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This is to certify that the
thesis entitled

THE ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THE YOUNG NOVELIST: An
Historical Survey of Novels by Authors Aged Twenty-
Five and Under

presented by

Peter Morris

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

M.A. English

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THE ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THE YOUNG NOVELIST:
An historical survey of novels by authors aged twenty-five and under
By
Peter Morris
A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS

Department of English

1990

(555 - 9754

ABSTRACT
THE ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THE YOUNG NOVELIST

By

Peter Morris

The accomplishment of novelists twenty-five and under has been maligned
and ignored, but rarely taken seriously. Their detractors include older
novelists who assume that young novelists lack experience. Such
dismissals, however, fail to account for the many great novels written by
young authors. These accomplishments are possible because the authors
have experienced the loss of innocence recently enough to describe it
poignantly. A survey of fifty-four such novels in various periods and
languages shows marked similarities in the way they trace the loss of
innocence. These stages include: the entertainment of temptation, distrust
of the senses, acute self-consciousness, disillusionment and ennui, and a
passion for solitude and wandering. Sorrow finally arrests this degenerative
cycle by proving ephemeral, thereby demonstrating that the seeds of
corruption are internal. Resolution is finally effected by constructing a
double self - one half able to function in society, the other half nurturing the

ache for wholeness.

Copyright by
PETER MORRIS
1990

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This thesis is dedicated to my parents for their unfailing support and
encouragement. I am especially indebted to Dr. Howard Anderson who first
encouraged me to work on this subject, and has supervised it from its
inception. Dr. William Johnsen and Dr. Arthur Sherbo have provided
valuable advice in serving as readers. Dr. Jay B. Ludwig afforded me the
opportunity to teach an experimental course based on this material, and to see
how enthusiastically students responded to these novels. The students in
that class - Ken Carps, Chris Cox, Ann Good, Lydia Lovell and Dawn
Schmelzer - provided me with inspiration and challenging readings of the
texts, as well as introducing me to a number of young novelists. The faculty
and graduate students of the English department of Michigan State
University have been helpful and supportive in innumerable ways. I am
particularly grateful to Robert F. Scott for his help with computer problems,
his boundless enthusiasm and his no-look passes. Marguerite Halversen was
a great help in preparing the final version. Among the many other people
whose support has been invaluable are Peter and Kristiina Overton, Tony
Johnston, Dave MacGregor, Janine Preston, Hy Francis, Steve Grob, Dr. Fred
Flahiff, Jim Neuberger, Chris Reslock, Dr. Brian Thomas, Kay Kaminski,
Brian Bode and Beth Guikema, Kiki Froberg, Barbara Amster, Carl Dalke,

Joong Soo Kim, and Dr. Michael Laine. Finally, I would like to thank Dennis

i i
Rodman and Steffi Graf for the inspiration which, unbeknownst to them, I

have derived from their examples.

This paper will suggest the possibility of distinguishing trends in the
novel which supersede or complement an historical approach. By
looking at novels written when the author was under twenty-five, we
will see to what extent characteristic features in the works can be
illuminated by looking at the origins of the novelist instead of the
origins of the novel. This idea that salient features can profitably be
isolated from other relevant factors bears in interesting ways upon the
theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and Northrop Frye, but it also hearkens
back to E. M. Forster's notion that we can think of all novelists
congregated around a table in a timeless continuum. As Edmund
Wilson suggests in "The Historical Interpretation of Literature",
looking at literature by considering a single, discrete element can
enable us to see likenesses which would not otherwise be apparent and
which often cut deeper than historical or national ones.

Much earlier, the Marquis de Sade articulated the idea of seeing the
novel as the result of a universal impulse which transcends historical
factors. He scoffed at the notion that the novel originated in Greece,
and was somehow transmitted to the Moors, the Spaniards and finally

to French troubadours. Instead, Sade argued that ”there are customs,

 

habits and tastes which cannot be transmitted; inherent in all men,
they are part of man's make-up at birth."1 Consequently, he
contended that "it was in the countries which first recognized gods that
the novel originated; and, to be more specific, in Egypt, the cradle of all
divine worship. No sooner did man begin to suspect the existence of
immortal beings than he endowed them with both actions and words.
Thereafter we find metamorphoses, fables, parables, and novels: in a
word, we find works of fiction as soon as fiction seized hold of the
minds of men" (Sade,98). Sade elaborated on the importance of

looking beyond historical trends for archetypal patterns:

Man is prey to two weaknesses, which derive from his
existence and characterize it. Wheresoever on earth

he dwells, man feels the need to pray, and to love: and
herein lies the basis for all novels. Man has written novels
in order to portray beings whom he implored; he has
written novels to sing the praises of those whom he
loves...But as man has prayed, and as he loved, Wheresoever
he dwelled on the face of the earth, there were novels, that
is, works of fiction, which at times depicted the fanciful
objects of his worship, and at times those more concrete
objects of his love.

One should therefore refrain from trying to trace the
source of this kind of writing back to one nation in preference
to another; one should be persuaded by what we have just
said that all nations have more or less employed this form,
depending upon greater or lesser predilection they have

either for love or for superstition. (Sade, 99-100)

3

As Sade's approach implies, one of the reasons for the staying
power which the novel has shown is this potential to regenerate itself
with each succeeding generation. This accords with Bakhtin's
description of how man's increasing awareness of time and the
fluctuations of history have led to the novel usurping the primacy
which once belonged to the epic. Whereas the epic was regarded as
almost exclusively the preserve of the old, wise writer who was
affirming the universality of his people's moment in time, the novel
represents an opportunity to express what is new and distinct about the
world. It therefore represents a genre uniquely well-suited to young
novelists and, as we shall see, their success tends to increase
proportionately with the instability of the times in which they write.
The years immediately following the French Revolution, World War I,
and World War II all produced flourishes of first-rate novels by young
writers. Somerset Maugham has written perceptively of his own
efforts to write historical fiction while very young and concluded that a
young novelist has to be immersed in his or her own age to have any
chance of being "of all time”2.

It is especially important to reaffirm the achievement possible for

young novelists at a time when very few young novelists are receiving

recognition and with many of the great accomplishments of the past
forgotten. Indeed, if there is any reason to suspect that the long
anticipated "death of the novel" is at hand, it is in the dearth of young
novelists currently attracting attention. The discovery that certain
elements continually recur in the fiction of young novelists even
when there is no question of influence seems to me to be the most
important evidence of the novel's ability to retain its relevance and
liveliness, and any indication that this characteristic is in decline is

grounds for concern. Phil Surguy observed in 1978,

The Thomas Wolfe myth of the unknown genius
who roars out of nowhere and electrifies the world
with his first novel is, if the ads and stories in
glossy magazines are any indication, still alive in
many areas. The reality, of course, is much more
prosaic... the sad truth is publishers are niggardly
when it comes to new fiction and the public is
largely indifferent to it. There was a time in the late
1950's and early 1960's (probably inspired by the
enormous success of W when
the phrase 'a brilliant first novel' clamoured from
paperback covers as frequently as 'a nationwide best

seller' does today. Those days are long gone now.3

What is generally true of first novels is more abundantly so when the
writer is young, and this tendency has become much more pronounced

in the last decade for a number of reasons. Targeting a book at the age

 

group for which so many livelier products compete must seem a risky
business, at best. More recognition of the important contributions
young novelists have made to the history of the novel could, however,
go a long way to helping to reverse this trend. A look at literary history
tells us immediately that the great novelists of the past were not all
grey-bearded sages when they wrote their masterpieces.

It is little remembered today how many novelists produced their
first novel before their twenty-fifth birthdays, and how many of those
who do publish that early create impressive works. Among the many
novels of the first order are Mary Shelley's W Stephen
Crane's Wage, Evelyn Waugh's chine and Fall,
F. Scott Fitzgerald's W Thomas Mann's
W Carson McCullers' Wm
Dickens's Pigwick Papers and Oliver Twist, Norman Mailer's 113
W Lermontov's Wing, Olive
Schreiner's WW Alain-Fournier's M
Mgaulnes, and Goethe's W. No doubt

many readers have read and been impressed with these novels without

realizing how young their authors were; conversely, the youth of an

6

author is often cited to explain away an inferior work, and hence a
misleading picture is often created. The impressive nature of this list,
to which many other novels could be added, necessitates a
modification of the accepted wisdom that comparatively few early
novels are anything more than shadows of future work. There is also a
rarely recognized but important tradition of works which may not be
enduring masterpieces, but live on as documents of what spoke
profoundly to the generation from which they arose. The reader is
referred to the bibliography at the end of the paper for a more
comprehensive list of novels by young hands.

Some very influential writers have contributed to an unfair
perception of young novelists. After admitting in his book on
Hawthorne that he had not read Fanshawg, Henry James nonetheless
felt empowered to conclude that "it is a proof of how little the world of
observation lay open to Hawthorne at this time....He was twenty-four
years old, but the 'world', in its social sense had not disclosed itself to
him.”4 That even as influential a critic as James can indulge in a subtle
form of marginalizing on the basis of age is indicative of the

pervasiveness of the practice. Aldous Huxley writes in his

introduction to Raymond Radiguet's W:

7

The young Mozart was not unique; he was only the

most marvelous of a small army of marvelous boys.
Where music is concerned, infant prodigies are almost
the rule. In the world of literature, on the other hand,
they remain the rarest exceptions. The fact is curious
and requires explanation....Literature....is an art primarily
concerned with the relations existing between the inner
and the outer world. It makes copies of things which are
not in the soul, and a part at least of its substance is
borrowed from external reality. This means that good
literature cannot be written without first-hand knowledge
of that reality, without actual experience of the relations
between the soul and the world outside it. Hence the
shortage of literary prodigies. Children can hardly be
expected to know much about the world or to be deeply

experienced in the queer and painful ways of adult living.5

This last sentence betrays a fundamental condescension in Huxley's
approach, in that he takes "adult living" as the proper subject of
literature and implicitly dismisses any value to seeing the world
through a youngster's eyes. Of course, on such terms, the contributions
of young writers will be of minimal significance. But as this paper will
demonstrate, one of the great virtues of the literature of the young
writer is its ability to capture a perspective which is at less remove from
the essence of the human condition. The title of a recent work by a
young novelist, David Leavitt's The Lost Language of Cranes, aptly
captures the sense that young writers are pursuing the origins of

epistemology.

8

Many writers, including Hawthorne, Henry James himself,
Benjamin Disraeli, John Cheever and Somerset Maugham, have subtly
contributed to the tendency to marginalize the work of young writers
by looking back on their earliest works with distress at having tried too
much, too soon. Of course in some cases the opprobrium is richly
deserved, since many early efforts do reflect little more than their
author's inexperience. But some of their remarks go much too far, as
with the comments of Maugham, Cheever, and Disraeli, which seem
almost to disallow the possibility of a young writer of fiction
accomplishing anything more than preliminary sketches while waiting
for his or her talent to mature.

Maugham gives this account of rereading his first published

collection of short stories, Orientations:

It sent so many cold shudders down my spine that I
thought I must be going to have another attack of
malaria. As a measure of precaution I dosed myself
with quinine and arsenic....[the stories] had passages
so preposterously unreal that I could hardly believe
it possible that 1 had written them.5

Cheever echoes Huxley's belief that young genius is peculiarly rare in

the field of literature by offering this contrast with the visual arts:

The parturition of a writer, I think, unlike that of a
painter, does not display any interesting alliances to
his masters. In the growth of a writer one finds

9

nothing like the early Jackson Pollock copies of the
Sistine Chapel with their interesting cross
references to Thomas Hart Benton. A writer can be
seen clumsily learning to walk, to tie his necktie, to
make love, and to eat his peas off a fork. He
appears much alone and determined to instruct
himself. Naive, provincial in my case, sometimes
drunk, sometimes obtuse, almost always clumsy,
even a selected display of one's early work will be a
naked history of one's struggle to receive an

education in economics and love.7

There is some truth in this observation, but I think it is largely
attributable to the length of time it takes a writer to make enough of a
survey of the field of literature to find such a master. An interesting
point which will be developed in the course of this paper is how many
of the most successful young novelists have settled upon the same
masters, with Dostoyevsky, Goethe, Keats, Byron and Shelley being
amongst the writers who have been useful models for several such
novelists.

Disraeli spent much of his political career trying to live down the
pot-boiling roman a clef Vivian Grey, which he had published
indiscreetly when he was just twenty-two. In 1853, he brought out a
bowdlerized edition of Vivian Grey and wrote ruefully in the preface

that:
Books written by boys, which pretend to give a

10

picture of manners, and to deal in knowledge of
human nature, must necessarily be founded on
affectation. They can be, at the best, but the results
of imagination, acting upon knowledge not
acquired by experience. Of such circumstances,
exaggeration is a necessary consequence, and false
taste accompanies exaggeration. Nor is it necessary
to remark that a total want of art must be observed
in their pages, for that is a failing incident to all first
efforts. When the writers of such books are not
again heard of, the works, even if ever noticed, are
soon forgotten, and so there is no great harm done.
But, when their authors subsequently become
eminent, such works often obtain a peculiar
interest and are sought for from causes irrespective
of their merits. Such productions should be exempt
from criticism, and should be looked upon as a

kind of literary lusus.8

Disraeli's eagerness to dismiss the accomplishments of young authors
is peculiarly attributable to the embarrassment attendant on his own
early work, but many other writers indulge in similar sentiments. J.D.
Salinger, for instance, has expressed the wish that his early short stories
be allowed to ”die a perfectly natural death"9. Susan Hill ”prefers to
forget her first novels”1°, as does Anne Tyler“. Thomas Keneally has
written rather scathingly: "I would like to be able to disown my first
two novels, the second of which was the obligatory account of one's
childhood - the book then that all novelists think seriously of

writing"12. Perhaps one reason for such attitudes from established

11

writers is that it seems unflattering to think that a young writer could
accomplish anything worthy of comparison with a work by a writer
who has years of experience upon which to draw.

Whatever the merits of these particular assessments, it is important
to reject the implicit suggestion that the aspiring young novelist
should avoid at all costs letting any early efforts get into print where
they can later come back to haunt him/her. We must also keep in
mind that this suggestion can serve to inhibit young writers who
mistakenly assume that the novel is not a genre conducive to them.
One consequence of this assumption is that many great novelists stick
to writing poetry while they're young, since poetic impulses are
perceived to mature earlier. There are, after all, poets like Keats and
Rimbaud who have achieved major status on the basis of work done
exclusively before their twenty-fifth birthdays. A sense of this
dichotomy may have led such unlikely writers as Ernest Hemingway,
Kingsley Amis, Paul Scott, Graham Greene, William Golding, Patrick
White and William Faulkner to make their first excursions into print
with volumes of poetry.

Fortunately, however, enough writers have ignored such warnings

12

to create the impressive list of novels already cited. In discussing the
works of older writers, Laurel Porter and Laurence M. Porter have
observed, "Each season of human life has its own genres: the
outstanding self-portraits of old people are memoirs"13, and this paper
will suggest that the young also have a genre of their own. Although
many of the works to be considered herein have received individual
acclaim, there has been little or no attempt made to appreciate the
existence of a family resemblance among the themes, insights and plots
in the most successful works by young novelists. John Fowles has very
perceptively written that Alain-Fournier's W5
"belongs to...a category of fiction that has no name, but exists.
Unfortunately, the most accurate description would be the novel of
adolescence - I say 'unfortunately' because in our time the adolescent
has come to be regarded as either a deteriorated child or an insufficient
adult, and to speak of a serious novel of adolescence seems almost a
contradiction in terms."14 Though I do not propose to name this
genre, this paper will make clear that the fiction of young writers is a
very well-defined and delineated domain whose rules are consistent.

The periods and countries which seem particularly prone to producing

13

good young novelists are the ones whose are particularly amenable to
explorations by young authors. As has been mentioned, young
novelists are particularly prone to flourishing in the wake of major
wars and revolutions which destroy social stability and put a premium
on the ability to adjust.

The suggestions of Huxley, James and Disraeli that experience of the
social world is what the young novelist most lacks reminds us of Dr.
Johnson's description the two requirements which are essential for the
modern novelist. These were "learning which is to be gained from
books” and ”experience which...must arise from general converse and
accurate observation of the living world”15. Since these are both areas
in which the very young novelist will automatically be at a
disadvantage, the implicit condescension towards young writers in
Johnson's description of Congreve is not surprising: ”Among all the
efforts of early genius which literary history records, I doubt whether
any one can be produced that more surpasses the common limits of
nature than the plays of Congreve"15. Since these "common limits of
nature" hold back the young novelist, we will accordingly look for the

ways in which young novelists are able to emulate V. S. Naipaul's

14

description of Conrad's art: "He couldn't risk much; he couldn't exceed
his knowledge. A writer's disadvantage, when the work is done, can
appear as advantage"17. John Updike alludes to the same problem and
potential solutions: "Often in art less is more, and one must depart to
arrive. In the first novel, the author fumbles, trying to pick himself up
by too many handles, and growing more handles in the process; in the
second, he takes a short but decisive side-step, becomes less himself,
and with this achieved...penetrates to the heart of his raison
d'ecrire”13.

As this paper will indicate, young novelists most effectively turn
their disadvantage into advantage by describing the loss of innocence
which is of course more immediate to them than to their older
colleagues. Somerset Maugham aptly describes the peculiar advantages
which a young writer does possess: "In the first twenty-five years of his
life the youth has gathered a multitude of impressions; if he has the
novelist's instinct he will probably have felt them more vividly than
he will ever feel anything again; and the persons he has known, he
will have known with an intimacy that in the turmoil and the hurry of
after life he will never achieve again”19. The immediacy of the conflict

between natural instincts and socialization make this a fertile ground

15

for young novelists in a way that novels of manners or ones with
social settings cannot be. Neither does this theme's suitability to young
writers limit its significance, for it is a universal theme which is
intimately linked to what Yeats saw as the fundamental challenge
artists face - that of trying to overcome "the slow dying of men's hearts
that we call the progress of the world, and lay their hands upon men's
heart-strings again, without becoming the garment of religion as in old
times. "20

John Fowles' eloquent description of Alain-Foumier's art in his

introduction to W suggests a role for the young

novelist similar to the one posited by Maugham:

What he nailed down is the one really acute
perception of the young, which is the awareness of
loss as a function of passing time. It is at that age
that we first know we shall never do everything we
dream, that tears are in the nature of things. It is
above all when we first grasp the black paradox at
the heart of the human condition: that the
satisfaction of the desire is also the death of the
desire. We may rationalize or anesthetize this
tragic insight as we grow older, we may understand
it better; but we never feel it as sharply and

directly.21

This one really acute perception is what much of the achievement of

young novelists is built upon, and the success which they have in

16

capturing the acuity of this sense while it is at its most poignant enables
their novels to overcome all their disadvantages.

In addition to the significance of so many young novelists choosing
this theme, there are striking similarities in their treatments of this
theme. The similarities are the more noteworthy because of the
variety of periods and nationalities represented by the authors of the
works from which I draw examples: LngQgrLita (1692) by William
Congreve (b. 1670), The Man of Feeling (1771) by Henry Mackenzie (b.
1745), W (1774) by Johannes Wolfgang
von Goethe (b. 1749), Emma (1778) by Fanny Burney (b. 1752), Kathe};
(1782) by William Beckford (b. 1760), the novellas "Mirza", "Adelaide
and Theodore" and "Pauline" (all 1786) by Madame de Stael (b. 1766),
W (1789) by Ann Radcliffe (b. 1764),
The Monk (1796) by Matthew Lewis (b. 1775), Atala and Rene (1801, but
started earlier) by Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand (b. 1768), m
and m (both 1810) by Percy Bysshe Shelley (b. 1792),
Fraukgnstein (1816) by Mary Shelley (b. 1797), Vivian Grey (1826) by
Benjamin Disraeli (b. 1804), mm (1828) by Nathaniel Hawthorne

(b. 1804), "The Terrible Vengeance” (1830) by Nikolai Gogol (b. 1809), A

17

WOW) by Mikhail Lermontov (b. 1814), W
(1846) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (b. 1821), Dodo (1893) by E. F. Benson
(b.1867), WW (1893) by Stephen Crane (b. 1871),
W08”) by W. Somerset Maugham (b.1874), MM
QEQQflWOl) by Miles Franklin (b. 1879), Where Angek Peg; to Tread

(1905) by E. M. Forster (b. 1879), "Description of a Struggle" (1905) by
Franz Kafka (b. 1883), Igung Tgrlgss(1906) by Robert Musil (b. 1880), 1.;
Grand Meaulnes (1913) by Henri Alain-Fournier (b. 1886), Man'
W (1920) by John Dos Passos (b. 1896), W
(1922) by Raymond Radiguet (b. 1903), Blindness (1926) by Henry Green
(b. 1905), Dusg Answer (1927) by Rosamond Lehmann (b. 1901), T_hg
W (1929) by Graham Greene (b. 1905), WEB (1931)
by Anthony Powell (b.1905), MM (1938) by Lawrence Durrell
(b. 1912), L'Etranger (1942, but written earlier) by Albert Camus (b. 1913),
W (1940) and W
Eyg(1941) by Carson McCullers (b. 1917), W
M12509“) by Truman Capote (b. 1924), The Beautiful Visit (1950) by
Elizabeth Jane Howard (b. 1923), W W
City) (1952) by Andre Langevin (b.1927), W (1953) by

1 8
Francoise Sagan (b. 1935), The Trap (1955) by Dan Jacobson (b. 1929), Ih_e_

W (1957) by V. S. Naipaul (b.1932), MW
(1959) by Philip Roth (b. 1933), HM (written in 1959, but not
published until 1974) by Beryl Bainbridge (b. 1934), W
Mirror (1959) by Yael Dayan (b. 1939), Melanesia/so 959) and 19::
Blanche (1960) by Marie-Claire Blais (b. 1939), W (1963)
by Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1939), W (1964) by Margaret Drabble
(b. 1939),1f Morning Ever Comes (1964) by Anne Tyler (b.1941), Ill:
W (1974) by Richard Price (b. 1949). W (1975)
by John Sayles (b. 1950), Iy_d_itL(1978) by Aritha van Herk (b.1954) and
MW (1988) by Michael Chabon (b. 1965).22

These writers represent a variety of nationalities: Naipaul is
originally Trinidadian; Dayan is an Israeli; Jacobson is South African;
Gogol, Lermontov and Dostoyevsky are Russian; de Stael,
Chateaubriand, Alain-Fournier, Radiguet, Camus and Sagan are
French; Kafka and Goethe are German; Mishima is Japanese; Musil is
Austrian; Langevin, Blais and van Herk are Canadian; Franklin is
Australian; Crane, McCullers, Dos Passos, Capote, Hawthorne, Roth,
Oates, Tyler, Price, Sayles and Chabon are American, and the

remainder are British. While there are many other novels by young

19

writers which are as good or better than many of these, these works
have been chosen because they all adhere to a basic pattern which
enables their authors to turn the disadvantages of inexperience into an
advantage. The remainder of this paper will demonstrate the existence
of this pattern and comment on its significance.

For while these works are set with great specificity in their authors'
own time period, they simultaneously are retracing the archetypal story
of man's fall. They characteristically feature an innocent who is
becoming conscious of temptation for the first time. The sources of
temptation vary, but a constant is that the simple act of entertaining
temptation precludes a return to the pre-lapsarian state. Consciously or
not, the characters have broken their bonds and eaten of the tree of
knowledge. This break is depicted symbolically by a cataclysmic event,
such as a forced eviction from an idyllic home. The order of the stages
which follow the realization that the break is irrevocable is not always
the same, but all the stages are essential components in the process
which follows the loss of innocence. The elegy written by the narrator

of Percy Shelley's SLIM could apply to any of the characters:

Ah! poor unsuspecting innocence! and is that fair
flower about to perish in the blasts of dereliction

20

and unkindness? Demon indeed must be he who
could gaze on those mildly-beaming eyes, on that
perfect form, the emblem of sensibility, and yet
plunge the spotless mind of which it was an index,
into a sea of repentance and unavailing sorrow.
(51,172)

But paradoxically it is the same events which are being lamented here
which give a voice to the young novelist. The novel, being rooted in
experience, becomes possible only after this ultimate experience has
occurred.

A full appreciation of what has been lost dawns gradually as the
naive empiricism of the characters erodes. The senses, which had once
afforded so much pleasure, now bring only fresh testimony to the
fallen condition. Another component of the process is settling upon a
word which describes the state of one who has discovered that the
world is a lesser place than one had taken it to be. As we shall see, the
word "wretch" and its various forms frequently assume this important
function. Dust is also a commonly used metaphor for the atrophy
which has taken hold of the soul. Weighted down by the burden of the
post-lapsarian landscape, the individual sinks into a slough of
disillusionment and ennui. Guilt takes hold and wracks the character

with feelings of inadequacy and self-consciousness. At the same time

21

as their curiosity about the appearance of the opposite sex is emerging,
they become acutely self-conscious about their own appearance.
Eventually the young person responds to all these developments by
becoming numb to all emotions or by succumbing to a nascent
misanthropy.

One approach which characters take at this point is to focus on a
quandary between reconciliation and exile from the world in hopes
that this will effect a resolution. Instead, it leads to an obsession with
wandering and a morbid predilection for solitude which are
unsuccessful ways of trying to recapture the irretrievable state of
innocence. Like Adam and Eve exiled from the garden, they engage in
a hapeless search for what they have lost. These methods fail to
achieve resolution because they attempt to attribute the fall to external
causes, while ignoring the duplicity which has begun to characterize
the individual's own actions. They continue to deny their own
willfulness.

It is one of the consequences of the fall of humankind which finally
breaks this cycle of deterioration and dissipation. The natural sequence

of sin bringing death and suffering into the world creates sorrow,

22

which in turn finally necessitates the recognition of the internal seeds
of corruption. The ability to mourn the death and suffering inherent
in original sin seems at first to confirm the superiority of the internal
self to the external world. When sorrow itself proves ephemeral,
however, there is no longer the illusion that one can retreat from the
corrupt world into some inner sanctum.

Having finally recognized that the imperfections of society are but a
manifestation of internal flaws, the individual can at last effect a
resolution. As we shall see, the process which accomplishes this
resolution is intimately connected with the technique of the writer.
This process entails a recognition of a fundamental duality or duplicity
in man's nature, and an understanding that acknowledgement of this
dynamic enables us to surmount it. These novels are full of stunted
reflections of the author, because only by recognizing the incubus left
behind when the loss of innocence is accepted can the mature writer
emerge. Thus, a prerequisite for the young writer would appear to be
some form of recognition of the double and the development of a
strategy for depicting it, such as John Keats' idea of Negative Capability.

The seventeen-year-old Radiguet understood this perfectly when he

23

wrote, "Age is nothing. It is Rimbaud's work and not the age at which
he wrote it that astounds me. All great poets have written at
seventeen. The greatest are those who succeed in making one forget
it"23. It is not, then, simply the case that age is nothing, but that the
young author who has successfully integrated the process described
here can make it appear as nothing, thereby turning disadvantage to
advantage.

The theme of childhood illusions being lost is enhanced in many of
these works by the use of an individual whose innocence has been
preserved for an exaggerated length of time. This enhancement serves
to compact the period in which all illusions are destroyed and therefore
heighten the effects of a process which normally takes place much
more gradually. The monster in Frankenstein is a new creation who is
confronted all at once with the realization of the imperfection of
human nature and of his own nature. He is able to read W
with a sense of its immediacy and receives a genuine shock from the
fall which no less innocent creature could. The narrator of W
Wk hopes to find in Omi "the pattern of that forgotten perfection
which the rest of us have lost in some far distant past" (CM,63) because

Omi's sensual appreciation of his body contrasts so distinctly with the

24

narrator's painful self-consciousness about his body. In Milk,
Ambrosio has been left at the abbey-door as an infant and "is now
thirty years old, every hour of which period has been passed in study,
total seclusion from the world, and mortification of the flesh" and
consequently, he "knows not in what consists the difference of Men
and Women" (M,17). His sister Antonia proclaims a like innocence
and is, as her aunt says, "totally ignorant of the world. She has been
brought up in an old Castle in Murcia; with no other society than her
Mother's." (M,12). Her awareness of sexuality remains so minimal that
she can still speculate that Ambrosio might "have been born in the
Abbey" (M251).

Such secluded settings serve notice of the ground to be covered in
the works which follow. Many of Joyce Carol Oates' early stories take
place in Eden County, including "The Census Taker", which takes place
in the county's "remote foothills" (BNG,21). In Ths Csstlgs 9f Athlin
Mme, Matilda raises Osbert and Mary in the castle of Athlin
on the north-east coast of Scotland, "an edifice built on the summit of a
rock whose base was in the sea" (CAD,1) to which she has withdrawn

to "devote herself to the education of her children" (CAD,3). Similarly,

25

the atmosphere of Harley College in Egnshswg is described as a haven
of innocence, located as it is in the "farthest extremity of a narrow vale,
which, winding through a long extent of hill-country, is well nigh as
inaccessible, except at one point, as the Happy Valley of Abyssinia"
(Fa,4). Under the "mild and gentle rule” (Fa,5) of the significantly
named Dr. Melmoth, the institution runs such that, "though youth is
never without its follies, they have seldom been more harmless than
they were here. The students, indeed, ignorant of their own bliss,
sometimes wished to hasten the time of their entrance on the business
of life; but they found, in after years, that many of their happiest
remembrances...referred to the seat of their early studies" (Fa,5—6).
Ellen Langton is introduced to this pastoral setting having "much of
the gaiety and simple happiness, because of the innocence, of a child"
although "her years approached womanhood" (Fa,10). Fanshawe too
"had hitherto deemed himself unconnected with the world,
unconcerned in its feelings, and uninfluenced by it in any of his
pursuits" (Fa,18). A similarly walled-off region of the Carpathian
Mountains is the setting for the initial fratricide in Gogol's story ”The

Terrible Vengeance":

Far from the Ukraine, beyond Poland and the

26

populous city of Lemberg, there rises range upon
range of immense mountains. Mountain after
mountain, they encompass the earth to the right
and to the left, as if with chains of stone, and box it
up with a wall of rock to protect it from
encroachment by the wild and turbulent sea...The
eye is quite powerless to survey them, and on some
of their summits no human foot has ever trod.
(TV,48)

Young Torless's boarding school is in a "remote and inhospitable
outlandish district" (YT,3) and "in the previous century had developed
out of a religious foundation and had since remained where it was,
doubtless in order to safeguard the young generation, in is years of
awakening, from the corrupting influences of a large city" (YT,3). The
opening sentence of WW announces that "a
traveler must make his way to Noon City by the best means he can, for
there are no buses or trains heading in that direction" (OVOR,5).
Bruggabrong, Sybylla Melvyn's childhood home in WI.
"in is sheltered nook amid the Tirnlinbilly Ranges" is "a very out-of-
the-way place" (MBC,3). While there, none of life's unpleasantries
seem to cling to her: "My brothers and sisters contracted mumps,
measles, scarlatina, and whooping-cough. I rolled in the bed with

them yet came off scot-free" (MBC,4). Although Maggie, in W

27

Cirl Qf $1.1: Strggts has "blossomed in a mud puddle", "None of the dirt
of Rum Alley seemed to be in her veins" (MGS,16). In The Trap, van
Schoor's decision to buy his own farm in a remote area brings him a
"delight he had never known before, because now he was alone, and it
was his instructions alone that were altering the surface of the farm -
he felt as though he was working with the earth itself, alone. And this
isolation, even his wife could not touch" (T,45). Private Williams, in
Refleg'ons in a Golden Eye, spent most of his spare time in the isolated
"woods surrounding the post. The reservation, fifteen miles square,
was wild unspoiled country" (RGE,3). The "lost domain" in M
Meaulnes is a place which, at least in Meaulnes' eyes, affords eternal
sanctuary for youthful innocence. These characters begin in the sort of
harmony with nature which Schiller attributes to the naive poet, but
all them are forced to leave their idyllic surroundings.

Marie-Claire Blais has shown a particular felicity for depicting the
state of innocence. Isabelle-Marie's idiot brother Patrice, the "Beautiful
Beast" of Mad Shadow's original title Ls figllg Bete, would "take refuge
in the forest and, in his innocent despair, he often threw himself fully

clothed into the lake" (MS,48). Isabelle-Marie's blind boyfriend

28
Michael is "wild and passionate, blessed with the same burning joys as

a child" because "his blindness cloistered his existence" (MS,63). Until

this vail is lifted, he shares with Isabelle-Marie an idyllic life:

They were eighteen. A wealth of physical well-
being was theirs to squander, as everything is
squandered at their age, even passion and genius.
They were innocent; they were virgins. They
enjoyed an intimate camaraderie which sanctioned
everything but spared them the wounds of the
flesh, unlike others who live before they have
discovered the magic of life. (MS,49)

Even the consummation of their relationship does not threaten their

state of innocence:

They rediscovered each other again and again in
childish innocence and did not believe that they
could ever be separated. As they awakened to the
excitement of desire, they promised and gave
everything to one another, eyes, arms, loins,
everything. (MS,78)

As in the scene in Frankenstgin where the monster attemps to
claim for himself a place in society by presenting himself to the blind
man only to be banished forever by the seeing children, Isabelle-
Marie's bliss is shattered when Michael regains his sight and sees that
she has deceived him about her appearance. Djuna Barnes' early short
story "Papricka Johnson" also recouns a story in which an ugly
woman tricks a blind man into marrying her, only to have the ruse

uncovered when surgery restores the man's sight. As these scenarios -

29

illustrate, the temptation to put off having to accept one's appearance is
very great but ultimately one will be discovered. These sight-restoring

operations unmask the women who have been sheltered by blindness,
in much the same way that the writing of Confgssions of a Mgsk

unmasks is narrator.

Sybylla Melvyn, in My firillisnt Cssggz, describes the discovery that

she is ugly and that people will judge her based on this in terms which

are reminiscent of the ones used by the monster:

As a tiny child I was filled with dreams of the great
things I was to do when grown up. My ambition
was as boundless as the mighty bush in which I
have always lived. As I grew it dawned upon me
that I was a girl - the makings of a woman! Only a
girl!...Familiarity made me used to this yoke; I
recovered from the disappointment of being a girl,
and was reconciled to that part of my fate. In fact, I
found that being a girl was quite pleasant until a
hideous truth dawned upon me - I was ugly! That
truth has embittered my whole existence. (MBC,40)

Similar emphasis on the importance of the use one can make of the

senses occur in Henry Green's Llindness, where the narrator has been

deprived of his sight by a freak accident and in Thg Hgsg Is A [giggly

Huntgr, where everyone assumes that the deaf-mute Singer has

affinities with them because "in his face there was something gentle

30

and Jewish, the knowledge of one who belongs to a race that is
oppressed" (HLH,114). In Gogol's "The Terrible Vengeance", only the
blind bandore-player can make sense of the story's horrifying and
seemingly arbitrary violence. These examples of course build upon
the classical tradition of the blind bard as a figure of exceptional insight,
but show is usage by these authors to be linked more directly to the fall
from grace.

In Igtg Blsnghs, three days after the title figure has asked, "Does
God know of all crimes?...if He knows of all the crimes in the world,
He can't be innocent" (TB,57), he begins to revel in his own nakedness
and is struck by a glimpse of the lace of Emilie's petticoat, which makes
him realize ”that I don't really know about the things girls wear"
(TB,57). The consciousness of nakedness is symptomatic of the loss of
innocence, just as it is in the book of Genesis. Sexual attraction ceases
to be simple and natural, but instead becomes one more forum for this
acute self-consciousness.

Like Blais, Carson McCullers uses nudity as an emblem of the
condition of innocence in Thg Eggs; Is A [grisly Hugtgs, but it leads
more precipitately to a fall. Mick Kelly and her neighbor Harry

Minowitz have biked to a secluded swimming hole. On the way, Mick

31

temps Harry into the "sin" of drinking a beer, which conspicuously
intoxicates him. After a couple of hours, when "there didn't seem to
be anything new to do" (HM-1,233), Mick asks "Have you ever swam
naked?" and when Harry responds, "I-I don't think so", she says
"something she didn't mean to say 'I would if you would. I dare you
to.'" Soon they stand naked before each other and Harry exclaims,
"Listen here. I think you're so pretty, Mick. I never did think so
before. I don't mean I thought you were very ugly - I just mean that -"
(HLH,234). Soon after this, the inevitable occurs. McCullers'
presentation of the scene emphasizes that it is Harry who acts self-
consciously and thus it is he alone who apparently bears the burden of
sin. His consciousness of sin is so great that he must leave the
community, whereas Mick seems comparatively untouched by the
event. Likewise, in Reflections in a Cgldgn Eyg, seeing the naked
Leonora Penderton destroys the innocent life which Private Williams
had hitherto led. There remains in him ever after a "deep reflection of
the sight he had seen that night" (RGE,28) which leads him into a

series of actions which even he doesn't seem to understand.

A scene very similar to the one in n un r

32

occurs in mm between Joel Knox and the
tomboyish Idabel Thompkins (who, incidentally, is based on Harper
Lee, the author of T9 Kill A Mggkingbirgi and Truman Capote's closest
childhood companion). After an unrewarding fishing expedition,
during which Joel tries to tease Idabel by telling her that her twin sister
Florabel is pretty, Idabel proposes that they bathe. When Joel reacts
self-consciously, Idabel Spits out "what you've got in your britches is no
news to me, and no concern of mine: hell, I‘ve fooled around with
nobody but boys since first grade. I never think like I'm a girl; you've
got to remember that, or we can't never be friends" (OVOR,74). Joel
complies with this declaration, which "For all is bravado, she
made...with a special and compelling innocence" (OVOR,74).

As they bathe, Joel is able to partially allay his self-consciousness by
thinking back to his baptism, seven years earlier. But nonetheless, his
shoulders contract "self-consciously" when she jokes that he "looks
like a plucked chicken...so skinny and white" (OVOR,74). In spite of
"Idabel's quite genuine lack of interest in his nakedness, [Joel] could
not make so casual an adjustment to the situation as she seemed to

expect". In contrast to her indifference, Joel notes that "she seemed

33

mostly legs, like a crane...freckles, dappling her rather delicate
shoulders, gave her a curiously wistful look...her breass had
commenced to swell, and there was about her hips a mild suggestion of
approaching width". (OVOR,74-5)

As she shampoos his hair, she rinses it out while telling him
"bawdy" jokes which neither one of them seems to understand; this is
a second baptism for Joel, into the adult world for which he is
approaching physical readiness but is nowhere near emotional
preparedness. As they sit in the sun to dry, Joel lies by claiming that he
never cries. Idabel in turn confesses that she does sometimes cry, but
asks Joel not to tell anyone. Although Idabel seems on the surface to be
the initiator, in fact it is she who is struggling desperately against the
forces to which Joel is succumbing.

Just as nakedness lacks suggestiveness for Idabel, so too does she
shun lying. In response to her request of secrecy, Joel "wanted to touch
her, to put his arms around her, for this seemed suddenly the only
means of expressing all he felt. Pressing closer, he reached and, with
breathtaking delicacy, kissed her cheek" (OVOR,75). The seemingly

innocuous gesture is a very threatening one to Idabel, just as the

34

apparently innocent kiss Harry Beecham attempts to bestow on Sybylla
in MW seems so menacing to her that she instinctively
lashes him with a riding-whip. Idabel's reaction is to grab his hair and
start to pull, and they wrestle until he cus himself by rolling over her
dark glasses. Even though she cannot hope to retain her innocence
forever, Idabel will not relinquish it without a struggle. Later, in
Randolph's account of how Joel's father came to be paralyzed, there is a
parallel to Idabel in the character of Dolores, who "was like a
child...liked to sit naked in the sun...and wash her hair...no less than
three times a day" (OVOR,80).

Scenes in which peeping Toms are initiated into the beauties of the
female form are thus an important way of symbolizing the loss of
innocence. When Joel Knox in Qher Voices, Other Rmms is bored, he
plays "a kind of peeping-tom game members of the Secret Nine had
fooled around with when there was absolutely nothing to do"
(OVOR,39) and witnesses "a young girl waltzing stark naked to victrola
music" (OVOR,39). In W Neil Klugrnan reflecs on
"how many years had passed since I'd stood beneath that marquee,
lying about the year of my birth so as to see Hedy Lamarr swim naked

in Egstssy" (GC,22). In The Mgnk, Ambrosio uses Matilda's enchanted

35

mirror to spy on Antonia as she undresses in the privacy of her closet

and his passion is aroused beyond control. In Le Grand Meaulnes the

 

boys of Sainte-Agathe hold as their ideal of beauty a girl named Jeanne,
"who could be seen in the nuns' garden through the keyhole"

(LGM,39). In Harriet Said the nameless narrator and Harriet mark a

 

new stage in their corruption when they spy on Mr. and Mrs. Biggs
making love. This event's connection to the Biblical fall is made
explicit by the lie Harriet tells to explain what the were doing there:
"We felt like an apple so we went into the garden" (115,85). It is
important to note that in all of these cases the narrator is a witness
rather than the one revealed. These instances of voyeurism contribute
to a psychologically acute depiction of the artistic consciousness - that
the painful self-consciousness about one's own body arises
simultaneously with profound curiosity about those of others. Implicit
in this paradox is the first dawning of awareness of a fundamental split
or duality in human nature.

Most eighteenth-century texts could not be as frank about describing
the sexual dimensions of this awakening, but they succeed in implying

is existence. Evelina has also led a "sequestered" life at Berry-Hill

36

under Mr. Villars' vigilant eye, who acknowledges,

She is quite a little rustic, and knows nothing of the
world; and tho' her education has been the best I
could bestow in this retired place... yet I shall not be
surprised if you should discover in her a thousand
deficiencies of which I have never dreamt. (E,19)

Likewise, Harley in W is "a child in the drama of the
world" (MF,10) for whom London comes as no less of a shock than it

does to Evelina. Werther's state at the beginning of W
Igung Werthgr is less one of primordial innocence, but his
consciousness is most clearly defined in his perceptions that "those
people are happiest who live for the moment, like children dragging

their dolls around with them" (YW,29) and that,

nothing is dearer to me than children. As I watch
them and see in everything they do the seed of all
virtue and strength they will one day need, when I
recognize future steadfastness and firmness in their
present obstinacy, good humor and the ability to
pass lightly over the perils on this earth in their
mischief, everything so unspoiled, everything still
whole -— then I want to repeat the Golden Rule of
the teacher of mankind: 'Unless ye become as one
of these.’ (YW,43)

These ideas reflect the burgeoning new belief that childhood was a
special condition, and that attaining adulthood was part loss as well as

part gain. Stimulated largely by Rousseau's Emilg, the innocence of the

thir

chi".

lette

TECO

deve

37

child began to be treated with a reverence which it has not entirely lost.
As Rupert Christiansen notes, in the wake of Ms, "People began to
think of childhood as a special condition to be cherished and to see
children as having qualities of personality which as aduls they had
lost...Children's sweet little remarks were recorded in diaries and
letters, and their sweet little acs of natural innocence tearfully
recorded"24. While it is beyond the realm of this paper to explore the
development of this philosophy, is importance to the emergence of a
body of young writers should not be underestimated.

Since these states of innocence have persisted for abnormally long
periods of time, there is enhanced friction when, in the terms of the
opening of W the "rust about every man at the
beginning" (MF,3) starts to rub off. The same metaphor is used in the
first paragraph of My; where youth is defined as the period
"before the rust of age had debilitated and obscur'd the splendour of the
original" (1,245). This effect of greater trials according to degree of
innocence is confirmed in Agnes's prophetic denunciation of
Ambrosio in 1h: Mgnk: "where is the merit of your boasted virtue?
What temptations have you vanquished? Coward! you have fled from

it, not opposed seduction. But the day of trial will arrive!" (M,49).

 

38

Lorenzo introduces the idea that Ambrosio's trial will be augmented
precisely because of the advanced age at which he still retains a

childlike naivete by explaining to Antonia that:

a Man who has passed the whole of his life within
the walls of a Convent, cannot have found the
opportunity to be guilty, even were he possessed of
the inclination. But now, when, obliged by the
duties of his situation, He must enter occasionally
into the world, and be thrown into the way of
temptation, it is now that it behoves him to show
the brilliance of his virtue. The trial is dangerous;
he is just at that period of life when the passions are
most vigorous, unbridled, and despotic; His
established reputation will mark him out to
Seduction as an illustrious Victim; Novelty will
give additional charms to the allurements of
pleasure; and even the Talens with which Nature
has endowed him will contribute to his ruin, by
facilitating the means of obtaining his object. (M,21)

This concept probably owes something to the idea which was so
important to Milton: "1 cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue,
unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her
adversary...we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity
much rather: that which purifies us is trial and trial is by what is
contrary. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the
contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to

her followers, and rejecs it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her

IE

w!

1112

of.

its

39

whiteness is but an excremental whiteness"25. The embodiment of

this idea in The Monk and in several other novels is that the

 

unusually prolonged period of innocence and the suddenness of the
confrontation with temptation serve to accentuate the universal
process of discovering that "all's not gold that glisters" ME“). The
sudden awakening of the passions makes the individual the more
prone to violent mood changes because, as Mirza says, "Passionate
souls know nothing but extremes" M90).

The myriad of forms in which temptation can come implicitly
reveals a great deal about what the state of innocence was like. The
association of curiosity with temptation suggess implies that
innocence is characterized by an unconditional faith in the senses.
Curiosity is the impulse to question their data; thus Verezzi, in
m is an innocent as long as it is "impossible" for him "to doubt
the evidence of his own senses" (2,11). This also gives an indication of
why characters deprived of one of their senses play important roles in
many of these novels. While temptation is aligned with the discovery
of sexuality in 111g Mgnk, this discovery is explicitly linked to curiosity

at several poins. The word "curiosity" occurs at least twenty-eight

he

91.

40

times in the novel, and is specifically used in the descriptions of the
awakenings of both Antonia and Ambrosio. In Incognita, Leonora's
love for Hippolito is attributed to "curiosity" (1,271 8: 272), as is
Aurelian's for Incognita (1,262). In turn the writer and the reader are
implicated in the process when the narrator later asks "if the reader
have the curiosity to know" (1,287) what will transpire next. When
Zastrozzi is in the next room with Matilda, Verezzi is moved by "a
curiosity, unaccountable even to himself, [which] propelled him to
seek Matilda" (2,34). Vathek is "of all men...the most curious" (V,128)
and possesses "the insolent curiosity of penetrating the secres of
heaven" (V,130). Nouronihar is led on by her "curiosity" (V,193) until
"the solitude of her situation was new, the silence of the night awful,
and every object inspired sensations which till then she had never felt"
(V,194). In the anti-climactic moral to mm; the narrator decrees that
eternal wandering "shall be the chastisement of that blind curiosity
which would transgress those bounds the wisdom of the Creator has
presented to human knowledge" (V,243).

Curiosity proves to be a process which feeds upon iself and expands

which each new discovery, as the narrator of Poe's early story "MS. in a

41

Bottle" concludes at the end of his narrative: "To conceive the horror
of my sensations is, I presume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to
penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions, predominates over my
despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death"25.
The narrator of W discovers as an adolescent the
"burning curiosity that would be my faithful traveling companion"
(CM,108), a curiosity which "resembled the hopeless yearnings of a
bedridden invalid for the ouside world and was also somehow
inextricably tangled up with a belief in the possibility of the
impossible" (CM,115). When put in charge of a recruit camp in M
W Ariel Ron begins to notice "two completely new
qualities" within herself - "one was patience, the other a curious
interest in others, instead of only in myself" (NFM,102). Private
Williams, in W standing over the head of
Leonora Penderton, has "an expression of intense curiosity" (RGE,58).
As with $5315, in Frankgnstein, temptation emanates from Victor
Frankenstein's desire to learn "the secrets of heaven and earth" (F,37).
Mary Shelley's father, William Godwin, wrote that "Curiosity is one of
the strongest impulses of the human heart. To curiosity it is peculiarly

incident to grow and expand upon itself under difficulties and

ll}

role

Vict

9mg

42

opposition. The greater are the obstacles to is being gratified, the more
it seems to swell, and labour to burst the mounds that confine it"27.
The title figure in Godwin's masterpiece WM gives an
account of himself which could as easily have come from Victor
Frankenstein: "The spring of action which, perhaps more than any
other, characterized the whole train of my life, was curiOsity...I was
desirous of tracing the variety of effecs which might be produced from
given causes...I could not rest until I had acquainted myself with
solutions that had been invented for the phenomena of the
universe"23.

Lust provides the means by which temptation is introduced in

many of these novels. Frequently, as in W

is importance to the characters seems to derive in part from the feeling
that "there didn't seem to be anything new to do". In Devil In ths
figs}; the absence of the whole generation of French men who have
gone off as soldiers rushes the narrator into the assumption of adult
roles for which he is utterly unprepared. In a sense, he is almost a

victim of a body which is more ready for adult experiences than are his

emotions, and he tries to compensate for this inadequacy by glutting

43

himself with sexual pleasure. Similarly, in M9919 Ambrosio finds
that the pursuit of pleasure with Matilda leads not to satisfaction but an
endless longing for new and different forms in which pleasure seems
increasingly irrelevant. David Lodge writes of Martin Amis's first

novel The Rachel Papers, published when Amis was twenty-four,

the narrator, a jaded roue of twenty, looked back
with appalled fascination at his younger self, a
creature compelled by his insatiable flesh to pursue
sexual satisfaction far beyond the limit of pleasure.
The novel was remarkable for is description of
foreplay and copulation in which the language of
pleasure was exchanged for the language of painful
labour, and in which anxiety, embarrassment and
boredom swamped any feelings of satisfaction or

tenderness.29

Sexual hunger, then, can cease to be a natural urge in the works of
these writers and become symptomatic of the wretched condition of

one whose innocence cannot be retrieved.

For whatever the mode of temptation, once it has been entertained

there is no retreat to innocence. As the narrator of W

Athlin and Dunbaygg writes:

When first we enter on the theatre of the world and
begin to notice the objecs that surround us, young
imagination heightens every scene, and the warm
heart expands to all around it. The happy
benevolence of our feelings prompts us to believe
that every body is good, and excites our wonder

44

why every body is not happy. We are fired with
indignation at the recital of an act of injustice, and
at the unfeeling vices of which we are told. At a
tale of distress our tears flow a full tribute of pity.
At a deed of virtue our heart unfolds, our soul
aspires; we bless the action, and feel ourselves the
doer. As we advance in life, imagination is
compelled to relinquish a part of her sweet
delirium; we are led reluctantly to truth through
the paths of experience; and the objecs of our fond
attention are viewed with a severer eye. Here an
altered scene appears; frowns where late were
smiles; deep shades where late was sunshine: mean
passions, or disgusting apathy, stain the features of
the principal figures. We turn indignant from a
prospect so miserable, and court again the sweet
illusions of our early days; but ah! they are fled for
ever! (CAD,4-5)

In Wilts, Rosamund looks back at how pregnancy has

changed her and observes:

When I was young, I used to be so good-natured. I
used to see the best in everyone, to excuse all faults,
to put all malice and shortcoming down to
environment: in short, to take all blame upon
myself. But for the child, I might have gone on like
that forever and, who knows, I might have been
the better and nicer for it in the kindness of my
innocence. I repeat; not being blind, I saw fauls but
I excused them. Now I felt less and less like finding
excuses. (Mi,68)

After her daughter is born, Rosamund is thrilled to rediscover in
Octavia the attribute which she herself has lost: "She had forgiven me

for our day of separation, I could see, and such generosity I found

45

amazing, for I am not generous. Fair, but not generous." (Mi,113).

Just as the monster in Frankgnstein hides himself where he can
observe the happy family life without disrupting it, so Meaulnes
shelters himself when he first happens upon the "lost domain",
fearing that his appearance will frighten away the children. Once he
has left it, he never is able to satisfy his longing to return there, since
even finding the coordinates does not allow him to recapture the spirit
of the place. What he can never regain is the epiphanal feeling he has
on first entering the lost domain: "an extraordinary contentment, a
perfect and almost intoxicating serenity, a feeling of certainty that he
had reached his goal and that from now on he could look forward to
nothing but happiness" (LGM,50). A similar dynamic operates in
W in which the mystical world which Judith Earle
discovers next door is subject to being punctured at any point, as for
example by a rain storm, and is finally lost forever. In 1mg Bgautjml
11511, the narrator feels a similar nostalgia bordering on obsession
towards her "beautiful visit" in the country. Elizabeth's cottage plays
this function in Thg Msn Within, with is significance being far greater

for Andrews when he is away from it than when he is there. Like

Me

(10!

C011

plac.
nave
unde
he 10¢

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46

Meaulnes, he comes to the cottage in the fog and conceives of it as
being in the middle of a remote wood. Only when he finally leaves it
does he realize "how far from the isolation he had imagined was the
cottage" (MW,94).

This propensity to look back nostalgically at a particular time and
place as a special bastion plays an important role in many of these
novels. Tete Blanche comes to say of his boarding school, "I
understand more and more that this is my kingdom" (TB,37) and later
he looks back on his days at the sea-shore with Emilie in a similar
fashion. Tete Blanche also refers to "the cloistered atmosphere"
(TB,122) of Delatour College. Cloisters, convents and monasteries play
figurative roles as lost domains in many of these works, and not
merely those which are in the Gothic mode. Even characters who have
never been in one seem to sense them as places from which they have
been exiled. In (his Man's Inig‘stign: 121 Z, in the midst of World War
I, the central character Martin Howe declares: "If there were
monasteries nowadays...I think I'd go into one" (OMI,48). Amid the
decadence of the Regina Hotel, Lobo, in W announces "I
will go into a monastery" (BB,28). In My Brilliant Career, Sybylla's

grandmother exclaims that, rather than see her become an actress, she

wc
hou
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con
her

life

she

9!!

47

"would rather see her shear off her hair and enter a convent this very
hour" (MBC,73). Young Torless's school has "developed out of a
religious foundation" (YT,6). Cecile, in W has left a
convent school only two years previously and is intrigued by some of
her father's less respectable friends because "after ten years of convent
life their lack of morals fascinate me" (BT,105).

In Judith, the title character decides to buy a pig farm like the one
she was reared on when she flees a moribund relationship in the big
city in hopes of recapturing her lost innocence. When first sent to
school, Young Torless attaches such significance to the letters he sends
his parens that: "when by day, at games or in class, he remembered
that he would write his letter in the evening, it was as though he were
wearing, hidden on his person, fastened to an invisible chain, a golden
key with which, as soon as no one was looking, he would open the gate
leading into marvellous gardens" (YT ,3). Gulchenrouz, the eternal
innocent to whom Nouronihar is betrothed in Msthek, can dwell
contentedly in the "inviolable asylums" (V,221) which Nouronihar
must leave behind: "Remote from the inquietudes of the world, the

impertinences of harems, the brutality of eunuchs, and the inconstancy

48

of women, there he found a place truly congenial to the delights of his
soul. In this peaceable society his days, months and years glided on"
under the watchful eye of a good old genius, who "instead of
burdening his pupils with perishable riches and vain sciences,
conferred upon them the boon of perpetual childhood" (V,221). Even
though most of these effors are doomed to failure, there is something
noble in the effort.

Another recurrent feature is the term "wretched" being used to
designate this condition of being aware of one's own lost innocence.
This may in part reflect the influence of Thomas Chatterton, who was
of great importance to the Romantic poes. A talented young poet,
Chatterton took his own life with an overdose of arsenic in 1770 at the
age of seventeen after his attempt to pass off his own poems as
medieval ballads was detected. His body was found in the midst of
torn-up fragmens of his verse, the last of which read: "Have mercy,
Heaven, where here I cease to live/ And this last act of wretchedness
forgive"30. The dramatic Opening sentence of Zastrozzi reads: "Torn
from the society of all he held dear on earth, the victim of secret

enemies, and exiled from happiness, was the wretched Verezzi!" (2,5).

49

A similar introduction takes place on the third page of Mme,
where the narrator asks, "Driven from this native country by an event
which imposed upon him an insuperable barrier to ever again
returning thither, possessing no friends, not having one single
resource from which he might obtain support, where could the wretch,
the exile, seek for an asylum but with those whose fortunes,
expectations and characters were desperate" ($1,113). Dodo gradually
comes to realize that her marriage to Chesterford is "all a wretched
mistake” (D,1108).

In the opening sentences of Muss, John Haye writes in his diary
"We went to Henley yesterday and it was wretched" (8,343) and later he
describes his life at school generally as "wretched" (B368). When
Clement Willoughby is first engaging in raillery with Evelina, he
defines a wretch as the "sneaking, shame-faced, despicable puppy"
(E,45) who has engaged her to dance and not kept the commitment.

Emile Zola's first novel W; (1865), published when
he was twenty-five, begins with is editor's apology for "the wretched
youth whose letters I now publish"31. After lying to Elsa in order to

protect her father, Cecile in W feels "wretched" and

50

occupies herself by "detesting my reflection in the mirror" (BT,42). The
time Meaulnes spends trying to find the lost domain is "a period of
terrible, wretched struggle for him, in total isolation" (LGM,200).
Leonora's father in Ingugnits calls her an "ungrateful and undutiful
wretch" (1,299) before the disguised identities are revealed. The word
appears throughout Ersnksnstsiu to characterize the state of both
Victor Frankenstein and his creation. The monster's final speech
equates wretchedness with the realization that the lost innocence is

irretrievable:

When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins,
I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose
thoughs were once filled with sublime and
transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty
of goodness...it is true that I am a wretch...You hate
me, but your abhorrence cannot equal that with
which I regard myself...1 shall die. I shall no longer
feel the agonies which now consume me or be the
prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched.

(Fr,211)
The realization that "there is no going back to virtue" brings "an

unattractive wretchedness and regret" (P,117) to Pauline's heart.
Edward Walcott, after the departure of Fanshawe, Dr. Melmoth and
Ellen from Crombie's Inn "alone, remained behind - the most ,

wretched being, (at least such was his own opinion,) that breathed the

51
vital air" (Fa,57).

Dust is also used frequently as a metaphor for the changes the
characters are undergoing, as a study of some of the word's occurrences
in these novels reveals. A characteristic of post-lapsarian existence is
that our identities become more and more fixed as things begin to cling
to us. Like the use Mackenzie and Congreve make of rust, dust affords
an analogue to this discovery that it is becoming increasingly difficult
to wipe the slate clean. In many of these works, dust pervades the air,
bringing with it the sense of diminution, of being less than one once
was. In My Brilliant Cargr, an important discovery in Sybylla's life
occurs when she is ten and finds out that her father is not the constant
man She has taken him to be. "He was", she writes, "my hero,
confidant, encyclopedia, mate, and even my religion till I was ten.
Since then I have been religionless” (MBC,4). Up until this time she
has been leading an idyllic life - living in a "sheltered nook", knowing
no fear and finding that, far from things clinging to her, she always
"came off scot-free". After this, her father's impecunity necessitates a
move to a new home where Sybylla writes the "Drought Idyll" which
illustrates that the five intervening years have wrought changes which

in her inner life, as well as in her outward circumstances:

52

There was not a blade of grass to be seen, and the
ground was dusty to sit on. We were too overdone
to make more than one-word utterances, so waited
silently in the blazing sun, closing our eyes against
the dust.

Weariness! Weariness!

A few light wind-smitten clouds made wan
streaks across the white sky, haggard with the fierce
relentless glare of the afternoon sun. Weariness
was written across my mother's delicate carewom
features, and found expression in my father's
knitted brows and dusty face. Blackshaw was weary,
and said so, as he wiped the dust, made mud with
perspiration, off his cheeks. I was weary -- my limbs
ached with the heat and work. The poor beast
stretched out at our feet was weary. All nature was
weary, and seemed to sing a dirge to that effect in
the furnace-breath wind which roared among the
trees on the low ranges at our back and smote the
parched and thirsty ground. All were weary, all but
the sun. He seemed to glory in his power,
relentless and untiring, as he swung boldly in the
sky, triumphantly leering down upon his helpless
victims.

Weariness! Weariness!

This was life - my life - my career, my brilliant
career! I was fifteen -- fifteen! A few fleeting hours
and I would be old as those around me. I looked at
them as they stood there, weary, and turning down
the other side of the hill of life. When young, no
doubt they had hoped for, and dreamed of, better
things - had even known them. But here they
were. This had been their life; this was their career.
It was, and in all probability would be, mine too.
My life -- my career - my brilliant career!

Weariness! Weariness!

The summer sun danced on. Summer is
fiendish, and life is a curse, I said in my heart.

53

What a great dull hard rock the world was! On it
were a few barren narrow ledges, and on these, by
exerting ourselves so that the force wears off our
finger-nails, it allows us to hang for a year or two,
and then hurls us off into outer darkness and
oblivion, perhaps to endure worse tortures than
this. (MBC,24-5)

The recurrent references to the dust emphasize Sybylla's acceptance
that this weariness is an inevitable process, which makes life hardly
worth living. Things get even worse for her when, after the reprieve
of living at her grandmother's house, she is sent off to act as governess
to the boorish M'Swats. On her journey there, "the dust was simply
awful. It rose in such thick gray clouds that often it was impossible to
discern the team of five which pulled us" (MBC,188). While at the
M'Swas, the piano which is the sole evidence of culture "had stood in
the dust, heat, and wind so long that every sign that it had once made
music had deserted it" (MBC,198). Sybylla is finally left to walk out
"ankle-deep in the dust" and wonder "How long, how long"
(MBC,212).

Similarly, Joel Knox, in Other Voices Other Rooms finds on

 

arriving at Skully's Landing that "gnat-like motes of dust circulated in

the sunny air, and Joel left a dusty imprint on whatever he touched"

 

(OVOR,27). In The Black Book the air of the Regina Hotel is "full of

the fine dust of the desert tombs -- the Arabic idiom of death" (BB,22).

In Thg 1118.12. after van Schoor sends Setole away, a heat wave strikes:

Dust was in the air all the time; indoors there was a
fine film over every stick of furniture, and a rift of
dust under every door; teeth grated on dust in the
bread that was eaten. And ouside the world was
heavy with dust. All round the horizon there
hung a grey band, round the waist of the universe,
that looked sometimes like the smoke of a great
city, but was only and always the dust. And above
all, above wind and dust and the parched earth,
hung the sun - hot, dimmed by the dust, present
throughout the day. (T,42)

The link to disillusionment is even more explicit in Where Angels
W where Lilia, taking her first solitary walk after her
husband Gino has prohibited them, runs to catch the night train but
instead is enveloped in the "choking clouds of moonlit dust" (WAFT,
63) which the train ploughs up. She faints and revives to find herself
"lying in the road, with dust in her eyes, and dust in her mouth, and
dust down her ears. There is something very terrible in dust at night-
time" (WAFI',64). She returns home and has the argument with her
husband which finally reveals his baseness to her. After she dies in
childbirth, Gino consecrates a room to her in which "Over everything

there lay a deposit of heavy white dust, which was only blown off one

55

moment to thicken on another" (WAFT,126). In this case, then, the
symbolic use of dust is clearly meant to bring to mind the Biblical
passage so frequently used at funerals: "Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust".

Dust, then, represens the perception that the transition from
innocence to experience has left an indelible mark and frequently it is
described in conjunction with actual journeys. The train station from
which Torless leaves home at the start of Young Torless is flanked by
dreary acacia trees, whose "thirsty leaves [are] suffocated by dust and
soot" (YT,1). The airplane factory where the narrator of Cutuigssjgrtut
51% works during the last year of the war is "located in a desolate
area seething with dust" (CM,132). On arriving at the villa on the
Mediterranean, Cecile, in W immerses herself in the
water and plunges about wildly, trying "to wash away the shadows and
dust of Paris" (BT,8). In W the narrator's outburst
against the airnlessness of the life which she is about to escape from is
accompanied by the perception that "Everything was dirty, dusty and
grey" (BV,14).

In W the small Quebec mining town of Macklin
and the health of is inhabitans are being consumed by the asbestos

dust from the same mines which provide the town's income. "Hour

56

after hour the conveyors [dump] fresh buckes of dust on top of the
debris piles" (DOC,34), which the wind in turn distributes all over

town. Consequently, Macklin was,

a hideous place...Practically all the houses had the
pitiable look of old coalbins, their paint eaten away
by the thick asbestos dust which spared nothing in
the region, not even the sparse vegetation. When
it rained, this dust formed a viscous coating. ’
Crowded between enormous piles of debris from
the mines, the town was laid out all lengthwise.
Only a few cross strees managed to pry their way
between the enormous sandy asbestos bluffs, and
the houses along them were crooked and
asymmetric as if twisted out of shape by their
pressure. (DOC,22)

A comment by the narrator of Kafka's "Description of a Struggle"
amply indicates the way in which dust stands for the awareness that

one's identity is being eroded without one's control:

”Often when I see dresses with manifold pleas,
frills, and flounces smoothly clinging to beautiful
bodies, it occurs to me that they will not remain
like this for long, that they will get creases that
cannot be ironed out, dust will gather in the
trimmings too thick to be removed, and that no
one will make herself so miserable and ridiculous
as every day to put on the same precious dress in
the morning and take it off at night. And yet I see
girls who are beautiful enough, displaying all kinds
of attractive muscles and little bones and smooth
skin and masses of fine hair, and who appear every
day in the same natural fancy dress, always laying
the same face in the same palm and letting it be

57

reflected in the mirror. Only sometimes at night,
on returning late from a party, this face stares out at
them from the mirror worn out, swollen, already
seen by too many people, hardly worth wearing any
more." (DS,48)

The consequence of the perception of temptation, whether yielded
to or not, is a sense of disillusionment and ennui, which the novels
brilliantly anatomize. The passage from W

Qunbamg quoted earlier continues:

Constrained, therefore, to behold objecs in their
more genuine forms, their deformity is by degree
less painful to us. The fine touch of moral
susceptibility, by frequent irritation, becomes
callous; and too frequently we mingle

with the world, till we are added to the number of
is votaries. (CAD,5-6)

"Dearly, indeed, do 1 purchase experience!" (E341) Evelina lamens,
having learnt to distrust the whole ”imperfect race" (E,267) of men. She
amplifies on her own exclamation "What a world is this we live in!"
(E278) by describing it as "a world so deceitful, where we must suspect
what (we see, distrust what we hear, and doubt even what we feel!"
(E,259). The terms in which this disillusionment is expressed indicate
Evelina's transformation from the naive empiricism of childhood to

the verge of the extreme skepticism which can ensue from moral

awakening. Sybylla Melvyn, in My Brilliant Csrsgt, declares that she

58

has "been cursed with the power of seeing, thinking, and, worse than
all, feeling" (MBC,127). In Thomas Mann's earliest short story,
"Disillusionment", written when he was twenty-one, a young narrator

is confronted by an older man who asks him,

Do you know, my dear sir, what disillusionment
is?...Not a miscarriage in small, unimportant
matters, but the great and general disappointment
which everything, all of life, has in store? No, of
course, you do not know. But from my youth up I
have carried it about with me; it has made me
lonely, unhappy, and a bit queer... (Dis,24)

Having been blighted in love, the man finds that "my greatest torture
resided in the thought: 'So this is the greatest pain we can suffer. Well
and what then - is that all?" (Dis,26). Now he awais only "death, that
last disappointment! At my last moment I shall be saying to myself:
'So this is the great experience - well and what of it? What is it after
all?” (Dis,27). The man's oft-repeated question is strikingly similar to
one of Meursault's favorite commens in L'Ettsngsr, "Anyway, it
doesn't matter at all".

Werther's fatal passions are symptomized in a similar distrust of
his own senses, "I have no imagination, no more feeling for nature,
and reading has become repugnant to me" (YW,64), and it is no

coincidence that the older man in Mann's story quotes young Werther.

59

The consciousness of the inadequacy of the world necessitates looking
inward to see if the senses contain the seeds of corruption, but
recognition of this truth is delayed by denial. Dodo comes to feel "as if
her powers of sensation had been seared... Her perceptions no longer
answered quickly to the causes that excited them; a layer of dull
unresponsive material lay between her and the world" (D, 171). It is as
if they are clogged by a layer of dust. The illicit love the narrator of
Devil in the Flesh feels for Marthe is like a "fasting inflicted upon my
senses" (DF,113). As suggested earlier, characters who have been
deprived of one of their senses are to some extent at an advantage,
which is in iself a model for how the young writer turns disadvantage
to advantage.

Another instance of this disillusionment with human powers is the
question the monster asks Victor Frankenstein: "Was man, indeed, at
once so powerful, so virtuous and magnificent, yet so vicious and
base?" (Fr,114). After meeting the stranger, Vathek is no longer
satisfied with the temples he has built glorifying the five senses, and
goes in pursuit of new experiences. During his wanderings, he is

continually being confronted with those who have lost at least one of

60

their senses: "Wherever the caliph directed his course, objects of pity
were sure to swarm round him: the blind, the purblind, smars
without noses, damsels without ears...a superb corps of cripples"
(V,186). Vivian Grey's father tries unsuccessfully to warn him of the
difference between the world of society and the shattered worlds of
home and school: "You are now, my dear son, a member of what is
called the great world; society formed on anti-social principles.
Apparently you have possessed yourself of the object of your wishes;
but the scenes you live in are very moveable; the characters you
associate with are all masked; and it will always be doubtful whether
you can retain that long, which has been obtained by some slippery
artifice" (VG,122). The novel ends with the statement that the
expectations of a long, happy life for Vivian "may be as vain as those
dreams of youth over which all have mourned. The Disappointment
of Manhood succeeds to the delusion of Youth; let us hope that the
heritage of Old Age is not Despair" (V G,447).

The mere week which it takes Ambrosio to weary of Matilda's
charms suggess that loss of faith can be succeeded by a numbness to all

pleasurable emotions. Father Sorel's responds to Rene's story by

61

telling him,

nothing in this story meris the pity which is
shown to you here. I see a young man intoxicated
with his illusions, displeased with everything,
withdrawn from the burdens of society, given to
idle dreams. One is not, sir, a superior man because
he sees the world in shadow. A man who hates his
fellow men and life has no breadth of vision.
(R,124)

This last injunction is strikingly similar to Ambrosio's counsel to
Matilda, when she was still posing as Rosario: "You must not indulge
this disposition to melancholy. What can possibly have made you
view in so desirable a light, Misanthropy, of all sentimens the most
hateful?" (M,51). After warning Vivian of the inevitable dawning of
disillusionment with society, Horace Grey adds "Do not, therefore,
conclude with Hobbes and Mandeville, that man lives in a state of civil
warfare with man...Man is neither the vile nor the excellent being
which he sometimes imagines himself to be" (VG,122-3). These
sentimens verge on the bitterness of Chatterton, who wrote a week
before his suicide that "tigers are a thousand times more merciful than
man"32.

One of the quintessential features of this disillusionment is is

ability to suddenly sap the most vital of the passions. The apparently

62

exemplary Ellen Langton in Fanshawe, having fallen prey to her
emotions, "felt a sort of indifference creeping upon her, an inability to
realize the evils of her situation, at the same time that she was perfectly
aware of them all" (Fa,96). Cecile, in BonjourI Tristesse, "feared
boredom and tranquillity more than anything else" (BT,109). Pauline,
who is also led astray by a conniving guide, finds herself "unable to
formulate any wishes or imagine any hopes" (P,117) and Tete Blanche
writes, "After Mama's death, 1 went through a death colder than death
iself: I was indifferent" (TB,86). When Verezzi learnt of Matilda's love

for him in Zastrozzi "A Lethean torpor crept upon his senses" (2,74)

 

and Shelley later uses considerable poetic license in saying of Verezzi,
"a frigorific torpidity chilled [his] every sense" (2,84). John Dos Passos,
in Ong Man's Initiation: 1217, presens World War 1 as a communal
disillusioning for the young men who fought in it. The comment of
one soldier that "The main thing about this damned war is ennui - just
plain boredom" (OMI,71) is an oft-repeated sentiment. If the chronic
lament in the literature of older writers is "Had we but world enough
and time", in the work of the young novelist it is "world enough and
time for what?".

The torpor and immobility consequent to this sense of

63

disillusionment with the world crystallizes in a dilemma between
whether to reconcile or exile oneself from the world. The subtitle of
lncognita is "Love and Duty Reconciled", which is illustrated by
Aurelian's plaintive query, "Oh ye unequal powers, why do ye urge us
to desire what ye doom us to forbear; give us a will to chuse, then curb
us with a duty to restrain that choice!" (1,282). The convent is an
embodiment of this dilemma in IbLMuuls, as is suggested by Agnes's
exclamation that "My disgust at a monastic life increases daily: Ennui
and discontent are my constant companions; and I will not conceal
from you, that the passion which I formerly felt for one so near being
my Husband is not yet extinguished from my bosom" (M,185). In _A_t_al_a
there is a similar conflict between religious vows and individual
conscience.

Werther gives a comparable account of the warring impulses: "I
have given a great deal of thought to man's desire to explore and roam
the face of the earth, and then again, I think about his inner impetus to
surrender willingly to the restrictions imposed by life and to travel in
the rut of routine living, never giving a thought to what goes on to

right or left" (YW,42). Ambrosio's description of this conflict in IL;

Mung foreshadows his own fate:

Man was born for society. However little He may
be attached to the World, He never can wholly
forget it. Disgusted at the guilt or absurdity of
Mankind, the Misanthrope flies from it: He
resolves to become an Hermit, and buries himself
in the Cavern of some gloomy Rock. While Hate
inflames his bosom, possibly He may feel contented
with his situation: But when his passions begin to
cool; when Time has mellowed his sorrows, and
healed those wounds which He bore with him to
his solitude, think you that Content becomes his
Companion? Ah! no, Rosario. No longer
sustained by the violence of his passions, He feels
all the monotony of his way of living, and his heart
becomes the prey of Ennui and weakness. He looks
round, and finds himself alone in the Universe:
The love of society revives in his bosom, and He
pans to return to that world which He has
abandoned. Nature loses all her charms in his eyes:
No one is near him to point out her beauties, or
share in his admiration of her excellence and
variety. Propped upon the fragment of some Rock,
He gazes upon the tumbling water-fall with a
vacant eye, He views without emotion the glory of
the setting Sun. (M,53-4)

In discussing the same proposition that "man is naturally a social
animal” (MF,74), the narrator of W doubs whether
the pleasure arising from the communication of knowledge "be not
often more selfish than social" (MF,53).

The obsession with this dilemma, however, proves only an excuse

for the individuals to extemalize the causes of their wretchedness and

65

indulge in wandering and solitude in the false hope of rediscovering
the lost world of innocence. In one of many scenes which echoes
W Robert Walden discovers Victor Frankenstein near the
earth's farthest extremities and the novel ends with the monster
fleeing even farther north. Vivian Grey is warned by his father against
"that wild spirit of speculation which is now stalking abroad; and
which, like the Daemon in Frankenstein, not only fearftu wanders
over the whole wide face of nature, but grins in the imagined solitude
of our secret chambers” (VG,20). In W; after the
wedding of Meaulnes and Yvonne, Jasmin and Seurel wander around
the grounds where the "lost domain" had been, hoping to recapture
the lost wholeness. Wanderers seem to be forever cropping up in these
works. While still a teenager, Gogol published at his own expense an
idyll in verse called "Hans Kuechelgarten", in which the title (figure
leaves home and his betrothed to wander about Europe in search of the
"beautiful". Eventually he arrives at the ruins of the Acropolis, where
he reflecs upon what he has seen and concludes that people
everywhere are "contemptible crea tures"33.

In Gogol's story "The Terrible Vengeance", the fratricide cannot be

66

avenged until the sorcerer is drawn back to the remote spot in the
Carpathian mountains where the killing occurred. In The Munk, after
Ambrosio has been sentenced to death as a sorcerer, he is carried off to
"a Precipice's brink, the steepest in the Sierra Morena" (M,438) where
he mees the same fate as Gogol's sorcerer. The description of the
wildness of the setting suggess the lost Eden: "the gloomy caverns and
steep rocks, rising above each other, and dividing the passing clouds;
solitary clusters of Trees scattered here and there among whose thick-
twined branches the wind of night sighed hoarsely and mournfully;
the shrill cry of mountain Eagles, who had built their ness among
these lonely Desars; the stunning roar of torrens, as swelled by late
rains they rushed violently down tremendous precipices" (M,439).
Ambrosio, far from finding this to be a chance to regain his lost
harmony with nature, is terrified by the scene.

Also in Thg M9nl_<, Ambrosio and Antonia's father, Gonzalvo, has
written a poem called "The Exile" about his feelings upon being
banished from Spain with "his mind clouded by sorrow" (M,214). The
appearance of the wandering Jew in the midst of Raymond's

adventures in Ihg Muuk signals the ominous possibility of being

 

67

doomed to wander the world without a country. It also, of course,
suggess once again the fall, which made all of humankind wanderers,
exiled from the garden. When Raymond expresses admiration of the
extent of the Wandering Jew's travels and remarks that these travels
"must have given him infinite pleasure", the Wandering Jew instead

shakes his head mournfully and replies:

"No one is adequate to comprehending the misery
of my lot! Fate obliges me to be constantly in
movement: I am not permitted to pass more than a
fortnight in the same place. I have no friend in the
world, and from the restlessness of my destiny I can
never acquire one. Fain would I lay down my
miserable life for I envy those who enjoy the quiet
of the Grave: But Death eludes me, and flies from
my embrace." (M,169)

One of Percy Bysshe Shelley's juvenile poems is called "The
Wandering Jew", from which he takes the epigraph for chapter eight of
St. Irvyue and which he also borrowed from for the imagery of both
Zsstmzl and Mme, jljhg Bgsutlful yisit ends with the narrator
setting off on a trip designed to test an old man's eccentric theory about
the shape of the earth and planning to record her findings in a
notebook which she calls "The Four Corners of the Earth". In My
Brilliant Csrggr, Sybylla Melvyn writes a poem which ends by

describing "The pitiless moving lake,/ Where the wanderer falls

 

68

dejected,/ By a thirst he never can slake" (MBC,42). Matilda, in

Zastrozzi aligns herself with the Ruth of Keas's "Ode to a

 

Nightingale" by describing herself as one who "has wandered,
unknown, through foreign climes" (2,31). Yeas' first major poem,
written when he was twenty-four, was "The Wanderings of Oisin".
Along the same lines, Vivian Grey's father counsels him that true
happiness does not "mean that glittering show of perpetual converse
with the world which some miserable wanderers call Happiness; but
that which can only be drawn from the sacred and solitary fountain of
your own feelings" (VG,122). The narrator pauses at a critical stage in
Fanshawe to ask, "What wanderer on mountain-tops, or in deep
solitude, has not felt these records of humanity, telling him...that he is
not alone in the world?" (Fa,96). Similarly, the narrator of A ngu uf
er Timg interrups the narrative to observe, "Anyone who has
chanced like me to roam through desolate mountains and studied at
length their fantastic shapes and drunk the invigorating air of their
valleys can understand why I wish to describe and depict these magic
scenes for others" (HT,44). Cecile, in Bunjgur. Tristgssg, believes that

she and her father "belonged to a pure race of nomads" (BT,112). In

69

W the "night of wandering" which the narrator
selfishly inflics upon Marthe "proved decisive" (DF,207) by leading to
the confinement from which Marthe never recovers. Chactas, the
narrator of AtLls, is "a wanderer without a country" (A,26) before he
meets Atala. After Pauline receives Theodore's fateful letter, "All
week she wander[ed] in the garden as if wild" (P,116). In Thg Heart Is A
lgugly Huntsr, following the departure of Antonapoulos, Singer
begins to attract attention because "in his face there came to be a
brooding peace that is seen most often in the faces of the very
sorrowful or the very wise. But still he wandered through the strees
of the town always silent and alone" (HLH,9).

The title of Richard Price's The Wanderers refers to a gang of
aimless New York City youths who take their name from the pop song
by Dion. Their "theme song" expresses their condition better than any
of them can: "they don't even know my name/ They call me the
Wanderer, yeah the Wanderer/ I roam aroun' aroun' aroun' ". Near
the novel's end, the song's recurrence shows that even this ideal is
beyond their grasps. As they sing along, "I roam from town to town/ I

go through life wi-thout a care":

Joey cried as he sang. Perry felt a great mantle of

 

7O

sadness creep over his head and shoulders. Richie
felt terrified of what he did not know. Soon all of
them stood with arms around each other's
shoulders, fingers pressing into flesh, trying to
make a circle which nothing could penetrate -
school, women, babies, weddings, mothers, fathers"
(W,225)

Werther describes himself as "a wanderer on this earth - a pilgrim"
(YW,83) and the final words he reads from his own translation of
Ossian are "And in the morn the wanderer will come who saw me in
my glory. His eyes will seek me in the field but he will not find me..."
(YW,119). The distinction between the significance which Werther and
Lotte attach to the wanderer is indicated by Lotte's tepid response, "A
journey might distract you" (YW,108). Lotte has been effectively
domesticated, and has lost the feeling of being alien which is so
important to Werther. The intimate relationship between Goethe's
novel and Mann's first short story is again shown by the queer man's

description of having gone

out into that supposedly so wonderful life, craving
just one, one single experience which should
correspond to my great expectations. God help me, I
have never had it. I have roved the globe over,
seen all the best-praised sighs, all the works of art
upon which have been lavished the most
extravagant words (Dis,26)

In W Ben Joe Hawkes gives a less idealized

71

account of his motivations for continuing to move on: "Every place I
go, I miss another place...Pretty soon I leave again...I get to thinking
about something I just miss like hell in another town" (IMEC,137).
This recognition that life is not just a progression towards fulfillment
eventually necessitates a new perspective for envisioning life. The first
reaction, however, is to leap from the innocently optimistic
assumptions about life to morbidly pessimistic ones. Led on by her
curiosity, Nouronihar, in Maths; finds herself "wandering in these
wild solitudes" (V,194). The final fate to which she and Vathek are
sentenced is "to wander in an eternity of unabating anguish" (V ,243)
amidst "a multitude that no one could number, each [of whom]
wandered at random unheedful of the rest, as if alone on a desert
where no foot had trodden" (V,233).

In W Ariel Ron experiences curiosity for the
first time when put in charge of a recruit camp. Always a loner, she
suddenly finds herself taking an interest in the lives of the recruis she

is supervising. But this ultimately only increases her isolation. Soon,

It was not I, it was not Ariel Ron who wandered
through the city strees on that Malkosh night. It
was an unrecognizable person in uniform and
sandals, with wet feet, hair drawn back in horsetail
fashion, soaking wet, her face wet, too, even the

72

eyelashes holding raindrops for a second and then
flicking them to the cheeks. (NFM,107)

Not long after this, Ariel experiences "the loneliest moment I had ever
known" (NFM,109).

Since solitude is inextricably linked to the idea of the wanderer, the
natural desire for solitude tends increasingly to be seen as a
manifestation of a morbid predilection. Amelia advises Rene to
"abandon as quickly as you can this solitude; it isn't good for you"
(R,112). The narrator of The Black Book refers to the "isolation in
which the hotel broods" (BB,29) and Gregory writes, "I am not speaking
of my isolation as yet, which is six by three. The isolation of the coffin"
(BB,29). Fanshawe is "a solitary being, upon whom the hopes and fears
of ordinary men were ineffectual" (Fa,18). Louise's "whole being" in
Mad Shsduws ress on the "solitary and fragile beauty" (MS,16) of her
son, and when it and her husband are gone, she is left playing her
"solitary chess game" (MS,83). Victor Frankenstein, shunning the
companionship of man, finds that "solitude was my only consolation -
deep, dark, deathlike solitude" (Fr,86). In response to Tete Blanche's
assertion that "My solitude is no loss. My solitude is a refuge” (TB,123),

Monsieur Brenner writes to him, "You have no right to reject your

73

youth. It is yours...perhaps you love evil as a matter of pride...Did you
not prefer the fantastic personage, who reared up inside you, to the
young Tete Blanche who was like all the other boys? Haven't you
deliberately chosen your solitude? Your Exile?" (TB,124—5). After
Theodore's desertion, Pauline ”could not bear to be alone; solitude
nourished her despair" (P,115) and "after four years Of complete
solitude" (P,123) the prospect of attending a simple fete leaves her
terrified and trembling. In Judith, the title character has moved to a
remote part of Alberta, where she lives amidst "lonely isolation in that
shimmery expanse of white" 0,144).

In Other Voices, Quer Rooms, Randolph's love for Pepe was "more

intensely threatening than anything I felt for Dolores, and lonelier"

(OVOR,82). It makes him realize that,

we are alone...terribly isolated each from the other;
so fierce is the world's ridicule we cannot speak or
show our tenderness; for us, death is stronger than
life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our
cries burlesqued in joyless laughter; and with the
garbage of loneliness stuffed down us until our gus
burst bleeding green, we go Screaming round the
world, dying in our rented rooms, nightmare
hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart.
(OVOR,82-83)

A "secret instinct" makes Agnes aware that "She was not born for

74

Solitude" (M,131) and Donna Rodolpha's threat that "Solitude will
perhaps recall her to a sense of her duty" (M,143) only leads to Agnes
shrivelling and decaying amongst the catacombs. The solitary setting
chosen by Matilda in M affecs all that takes place there: "left to
solitude and his own torturing reflections, Verezzi's mind returned to
his lost, his still adored Julia" (2,55),

while Matilda's own passion "nursed by solitude...sometimes almost
maddened her" (2,60). At last, Verezzi asks Matilda, "Is it the solitude
of this remote castella which represses the natural gaiety of your soul?"
(2,79). In CutugssiouLQLLMask, when the narrator's homosexual
tendencies are first manifesting themselves, he finds that "some
instinct within me demanded that I seek solitude" (CM,81). Evelina's
"passion for solitary walking" (E,300) causes her much grief, and the
argumens between Lilia and her husband Gino in Where Anggls Fear
tum are caused by her zeal for solitary walks. Gino's proposal that
she can go on walks with their servant Perfetta shows how completely
he misses the point, since, as Kim Novak tells Jimmy Stewart in

X31189: "One only can be a wanderer; two together are always going

somewhere". The young Osbert in :lhg Castlgs ul Athlln and

75

Dunuayns "would often lose himself in awful solitudes" (CAD,9).
Werther thus sums the situation up aptly when he writes, "Since we
mortals happen to be so constituted that we compare everything with
ourselves and ourselves with everything around us, our happiness
and our misery have to lie in the things with which we compare
ourselves. Nothing is therefore more dangerous than solitude"
(YW,70).

The emotion which forces some sort of resolution is sorrow, which,
as the narrator of mvil in tug Elssh says, "lies, not in leaving life, but
in leaving that which gives it a meaning" (DF,91). As a result of that
loss of meaning, characters find themselves impelled into taking
cataclysmic action or become frustrated by their inability to take such
action. In Kafka's "Description of a Struggle", the narrator and his
acquaintance are overwhelmed by the perception that "our sorrow had
darkened everything" (DS,50) just before the acquaintance stabs
himself. More frequently, however, sorrow leaves the characters with
a sense of inadequacy at being unable to find sufficiently dramatic

responses. Cecile, in W begins her look back at the

summer which began with her "seventeen and perfectly happy" (BT,7)

76

by declaring:

A strange melancholy pervades me which I hesitate
to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow.
The idea of sorrow has always appealed to me, but
now I am almost ashamed of is complete egoism. I
have known boredom, regret, and occasionally
remorse, but never sorrow. Today, it envelops me
like a silken web, enervating and soft and ses me
apart from everybody else (BT,7)

"Tristesse" is of course the French word translated here as sorrow. The
narrator of Confessions of a Mask's description of the beginning of his
awakening process proposes that sorrow necessarily play an important
role after the senses have been sated and indifference has set in. Thus,
in his meditations on the occupation of the night-soil man he feels,
"something like a yearning for a piercing sorrow, a body-wrenching
sorrow. His occupation gave me the feeling of tragedy in the most
sensuous meaning of the word. A certain feeling as it were of 'self-
renunciation', a certain feeling of indifference, a certain feeling of
intimacy with danger, a feeling like a remarkable mixture of
nothingness and vital power - all these feelings swarmed forth from
his calling, bore down upon me, and took me captive" (CM,9). And
while sorrow is generally associated with the loss of love or a loved

one in these novels, it can more generally refer to "a kind of desire like

stinging pain" (CM,8).

77

As these passages show, the necessity of experiencing sorrow is so
great that it must be feigned if it is not occasioned. The homesick
Young Torless fills his letters home with a "passionate, mutinous
sorrow" (YT,5). But even after the homesickness has past, his letters
contain a similar flavor, although "the object of longing, the image of
his parents, actually ceased to have any place in it at all: I mean that
certain plastic, physical memory of a loved person which is not merely
remembrance but something speaking to all the senses and preserved
in all the senses, so that one cannot do anything without feeling the
other person silent and invisible at one's side" (YT,4). Soon, his
mental image of his parens became not them themselves but "the
boundless grief and longing from which he suffered so much and
which yet held him in is spell, is hot flames causing him both agony
and rapture...the thought of his parens more and more became a mere
pretext, an external means to set going this egoistic suffering in him"
(YT,4). When the homesickness has worn off, "what it left in young
Torless's soul was a void. And this nothingness, this emptiness in
himself, made him realize that it was no mere yearning he had lost,

but something positive, a spiritual force, something that had flowered

 

78

in him under the guise of grief" (YT,4).

In Madame de Stael's tale M_ir_z_s, Ximeo confides to the narrator the
story of his perfidy because he sees him as being "like a man of feeling"
who can "listen to long tales of sorrow" (Mir,82). When the tale is
over, Ximeo spurns the narrator's attemps to console him, because he
now lives only to nurture the sorrow which unites him with Mirza.
He has told the story at all only in hopes that the story of Mirza's
sorrows will outlive him, and the narrator concludes by writing,
"Sorrow inspires respect; I left him, my heart filled with bitterness. I
am telling his story to keep my promise and consecrate, if I can, the sad
name of his Mirza" (Mir,91). Since the process of disillusionment has
relied heavily on external factors, there has been no necessity to
acknowledge individual involvement with society's corruption until
sorrow enters in. Sorrow comes from the death brought into the world
by sin and it forces the recognition that one's own soul contains the
same seeds of corruption which have already been discovered in
society and in the flesh. Thus, Victor Frankenstein speaks of trying to

forget "myself and my ephemeral, because human, sorrows" (Fr,90).

The narrator of Cunfsssluns gt s Mssk feels upon his first look at

79

Sonoko that the impression her beauty makes upon him is different
from what he has felt for any woman before: "The difference was that
now I had a feeling of remorse...Each second while I watched Sonoko
approach, I was attacked by unendurable grief. It was a feeling such as I
had never had before. Grief seemed to undermine and set tottering the
foundations of my existence. Until this moment the feeling with
which I had regarded women had been an artificial mixture of childlike
curiosity and feigned sexual desire. My heart had never before been
swayed, and at first glance, by such a deep and unexplainable grief"
(CM,143-4). Everard Gray, in MEI—9119213 says that, to judge
from the sad look in Sybylla's face when at rest: "One would think you
had had some sorrow in your life" (MBC,75). This same discovery of
the finiteness of the human ability to mourn is crucial to numerous
other characters. The dawning of the awareness that there may not be
world enough and time helps to clarify the importance of these
qualities.

In Djuna Barnes' Nightwgd, Dr. Matthew O'Connor describes a
paradox which is crucial in many of these novels: "A man's sorrow

runs uphill; true it is difficult for him to bear, but it is also difficult for

80

him to keep"34. The missionary provides sage advice in terms well
suited to the young mind when he counsels Atala at the end of his
narrative that, "Believe me, my son, sorrows are not forever. Sooner
or later they must end because the heart of man is finite. It is one of
our great miseries. We cannot even be unhappy for long" (A,82). Tete
Blanche complains of a similar development after his mother's death:
"in spite of myself, I am attached by something stronger and more vital
than my sorrow, and I cannot die" (TB,61). Similarly, the narrator of
Ills Muuk informs us that "Nobody dies of mere grief" (M,308) and the
Duke paraphrases As You Like It in asserting that "Men have died, and
worms have eaten them; but not for Love!" (M,399). Antonia wishes
that, like Clarissa Harlowe, her feelings of shame could kill her, but it
takes Ambrosio's poignard to accomplish that. The unnamed narrator
of ngil in mg Figsh writes after Marthe's departure that, "I was sorry
that one could die neither of boredom nor of sorrow" (DF,156). The
climax of Zastrozzi is precipitated by Verezzi's discovery that, in spite
of his own certainty that Julia's reported death will kill him, his
"violent and fierce sorrow was softened into a fixed melancholy" (2,51)
and indeed, the time comes when "that passion, which he had fondly

supposed would end but with his existence, was effaced by the art of

81

another" (2,75).

In The Heat: Is A Lonely Hunter, after his wife's death Biff asks
himself "Why was it that in cases of real love the one who is left does
not more often follow the beloved by suicide?" (HLH,104). In m
her husband Edouard has declared confidently that if he discovered
dishonor in his wife, "I would die of sorrow, but I Would leave her"
(P,128). Instead, when that situation comes to pass, Edouard does not
leave her and when it is she who dies, he is "devoured by regret"
(P,139) that he had not forgiven her in time, and lives on "in absolute
solitude...to raise the child so precious to him because of his love for
Pauline" (P,139). In My Brilliant Cmr, Sybylla's Aunt Helen worries
that someone may "wile her passionate young heart away and then
leave her to pine and die" (MBC,77), but Sybylla knows already that "It
is only good, pretty little girls, who are a blessing to everyone, who die
for such trifles" (MBC,111). Life iself is always less romantic than it
seems it ought to be. Dodo adds this typically breezy aside at the end of
a description of an evening which moved her: "The world was going to
be a different place ever afterwards, and I expected to die in the night.

But I didn't you know" (D,143). Meursault in 'Etr n r in a sense

82

starts at the point to which all these other characters come to by
refusing to follow the conventional forms of observance after his
mother's death, as does Elizabeth in 1h_e_Mar_r_V_Vlt_l_r_ir_r_, after the death
of the man who has raised her. In that same novel, after Andrews
makes love to the harlot he feels that he has betrayed Elizabeth and
wonders "Why can't I die?" (MW,167). The harlot reSponds by
informing him that "the feeling won't last. For a day we are disgusted
and disappointed and disillusioned and feel dirty all over. But we are
clean again in a very short time, clean enough to go back and soil
ourselves all over again." (MW,167)

In A ngo of @r Time, the titular figure Pechorin tells Maxim
Maximych that, "My soul's been corrupted by society. My imagination
knows no peace, my heart knows no satisfaction. I'm never satisfied. I
grow used to sorrow as easily as I do to pleasure, and my life ges
emptier every day" (HT,54). Maximych's response, that "it was the first
time I'd ever heard such things from a man of twenty-five" (HT,54)
shows that he was unfamiliar with the writers being considered herein,
for, as we have seen, the discovery of a will to live stronger than the

ability to sorrow over a death or an unrequited love is pivotal in these

83

works and would appear to be a characteristic trait of the youthful
imagination. Werther's suicide seems to be the result of his perception
that he will survive the loss of Lotte and his desire to bring about what
his romantic imagination perceives as a more appropriate ending.
Evelina has been "born in so much sorrow" (E,125) and since her
father's death, Isabelle-Marie ”had withdrawn into her sorrow, and
contempt for Louise had shriveled her soul" (MS,24).

The Marquis de Sade wrote in 1800 of 1111s M9113 and the fiction of

Mrs. Radcliffe (whom he called Mrs. Radgliffe):

'twas the inevitable result of the revolutionary
shocks which all of Europe has suffered. For
anyone familiar with the full range of misfortunes
wherewith evildoers can beset mankind, the novel
became as difficult to write as monotonous to read.
There was not a man alive who had not
experienced in the short span of four or five years
more misfortunes than the most celebrated

novelist could portray in a century.35
Likewise, Madame de Stael wrote in 17.95 in her W that

the Reign of Terror had negated fiction's ability to raise "deep and
terrible emotions"36 in is readers. Theodore Hook exploited this
feeling that it was an age of sorrows with his parodic novel W
Errows (1808), for which the eighteen-year-old Hook used the

irreverent epigraph "He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with

84

grief"37. The predominance of the theme of sorrows in this period is
an indication of why so many young noveliss thrive during it, and
such periods quite naturally produce an abundance of good young
noveliss. The adaptability of the young becomes a more important
skill in times of turmoil than any of the ones possessed by their elders.

As we have seen, the disintegrative process of temptation,
perception of the world's inadequacies, a consequent ennui and
disillusionment and recourse to an unhealthy longing for solitude in
these novels is either completed or arrested by the contemplation of
one's sorrows. When it is arrested, the resolution reflecs a complex
awareness of the necessity of the process being completed. Thus, in
both WM and Magl Shauuws, it is only
when the three main characters have sealed themselves off in mutual
isolation ("the estrangement which has closed in upon all three of
them" (YW,122)) that any form of closure becomes possible. The hope
for reconciliation with society lies in realizing the sterility of such
isolation.

It is not, however, simply a question of embracing society and

ignoring the problems which have surfaced. Rather, the solution

85

entails acknowledgement of the central duplicity of existence within
society but seeks to deal with it through recognition of a central duality
in man's nature. John Keas was but twenty-two when he arrived at
his classic definition of "what quality went to form a Man of
Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare
possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a
man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubs, without any
irritable reaching after fact and reason"38. F. Scott Fitzgerald described

the struggle of the young adult in these terms:

the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to
hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same
time, and still retain the ability to function. One
should, for example, be able to see that things are
hopeless and yet be determined to make them
otherwise...[to] hold in balance the sense of the
futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to
struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of

failure and still the determination to 'succeed'39

It is this dialectic which is suggested by Matilda's injunction to
Ambrosio (that "Your sudden change of sentiment may naturally create
surprize, and may give birth to suspicions which it is most our interest
to avoid. Rather redouble your outward austerity, and thunder out

menaces against the errors of others, the better to conceal your own"

86
(M,231), which at the same time echoes Lady Macbeth's "Look like the

innocent flower/ but be the serpent under't"40. Another Matilda, this
one in Ml, is frequently described as "wily" (2,29,31,58), which as
Stephen Behrendt poins out "is the word typically associated with the
Serpent of Eden, both in traditional biblical commentary and in
Wfil. Matilda's ally Zastrozzi says that, "My maxim . . .
through life has been, wherever I am, whatever passions shake my
innocent soul, at least to appear collected" (2,47). Many of these books
A feature prominently a character struggling with duplicity, such as in
Tete Blanghg where Emilie les her sisters "do anything they want,
except tell fibs" (TB,76). In W the narrator's
relationship with Marthe leaves him more and more inured to deceit,
and he marks his progression from one stage of dishonesty to the next
in clinical detail.

Dishonesty is always more easily recognized in others than in
oneself. Both The Heart ls A Qnely Hunter and ms Man's Initiau’on:
1212 feature characters who appropriate Marxist terminology to
denounce the world's dishonesty. Jake Blount, in lbs Hsart ls A
Lonely Huntgr, witheringly describes "America as a crazy house...men

have to rob their brothers in order to live...children starving and

87

women working sixty hours a week to get to eat...the whole system of
the world is built on a lie. And although it's as plain as the shining
sun - the don't knows have lived with that lie so long they just can't
see it" (HLH,129). In W Andre Dubois says
angrily "We are all slaves. We are blind. We are deaf...It has always
been the same: man the slave of property or religion, of his own
shadow...Now we know nothing but what we are told by the rulers.
Oh, the lies, the lies, the lies, the lies that life is smothered in!...Oh,
they have deceived us so many times. We have been such dupes, we
have been such dupes!" (OMI,131-2). Neither of these characters,
however, seems capable of moving beyond this recognition of society's
dishonesty to constructing a viable role for the self within such a
society. The very stridency of their rhetoric suggess an unwillingness
to recognize the latency of the same seed within themselves. A more
sophisticated way of conceptualizing the problem is mooted in
LLEtIauget, which Camus described as "the story of a man who,
without any heroic pretensions, agrees to die for the truth" (E,96).
Camus could thus say "paradoxically, that I tried to make [Meursault]

represent the only Christ that we deserve" (E,96). And of course this

88

duplicity is also linked to the biblical fall, since the first manifestation
of the loss of innocence was the attempt to deceive God. This conflict
between realizing that one is an impure person living in a dishonest
society and still protecting the facet of the identity which longs for
more necessitates the concept of the double self or doppelganger which
has long been a favorite of young authors.

Trying to find a role in adult society requires a division of the self
into two distinct pars, which may appear to be in direct conflict. In
Bonjuur, Tristgssa, after Cecile resolves to conquer Anne, she finds
that: "For the first time in my life my 'self' seemed to be split, and I
discovered opposing forces within that shocked me" (BT,57). The

resolution Ariel Ron makes after her first day of cadet school indicates

a similar recognition:

I drew a straight line down the middle of the paper:
I must cut myself in two. For the next few months
of the course I would have to plan my moves in
detail, master every moment by predicting it, work
out apart and play it artistically, making sure that I
didn't fail or break down at any point. This was my
only hope of coming through it well, of remaining
in complete charge of myself and of all situations. I
retraced the line down the centre of the paper.

One half was the future Lieutenant Ariel. The
easiest way for that person to get on well would be
to play a new game, to be sociable, helpful, and
always kind; to volunteer for things, never to

89

complain, to co-operate dumbly. It might be as well
to make friends, but only on the surface; I would
keep myself stainless, faultless, sociable, and strictly
under control, holding back every desire to protest.
Then I would be left to myself.

On the other side of the line drawn down the
middle of the paper would be me, I myself, able to
feel things more deeply and fundamentally, but
sharing my emotions with no one and never
exhibiting them. Within me I would be the
mistress; ouside, if necessary, a slave. I would knit
my world together, make contact with the ouside
world, write the right kind of letters, and be as I
thought appropriate to different people. On leave
every other week-end 1 would be my other, my true
self, as bad as I wished, doing unkind things,
harming or hurting as I pleased, or blessing and
making happy. For a few months I would trim my
life to fit a schedule and stretch out nets to collect
my joys and - if I wanted - my sorrows. I would
cry or laugh if I had to, but never let myself be
pushed around; I would get all I wanted whatever
that might be. (NFM,43-44)

As these examples suggest, the double self is a technique for coping
with the world's dishonesty without simply pretending that one is
above such deceitfulness. Society, in this view, is conceived of as a
charade into which we funnel all our dishonesty in order to keep pure
the soul's deepest longings. Thus, acceptance of society rather than
rejection of it is the ultimate path to self-knowledge and self-

fulfillment, provided that it is accompanied by an awareness of this

90
doubleness. This dichotomy is illustrated in filters Angels Fear to

Itaagl, as E. M. Forster delineates the contrast between staid and highly
nurtured English characters and the brutish but natural Italian Gino
Carella. Caroline Abbott comes to see a quality in Gino which her
English friends lack: "he doesn't try to keep up appearances as we do"
(WAFT,175). She is particularly impressed that he can say something
in the heat of passion and then reverse himself when calm without
finding it worthy of explanation: "Gino is not ashamed of
inconsistency. It is one of the many things I like him for" (WAFT‘,175).
This is closely akin to Keas' definition of Negative Capability as the
ability to harbor dissonance without feeling obliged to leap to a
resolution which trivializes the issue.

Graham Greene's Thg Man Within chronicles the consequences of
is protagonist's perception that he embodies the Thomas Browne
quotation which serves as the novel's epigraph: "There's another man
within me that's angry at me". Thg Man Within begins with Francis
Andrews, who is following in his father's foosteps as a smuggler, on
the run from the fellow smugglers whom he has betrayed in order to
escape from his father's legacy. As a fugitive he remains

"embarrassingly made up of two persons, the sentimental, bullying,

91

desiring child and another more stern critic" (MW,24). Although he
wonders what would happen if someone believed in him, "he did not
believe in himself. Always while one part of him spoke, another part
stood on one side and wondered 'Is this I who am speaking? Can I
really exist like this?’ " (MW,24). Even when he finds in Elizabeth
somebody who does believe in him, Andrews continues to be
tormented by the fear that his other self, in the form of his pursuers,

will catch up to him. Only after Elizabeth's death does he realize that:

His father had made him a betrayer and his father
had slain Elizabeth and his father was dead and out
of reach. But was he? His father's was not a
roaming spirit. It had housed iself in the son he
had created. I am my father, he thought, and I have
killed her...His enemy was his father and lay within
himself. (MW,215)

After confessing to the killing, Andrews

felt happy and at peace, for his father was slain and
yet a self remained, a self which knew neither lust,
blasphemy nor cowardice, but only peace and
curiosity for the dark...His father's had been a
stubborn ghost, but it was laid at last, and he need
no longer be torn in two between that spirit and the
stern unresting critic which was wont to speak.
(MW ,220)

A comparable dynamic takes place in Tha Mysteries of Pitsburgh,

where the narrator only gradually becomes aware of how much his .

92

father's being a gangster has cast a shadow over his own life.

The literary use of the doppleganger is, then, a response of sors to
dishonesty, which is more effective, if less blunt, than are the outburss
of Blount and Dubois. Fyodor Dostoyevsky's second novel _T_h_g_D_9_r_1_b_l_e
explores the way that Mr. Golyadkin junior explodes the comfortable
but empty world which the original Mr. Golyadkin has established for
himself. To Mr. Golyadkin's great surprise, no one but he finds the
presence of his identical double in the same office the least bit
remarkable. Dostoyevsky is one of those writers who provides a model
for a number of other young writers. Sylvia Plath was working on a
master's thesis on Dostoyevsky's use of the double at the same time as
she was starting to make a name for herself as a poet. W
published when she was twenty-nine, abounds with images of doubles.
Alain-Fournier's reading of one of the same novels Plath studied, Ina
Brufisrs Karamazuv, "provided him, in part, with a paradigm for the
strategy of dividing the conflicting pars of a single ego among three
distinct characters"42. Alain-Fournier in turn introduced a young
American he was tutoring at the time to Dostoyevsky, and a few years
later that same. American would credit his first major poem, "The Love

Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to that introduction. Mishima took the

93

epigraph to W from W. In
Blindngss, one of the early entries in John Haye's diary reads: "Am
reading W by Dostoievsky. What a book! I do not
understand it yet. It is so weird and so big that it appals me. What an
amazing man he was, with his epileptic fis which were much the
same as visions really" (B363). A similar feeling of deep affinity for
Dostoyevsky is frequent amongst young writers, although it often is
difficult to articulate satisfactorily.

The central premise in 131212911121: that only Mr. Golyadkin can see
the significance of his double also operates in Frankenstein, where only
Victor Frankenstein sees his creation before the story's end. The fact
that the narrator of Wash never sees the husband whose
place he has usurped until the book's final page suggess a similar
dynamic. Ambrosio and Antonia also function as doubles in I_h_e;
Mauls, with the fact that they are siblings coming to light after the
sister's murder being one of the many parallels shared with Ferdinand
and the Duchess from Webster's The DuQess of Malfi. Similarly, the
brother and sister in Madgfladuws, Patrice and Isabelle-Marie, function

as twins, with her brains being the necessary complement for his

94

beauty. The doubleness accouns for the strange mixture of attraction
and repulsion which characterizes their relationship. Florabel and
Idabel are twins in cher Vuigss, Qtltgr Rmms, although they are so
unlike in every respect that Florabel notes: "We were born twins, like I
told you, but Mama says the Lord always sends something bad with the
good" (OVOR,23). After the initiation which Idabel participates in, Joel
comes to think of himself as "a second person, another Joel Knox about
whom he was interested in the moderate way one would be in a
childhood snapshot" (OVOR,114). Captain Penderton, in W
a Culuen Eye, has phantasies in which "he saw himself as a youth, a
twin almost of the soldier whom he hated" (RGE,121). Near the end of
WW9; Ariel begins conversing with a shadow who is
also named Ariel, and who is clearly a part of herself. Villier de l'Ile
Adam's unfinished novel Isis, published in 1862 when he was twenty-
three, breaks off at the point where the two main characters have been
fused into one, as if this were the extent of Villier de l'Ile Adam's
vision for the novel.

In Priug gt tltg Bimms, the delightfully offbeat first novel by

filmmaker and writer John Sayles, the notion of pride is explored with

95

great sensitivity. The midget Pogo Burns has spent his life trying to
learn to cope with his height and his father's belief that having a
midget son is "just another kick in the balls". He quis his job as a
private detective and plays shorstop for a barnstorming softball team,
in hopes that being a part of the macho world of athletics will earn him
the respect denied to him because of his height. But ironically, it is a
team which dresses in drag and masquerades as the famous woman's
softball team, the Brooklyn Bimbos. Throughout the novel he is being
stalked by an enormous black pimp who has sworn to kill him because
Pogo has injured his pride. Just when the pimp abandons his pursuit,
however, Pogo becomes aware of a more insidious problem -- that his
teammates don't respect him. He kills himself and is replaced on the
team by his closest companion, the ten-year-old son of another player
who is exactly the same size as Pogo.

The narrator of Radiguet's W has an affair with
Svea after she shows him a nude picture of her twin sister, which
"looked so much like her that I suspected she was making fun of me
and showing me her own picture" (DF,164). This scene illustrates that

doubles are used in many of these works to examine whether it is

96

fundamentally duplicitous to love more than one person. That issue is
handled directly, if rather heavy-handedly, in all three of Madame de
Stael's novellas, and it is also of primary importance in Zasttuzzi, Atala
augl Rang, Fanshawg, thrg Anggls Fear tu Trgagl, Duds; and M
Meaulnes, among others. In Incuguita, the issue is addressed through
the complicated scenario of disguises which means that none of the
characters realizes until the end that there is no actual conflict between
marrying for love and marrying for duty. In Evelina, Evelina's
brother's love can finally be sanctioned only after the plot has
unravelled to the extent that it is no longer incestuous or
improprietous. What is important in both stories is that the first love
cannot be approved until it is threatened by a second love whose object
turns out to be a double of the first. There is a fundamental
importance, then, attached to discovering and enunciating, as Tete
Blanche does, the reality that, "You can love many people at once"
(TB,56). This discovery helps explain why the sorrow which so many
characters expected would prove fatal, instead proved ephemeral.
Another prominent manifestation of this concern with the double

is the frequent occurrence of poes dying young because they are too

97

good for the world. These figures are, in a sense, the author's own
double, for they represent the incubus left behind to create a finished
work. The notion of the mad poet as an emblem of duality is as old as
Plato, who described the poet as being "never able to compose until he
has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in
him"43. The influence of Chatterton was pervasive during the
Romantic period, which saw the first great flourish of young writers.
What was more important to the legacy than the intrinsic worth of
Chatterton's poetry was the implied message that his poetic genius
made him unfit for the world. Shelley describes Chatterton, still in
"solemn agony" in "Adonais", his elegy to John Keas. Coleridge wrote
a monody about Chatterton when he was seventeen, and was married
in St. Mary Redcliffe, the church where Chatterton had claimed to have
discovered the medieval ballads which he had actually written himself.
Wordsworth acknowledged Chatterton's "sleepless soul" in

‘ "Resolution and Independence", a poem whose meter and subject are
borrowed from Chatterton's 'Ballad of Charitie'. Keas described him
as the "marvelous boy" and inscribed "Endymion" "to the memory of
Thomas Chatterton"44. Keas in turn passed this tradition on to a later

generations of writers; Alain-Fournier, for instance, wrote of La Crangl

98

Meaulngs that "my book is the story of Keas"45.
Young Werther also conceives of himself as a prototypical young
poet unable to believe that anyone can survive what he is going

through:

Sometimes I tell myself my fate is unique.
Consider all other men fortunate, I tell myself; no
one has ever suffered like you. Then I read a poet
of ancient times, and it is as though I were looking
deep into my own heart. I have to suffer much.
Oh, has any human heart before me ever been so
wretched? (YW,95)

Similarly, Fanshawe, after finishing his singular adventure, leaves "a
world for which he is unfit" because no one "could prevail upon him
to lay aside the habis, mental and physical, by which he was bringing
himself to the grave" (Fa,113). Gulchenrouz, who is Nouronihar's

betrothed in Vathek is an ethereal and effeminate young man who,

 

could write in various characters with precision,
and paint upon vellem the most elegant arabesques
that fancy could devise. His sweet voice
accompanied the lute in the most enchanting
manner, and when he sang the loves of Megnoun
and Leilah, or some unfortunate lovers of ancient
days, tears insensibly overflowed the tears of his
auditors. The verses he composed (for, like
Megnoun, he too was a poet,) inspired that
unresting languor so frequently fatal to the human
heart. The Women all doted upon him and, though
he had passed his thirteenth year, they still detained
him in the harem (V,190)

99

Gulchenrouz is the other self of Nouronihar, the eternal innocent
whom she must eventually desert because of her curiosity. When they
are isolated by the lake in a symbolic world of enduring innocence and
told that they have died, Nouronihar is continually "ruminating on
the grandeur of which death had deprived her" (V ,205), whereas
Gulchenrouz is entirely content. Before long, Nouronihar must leave
him behind to search for a world more in tune with her longings.

This figure of a dying young poet who leaves a world for which he
is unfit makes far more shadowy appearances in other works. The
father Isabelle-Marie has lost in W is "that gallant dreamer
and poet who used to speak of his land as though of a virgin
consecrated to God" (MS,24), who had married her superficial mother
only "because Louise knew how to pounce on vulnerable spiris, taken
by her charms" (MS,24). In Mam both Pierre and Tete
Blanche's mother die of tuberculosis, which has long been associated
with poes, and especially with Keas. Susan Sontag has aptly

summarized the metaphorical linking of tuberculosis with the dying

young poet in Illness As Metauhur, where she writes:

The myth of TB constitutes the next-to-last episode
in the long career of the ancient idea of melancholy
—- which was the artist's disease, according to the

100

theory of the four humours. The melancholy
character -or the tubercular - was a superior one:
sensitive, creative, a being apart. Keas and Shelley
may have suffered atrociously from the disease.
But Shelley consoled Keas that 'this consumption
is a disease particularly fond of people who write
such good verses as you have done...'. So well
established was the cliche which connected TB and
creativity that at the end of the century one critic
suggested that it was the progressive disappearance
of TB which accounted for the current decline of

literature and the arts.46

The eighteen-year-old delinquent dies repeating, "I don't want to live"
(TB,24) and Tete Blanche writes, "He let himself die, and nobody can
tell why. Does this happen often, to boys who are not yet twenty years
old?" (TB,25). The narrator of Cunfessiuns of a Mask is mistakenly
diagnosed as tubercular, and one of his revelations is prompted by the
death of a classmate from tuberculosis. Later, a friend's prediction that
the narrator will die before he is twenty has "a strangely sweet and
romantic attraction" (V32).

Evelina's brother is introduced as a melancholy poet afflicted by
"internal wretchedness" (E,177) who addresses, "Life, thou lingering
dream of grief, of pain" (E,177). In his discussion with Ben Silton in
Ths Man 9f Fgling, Harley points out that the prudent "urge the

danger of unfitness for the world" (MF,56) against the poetical

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inclination. Theodore in Adelaide and Theouore returns to his wife as
"a shadowy figure" (AT,101) whom Adelaide does not even recognize.

The first book which the monster reads in W is Thg Sorruws

uf Young Wermgr and he finds it,

a never-ending source of speculation and
astonishment. The gentle and domestic manners it
described, combined with lofty sentimens and
feelings, which had for their object something out
of self, accorded well with my experience among
my protectors and with the wans which were
forever alive in my own bosom. But I thought
Werter himself a more divine being than I had
ever beheld or imagined; his character contained
no pretension, but it sank deep. The disquisitions
upon death and suicide were calculated to fill me
with wonder. I did not pretend to enter into the
meris of the case, yet I inclined towards the
opinions of the hero, whose extinction 1 wept,
without precisely understanding it. (Fr,122-3)

In Ths Monk, there is an extensive (and seemingly irrelevant)
discussion of a poem by the boy Theodore entitled "Love and Age". It
is Matilda, however, in her initial incarnation as the melancholic
Rosario who plays the part of the young poet. Upon reading the
disquieting poem inscribed on the wall of the hermitage, Rosario lay
down "In a melancholy posture. His head was supported upon his

arm, and He seemed lost in meditation" (M30). He finally exclaims

1 02
aloud "Happy were I, could I think like Thee! Could I look like Thee

with disgust upon Mankind, could bury myself for ever in some
impenetrable solitude, and forget that the world holds Beings
deserving to be loved!" (M,51).

A second type of embryonic reflection of the author is presented in
the children -- some of them stillborn - who bear their parents'
images. The stillborn children, and Agnes's who dies shortly after
birth and whose corpse Agnes clings to long after it has begun to decay,
stand in relation to the artist in much the same way as does the
narrator's wife in Poe's story "The Oval Portrait". In Raflgglous in a
Coldsn Eyg, after the death of her infant daughter, Alison Langdon
remained "obsessed by the sharp, morbid image of the little body in the
grave" (RGE,93). The death of Dodo's child at a young age crystallizes
the differences in sensibilities between Dodo and Chesterford, and EM.
Forster also uses mourning habis to epitomize the characters in
'Where Angels Fear to Tread. Anne Tyler's second novel The Tin—Can
113a is entirely devoted to describing the different ways in which the
members of a family cope with the death of a child. Susan Hill's first

novel, The Enclosure published when she was nineteen, concerns a

 

middle-aged novelist whose marriage unravels while she is pregnant

103

with a child which is eventually stillborn. The miscarriage of the child
Liza has conceived out of wedlock in Liza of Labeth is shortly
followed by Liza‘s own death. Lilia in W

dies giving birth to the son who has already supplanted her in her
husband's affections. All of these instances suggest the image of the
babe born in innocence who must be left behind and in a sense
consumed for the "full-grown poet" (in Whitman's phrase) to emerge.
The birth of healthy children necessitates a similar process of
recognition as well as the resumption of Adam's Edenic task of naming
a new creation.

The emphasis on recognition in ngil in thg Flash highlighs the
young mind's preoccupation with finding a copy of iself, which is
connected to Huxley's definition that "Literature...makes copies of
things which are not in the soul". The novel's narrator writes that
"love is egoism at is height" (DF,217) and called love simply "the
egoism of two" (DF,93). Thus, he comes to feel that, "By turning
Marthe in whatever direction happened to suit me I was gradually
remaking her in my own image...That she should begin to resemble

me, to become my creation, both delighted and angered me" (DF,145).

104

The discovery that strangers were taking him and Marthe for brother
and sister increases the narrator's sense that love iself is but a search

for resemblance and recognition:

No doubt we are all like Narcissus, loving and
hating our own reflection, but indifferent to all
others. It is this instinct for resemblance that leads
us through life; it is this that makes us pause to
admire a certain landscape, a certain woman, a
particular poem. We can admire others without
feeling this shock. The instinct for resemblance is
the only rule of contact that is not artificial. But in
society only the grosser spiris appear not to
contravene the rules of morality, always remaining
loyal to the same type. Some men, for example, go
blindly for 'blondes', unaware that the deepest
resemblances are often the most secret. (DF,146)

Love, then, is a quest to recapture the dimension first noticed when the
characters became self-conscious about their own bodies and desirous
of others. This seems particularly closely linked to the narrator of
Confessions of a Mask's instinctive realization on seeing Omi that he
contains "the pattern of that forgotten perfection which the rest of us
have lost in some far distant past" (CM,63). Love is either identical
with the quest to regain this past or too closely tied to it for any
differentiation to be possible.

The narrator of Evil in thg Fles '3 sense of the importance of

resemblance revives with the birth of his son. When his brothers

105

announce that young Grangier has become an uncle, he writes, "It is
the object that we see before us every day which, when it is moved
from is usual place, we find most difficult to recognize. I did not at
first recognize young Grangier's nephew as Marthe's child - my child"
(DF,218). Marthe gives the boy the narrator's name (whatever that may
be), and writes that "He is like you", which causes the narrator to say
caustically that, "only love can show the woman the resemblance she
is searching for" (DF,223). Just as with the death of Meaulnes' wife in
W; the announcement of Marthe's death is made by a
schoolboy, and it too is greeted by a delayed recognition on the
narrator's part. The novel ends with the first appearance of the long-
suffering husband, Jacques, who is proudly announcing that his wife
died calling their son's name, not realizing that the name is also that of
the baby's real father. In spite of the narrator's cynicism, then, there is
ultimately something affirmative in this use of the double, as there is
in both Paullug and QfitauglMgauans, each of which end with a
father vowing to take better care of their infant than they have of their
wife. Margaret Drabble's Ilhg Millstung ends somewhat differently,

with the narrator deciding to conceal from the father of her daughter

106

that he is the father.

The character of Gino in Where Angels Fear to Tread seems almost
to have been written to illustrate the commens of Radiguet's narrator.
Shortly after his marriage to Lilia, Gino tells a group of his friends that
"It pleases me very much. If you remember, I had always desired a
blonde" (WAFT,50). Soon, however, Lilia's pregnancy reveals in Gino

a much deeper desire:

he wanted a son. He could talk and think of
nothing else. His one desire was to become the
father of a man like himself, and it held him with a
grip he only partially understood, for it was the first
great passion of his life. Falling in love was a mere
physical triviality, like warm sun or cool water,
beside this divine hope of immortality: "I
continue". (WAFT,67)

Later, when Gino is about to be tempted with an offer to give up the
baby boy for a sum of money which he needs, he is "filled with the
desire that his son should be like him, and should have sons like him,
to people the earth...the strongest desire that can come to a man - if it
comes to him at all -- stronger even than love or the desire for personal
immortality" (WAFT,137). Holding up the naked child, Gino says
"Who would have believed his mother was blonde? For he is brown

all over - brown every inch of him...And he is mine; mine for

107

ever...He cannot help it; he is made out of me; I am his father"
(WAFI',139). Caroline Abbott, the demure young Englishwoman who

witnesses this scene seems suddenly to sense that

The man was majestic; he was a part of Nature; in
no ordinary love scene could he be so great. For a
wonderful physical tie binds the parens to the
children; and - by some sad, strange irony - it does
not bind us children to our parens. For if it did, if
we could answer their love not with gratitude but
with equal love, life would lose much of is pathos
and much of is squalor, and we might be
wonderfully happy. (WAFI‘,139)

The sentimens of Radiguet's narrator are also echoed in char;

W and by the narrator of Mishima's Cmfessignshf

a Mask, who observes:

In the wood block prins of the Genroku period one
often finds the features of a pair of lovers to be
surprisingly similar, with little to distinguish the
man from the woman. The universal idea of
beauty in Greek sculpture likewise approaches a
close resemblance between the male and female.
Might this not be one of the secres of love? Might
it not be that through the innermost recesses of
love there courses an unattainable longing in
which both the man and the woman desire to
become the exact image of the other?" (CM,83)

In W Randolph tells Joel:

They can romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is
their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to
destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then
could we look for reassurance of our identities? I
tell you, my dear, Narcissus was no egotist... he was

108

merely another of us who, in our unshatterable
isolation, recognized, on seeing his reflection, the
one beautiful comrade, the only inseparable love...
poor Narcissus, possibly the only human who was
ever honest on this point... happiness in love is not
the absolute focusing of all emotion in another: one
has always to love a good many things which the
beloved must come only to symbolize; the true
beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilacs
opening, ship lighs, school bells, a landscape,
remembered conversations, friends, a child's
Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn
and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and
water of existence, memory... When one is your age
most subtleties go unobserved; even so, I imagine
you think it incredible, looking at me as I am now,
that I should've had ever the innocence to feel such
love" (OVOR,78-79)

This revelation is not unique to these characters. In W
Qty, Dr. Dubois' marital problems are intensified when he realizes that
his wife Madeleine "was neither a mirror reflecting me nor an echo of
my voice; she was the quarry I had always to pursue" (DOC,61). After
Neil Klugrnan and Brenda Patimkin in Cuuulzye, Culumuus have, in
Neil's words, "whipped our strangeness and newness into a froth that
resembled love," Brenda tells Neil, "You look like me. Except bigger"
(GC,50). Neil interpres this as meaning "that I was somehow
beginning to look the way she wanted me to. Like herself" (GC,50).

Of course the very lack of a name for the narrator of Qvil in tug

109

Flashsuggess his shirking of the Adamic task and his need for an
identity. This is also true in Confgssions of a Mgk, where the
narrator's namelessness is just another facet of his shrinking from his
identity. Similarly, the namelessness of the narrator of liap_ie_t_$_ai_cl
represens the way she subsumes her identity to Harriet's. Private
Williams, in W has no first name, which is
indicative of his simple innocence. WM brings together
this emphasis on naming with the double as one's mirror image. Early
in the novel, the narrator pus on one of her sister's dresses, looks in
the mirror and direcs an elliptical comment to her reflection, in which
she uses the name Lavinia. Neither her name nor her sister's is ever
mentioned again, and we are left to speculate on whose name it is.

This suggestive habit she has of addressing commens to her mirror is
shared by Sybylla Melvyn of My Brilliant Career and others.

These two main ways in which young noveliss make use of
doubles to depict their own complex and even duplicitous relationship
to the society they are depicting thus serve as images of what the
author leaves behind to create the novel. The experience they have,

like Evelina, "purchased so dearly" has enabled them to become

110

successful novelists, but they leave behind these signposs to
commemorate what they have overcome. This allows us to remark
once again that the process by which young writers come to create
important works of fiction exhibis a strikingly similar pattern,
regardless of nationality or period. This will often be in some degree
indebted to the discovery of another young writer as we have seen, and
a feeling like the one Baudelaire expressed on reading Poe for the first
time at age twenty-five, that these were the stories he had been trying
to write. But indebtedness iself is only incidental to the process by
which a writer creates and so an Alain-Fournier's discovery of Keas
and Dostoyevsky, or a Mann's discovery of Goethe, or a Disraeli's of
Byron facilitate their writing largely by giving the message that the
young writer can succeed by looking inward and taking as his or her
subject the complex process ensuing from the loss of innocence.

In conclusion, then, we have found from this selective study of a
cross-section of novels two poins which have received very little
attention. First, we have noted that there is a very impressive body of
work which has been done by authors writing before their twenty-fifth

birthdays. In spite of some very emphatic denials of the possibility of

111

such achievement by writers with impressive credentials, novelists
who publish that early in many cases are very confident of their craft
and very successful. Our second major point has been that the novels
produced at such a young age almost always take as their theme the
loss of innocence and the ensuing process of arriving at a way of
moving on. As we have seen this process encompasses temptation,
disillusionment, a morbid desire for solitude, the discovery that even
sorrow will not last and finally a recognition of an internal duplicity
out of which art can spring. This acknowledgment makes it possible
for the novelist to turn disadvantage into advantage by building upon
this vision of the divided self a world view which is as profoundly true
for the old as for the young.

This can be but a tentative conclusion, however, because there is
much more work needed on this neglected topic. The history of
literature has always been greatly influenced by parodies, and the most
effective and influential spoofs of this genre have also been done by
young writers. I've mentioned Theodore Hook's mm
which may well be the first such work, but P. G. Wodehouse's
schoolboy novels will be seen to have had a much more enduring

influence. Just as Wodehouse inaugurated a major strain in the

112

twentieth-century novel for which he has received far too little credit,
so too he suggested the possibility of an alternative pattern for the
young novelist to follow. Wodehouse's models and approach are
amply indicated in these commens about a work called M
Eversley's Friendship, although he is in fact mistaken about the book's

plot:

Gerald intends to commit suicide, but finally
Nature provides him with a galloping
consumption and with his death the story ends, as
all school stories should, happily... Sudden death is
always good but to make your hero die on a
sunset evening, in a bathchair, placed under a big
cedar tree, looking o'er the shining waters of the
lake, and quoting extracs from obscure Greek poes
is, I aver, a mistake... No, the worst thing that ought
to happen is the loss of the form-prize or his being
run on against the M.C.C. There should be a rule
that no one under the age of twenty—one be
permitted to die, unless he can get the whole thing
finished in a space of time not exceeding two

minutes.47

It will accordingly be of benefit to look at such works as Jane
Austen's juvenilia, F. Anstey's ZlggJLetsa, P. G. Wodehouse's

schoolboynovels, Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall Anthony Powell's

 

Afternoon Men Malcolm Bradbury's Eating People Is Wrong, V. S.

 

Naipaul's Ilhe Mystic Massgur, David Lodge's Ciuger. X'uu'tg Barmy

113

and Martin Amis's W5, as works in which the young
novelist develops his or her own craft by parodying the conventions of
the genre which has been defined herein. Much more work, too, is
needed on the many first-rate novels produced by young women
noveliss to see to what extent they modify this tradition. Such works
as Olive Schreiner's WW Rosamond
Lehmann's W Elizabeth Jane Howard's Mammal
Misit Carson McCullers's The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, Margaret
Drabble's W and W Blais' Mad
Shades: and Mamba and Anne Tyler's W
represent a body of oustanding work which is long overdue
recognition as amongst the best literature of the past century by man or
woman, young or old. While some of these works have fit well into
the tradition I have been defining, much of what is most oustanding
about many of these novels falls well ouside the boundaries of this
study. If their failure to attract the recognition they deserve is in part
due to the assumption that young writers are not capable.of
masterpieces, then it is to be hoped that this paper will help to rectify

such wrongs. While the end result of such further study may

114

necessitate some modification of a few of this paper's descriptions of
the characteristic work of the young novelist, it can only continue to
deepen the sense that the novels of the young are an impressive body

of literature and have been unfairly maligned and neglected.

115

We:

1. Sade, Marquis de "Reflections on the Novel" (1800), in Ill: 129 Days
of Sodom and Other Writings (New York: Grove Press, 1967), pg. 98

2. Maugham's introduction to W (London: Wm.
Heinemann, 1939)

3. Surguy, Phil "Initiation Writes", W April1978, pp. 8-9
4. James, Henry Hawthurng (New York: Collier, 1966), pg. 32

5. In Huxley's introduction to Devil in the F1283.) (New York: Bantam,
1969), pg. v

6. Quoted in Usborne, Richard Wudghousa at Wurk tu tug Eng
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), pg. 67

7. Cheever, John The Stories of lohn Cheever
(New York: Ballantyne, 1980), pg. ix

8. Introduction to Disraeli Viflan Crey (London: Cassell, 1968), pg. xii

9. An interview with J. D. Salinger, Ngty Yutk flfimgs, Nov. 3, 1974

10. Eritish Nuvelists Sings flurlgl flat ll, past 2 (ngtiunaty_of_1_._itgtaty
Biggtaphy. vol. 14) (Detroit: Gale Research, 1983), pg. 394

11. Amau'gan Nuvalists Sings flurld flat ll W
Biugtaphy, vol. Q) (Detroit: Gale Research, 1980), pg. 338

12. antemporat'y Nuvslists (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982),
pg. 360

13. Porter, Laurel and Laurence M., ed. Aging in Litgraturs ('I'roy, Mi.;
International Book Publishers, 1984), pg. 150

116

14. In his afterword to Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes (New
York: Signet Classic, 1971 ), pg. 208

15. Cited in Butt, John and Carnall, Geoffrey Thg Mid-Eighteenth

Century (volume viii of Wm.

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pg. 208

16. Johnson, Samuel W (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1905), II. 219

17. Naipaul, V.S. "Conrad's Darkness" in W
(New York: Vintage, 1981), pg. 244

18. Updike, John W (Greenwich: Fawcett, 1975), pg. 276

19. Maugham's introduction to Lisa pf lampgth (London: Wm.
Heinemann, 1939), pg. xviii

20. Cited in Bradbury, Malcolm and McFarlane, ed. Modernism
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), pg. 330

21. Fowles' afterword to Le Crangl Meaulngs

22. All citations from these primary texs will be noted in the text. A
list of abbreviations used and editions cited appears in the bibliography.

23. Cited by Jean Cocteau in his preface to Radiguet's CounLiQrgal
(New York: Grove Press, 1968)

24. Christiansen, Rupert W (London: Cardinal, 1988),
pg. 100

25. Milton, John W53 (New York:

Macmillan, 1957), p. 728

26. Poe, Edgar Allan Cumpletg Talfi and ngms (New York:

Vintage,1975), pg. 125

117

27. Godwin, William Thg Enguitgr (New York: August M. Kelly, 1965),
pg. 131

28. Godwin, William Calebjlllllatns (London: Four Square, 1966),
pg. 20

29. Lodge, David Writs m (London: Secker 8: Warburg, 1986), pg. 109
30. Christiansen, op. cit., pg. 56

31. Zola, Emile Watts Trans. George D. Cox (New York:
Howard Fertig, 1979), pg. 19

32. Christiansen, pp._g_t_, pg. 56

33. Described by David Magarshack on page 2 of his introduction to
Gogol's Talas pf QM angl Eyil (Garden City: Doubleday, 1957)

34. Barnes, Djuna Nightwmgl (New York: New Directions, 1961),
pp. 21-2

35. Sade, Marquis de up_git_., pg. 109

36. An Extraordinag; Woman: Selscted Writings of Cerminie de Stael

translated and edited by Vivian Folkenflik (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1987), pg. 14

37. Hook, Theodore Chuige Humuruus flurks at ThQuurg ngk
(London: John Camden Hotter, 1872 or 1873??), pg. 14

38. Cited in Bate, Walter Jackson Criu'gs' ut: Tha Majut jl'gxts (New
York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1952), pg. 349

39. In Stafford, William Twenti 11 Am ri n Wri 'n (New
York: Odyssey, 1965), pp. 193-4

40. Magbeth, I,v,66

118

41. In Behrendt's notes to the Oxford edition of W
Irvme, pg. 203

42. Gurney, Stephen ABM (Boston: Twayne, 1987), pg. 44
43. Christiansen, Mt, pg. 53

44. lag, pp. 56-57

45. Gurney, 9293.: pg. 24

46. Sontag, Susan W323): (New York: Vintage, 1979), pp.
31-2

47. Usborne, m pg. 68

119

Selected Bibliography of Novels written when author was 25 or younger

Tit a

Pub]. Authur

Young Man with Good References 1935 Loukis Acritas

The Railway

The Parson's Daughter
Le Grand Meaulnes
Somebody in Boots

1 The Rachel Papers
Dead Babies

Brother Lucifer

The Child of Pleasure
Vice Versa

The London Venture
Sanin

The Mulatto

Harriet Said

I Live

The Monstrous Gods
Hopeless Generations
Long Lankin
Nightspawn

The Floating Opera
The Two Sisters

The Seekers
Catherine Foster
Charlotte's Row
Vathek

The Fourth of June
Dodo

The Expert

Cruel Town

The Poor Christ of Bomba
Mission to Kala

King Lazarus

Mad Shadows

1884
1885
1913
1935
1973
1975
1932
1889
1882
1920

1907*

1881
it
1958
1960
1880
1970
1971
1956
1925
1926
1929
1931

1786*

1962
1893
1895
1954
1956
1957
1958
1959

Juhani Aho

Alain-Fournier
Nelson Algren
Martin Amis

Stefan Andres

G. D'Annunzio
F. Anstey
Michael Arlen
M.P. Arsybashev
Aluizio Azevedo
Beryl Bainbridge
Layla Balabakki

Herman Bang
John Banville

John Barth
H. E. Bates

William Beckford
David Benedictus
E. F. Benson
Waclaw Berent
Mongo Beti

Marie-Claire Blais

1909
1861

1886
1909
1949

1906
1863
1856
1895
1878
1857
1934
1936

1857
1944

1930
1905

1759
1938
1866
1873
1932

1939

Year uf Birth Nat.

Gr.
Fi.

Fr.
Am.
Br.

Ge.
It.
Br.
Br.
Ru.
Bz.
Br.
Le.

Da.
Br.

Am.
Br.

Br.
Br.
Br.
Po.
Af.

Ca.

Tete Blanche
Les fins dernieres

120

1960
1952

Mon Village a l'heure allemande 1945

This Way for the Gas, Ladies &

Through the Wheat
Eating People Is Wrong
Three Times Dead
For Want of a Nail
Poverty
Hackenfeller's Ape
Gabriel Denver
Falkland

Pelham

The Disowned
Devereux

Evelina

A Man Indeed

The Eagle's Shadow
The Bastard
Strange Fugitive

The Path of the Nest of Strangers

A Happy Death

The Stranger

Other Voices, Other Rooms
Black Blood

Shadow Dance

A Child of our Time

The Guitar

The Fever Pitch

Comrade Jacob ,

The Family of Pascual Duarte
The Mysteries of Pitsburgh
Roux the Bandit

Atala and Rene

Do You Call This A Man?
The Shooting Party
Des-Days

Incognita

1948
1923
1959
1860
1965
1884
1953
1873
1827
1828
1828
1829
1778
1928
1904
1929
1928

1942‘

1948
1923
1966
1957
1957
1959
1961
1942
1988
1925

1801‘

1863
1884
1952
1692

Pierre de Boisdeffre 1926

Jean-Louis Bony
Tadeusz Borowski
Thomas Boyd
Malcolm Bradbury
Mary Braddon
Melvyn Bragg
Sandor Brody
Brigid Brophy
Oliver Brown
Bulwer-Lytton

Fanny Burney

Si Burupha
James B. Cabell
Erskine Caldwell
Morley Callaghan
Italo Calvino
Albert Camus

Truman Capote
J.M.F. de Castro
Angela Carter
Michel del Castillo

David Caute

Camilo Jose Cela
Michael Chabon
Andre Chamson
Chateaubriand
Ilia Chavchavadze
Anton Chekhov
Hugo Claus
William Congreve

1919
1922
1898
1932
1835
1939
1863
1929
1855
1803

1752
1904
1879
1903
1903

1913

1924
1898
1940
1933

T936

T916
1965
1900
1768
1837
1860
1929
1670

Fr.
Fr.
Po.
Am .
Br.
Br.
Br.
Hu.
Br.
Br.
Br.

Br.

Am.
Am.

It.
Fr.

Am.
Po.
Br.
Fr.

Br.

Am.
Fr.
Fr.
Ru.
Ru.

Br.

Confusion 1923
Michael Scarlett 1925
Cock Pit 1926
The Son of Perdition 1929
Maggie 1893
The Red Badge of Courage 1895
The Snake 1945
Burnt Child 1948
Wedding Pains 1949
Emelina 1887
New Face in the Mirror 1959
Envy the Frightened 1960
Dust 1963
Murder Stalks the Wately Family 1934
The Pickwick Papers 1837
Oliver Twist 1838
Mariana 1940
The Black Curtain 1912‘
One Man's Initiation.1917 1920
Three Soldiers 1921
The Life of Alberto Pasini 1870
Poor Folk 1846
The Double 1846
A Summer Bird-Cage 1963
The Garrick Year 1964
The Millstone 1965
La dame aux Camelias 1848
Pied Piper of Lovers 1935
The Black Book 1938
Rome Haul 1929
Less than Zero 1985
The Rules of Attraction 1987
Blind Race 1927
Doctor Rip 1931
Ariadne 1935
The Nineteen 1927
When Life's Twilight Comes 1902
Young Entry 1928
Taking Chances 1929

121

James Cozzens 1903
Stephen Crane 1871
Stig Dagerman 1923
Ruben Dario 1867
Yael Dayan 1939
August Derleth 1909
Charles Dickens 1812
Monica Dickens 1915
Alfred Doan 1878
John Dos Passos 1896
Carlo Dossi 1848
Fyodor Dostoyevsky 1821
Margaret Drabble 1939
Dumas fils 1824
Lawrence Durrell 1912
Walter D. Edmonds 1903

Bret Easton Ellis 1964

Francisco Espinola 1901
Salvador Espriu 1913

Alexander Fadeyev 1901
Johan Falkberget 1879
M. J. Farrell 1904

Am.

Am.

Sw.

Am.
Br.

Br.
Am.

It.
Ru.

Br.
Fr.
Br.

Am.
Am.

Ur.
Ru.

No.
Br.

122

Two Valleys

Strange Yesterday
Conceived in Liberty
Dawn O'Hara

Lief the Lucky

This Side of Paradise

The Beautiful and Damned
The Shifting of the Fire
Where Angels Fear to Tread
My Brilliant Career

Jurg Reinhart

Antwortes der stille
Summer in Williamsburg
Journal of a Vagabond

Our Fellow Men
Mademoiselle de Maupin
The Notebook of Andre Walter
La Tentative Amoureusse
Urien's Voyage
Marshlands

Workers of the Dawn

An Idealist

The Descendent

Phases of an Inferior Planet
The Reluctant Dictator
Henry Sows the Wind
Along the Arno

The Sorrows of Young Werther
The Young Assassins

Duel in Paradise

Fiestas

Copies

Blindness

Living

Avarice House

The Man Within

The Ship Sails On

The Collegians

1933
1934
1937
1911
1929
1920
1922
1892
1905
1901
1934
1937
1934
1927
1932
1835
1891
1893
1893
1895
1880
1878
1897
1898
1952
1954
1956
1774
1954
1955
1958
1900
1926
1929
1926
1929
1925
1828

Howard Fast

Edna Ferber
Leck Fischer
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Ford Madox Ford
E. M. Forster
Miles Franklin
Max Frisch

Daniel Fuchs
Hayashi Fumiko
Pier Gambini
Theophile Gautier
Andre Gide

George Gissing
Karl Gjellerup
Ellen Glasgow

Brian Glanville

Goethe
Juan Goytisolo

Jacinto Grau
Henry Green

Julien Green
Graham Greene
Nordahl Grieg
Gerald Griffin

1914

1885
1904
1896

1873
1879
1879
1911

1909
1904
1910
1811
1869

1857
1857
1873

1931

1749
1937

1877
1905

1904
1902
1803

Am.

Am.
Da.
Am.

Br.

93’?

Am.
Ja.
It.

Fr.
Fr.

Br.
Da.
Am.

Br.

Sp.
Br.

Fr.
Br.
No.
Br.

The Mercury

Guest the OneoEyed
Dust

The Midnight Bell
The Mysterious One
Bjorger

Surrender

Fasching

Bahnwater Thiel

The Cannibal

The Beetle Leg
Fanshawe

Man and Animal

The Enclosure

Do Me a Favour
Gentlemen and Ladies
Mr. Nicholas

The Eighth Day of the Week
The Ikon-Maker

The Man of Sorrows
The Closed Door

The Beautiful Visit
Hans of Iceland
Bug-Jargal

The Field of Life

The Kordrin Banner Plains
The Sea of Earth

The Sun in the Morning
Sally Cray

Earth and Stone

The Flame

Growing Up

A Simple Story
Setting Free the Bears
All the Conspirators
The Trap

The Pot Boils

The Happy Highways
This Bed Thy Centre

123

1970 Jose M. Guelbenzu 1944

1914 Gunnar Gunnarson 1889

1907 M. Hakucho 1879

1929 Patrick Hamilton 1904

1877 Knut Hamsun 1859

1878

1935 M.A. Hansen 1909

1887 Gerhart Hauptmann 1862

1888

1949 John Hawkes 1925

1951

1828 Nath. Hawthorne 1804

1924 Sadiq Hidayat 1902

1961 Susan Hill 1942

1963

1968

1952 Thomas Hinde 1926

1957 Malek Hlasko 1931

1976 Desmond Hogan 1950

1808 Theodore Hook 1789

1926 Egon Hostavsky 1908

1950 Elizabeth J. Howard 1923

1823 Victor Hugo 1802

1826

1935 Hsaio Hung 1911

1939* T. Hung-Liang 1912

1936

1961 Jim Hunter 1939

1963

1963

1965

1895 Higuchi Ichiyo 1872
* Elizabeth Inchbald 1764

1968 John Irving 1942

1928 C. lsherwood 1904

1955 Dan Jacobson 1929

1919 Storm Jameson 1894

1920

1935 Pamela H. Johnson 1912

Ic.

Ja.
Br.
No.

Da.

Br.
Am.
Br.
Br.
Po.
Br.
Br.

Br.
Fr.

Ch.
Ch.

Br.

Ja.
Br.

Br.
SA
Br.

Br.

Blessed Among Women
Here Today

The Monument
Speculations about Jakob
Breaking Through

The Storm of Steel
Flowers of Hell

The Way You Write
The Scandalizer

Serpent and Lily

A Different Drummer
Aage and Else

To the Dark Tower
Never Again

The Light that failed
Croatian Rhapsody

The Night-Duty Policeman

Nothing(Nada)
Moral Tales
People

Iron and People

In the Castle of My Skin
Dust Over the City
Jill

A Girl in Winter
Waiting for a Ship
Maldoror

The White Peacock

The Great Weaver from Casmir

The Dark Child
The Radiance of the King

The Lost Language of Cranes

The Interrogation
Dusty Answer

Au pied de la pente douce

The Badgers
A Hero of Our Time
Princess Ligovskoya

124

1936
1937
1938
1959
1888
1920
1902
1912
1928
1906
1962
1903
1946
1948
1890
1918
1895
1944
1886
1912
1915
1953
1953
1946
1947
1931
1869
1911
1927
1953
1954
1986
1963
1927
1944
1925
1840

i

Uwe Johnson 1934
Johannes Jorgensen 1866
Ernst Junger 1895
N agal Kafu 1879
Frigyes Karinthy 1888
V. Kaverin 1902

Nicos Kazantzakis 1883
Wm. Melvin Kelley 1937
Harald Kidde 1878
Francis King 1923

Rudyard Kipling 1865
Miroslav Krzela 1893
Izumi Kyoka 1873
Carmen Laforet 1921
Jules LaForgue 1860
Par Lagerkvist 1891

George Lamming 1927
Andre Langevin 1927
Philip Laan 1922

Marcus Lauesen 1907
Lautreamont 1846
D. H. Lawrence 1885
Halldor Laxness 1902
Camara Laye 1928

David Leavitt 1961
J.M.G. LeClezio 1940
Ros. Lehmann 1901
Roger Lemelin 1919
Leonid Leonov I899
Mikhail Lermontov 1814

Ge.
Da.

Ja.
Hu.
Ru.
Gr.
Am.
Da.
Br.

Br.

Ja.

Fr.
Sw.

99

Da.
Fr.
Br.
1c.
Af.

Am.
Fr.
Br.

Ru.
Ru.

Reporter

Frankie and Johnnie
The Monk

Water

The Picture-Goers
Ginger, You're Barmy
Ultramarine

Euphues

Julian the Magician

The Man of Feeling

The Young Desire It

The Naked and the Dead
Le Cabochou

Le vent du diable

Into the Labyrinth

The Illusionist

The Red Room

Lunes en papier

The Temptation of the West
Buddenbrooks

The Wind Changes

Les aventures de "“

La voiture embourbee
Lantern Lecture
Withered Leaves

Liza of Lambeth

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
Reflections in a Golden Eye
Confessions of a Mask
Thirst for Love
Forbidden Colors

eleven others, none of them translated into English as far as I can tell

Imaginary Toys

Le Repit

The Golden Barge

The Time of Indifference
The Gun-Room

Enrico

125

1929 Meyer Levin 1905
1930
1796 Matthew Lewis 1775
1933 Ting Ling 1907
1960 David Lodge 1935
1962
1933 Malcolm Lowry 1909
1578 John Lyly 1554
1963 Gwendolyn MacEwan 1941
1771 Henry Mackenzie 1745
1937 Seaforth Mackenzie 1913
1948 Norman Mailer 1923
1964 Andre Major 1942
1968
1950 Francoise Mallet 1930
1951
1956
1921 Andre Malraux 1901
1926
1900 Thomas Mann 1875
1937 Olivia Manning 1911
1713 Marivaux 1688
1714
1980 Adam Mars-Jones 1954
1955 G. G. Marquez 1928
1897 Somerset Maugham 1874
1940 Carson McCullers 1917
1941
1949 Yukio Mishima 1925
1950
1951
1961 Julian Mitchell 1935
1940 Michel Mohrt 1914
* Michael Moorcock 1939
1929 Alberto Moravia 1907
1919 Charles Morgan 1896
1944 Marcel Moulodji 1922

Am.

Br.
Ch.
Br.

Br.
Br.
Ca.
Br.

Am.

Be.

Fr.

Ge.
Br.
Fr.

Br.
Co.
Br. -
Am.

Br.
Fr.
Br.
It.

Br.
Fr.

126

En souvenir de Barbarie 1945

The Dream 1922 Henry de Montherlant1896 Fr.
Young Torless 1906 Robert Musil 1880 Au.
Confessions..Child of the Century 1836 Alfred de Musset 1810 Fr.
Party to the Northwest 1952 Ana Maria Mutate 1926 Sp.
Mary 1926 Vladimir Nabokov 1899 Ru.
The Mystic Masseur 1957 V. S. Naipaul 1932 Tr.
The Suffrage of Elvira 1958

Pierce Penniless 1592 Thomas Nashe 1567 Br.
Summer's Last Will 1592

El habitante y su esperanza 1926 Pablo Neruda 1904 Chile
The Blue Hussar 1950 Roger Nimier 1925 Fr.
Fisherfolk 1907 Ludvig Nordstrom 1882 Sw.
With Shuddering Fall 1964 Joyce Carol Oates 1938 Am.
A Clown's Flowers 1935 Dazai Osanu 1909 Ja.
Held in Bondage 1863 Ouida 1839 Br.
Allegory of November 1908 Aldo Palazzeschi 1885 It.
Perela, the Man of Smoke 1911

Saint Quelqu'un 1946 Louis Paumels 1920 Fr.
Passage of Angels 1926 Odilon-Jean Perier 1901 Fr.
Mother and Child 1899 C.-L. Philippe 1874 Fr.
Turbott Wolfe 1925 William Plomer 1903 SA
The Fisher of Pearls 1895 Janis Poruks 1871 Yu.
Afternoon Men 1931 Anthony Powell 1905 Br.
The Wanderers 1974 Richard Price 1949 Am.
V 1963 Thomas Pynchon 1937 Am.
The Year Fifteen 1930 Rachel de Queiros 1910 82.
Berg 1964‘ Ann Quin 1936 Br.
Castles of Athlin & Dunbayne 1790 Ann Radcliffe 1764 Br.
Devil in the Flesh 1922 Raymond Radiguet 1903 Fr.
Count d'Orgel J 1923‘

Obbligato 1956 Frederic Raphael 1931 Br.
Game in Heaven w. Tussy Marx 1966 Piers Paul Read 1941 Br.
Le Casse 1964 Jacques Renaud 1943 Ca.
Beba 1894 Carlos Reyles 1868 Ur.
The Coming of Winter 1974 David A. Richards 1950 Ca.
Blood Ties 1976

The Acrobas 1954 Mordecai Richler 1931 Ca.

Son of a Smaller Hero
Am Leben him

Zwei Prager Geschicten
Death of a Nobody
Awakening (Les Malpartes)
Goodbye, Columbus
The Understudy

The View

The Soldier

Rashomon

Bonjour, Tristesse

A Certain Smile

In A Month, In A Year
Aimez vous Brahms?
The Pride of the Bimbos
Undine

The Story of An African Farm

In Vain

Frankenstein

Zastrozzi

St. Irvyne

Drifting Clouds

An Excusable Vengeance

127

All the Usual Hours of Sleeping 1969
Wailing Monkeys Embracing A Tree

Old Arcadia

The Breaking of Benko
My Friend Judas

Theirs Be the Guilt

The Park ,

In the Middle of the Jazz Age

A Woman Too Many
Pauline

This Sporting Life

To the Islands

Lie Down in Darkness
Tattoo (Shisei)

Ivan Savel

1955

1898 Rainer Maria Rilke 1875

1899

1911 Jules Romains 1885

1950 Jean-Baptiste Rossi 1931

1960 Philip Roth 1933

1896 Raymond Roussel 1877

1901

1933 Adolf Rudnicki 1912

1915 Akutagawa Ryunosoke 1892

1953 Francoise Sagan 1935

1956

1957

1958

1975 John Sayles 1950
‘ Olive Schreiner 1856

1883‘

1872 Henryk Senkiewicz 1846

1818 Mary Shelley 1797

1810 Percy Shelley 1792

1810

1887 Futabatei Shimei 1864

1967 Penelope Shuttle 1947

. 1973

1580 Philip Sidney 1554

1959 Andrew Sinclair 1935

1959

1903 Upton Sinclair 1878

1961 Philippe Sollers 1936

1931 Knud Sonderby 1909

1935

1784 Madame de Stael 1766

1960* David Storey 1933

1958 Randolph Stow 1935

1951 William Styron 1925

1910 Junichiro Tanazaki 1886

1876

Ivan Tavcar 1851

Fr.
Fr.
Am.
Fr.

Po.

Ja.
Fr.

Po.
Br.
Br.

Ja.
Br.

Br.

Am.
Fr.

Fr.
Br.

Am.

Ja.
Yu.

The Colour of Rain
Tiburon

Captives

The Decline of Skleroi
Childhood, Boyhood, Youth
The Neon Bible

The Savage Dane

A School in Private

If Morning Ever Comes
The Tin Can Tree

Mrs. Martha Oulie

The Happy Age

Poorhouse Fair

The Living Scourge
Letters of a Pretender

A Love Story

Judith

Evenings

Drogon

The City and the Dogs

1 carbonari della montagna
J'irai cracher sur vos tombes
Williwaw

The City and the Pillar
Dark Green, Bright Red
Footnote to Youth

Isis

Viaggio in Sardegna

Third Life of Grange Copeland

The Great Illusion

The Dark Pilgrimage

The Foxglove Saga

Path of Dalliance

Who are the Violes Now?

What's the Matter with Mary Jane? 1988 Daisy Waugh

Decline and Fall

Maiden Voyage

The Return of the Soldier
The Grandmothers

128

1962 Emma Tennant 1937
1935 Kylie Tennant 1912
1932 Angelos Terzakis 1907
1933
1852 130 Tolstoy 1828
John K. Toole 1937
1937 Philip Toynbee 1916
1941
1964 Anne Tyler 1941
1965
1907 Sigrid Undset 1882
1908
1958 John Updike 1932
1927 Milo Urban 1904
1849 Juan Valera 1824
1887 L. van Deyssel 1864
1978 Aritha van Herk 1954
1947 G. K. van het Revel 1923
1896 Arthur van Scherdel 1874
1962 Mario Vargas Llosa 1936
1862 Giovanni Verga 1840
1946 Boris Vian 1920
1946 Gore Vidal 1925
1948
1950
1933 Jose Garcia Villa 1914
1862 Villiers de l'ile Adam 1838
1931 Elio Vittorini 1908
1970 Alice Walker 1944
1928 Mika Waltari 1908
1897 Jakob Wassermann 1873
1960 Auberon Waugh 1939
1963
1965
1967
1928 Evelyn Waugh 1903
1943 Denton Welch 1917
1918 Rebecca West 1892
1927 Glenway Westcott 1901

Br.

Gr.

Ru.
Am.
Br.

Am.

Fr.
It.

Am.
Fi.

Br.

Br.
Br.
Br.
Br.
Am.

129

The Beautiful Years 1921 Henry Williamson 1895 Br.
End As A Man 1947 Calder Willingham 1922 Am.
The Pothunters 1902 P. G. Wodehouse 1881 Br.
A Prefect's Uncle 1903

Tales of St. Austin 1903

The Gold Bat 1904

The Head of Kay's 1905

The White Feather 1907

John Sherman and Dhoya 1891 Wm. Butler Yeas 1865 Br.
The Heartless 1917 Yi-Kwang-Su 1892 K0.
Claude's Confessions 1865 Emile Zola 1840 Fr.
A Dead Woman's Wish 1866 '

Claudia 1912 Arnold Zweig 1887 Ge.

* Book published two or more years after being finished (if no date given, the
book was published long after being written or posthumously)

Key to abbreviations: A=Australian Af=African Am=American Au=Austrian
Be=Belgian Br=British Bz=Brazilian Ca=Canadian Cat=Catalan Cb=Caribbean
Ch=Chinese Chile=Chilean Co=Colombian Cz=Czech Da=Danish Du=Dutch
Eg=Egyptian Fi=Finnish Fl=Flemish Fr=French Ge=German Gr=Greek
Hu=Hungarian Ic=1celandic Ir=Iranian Is=Israeli It=Italian Ja=Japanese
Ko=Korean Le=Lebanese Ni=Nigerian No=Norwegian Pe=Peruvian
Ph=Phillipine Po=Polish Ru=Russian SA=South African Sp=Spanish
Sw=Swedish Th=Thai Ur=Uruguayan Yu=Yugoslavian

AM

AT

BB

BNG

BT

BV

DA

DF

130

Wor i d

”Atala" in Chateaubriand, Francois Rene de Mam tr.
Walter J. Cobb (New York: Signet Classic, 1961)

Powell, Anthony AfiemmLMgn (London: Fontana, 1979)

"Adelaide and Theodore" in Anjmunljnatyflgutam

21%;th Writings uf Csmin nig Q: Stasl tr. and ed. by Vivian
Folkenflik (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987)

Blinunsss in Green, Henry blathlngI Dating, Blindusss
(London: Picador, 1979)

Durrell, Lawrence W (New York: EP Dutton, 1963)

Oates, Joyce Carol W (Greenwich, Conn.:
Fawcett Crest, 1971)

Sagan, Francoise MW tr. Irene Ash (New York:
Dell, 1955)

Howard, Elizabeth Jane W (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1977)

Radcliffe, Ann W (New

York: Arno Press, 1972)
Benson, E. F. W (London: Hogarth Press, 1986)

Lehmann, Rosamond Dusty Answer (Leipzig: The Albatross,
1937)

Radiguet, Raymond Devil in thg Flash tr. Kay Boyle (New
York: Bantam, 1969)

Dis

Doub

DS

Fa

Fr

HS

HT

INIEC

131

"Disillusionment" in Mann, Thomas W
tr. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936)

Langevin, Andre W tr. John Latrobe and
Robert Gottlieb (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974)

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor M in Ihrgg Shptt Nuvgls uf
Dostoygvsky tr. Constance Garnett (Garden City, NY: Anchor,

1960)

"Description of a Struggle" in Kafka, Franz The Cpmplete
5.19.1122 (New York: Schocken, 1976)

Burney, Fanny Evelina (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982)

 

Eausltayyg in Hawthorne, Nathaniel Huygls (New York:The
library of America, 1983)

Shelley, Mary Etanlgeustslu (New York: Signet Classic, 1965)

Roth, Philip W (New York: Random House,
1972)

McCullers, Carson W (New York:
Bantam, 1968)

Bainbridge, Beryl flattlgtjaitl (New York: Signet, 1974)

Lermontov, Mikhail A Hero pf Our Time tr. Paul Foote
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966)

Congreve, William Incoguita in Shurter Novels of the
Eyentggnth antuty (London: Everyman, 1967)

Tyler, Anne If Morning Evgr Comes (New York: Bantam, 1965)

van Herk, Aritha Judith (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart,
1984)

L'E

LCM

MBC

MF

MGS

Mir

MM

MP

MS

MW

132

Camus, Albert L'Etranggr tr. Joseph Laredo (London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1982)

Alain-Fournier Le Crangl Meaulngs tr. (as Tha Wanugrer) by
Lowell Bair (New York: Signet Classic, 1971)

Maugham, W. Somerset Liza pf Lamhgth (New York: Avon,
1947)

Lewis, Matthew The Munk (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1989)

Franklin, Miles My Brilliant Career (New York: Washington
Square Press, 1981)

Mackenzie, I-Ienry Ths Man pf Fgling (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1972)

Crane: Stephen W (New York:
Washington Square Press, 1966)

Drabble, Margaret The Millstons (as Thauk Yuu All Veg
M3311) (New York: Signet, 1969)

"Mirza" in An Extraordinaty Woman: 31 $351 Wriungso of
W tr. and ed. by Vivian Folkenflik (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1987)

Naipaul, V. S. flhaMystlgMassgut (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1973)

Chabon, Michael W (New York:
William Morrow and Company, 1988)

Blais, Marie-Claire MatLShadms tr. Merloyd Lawrence
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986)

Greene, Graham :ljhs Mau Within (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1971)

NFM

OMI

OVOR

PB

RGE

31

TB

TT

TV

VG

133

Dayan, Yael WW (Cleveland: The World
Publishing Company, 1959)

D05 Passos. John W (Lanham. MD:
University Press of America, 1986)

Capote. Truman W (New York:
Signet, 1948)

"Pauline” in W
Cerminig ue Stael tr. and ed. by Vivian Folkenflik (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1987)

Sayles, John Brigg uf thg Bimhus (New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1987)

"Rene" in Chateaubriand, Francois Rene de M tr.
Walter J. Cobb (New York: Signet Classic, 1961)

McCullers, Carson Reflections in a @luan By: (New York:
Bantam, 1970)

St. Irvmg in Shelley, Percy Bysshe Em and St. Iryme
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986)

Blais, Marie-Claire Tetg Blanghg tr. Charles Fullman (Toronto:
McClelland and Stewart, 1961)

The Trap in Jacobson, Dan The Trap and A Dancg in the Sun
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968)

"The Terrible Vengeance" in Gogol, Nikolai Tales of QM and
Eyjl tr. David Magarshack (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957)

 

Beckford, William Vathek in Three Eighteenth Centugg
Bumanggs (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971)

Disraeli, Benjamin Vivian Crey (London: Cassell, 1968)

134

W Price, Richard W (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1985)

WAFT Forster, E. M. W (New York: Vintage,
1920)

YT Musil, Robert Yuuuglotlgss tr. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst
Kaiser (New York: Pantheon, 1985)

Y W Goethe, Johannes Wolfgang von W

Warther tr. Catherine Hutter (New York: Signet Classic, 1962)

Z min Shelley. Percy Bysshe W
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986)

"IllllllllllllllllllS