Arria Marcella by Theophile Gautier (1852)

Another slice of voluptuousness. Whereas many of the author's pieces in this mode were published early on, this one proves that the preoccupation was a long-lived one, as it was published in 1852, a good decade and a half into his career. In this, three sensualist young Italian men visit Pompeii and are fascinated by the ruins and artifacts retrieved for the museum. Gautier describes them and their impressions very much from a Parisian standpoint, likenings abounding to French originals and ways of thinking. Max and Fabio are fairly straightforward creatures, Octavian is a historic dreamer. He becomes obsessed by one of the 'casts' displayed in a glass cabinet, which outlines the form of a superbly rounded young woman delineated into a casing of ash and cinders. At dinner that night, with the wine flowing, Max and Fabio rib Octavian about his melancholic fascination with this twenty-centuries-dead creature. When they tumble off to a drunken sleep, Octavian, who is less affected, decides that he'll go for a walk in the ruins as he can't sleep. But under the pressure of the wine, the enchanted moonlight and the urgent call of his soul, he begins to see Pompeii come to life as it was in AD 79. It starts with shadows flitting just out of eyeline and then buildings resume their complete shapes. He begins to see the denizens walking the streets in full view. Then they start to notice him and wonder at his strange attire. Eventually, a young man of the town takes him under his wing as an incomer who needs a welcome. He organises for Octavian to attend the play that is about to be put on. The audience mutter confusedly and curiously about Octavian when he enters the amphitheatre, but they are quickly distracted by the comedy on stage, as is he. Part way through he notices among those in an adjoining stand a young woman who absolutely arrests his attention. As he marvels over her sultry beauty the realisation dawns on him that this is the original of the 'cast' in the museum! Arria Marcella herself is before him. She notices him too, and after the play has her slave Tyche seek him out for an assignation. Tyche leads him through the alleys of the town to the home where, twenty centuries later, the melancholy cast was found, now resplendently beautiful. After he undergoes a ritual bathing, the two finally meet and talk, Arria Marcella explaining that it is his belief in her and the profound urgings of his soul that have brought her back to corporeality. Their sensuality heightens until the curtain is brushed aside angrily and they are faced with her father, Arrius Diomedes, a believer in the then new cult of Christ. He excoriates Arria Marcella for her sensualist ways, exhorts her to stop, and having received a defiant negative, screams out an exorcism which defeats her. She crumbles back to dust in Octavian's arms, her father disappears, and he slumps to insensibility in a small chamber in what is now again the ruins. This is lovely, deeply coloured and entertaining stuff, which Gautier uplifts to other heights with discursions upon the power of the imaginations of true believers and what they mean to art, and psychological and historical detail which enliven it.

La Vie Errante by Guy de Maupassant (1890)

Published two years before Maupassant died, this feels, in some senses, like a posthumous piece. The editing is a little odd, allowing him to repeat strong impressions and colourings in a couple of places only a few paragraphs after they were first employed, almost like the editors were suffering, by that stage, from Great Author Syndrome, and wouldn't gainsay him. It is a much more beautiful and satisfying piece than its companion, Au Soleil. After a niggly first chapter which bodes badly, complaining narkily about the Eiffel Tower, we are taken on a tour of the western Mediterranean by boat. The most gorgeous of these impressions is that of Sicily, which is rampant with colour, exoticism and poetic breadth, taking in its vulcanism and history fundamentally. Then there is an extended land tour of Algiers and, most importantly, Tunisia, where he explores profoundly the richness of the place from a European-eye view. He is fascinated by Islam and its adherents, and critical of them too in some senses - very much a colonial attitude underpinned with a strong sense of intrigue and mesmerizedness-with-the-alien. His descriptions of the landscape are powerfully evocative; swamps, mires, white towns, terrains of cactus-growth and rock, ancient ruins, decorations of mosques, religious compounds and private houses, mirages, mists, the huge variety of the colourings and moods and wear of the people themselves. One of the examples of the author's work where his ability with fluid verbal decoration and addiction to his version of truthfulness are allowed full sway without being drowned out in snarkish attitude and over-simplified concentration on the negative. Quite quietly stirring.

Miss Fallowfield's Fortune by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler (1908)

This one marked a change of publisher, and one wonders why. Did she feel dissatisfied with Hutchinson and seek new energies elsewhere? Did Hutchinson reject this? I feel it must be the former, considering how well she continued to do, and Cassell were the lucky recipients. My copy is from the fifth thousand in the first year of publication, so things appear to have gone well in this first instance. This one is not markedly different, in terms of contents, to those which it succeeded, but whether it's my brainscape talking, or whether there is a slight alteration, it feels a little more airy, bright and confident than she has for a while. The story is of a young woman mid-century who loses her lover before their marriage, but is nominated by him to receive the enormous fortune his uncle has just bestowed upon him. Thus Charlotte Fallowfield becomes a wealthy woman on her own in the world. We skip forward in time to her very well-established in the manor house at Dinglewood in the midlands (Fowler's favourite territory, re-dubbed, as she always does, Mershire), which is a fairly small village. There is with her her niece, the daughter of her dead sister Phoebe, to whom we had been introduced earlier. Dagmar is young and beautiful, of course, and quite forthright, like her mother. It is at this point that the really enjoyable humour of this piece is introduced, in two forms. One is a chorus of women of the village who meet to knit, sew and read improving books, and gossip like hell. Thelma Barlow, Pam Ferris, Deborah Findlay and other actresses perfectly calibrated for these roles immediately come to mind. The other is in some subsidiary characters who have puffed up opinions of themselves, particularly a young journalist with the improbable name of Octavius Rainbrow, and a persistently disappointed young cleric with snooty tendencies whose savage mother is part of the sewing circle, Theophilus Sprott. The push and shove comes when a new vicar is touted for the parish and, as usual, Theophilus misses out, disgracing himself with hopelessly propounded self-congratulatory views and no 'people-sense' whatsoever. The man who is offered the job comes from a little further north, has lost his wife, and has a son in his early twenties with him who spikes the local female interest. Dagmar also takes an interest in Claude, but they are doomed to a lot of misunderstanding in their primary, opinionated and varyingly idealistic natures. However, as they are more mature, the affinity between Charlotte and Luke Forrester, the new vicar, is quickly developed. They marry and head off to Australia on a very extended honeymoon. But, on the way their ship strikes a reef in the Indian Ocean, and all aboard perish, bar one, Octavius Rainbrow, who has accompanied them. Before this is known, though, the probate court operate on the interesting assumption that Forrester would have been likely to have survived his wife, being a stronger male, and that therefore the fortune should go to his son Claude rather than Dagmar. Once Rainbrow returns to Mershire, and explains that Forrester went down in the ship quite quickly, but Charlotte was with him in one of the boats and survived a few days, it becomes clear to the probate court that the fortune should go to Dagmar instead. This means that an architecturally beautiful retreat-style religious house that Claude has started building will no longer be funded. Dagmar asks him once she's re-inherited to continue building it, but instead to dedicate it to her favourite passion, an orphanage. Claude is pretty devastated by the loss of his dream, but complies. Through these testing monetary times, when absolute enmity could have eventuated, he and Dagmar have managed to remain not only civil, but connected as friends. Dagmar is more aware than he is (he is lost in his dreams of the helping of humankind) and sees eventually that the dream which he has embraced is not a slap in her face, but rather something quite separate, and part of his soul. She makes a deep sacrifice to her own dreams, and foregoes the beloved idea of her orphanage so that Claude can have his 'monastery' (an Anglican institution of retreat and religious education, rather than anything "Popish"!). Even the love that she shows him by this act doesn't quite get through Claude's dreaming miasma. He still doesn't register that she cares for him enormously. Then, in an enormous surprise, Luke Forrester himself turns up at the manor. He has survived the wreck by clinging to a spar and being picked up by another ship. His memory was temporarily expunged by the deprivations and he lived for some months in Australia not knowing who he really was. So, with all the joy that his 'resurrection' brings also comes yet a third turnaround for the fortunes of Miss Fallowfield's fortune. He tells Claude very tenderly that Charlotte was quite clear about how she wanted her fortune used should she die, and that his 'monastery' will need to be turned this time into almshouses for older single women! Claude is devastated for a second time, and contrarily some very blackly funny dialogue is perpetrated between he and Dagmar about how old women will have no appreciation of the beautiful building, it will be wasted on them, and that people of that age don't care where they live or what they do. In the end, in talking it all over with Dagmar, he is carefully alerted by her to the slightly cryptic Biblical text of the alabaster box of ointment, whose contents was better poured out than sold and the proceeds given to the poor. Claude decides, in a moment of enlightenment, that he needs to simply pour out his contribution and have it used in any way that God wills. The fact that Dagmar alerts him to this finally opens his eyes to her care for him, which is perhaps for me the least believable part of this already stretched tale in the matter of plausibility. But again, what saves it is Fowler's cheerful and robust storytelling. Despite her nonsenses, one wants to spend time in her company.

Commonplace Book

'...Breathes there a man in this modern England of ours with soul so dead but that at some time or another he has not yielded to the almost universal temptation to cut down, in a few fatal minutes, trees which it would take a century to reproduce; and then endeavour to fill their place by dwarfed and squalid shrubs; and - which is stranger still - has counted the same to himself for righteousness? Breathes there a town council, or even a county one, with spirit so unurban and impolitic that it has never once pulled down old and beautiful and well-built houses in order to erect new and vulgar and unsubstantial villas in their stead? If such there be, let me make a friend of that man; and give me a vote for the re-election of that town or county council!'

from Miss Fallowfield's Fortune by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler (Chapter XVII)

A Family and a Fortune by I. Compton-Burnett (1939)

[Reading this brought on an extra urge, which was devising further Compton-Burnettesque titles as an extension of her bibliography. Each one which was convincing enough I will scatter through this summary in square brackets just for fun. I've allotted them each a year of publication and have managed to extend the author's career (and lifetime!) by quite a margin. We'll start with The Guessed and the Glimpsed 1973]. The main tonality of this instalment in the C-B lists is no different from those which have preceded it. [Destinies and Histories 1976]. There is still the late Victorian/Edwardian family; they still bicker endlessly, loving all the contretemps flickering between them, picking each other up and revealing faultlines with agitated glee. [Going Without Saying: An Autobiography in Dialogue 1978]. These cerebral scenes still have occasionally physical consequences where interlocutors are shoved aside, people run out of the house 'never to return', doors are kicked - bashing people's heads. [The Most and the Least (a magnum opus of 660 pages) 1981]. In other words, the fuming regurgitative spiral of interplay is the mode here as it always seems to have been. [The Exposed and the Excused 1983]. But nevertheless there has been a revolution. The change is in how much Compton-Burnett tells us via authorial interpolation. [A Pauper and His Plenty 1986]. Whereas the previous few novels have seemed to betray the author's wish to develop the project of scraping out everything except dialogue, this one tells a different story. [Yeasayers and Naysayers (a tiny novel of 76 pages) 1991]. That scheme has been dispensed with here; she gives us a great deal more in her own voice, describing how people react, how and where they move, the looks in their faces, and so on - the 'usual fare' of novel-writing. Now what has prompted this change? [The Moulded and the Marred 1993]. Did that particular effort reach a 'natural' end, or was this a specific piece which needed a more traditional approach? Will the all-dialogue project be taken up again in the next book? [A Firebrand and Her Foil 1996]. We'll see, but I will admit to the after-feeling of a great deal more filled-outness in this piece, and there's a form of satisfaction in it. [Compton-Burnett-reanimes has reached the grand old age of 112 by the time that that last mentioned novel has been published. I think I'll keep her going well on into her second century as good ideas for titles present themselves].