Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.

“THE ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL” by George Meredith (first published 1859)

I had occasion to mention George Meredith (1828-1909) once before on this blog [look up Beauchamp’s Career on the index at right] and I noted that he was a writer who has basically slipped out of the canon, for all the efforts of a few academics to keep him there. Not only is he too intellectual (and too dated in his intellectual concerns). He is also addicted to a rather recherché vocabulary which tends to repulse even intelligent readers. But, said I, among his fourteen odd novels there are some that reward a reading, and the best of them is his first The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (it was preceded by the freakish Arabian Nights fantasy The Shaving of Shagpat which I’d be hard pressed to call a novel). I even nominated The Ordeal of Richard Feverel as Most Underrated Novel of the Nineteenth Century.

More than anything, this is a moral fable that has somehow got crossed with a Victorian novel. With neat antitheses, it sets out to chart the battle between Reason and Passion.

At Raynham Abbey in the country, Sir Austin Feverel strives to bring up his son Richard according to “the System”, a plan of strict Rationality, which involves segregating Richard from women until such time as he can form rational relationships with them.

“Sir Austin had this gift. He spoke as if he saw the truth and, persisting in it so long, he was accredited by those who did not understand him, and silenced them that did.” (Chapter 12)

Sir Austin scorns Passion and Feeling since his lady, years before, ran away with a caddish romantic poet. Young Richard is a scamp who has to be rebuked, in the early chapters, for poaching from honest Farmer Blaize and later for setting fire to Farmer Blaize’s ricks when he is found out. He learns humility when he has to apologize to the peasant farmer, and Sir Austin congratulates himself that Richard’s animal instincts have been contained by Reason.

But a much stronger test to Sir Austin’s system follows. In the passage that gives the novel its title, Sir Austin warns Richard what a man’s real ordeal is:

“There are women in the world, my son! .... it is when you encounter them that you are thoroughly on trial. It is when you know them that life is either a mockery to you or, as some find, a gift of blessedness. They are our ordeal. Love of any human object is the soul’s ordeal; and they are ours, loving them or not.” (Chapter 21)

At the age of 18 or so, Richard falls passionately in love with Farmer Blaize’s niece Lucy Desborough. By Sir Austin’s standards, Lucy is not a suitable match for Richard. She is not only a peasant, but also a Catholic. Sir Austin tries every stratagem to break the couple up, including getting his butler Benson to spy on them (Richard thrashes the butler for his pains). When Lucy leaves the area, Sir Austen imagines that Richard will naturally get over his love madness and he starts thinking of more rational and advantageous matches for the boy. Richard agrees to go to London. But – by chance – he happens to see Lucy at a railway station and it is all on again. Their love blazes up with renewed vigour. They elope. Almost exactly halfway through the novel they are married.

Love and Passion appear to have triumphed over Reason. Yet we are only halfway through the novel. How will Richard react to the fact that his cousin Clare was going to marry him, that Clare was genuinely in love with him, and that he knows that (by spurning her for Lucy) he has condemned her to a boring arranged marriage? And how well will his marriage to Lucy endure when his aristocratic relatives contrive to give her the cold shoulder? And, susceptible young man that he is, how will Richard fare when he is separated from Lucy, wandering in Germany or in the company of the experienced demi-mondaine Mrs Bella Mount (what a name!), who is set on seducing him? Yes, dear reader, in this Victorian novel the word “seduce” is actually used and the novel was indeed considered ground-breaking and sexually-daring when it was first published. By marrying the ardent young lovers at mid-point, Meredith nullifies the expectations of a romantic novel and warns us that love will not necessarily run smooth.

I refrain from synopsising the rest of the plot and naming all the significant characters. Suffice it to say that there is much irony and some tragedy in what follows – and you will enjoy it much more if you find it out for yourself. By implication, the prudential rationality of Sir Austin Feverel’s pedagogical system has been found wanting in the face of Love and real human emotional needs. But, as later developments in the plot show us, romantic sentimentality and a prideful sense of honour also prove destructive. A balance between Reason and Passion is advocated in a novel that takes healthy marital love and parenthood as ideal goods.

All the way through my delighted reading of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, one bon mot kept occurring to me, which I hereby copyright – this is an 18^th century novel which happens to have been written in the 19^th century. This impression is partly a function of the novel’s sylvan and rural setting, which often seems pre-industrial. It is like an intrusion when, for example, a railway train is mentioned. More to the point, the novel has many of the characteristics of a conte philosophique of the French Enlightenment. Sir Austin’s philosophical system is overtly on trial and overtly discussed. The people who surround Sir Austin at Raynham Abbey are basically types and “humours” (the cynic, the man of good sense etc.) of the sort that you might find in one of the short novels of Thomas Love Peacock. Yet it is, after all, a novel of the 19^th century, as it is reacting to two things that had already had their impact on European thought by the middle of the 19^th century – Enlightenment rationalism (Sir Austen’s “System”) and Romantic emotionalism (Richard’s impulsiveness and readiness to be led by his passions).

What can I say of the sheer lushness of the prose in many of the romantic passages? Sometimes it is almost too gorgeous, as in the “Ferdinand and Miranda” sections, where Richard and Lucy’s young love is blooming and nature thoughtfully joins in their joy in the time-honoured pathetic fallacy.

“The sun is coming down to earth, and the fields and the waters shout to him golden shouts.” (Chapter 19)

Nature again gives Meredith his stylistic head in later passages where Richard, travelling in Germany, is caught in a downpour of torrential life-giving rain.

“Prolonged and louder it sounded, as deeper and heavier the deluge pressed. A mighty force of water satisfied the earth.” (Chapter 42 – sexual connotation purely intentional).

How ironical is Meredith being in such passages? How much a conscious spinner of purple prose? I think he has it both ways. Such passages genuinely express the young man’s love and turbulent passions and are genuinely felt. But they take on an ironical quality in the context of the whole fable and especially in the light of the many faults of Richard as they are gradually revealed (his fickleness, his gullibility etc.) This is not the urbane man-of-the-world irony of, say, Thackeray. It is almost regretful for the purity of the young man’s vision and its inevitable passing.

There are 19^th century novelistic conventions here – complications and coincidences laid over what is essentially a simple fable-like “chiselled” plot. Suspense (Will Richard be able to marry Lucy when the ring is lost? Will Richard die in a duel?). Surprise (one old comic character turns out to have a familial relationship with Richard). Frankly Dickensian characters and situations which take Meredith into a type of comedy that is not his own (the old house-keeper Mrs Barry is as garrulous as Mrs Gamp). And there are some jarring strokes of melodrama in the conclusion.

But the novel is young Meredith (just over 30 when The Ordeal of Richard Feverel was published) at his most earnest and engaged, before the tedious intellectualising overwhelmed him. Compare the brisk intellectual chatter of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel with the prolonged discussions on dated issues in Diana of the Crossways. Compare the deft handling of a fable-like plot with the heavy machinery of fable in his most famous novel The Egoist. Often The Egoist and Diana of the Crossways are cited in literary surveys as Meredith’s best and most representative work. Representative they may be, but they are not his best. It was his worst qualities that possessed Meredith him in them, while The Ordeal of Richard Feverel remains deft and readable.

I refrain from mentioning the “scandal” that apparently greeted the novel’s first appearance (given Sir Austin’s situation, readers detected in its plot elements relating to the break-up of Meredith’s first marriage). Remember the basic literary aesthetic – you judge a novel by the novel, not by the chitter-chatter surrounding it. On this basis The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is a gem.

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

HOW OFTEN DOES THIS HAVE TO BE SAID?

Recently I was reading for review a book of anecdotes about the book-collecting trade, when I came across a passage that chilled my heart.

The book was rare-book-seller Rick Gekoski’s Lost, Stolen or Shredded (Profile Books, 2013), in which the author narrates tales of literary works and art-works which have somehow gone missing or been destroyed.

One of his chapters deals with the diaries of Philip Larkin.

As Larkin lay in hospital with a terminal illness, he instructed his secretary to destroy his voluminous private diaries. She did as she was told, meaning that said diaries never became part of an auction lot or wound up in the archives of a wealthy American university. As Gekoski notes, Larkin was probably prudent to have his diaries destroyed because (if comments from his friends are any guide) they probably consisted in large part of his masturbation fantasies.

When I was younger, and first encountering Larkin in such anthologies as George MacBeth’s Poetry 1900 to 1965, Larkin was seen as a pre-eminently, and even severely, intellectual poet. But later I was aware that, especially after his death, it became common knowledge that the never-married heterosexual Larkin had a taste for pornography and in his private correspondence expressed many grumpy reactionary views which right-thinking liberals would regard as “inappropriate”. He routinely referred to “wogs”, “niggers” etc. and stood for cricket and warm beer and the roast beef of old England.

And so we come to the paragraph in Gekoski’s book, which chilled my heart. Here it is:

 “Following the publication of the Larkin letters in 1992, various critics were duly offended. Tom Paulin, who has deep reserves of indignation, put the case clearly, describing the contents as ‘a distressing and in many ways revolting compilation which perfectly reveals and conceals the sewer under the national monument Larkin became.’ Joining the chorus of disapprobation, Professor Lisa Jardine, of the University of London, described their author as a ‘casual, habitual racist and an easy misogynist’, observing with some pleasure that ‘we don’t tend to teach Larkin much now in my department of English. The little Englandism he celebrates sits uneasily within our revised curriculum.’ Even Alan Bennett, himself capable of a bit of smutty puckishness, remarked that Larkin looked a bit like a rapist, and noted unsettling resemblances to John Reginald Halliday Christie, the Rillington Place serial killer.” (p.116)

Tom Paulin’s comment is merely rhetoric and Alan Bennett’s is plainly nonsense. (What, pray tell, does a rapist look like? Perhaps a bit like you, dear reader.) But of these comments, the worst is Lisa Jardine’s. Jardine rejoices that “we don’t tend to teach Larkin much now in my department of English” and that his values “sit uneasily within our revised curriculum”. What she is, in effect, saying is that her English department teaches texts on the criterion of the acceptability of the author as a human being; rather than on the merit of the texts as pieces of writing. Yes, there is indeed some “Little Englandism” in the later published poems of Larkin (especially in the collection High Windows, with its particularly inane title poem). But most of his brash prejudices were expressed in his private correspondence and are not part of his published poetical work. To wipe away Larkin like this is to pretend that he didn’t write some of the best – and most significant – English-language poems of the mid-20^th century.

I do not wish to confuse two quite separate issues here. Commenting on values expressed in a piece of literature is a perfectly valid (indeed essential) function of literary criticism. I recall an angry novelist once telling me that my review of the novelist’s work showed that I was “a moralist – not a critic”. As the novel in question made all manner of moral statements of its own (about people’s values, attitudes and the organization of society), I fail to see how the two roles can be separated – unless we adopt an extraordinarily narrow view of what is meant by morals. This is not, however, an invitation to ignore the quality of a piece of writing because we disagree with its expressed values.

But this is quite different from commenting on the values expressed by an author outside his/her published work. And certainly it has nothing to do with praising or deploring a body of writing on the basis of what we think of the writer’s personal life and habits.

            For this reason, I give this week’s “Something Old” the exasperated heading “How Often Does This Have to be Said?”, as I have tried to make this point often enough before on this blog. Good writing is not necessarily produced by pleasant people. Pleasant and even admirable people may be mediocre writers. What I am saying goes against the cult of the literary biography, but it still has to be said.

            Let us assume that Philip Larkin was a racist, misogynist, reactionary and habitual wanker. (I’m not saying this is proven. I’m just saying “let’s assume”.) In other words, let’s assume that Philip Larkin was as bad in his way as you are in your’s hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère [et ma soeur]. This would still not diminish or take away from the brilliance of Church Going, The Whitsun Weddings, Toads, Vers de Societe and An Arundel Tomb. If, in 1992, Lisa Jardine and her department couldn’t see this, it doesn’t prove that their “revised curriculum” recognised quality. It simply means they had a tin ear.

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books

“THE LOST PILOT – A Memoir” by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman (Penguin, $NZ40)

            Writing honestly and unsentimentally about your own parents is one of the hardest things a writer can do.

I know this from experience.

Sixteen years ago, my friend the late Bill Sewell asked me to contribute an essay to a book he was editing, in which New Zealand men wrote about how their fathers influenced them. The book appeared as Sons of the Fathers (Tandem Press, 1997). When I re-read now the essay I contributed, I don’t regret any of the factual material I included. I would still endorse most of the things I said about my father. But a couple of times I do detect a note approaching sentimentality, which I would probably edit out now. It’s so hard to get the tone quite right when discussing your parents in public. Edmund Gosse knew this when he wrote his classic autobiography Father and Son [see index at right to find my comments on it].

            Jeffrey Paparoa Holman’s The Lost Pilot is a whole book in which the author reconciles with his long-dead father; but he does so in a very roundabout and artful way. As Holman notes in his introduction:

 “In the course of telling this story, I was well aware that this book was going to cross many genres: memoir, history, travel, a spiritual quest – and poetry. Not only does it do that, but in the process various themes and styles and voices are interwoven, with leaps backwards and forwards in time. There are historical sequences where the personal interjects, and the register changes….” (p.11)

            After his introduction, he opens with his father Bill (William Thomas) Holman dying of cancer, at the age of 50, in 1972. This develops in the second chapter into an account of how son related to father when the author was a child and a young man. Bill Holman was no intellectual, but he was no fool either. Jeffrey has a youthful memory (p.20) of his father reading Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge and identifying with its troubled anti-hero John Henchard. An English immigrant to New Zealand, Bill Holman was moody, an alcoholic and prone to rages, which he sometimes worked out on his sons. The war had clearly played a part in damaging him. From the family home in Blackball on the West Coast, Bill went to prison when he embezzled money to cover gambling debts. His wife, the author’s long-suffering mother, formally separated from him. But she took him back when he promised to reform. Unfortunately Bill relapsed into booze and gambling; and to make matters worse he’d been kicked out of the social clubs connected with the navy, which were his chief standard of identity. The author admits that there were clearly some Oedipal feelings at work, as he rivalled his Dad for his Mum’s attention.

Only when Bill died and was buried did his son begin to research his parents’ background in earnest. Bill Holman was the child of a working class English family in the Depression. Circumstances led him into youthful crime. In 1938, as a teenager, he was drafted into the British Navy as a punishment for petty theft and as a preferable alternative to being sent to jail. The childhood of Jeffrey Holman’s Mum was just as fraught. She was put into an authoritarian orphanage by an over-stressed mother, who had a hard time keeping her. Later, as best the author can work it out, she was sexually molested by one of her mother’s lodgers. So both parents had unpromising starts in life, which made them emotionally distant from their children.

Yet the author is aware of his parent’s hardships and praises their resilience, especially in the circumstances of the Second World War, where civilians like his mother and her family were as much in the front line as Royal Navy boys like his father. As he notes:

“In this new form of total war, the front line was not some far away designation in a newspaper headline, but your own address. What my mother, her mother and the entire Liverpool community went through was a trial by fire every bit as deadly as that faced by my father and his shipmates at sea. It would be returned – with savage interest – on German civilians…” (Pg.68)

Although announced at the start, the key and centrepiece of this memoir is held back until the third chapter. In 1945, Bill Holman was serving as a signaller in the British Pacific Fleet’s aircraft carrier Illustrious. On 6 April 1945, a kamikaze plane dived out of the clouds over the aircraft carrier. Accurate fire from the ship’s Bofors guns sheared off one of the Suisei dive-bomber’s wings. It crashed into the sea and exploded a mere 30 yards off the ship’s starboard side, at once killing its two-man crew (pilot and navigator). Jeffrey Holman’s father (who was on the ship’s bridge) and his fellow crewmen had missed death by a mere fraction. Jeffrey Holman has a photograph of the moment his father’s life was almost lost – taken from another ship, a grainy shot of the huge tower of water as the kamikaze plane exploded next to the Illustrious.

This incident, for the author, became the key to all his questionings about how the war damaged his father and turned him into the unhappy, angry man that he was. But it also led him to think about the mentality of young men in wartime – kamikaze pilots as much as English seamen. So he set off on research into the Japanese and their military tradition. He relates this without sentimentality. He is aware that two atom bombs may have seemed, to sloppy observers, to turn all Japanese into the war’s victims. But they only followed the barbarism and atrocities of Japan’s own campaigns in China and elsewhere. He remarks:

“The post-war, post-atomic Japanese victimhood and memory loss regarding atrocities committed in the course of her stated desire to liberate colonial Asia from the British, the Dutch and the French remain in the court of history as familiar examples of a bully’s self-piteous reaction when his nose is bloodied in defeat.” (Pg.95)

Nor does he glamorise the kamikaze crews. Perhaps something could be said in favour of a desperate last-minute attempt to ward off an invading enemy by suicide attacks. But, after quoting pages of transcripts from diaries by Japanese war pilots, Holman concludes that there was much sheer cynicism in their deployment. Many of the kamikaze crews were scared, unwilling young men who flew off on their one-way missions out of a sense of duty, but without the patriotic fervour that Japanese newsreels depicted. Most knew their campaign was futile and were thinking of the families they would miss rather than the emperor they were supposed to worship.

The cynicism came from Japan’s highest authorities. The Emperor Hirihito was essentially a war criminal who had approved much military barbarity. The emperor survived only because, post-war, the occupying Americans needed a unifying figure to calm down any Japanese anxiety. Hirihito (pp.116 ff.) was not in the least concerned about the loss of his own pilots’ lives – he had already advised inhabitants of Saipan to commit suicide rather than surrender. His cynical purpose in authorising the kamikaze campaign was to show the strength of Japanese resolve in face of what he knew was inevitable defeat; in the hope that the Americans would not invade Japan and that they would reach a negotiated peace.

Once Jeffrey Holman has established all this, from a little over halfway through (p.168), The Lost Pilot becomes an account of his month-long visit to Japan, in his quest to find out fully how young Japanese men regarded the war; what their stresses were, as opposed to his father’s; and whether he could somehow put his father’s harsh experience into perspective. A strong sense of death hangs over these chapters, as they were written post-Christchurch earthquake and post-tsunami that ravaged coastal Japan in 2011.

Holman does get to meet, and is reconciled to, the Nagata family, surviving relatives of one of the kamikaze crews that attacked the Illustrious on 6 April 1945. He also describes in detail his own feelings and spiritual development as he considered Japanese ways of remembering the dead, and how war now features in Japanese culture. As he lays his father’s troubled ghost to rest, he makes many comments on the modern Japanese such as:

“Walking back, I’m getting used to being the roving gaijin zoo animal; drivers, bikers and walkers sneak a look at me as I go. Tourists don’t come very often to Kurume and there are few local foreigners. Neil, tall and blond, sticks out like a giraffe in a deer park; when he breaks into his fluent Japanese, amazing the locals wherever he goes, suddenly he seems to blend in. He’s a permanent outsider here, however, a state of being he accepts and wears as a kind of badge. Japan does seem a nation unto itself: despite Western prejudices about its propensity to imitate the West, that’s only true on the surface. So, a gaijin is a gaijin is a gaijin: the price is a certain undeniable loneliness….” (p.223)

The final chapter (entitled “The Old Illustrians – Writing from Memory”) reflects on the whole meaning and purpose of writing a memoir like this. Holman draws heavily on the observations of the German W.G.Sebald and others to remind us that, even if it is scrupulously well-researched and honest, any memoir is still the theatre for unreliable memory and translation. Hence inevitably any memoir becomes a species of fiction. The written memoir is never the same thing as the lived experience. Holman knows fully that his interest in Japanese kamizake pilots is as much an exorcism of his father as a memory of him.

In both its poetry and its prose, there is much to admire in this book. Jeffrey Holman is not patronising about his parents’ generation or about the motives that drove them. He respects people’s spiritual traditions and, although his own understated Christian faith is clear, he does not proselytise. Though it is roundabout in structure, I found this an enlightening journey. I do have to admit, though, that I felt it drooped stylistically after the mid-point where it becomes, in effect, the worked-up version of Holman’s diary notes from his Japanese journey. Perhaps some of this could have been more rigorously edited.

Even so, I found much of the book’s detail fascinating.

I never realised, for example (p.75) that when the British Pacific Fleet went into joint operations with US fleet in the Pacific war, British signallers like Holman senior were required to re-learn their craft and adopt the US Navy signal system in order to operate. A clear indication of how much the British fleet was junior partner in that theatre.

Then there is the story Holman tells of his great-uncle (his mother’s uncle), the English strategic theorist Hector C. Bywater who speculated on the coming war in Pacific. In 1925, Bywater wrote a book called The Great Pacific War, 1931-33 in which he predicted that the Japanese would launch a war with a surprise attack on American naval bases (just as they had surprise-attacked the Russians at Port Arthur in 1904); that they would gamble on America not having the will to retaliate, despite its much greater industrial base; that the Americans would defeat Japan by adopting an “island-hopping” strategy; and that in the last phases of the war the Japanese would adopt tokkotai (suicidal crash-dive or kamikaze) tactics. Allowing for the fact that Bywater couldn’t be expected to predict the atom bomb in 1925, this was, twenty years before the fact, a very accurate account of what actually did happen. More amazingly, Bywater’s book was read avidly by Japan’s high command, who agreed with the doctrine of a first strike and resistance to invasion at all costs, but who failed to take on board Bywater’s clear conclusion that in any such conflict Japan, lacking America’s resources, would inevitably lose.

Finally, in The Lost Pilot I discover (p.220) the extraordinary fact that T.W.Ratana modelled his famous temple on the Urakami Cathedral in Nagasaki. Ratana visited this Catholic cathedral in 1924. As Holman tells us, the cathedral was exactly re-built in 1959, after having been obliterated by the second atomic bomb as much of Nagasaki was.

I do not think The Lost Pilot hangs together well. In his introduction, Holman has fairly warned us that it is a blending of many genres. Even so, the jumps from personal memoir, to the history of his parents, to a general history of Japan, to a travel diary, are very jarring, as if the author hasn’t fully digested his own material. But if the parts do not hang together, each has much that is worth reading. And the image of the lost (kamikaze) pilot is a fair image of all young men who are destroyed or damaged by war, including the young sailor who never adjusted to the peace and turned to booze and domestic violence.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.

“THE BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR” by Sir Walter Scott (first published 1819)

           

            You will find this a very eccentric statement for a modern and literate person to make, but there was a time when I thought Sir Walter Scott was a good writer.

I have the excuse that I was thirteen or fourteen years old at the time.

I read one of Scott’s shorter effusions – his romance of the Crusades, The Talisman – and I was off reading others of his medieval tales, notably Ivanhoe, which at that age I thought quite wonderful. Why? Partly, I now suspect, because I thought the language was somehow quaint and pretty and I had the vague idea that this was a “classic” and that I was very clever to be reading it.

For a number of weeks I spent the money I earned from my paper round (12 shillings a week delivering the Auckland Star) buying new Collins hardback imprints of novels by Scott. The three or four volumes I bought now sit on the bookshelves of my eldest brother in far-distant Wellington, because I gave them away when I subsequently inherited from my father a handsome, elaborately-bound nineteenth century collected edition of the all novels of Scott. They contain two novels per volume and therefore they have very small print, but they do look handsome on the shelves.

By that stage, I knew enough about Eng Lit to know that Scott was now more praised for his earlier Scottish novels than for his later Hollywoodish medieval efforts. So one summer I set about the mad task of reading his novels in the order in which they were written. I read Waverley, Guy Mannering, The Antiquary and Rob Roy – and then I gave up, wearied by the effort. Later I cracked The Heart of Midlothian and Redgauntlet (because in various surveys of literature I’d seen them cited as his best novels) and The Bride of Lammermoor (because I knew it was the basis of the most famous opera based on Scott – and I also knew there were Lammermoor Hills in New Zealand named after the ones in southern Scotland).

And then I parted company with Scott.

I was fully over him, being now adult enough to yawn at all his faults, his unreal view of history and especially his pompous prose style. I was, and still am, fascinated by the knowledge that at one stage he was the most popular and widely-read novelist in all of Europe, which says much about the state of civilization in his day. But that alone was not enough to sustain a continued interest in reading him; and after having downed at least nine of his novels, I thought I had the right to make this judgement. I was no longer thirteen or fourteen and I had other literary idols.

But not too long ago, I re-read The Bride of Lammermoor as I was preparing for Opera New Zealand a programme note for their production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor.

True to my customary practice, I made a detailed summary of its contents, which go like this:

Sir William Ashton (often known as the “Lord Keeper”) and his wife Lady Ashton (Margaret Douglas) are Whiggish landowners in Scotland in the very early eighteenth century, during the reign of Queen Anne. The land they own and occupy was previously owned by the Ravenswood family, which has been largely dispossessed. At the opening of the novel, old Sir Allan Ravenswood dies, and there is almost a riot when his son Lord Edgar Ravenswood wants him to be buried according to Episcopal rites, but the local justice prevents this and insists on the Presbyterian-Protestant rites.

            Edgar, generally known as the “Master of Ravenswood” seethes at the injustice done to him and his family. Yet one day, by chance, he saves Sir William Ashton’s beautiful daughter Lucy Ashton from being attacked by a wild bull. He feels himself strongly attracted to her, but his family honour means he keeps aloof from her. Later, when Edgar is keeping to the one, tumbledown, cliff-top “castle” (Wolf’s Crag) that he still possesses, Sir William Ashton and his daughter Lucy happen to be hunting nearby. Lord Edgar joins in the chase, and then, as a thunderstorm breaks, he cannot prevent himself from inviting them into his home. As he entertains them, his feelings for Lucy Ashton grow, observed surprisingly benignly by Sir William Ashton. Indeed, to Edgar’s surprise, Sir William is remarkably friendly to him and seems to approve of the mutual attraction between the young people. But what we know, and Edgar doesn’t, is that Sir William is trying to forestall a Tory court intrigue that might find in favour of the Ravenswood family and dispossess him of all the Ravenswood estates he has recently acquired. His friendliness to Edgar, and dangling of his innocent daughter before him, are sheer policy. Even hunting near the Ravenswood home was not accidental.

            Edgar accompanies Sir William and Lucy to their home, Castle Ravenswood, which had formerly been his family’s seat. His mind is filled with contradictory thoughts  - on the one hand, his family’s dispossession and ancestral honour; on the other, his growing love for Lucy. Lucy is also torn in two by her feelings. While out walking, he resolves to break off their attachment, but her tears change Edgar’s mind and instead he pledges his love to her in a woodland glade near a natural fountain. Almost at once there is a scene where an ancient family retainer, the blind old seer Alice Gray, who lives as a sort of hermit, predicts disaster for both their families.

            Meanwhile a neighbouring laird, Francis Hayston of Bucklaw, irritated by Edgar’s slighting treatment of him, determines to win Lucy for himself. He uses the parasitical Jacobite factor Craigengelt as his agent.

            Lady Ashton has been away in London. She returns and takes a firm hand against Edgar, banishing him from Castle Ravenswood. Edgar leaves and finds employment overseas with his powerful kinsman the Marquis of A. As he goes into exile from his ancestral home, he encounters the ghost of the prophetic old Alice Gray, who has just died. He also meets a gravedigger who, like the one in Hamlet, talks unaware of whom he is addressing, about the fallen fortunes of the Ravenswoods. He tries to write to members of the Ashton family, pressing his suit for Lucy. But he gets a firm rebuff from Lady Ashton, and from Lucy a fearful note suggesting her reason is in danger.

            A year passes. In one of the big holes in the plot, Scott does not tell us why, but Edgar is busy overseas on some important, unspecified work. Edgar’s kinsman, the Marquis of A., has been working to get Ravenwood’s former estates transferred back from the possessing Ashtons. This has served only to make the Ashtons (especially the domineering Lady Ashton) even more hostile to the absent Edgar. So they have arranged for Hayston of Bucklaw to marry Lucy.

But Lucy is hesitant and falls into deep melancholy, because she believes herself pledged to marry Edgar.

She writes to him, but does not hear back. In fact, Lady Ashton is stopping all her letters. Lady Ashton also encourages the third-hand rumour that Edgar has already married somebody else abroad. Lucy is kept in virtual house arrest, as her artless and loving little brother Henry at one stage inadvertently reveals to her.

            Lady Ashton stoops to crueller devices in forcing her daughter to relinquish her pledge to Edgar. She employs a “witch”, Ailsie Gourlay, the “Wise Woman of Bowden”, to frighten Lucy with tales of Edgar’s infidelity. She also brings in the Presbyterian minister “Bide-the-bent” to remind Lucy of her duty to her family. Bide-the-bent, however, much as he hates the High Church party to which Edgar adheres, has a conscience, and realizes Lucy is being persecuted, and allows a message about her to get to Edgar abroad.

            Lucy is worn down, distracted and pale. At this point, the family arrange for the signing of her marriage contract with Bucklaw. The whole family gather. She signs with a wavering hand, guided by the implacable Lady Ashton. Whereupon footsteps are heard outside. A distracted, armed Edgar bursts in to confront the family. The males of the household withdraw, despite the oaths of Lucy’s elder brother, the choleric Douglas Ashton. Edgar tries to get Lucy to tell him if she has renounced her oath to him of her own free will, but Lady Ashton does all the answering for her daughter. Finally, Lady Ashton (with some sophistical help from the Presbyterian minister) persuades Edgar that Lucy has indeed given him up. Distracted and angry, Edgar burns their love-tokens in the grate, and departs, but not before Douglas Ashton has sworn to fight a duel with him.

            The wedding day. Lucy and Bucklaw are married (by Presbyterian rites). As Lucy and Bucklaw head for the bridal chamber, there is planned revelry in the great hall. But there is an omen. Mysteriously, the portrait of a Ravenswood ancestor is hanging in the place where an Ashton portrait should be. A scream is heard from the bridal chamber. The door is broken in. Bucklaw is lying as if dead, covered in blood. A search is made for Lucy, and she is found, her gown stained with Bucklaw’s blood, a knife in her hand, quivering in the great fire-place. She dies a few days later, distracted and insane. Bucklaw recovers, but refuses to say what happened in the bridal chamber.

            At Lucy’s funeral, a muffled stranger mingles with the Ashton family. Douglas Ashton takes him aside. It is Edgar. Douglas renews his challenge to a duel. Edgar accepts, and after one last visit to Wolf’s Crag, he gallops off to meet Douglas in combat. But he is too hasty, and drowns in quicksand. An epilogue tells us that the fortunes of both the Ravenswood and the Ashton families were ruined.

            There are historical and political overtones to this. The plot’s most sensational event (bride stabbing bridegroom) was loosely based on a real event that had happened some forty or so years before the time the novel’s plot is set. Scott appears to have moved it to Queen Anne’s reign, just before the Act of Union that abolished a separate Scottish parliament, so that he can draw a contrast between the new Anglophile possessing class (the Ashtons) and the old feudal lairds who were now losing power (Ravenswood). If he were more honest and less Romantic, Scott would have had Ashton as a pure Whig and Ravenswood as a Jacobite, the novel’s setting being some years after the exile of King James II, but before the 1715 uprising. Indeed the Jacobite agent Craigengelt, depicted unsympathetically, attempts to get Edgar to join the cause of the exiled king. But Scott can’t bring himself to support a Catholic king like James II. So (most improbably) he makes Edgar a supporter of the tiny (Anglican-type) Scots Episcopal church instead. (This was the church to which Scott himself belonged). Only fairly late in the novel are court intrigues between Whigs and Tories alluded to.

            The plots that Scott spins are often passionate ones – in this case a forced marriage that leads to madness and murder. I have remarked before on this blog [look up the posting on Trilby on the index to the right] that some novels are remembered for just one incident. But what is remembered of this novel – Lucy stabbing Bucklaw in the bridal chamber and going mad – takes up at most about three pages of the 288 closely-printed pages in the nineteenth century edition I read. The overall impression is that the whole story preceding this incident is mere pretext to get us there.

Scott sometimes shows amusing insights into character, as in the way Sir William Ashton lives in constant fear of being henpecked by his termagant wife. There is the odd pleasing touch, like the incidental introduction of Lucy’s little brother Henry, with his boyish enthusiasm for hunting. Occasionally, Edgar’s contradictory feelings are examined closely. But Lucy remains a pretty doll, passive and seen only from the outside. Early in the novel (Chapter III) she is described thus:

“Lucy Ashton’s exquisitely beautiful, yet somewhat girlish features, were formed to express peace of mind, serenity, and indifference to the tinsel of worldly pleasure. Her locks, which were of shadowy gold, divided on a brow of exquisite whiteness, like a gleam of broken and pallid sunshine upon a hill of snow. The expression of the countenance was in the last degree gentle, soft, timid and feminine, and seemed rather to shrink from the most casual look of a stranger, then to court his admiration….”

Frankly, she never develops beyond this description. If you wished to get all Freudian, you could see the (undramatised and off-stage) hysteria of Lucy in the bedroom as this virginal creature’s shocked reaction to the prospect of real sexual intercourse – but I doubt if this was either Scott’s intention or his perception. Lucy is even more of an inane puppet than Dickens’ Dora Spenlow.

            Even worse than having this unreal heroine, Scott tells his tales in the language of a law clerk filing a report. The vocabulary, even by the standards of 1819, is formal, archaic, Latinate and unnatural. Dialogue is forced and pedantic. Colloquialisms appear only when the “comic” minor characters break into broad Scots dialect, like the three harpies discussing the family fortunes at Lucy’s funeral. Attempts at humour are laboured. In The Bride of Lammermoor, we have pages of Lord Edgar’s servant Caleb Balderstone attempting to cover up his master’s poverty by pretending to prepare great banquets, or scrounging for food in the local villages. Comic climax is supposed to be his pretending to burn down Wolf’s Crag (by burning off scrub-grass nearby) to prevent guests coming in and seeing he has no dinner for them. This is as funny as a tax demand.

There were some stiffer and more inept stylists than Scott. But not many of them. (His near-contemporary, the American James Fenimore Cooper, makes Scott look a master a suppleness and wit). Scott’s descriptions are pure pasteboard, and most of the action in his novels consists of set pieces. The attack by a wild bull! The hunt for a stag! The thunderstorm! The lovers’ pledge in a woodland setting! The dire prophecies of blind Alice! Her ghost! The description of the fire! Edgar’s bursting in to the signing of the contract! The stabbing in the bedchamber! Etc. etc.

It sounds far more exciting in summary than the text of the novel itself is. These set pieces, I suspect, are what translate so well into bel canto opera. Each is waiting for an aria or a duet. Some weeks back, looking at Victor Hugo’s The Laughing Man [see index on the right], I said it was not a novel but notes towards the libretto of an opera nobody had yet got around to writing.

After only Shakespeare, and perhaps level-pegging with Victor Hugo, Sir Walter Scott was the most popular source for European opera plots in the nineteenth century. Literally dozens of operas were drawn from his works. Verdi never touched him, because Verdi chose to wrestle with Shakespeare, and I verily believe that Verdi’s Macbeth and Otello are in every respect works of art as great as the plays that inspired them. Indeed Verdi’s Falstaff is a much greater work of art than the lame Shakespeare play (The Merry Wives of Windsor) that inspired it. Likewise, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor is a much greater work of art than the halting novel from which its libretto was drawn. The tale of passion, implicit in Scott’s plot, works much better against music, and with a coloratura soprano doing her damnedest, than it does in the trudge through Scott’s stodgy prose.