Expressionism in Becher’s Abschied (Farewell)

 

Endnotes are in brackets.  For the convenience of those who do not read German, I provide references in endnotes to both the München:Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag edition of 1987 and the Seven Seas translation of 1959.  

                                1924 portrait of Becher by Lajos Tihanyi

    My English copy, an unlikely thrift store purchase, is a 1970 edition of Johannes R. Becher’s Abschied, under the title Farewell, translated by Joan Becker under the Seven Seas imprint based in the Eastern sector of Berlin.  Founded by American Communist Gertrude Gelbin, the wife of German expatriate anti-fascist writer Stefan Heym (born Helmut Flieg) in 1958, who had left the United States in 1952 in protest of the Korean War and McCarthyism.  This company published English books by leftist authors like W. E. B. DuBois, John Reed, Christopher Caudwell, Herbert Aptheker, Philip S. Foner, and Walter Lowenfels, and classics by Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, Cooper, and Mark Twain as well as contemporary German works by Heym, Bruno Apitz, Johannes Bobrowski, and Louis Fürnberg.

*          *          *          *

     The distaste which one must feel for the dictatorial East German and Soviet regimes need not influence the evaluation of artists from these countries, even those who accommodated to tyranny.  Though most critics can see past Stalin to appreciate the virtues of Eisenstein’s movies and Shostakovich’s music, much of the literary output labeled “Socialist Realist” is today ignored.  This prejudice has resulted in the neglect of Americans worth reading (Dahlberg, Ridge, Conroy, Gold), and, even more, of Germans, Russians, and other Eastern Europeans who wrote during the Soviet era without expressing explicit dissidence.  The case of artists who actively embraced totalitarian control over the arts such as the German writer Johannes R. Becher is more troubling yet. 

     Becher is admittedly a difficult man to justify.  After a youth as an avant-gardist, rebelling against the social and aesthetic order, he became a harsh guardian of the party line.  Having written a book of lyrics titled Always in Revolt (Ewig in Aufruhr) in 1920, by 1926 he had submitted to discipline.  A critic observes, “from an intellectual anarchist he turned into a disciplined communist.” [1]  With the introduction of Zhdanov’s reductive “Socialist Realism” in 1934 his work looked ever more suspect and, a refugee in the Soviet Union, he was accused of Trotskyite tendencies and, in his own self-interest, informed on other writers.  In the last phase of his life as Cultural Minister of East Germany, the Warsaw Pact nation with perhaps the most elaborate system of surveillance and informers, he persecuted dissidents very much like himself when young.  He was perennially in shaky mental health and several times attempted suicide. In the end he renounced his lifelong Marxist allegiance in a book Das poetische Prinzip (The Poetic Principle) published only posthumously.  Yet, whatever one might think of Becher’s politics or ethics, his work remains.

     Becker’s Abschied (Farewell) is a typical semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman describing the childhood and youth of a bourgeois boy in the early years of the twentieth century up to the outbreak of World War I.  For the most part the writing is solidly within the nineteenth century Realist or Naturalist model, here modified in two ways: the author’s ideological commitment and vestiges of his Expressionist practice.  The writer’s party membership, not to mention his residence in exile in the Stalinist Soviet Union, leads to the emphasis on socialism in the book’s themes.  The book’s main character seems meant to be an Everyman, typical of his fellow-countrymen.  The radical novelist Sack says as much.

 

 “You know, what you’ve told me about yourself is a real story, an adventure story.  Write it down!  You’ll write it sometime, perhaps after many, many years.  You’re not the only one who’s taking farewell of himself, there are plenty like you, and you’ll all be needed. You could call it ‘Farewell’.  A German tragedy . . . The book will be about yourself, but it won’t be a conventional biography.”  [2]

 

     Yet the petty bourgeois Gastl makes an unlikely proletarian hero.  Far from an idealized worker, he resembles the neurotic author who had been a confused and self-doubting schoolboy with little strength of character.   The reader might wonder why the lost lad is so peculiarly susceptible to the ideas suggested by Hartinger and the Little Jew, why he is fascinated with the “Internationale,” piping up with it inappropriately, why he ultimately decides to avoid service in World War I.  He seems more in Oedipal rebellion against his father than a prospect for a revolutionary cadre.   

     This weakness becomes metafictional with the story of Fanny.  Becher himself when just short of nineteen years old had made a suicide pact with a young prostitute named Fanny Fuss.  He killed her and wounded himself severely, but his father then managed to protect him from prosecution by having him declared insane.  This incident not surprisingly obsessed him for years, but in Abschied his treatment is evasive.  Though many fictional details correspond to the historical ones, even to Fanny’s shop’s location, in the novel Fanny’s character dies at the hands of malicious others after making love with Gastl, thus erasing the issue or reducing it to a simple matter of a sordid demi-monde.  Becher’s own responsibility is absent in this fictional version, though the author’s continuing return to the incident suggests that his treatment is unsatisfactory.  He seems to share some of Hans Peter Gastl’s drifting fecklessness.

     The coterie in the radical Café Stephanie is clearly like him middle class, artists and intellectuals, many of them bohemian in habits, scarcely a promising foundation on which to build a worker’s state, though accurately reflecting Becher’s youthful associations.  Expressionism survives in Abschied only vestigially, in certain extravagantly bizarre characters such as the insane Uncle Carl and the cocaine-addicted psychoanalyst, in periodic dream fantasies and images, and in a constant existential dread lurking in the background. 

     Such moments, though intermittent, carry the narrative’s thematic burden.  In one such passage, a prolonged, visionary dream, tumbling coins gives way to a Last Judgement as familial, academic, national, and apocalyptic authority figures mingle and Hans feels his secret sins are all revealed, though receiving “bad marks” is the only specific offense mentioned.  The boy is left pleading for that change which is the book’s primary motive [3].  But what change does he have in mind?  The possibility of a socialist future is repeatedly invoked, but the desire for change seems more often to be a simple plea for psychological relief.   

     History seems more absurd than dialectically determined when the deranged Uncle Carl fondles a book titled Foundations of the Twentieth Century only to look up in horror.  Feeling he is in the middle of vast contending forces, he calls out “No pardon will be given!” [4]  Here is a despair beyond any socio-economic conditions.

     In a later dream, as he “groped his way into the new life” [5] young Gastl imagines a medieval innkeeper, tortured by the ruling class, an image of the soul battered and defeated by the stresses of the world.  Once again, the figures of the Trinity are present, as is the narrator’s father, the judge, while the Headmaster and even the mad Uncle Carl appear as well in another figuration of the narrator’s stresses, leading him to exclaim “Things must change!” [6] 

     In all these passages Becher is clearly expressing not social outrage but rather existential dread, most familiar prior to Sartre and Camus from Munch’s 1893 The Scream.  The reader finds extreme psychological alienation and scarcely a word about economic injustice.  Witnessing his grandmother’s death he loses any faith in eternity and imagines her singing a sort of blues for him: “Little Hans went off alone to the big, wide world, far from home” [7].  Her decease culminates in  yet another dream in which the dreamer is denounced as a coward, a madman, aboard a runaway train in danger of crashing off a bridge as phantom accusers denounce Gastl for all “the scandalous things you’ve done.” [8]

     As Camus said that the only philosophical question was suicide, for Gastl the specter of the Grosshesseloh recurs as a constant temptation to despair and follow other suicides. [9]  This is the real problem of the novel, not politics.  Even the vision of revolution that appears is entirely phantasmagoric; in the tide of red flags, the message is indecipherable hieroglyphics [10].

     Given Becher’s biography, this psychological theme is unsurprising.  Apart from his suicide pact as a youth when he succeeded in killing his lover but not himself, followed by years of addiction to morphine, Becher continued to struggle with severe depression and attempted suicide several times.  His persecution by both Weimar and Stalinist regimes, his informing on others, and the ultimate ambivalence that led to his apostasy from Marxism, all must have exacerbated his instability and magnified his mental distress.  This inner conflict is the true center of Abschied.

     The fracture in the novel generated by its largely realistic picture of early twentieth century bourgeois Germany and the profoundly alienated sensibility of the protagonist forms in fact the central theme of the book.  Even a utopian social vision cannot soothe the soul of this young misfit.  Bohemian in tendency, he is far more engaging than a heroic worker hero like Pavel Korchagin in Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered.  The contradictions of Becher’s life may have distressed him deeply, but they allowed him to write in Abschied a more nuanced narrative, one as revealing about psychology as about history, arising more from neurotic avoidance and anxious self-doubt than from revolutionary zeal.  The reader need admire neither Becher nor his protagonist Gastl to realize that their characteristics are in part our own. 

 

 

1.  Theodore Huebener in The Literature of East Germany After 1926 (p. 39).  

2.  In German Abschied p. 415, München : Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag edition of 1987; in English translation the Seven Seas edition titled Farewell p.364.  The original text of this passage:  “Was Sie da erzählt haben von dem Anderen, ist ein Roman.  Ein Abenteuerrioman.  Schreiben Sie ihn!  Sir werden ihn schreiben, vielleicht erst nach vielen, vielen Jahren.  Nicht nur Sie nehmen Abschied darin von sich selbst, ihresgleichen sind nicht wenige, und alle werden gebraucht werden, auch solche wie Sie .  . . müsste er heissen – ‘Abschied.’  Eine deutscge Tragödie . . . Sie werden über sich sellbst schreiben, aber dieses “Ich” herkömmlich biographisches sein.”

3.  Abschied 36, Farewell 54.

4.  Abschied p. 86, Farewell p. 80. “Pardon wird nicht gegeben.”

5.  Abschied German 180,  Farewell 162. “So tastete ich mich in das neue Leben hinein.”

6.  Abschied 185, Farewell 164.  “Es wird anders werden!”

7.  Abschied 224, Farewell 200.  “Hänschen klein/ geht allein/ in die weite Welt hinein . . .”

8.  Abschied 236, Farewell 211.  “Wir Wissen um deine Schandtaten.”

9.  Abschied 257, Farewell 229. 

10.  Abschied 353, Farewell 312. 

Every Reader's Byron

 

This is the fourteenth of a series of essays meant to introduce (or re-introduce) non-scholarly readers to the work of important poets. In Every Reader’s Poets I limit my focus to the discussion of only a few of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and biography, eschewing most byways and all footnotes. A general introduction “Why Read Poetry?” is also posted on this site.

 

 

     Byron was doubtless the best-known poet of his age, a celebrity widely admired and excoriated for his life and opinions as well as for his work.  The young aristocrat had very much the reputation of a bad boy rock star in which extravagant adulation for his work mixed with attacks on his morals and his lack of religion.  His detractors had plenty to criticize.  Byron seems to have felt lustful toward most anything on two legs: women, men, other people’s lovers, his own half-sister, he pursued them all.  A habitual critic of organized religion, he expressed sentiments that sound pantheistic at times, while more often savoring of the intellectual Deism common in his day.  Still, the poet remained haunted by concepts of original sin and predestination that he had imbibed when young. 

     Byron wrote a great deal.  The 1833 collected works amounted to seventeen volumes.  Today, apart from a handful of brief love lyrics, his work is neglected.  In his day not only did poetry sell well, readers enjoyed long verse narratives and closet dramas as much as they did novels.  Byron wrote a good many such substantial pieces.  The defiant, rebellious antiheroes of works like Cain and Manfred which once seemed exciting and outrageous still find readers who value what they believe they see of their author in them.  Though Byron’s version of Don Juan is hilarious, dazzling with wit and verbal inventiveness, a work more liable to the charge of frivolity than that of pedantry, most of its readers are Ph. D. candidates.    

     One of the most familiar of the short and rather conventional love poems popular in Byron‘s day and now is “She Walks in Beauty” the enduring appeal of which is suggested by the fact that a sung version is included in Marianne Faithfull’s forthcoming album.

She walks in beauty like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies, And all that's best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes; Thus mellowed to the tender light Which heaven to gaudy day denies. One ray the more, one shade the less Had half impaired the nameless grace Which waves in every raven tress Or softly lightens o'er her face, Where thoughts serenely sweet express How pure, how dear their dwelling place. And on that cheek and o'er that brow So soft, so calm yet eloquent, The smiles that win, the tints that glow But tell of days in goodness spent A mind at peace with all below, A heart whose love is innocent.

    

     Using a folksy, informal iambic tetrameter line and a reassuring ababab rhyme scheme, Byron opens with a clever and memorable statement, the stronger for its simplicity and so slightly odd that the reader is charmed without knowing just why.  The lady is not said to be beautiful; rather she “walks in beauty,” somewhat like the glow of pure excellence of a divine apparition in Homer or a Victorian spiritualist’s aura. 

     While using a simple and comfortable form, Byron still teases conventional expectations.  The woman he praises does not, as in earlier poets, possess a dazzling radiance, so bright and sunlike as to cause the other stars to vanish.  The poet is an aesthete and appreciates subtlety.  His ideal represents a perfect chiaroscuro, mixing darkness and light in exquisitely designed proportions, far superior to the glare of “gaudy” daytime. 

     The conceit is well-accommodated to his subject as she, contrary to some narrow notions of British beauty, is dark-haired, with “raven tress.”  He is naturally moved to such ingenuity by her “nameless grace,” which, being ineffable, requires a figure of speech.  With a kind of Platonic afflatus at the end of the second stanza, he generalizes her perfect physical beauty into moral excellence.  She is exceedingly “pure,” a literal desideratum for females, all the more perhaps when their masculine admirers feel themselves somewhat corrupt. 

     The final stanza reinforces the point.  Her smile, her “tint,” her very being testify to her virtue, her “days in good ness spent.”  With an immaculate conscience, she must be “at peace with all below” because she possesses “a heart whose love is innocent.”  Surely Byron is here projecting a self-portrait in negative.  The author was, the reader knows, vulnerable to attacks on his sexual morality and very likely experienced mental turmoil arising from a less than innocent love.  He expresses here a dream of an uplifting affection through which one might hope to improve oneself.  The lady in question, biographers tell us, was his cousin’s wife Anne Beatrix Wilmot, and she may have been a woman he did not try to seduce. 

     Like other popular poets such as Amy Lowell, Dylan Thomas, and Allen Ginsberg, Byron was known as much for his public persona as for his writing.  After the publication in 1812 of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the poet said, "I awoke one morning and found myself famous."  Readers celebrated Byron as a poet who spoke his heart’s truth directly and, as the poem described a journey which in part resembled Byron’s recent travels, most conflated the author and his hero.  Both were considered dissolute, guilty, passionate, and rebellious, and dangerously beautiful.  The opening stanzas offer not the best poetry on the work, but the clearest portrait of the “Byronic hero.” 

     The poem was written in the elaborate Spenserian form using the archaic language that had been obsolete even for Spenser and had been favored by eighteenth century writers.  In his peculiar archaizing language though with a very modern irony he notes that Harold “ne in virtue's ways did take delight,” but was rather “sore given to revel and ungodly glee.”  His family, though noble had, like Byron’s own, something of a bad reputation.  His dissipation leads, however, to world-weariness.

  

Worse than adversity the Childe befell;

He felt the fulness of satiety:

Then loathed he in his native land to dwell,

Which seem'd to him more lone than Eremite's sad cell.

 

 

Though Harold “through Sin's long labyrinth had run,” he feels nonetheless an honorable attachment toward a woman too pure for him.   Since their marriage is impossible due to his inconstancy, he considers “calm domestic peace” to be unavailable to such as him, causing him to settle for “vulgar bliss” in more common arms.

     Though libertine, he feels so sensitively the loss of this ideal wife that he finds himself “sore sick at heart” to the point of suicidal ideation.  

 

 

And from his native land resolv'd to go,

And visit scorching climes beyond the sea;

With pleasure drugg'd, he almost long'd for woe,

And e'en for change of scene would seek the shades below.

  

     Byron’s own case was but little different.  He had several years earlier taken the Grand Tour of Europe customary for upper class youth but in 1816, driven into a sort of exile by a combination of adventurous restless instability and public disapproval of his morals following a scandalous divorce, ending with his death in Greece where he had joined the revolt against the Ottoman overlords.  The poem abounds in travelogue details and political reflections, but occasionally, as in the following three stanzas, pauses for philosophic reflection.

  

   CLXXVIII.

   There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
   There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
   There is society where none intrudes,
   By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
   I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
   From these our interviews, in which I steal
   From all I may be, or have been before,
   To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

CLXXIX.

   Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean—roll!
   Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
   Man marks the earth with ruin—his control
   Stops with the shore;—upon the watery plain
   The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
   A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,
   When for a moment, like a drop of rain,
   He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.

CLXXX.

   His steps are not upon thy paths,—thy fields
   Are not a spoil for him,—thou dost arise
   And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields
   For earth's destruction thou dost all despise,
   Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,
   And send'st him, shivering in thy playful spray
   And howling, to his gods, where haply lies
   His petty hope in some near port or bay,
And dashest him again to earth:—there let him lay.

                                                           Canto the Second, CLXXIX-CLXXXI

 

     Harold and his writer and his reader here contemplate the void, figured in nature and most emphatically in  the ocean.  While recognizing the indifference of the cosmos, imagining death as a shipwreck and drowning at sea, he calls out an affirmation: “Roll on!”  The spirit as in ancient tragedy has its victory not in turning suffering aside, but in maintaining one’s composure in accepting it.  Human life is momentary before each sinks to the ocean depths “with a bubbling groan.”  We end all alike “without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.”  This is looking at the terms of life straight on, a kind of early nineteenth century Existentialism, oddly thrilling to the poem’s original audience.

     The tone of Don Juan, a wonderful poem to read aloud, is clear at the start.  Byron satirically dedicated the poem to Robert Southey, the same Poet Laureate Lewis Carroll was later to ridicule.

  

 III

You, Bob! are rather insolent, you know,

       At being disappointed in your wish

To supersede all warblers here below,

       And be the only Blackbird in the dish;

And then you overstrain yourself, or so,

       And tumble downward like the flying fish

Gasping on deck, because you soar too high, Bob,

And fall, for lack of moisture quite a-dry, Bob!

 

 A mischievously disrespectful portrait even for those unfamiliar with the schoolboy slang “dry bob.”  While Southey sought the high tone and gravitas that won him the Laureateship but which are little admired today, Byron deflated him with a modern-sounding counter-cultural ridicule. 

         Don Juan’s education was, as for most upper-class Europeans, thoroughly Classical.

 

41

His classic studies made a little puzzle,

   Because of filthy loves of gods and goddesses,

Who in the earlier ages raised a bustle,

   But never put on pantaloons or bodices;

His reverend tutors had at times a tussle,

   And for their Aeneids, Iliads, and Odysseys,

Were forced to make an odd sort of apology,

For Donna Inez dreaded the mythology.

  42

Ovid's a rake, as half his verses show him,

   Anacreon's morals are a still worse sample,

Catullus scarcely has a decent poem,

   I don't think Sappho's Ode a good example,

Although Longinus tells us there is no hymn

   Where the sublime soars forth on wings more ample:

But Virgil's songs are pure, except that horrid one

Beginning with 'Formosum Pastor Corydon.'

     Here a footnote is useful.  Vergil’s Eclogue II begins Formosum pastor Corydon ardebat Alexim  (Corydon, the shepherd, was aflame for the fair Alexis), a line not only erotic but homoerotic.  The fun of the passage is Byron’s quite justified irony in pointing out that Classical literature, given its privileged position in the education of the English ruling class (who would have known Vergil’s poem), was considerably less moralistic than the Established Church of the poet’s day.  The very literature that people regarded as uplifting, civilizing, and refined in fact openly promoted sexual pleasures of a shocking variety.  (I recall the old Loeb Library editions of Greek poetry with facing English translations.  When the content required censorship, the English would become Latin, as though one who could adequately read the Latin was probably highly enough educated to be trusted in reading a smutty joke.)

     Another short piece might be described not as a love poem, but as an anti-love poem.  It was originally contained in a letter to Thomas Moore which describes the occasion of its writing. 

 

 

At present, I am on the invalid regimen myself. The Carnival--that is, the latter part of it, and sitting up late o' nights--had knocked me up a little. But it is over--and it is now Lent, with all its abstinence and sacred music... Though I did not dissipate much upon the whole, yet I find “the sword wearing out the scabbard,” though I have just turned the corner of twenty-nine.

 

Whether from world-weariness, ennui, or a recurring hangover, the poet is not inclined to carouse.   His body has been abused by intemperance in both drink and sex during Carnival; he must rest. 

 

So, we’ll go no more a roving

So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a roving
By the light of the moon.

 

      Yet he did not remain an “invalid” long.  Returning to the bottle and the delights of love, he was an athlete of hedonism who could not slow down until he burned himself out.  His affairs in Europe would fill a soap opera.  People magazine would have covered him extensively.  Greece still remembers his gallant participation in their war for independence.  Strikingly modern in his adversarial relation to social propriety, he confronted the absurdity of life with realism and high spirits, which would have counted for little except that, in addition, he was one of the best versifiers of the Romantics.

Godwin's Theatre of Calamity

References in parentheses are cited by part and chapter.

     Godwin may have conceived of Things as They Are or Caleb Williams as a Tendenzroman, and the theme is certainly asserted with little room for doubt. The book’s unfortunate protagonist, a clever and idealistic youth of serious moral character, suffers all but constantly from the irrational persecution of a member of the ruling class, whose imperious power is unjust always and susceptible to aggravated criminal misuse. The legal system is condemned in the strongest terms for its injustice and inhumanity. The novel’s revolutionary implications did not escape the bookseller or the authorities and Godwin was first dissuaded from his original ending and then convinced to remove a preface that indicated the book meant to illustrate “a general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism, by which man becomes the destroyer of man.” Godwin arranged for its publication on the very day Prime Minister William Pitt suspended habeas corpus and began rounding up the radicals of the London Corresponding Society. [1] Stage adaptations were banned, though Sheridan presented one under a different title.
     Countless passages throughout the book remind the reader that morality and justice have little to do with the operations of government, that the wealthy and privileged are empowered to do as they will while the poor make do as they must. Godwin’s position as a philosophical anarchist is evident from his non-fiction works, [2] and he presents with passion and conviction a shocking story of “the gore-dripping robes of authority.” ( III, 1) The book’s title (anticipating Trollope’s The Way We Live Now with which Godwin’s book might be profitably contrasted) insists on its intention to break through what Rexroth used to call the Social Lie and reveal the simple fact of the absolute amorality of government by the selfish.
     Yet it is difficult to view the novel in only that way. The theme of social protest is surely distorted by the depiction of the oppressor Falkland who is anything but a typical aristocrat just as Caleb is not a representative worker. Falkland in fact seems an extraordinarily unselfish and moral person whose sense of noblesse oblige is part of his polished and sophisticated manners. His degradation arises not from simple greed (as does the corruption of the ruling class under any system) but rather from his obsessive idealistic concern about honor and reputation. The reader never hears of how he makes his money. Though he might be viewed as an etiolated aristocrat whose decadence presages the end of his class’s governance, the central protest is not economic but legal. The wealthy can manipulate the law.
     But in the conclusion as it stood in the first edition, Williams is implicated in similarly using legal process for private ends. Though he had long made it a point of pride not to reveal his one-time employer’s blood-guilt, he ultimately does, not to secure a disinterested retribution, but in revenge. He relates the tale of his personal “theatre of calamity” (I, 1) retrospectively so the pathetic (if not quite tragic) conclusion was never in doubt and Caleb ends by thinking himself more a sinner than his persecutor. Though at the outset he had said he wrote in hopes that “posterity” might “render me a justice, which my contemporaries refuse,” (I, 1) but he ends having given up on himself – he says “I have no character that I wish to vindicate” -- and hoping only that his antagonist “may be fully understood.” (Postscript) Even Falkland lauds Williams’ “greatness and elevation of . . .mind.” (Postscript) The reductive social reading’s bipolar distribution of good and evil is thoroughly confounded, and the alternate ending, in which the narrator’s persecutions continue, pushing him into madness, would have emphasized Williams’ own pathology.
     As the first-person narrative voice tells the tale in retrospect, the reader can never expect a Dickensian story of the eventual rise of a meritorious but poor lad. The curiosity that marks his advancement in education and skills also will lead him to investigate the forbidden chest, extract his employer’s confession, and lock them in mutually destructive struggle. The very real economic conflicts of the early Industrial Age are quite absent; instead, the story suggests the role of chance (called “fatal coincidence” in the Postscript) and a powerful psychological determinism.
     In the final pages of the book Caleb excoriates himself and excuses Falkland, thinking his employer has acted in the only way that he could given his life experience which led him early to dedicate himself to “the poison of chivalry.” The reader is invited to consider Caleb, too, as a victim of circumstance, operating blindly in a deterministic world where a person can only suffer and cannot control destiny.
     The book, as Godwin said in his 1832 preface to the Bentley’s edition, “has always been regarded by the public with an unusual degree of favour.” He conceived it, he says as a volume of “fictitious adventures, and wrote the last part first, elaborating Caleb’s repeated attempts to dodge his tormentor, never for long successful, a continuous “flight and pursuit.” And indeed the book makes a decent episodic suspense story as Williams finds the agents of his nemesis oppressing him at every turn. Taken realistically the narrative involves a wide variety of circumstances from the robber’s den with its unlikely leader to his short-lived idyll in Wales. The conclusion in which Falkland and Williams reconcile at the end of the novel betrays the laboriously constructed horror of the Gothic machinery. The original ending, too strong for the publisher’s opinion of the public, had had Williams descend into madness while imprisoned under the supervision of the tireless Gines (or “Jones”).  

     The book may have sold as a straightforward adventure story, but the hero’s persecution is so extreme that the plot sounds very like a projection of the imagination of a paranoid schizophrenic, and his suffering is primarily psychological. If Williams is paranoid, surely Falkland is grandiose. Both Falkland and Williams are obsessively enwrapped in each other, their relationship deeply neurotic, ambivalent, and in the end internecine. Their connection has been taken by some as homoerotic and much of what happens might be viewed as a dramatic representation of the trials of love. [3]
     The narrator’s mental suffering reaches such heights that it becomes a truly Existential theme. Like Beckford’s Vathek and Byronic heroes soon to come, Williams takes on the world and goes crashing down in glory if not in comfort. A large share of Williams’ pain arises from his isolation, as Falkland denies him the chance to have friends or even more casual human relationship. His isolation and his Job-like suffering lead him to cry out “Here I am, an outcast, destined to perish with hunger and cold. All men desert me. All men hate me. I am driven with mortal threats from the sources of comfort and existence. Accursed world . . .Why do I consent to live any longer?” (III, 7)
     Today Godwin’s philosophic anarchism plays little role in contemporary political discourse, and his name most commonly appears in accounts of Shelley and Byron detailing their involvement with his daughter Mary and his step-daughter Clair Clairmont. The reader of Things as They Are or Caleb Williams will find something unrelated to these issues, a readable, compelling story that reflects how everyone has felt, at one time or another, about a boss, a loved one, or life in this world.



1. The date was May 12, 1794. It is a pleasure to report that English juries freed all the defendants.

2. See most prominently his Enquiry concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness which was published the same year as Things as They Are.

3. See, for instance, Gold, Alex, Jr. “It's Only Love: The Politics of Passion in Godwin's Caleb Williams.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 19 (1977): 135–160.