From Trollope to Gide II

 

 

                      Penguin 1st printing - 1960                   Penguin 1st printing - 1952

I read The Immoralist (1902) nearly at one sitting in Salisbury. What I knew about Gide was really only the blurb on the back of the Penguin. His dates, 1869 to 1951, took in the Third (1870-1940) and Fourth Republics (1946-1958), with the 'gap' for the Second World War. After an irregular and lonely upbringing, he emerged, by 1917, as a prophet to French youth - his unorthodox views were a source of endless debate and attack. He married his cousin in 1892...  The book apparently sold only 200-odd copies in the first few years after its publication; thus, if there was a 'scandal' about its contents it must have been limited. Gide, in his Preface, says I intended to make this book as little an indictment as an apology and took care to pass no judgement.  However, his protagonist, Michel - who recounts his marriage to Marceline; his suffering from tuberculosis;, his recovery aided by his fascination with young Arab boys' bodies; his wife succumbing to the same illness but dying partly through his own selfish and hedonistic neglect of her - surely has the novelist more on his wavelength than against. 

A 1995 critic argued that the book, it would not be entirely unfair to say, is the story of a man whose discovery that he is a pederast transforms him from a prematurely dried-up bookworm into a passionate lover of life. I found reading the novel compelling but threatening, even repellant, in its totally hedonistic self-centredness. As another critic has written, Michel is trying to seduce and convince us...he doesn't so much challenge us as suggest that we might feel the same.

Strangely, Strait is the Gate (1909, although the first novel he wrote) 'troubled' me more. Set mainly in Normandy, it is the story of cousins Jerome and Alissa who, aged 10 and 12 respectively, make a commitment of undying love for each other. Alissa is witness to her mother's infidelity and develops, through religiosity, a barrier to human love. Perversely, she keeps Jerome 'hanging on' and we are drawn in to a deeply sad, even tragic, story. The title comes from St. Luke's strive to enter in at the strait gate: for many, I say unto to you, will seek to enter in, and shall not be able. Taking Pascal's What is not God cannot satisfy my longing and adding the feeling that their love can only be an impediment to Virtue, Alissa rejects Jerome again and again. Only when she dies at the end, with the reading of sections of her Journal which she allowed to survive, does Jerome fully comprehend her behaviour. I read it is a romantic story of doomed love. I could see little romance in her monstrous virtue and felt less sympathy that I should for her almost self-imposed death. In practice, her behaviour is as self-centred, even as cruel, as Michel's in the previous book. Immoralism versus Moralism! If only, Jerome had turned to the more straightforward love of Alissa's younger sister, Juliette, who clearly still loves him as the story closes - another impossible romance.

Between these two novels I read Gide's The Vatican Cellars (1914).

                                                    Penguin 1st printing - 1959)

In between the previous two books I read Gide's The Vatican Cellars. A plus in my mind was the knowledge that the Roman Catholic Church had banned it (along with Gide's other works in 1952 - 5 years after he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Who was right?!). Here, at last, I found some humour; delicious satire targeting religion and society's official mores. First we meet Anthime and his wife, Véronique; he is a combative atheist until, one night after damaging a statue of the Virgin Mary, he has a vision and wakes up cured of a long-standing (pardon the pun) pain in his leg. His subsequent saint-like behaviour annoys his religiously-minded wife and family even more than his atheism did.

The book then charts the story of Anthime's brother-in-law, Julius de Baragliol, and, even more importantly, a previously unknown illegitimate half-brother, Lafcadio Wluiki. We meet Julius's sister, a comtesse, who is taken in by a scam engineered by Protos, a school friend of Lafcadio. Protos is part of a racket to con people out of money to rescue the pope who, allegedly, has been kidnapped. The comtesse's husband, the rather weedy Amédée Fleurissoire, sets off to Rome with a large sum of money to help ransom the pope. On the same train is the now well-off Lafcadio who, instantly disliking Amédée, throws him off the train to his death. Through a convoluted process, it is Protos who is put in gaol for the murder and the book ends with Lafcadio, having just slept with Julius's daughter, deciding to turn himself in...or not.

There is the usual Gide depravity but it is spiced with (often sarcastic) humour. He called the novel a sotie - a short satirical play once common in 15th-16trh century France. Sots were fools. The front of the Penguin paperback (see above) states it is A dramatic novel in which Gide works out his idea of the unmotivated crime. Well, the prototypical nihilist, Lafcadio is the right man to commit it.

I just have Gide's autobiography, If it Die (1924 second, public edition), in French Si Le Grain Ne Meurt, to read. Then I shall return to Albert Camus (who I read again en bloc a couple of years ago) and his La Chute (The Fall) of 1956 - I see my Penguin was bought in October 1973 in Swindon, another wilderness.

From Trollope to Gide I

 I love a good Trollope. Well, let me qualify that. I have gained immense satisfaction from the Trollopes I have read: viz. The Barchester series, all six of them, and Dr. Wortle's School. I re-read all of them, in the correct chronological order of course, last year. More recently, I have been dipping into one of the Trollope Society's excellently produced tomes - Anthony Trollope on Clergyman of the Church of England (others I have include A Guide to Trollope by the Geroulds and Barchester Pilgrimage by Ronald A. Knox).

    

           Ronald Knox - 1935                The Geroulds - 1948              A. Trollope -1866

I finished Trollope's Clergymen during an atmospheric long weekend in Salisbury. Our hotel's lawns ran down to the River Avon and we could see, across a field with a few sheep in, the wonderful spire of the cathedral. A few minutes' stroll brought us into the Close and its surrounding Trollopian buildings - a long dip into the Salisbury Museum's marvellous collection, a sneer as I swiftly walked past the late Ted 'Grocer' Heath's 'chateau' and, then, a slow, slow wander inside the cathedral itself.  Memories of my researches into Walter Hungerford for the Richard III Society's Journal in the late 1970s came flooding back as I ambled past two Hungerford table tombs. 

 

                                 The River Avon                         The Rose and Crown

 

            Walter 1st Lord Hungerford d. 1449          Robert Lord Hungerford d. 1459

Then a pause at a memorial to the episcopal father of Chancellor Christopher Wordsworth (1848-1938) a dear friend of John Meade Falkner; another at Richard Jefferies' (1848-1887) wall-mounted memorial and a third at Gilbert Burnet's (1643-1715), Bishop of Salisbury, the great Scottish philosopher and historian. What a wealth of talent, and probable piety, is remembered in this great building. The refreshments and an original Magna Carta were bonuses.

   

                           Christopher Wordsworth                   Richard Jefferies

Gilbert Burnet

We tore ourselves away from Salisbury on the Sunday, to travel the few miles to Winchester, another great cathedral town. The highlight for me was not the cathedral (rather squat and grey, with nothing like the beauty of its sister); or the ruins of Wolvesey Castle (Bishop's Palace) - base of the famous Bishop Henry, brother of King Stephen. We met no Russians, either.

On the way back from the ruins I passed the rather forlorn-looking last domicile of Jane Austen, where she died in 1817. Chawton appears to be the Mecca. No, the highlight was recalling and then entering the superb, if tiny, second-hand book shop in the cathedral close. For once 'biography' didn't mean the vacuous irrelevance of modern pop-singers, 'celebrities', sports-people and other transient nonentities, but proper in-depth studies of the long-dead and history-making people.  I spent a happy half-hour in there, occasionally surreptitiously lowering my mask  to 'de-steam' my glasses. Two hardbacks (on Henry V and Redcoat: The Phantom Fox) joined two well-preserved first printing orange Penguins - novels by André Gide. I had heard of him but never read anything by him. That evening I started on his The Immoralist...

Susanna Gregory's Matthew Bartholomew series

 I have just finished reading The Sanctuary Murders - Susanna Gregory's twenty-fourth chronicle of Matthew Bartholomew. The first of the series - A Plague on both your Houses - was published way back in 1996, I have them both in their first edition paperbacks; and I have the other twenty-two chronicles, neatly side by side, now taking up nearly a whole shelf in my Library.

 

                 Warner Books - 1996                     Sphere paperback - 2020

For the first time since 1996, there was a two-year gap between the penultimate and last books. Is this a sign of Gregory tiring of her creation, or just taking it easy as the years roll by? It is interesting the Michael Arnold's Stryker series, set in the English Civil War, started at a pace - six books in five years. A hiatus has now lasted four years, with no real sign of the seventh tome appearing.

I trawled through some of the reviews on Amazon and came across this one about the first Matthew Bartholomew story: Although this historical mystery is already 23-years-old, it's still as fresh now as it was then...it's also a story where all the characters come vividly to life and where the historical details are wonderfully worked out,,,and not to forget the delightful picturing of the atmospheric surroundings of Cambridge...you'll find two well-drawn maps of Cambridge and of Michaelhouse... In fact, although the map of Cambridge has remained the same in all the books, the one of Michaelhouse disappeared from then on; a pity, as occasionally it would be useful to reacquaint oneself with the college layout (admittedly an imaginary one). 79% of reviewers gave the book a 5 or 4 star (58% the former). It has clearly 'travelled well'. So far 83% of reviewers have given the latest book a 5*. Not a bad track run!

However, the very first review (a mere 2*) did have this to say: I've been reading the Matthew Bartholomew series for many years and, unfortunately, I think the author has run out of ideas. The book was a turgid trip around 14thc Cambridge with no tension or interest, just a desire to reach the last page. It would help if the hero had some kind of love life, but the author just does not like Matthew's bride-to-be, Matilde. In this book she is away from Cambridge, fetching an elderly aunt. In the last few books she is mentioned but rarely puts in an appearance. Whilst never stooping to the epithet 'turgid', I must say there is a ring of truth here. (I find the same in the Thomas Chaloner series, set in Restoration London - Thomas had already lost one wife before the series took off, marries a shrew who also dies, and seems to prefer time spent with spy-masters, retired and active.)  Matthew, the medical tutor, spends more time as the university's corpse examiner, and in the company of the Benedictine monk, the heavy-boned Michael. Inevitably, the characteristics of the two men, and their relationship, become repetitive and I occasionally wanted them to 'hurry up' with their surmising (and wrong alleyways). Gregory undoubtedly does her research, and alludes to it at the end of most of her books, but she perhaps brings too many characters into play at times - a ploy to keep the reader guessing as to who the culprit[s] is.

Another reviewer suggested:  Susanna needs to bring what has been a most admirable series to a conclusion. I shall miss my Cambridge friends but it is time to draw a line. Many thanks Susanna for all the entertainment. Perhaps the suggestion that Matthew will leave Michaelhouse to marry Matilde will bring the curtain down in a final book?

However, I am on the treadmill as a 'series addict' or serial thriller; so will continue to send off for the next Susanna Gregory (Matthew Bartholomew and Thomas Challoner); Sarah Hawkswood (Bradecote and Catchpoll); Michael Arnold (Stryker - if he returns!); and C. J. Sansom (Matthew Shardlake); as well as the thriller writer stable of Scott Mariani (Ben Hope - number 22 comes out in November!) and others such as Sam Bourne, Raymond Khoury and Chris Kuzneski.