’ve posted reviews of other Pratchett novels here and elsewhere, which you can get at through this link to The Shepherd’s Crown.

Category: baroque and dramatic

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