CONTENTS
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
– 1900s –
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz · L. Frank Baum
Claudine in Paris · Colette
Kim · Rudyard Kipling
Anna of the Five Towns · Arnold Bennett
Heart of Darkness · Joseph Conrad
The Hound of the Baskervilles · Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Immoralist · André Gide
The Golden Bowl · Henry James
The Scarlet Pimpernel · Baroness Orczy
Ann Veronica · H. G. Wells
– 1910s –
Howards End · E. M. Forster
Sanders of the River · Edgar Wallace
Death in Venice · Thomas Mann
Le Grand Meaulnes · Alain-Fournier
The Way by Swann’s · Marcel Proust
Tarzan of the Apes · Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Good Soldier · Ford Madox Ford
The Thirty-Nine Steps · John Buchan
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man · James Joyce
Tarr · Wyndham Lewis
– 1920s –
The Age of Innocence · Edith Wharton
Siddhartha · Hermann Hesse
The Prophet · Kahlil Gibran
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes · Anita Loos
The Great Gatsby · F. Scott Fitzgerald
Mrs Dalloway · Virginia Woolf
The Painted Veil · Somerset Maugham
The Trial · Franz Kafka
Lady Chatterley’s Lover · D. H. Lawrence
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man · Siegfried Sassoon
– 1930s –
As I Lay Dying · William Faulkner
The Highway Code
Brave New World · Aldous Huxley
More Pricks Than Kicks · Samuel Beckett
Right Ho, Jeeves · P. G. Wodehouse
Tropic of Cancer · Henry Miller
Of Mice and Men · John Steinbeck
To Have and Have Not · Ernest Hemingway
Rebecca · Daphne du Maurier
The Big Sleep · Raymond Chandler
– 1940s –
Biggles in the Baltic · Captain W. E. Johns
Darkness at Noon · Arthur Koestler
The Outsider · Albert Camus
Candleford Green · Flora Thompson
Brideshead Revisited · Evelyn Waugh
Cry, the Beloved Country · Alan Paton
Love in a Cold Climate · Nancy Mitford
Nineteen Eighty-Four · George Orwell
The Sheltering Sky · Paul Bowles
The Thief ’s Journal · Jean Genet
– 1950s –
The Catcher in the Rye · J. D. Salinger
A Question of Upbringing · Anthony Powell
Casino Royale · Ian Fleming
Junky · William S. Burroughs
Lord of the Flies · William Golding
Lucky Jim · Kingsley Amis
Lolita · Vladimir Nabokov
Breakfast at Tiffany’s · Truman Capote
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning · Alan Sillitoe
Cider with Rosie · Laurie Lee
– 1960s –
Call for the Dead · John Le Carré
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie · Muriel Spark
A Clockwork Orange · Anthony Burgess
The Bell Jar · Sylvia Plath
Herzog · Saul Bellow
The Crying of Lot 49 · Thomas Pynchon
Wide Sargasso Sea · Jean Rhys
Couples · John Updike
The French Lieutenant’s Woman · John Fowles
Portnoy’s Complaint · Philip Roth
– 1970s –
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas · Hunter S. Thompson
Crash · J. G. Ballard
The Memoirs of a Survivor · Doris Lessing
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance · Robert M. Pirsig
The History Man · Malcolm Bradbury
Quartet in Autumn · Barbara Pym
Staying On · Paul Scott
Praxis · Fay Weldon
The Sea, The Sea · Iris Murdoch
Success · Martin Amis
– 1980s –
Midnight’s Children · Salman Rushdie
Bright Lights, Big City · Jay McInerney
Hotel du Lac · Anita Brookner
The Unbearable Lightness of Being · Milan Kundera
Blood Meridian · Cormac McCarthy
Love in the Time of Cholera · Gabriel García Márquez
Oranges are Not the Only Fruit · Jeanette Winterson
Beloved · Toni Morrison
The Bonfire of the Vanities · Tom Wolfe
The Remains of the Day · Kazuo Ishiguro
– 1990s –
Possession · A. S. Byatt
American Psycho · Bret Easton Ellis
Generation X · Douglas Coupland
Trainspotting · Irvine Welsh
High Fidelity · Nick Hornby
Enduring Love · Ian McEwan
The God of Small Things · Arundhati Roy
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone · J. K. Rowling
Atomised · Michel Houellebecq
Disgrace · J. M. Coetzee
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
About the Book
John Crace’s Digested Read column in the Guardian has rightly acquired a cult following. Each week fans avidly devour his latest razor-sharp literary assassination, while authors turn tremblingly to the appropriate page of the review section, fearful that it may be their turn to be mercilessly sent up.
Now he turns his critical eye on the classics of the last hundred years, offering bite-sized pastiches of everything from Mrs Dalloway to Trainspotting via Lolita and The Great Gatsby. Those who have never quite got around to reading Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man will be delighted to find its essence distilled into a handful of paragraphs. Those who have never really enjoyed Lord of the Flies will be pleased to find it hilariously parodied in an easily swallowable 889 words. And those who find all such works a little highbrow will be relieved to find that they can also discover, between the covers of this book, John Crace’s take on the likes of Ian Fleming, P.G. Wodehouse and the author of the Highway Code.
Witty and sharp, this is essential reading both for those who genuinely love literature and those who merely want to appear ridiculously well read.
About the Author
John Crace is a Guardian staff feature writer and columnist, and author of the regular Digested Read and Digested Classic columns.
The Digested Read of
the Twentieth Century
For Jill
FOREWORD
SO MANY BOOKS, so many years … Compiling any list is an arbitrary, thankless task. Why 100 books? Why not 103? Compiling a list of the 100 classic reads of the twentieth century is more arbitrary and more thankless than most. Inevitably it involves compromise and the omissions are as striking to me as they must be to you.
My choices are almost entirely skewed towards European and American writers. This isn’t because there are no great Chinese, Indian or African writers; it’s because they are not widely known or published in the west, and there’s little fun to be had in parodying a book very few people are likely to have heard of, let alone read. So my selection is conservative; it reflects the consensual view of the western literary canon rather than trying to reshape it.
Even within these parameters, though, there are some key books missing. Where is Ulysses? Where is The Leopard? Where indeed. When I began this project, I formulated some rules. No author could appear more than once: partly to allow me to include as many different authors as possible and partly because repeating the stylistic mannerisms of a particular author could get … well, repetitive. So Ulysses lost out to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a book I reckoned more readers – myself included – were likely to have finished.
I also decided to divide the book into 10 decades featuring 10 books each. Apart from giving the book a very obvious symmetrical structure, it also offered a good way in to both what was considered important at the time and to tracking different literary traditions – from the late Victorians to the modernists, the existentialists, the social realists and post-modernists. But it also has its drawbacks. Some decades are far richer in literature than others; in any other decade but the 1950s, The Leopard would have made the cut. But rules are rules …
It also became harder to decide what constituted a classic the later on into the twentieth century I progressed. Will people still be reading High Fidelity in 100 years’ time as they now continue to read Howards End? Perhaps not, but High Fidelity is important – if not for its stylistic brilliance then for creating a new genre of lad-lit. Similarly, no one would claim Harry Potter to be a masterpiece but it was and is a cultural phenomenon that turned many kids on to the pleasures of reading.
So I’ve taken the word ‘classic’ in its broadest sense. Not just so as to include those books the critics tell us are of lasting literary value, but also those with a wider social significance to the twentieth century. My guess is that most people will find little to quibble with in about 80 of my choices. I suspect there will also be little agreement about which 80 these are. But please feel free to make your feelings known. It’s a conversation well worth having.
John Crace
June 2010
– 1900 –
THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ
L. Frank Baum
DOROTHY LIVED IN the midst of the great Kansas prairies with Uncle Henry and Aunt Em. Their house had four walls, for if there had been only three it would have toppled over. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em never smiled; it was Toto the dog that made Dorothy laugh. Today they were not playing, though, for a low wail of wind approached from the north.
Uncle Henry and Aunt Em made it to the cellar before the cyclone struck; Dorothy and Toto were not so fortunate. The house started whirling around and lifted many miles into the air. Dorothy got bored waiting for them to land, so she fell asleep.
She awoke to find herself in a luscious country surrounded by the queerest people. ‘Are you the Seven Dwarves?’ she enquired of the little men with white beards and pointy hats.
‘Good guess,’ said one, ‘but in fact we are Munchkins. And you are very welcome because your house has squashed the Wicked Witch of the East and freed us from our bondage.’
Just then a little lady appeared. ‘Who are you?’ said Dorothy.
‘I am the Good Witch of the North,’ the little lady replied, ‘and if you put on the Wicked Witch’s silver shoes …’
‘I’ll look like Lady Gaga.’
‘… you’ll have magic powers. Now where would you like to go?’
‘Anywhere that Andrew Lloyd Webber is not.’
‘Then you must avoid meeting the Wicked Witches of the West and the North-West.’ And so saying, she kissed Dorothy on the forehead and took off her magic hat. A sign then appeared on the ground which read Follow the Yellow Brick Road to see the Great Oz in the Emerald City.
After Dorothy had been walking for an hour, she came across a Scarecrow that winked at her. ‘Are you alive?’ she asked.
‘Of course I am.’
‘Then why don’t you move?’
‘Because I’ve got a pole rammed up my arse.’
Dorothy and the Scarecrow started walking. ‘How I wish I had some brains instead of a head full of straw,’ the Scarecrow sobbed.
‘A lot of people back home in Kansas feel the same way,’ Dorothy replied, and they carried on walking until they came across a Tin Woodman.
‘What happened to you?’ Dorothy asked.
‘It’s a sad story. The Wicked Witch of the East killed my love for a Munchkin by making my axe slip. First I chopped off all my limbs and then I cut out my heart so now I don’t feel anything.’
‘How would you know it’s sad if you don’t have any feelings?’
They all chose to ignore this inconsistency and carried on walking until they came across a Lion. ‘I want to be very brave,’ the Lion said. ‘But really I’m a bit of a pussy.’
Eventually the four of them, along with Toto, reached the Emerald City, where they each in turn had an audience with the Great Oz. To Dorothy he appeared as a giant Head; to the Scarecrow as a lovely Lady; to the Tin Woodman as a terrible Beast; and to the Lion as a Ball of Fire. Dorothy asked to be returned to Kansas, the Scarecrow for brains, the Tin Woodman for a heart and the Lion for courage. Yet to each the answer was the same: ‘First go with Dorothy to slay the Wicked Witch of the West.’
Off they headed along the West Road, where they encountered Cackling Crows, Beastly Bees, and the Winged Monkeys who were under the Wicked Witch’s command. Yet Dorothy wasn’t that bothered because she could already see how things were shaping up. The Scarecrow wasn’t nearly as stupid as many Republicans she knew, the Tin Woodman was actually a bit of a softy and the Lion was really very brave. So when Dorothy threw a bucket of water over the Wicked Witch of the West, it wasn’t the slightest bit surprising when she evaporated.
‘The thing with children’s allegories,’ she explained to the others, ‘is not to question anything.’
‘Oh dear,’ said the Great Oz, when they returned to claim their reward. ‘You see, I’m actually a charlatan from Omaha.’
‘Are you sure you’re not a President from Texas?’ Dorothy asked.
‘Quite sure. But if I pumped a load of manure into the Scarecrow he would have shit for brains. If I drew a heart on the Tin Woodman he’d be more human than Simon Cowell, and if I gave the Lion a bottle of vodka he’d have Dutch Courage …’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Dorothy testily. ‘We get the point. But can you get me back to Kansas?’
‘No chance, but you can come with me in a balloon to Omaha.’
‘I guess that’s better than nothing.’ But before she could get in, the balloon flew off without her.
Dorothy wept with frustration. So did the readers. ‘I guess we’d better start walking somewhere again,’ she announced to her companions, and off they set once more.
Again they faced many difficulties. The Scarecrow rescued them from a smack overdose in a poppy field; the Tin Woodman rescued them from Marauding Trees by chopping down loads of branches; the Lion accidentally scared off a few Tigers; and the Winged Monkeys did the rest.
‘Hello,’ said Glinda, the Good Witch of the South. ‘How can I help?’
‘I want to go back to rule Oz because they are used to having an idiot in charge,’ said the Scarecrow.
‘I want to rule over the Winkies because I’m a right Winker,’ said the Tin Woodman.
‘The Beasts of the Forest have asked me to be their Lion King,’ said the Lion.
‘I sense a spin-off musical there,’ said Dorothy.
‘These three things I can do,’ Glinda smiled. ‘And what of you, Dorothy?’
‘I want to go back to Kansas.’
‘You could have done that anytime. All you had to do was click your Lady Gaga heels three times.’
‘You mean, we needn’t have gone through endless repetitions of the same story,’ everyone gasped.
‘Precisely so.’
With that Dorothy clicked her silver heels three times and woke to find herself back home.
‘Where have you been?’ asked Aunt Em.
‘I’ve been to Oz.’
‘How was it?’
‘I could have done without Andrew Lloyd Webber.’
– 1901 –
CLAUDINE IN PARIS
Colette
PAGE ONE AND I am already exhausted! But I can just about raise my head to look at myself in the mirror. How my hair has been shorn! I may be 17, but I do declare I could pass for 15. Still your beating hearts, mes petits schoolgirl fantasists!
For the honour of my notebooks, I shall have to explain how I come to be in Paris. Oh Papa, I am as furious with you as I am with my naughty eyebrows! How could you have forced us to leave Montigny after a publisher failed to respond to the delivery of your manuscript on the Malacology of Fresnois within half an hour? It was all I could do to find my darling cat, Fanchette, before our train departed.
My memory of our arrival at the apartment in the dismal Rue Jacob is confused in a fog of misery. The effort of unpacking a single box of clothes left me with a brain fever so profound the doctors feared I might never try on a pair of cami-knickers again. The violets by my bedside prolonged my illness for they reminded me of Montigny and it was several months before I was well enough to venture outside.
‘We should visit my sister, your Aunt Coeur,’ Papa said one day.
‘But my hair is far too short!’ I complained. ‘And I have nothing to wear!’
The whipped-cream living-room couldn’t have been more 1900 and I was curious to get to know my aunt’s grandson, Marcel, who was waiting there. The days before our dinner engagement passed slowly. I spent my mornings having my bottom pinched – Ooh la la! – and the afternoons worrying that my breasts were too tiny for my décolletage – Encore ooh la la!
It was annoying to be seen in public with Marcel as he was far too pretty to be a boy and everyone stared at him not me. Yet I contained my jealousy and fluttered my eyelashes coquettishly at him.
‘I am not a goody-goody,’ he said, ‘but I will not make love to you. Rather, let me tell you about my dear friend Charlie.’
How thrillingly racy for the Paris demi-monde! A boy’s forbidden love for another boy! We must become each other’s confidante!
‘Tell me all about Charlie’s naughty bits,’ I demanded.
‘Only if you tell me all about your Fresnois Sapphism,’ he pouted.
How I yearned for a glimpse of Aimée’s budding breasts! How I used to delight in beating Luce about the head when I caught sight of her staring at me pulling my silken stockings over my milky thighs! How strange it was she had not replied to my letter! But, no! I would make Marcel wait awhile.
After a few days’ tiring shopping, Marcel introduced me to his father, my Uncle Cousin Renaud. Mon Oncle bowed low before me, taking my hands in his and kissing them softly, brushing his silver moustache against my quivering skin. My cheeks flushed with excitement. How could I contain my incestuous feelings for an older man!
‘Let me take you to the opera,’ he whispered in my ear, ‘and thrill you with scandalous tales of men who dress as women while we watch Marcel and Charlie slip away into the night together.’
Paris was muggy that month and men were staring at the sweat glistening on my exposed breasts when I unexpectedly met Luce, dressed in the most expensive fashions, on the Rive Gauche.
‘Ma chère Claudine,’ she said. ‘I moved to Paris to escape my horrid papa and threw myself on the mercies of my wealthy 127-year-old uncle, who gives me 30 Louis each month for the pleasure of my flesh! But I yearn for you. My breasts are rounder now; take them in your greedy hands and ravish them.’
She pushed her mouth towards mine and I felt a momentary passionate quiver, before beating her cruelly until she gasped her little death. I dismissed her contemptuously, enjoying her squirm every bit as uncomfortably as the Messieurs who are reading this on the Métro.
‘So tell me about all the saucy things that you and Charlie do?’ I begged Marcel, as he tried on a crêpe de Chine cravat.
‘It is a special love we have,’ he replied, guilefully. ‘Not like Papa. He is a journalist and he sleeps with any older woman whose nipples harden for him.’
How I hated those other women! And how my own nipples also strangely hardened!
‘Do not call me Oncle any more,’ Oncle implored, as we shared a bottle of Asti Spumante. ‘It makes me feel such a dirty old man.’
‘That is precisely why I love to use it,’ I said, feeling quite gay. ‘I would be your daughter, if I could, as that is so much more shocking. Yet, if you insist, I will call you Renaud.’
‘Oh, Claudine! My grey hair is turning blond once more. Let us be wed!’
How I enjoyed the twisted thrill of older men imagining themselves in bed with a submissive teenaged girl! And yet how strangely coy and dated it now seemed!
‘You’re only getting married to Papa to get his money,’ Marcel sulked.
‘I cannot marry you,’ I cried, thrusting myself against Renaud in a last attempt at titillation. ‘I will be your mistress instead.’
‘Non,’ Renaud insisted. ‘I may be a dirty old perve, but I am a dirty old perve with family values.’
– 1901 –
KIM
Rudyard Kipling
HE SAT ASTRIDE the gun Zam-Zammah, opposite the Lahore Wonder House. Burnished black by the sun, though definitely not a native as he was the orphaned son of an Irish soldier, Kim yonder espied a Tibetan lama.
‘Whither goest thou, Most Holy Asiatic man?’ he asked.
‘I searcheth for the River in which the Arrow of Life has landed,’ the lama replied. ‘And what, pray, is thy name, boy?’
‘They callest me Friend of the World,’ Kim said, ‘and I shall be your chela on your quest to escape the Wheel of Things. But first, lettest me say farewell to my erstwhile guardian.’
‘God’s curse on all Unbelievers,’ Mahbub Ali exclaimed, reflecting the colourful diversity of the Indian sub-continent. ‘Since thou musteth go, then sendeth a letter to the British commander in Umballa telling him the pedigree of his stallion is pukka.’
With the natural disguise of the native and the intelligence of the sahib, Kim overheard two brigands talking. There was more to Mahbub Ali’s note than met the eye. ‘Come,’ he said to the lama. ‘Letteth us leave on the te-rain before there’s trouble afoot.’
‘Thou art a doughty fellow,’ Colonel Creighton said, glancing at the note. With the natural disguise of the native and the intelligence of the sahib, the Friend of the World realised the Game was on. There was to be fighting in the North! But first, he would remain the lama’s chela and seek out the River of the Arrow.
‘Hit ye not that snake,’ the lama cried as they walked along the Grand Trunk Road. ‘For within that snake is a fallen man seeking redemption.’
‘Actually,’ the cobra hissed, ‘I was a millipede in my last life and I’m on the way up.’
‘How happy we are,’ the Sikh and the Pathan declared, sharing their victuals with Kim and the lama. ‘We artest truly blessed to enjoy the rich diversity of India.’
‘Indeed we are,’ the Old Soldier agreed. ‘The Mutiny is but a long-forgotten aberration. Verily, those that did riseth up against the Sacred Sahibs were grippest by a Fevered Madness. How else can one explaineth so profane an act against the undisputed benevolence of the Raj?’
With the natural disguise of the native and the intelligence of the sahib, Kim procured some tikkuts for the te-rain and, after many pages on the richness of Indian culture, realised the plot was getting seriously waylaid.
‘Forsooth,’ cried Kim, ‘my parents always toldeth me the Red Bull would beareth me Good News. And thither is the flag of the Red Bull.’
‘Behold,’ whispered the lama. ‘It is the ensign of your father’s regiment. Seeeth how the prophecies cometh true.’
‘Well, young man,’ the chaplain declared. ‘Seeing as thou art a pure sahib by birth, the regiment will taketh thee in and schooleth thee at Lucknow.’
‘God’s teeth,’ the Colonel exclaimed. ‘With his natural disguise of the native and his intelligence of the sahib, the boy will becometh a top spy in the Great Game once we have taughteth him a feweth lessons. Come playeth the White Man, boy!’
‘I musteth returneth to my spiritual quest for the River of the Arrow,’ the lama whispered. ‘Else I shall be grindeth by the Wheel of Things. Yet letteth me payeth for my chela’s schooling and letteth him visit me from time to time.’
‘Thou art a mischievous imp, O Friend of the World,’ Mahbub Ali groaned some three years later. ‘Thy constant scampish cunning and thy boundless romantic idealising of Indian imperialism becometh rather wearing after a whileth. Prithee, forgeteth the fake fakirs and get oneth with the story. Such as it iseth.’
Kim flung himself upon the next turn of the Wheel, learning the arts of the Game, first with Sahib Lurgan and his Hindu servant, and then with Babu Hurree Chunder Mookherjee.
‘What the dooce!’ cried Babu Mookherjee. ‘We neeedeth to find the eveeeeedence of an attack in the north.’
‘Taketh no notice of Babu’s funny voice,’ the Colonel laughed. ‘He talketh stupid to letteth you know that though he iseth a well-educated Indian, he iseth stilleth a native and canneth never be oneth of us.’
‘Do not thou and I also talk quaintly?’ Kim enquired.
‘Pon my word tis a bitteth late to thinketh of that. Now get thee hence to the North to playeth the Great Game.’
‘Come, chela, perhaps the River of the Arrow is to be found in the Karakorum,’ the lama said. ‘Yet what manner of Unenlightened strangers shall be found in the mountains?’
‘Da. Niet. Dosvedanya.’
‘Good fortune!’ Kim said. ‘We haveth cometh upon the Russians, and yet it iseth the Russians who are the enemy of Blessed India. Keepeth them talking while I nicketh their code books and diaries and thence we shall sneaketh off.’
‘You haveth the eveeeedence, O Friend of the World.’ Babu smiled. ‘The Great Game hath beeeeen won.’
‘Methinks I hath been looking for the River of the Arrow in the wrong place,’ the lama said sadly. ‘Wilt thou comest with me to find the Meaning of Life further south?’
‘Perhaps I will. For I am Kim. Or am I?’
– 1902 –
ANNA OF THE FIVE TOWNS
Arnold Bennett
‘THERE YOU ARE, Anna,’ cried Mr Henry Mynors, the superintendent of the Bible Class, who had been waiting for her outside the school.
Tall and sturdily built with the lenient curves of absolute maturity, Anna Tellwright stood motionless. This was one of the great tumultuous moments of her life – she realised for the first time she was loved.
How calm and stately she is, Mynors thought, as she took his hand in greeting and they walked together through the forbidding street that united the five contiguous towns that marked the ancient home of the potter. ‘I mean to call on your father to discuss business,’ he said, ‘but I trust you will be in.’ Anna’s heart shuddered with expectant perturbation.
She sat in the bay window of the parlour, her mind drifting as pages of tedium detailed every last ha’porth of her father’s wealth, in case anyone failed to realise he was a tight-fisted bastard.
‘Tha’ art twenty-wun t’day, lass,’ said Ephraim Tellwright, the only person so morally defective as to talk with a t’Staffordshire accent. ‘So tha’ inherits the fifta’ thoosand poond tha’ late mutha’ left tha’. Burt doan’t tha’ worra’ aboot wha ta do wi’ t. Tha’ canst leaf that ta me.’
‘Thank you, father,’ Anna replied, mindful of her duty, ‘for I am too feeble to manage it myself.’
‘Noo, get tha’ sen down to Mr Price. He owes ma’ twenta’ poonds in rent.’
‘Oh, Miss Tellwright,’ sobbed old Titus Price, as his son Willie hid quietly in the corner. ‘Times are very hard. We are but honest folk trying to make an honest living. I could give you ten pounds now. Will that do?’
How Anna longed to tell Mr Price that he could forget about the rent! And yet she had a duty to her father, whom she knew would not relent on even a half-penny of what he was owed.
‘For now,’ she said. ‘But mind you give me the rest soon.’
Such harshness grated on her soul, yet her passivity allowed her no recourse to graciousness so she pondered these things deep within herself at the Methodist Revival meeting. How she longed to find Christ and yet somehow He did not come despite the playing of the Cornet.
‘So, Mr Tellwright,’ Mynors said, as he paid him a call later that evening. ‘Will you invest in my pottery?’
‘Nay, lad,’ Tellwright replied. ‘Me brass is all tied oop. But ma daughter will. Woan’t tha’, lass?’
‘Whatever you say, father, for I am too stupid to make financial decisions for myself.’
‘Thass settled thun. Noo giv Mr Mynors anuther morsel of fat and thun go an lean on Mr Price for more brass.’
Anna was much troubled by this, but she knew her duty was to be obedient to her father even though it was to precipitate the catastrophe that nobody would give a toss about what was to befall Mr Price.
‘How nice that you can come on holiday with us to the Isle of Man now that you are monied,’ cried Mrs Sutton. ‘I do also declare Mr Mynors is enamoured of you.’ There had been a time when Anna would have dreaded such a disclosure, but now she merely smiled as if to say, ‘Yes I, the shy, dreary one, am beloved by the man desired of all.’
Few men in Bursley took conscious pride in the ancient art of the potter, steeped as it was within the weft of human life, yet Mynors’s works were acknowledged to be among the finest available for those of modest means. ‘Thrift is a great virtue,’ he said to Anna. ‘That’s why it is for Mr Price’s good you must ensure he pays you what is owed.’
‘Would you be so gracious as to take a promissory note from Mr Sutton as our pledge?’ Titus asked.
‘I’ll tak’ it,’ Tellwright answered.
The separation from the tight paternal fiscal grip lightened Anna’s mood on holiday and she nearly ventured to initiate a conversation before thinking better of it. Fortunately Mrs Sutton’s daughter caught influenza and Anna was able to stay silent indoors and nurse her. It is far better that someone as dull as me should risk infection, she thought, than that Mrs Sutton should be put in jeopardy.
‘The fever has passed,’ she said after a lengthy nine-day vigil.
Mynors was deeply touched by her servitude. ‘You clearly know your place,’ he said. ‘Allow me to do you the honour of becoming your husband.’
What strange transport!
‘He onla wunts ta marry tha’ for tha’ brass, tha’ mis’rable old cow,’ Tellwright said. ‘Burt doan’t let it wurry tha’. Tha’ wonst git a betta offa.’
‘Shocking news!’ cried Mynors. ‘Titus Price has hung himself.’
Grieved and confused, Anna fell prostrate. Like Christ she had consorted with sinners. Yet had it been her obedience to her father’s will that had precipitated Mr Price’s downfall?
‘You are the meekest of angels,’ said Willie Price. ‘Thy soul is pure. My father killed himself because he had forged Mr Sutton’s promissory note and was to be exposed.’
Anna looked deep into Willie’s eyes and in that moment they somehow knew they were in love. Yet Anna did not break off her engagement to Mr Mynors because she was so unbelievably dull. Instead she gave Willie one hundred pounds and bade him leave for Australia. She never heard from him again. Neither did anyone else, for Willie threw himself down a pit-shaft, an anti-climactic tragedy that moved no one, save those who wished they had done much the same themselves long ago.
– 1902 –
HEART OF DARKNESS
Joseph Conrad
THE FLOOD HAD made, the wind was nearly calm and the only thing for it was to wait for the turn of tide. The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! … The dreams of men, the germs of empires.
Between us four was the bond of the sea, making us tolerant of each other’s yarns. Which was just as well when Marlow, sitting serenely as a Buddha, began his two-hour, neo-Freudian critique of colonialism.
‘This also has been one of the dark places of the earth,’ he said didactically, leadenly ensuring we should not miss the parallels between the Romans in Britain and what was to follow. ‘Many men must have died here. The conquest of the earth is not a pretty thing. All that redeems it is the idea.’
He broke off a while to let his words hang portentously. We waited patiently for him to continue. There wasn’t anything else to do. ‘I don’t want to bother you much with personal details,’ he said eventually. ‘But I’m going to anyway.
‘When I was a little chap I had a passion for the blank spaces on the map. And there was one, the biggest, the most blank of all, that I had a hankering after. True, by the end of my boyhood it was no longer a blank. It was a place of darkness. Yet like a giant snake, ensnaring me with its phallic symbolism, this mighty river drew me in and I got appointed as a steamboat skipper.
‘I crossed the Channel to show myself to my employers and in a few hours I was in the whited sepulchre of their city. I saw the Company doctor, inspected another map which showed the river coiling snake-like through the darkness and said goodbye to my aunt. It’s queer how stupid women are. They live in a world of their own.
‘As the steamer made its way along the serpentine channel of the river, we passed several settlements where many niggers lay dying in the service of the Company. We eventually disembarked and, in the company of a vastly overweight, unattractive white man, the very obvious physical embodiment of imperial greed and exploitation, began the two-hundred-mile journey on foot to the Central Station.
‘I arrived to find that my steamboat had been sunk and I kept myself to myself, content to overhear snippets of conversation about a man called Kurtz. “Who is this Kurtz?” I asked at last. “He runs the Inner Station,” the Manager said. From this reply, I inferred that this man was afraid of Kurtz, as if he held up a mirror to the moral bankruptcy of Dutch colonialism while somehow escaping judgement himself.
‘Two months passed, time which I spent being charmed by the snake-like properties of the river as it slithered its way into the wilderness of the jungle id, before my boat was seaworthy and I could set off in search of Kurtz in the heart of darkness. I had on board with me several white men, whom I shall meaningfully call pilgrims, a bunch of cannibals – surprisingly jolly fellows when they were not eating rancid hippopotamus – and my sturdy, silent helmsman. This fine black specimen did not speak, but had he done so would undoubtedly have said, “You are a good man, Mistah Marlow. We niggers have no language or culture worth mentioning. It is just a shame that we’ve been civilised by those fat Dutch bastards instead of by someone with your more refined sensibilities.”
‘We stopped briefly at an abandoned settlement where a written note warned of dark, portentous events ahead, and as we neared Kurtz’s station on a bend of this vast snaking river, we were becalmed by fog. The screech of savages assailed us from the darkness and a hail of pitiful arrows rained down on the deck. My sturdy helmsman rashly opened a shutter and was struck by a spear. He looked up, grateful that his last vision before he passed into his own heart of darkness should be of me. I patted my pet affectionately as he died, before tossing his body into the murky darkness of the snake-like river. Rather the fishes should eat him, I thought caringly, than the cannibals.
‘At last we reached a clearing in the jungle darkness and there we found Kurtz, semi-delirious with disease, being tended by a young Russian man. “It was Kurtz who ordered the natives to attack you,” he told us. “They are in awe of his savagery. They treat him like a god.” We gathered up his vast stockpile of ivory and I began to read his journal that started as a witness to a noble moral ideal and ended in unimaginable barbarism with the exhortation to exterminate all the savages. Yet somehow I could not bring myself to pass judgement.
‘Kurtz escaped during the night and I found him heading back towards the heart of darkness. He talked briefly of his Intended before whispering, “The horror, the horror.” We carried him back onboard and set off down the muscular, coiling stream, yet he died before we reached the brightness of the ego.
‘I too almost succumbed to illness and it was with a sense of moral fatigue that I visited Kurtz’s Intended on my return to Europe. “I hadn’t seen Kurtz for nine long years,” the Intended murmured. “Pray tell me his last words.”
‘My heart trembled. She was only a woman and was thus too dim to be told of the horror, the horror, and the moral depravities of the heart of darkness. “They were your name,” I said.’
Marlow ceased talking and we turned our heads towards London, once more mindful of the darkness.
– 1902 –
THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
SHERLOCK HOLMES HAD in his hands a stick left behind by a doctor the night before. ‘Well, Watson, what do you make of it?’ he said.
I sighed. ‘Do we always have to start a new story with me humiliating myself by jumping to all the wrong conclusions?’
‘Humour me, Watson.’
‘Very well, Holmes. It belongs to an elderly man with a huge dog.’
‘My dear Watson, your stupidity never lets you down,’ Holmes cackled, drawing deeply on a pipe of heaviest shag. ‘Our man is in his thirties with a small spaniel.’
‘Good God, man! How could you possibly deduce that?’
‘Because he’s sitting in that chair in the corner.’
‘There’s no time to waste,’ said our visitor, introducing himself as Dr Mortimer. ‘I have urgent need of your services. You may have heard of the legendary curse of the Hound of the Baskervilles. For centuries it has been held as but a myth, but recently Sir Charles Baskerville was found dead on Dartmoor surrounded by the paw prints of a giant beast. Today, his only heir, Sir Henry, arrives from Canada and I fear for his life.’
‘This is a most interesting problem,’ Holmes replied grimly, ‘and I fear it will be even trickier than the curious case of Lady Ascot’s missing Fortnum & Mason’s hamper. Bring Sir Henry to these rooms tomorrow and I shall ponder the matter overnight. Watson, get me some morphine. It’s the only way I can bear to listen to my violin-playing.’
An urgent knocking interrupted our breakfast the following morning . ‘Sir Henry Baskerville, I presume,’ Holmes said drily.
‘The very same,’ he responded. ‘It really is most intolerable, sir. I’ve been in the country less than 24 hours and I’ve already been sent an anonymous letter warning me to stay away from Baskerville Hall if I value my life.’
‘Show me the note,’ Holmes demanded. ‘Hmm. I see it has been fashioned from today’s Times leader.’
‘How could you possibly know that?’ I ejaculated.
‘Elementary, Watson. Which bit of the paper would you cut up other than that which you had no intention of reading? This problem may turn out to be even more curious than the case of Elton of John’s tiara.
‘It seems you are being followed, Sir Henry, but I fear the answers are to be found in Devon. I must stay in town to complete my investigations into the disappearance of the Prince of Wales’s toothbrush, but Watson will accompany you to Dartmoor.’
Sir Henry’s mood darkened as the train sped westward; by the time we reached Coombe Tracey and discovered a prisoner had escaped on the moor, it was thunderous. ‘Why did Holmes have to send me down with you?’ he barked. ‘I’ve read enough of his exploits to know you’re a complete moron who will get everything wrong. And besides, the bits where Holmes doesn’t feature are usually fairly dull.’
An eerie howling atmospherically emanated from the moor. ‘I don’t much like the look of Barrymore the butler,’ I whispered to Sir Henry. ‘I’d steer clear of the swimming pool.’
Later that night, I observed Barrymore signalling to someone out on the moor. ‘Caught you, you bounder,’ I yelled.
‘Oh, sir, I meant no harm,’ Barrymore whimpered. ‘The escaped prisoner is the wife’s younger brother. He’s a murderer with a heart of gold really and we’re leaving food out for him.’
‘Of course, my good man,’ I replied. ‘So you’re just a red herring and I’ve got everything wrong as usual.’
Taking our afternoon perambulations out on the moor, Sir Henry and I encountered the local naturalist John Stapleton out with his sister.
‘I say, you’re a bit of a stunner,’ Sir Henry muttered as he doffed his hat to Miss Stapleton.
I rather thought he had caught her fancy too, but she whispered a hasty, ‘Stay away,’ before her brother pulled her away, laughing satanically as a horse was sucked into the mud of Grimpen Mire.
‘That’s all very queer,’ I said as we returned home. Queerer still was the silhouette of a thin, angular man I glimpsed against the moon. Later that night, Sir Henry went out on the moor alone. A deep growl followed by a desperate scream rent the air. I hastened to the body, fearing the worst.
‘Thank God,’ I gasped. ‘It was only the escaped prisoner dressed in Sir Henry’s clothes.’
‘Good evening, Watson,’ Holmes said, stepping from out of the shadows.
‘What the deuce are you doing here, Holmes?’
‘I’ve been hiding on the moor all along and I have the case solved. Stapleton is a distant relative of the Baskervilles and the woman posing as his sister is his wife. She has tried to warn Sir Henry he is planning to kill off everyone to inherit the Baskerville fortune, but Stapleton has silenced her. We must act before he succeeds.’
Fog swept over the moor as a shiny, fire-breathing beast bore down on Sir Henry. Holmes emptied his revolver. The mastiff fell lifeless and Stapleton ran into Grimpen Mire, to be swallowed by the mud.
‘See how he painted the dog and placed phosphorus in his mouth,’ Holmes said breezily. ‘This really has been the most fiendish of cases I’ve ever encountered, more fiendish even than the abduction of Mrs Slocombe’s pussy.’
‘Just one thing bothers me, Holmes,’ I replied. ‘Even if Stapleton had killed Sir Henry, how would he have gotten away with suddenly announcing himself the heir?’
‘Shut the fuck up, Watson.’
– 1902 –
THE IMMORALIST
André Gide
MICHEL HAS SPOKEN to us. Oh, what will you think of our friend? Shall we reprove him or shall we admit that we can recognise ourselves in this tale? Or will we even care?
My dear friends, thank you for coming. The last time we met was at my wedding. I hardly knew my wife and it was a loveless marriage. I merely felt a comme-ci, comme-ça tenderness for Marceline born of pity. Where I was a wealthy, successful classicist, she was an impoverished simpleton. Why did I marry her? To keep my father happy on his death bed.
We travelled south, sleeping in separate rooms, naturally, and it was only after several months that I momentarily slipped out of my self-absorption and realised Marceline was actually quite pretty. But back to me. When we reached Sousse, I felt unwell and casually told Marceline I had spat blood in the night.
She collapsed to the floor with fright. I was enraged. Was it not enough that one of us was ill? Thrilled with the daring selfishness of my thoughts, I summoned a doctor before losing consciousness myself. We were taken to Biskra, where Marceline slowly nursed me back to health. I passed my convalescence observing the nakedness of young Arab boys beneath their thin white gandourah and ignoring Marceline.
‘I’ve been praying for you,’ she said one day.
‘Don’t bother. I don’t need God’s help; it creates obligations.’
Marceline passively accepted her role as a patsy in a thinly disguised Nietzschean treatise and as her reward, after wasting several more months ogling boys, I consummated our marriage in Sorrento during our return journey to France. Her gratitude was touching, but the sense she was but an impediment to my inflated ego was growing daily.
Having come so close to death, I felt an unconstrained need to experience joy by doing whatever I liked, when I liked. To show the courage of my convictions – how I had cast off the shackles of my past – I even declined to visit Agrigentum. How risqué was that!
After a few days in Paris spent in companionable silence, Marceline and I moved to Normandy to visit my family’s estate. It was there I had a new emotion to deal with: Marceline announced she was pregnant. I was filled with a joy that I expressed by ignoring her, choosing instead to spend my days with my farm manager, Bocage, whose unctuous sincerity I found cloying, but whose son Charles was an utter delight. Apart from his clothes, which were not to my taste.
‘I could manage the estate so much better,’ Charles teased, as we went out riding together – me playfully slapping his thighs with my hunting crop and allowing my hands to touch his in lingering caresses. Yet his attire was de trop: even his beauty could not carry off his peasant chic, so Marceline and I were forced to return to Paris once more.
I was not that concerned by Marceline’s fatigue – why should I have been? – for I was weighed down by the seriousness of my Nietzschean crusade, which had led me to reject my bourgeois friends, whose lives were ruled by duty, and to live my life in the moment.
It was after delivering a derivative lecture on how Culture kills Life that I met Mélanque, himself an obvious Nietzschean avatar. ‘I live life in the ici et maintenant,’ he said. ‘I have no rules other than to do what I want, when I want. It is the only honesty. The past means rien.’
‘I’m sure the readers will agree,’ I said enthusiastically, embracing the New Order with as much speed as a terminally languid member of the French bourgeoisie could muster. ‘Another glass of Syrah, perhaps?’
I returned home to find Marceline had lost the baby. For a moment I was distraught, but then I forgot the past and went out looking at boys instead until she had got over it.
‘God helped me get better,’ she said.
‘I got better on my own,’ I replied. ‘Now God can help you pack up the house while I leer at garçons, because we’re off to Normandy again as I’m exhausted by your illness.’
Marceline was content to stay in the house, but I preferred the company of rustic proletarians whose primitive responses to stimuli lacked the guile and simulacra of the more refined. I became nocturnal, going out poaching with Bocage’s youngest son Alcide on my estate at night. How very, very dare you!
‘Don’t you fancy me any more?’ said Charles one day, after I had been ignoring him for some time.
‘Not really,’ I replied. ‘You’ve become as big a twat as me and you still have no dress sense.’
Marceline’s health was failing so obviously that with the great love I felt towards my impediment, I took her on an arduous journey of symbolic circularity back to North Africa. Annoyingly she seemed to recover at first, but then she grew weak once more.
I, the Superman, felt restrained by her cloying neediness and spent my nights searching out boys. Or girls, if I couldn’t find any boys. Marceline was touched by my deep expressions of love when I dropped in on her for a few moments and, when I announced we must move to Biskra after she had started coughing blood, whispered, ‘I am not worthy of such a strong man.’
‘You’re right.’ I shrugged. ‘But since we’re back where we started the book, you can croak now.’ And she did! So now I’m off to play with some boys. See you later, alligators.
– 1904 –
THE GOLDEN BOWL
Henry James
THE PRINCE HAD always liked his London and, as we join him, he is conversing with his affianced bride, Maggie, daughter of the rich American art collector, Mr Verver.
‘You are truly a galantuomo,’ she had said.
‘I know.’
With that they had lapsed into pages of intense introspection, an introspection into the most precise nature of their feelings, feelings which would include the Prince’s impecunious state, a state that was of necessity the binding force between them, conferring on Maggie the advantage of European aristocracy and on the Prince the endowment of new capital. They smiled at one another, a smile that lasted for at least another dozen pages, pages which induced an extreme sopor, a sopor that would in time degenerate into unconsciousness.
It was on the Friday before his wedding that the Prince paid a visit to the Assinghams, a couple delicately placed beneath the highest ranks of the upper classes with whom he had been acquainted in Italy.
‘Your arrival is most gracious yet unexpected, Your Highness,’ said Mrs Assingham, curtseying before the Prince, ‘for Miss Charlotte Stant is due for tea.’
Miss Stant made no circumstance of thus coming upon the Prince, and for his part the Prince felt ‘safe’, ‘safe’ for being so placed in the innocent coincidence of their meeting that he could interject a note of jocularity, a jocularity tempered by the remembrance of the refinement of their heightened sensibilities, such that it would pass unnoticed.
‘Perhaps I could accompany you on an expedition to acquire a present for your bride?’ Charlotte enquired.
This little crisis was of a great deal shorter duration than our account of it, but then it could hardly have been much longer save that it had taken five hours including nodding-off breaks to read it. Upon their departure Mrs Assingham apprised her husband of the situation.
‘The Prince and Miss Stant had been intimate in Italy,’ she said, ‘and I do believe that if she had even a little money, he would have bravely married beneath himself. This places me queerly with the Ververs, for perhaps I might have mentioned this fact to them previously.’
Up, up, up, never so high, the Prince walked with Charlotte around the antiquarii of Bloomsbury. ‘See in the Jew’s shop window a Golden Bowl, a Golden Bowl worthy of the selflessness of your bride,’ Charlotte said in perfect Italian.
‘Trust not the thieving Son of Abraham,’ the Prince replied. ‘For the gilded crystal bowl has a hidden fatal flaw.’
Overwhelmed by the symbolism, the pair continued their promenade in mute intensity, an intensity borne of the superlative degree of their angularity.
Mr Adam Verver, inscrutably monotonous behind an iridescent cloud, patted the Principino, the Principino who need detain us no longer now that the passage of hymeneal time has been indicated by the arrival of issue to the Prince and Maggie, and wondered whether the actuality of his not having remarried after the death of his wife was preventing Maggie from obtaining the maximum immersion in the fact of her being married.
‘I am aware it is you who are young and I who am old,’ he said to Charlotte.
‘Au contraire,’ Charlotte answered with tortured logic, a logic in which no one but James believed. ‘It is you who are young and I who am old.’
Charlotte questioned whether she was square with Mrs Assingham, but the place of her marriage to Mr Verver made her placement so, a placement whose matchless beauty allowed her to do nothing in life at all, not that she’d done that much previously, a placement that made her proximity to the Prince an occurrence of immense naturalness such that when Lady Castledean invited them to stay it was only natural they should return to London alone.