The Gypsy Gentleman [George Borrow]

 

     I was gazing over the last few decades’ self-help books and romances on the bookshelves of a nearby Salvation Army store when my eye was caught by the familiar form of a faded early Everyman’s library volume with handsome ornamentation on the spine, reminiscent of William Morris design.  It dated from 1906, the year that J. M. Dent launched this admirable series of classics costing only a shilling.  The title -- The Romany Rye -- was unknown to me and its meaning obscure, though the author’s name George Borrow seemed like one I had heard before.  His own story turned out to be at least as compelling as the narratives he put to  paper.

     George Borrow’s name has fallen into obscurity, yet during the Victorian Age he was a literary man of consequence.  His The Bible in Spain, recounting his activities distributing Protestant scriptures in Spain and including descriptions of the country in general as well as details about the Romani population [1], was a minor best-seller, going through six printings in a year.  He went on to write two novels which, while they were less popular than his book on Spain, were highly regarded for decades, entering the canon briefly before sinking into neglect.  His book Wild Wales contains much lore and careful (if Romantic) nature description, though Borrow repeatedly manages to maneuver the rhetorical spotlight onto himself.  He translated a sufficient quantity to fill sixteen volumes, including significant work from an astonishing range of languages, though much was unpublished in his lifetime.  He made so bold as to produce English versions of works in Danish, German, Old Norse, Russian, and Turkish, and a variety of other tongues, as well as translating the Bible into Manchu and a Gypsy dialect.  One book that did see print has the remarkable title Targum Or Metrical Translations from Thirty Languages (1835).  Meanwhile he also found leisure to research and publish six volumes of Celebrated Trials and Remarkable Cases of Criminal Jurisprudence from the Earliest Records to the year 1825.  

     He produced this remarkable literary output, in part the work of a non-university man seeking to support himself with his pen, at the same time as he devoted considerable enthusiasm to the cause of Protestant Christianity.   He acquired half his languages to assist in proselytizing and pursued converts in such unlikely places as Catholic Spain and Orthodox Russia.  His virulent anti-Catholic prejudices are evident in much of his work (as is his English patriotism), and his uncompromising evangelism led twice to his imprisonment.   

     Around the time of my copy’s publication, H. W. Boynton in The Atlantic called Borrow “a writer of unique genius,” adding that “that genius found, of course, its best expression in Lavengro and its sequel.”  To Boynton not only is “the charm of his mere style” “irresistible,” in addition “the peculiarity of the subject-matter” “will keep Borrow’s writings alive.”  He felt confident that “whatsoever books of the Victorian epoch are smothered and lost beneath the ever-accumulating mass of English literature, Borrow’s writings will be remembered.” [2]  In an introductory note that prefaced the 1893 edition  of Lavengro, Theodore Watts ventures to say that “there are passages in “Lavengro” which are unsurpassed in the prose literature of England—unsurpassed, I mean, for mere perfection of style—for blending of strength and graphic power with limpidity and music of flow.” He goes on to describe Borrow as “splendid,” “brilliant,” “classic,” and a “genius,” adding that “all competent critics” allowed Lavengro and The Romany Rye “to be among the most delightful books in the language.” A few years later Edward Thomas said, begging the question: “We to-day have many temptations to over praise him, because he is a Great Man.” [3]  And the Brittanica’s article yet today declares him “one of the most imaginative prose writers of the 19th century.”                   

     Though the only clues to ambivalence in Boynton’s praise are his use of the words “unique” and “peculiar,” the authors of many of the standard literary histories were more straightforward in qualifying Borrow’s place in Parnassus.  They are likely to use terms like “idiosyncratic” or, in a slightly more circumspect, phrasing: “No figure is more original than that of Borrow.”   Some prefer to provide an explicitly balanced judgement:  “There are dull stagnant places in his books, and there are passages aflame with genius.” Another notes circumspectly that “more than one of the publications of George Borrow are still held in honour by critics of eminence” due to their containing “enough of the genuine spice of free genius to overpower our sense of their eccentricity and offences against good taste.” [4]

     By 1912 opinion had shifted sufficiently that his first biographer speaks of him as passé.  “It was Borrow’s fate, a tragic fate for a man so proud, to outlive the period of his fame.  Not only were his books forgotten, but the world anticipated his death by some seven or eight years.” [5]  A review of another survey of the author in 1929 flatly calls him “one of the most pathetic failures” in letters whose writing “leaves much to be desired.” [6]

     From the start critics had puzzled over the genre of The Romany Rye.  They accurately noted its picaresque character, but devoted considerable discussion to the question of whether it and its predecessor Lavengro should be considered fiction or memoir.  Very little of either book, though, is devoted to the primary line of narration.  In The Romany Rye the love interest with Isopel is so discreet as to be almost vanishing, and she does indeed disappear early, only to bob up again at second-hand much later.  The reader’s interest is to be held by the story of the narrator’s acquisition and sale of a horse.  The animal is more or less forced upon the hero, for reasons that remain obscure, and the sale, though occurring in the midst of a variety of tensions, takes place without incident.  In the very last line, in a wholly unexpected turn, the narrator contemplates traveling to India, scattering the wispy fragments of a plot. 

     The Romany Rye clearly lacks the formal unity of a conventional novel.  The book does not fit the genre of autobiography as it provides no coherent pattern of a particular life.  Neither is it a proper travel book as the descriptions both of the Romani camp and of the countryside are for the most part vague or conventional or both.  At heart The Romany Rye resembles most those collections of odd stories midway between folk-tale and modern short fiction, the kind of tales in Canterbury Tales, the Decameron, Painter's Palace of Pleasure, or the Thousand and One Nights that replicated for a more literate age the archaic story-teller around a fire.  One speaker succeeds another, the Old Man, the Hungarian, the Postilion, the Jockey, and Murtagh all tell stories, and the sum of these together constitutes a significant portion of the book. 

     These inserted narratives have a miscellaneous character.  The tale of the old man robbed of his ass in  Chapter XXI resembles a folk-tale with its retributive justice and the concluding idyll of rural simplicity as the old man cultivates his garden to the humming of his bees.  The man in Chapters XXXII to XXXIV who becomes an aficionado of “crockery literature” is pure quaint picturesqueness as is the jockey’s knowledge of “coin sharping,” Hopping Ned and Biting Giles.  Borrow does not mind retooling old stories like the history of Hunyadi (Ch. XXXIX) and of Finn-ma-Coul (Ch. XLIV).  Yet these little divertimentos add up to very little. 

     Apart from included narratives, other sections are similarly irrelevant to any central plotline.  The Man in Black, whose discourse covers three chapters (II-IV) is a straw man for Borrow’s narrow-minded anti-Catholic prejudice.   Just when one might think Borrow might better be establishing the verisimilitude of his story, he features a caricature who talks as the most cynical priest has never done.  Other chapters are related in the voice of Ursula, the landlord, and the ostler, leaving very little spacet for the narrator’s own affairs.  It is as if the “novel” is composed in large part of filler material. 

    For today’s reader the book remains a curiosity.  If the style has little charm and the structure is almost arbitrary (it has been called “formless” [7]), the one-time popularity of The Romany Rye might be explained by its providing access to an exotic culture of which few Britons had experience as intimate at Borrow’s.  Yet, in spite of his adoption of the Romani, living and working side-by-side with them and learning their language, exceedingly little information about them finds a place in his book.  Apart from the use of some Romani words which provides a patina of authenticity and references to “dukkerin” (fortune-telling) and theft, he tells his readers virtually nothing about their beliefs and practices.   Significantly, the titles of both his novels , though couched, he tells his readers, in Romani dialect, refer to Borrow himself: Lavengro meaning “wordmaster” and The Romany Rye meaning the “Gypsy Gentleman.”  What appeals to Borrow’s readers is not the Romani vision of the world, which would require a fuller picture, but rather his own.  Bourgeois homebodies are engaged by the sensibility of this man who has chosen to live among the outcast, and this is perhaps the key to his charm. 

     The same critic who found Borrow’s work to lack structure also noted that he is “unique in English literature for the sense they convey of intimate contact with adventurous, lawless life.” [8]  The vagueness of the last three works is significant.  The reader is entertained not by becoming acquainted with Romani life in particular, but rather by imaginative intimacy with the “adventurous, lawless life” of a white Englishman.  While The Romany Rye certainly looks back toward picaresque novels, which regularly featured footloose heroes, it looks also forward to the twentieth century vagabond road books that hover between memoir and novel: London’s The Road, Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier, and Kerouac’s On the Road.  Though at first glance the concluding resolution to go to India seems to come out of the blue, it is the clearest sign for a Westerner of daring adventure as much in Borrow’s time it seems as in the nineteen-sixties.

     Borrow might be considered a late Romantic gasp, a last Byronic hero, doing what his readers would not dare to do but about which they relish reading.  His  exoticism and counter-cultural enthusiasm rise directly from Romantic models.  He has the assertive ego of the nonconformist, the bluster of a mountebank, the theatrics of a man who likes the spotlight.  Childe Harold enjoyed a considerable audience, but he seemed to be putting up the highest existential stakes as his creator did in Greece.  In comparison with the profundity of Byronic alienation and anxiety, though, Borrow seems a mere entertainer, though with a similar self-absorption.  The Romany Rye wanders about, free of real risk or drama.  Arthur Compton-Rickett noted in 1912 that his persona regularly betrayed “a curious selfishness.”  His characters seem to “exist chiefly for his own curiosity and inquisitiveness.”  In Borrow the “human touch is markedly absent;” “not even Isopel could break down the barrier of intense egoism.” [9]

    In part the interest the book retains today derives from its prefigurations of modernity.  The book’s very randomness suggests later practices of conscious fragmentation and bricolage.  Borrow might be seen as a proto-hip character, anticipating an important twentieth century aesthetic category.  His indifference to social norms and his individualist adventuring make him seem a free spirit to readers in spite of his peculiarity, aimlessness, and vulnerability to depression which he called “the horrors.”

     He remains, diminished perhaps to a vanishingly minor figure, a fascinating curiosity, a pleasant read, a diverting story-teller, and, perhaps most important, a colorful character.  His breadth surely outshone his depth.  Though he vaunted his linguistic accomplishments at every opportunity, subsequent scholars have found his mastery even of German to be imperfect at best. [10]  His insouciance about form, his idiosyncratic attitudes, his very eccentricity constitutes his appeal. [11] 

     The fact that this book and its predecessor Lavengro were included in the Everyman’s Series indicates the regard of the literary establishment for Borrow as a modern classic a quarter century after his death. [12]  He had attained a position in the literary canon, albeit toward the margin, eliciting an oddly enduring but lukewarm appeal from both critics and common readers.  I consider my discovery of a copy of The Romany Rye a happy chance, unlikely to be repeated by future junk shop browsers, though it takes but a bit of imagination to envision the Gypsy Gentleman himself sifting through the old clothes and kitchen wares.

 

 

 

1.  Borrow translated the Gospel of Luke into Caló, a Gypsy dialect used in Spain and Portugal.    His first book The Zincali: or an account of the Gypsies of Spain (1841) described Romani life.   Romano Lavo-lil A dictionary of the language of the English Romanichal people (1874) has been found seriously defective by scholars.  Mérimée was influenced by Borrow in his depiction of Carmen.  The World Romani Conference has declared the use of the name “Gypsy” to be pejorative.  I use it in my title for historical reasons.    

2.  H. W. Boynton, “George Borrow,” The Atlantic, Feb. 1904.

3.  Edward Thomas, George Borrow: The Man and his Books, 1912.

4.  In order, the quotations are from Theodore Watts-Duncan in Ephraim Chamber’s Cyclopedia of English Literature 1901-3 edition in an article that runs over six double-columned pages; Émile Legouis’ History of English Literature (1926)  Andrew Lang, History of English Literature from Beowulf to Swinburne (1921), and Thomas B. Shaw. B., A History Of English Literature (1895). 

5.  John Murray, The Life of George Borrow (1912), Iv.

6.  Review of Samuel Milton Elam’s George Borrow, New York Times, July 7, 1929.

7.  George Sampson, “George Borrow,” The Concise Cambridge history of English literature (1965). 

  

8.  Sampson.

9.  Arthur Compton-Rickett, A History of English Literature (1912).

10.  Though, in the view of George Hyde, Borrow “produced some of his best poetry in his capacity as translator.”  See “’Language Is First of All a Foreign One': George Borrow as a Translator from Polish,” The Slavonic and East European Review Vol. 77, No. 1 (Jan., 1999). 

11.  The most comprehensive book on Borrow in the last generation is titled George Borrow: Eccentric (Michael Collie, 1982).  Shortly after Borrlw’s death a little feature in the New York Times (February 24, 1894) titled “The Eccentric Borrow” retells several stories of his odd behavior.  The writer explains Borrow’s  peculiarities as “those unaccountable fits to which men of genius . . . are often subject.”

12.  Lavengro had already been published in in the Oxford University Press World's Classics Series in 1904.

Transformation of Plot in Several Stories by Aphra Behn

I discuss here “The Adventure of the Black Lady,” “The Court of the King of Bantam,” “The Unfortunate Happy Lady” and “The Fair Jilt,” the short fictions in the very early Grove Press volume Selected Writings Of The Ingenious Mrs. Aphra Behn, published before Barney Rosset had become editor.  Numbers in parentheses refer to pages in that edition, and my quotations follow it, including the editor’s unnecessary modernization of spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.  Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.

 

     Though literary convention is sometimes dismissed as a device favored by writers lacking originality, in fact, the use of conventions in literature (as in language in general), enables an increased density of signification and subtlety. [1]  Conventions create reader expectations, which may then be fulfilled, frustrated, altered, inverted, or twisted.  Often conventions foreground important thematic elements, by reinforcing preconceptions in some cases and by challenging them in others.  At the same time, just as in music, a certain idea, like a melodic phrase, may be part of a formal design as it is repeated or varied.  Folk stories and myths are highly conventionalized, indeed to the extent that scholars such as Propp and Levi-Strauss have sought to reduce their patterns to formulae. [2]  The entertaining short narratives of Aphra Behn illustrate this principle of economic variations on a theme and shed light on the uses and pleasures of story-telling  by the creation of patterns that highlight the central concerns of the literate public of her day. 

     Aphra Behn stands at the wellsprings of the English novel.  Though many of us learned from Ian Watt’s The Rise of the English Novel to call Robinson Crusoe (1719) the first novel, Behn had published the extraordinary Oroonoko in 1688 and she was quite likely the author of Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister (1684) even earlier.  While that work foreshadows the epistolary form that dominated the eighteenth century in works by Richardson, Cleland, Fielding, Goldsmith, Burney, and others, Behn wrote a number of shorter narratives with a different sort of voice.  “The Adventure of the Black Lady,” “The Court of the King of Bantam,” “The Unfortunate Happy Lady,” and “The Fair Jilt” are written with colloquial liveliness as if they were transcriptions of spoken story-telling, including hesitations and revisions.  Like folk tales, most romances, medieval fabliaux and tales like those in Poggio’s Facetiae, the stories have very little characterization or description.  Action is what matters.   While more subtle retellings are available in collections such as Boccaccio’s Decameron or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the barer narratives remained popular in collections like Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure and the hagiographies of the Aurea Legenda.

     Long neglected, then studied from the narrow perspective of social implications, Behn’s fictions also illustrate the pleasures of a largely formal elaboration beautiful after the manner of a fugue or an abstract painting.  The sequence of stories in the Grove Press anthology indicates increasingly sophisticated patterns of play between oppositions which, though arising from experience and rooted in the day’s received expectations, take flight and assume independent aesthetic value.

      “The Adventure of the Black Lady” provides the basis for her formula.  As the protagonist’s name suggest, Bellamora seeks a satisfying love relationship.  She has conceived a child with a man of her choice who, though he had persuaded her to bed with “violence” and “accursed success,” is nonetheless sincere in his affection, as indicated by his name Mr. Fondlove.  Consumed by shame and escaping an unwanted marriage to another gentleman “of much better estate,” the “fair innocent” moves from her home in Hampshire to London, feeling “ashamed, ruined, and damned . . .for ever lost” (24) and hoping to stay with a city cousin.  Though Mr. Fondlove had importunately urged his attentions upon her, she is convinced that, by yielding to his advances, she has lost his respect, and he will surely no longer care to marry her.  A country girl lost in the big city, she loses her luggage and cannot locate her relative.  In the sort of unlikely coincidence common in romances, she is charitably given shelter in a home which, as it happens, belongs to Mr. Fondlove’s sister.  Hearing then of her distress, and faithful still in spite of her fears, he arrives to marry her and resolve the plot’s tensions in a happy denouement. 

     Behn has set in play a number of oppositions each of which is resolved in this brief narrative.  The most significant are the tension of the requirement (for women only) of virginity for a respectable marriage and the suspense of placing an unsophisticated young woman from the country at risk in an urban environment.  The damsel in distress is, of course, a universally popular theme [3], pervasive in early English novels such as those by Richardson and the later Gothic novels. 

     As an author of works that aimed for a large purchasing audience, Behn implicitly endorsed the norms of her era.  The imbalance in male and female power in sexual relationships is evident in Fondlove’s impetuous seduction and in her fear that, having had his way, he will no longer wish to be with her.  The move from country to city emphasizes the myriad dangers that might threaten the poor and naïve woman in the city, though Bellamora, through incredible luck, not only escapes all hazards, but also regains her beloved.  The unexpected pregnancy, which had seemed disastrous, becomes an occasion for joy, and the reader may assume that the happy couple will assume their place back in Hampshire as a respected couple.  In this tale the knots of difficulty all vanish in a rapid and satisfying rush, making way for the story to conclude with a tension-releasing joke.

     This final humor is at the expense of the “Overseers of the Poor” whom Behn calls “the vermin of the parish,” well-named, she notes, because they overlook the needy they are supposed to serve.  This satirical touch is surprising because the story itself has little to do with social justice of any kind and includes no lower-class character, though the heroine finds herself in need after leaving her home and losing her possessions.  Though unrelated to the main thread of Behn’s narrative, this social comment adds a sassy note to the speaker’s voice.

     In “The Court of the King of Bantam” which Behn claimed she wrote “upon a wager,” [4] the same story is retold with greater complexity and a different tone.  Again, the plot concerns an upright woman who has a bad suitor and a good one.  She evades the first and marries the second.  Yet in the “King of Bantam” the tone is humorous whereas it had been anxious in “The Black Lady.”  Additional characters ornament the plot line like decorative motifs.  The lady and her good lover are symmetrically supplied with a relative, Sir Philip Friendly assisting and Sir George Goodland retarding the relationship.  Lucy is the less respectable (but still worthy) doublet of Philibella.  While the lady of quality must have a corresponding mate, the reader assumes that Lucy, already compromised by her willingness to take a lover for money, is likely well-pleased at accepting the King after Sir Philip has decided to cast her off. 

     The satirical element plays a greater role here.  The Would-be King, the King of Bantam [5] is ridiculous because he is a parvenu, an arriviste who lacks refinement.  Though genuinely rich from his real estate investments, he is a figure of fun to the others due to his lack of taste.  Associated throughout her life with the party of the court, Behn would not have grudged the greedy accumulation of those of aristocratic birth, but this capitalist King is an absurd pretender.  

     With its paradoxical title, “The Unfortunate Happy Lady” once more tells a tale of a virtuous woman, this time in the most melodramatic terms.  The undesirable marriage option here appears in the extreme form of prostitution and the “barbarous” (50) and profligate brother Sir William Wilding is a heightened version of the pushy families of the first two stories.  Just as Bellamora had happened to lodge at the home of her fiancé’s sister, Philadelphia’s first customer in the brothel turns out to be not only compassionate, but takes up her cause and, in the end, marries her as well.  She is indeed “happy” in his arrival, as her escape depends entirely on his aid while she remains largely passive, contrary to the assertions of contemporary critics who would like to imagine Behn’s anticipating modern ideas of feminism. [6]  The heroine sounds very like countless other demoiselles en détresse when she cries, “’O heaven! . . . thou asserter and guardian of innocence!  Protect me from the impious practices intended against me!’” (57)  She appeals to Gracelove, who thought he had purchased her sexual favors, “”for heaven’s sake, hear and help me!’”    Her virtue is so great that he is instantly reformed and says “’By all things sacred, I find my error; I pity you and I fear I shall love you.’” (58)  Indeed, the beneficent effect of her aura is sufficient even for the rehabilitation of her positively wicked brother.  

     Here the story is elongated and embellished in unlikely ways that do not alter the familiar basic pattern.  Before her happy marriage, the heroine acquiesces in a (presumably unconsummated) brief marriage to Counsellor Fairlaw which places her in comfortable circumstances.  In an exotic nod to adventure tales, the good lover, Mr. Gracelove, who had been abducted by pirates and detained abroad, has the good fortune to be spotted by Philadelphia in a carriage as he trudges down the road.  These additions contribute suspense and pathos while preserving the standard plot.

     “The Fair Jilt” (1688) employs a more radical transformation of the narrative by making a manipulative woman the central figure.  (Novel though it is, Behn may have been influenced by the popularity of The London Jilt; Or, the Politick Whore [1683].)   The story opens with a rhetorical paean to love as “the most noble and divine passion of the soul” which becomes the occasion for another of Behn’s adventitious satires, here ridiculing the self-love of fatuous coxcombs. (72)  The leading lady Miranda is universally admired for her beauty and her accomplishments (as her name implies), yet she is a cynical Beguine, a femme fatale who enjoys her power over men and who “loves nothing so much as to behold sighing slaves at her feet.” (76) 

     Capable of even greater villainy than Sir William Wilding, Philadelphia’s brother, this sinister Miranda first contrives to punish the noble Henrick (who has entered holy orders in reaction to his selfish brother’s having usurped his beloved and then intrigued to have him killed) by a false accusation of rape.  Having married Prince Tarquin [7] and squandered their funds, she seeks to kill her sister Alcidiana for her money at first at the hands of a servant and then through the agency of Tarquin himself.   In one of Behn’s improbable turns which strain her readers’ ability to accept her claims that the story is factual, Tarquin’s execution is botched, whereupon he is pardoned.  Following a life of iniquity, matters are now settled.  Father Francisco, born Henrick, is freed; Alcidiana survives; both Tarquin and Miranda are morally regenerated; and all live subsequently happy lives.  So even this plot bends around in the end to the same conclusion of all the others.  

     The innocent heroine has become a cruel and arrogant villain (a good role perhaps for Joan Crawford [8]) whose iniquities preying upon men match those of the immoral seducers in some of the other stories.  The subsidiary stories of Henrick and Alcidiana grow naturally out of the basic reversed framework; both are virtuous individuals traduced by the wicked Miranda.  Retributive justice takes the life of the servant Van Brune but Tarquin is miraculously spared in a botched execution so that he may provide a match for Miranda to make the required happy ending, leaving Miranda in fact in “as perfect a state of happiness, as this troublesome world can afford.” (116)

     The transformation of convention in these narratives serves several purposes.  These stories foreground certain thematic implications: gender stereotypes such as the lusty man, the weaker woman, and the importance of a good marriage for the female’s survival, as well as the more general hazards of erotic desire.  Apart from these issues, meant to evoke the reader’s unhesitating assent, the use of convention allows the author to manipulate reader expectations.  What the convention may lead one to anticipate may be delivered, heightened, softened, multiplied, twisted, or inverted.  When the writer fulfils the reader’s assumptions, she or he is gratified at a correct presumption, both about the text and about the world to which it refers.  When the convention is altered, there is instead the pleasure of surprise and the possibility for the development of novel ideas, themselves perhaps to be overturned in another generation. 

 

 

1.  See my essay “Transformation of Convention” on this site.  Among the analyses which use this concept are “Transformation of Convention in Early Minnesang” and “The Early English Carol.”

2.  See Propp’s Morphology of the Tale (1928) and Levi-Strauss’s “The structural study of myth,” The Journal of American Folklore 68, (1955) 428–444.  The latter’s so-callled “canonical formula” is fx(a) : fy(b) ≃ fx(b) : fa-1(y). 

3.  Among the countless works using this motif are stories of the Odyssey and the Ramayana, St. Barbara, the Yuan Dynasty play The Injustice Done to Dou E, and the early film serial The Perils of Pauline.  The more immediate context of Behn’s work includes the so-called “amatory fiction” of Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood as well as Defoe’s Roxana and Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Other related fictions include picaresque novels in translation, stories by Paul Scarron, and Richard Head’s The English Rogue (1665) whose later editions were cowritten with Francis Kirkman.

4.  See Behn’s “An Advertisement to the Reader,” prefixed to the text.  She goes on to say she was simply trying to imitate the style of the French writer Paul Scarron.

5.  The name derives from the location on Java where in 1605 the British established a trading post which apparently seemed so exotic as to be somewhat absurd.  The association of the word with diminutive stature (bantam fowl) made the term appropriate for her mocking use here. 

6.  See, for instance, Juan de Dios Torralbo Caballero, “’I drink to thee’: Female agency and female authority as gender reversal in ‘The Unfortunate Happy Lady,’” Études anglaises Volume 69, Issue 4, 2016, 410-426 and Violetta Trofimova, “Liberated Women in Aphra Behn’s and Jane Barker’s Prose Fiction,” Litinfo: Georgian Electronic Journal of Literature vol. V, no. 1, 2011, available at  https://www.litinfo.ge/vol.5-iss-1/trofimova.htm.              

7.  Prince Tarquin claimed a descent from Sextus Tarquinius, son of the last king of Rome, known principally for his rape of Lucretia.  This seems as outlandish a title as King of Bantam. 

8.  One might also think of Bette Davis in Of Human Bondage or Marlene Dietrich in Der Blaue Engel. 

Enoch Arden as Popular Literature

 

 

     In his own day, the prestige of Alfred, Lord Tennyson was immense.  He was the longest-serving Poet Laureate in British history and to many embodied Victorian values in his very skillful, high-minded, and stately works.  A reviewer spoke for a great many, critics as well as the general population, when in the middle of the poet’s career he declared unreservedly “We have no great living poet but Alfred Tennyson.” [1]  His reputation remained potent enough that my generation still read Idylls of the King in junior high where a common curriculum made it many American students’ first substantial poetic text (as well as, perhaps, for many their last). 

     In the 1860s Tennyson was clearly the most prominent of British poets, and Enoch Arden was one of his most popular works, selling 17,000 copies on the day of publication and over 60,000 the first year.  Fancy illustrated gift editions and translations then appeared, both authorized and pirated. [2]  A reviewer hailed the poem as “the most popular poem since the days of Byron.” [3]  The initial review in the New York Times put the author’s name in all capitals, lauding “TENNYSON” as “the poet of the age, whose song reflects faithfully the movement, the intellectual tendencies, the moral conflict, and all that goes to make up the complex sum of our civilization.” [4]  a recent scholar notes that in America editions of Enoch Arden ”were too numerous and their sale too rapid for accurate recording.” [5]

  The poem’s appeal persisted.  In 1897 Richard Strauss wrote a piano composition to be performed along with a dramatic reading of the poem, indicating the poem’s success among Continental readers. [6]   Three stage versions and four silent movie treatments were produced, including a 1922 version by D. W. Griffith. 

     Yet in the marketplace of literature Tennyson’s stock was falling.  Already in 1926 a judicious critic noted “Tennyson pre-eminently represents Victorian literature, a privilege which to-day is in the eyes of many one of his shortcomings.” [6]  Literary judgments of Tennyson’s reputation had dramatically slumped, with writers leading critics in revising their parents’ literary judgement.  Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus, for instance, dismissed the poet, remarking, "Tennyson a poet? Why, he’s only a rhymester," [7] and in Ulysses he is called “Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet.” [8]  Hardy’s late (1922) poem “An Ancient to Ancients” describes the decay of the laureate’s appeal mercilessly yet with a powerful sense of longing, nostalgia, and loss, noting that "The bower we shrined to Tennyson" . . ."is roof-wrecked . . "damps there drip upon/ Sagged seats, the creeper-nails are rust,/ The spider is sole denizen."    

                  The very reasons that made Enoch Arden so popular in its on day limited its long-term literary reputation.  There is no question of Tennyson’s skill and craft.  The greatest master of sound in English poetry since Pope, his melodies are regularly precise and satisfying.  The opening of Enoch Arden has sharp and well-formulated images, with a painterly depiction of the scene.  

                                               a hazelwood,

By autumn nutters haunted, flourishes

Green in a cuplike hollow of the down. 

This opening sketch concludes with the three principals as children making sand castles on the shore, an effective symbolic premonition of their ill-starred plans. 

     Soon, however, qualities emerge that might ultimately prove Tennyson’s aesthetic vulnerabilities.  The vigorous Enoch sometimes bests Philip in a fight, causing his friend to declare, “I hate you, Enoch!”  

                                                          at this

The little wife would weep for company,

And pray them not to quarrel for her sake,

And say she would be little wife to both. (33-36) 

This is surely by most any standards “twee.”  The “little” before “wife” insists on the already cloying cuteness even further.  Tennyson may be salvaged by admirers who could maintain that this prettiness is only a set-up for the cruel caricature that life makes of the “wife to both” notion, [9] but through the rest of the poem he consciously aims at highly-colored sentimental effects emphasizing the cute and the pathetic. 

     The reader of the poem’s latter scenes may think as Enoch wastes away in sickly virtue of Wilde’s well-known line “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.” [10]  Wilde went for aphoristic reversals, but his play was rarely verbal alone.  He justifies his witticism elsewhere, noting “a sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.” [11]   

     From the start a taste for the sentimental found both ardent admirers and mockers.  The earliest citation of the word in the OED is from a 1749 letter which indicates both the term’s novelty and ambiguity, yet also indicates its vogue. "What, in your opinion,” Lady Bradshagel asked Samuel Richardson whose novels were thought to contain fine feelings indeed, “is the meaning of the word sentimental, so much in vogue among the polite...Everything clever and agreeable is comprehended in that word...such a one is a sentimental man; we were a sentimental party; I have been taking a sentimental walk." [12]  Not only “everything clever and agreeable,” that is to say, what is socially attractive, but aesthetic and moral excellence as well were implied by eighteenth century notions of sensibility. [13]  A popular example, albeit using the term “sensibility” rather than “sentimentalism,” indicates the claims of the partisans of feeling.

 

Sweet Sensibility! Thou keen delight!

Thou hasty moral! Sudden sense of right!

Thou untaught goodness! Virtue's precious seed!

Thou sweet precursor of the gen'rous deed!

[14] 

In his History of England (1771) Oliver Goldsmith noted the “refinements” brought to Britain through Roman occupation, but noted “They were only incapable of sentimental pleasure” [15] as though that were the crowning attribute of a sophisticated society. 

     Yet from the time of its birth, the eighteenth-century concept of the “sentimental” also attracted satirists.  Whereas Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) popularized a hero whose sensibilities and the sympathetic bonds with others they inspire form the basis for both a model of a harmonious society and a genuine individual moral virtue, Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (1768) is decidedly more ambivalent.  Yorick is often absurd and misguided when he feels uplifted by lofty sentiments.  In 1784 a poet pointedly associated “mischief” with “your dying sentimentals,” [16] referring to the habit of fainting by men and women of sensitivity in novels and, apparently, in person.  An anonymous Veronese painting from 1750 depicts “A Lady Fainting During a Party.”  So many fictional protagonists were prone to such incidents that Jane Austen in her juvenile novel Love and Freindship [sic] (1790), imitating but also reacting against Samuel Richardson, a character prudently provides advice to another: “Beware of swoon, dear Laura . . . Run mad as often as you chuse, but do not faint.”

     In 1797 Coleridge published a set of sonnets attributed to Nehemiah Higginbottom satirizing the vogue of sensibility, what he called in Biographia Literaria “the spirit of doleful egotism.” [17]  The appeal of sentiment was not in fact vanishing, though.  It was probably increasing, becoming perhaps less prominent among poets and the upper reaches of the beau-monde but more popular among the less well-to-do and less educated.  As late as 1899 an article in a popular magazine celebrated "The Decay of Sensibility" but demonstrated its persistence as well by saying “the modern young woman does not swoon promiscuously.”  She no longer “at the slightest shock shuts up into a pink, formless pulp.” [18]

     Fainting, however, was just one of the more dramatic representations of vulnerability to feelings.  Though in Enoch Arden no one faints, it seems to the modern taste far too sentimental.  Sentimentality describes excessive emotion (clearly a matter subject to taste and judgement) or the unseemly enjoyment of the spectacle of a character’s emotions unjustified by sufficient artistic or thematic role.   

        But “excessive” and “unseemly” are value judgements from which the masses may dissent.  Sentimentality has always been popular because of its simplicity.  It is straightforward, unambiguous, luxurious, and easily understood.  Charles Cary Rumsey’s sculpture of a “Dying Indian” is sentimental because it invites the viewer to feel a sweet sadness about the displacement of native Americans “free of charge” to use the imagery of Wilde and Joyce, that is, in a reductive and facile view. [19]  Similarly Enoch Arden posits an unusual hero.  While most heroes exemplify characteristics prized in their culture and inspire people to imitation, Enoch is specifically meant to elicit strong emotions in the sensitive reader by his passive submission.  The reader’s pleasure is directly inspired by Enoch’s suffering. 

     Though all overdone pathos might be in questionable taste, the poem’s climactic focus on death in the nearly hagiographical Enoch Arden heightens Tennyson’s aesthetic risk, though it clearly increases as well his demands on the reader’s sentiment.  Such pleasures do not suit the modern taste.  Even those who relish the works of Edgar Allen Poe are likely to hesitate before his celebrated dictum declaring the death of a beautiful woman “the most poetical topic in the world.”  “Beauty,” Poe continues, “of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.”

     The emotional appeal to the picturesque, the sentimental, the easy laugh or tear is part of what allows a work to be popular.  It must be assimilable at first scan, avoiding the complexities of character in works considered “high art.”  A parallel relation exists between the themes of popular art and “high” art.   Popular works, including orally transmitted material and commercial popular art of either “folk” or mass culture provenance tend necessarily to reinforce received ideas, reassuring the audience of the correctness of the community’s consensus, transmitting values to the young, celebrating a culture’s (or subculture’s) values.  In contrast, elite, academic, and learned art is likely to point out the lapses or contradictions of social and intellectual norms, to challenge readers’ expectations, and to develop innovative forms.  Such poetry foregrounds ambiguities, ambivalences, contradictions, and mysteries, causing readers to question what is accepted.  

     Tennyson wishes to approve the institution of faithful marriage, yet the life of an honest and hard-working fisherman would, however desirable in a citizen, have little to recommend it to a reader.  A harmonious marriage, though it be a practical and moral ideal, would make an uneventful love story.  How many pop songs celebrate a happy marriage?  Tennyson seeks to regain the excitement that he loses by being so proper by exaggerating his emotional scenes and indulging in overdone pathos, in a word, by his practice of sentimentalism.

     He also, for all the Crabbe-like “realism” of the setting [21], did not hesitate to include unlikely, all-but-fairytale elements. Enoch’s prolonged disappearance as a castaway, his glimpse of the domestic scene of Annie and Philip, and his subsequent wasting away, all the while unknown to the happy couple need not be plausible. Their goal is to render possible not the happy ending so common in popular art, but the more intense option, a lugubrious one, lifted to sublimity by affording Enoch the opportunity to act with wholly selfless great-heartedness. He pauses then beyond the virtue of the monogamous spouse to the altruism of the saintly. This extreme, while it exalts the hero, removes him safely from the realm of daily lived experience. 

     The poem’s concluding lines have been a subject of considerable discussion. 

            And when they buried him the little port

Had seldom seen a costlier funeral.

 The contrast between Philip’s affluence and Enoch’s poverty had been a theme from the start.   Enoch only went to sea in order to provide for his family, though his more sensitive wife could see the ominous future.  Part of his reluctance to disturb Annie and Philip upon his return is because they have such a comfortable and secure life.  Just as Philip had had to bear the cost of educating Enoch’s children, so he also pays for Enoch’s funeral.  We resist the assumption that a lavish ceremony is something grand and good.  But there can be little doubt that for Tennyson the line was straightforward. The expenditure was a tribute to the “brave heroic soul” who had passed away.  The laureate unquestioningly participates in bourgeois values, improving his chances of a large readership but damaging his name among the cognoscenti.

     Unsurprisingly, some recent critics has sought to rehabilitate “Enoch Arden,” not by the intriguing route of recovering sentimentalism itself, but by pointing to the fissures and contradictions in his text as evidence of irony in order to make the tale acceptable to moderns. [22]   Both approaches are likely fruitful.  Just as other genres from the early Chinese novel to American comic strip art, once ignored by the literati, have received fruitful attention, as we have become more accepting of outsider art, the camp, and the kitsch, perhaps the sentimental is due for a re-evaluation.  Yet wherever one assigns value, whatever one’s taste, the generic characteristics of the popular and the sophisticated will remain distinct, each pursuing different goals by the most appropriate methods.  The very qualities that made Enoch Arden a roaring success with some audiences have also made it wholly ignored or disdained in others. 

 

 

 1.     The North American Review (vol. 100, p. 305) notes the publication of illustrated editions which “meet the demand of the general public for ornamental books which may serve as pretty gifts.”

 2.      The Union Review, vol. 3 (1865), p. 132.

 3.      New York Times, August 10, 1864.  The writer went continued, “Readers full of strong sympathetic admiration trace in TENNYSON the poet of the age, whose song reflects faithfully the movement, the intellectual tendencies, the moral conflict, and all that goes to make up the complex sum of our civilization.”

 4.      In 1962 Strauss’ Enoch Arden was recorded by Claude Rains and Glenn Gould and, the following year, received a Grammy nomination in the category of Best Documentary or Spoken Word Recording. in 1962.

 5.      Norman Page, “Tennyson’s Sense of an Ending: the Problem of ‘Enoch Arden’,” Tennyson Research Bulletin, Vol. 10, No. 3 (November 2014), pp. 219-235.

 6.      Émile Legouis and Louis Cazamian. A History of English Literature. London: J. M. Dent.  1169.

 7.      A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, chapter 2.

 8.      Ulysses, 3.492.  Lawn tennis was considered a particularly genteel game.  The satirical nickname for Tennyson had been used in Punch and other humor magazines since the 1870s, so by Joyce’s time even the humor must have had a musty air about it. 

 9.      Indeed, the processes of taste are dynamic.  Since the seminal work by Susan Sontag in Notes on “Camp,” many have sought to recover the aesthetic value by revaluing rejected materials, sometimes with humorous or ironic intent.  To mention only a few phenomena among many, see Odd Nerdrum’s theory of kitsch, scan James Parker “The Twee Revolution,” in the Atlantic, July-August 2014, or survey the pervasive Japanese fascination with what they call kawaii. 

 10.   Ada Leverson, Letters to the Sphinx.  Wilde, who claimed to prefer Disraeli’s novels, doubtless envied Dickens’ immense popularity.

 11.   De profundis.

 12.   Lady Bradshagel (Balfour) to Samuel Richardson, published in his Correspondance (1804) IV. 282.  See also Allen Sprague, “The Date of Sentimental and its Derivatives,” PMLA vol. 48 (1933), 303-307.

 13.   See, for instance, Adam Smith’s The Theory Of Moral Sentiments.

 14.   Lines 337–340 of Hannah More’s “Sensibility: An Epistle to the Honourable Mrs. Boscawen.”  More was a prominent social reformer and religious thinker as well as being a poet, playwright, and a leading Bluestocking.

 15.   Oliver Goldsmith, History of England, 28.

 16.   Unfortunate Sensibility; or the Life of Mrs. L-, Written by herself. In a Series of sentimental Letters, dedicated to Mr. Yorick in the Elysian Fields. 2 Vols. 6s. Richardson and Urquhart.

 17.   Ch. 1.  Coleridge makers it clear that he was parodying himself as well as Southey, Lamb, and Lloyd.

18.   The Cornhill Magazine, July 1899.

 19.   Rumsey’s work is from the first decade of the twentieth century.  A good many similar works were produced, among them “The Wounded Indian” (anonymous 1848), Ferdinand Pettrich’s “The Dying Tecumseh” (1856), and Thomas Crawford’s “The Dying Chief” (1875).  The stricken Indian shares with the cheerful Black jockey hitching posts an utterly non-threatening view of the Other.

 20.   “The Philosophy of Composition,” Graham’s Magazine, vol. XXVIII, no. 4, April 1846.

 21.   One of Tennyson’s influences was Crabbe’s “The Parting Hour.”

 22.   See, for instance, James R. Kincaid, Tennyson’s Major Poems: the Comic and Ironic Pattern.  Kincaid describes the ironic view, but then adds, “Everyone recognizes, though, that this is a wild misreading.”

Not Quite a Jackpot: Erskine Caldwell's Short Stories

     Whatever else may be said of him, Erskine Caldwell was prodigiously productive and wildly popular. Though his best-known works were early -- Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre -- he was the author of several dozen novels, something like a hundred and fifty short stories, and a variety of other works. Attempts to censor at least two of his novels resulted in considerable notoriety and sizable sales. For the next twenty-five years he enjoyed best-seller status with his work widely available in inexpensive trade paperbacks offered in the racks in bus stations and drug stores with cover art and copy promising erotic fiction. The formula worked so well that he sold eventually something like a hundred million books.
     He received attention from the start as a regionalist at a time when the American South seemed almost as fertile a field for fiction as the Jewish Lower East Side, and he doubtless benefited from the vogue for the proletarian novel and perhaps from liberal indignation at the attempts to ban his work, yet his critical reputation never approached his enormous sales. Apart from his exceedingly successful career as an author of potboilers, his belief in the eugenics movement and his conviction that many of the “poor white trash” were irredeemably degenerate through some biological devolution eventually alienated many of his progressive supporters.
     The weighty volume of stories titled Jackpot, over seven hundred pages, seems at times like a collection of improvisations. The language is simple, direct, and transparent, but not in the exaggerated way associated with Hemingway. Each piece is very short, no longer than it might take a front porch lounger to deliver a bit of neighborhood news, satisfactorily heightened to make an impact.
     Some of Caldwell’s stories do sound like just such gossipy anecdotes, a few have the ring of regionalist tales like those of George Washington Harris. Stories like “Meddlesome Jack” and “It Happened Like This,” and “Hamrick’s Polar Bear” sound like anecdotes that might have been current in oral form. As much, though as Caldwell is identified as a close observer of poor and feckless white Southerners, he had little difficulty in switching to similar characters in rural Maine when he lived there.
     Caldwell was capable of social realism as protest as well, displayed in stories such as “Slow Death” and “Knife to Cut the Corn Bread With.” He pulls no punches in the depiction of vicious and violent racism as in “The End of Christy Tucker,” “Blue Boy,” and “The Negro in the Well.” A sort of mute, unthinking violence lurks always near the surface of his action, breaking out in stories like “The Growing Season,” “The First Autumn,” and “The Shooting.”
     He was, of course, best-known for sexual content, an appeal enhanced by paperback cover art by artists like James Avati and Hans Helweg. A good many of the stories in Jackpot describe the dawn of desire in adolescents who barely understand their feelings as in “The Strawberry Season” or “Indian Summer,” sometimes in a comic vein as in “A Day’s Wooing,” “Snacker,” or “Where the Girls Were Different.” Erotic desire may be mysteriously inexorable as in “Warm River,” “Crown-fire,” or “A Dream,” rudely imperative as in “Midsummer Passion,” or calculating as in “Maud Island.”
     These last two stories also illustrate the characteristic mixture of sex and violence typical of an author who presents virtually no examples of real and mutual love. In “Rachel” the theme of adolescent sexuality is combined with excruciating poverty. The narrator glimpses Rachel’s “sinuous beauty” at the moment she begins to die from ingesting rat poison. In “Martha Jean” another indigent young girl is raped, and in “The Lonely Day” Katherine is led to her death by an irresistible siren call of naked frolics.
     My copy of Jackpot, the 1943 Sun Dial Press edition, includes brief headnotes for each story in a bluff style presaging the author’s late career in men’s magazines with names like Gent, Cavalier, and Male. While stressing his identity as a writer, these regularly suggest the informal, almost chance character of his compositions and ridicule critics with authentic American anti-intellectual vitriol in terms like “bloated middleman.” Such critics, according to Caldwell, “make a profession of tearing flesh from bone” and, failing to understand a story, they may well ”set out to prove that the author was a jail-bird and a wife-beater.” Oddly, though his career was in fact launched by the celebrated editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's who published and promoted him after he had been recommended by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Caldwell in these notes repeatedly ridicules a certain Prof. Perkins, making him the surrogate for all the pointy-headed critics who did not sufficiently praise his work.
     Perhaps the truest note of Caldwell’s sensibility is suggested by a story such as “The Automobile that Wouldn’t Run” whose protagonist prefers to avoid work if possible and to sit in an engineless car serenading a lady with his banjo. According to another of his prefatory notes his wise grandfather maintained that “storytelling was a bastard art because it had been created by tellers of tales for the sole purpose of making laziness respectable.” The same sage, he says, rated every story “either a hum-dinger” or else “god-awful.” Substitute a typewriter for a banjo and one might approach Caldwell’s idealized version of himself. This insouciant image of the artist may not be wholly a pose. Once Caldwell learned how to sell his work, he turned out appropriate product in sufficient quantity to support himself. When he says that he does not read his own work the reader may guess that that policy includes eschewing revision.

An opinion that goes against the grain is often more engaging that a reinforcement of the general view of others. I am afraid I can only agree with the critics Caldwell feared. In the best moments as I read his stories, I was reminded of the unsparing though often comic portrayals of small towns in Huckleberry Finn where ignorance thrives and violence is never far off. The racial themes are reminiscent of Faulkner and the erotic ones of Nabokov, but simply mentioning these names emphasizes how far Caldwell fell short of the achievements of the American masters. Nonetheless, he has a place in the history of literature. These stories seem to me, however, less a jackpot than a modest trickling weekly allowance, dependable if never dazzling.

Tarkington’s Vulgarian Hero [The Plutocrat]

I would perhaps never have read this had I not come upon a copy of the 1927 Doubleday first edition in a Salvation Army store. The title (with “The” alone oddly italicized) is pasted with a graphic of travel decals to the front and the spine and the endpapers are marbled. A discreet label in the back identifies it as having been originally purchased at the Washington, D. C. Brentano’s. Successive penciled used bookstore notations record prices of two dollars and one dollar before the volume ended up as a donation.

The few page numbers in parentheses refer to this edition. Numbers in brackets are endnotes.

I. a philistine paragon

     Virtually all those who have commented on Tarkington during the last few decades have begun by noting the extraordinary decline in his literary reputation since his death and I shall be no different. In the early twentieth century Tarkington was immensely popular. His books regularly lingered on the best-seller lists, and many were made into films, including the Welles classic The Magnificent Ambersons. The film version of The Plutocrat (called Business for Pleasure) starred the beloved Will Rogers as Tinker. Tarkington received the Pulitzer Prize twice. His Penrod was once as popular as Huckleberry Finn. In his youth he successfully sought election to the Indiana legislature considering such service part of a wealthy family’s responsibilities. Curiously, the author who had once been so thoroughly mainstream as to be celebrated by critics and a mass audience alike now appears as something of an outlier.
     Were one to see a novel titled The Plutocrat by Jack London or George Norris or Upton Sinclair, one would expect a muckraking expose of the fat cats’ misdeeds. Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald would be expected to satirize the subject more or less broadly. Who but Booth Tarkington, though, would have actually made the vulgar rich man his hero, and this on the cusp of the Great Depression? In politics he was staunchly conservative, not to say reactionary. He not only supported Prohibition and opposed the New Deal; he never could quite accept the advent of the automobile.
     Tarkington was by no means unconscious of the conundrum of artistic success in the early twentieth century; he was defensively anxious to secure his place in the spectrum of American literature. The issue of artistic prominence is a central theme of The Plutocrat. To Ogle’s artistic associates Jones and Macklyn the playwright’s appeal to the “Many” as opposed to the “Few” is a mark of aesthetic mediocrity. The poet and the painter who consider popularity a sign the artist has given in to “the mob” are portrayed with a kind of explicit brittle snobbery every bit as much a caricature as that of the Midwestern businessman. The thematic thrust of the novel, though, is not symmetrical. The satire of the artists is validated while the philistine turns out to be in fact admirable. The reader is brought around to the position of the mediating figure of his daughter Olivia who appreciates her father’s heroic qualities while remaining quite aware of his absurdity.
     There can be no suspicion of ambiguity or irony in the book’s theme. It was published shortly after Babbitt and looked very much like a riposte, though Tarkington (perhaps looking down his nose) claimed he had never read Lewis’s novel. The comparison was not lost on the New York Times reviewer whose article was headlined “Booth Tarkington Draws A Heroic Babbitt.” [1]
     Much of the book is less about Tinker’s greatness than about Ogle’s shortcoming in being unable to perceive it. When Ogle finds himself “the only person of the whole ship’s company who went about Gibraltar alone,” he questions his own standards. “He could almost have wished that nature had made him a little less exclusive.” Tarkington suggests that this fault of character had been produced by Ogle’s “lonely and satiric father” who believed in a small band of elect distinguished by superior culture. Thus he had no fellow-feeling with others, seeing them rather as caricatures while he could not see himself in that light. (182-183) After a couple of hundred pages of shallow but merciless satire of all characters, including Olivia, who proves ultimately insightful, the reader might be forgiven for taking Tarkington’s description of Ogle as a self-portrait.
     Ogle is obliged to question his own habitual value judgements in the face of Mme. Momoro’s apparent fondness for the loud Mr. Tinker, and then by Dr. Medjila’s apparently more disinterested appreciation. From that latter scholar comes the suggestion that this man whom he had instantly despised was in fact “the new Roman.” (473) [2] He comes to accept this and the reader can hardly disagree when the narrator informs the reader explicitly that Ogle by story’s end “had suffered some enlightenments and improved his knowledge of himself.” (534)
     Ogle, of course, had the inducement of the allure of Tinker’s daughter Olivia to persuade him that there may be more to her father than he had at first expected. It is true that the businessman is idealistically depicted as fascinated by urban planning, water systems and the like associated with general social improvement rather than projects valued for their money-making potential. If one is to admire Tinker, one must assume that advancing the interests of the plutocrats is equivalent to advancing society itself, a conviction that ignores that brutality of capitalism, more nakedly undeniable in those days before the New Deal. Working people and the poor make no appearance in the story, except in the nameless North Africans, portrayed as sulking and silent except when uncontrollably animated. Olivia twits Ogle about his resemblance to these less-than-human figures, but, as we know, he recovers his cordiality when he learns to admire the rich.
     Vernon L. Parrington, a few years before the publication of The Plutocrat, called Tarkington “the great failure in contemporary literature.” “His art,” wrote Parrington, was “destroyed by love of popularity.” Tarkington for him is “a perennial sophomore” who sought only to gratify his “middle-class” readers at whom Parrington looked down his nose and called “lovers of comfortable literature.” [3] Is this the voice of the supercilious snobs Jones and Macklyn? If so, it is also my voice and not so different from the voices of most knowledgeable critics. Though it is generally more enlightening and lively as well to overturn expectations and to move against the current, when the aesthetes and the philistines are choosing up sides, it is difficult to be a contrarian.


1. New York Times, January 9, 1927. The piece went on to define the novel’s theme in confusing if semi-Tarkingtonian terms: “Mr. Tarkington has put his pen at the service of an ideal -- the ideal of an American cosmopolitanism as opposed to a parochial sophistication.”

2. It would have been considerably more difficult to pass off Mr. Tinker as a “new Greek,” of course.

3. Vernon L. Parrington, Maincurrents in American Thought, "Addenda 1917-1924." P. 375.




II. a Tarkington fan

I quote here from Smith’s remarks as recorded in volume 25 of the Proceedings of the Indiana Bar Association, p. 65.

     That final paragraph suggests that my own notions and those of the academy (and whatever other literati might be said to exist in this belated period) were as much in peril of being caricatures as those of Jones, Macklyn, and the brittle Ogle that preceded his enlightenment. Like it or not, we were enacting the role of elitist aesthetes. Given pause, we might then wonder, if Tarkington did not write for literary specialists, to whom would Tinker seem appealing? Surely working people are an unlikely audience. The current president is a genuine crass businessman, but his ego is too colossal to admit any object but itself. We have, however, the recorded comments of a somewhat lesser Midwest grandee. Perhaps the praise of one who appreciates Tarkington will reveal something of the source of his appeal.
    Consider whether the encomium of Tarkington from a prominent judge whose very name sounds like a fictional creation does not sound very much like Earl Tinker. F. Dumont Smith addressed the Joint Illinois and Indiana Bar Associations:

Undoubtedly, today, the consensus of opinion in the literary world of America, is that Booth Tarkington is the dean of American letters, and unquestionably he is the greatest fiction writer in America, today. I think that would be conceded by almost anyone. But I go further than that – I say he is the greatest fiction writer that America has ever produced.

     Smith is here complimenting his hosts on a native son, but the tone of boosterism is evident in his extravagant final statement. Should anyone doubt Smith’s ability to make such grand literary judgements, he offers his bona fides:

I have written a couple of books, myself, and many magazine articles, and when they built the great Kansas City Club, at an expenditure of one and a half million dollars, they came out to Hutchinson, Kansas, and selected me as chairman of the Library Committee.

     His claim to himself an author is quite true, but what is revealing is that he uses that as a mere prelude to the real source of his pride, his role in a very expensive businessman’s club. He boasted as well of being a Knight Templar Mason, a member of the Mystic Shrine, as well as of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, the Knights of Pythias, the Ancient Order of United Workmen, and the Woodmen of the World.
     After these pleasantries, Smith went on to his more serious business, praising recent Kansas legislation outlawing strikes.

Sir Isumbras and the Functions of the Fabulous

     As soon as language appeared, it became possible to describe things contrary to reality, facilitating lying and allowing the emergence of religion and literature. The appetite of the pious for marvels knows no boundaries in space or time; supernatural events provide marvelous entertainment and add the simplest seal of authenticity for every sadhu, faith healer, priest and shaman. Miracles continue to occur regularly if one believes the tales of the faithful.
     There is, however, no controversy over the unreality of all imaginative literature. Every story is made up, in this sense a “lie;” it makes no claim to have actually happened and thus be “true.” Every poem is also a little work of fiction, with a persona saying things the author imagined might be said. As Aristotle knew, literature provides quite a different sort of truth. In fact, both verisimilitude and fabulation are rhetorical figures, the former suggesting a complex of attitudes arising from an apparently plausible plot and the latter making use of a story’s improbability .
     Those utterly unsophisticated in visual art sometimes tend to think that the best painting is the most real-looking. (Naïve as it is, this notion has a continuous history reaching back to antiquity.) By a similar standard of judgment, verisimilitude would be the mark of the best writing. One might using this criterion criticize a novel’s conclusion as implausible, the description of a city as quite unlike the original, or dialogue as stilted. Such points are indeed salient, but only if the narrative had already established an expectation of realism making the offending passage dissonant.
     In fact a great deal of literature employs unrealistic turns of plot altogether appropriate, indeed necessary, for the effects and themes of a given work. The myths by which humans structure and understand their world include none of the restraints of lived experience. Heroes and villains die and are reborn, they possess the power of invisibility, heal the sick and raise the dead. Their reality is symbolic and not literal. Similarly, the conventions of romance involve the most incredible coincidences and pairings, the most improbable reappearances and denouements. Folk tales, too, are often utterly supernatural from the start, though many rely on spirits and goblins rather than deities.
     Verisimilitude and its opposite both make an impression on the reader. The many critics who have pondered whether Sir Isumbras is a courtly romance or a religious quasi-hagiography neglect to observe what the two genres have in common: both saints’ lives and chivalric narrative allow themselves conventions that stray far from realism.
     The sort of entertainment Sir Isumbras offers may seem in little demand today. in the narration of a medieval Job [1], whose travails mount until he accepts his guilt and, having performed extravagant penance, finds his material as well as spiritual well-being restored as a result. As a tail-rhyme romance, the account is clearly meant for popular amusement rather than for catechism; the poem certainly arose and circulated apart from any ecclesiastical imprimatur, yet is was an age when the canonical saints themselves had careers recorded as rather more lively with miraculous manifestations than the readers’ lived experience.
     The boldly dramatic turns in Sir Isumbras’ life are told with little concern for verisimilitude. After the talking bird sent by Christ sets the plot in motion, a reader or listener not swept along by the story might wonder at the lion, leopard, and unicorn that carry off his sons with such regularity, or at their miraculous reappearance in his hour of need without any explanation of what had happened in the meantime. His wife’s failure to recognize him after his long service as an ironworker is likewise implausible (as his her treatment by her captor and her immediate ascendance to rule in his absence). Sir Isumbras’ restoration to prosperity with which the tale ends is as flat and simple as the end of the book of Job. A griffin’s steals his gold, but then it fortuitously reappears. Anything can happen, it seems, that the narrator wishes to propose.
     All these extraordinary events are far from random. They serve the ends of the romance just as similar improbabilities fill other romances from Daphnis and Chloe to The Winter’s Tale. In the first place, use of the fabulous is a sign of the aesthetic text. Though marvels and the supernatural appear as well in texts centered on history, travel, or even science, as well as religion, such showy violations of natural law are characteristic of imaginative literature. The reader accepts with relish the fact that fictions have no limits as surely as did those who were listening to the Wife of Bath when she began “In th' olde dayes of the kyng arthour . . .”
     The fabulous plot elements also provide a measure of structural symmetry, marking off the central portion of the tale with its action from the backstory, the long central portion of penitential labor in the ironworks, and the denouement. Rather like the working out of a well-designed farce, every element – in this case, the wife, the three sons, and the throne – returns with a satisfying inevitability once the pattern is set into motion.
     The chief appeal of the fantastic is surely, though, the timeless pleasure of recreationally contemplating the amazing and the impossible. Indeed, England no less than India, enjoyed stories featuring marvels of all sorts [2] and a good many religious narratives as well as heroic battle narratives catered to a taste akin to that of lovers of science fiction and fantasy. Miracles in art and in language were the equivalent of the special effects so prominent in films today, relished for their very improbability. The world of superheroes in comics and films is part of a lineage that includes such varied texts as Jataka Buddha stories and Sir John Mandeville.
     Virtually all the romances include religious formulae and Sir Isumbras is not unique among them in its foregrounding of the theme of salvation. [3] The presence of miraculous events is a universal sign of divine activity, so the episodes related of the penitential knight might be considered to bolster the Gospel stories of Christ walking on water and raising the dead. The small bird that posed Sir Isumbras the question of whether he preferred happiness at the beginning or the end of his life was the direct agent of Jesus Christ. The whole story is a dramatic enactment of Providence modeling original sin, repentance and penitence, and the felicity that accompanies acceptance of God’s grace. Though the narrated events are sensational, they reflect thereby only the more strongly the culture’s hegemonic ideology about the course of every Christian life.
     Yet there lurks a contradiction in that Christian confidence. Sir Isumbras is not susceptible to the sort of programmatic allegorical reading applicable to, say, The Faery Queen or Pilgrim’s Progress. The story cannot be read purely as an ingenious thematic statement, and for that reason its realism cannot be wholly dismissed as an issue. The gap between the reader and the hero is yawning wide. Though one might call Sir Isumbras an everyman in his sin, repentance, and salvation, he is unlike anyone’s lived experience in his having lived so high, sunk so low, and endured such extraordinary suffering before his marvelous deliverance. The inexorable retributive justice which first condemns the hero to prolonged suffering and humiliation and later restores him to prosperity seems to belong to a world apart from that of lived experience just as Christ’s miracles and the supernatural events of the Hebrew scriptures are remote in time and place. After appreciating the justice meted out to Sir Isumbras, after all, the reader or listener returns to a far less visibly just world. The church would maintain that all accounts are balanced in the afterlife, but this assurance has not always determined the behavior of those who identify as believers. In a way Sir Isumbras is a poignant wish, reflecting more how the world lacks justice than solid confidence that all will be right in the end.
     The rhetoric of fancy in which anything can happen is exhilarating. The poet, like a magician, can attract a considerable audience by making rabbits appear out of hats or sawing attractive assistants in two. This entertainment value may indeed be its formal cause in the Aristotelean sense, but the role of the fabulous is significant in what a medieval churchman would have considered the poem’s central purpose to be its teaching of Christian precepts. Even dealing with dogma, however, art is subtle enough to introduce contradictions, tensions, and uncertainties into the narrative by use of the very same “unrealistic” incidents which at the same time hammer home central points of doctrine.



1. Sir Isumbras elides the central issue of Job by the knight’s clear sin of pride before his fall.

2. See, for instance my “Sacred Space as Sideshow” (http://williamseaton.blogspot.com/2010/02/sacred-space-as-sideshow.html).

3. Dieter Mehl’s The Middle English Romances of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries proposes a subgenre of “homiletic romances” which includes Sir Isumbras as well as The King of Tars, Robert of Sicily, Sir Gowther, Emaré, Le Bone Florence of Rome, Athelston, The Sege of Melayne, and Cheuelere Assigne.