des affaires assez déplaisantes

Maigret chez le ministre (1954) begins with a minister seeking an urgent private consultation with le commissaire Maigret. The latter is not enthusiastic. 

Tout le temps [que Mme. Maigret] parlait, Maigret la regardait, les sourcils toujours froncés, avec un air qui proclamait sa méfiance de la politique. Il était arrivé plusieurs fois, au cours de sa carrière, qu'un homme d'Etat, un deputé, un sénateur ou quelque personnage en place fasse appel à lui, mais toujours cela avait été par les voies régulières, chaque fois il avait été appelé chez le chef et, chaque fois, la conversation avait commencé par :

 — Je m'excuse, mon pauvre Maigret, de vous charger d'une affaire qui va vous déplaire. 

Invariablement, en effet, c'étaient des affaires assez déplaisantes. 

(Maigret chez le ministre, Chapter 1)

All the while Mme. Maigret was speaking, Maigret looked at her, his brows knitted, with a face expressing his wariness of politics. Several times in the course of his career it had happened that a statesman, deputy, senator or some other person in authority had called for his aid, but it had always been through official channels; each time he had been summoned to the chief and each time the conversation had begun with

"I'm sorry, my poor Maigret, for saddling you with a job you're not going to like."

Invariably they were indeed somewhat unpleasant affairs. 

  

Simenon never over-explains. It's evident, though, that Maigret's wariness is about moral uncertainty, about good and bad being inextricably mixed, about motives never being single, about being unsure whether you're working for the right side. 

*

The scenario here is much like Grenfell Tower. A flagship institutional building has collapsed due to flooding, a hundred orphans have died, and now it's a question of who knew about the risks and chose to ignore them. 

Back when construction was being mooted, there was an unfavourable report warning of precisely this catastrophe; evidently, it was "buried". 

Here, then, are the building magnates and senior politicians desperate that the report never comes to light. But Maigret, like other members of the public, never really sees them directly. He only catches ideas of them through media reports, always cloaked in deniability. He supposes that a whole class of politicians is implicated but he never knows who they are. 

More tangible are those behind the indignant editorials clamouring for the report's publication. The député Joseph Mascoulin, for instance. But he, the real villain of the piece, has no intention of publishing the report, only of deploying its threat to exert power over the powerful. 

In the story Point, the minister of Public Works, summons Maigret after he receives the explosive report, reads it, but then finds it stolen before he can act on it. He knows he will be accused of destroying it himself. 

Maigret saves the good Auguste Point's reputation (Point has had enough, though; he will resign and leave politics). But he cannot bring the report to the public, nor expose Mascoulin. The refusals of Point and Maigret to shake hands with the "mains sales" (of Mascoulin and others like him) are victories of gesture and personal integrity. But at the end the corrupt edifice of politics, press and capitalism remains in full control. 

*

Point tells Maigret of his meeting with the Président du Conseil (i.e. the Prime Minister, now termed Premier ministre), prior to facing the press. He has offered his resignation. 

[»] Il m'a déclaré que ma démission n'arrangerait rien, qu'elle sera considérée comme un aveu de culpabilité et que tout ce que j'avais à faire était de dire la vérité.

—Y compris sur le contenu du rapport Calame ? questionna le commissaire.

Point parvint à sourire.

—Non. Pas exactement. Au moment où je croyais la conversation terminée, il a ajouté :

» — Je suppose qu’on vous demandera si vous avez lu le rapport. 

» J’ai répondu :

» — Je l’ai lu.

» — C’est ce que j’ai cru comprendre. C’est un rapport assez volumineux, bourré, je suppose, de détails techniques sur un sujet qui n’est pas nécessairement familier à un homme de loi. Il serait plus exact de prétendre que vous l’avez parcouru. Vous n’avez plus le rapport sous la main pour vous rafraîchir la mémoire. Ce que je vous en dis, cher ami, c’est pour vous éviter des ennuis plus graves que ceux qui vous attendent. Parlez du contenu du rapport, mettez des gens en cause, qui que ce soit – cela ne me regarde pas et je n’en ai cure – et on vous accusera de lancer des accusations que vous n’êtes pas en mesure de soutenir. Vous me comprenez ? 

(Chapter 5)

'... He told me that my resignation wouldn't fix anything, that it would be taken as an admission of guilt and that all I had to do was tell the truth.'

'Including about the contents of the Calame report?' the inspector asked.

Point managed a smile.

'No. Not exactly. Just when I thought the conversation was over, he added:

'"I imagine they will ask you if you have read the report."

'I replied:

'"I have read it."

'"That's what I thought I understood. It is a quite voluminous report, stuffed, I suppose, with technical detail that is not necessarily familiar to a man of the law. It would be more correct to say that you have looked through it. You no longer have the report to hand to refresh your memory. What I'm saying to you, my dear friend, is to keep you out of worse trouble than you're in now. Speak about the contents of the report, implicate people, whoever they may be -- that's none of my business, and I don't care -- and you'll be accused of making allegations you can't back up. You understand me?"'

*

Both Maigret and Point are conspiracists, in the way that most thoughtful people are. They have abundant evidence for the existence of serial conspiracies, even a culture of conspiracy, within the corrupt edifice of politics, media and capital. But they don't have full visibility of any of these conspiracies and their allegations, should they ever become specific, are "groundless". 

*

From Bill Alder's book Maigret, Simenon and France (2013), p. 159:

[Maigret] distrusts politicians: although Auguste Point, the government minister of Maigret chez le ministre (1954), is himself an honest man (and, perhaps significantly, from the conservative heartland of the Vendée), the bourgeois democracy of the Fourth Republic is seen as a dirty business, symbolized by the ambitious and corrupt député Mascoulin. In this, Maigret's view seems to reflect that of his creator:

In Maigret chez le ministre ... we discover the moral that can be drawn throughout the whole of Simenon's writings concerning political activity ... An honest man cannot engage in a political career without risking the worst. The lesson is a hard one and it is probably for this reason that the minister and the commissaire "had the same heavy sad look, the same hunching of their shoulders" [Gallot, 1999, 211, cited in Baronian et al., 2004-2007, "Le film dans le texte," 49].

*

The French text of Maigret chez le ministre is easily available online, but probably not legally. 

*

You can watch the Michael Gambon TV episode "Maigret and the Minister" online, if you can tolerate thirty seconds of adverts every four minutes. It first aired in April 1993. It has some deft moments, but its alterations (e.g. the character of the minister, the report is published, Mascoulin is exposed) sacrifice the essence of Simenon's moral fable.  

There are other TV versions: an earlier British one (Rupert Davies, 1962, now part of a Blueray set), two French ones (Jean Richard 1987, Bruno Crémer 2002), a Japanese one (1978), and a Soviet one (1987). 

 

Books in The Paris Library

Janet Skeslien Charles' The Paris Library (2021) is a novel that leads us through Paris under occupation, mainly narrated by Odile, a book-loving French girl (her father is a police inspector) who gets a job, in early 1939, at the American Library in Paris. 

It's thick with the titles of Odile's beloved books. Jane Eyre, As You Like It, Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Fitzgerald.... But there's also many that I didn't know much about, or had forgotten about. (We also get some of  Lily's favourite books in her part of the novel, set in Montana from 1983.)

p. 4 Isak Dinesen  aka Karen Blixen. Her Out of Africa was published in 1937. 

p. 6 Zora Neale Hurston "my favourite living author". Harlem Renaissance novelist, best known for Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). See also p. 63, p. 82, p. 98, p. 185, p. 212, p. 322, p. 405. (Odile's favourite dead author is Dostoevsky.) 

p. 31 A Season in Hell. Rimbaud's extended poem in prose (1873).

p. 56 Clara de Chambrun, Playing with Souls. Novel published in 1922. [She is one of the historical characters in this novel, too.]

p. 62 Belinda, by Maria Edgeworth (1801); famous for depicting an inter-racial marriage. The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, by Olaudah Equiano, former slave and abolitionist (1789). My Ántonia, novel by Willa Cather (1918), one of her best-known (see also. p. 393).

p. 68 Dorothy Whipple, The Priory (novel, 1939) (see also p. 75 and p. 270 ff.). Popular author between the wars, born in Blackburn. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day: 1938 novel by Winifred Watson. 

p. 74 The Death of the Heart. 1938 novel by Elizabeth Bowen. 

p. 75 Miss Maisy: untraced, apparently a children's story. 

p. 119. The Little Prince, novella by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, published in USA in 1943, and in France after liberation. 

p. 134. Voyage in the Dark, 1934 novel by Jean Rhys. See also p. 367.

p. 139 Good Morning, Midnight, 1939 novel by Jean Rhys. (See also p. 299-300, p. 340.)

p. 145 All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929 novel by Erich Maria Remarque. 

p. 155. Nevada, 1928 novel by Zane Grey.

p. 178 Refers to the attack on Mers-el-Kébir (3/7/1940) in which the British scuttled French ships and killed over a 1,000 French sailors. 

p. 185. The Long Winter, by Laura Ingalls Wilder (1940), a semi-autobiographical children's book (see also p. 197, Odile reads it when just published). A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, 1943 bestseller by Betty Smith. 

p. 193 Bridge to Terebithia, 1977 children's novel by Katherine Paterson. Also p. 393. 

p. 212 Greenbanks. Another novel by Dorothy Whipple, published in 1932. 

p. 228 The Age of Innocence, 1920 novel by Edith Wharton.

p. 241 And Then There Were None. by Agatha Christie. The US title (1940); published in the UK as Ten Little Niggers (1939). 

p. 242 "Hope is the thing with feathers", poem by Emily Dickinson. 

p. 259. "I want today, now. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nancy Mitford, Langston Hughes." (Mr Pryce-Jones). Nancy Mitford published three novels before the war, though her better-known ones come later. Langston Hughes, another member of the Harlem Renaissance. His first novel was published in 1930, first short story collection in 1934. 

p. 267. Christmas Pudding and Pigeon Pie. Two of Nancy Mitford's novels, from 1932 and 1940 respectively. 

p. 269 Bella the Goat and Homer the Cat. Untraced children's books. 

p. 318. Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka, published 1915. English translation published in 1937.

p. 327 The Silence of the Sea. Le Silence de la mer, secretly published in occupied Paris in early 1942. By Jean Bruller under the pseudonym "Vercors". 

p. 385 Forever, 1975 young-adult novel by Judy Blume, controversial for detailed descriptions of sex and birth control. 

p. 393 Roots, 1976 novel by Alex Haley. 

The Gustafssons

My Sundsvall grandparents were Klas and Sigrid Gulliksson.

This post focusses on the family of my maternal grandmother (mormor). She was born Sigrid Gustafsson on 26 June 1906.

It's a companion to an earlier post which focusses on my grandfather's side of the family, the Gullikssons: https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2019/05/min-morfar.html

Sigrid was the youngest sibling.

Karl Gustafsson (1868 - 1937)  m.  Amanda (1872 - 1927)

                                          |

Anna  (1898 - 1976)    

Ida (died in childhood)  

A boy (Signe? died in childhood)  

Greta  (1901 - 1988)

Sigrid   (1906 - 1997)

One of  the surviving nuggets of family history is the coincidence that the birthdays of Karl, Ida and Greta all fell on the same day, 24 August. 

Karl's name was also spelled "Carl", e.g on his Kungliga Patriotiska Sällskap medal. 

Inscription on a pewter vase, a birthday present to Karl from his children in 1929. 

Karl Gustafsson

Karl once owned the Belgian pinfire pistol that I remember from my dad's gun collection. Dad used to say it was so flimsily made that it was more likely to injure the user than an assailant. 

Karl came from Uppsala. He travelled long distance between Uppsala and Sundsvall with the brewery's casks of alcohol. There was some danger of being robbed on the way. His forebears had been Walloon; Huguenots who brought iron-mining expertise to Sweden.

(But I feel there's a chronological mismatch in the idea that the pistol has anything to do with his Belgian ancestry. Karl's pistol was modern. But with a surname like Gustafsson, Karl must have been at least two generations removed from any Belgian connection.)

It wasn't necessarily strong alcohol. He also brought the casks of "svagdryck", very weak beer that townsfolk drank instead of water, which could still carry disease in those days. (This was the basis of the "beer soup" that my mother, according to family legend, largely lived on as a child. She was a nervous eater, a condition made worse by anxious relatives fussing over her.)

Amanda Gustafsson

Amanda was from Sundsvall. When Karl and Amanda married they lived near the river in Sundsvall (Selångersån). Karl worked for the brewery in Sundsvall. 

Amanda died when Sigrid was about 21. By the time of Sigrid's marriage Karl was elderly and not very well. His feet had been frozen on those Uppsala-Sundsvall trips so he had bad circulation. 

His house was Albäcksgatan 4. This was also Klas and Sigrid's first home. They lived there to take care of him. He died when Eva was about one year old, and they left Albäcksgatan when she was two or three. 

She could already talk. Both her memorable phrases are cellar-related. She used to say "Är de jåttar, mamma?" (Is it rats?) and "Kas eldar!" (Klas is lighting the stove!) He had to do this once a day. Banked up, the stove in the cellar would stay alight and provide warmth for the next twenty-four hours. 

*

Sigrid was fourteen years younger than her husband Klas. I don't know when they got married but Eva (my mum) was born on 7 September 1936. Sigrid was 30 and Klas was 44. 

Anna never married. When I knew her she lived in Falköping. Greta did marry (Erik Andersson; they lived in Stockholm), but they did not have any children. My mum was in effect an only child and an only grandchild, on both sides of her family. (There were other children on Klas' side of the family but they were in America and no-one would ever meet them. In those days, emigration was a forever thing.)

I knew Mormor and her sisters Anna and Greta far better than I ever knew Morfar or his relatives. (In her later years, after Erik's death, Greta lived much of the time with Sigrid.) I knew them all as beloved presences, as kindly and loving relations. 

But as a child I lived only in the present: their nice homes and generosity and food and laughter. Because of the language barrier, I never knew much about them. 

And generally I still know less about the Gustafsson side of the family than the Gullikssons. Maybe one factor is that Eva herself never knew either of her Gustafsson grandparents.  

Two of the Gustafsson girls. Anna and Greta, I think.

Anna Gustafsson

I loved Moster Anna dearly. Partly because of her delightful personality, and partly because we usually visited her near the beginning of our summer holiday in Sweden, after long days of driving through France, Belgium, Netherlands, West Germany and up through Denmark, the distances ever elongating. To arrive at Anna's welcoming apartment in Falköping was to feel that now the most precious part of the whole year had well and truly begun. 

But I have only one fact about her to hand. 

It was this: that when Anna was still living in Sundsvall she worked for a certain doctor Svensson. And so did a lady called Berna. 

Thus it came about that Berna and Willem Eriksson became friends with Sigrid and Klas. Berna and Willem had a son Bosse who was three years younger than my mother Eva. Lacking any young relatives of her own Eva always referred to Bosse as "my little brother". They have remained lifelong friends. Bo and Gunilla live in Borlänge (Dalarna).

Greta

Greta married Erik Andersson and they lived in Stockholm; they had no children. I remember visiting them as a child, first at a flat in Central Stockholm and later in the "dormitory town" of Kista. After Erik's death, Greta lived most of the time with her sister Sigrid. 

Sigrid

After Greta's death in 1988, Sigrid was lonelier than ever. Her health declined and she eventually went into care, with symptoms of Alzheimer's before the end. My mother flew back and forth from England; she went nine times in Sigrid's final year.

Mum's cousins.

Amanda had siblings, though I don't know how many or their names. Anyway, it was through one of them that Sigrid had a first cousin called Bernard, married to Anni. I don't remember them, but my Dad met them.

Bernard and Anni had two daughters. 

One was Sylvia, who married Ragnar, one of eleven children from a poor family from the remote hamlet Återvänningen. Sigrid remained close to them and I remember Sylvia and Ragnar fondly. It was at their house that I first tasted surströmming. They had a daughter Inge, who married Lennart. Inge died recently (2023).

Bernard and Anni's other daughter was Aina, who married a bus driver called Yngve. They had two children, Monica and Lage. 

When Sigrid died in 1997, I met mum's cousins at the funeral; Inge, Monica, Lage and their partners. They were now Mum's closest relatives in Sweden. For the next fifteen years or so Mum and Dad used to meet up with "the cousins" each summer while they were in Norrland. 

I've visited Monica's home several times and am still in touch with her. She and husband Leif (truck driver, now retired) live in Ljustorp. They have one daughter, Annica.

Eva with her doll

Eva with Michael

Klas and Sigrid with Michael

Eva, Greta and Sigrid

Min mormor

George Peele: David and Bethsabe (early 1590s)

 

The servants of Absalom killing Amnon, 1540 engraving by Heinrich Aldegrever

[Image source: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/428353 .]

George Peele's David and Bethsabe is one of just two surviving plays from Shakespeare's time with a biblical subject. However, we can see from the titles of lost plays that biblical subjects became popular in the early 1590s. (The other surviving play is A Looking Glass for London and England by Lodge and Greene, which is based on the book of Jonah.) 

David and Bethsabe recounts scenes from the history of David's reign: basically 2 Samuel 11-19. And what history! If you haven't read 2 Samuel recently, suffice it to say that there's places where even Peele tones it down a bit. On the whole, though, it was exactly his kind of thing: David's power-grab of  Bathsheba, his elimination of her husband Uriah, his son Amnon's rape of his half-sister Tamar, Absalom's revenge, insurrection and eventual death by multiple stabbings while dangling from a tree, to name a few highlights.  

[From now on I'll be using the names that appear in the play: Bethsabe, Urias, Thamar, Absalon...]

David and Bethsabe was entered in the Stationers' Register in May 1594. Various hypothetical composition dates have been thrown around but, so far as I can see, this is the only hard evidence. There appear to be borrowings from Tamburlaine (1587?) and from Book I of the Faerie Queene (1590). So "early 1590s" is likely. Irritatingly, that's not enough to determine if it antedates or postdates any of Peele's other plays of that period, i.e The Battle of Alcazar, Edward I, The Old Wives' Tale and his part of Titus Andronicus. 

The surviving text is rather a mess, and there are indications that some scenes are missing. Possibly Peele revised the play to make a reading text, adding the Du Bartas borrowings in the first and last scenes.

Nevertheless the play is more impressive and coherent than you might gather from its reputation. 

Earlier scholars had tended to accuse Peele, here as elsewhere, of poor plot structure. But as far as David and Bethsabe was concerned, Inga-Stina Ewbank surely put an end to those accusations in 1965 (details below).

The section Peele picked out of the book of Samuel is what biblical source critics call the "court history" or "succession narrative". It's unified by a focus on David's ill deeds and his subsequent troubles.

Peele made the focus more explicit than the bible does. He begins with the most notorious of David's offences, and proceeds to show him suffering the death of three of his sons (the infant son of Bethsabe, Amnon, Absalon) before ending with the education of Solomon, the son who will be his true successor. David, Nathan, and Semei all interpret the family turmoil as punishment for David's sin. The bible frames only the infant's death in that way, but Peele was unconsciously in line with a strand of Jewish commentary that understands David's "fourfold" retribution (2 Samuel 12:6) as realized in his infant son, Amnon, Tamar, and Absalon. 

In the bible the events of the play take place over a considerable stretch of years. Peele eliminates these time lapses, and interleaves the stories. Sometimes this leads to strange effects, e.g. when David, having just heard of Amnon's crimes through Absalon, doesn't seem to think there's anything odd about Absalon wanting Amnon to come to his sheep-shearing feast (Scene 5). But the time-compression can also work really well, as here:

Bethsabe. One medicine cannot heal our different harms;

But rather make both rankle at the bone:

Then let the king be cunning in his cure,

Lest flattering both, both perish in his hand.

David.  Leave it to me, my dearest Bethsabe,

Whose skill is cónversant in deeper cures. −

And, Cusay, haste thou to my servant Joab,

Commanding him to send Urias home

With all the speed can possibly be used.

(Scene 1)

Bethsabe is still resisting David's move on her, but with "let the king be cunning" there's a hint that her uncompromising chastity is turning into resignation. David, at any rate, takes it that way, and immediately sets about bringing Urias home from the wars. In the bible this plan arises from Bathsheba's pregnancy (2 Samuel 11:5-6); the idea is apparently to ensure that Urias sleeps with his wife as soon as possible, so he will believe that David's child is his own. Peele, tolerating no time gaps, brings the decision forward to the seduction scene. That is, his David already anticipates making Bethsabe pregnant, and sets about covering his tracks. 

The biblical narrative is quite tight-lipped about what's going on here, and Peele is more so. (Evidently, he relied on his audience knowing the story well.) But the absence of spelt-out motives makes for compelling drama. 

In Scene 5 it takes a comic turn, with David practically begging Urias to take a night off, then resorting  to making Urias so drunk that he might at least not remember whether he slept with Bethsabe or not. Here's the carouse in full swing:

Urias.  Cusay, I pledge thee all with all my heart. −
Give me some drink, ye servants of the king
Give me my drink.
[Drinks.]
David.  Well done, my good Urias! drink thy fill,
That in thy fulness David may rejoice.
Urias.  I will, my lord.
Abs.  Now, Lord Urias, one carouse to me.
Urias.  No, sir, I’ll drink to the king;
Your father is a better man than you.
David.  Do so, Urias; I will pledge thee straight.
Urias.  I will indeed, my lord and sovereign;
I’ll once in my days be so bold.
David.  Fill him his glass.
Urias.  Fill me my glass
[He gives him the glass.]
David.  Quickly, I say.

Despite abundant signs of growing intoxication, Urias is resolute in not going home to his wife, like the proud soldier he is. It's time for David to roll out Plan C. 

The drinking scene is all the funnier because we understand that it holds Urias' life in the balance. (It shows that Peele had learnt from Kyd's stagecraft  as well as Marlowe's.) 

In passing, the drunk Urias even intuits Absalon's longing to outshine his father, a theme that still lies in the future. 

It's a small example of how Peele brings his stories to life by interlacing them. Larger examples are  Amnon's story getting under way (in Scenes 3 - 4) while Urias is still on the way back to base, and David being told of Amnon's death at the very moment he's crowing over his victory at Rabbah (Scene 9). 

At such moments we recognize the kinship of David and Bethsabe with the history plays of the same period. Here (as in Shakespeare's Henry plays) foreign war is succeeded by civil war, and the ultimate cause of national turmoil is a monarch's sin.  

*

This post was inevitably going to happen, following on from my post on Tom Raworth's "West Wind", which unexpectedly quotes from the superb parasol song that begins David and Bethsabe.

Hot sun, cool fire, tempered with sweet air,

Black shade, fair nurse, shadow my white hair:

Shine, sun; burn, fire; breathe, air, and ease me;

Black shade, fair nurse; shroud me, and please me:

Shadow, my sweet nurse, keep me from burning,

Make not my glad cause cause of mourning.

Let not my beauty's fire

Inflame unstaid desire,

Nor pierce any bright eye

That wandereth lightly.

Elsewhere Peele writes a ringing, regular iambic pentameter, with few feminine endings or inversions, mainly end-stopped. It's ornamented with copious alliteration and gorgeous imagery, but it has better things to offer than a monotony of riches. 

[David.] Bright Bethsabe gives earth to my desires ...

(Scene 1)

[Amnon to Thamar.] 

Hence from my bed, whose sight offends my soul

As doth the parbreak of disgorgèd bears!   

(Scene 4)

[Nathan to David.] 

Urias thou hast killèd with the sword;

Yea, with the sword of the uncircumcised

Thou hast him slain: wherefore, from this day forth,

The sword shall never go from thee and thine ...

(Scene 7)

[Cusay to Absalon's council of war.] 

... To gather men from Dan to Bersabe,

That they may march in number like sea-sands,

That nestle close in one another's neck ... 

(Scene 11. Dan and Bersabe (=Beersheba) describe the northern and southern limits of David's kingdom)

[Achitophel, about to commit suicide.] 

Let all the sighs I breathed for this disgrace,

Hang on my hedges like eternal mists,

As mourning garments for their master's death. 

(Scene 13)

[Joab to Absalon.] 

Hold, Absalon, Joab's pity is in this;

In this, proud Absalon, is Joab's love.

        [Stabs him again.]  

(Scene 15)

Doubtless Absalon was suspended from a stage arbour, like the one in the 1623 illustration showing the hanged body of Horatio in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. The same property (looking like a fire-screen with painted branchwork) would also have been e.g. what Benedick and Beatrice eavesdropped behind. 

*

We are very lucky to have Peele's plays online, with copious annotation; they (and many others) are on the site elizabethandrama.org, a labour of love by Peter Lukacs:

http://elizabethandrama.org/the-playwrights/george-peele/david-bethsabe-george-peele/

(If you just want to read the play, choose the un-annotated text.)

*

Inga-Stina Ewbank, "The House of David in Renaissance Drama: A Comparative Study". Renaissance Drama vol 8 (1965), pp. 3-40. 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/41913890

Defence of the structure of Peele's play (saying most of what I said above, but better); with numerous analogues from European sources. 

She also wrote an earlier note (not online):

Inga-Stina Ekeblad (later Ewbank), ‘The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe: A Note on George Peele’s Biblical Drama’, English Studies 39 (1958), 57-62 (57).

Annaliese Connolly, "Peele's David and Bethsabe: Reconsidering Biblical Drama of the Long 1590s". Early Modern Literary Studies Special Issue 16 (October, 2007) 9.1-20.

https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/si-16/connpeel.htm#

This essay gives a lot of useful background. Connolly argues that biblical history was a speciality brand of the Admiral's Men, and that David was just the kind of role in which Edward Alleyn excelled. But it's odd that it's totally absent from Henslowe's Diary, unless connected with the payment for "poleyes & worckmanshipp for to hang absolome" in October 1602. (The 1599 quarto claims that it had been frequently performed.) 

Peter Auger, British Responses to Du Bartas’ Semaines, 1584-1641 (D. Phil. Thesis, 2012 (Merton College, Oxford)). 

https://ora.ox.ac.uk/catalog/uuid:be0f89c2-c2e4-482d-ac8f-e867985ff72e/download_file?file_format=application%2Fpdf&safe_filename=British%2BResponses%2Bto%2BDu%2BBartas%2BSemaines

Provides a detailed account of how Peele uses Du Bartas in the first and last scenes of David and Bethsabe. See especially pp. 189 - 197. 

*

On King David:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2020/11/king-david.html

On Titus Andronicus, by William Shakespeare and George Peele:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2015/11/william-shakespeare-and-george-peele.html

Complete list of posts on Shakespeare and his contemporaries

“don’t say, now, you don’t know me—if I have not got a white parasol!”

This post is about Henry James' novel The American (1877). Spoilers will follow immediately!

Matthew Modine as Christopher Newman

[Image source: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0215514/ . From the TV Movie The American (1998), directed by Paul Unwin. Matthew Modine looks fantastic, but the adaptation defuses the story into genre fluff. You can watch it on YouTube.]

To give due credit, the TV movie was funded by ExxonMobil.  

It's impossible now, I think, to read The American without feeling that the book is as much about the good-natured hero's economic aggressiveness as about the sinister emptiness of the old culture figured by the Bellegardes. The latter, so to speak, can only destroy each other. Christopher Newman can destroy the planet. 

The title pitches it in nationalistic terms. But then James himself rather complicates things by making his Bellegardes both French and English. In fact they aren't an expression of a single nation's essence; the ruling class has always been international in its marriages, connections and transactions. The novel confronts, not so much nations with each other, as an old ruling class with a new ruling class. The Bellegardes, it turns out, can't bring themselves to extend their international connection to merge with the new power that Newman has acquired. Newman finds it ridiculously easy to see all that is wrong with the Bellegardes, and he feels it strongly, as a desperate waste of life and potential; that is, as an offence against economy or productivity. At his own position, however, he doesn't look too closely or ask too many questions. That kind of self-consciousness would be a handicap in business. And his success, with clean hands so far as criminality is concerned, may feel as if it sanctifies him. To have started from so little and been so conspicuously prosperous. Doesn't that economic triumph sound like it has a kind of moral aspect, too? Compared e.g. with those whose wealth hasn't been worked so hard for?

“Since you ask me,” said Newman, “I will say frankly that I want extremely to marry. It is time, to begin with: before I know it I shall be forty. And then I’m lonely and helpless and dull. But if I marry now, so long as I didn’t do it in hot haste when I was twenty, I must do it with my eyes open. I want to do the thing in handsome style. I do not only want to make no mistakes, but I want to make a great hit. I want to take my pick. My wife must be a magnificent woman.”

“Voilà ce qui s’appelle parler!” cried Mrs. Tristram.

“Oh, I have thought an immense deal about it.”

“Perhaps you think too much. The best thing is simply to fall in love.”

“When I find the woman who pleases me, I shall love her enough. My wife shall be very comfortable.”

...

“Present me to a woman who comes up to my notions,” said Newman, “and I will marry her tomorrow.”

“You have a strange tone about it, and I don’t quite understand you. I didn’t suppose you would be so coldblooded and calculating.”

Newman was silent a while. “Well,” he said, at last, “I want a great woman. I stick to that. That’s one thing I can treat myself to, and if it is to be had I mean to have it. What else have I toiled and struggled for, all these years? I have succeeded, and now what am I to do with my success? To make it perfect, as I see it, there must be a beautiful woman perched on the pile, like a statue on a monument. She must be as good as she is beautiful, and as clever as she is good. I can give my wife a good deal, so I am not afraid to ask a good deal myself. She shall have everything a woman can desire; I shall not even object to her being too good for me; she may be cleverer and wiser than I can understand, and I shall only be the better pleased. I want to possess, in a word, the best article in the market.” ...

 “ ... I made up my mind tolerably early in life that a beautiful wife was the thing best worth having, here below. It is the greatest victory over circumstances. When I say beautiful, I mean beautiful in mind and in manners, as well as in person. It is a thing every man has an equal right to; he may get it if he can. He doesn’t have to be born with certain faculties, on purpose; he needs only to be a man. Then he needs only to use his will, and such wits as he has, and to try.”

“It strikes me that your marriage is to be rather a matter of vanity.”

“Well, it is certain,” said Newman, “that if people notice my wife and admire her, I shall be mightily tickled.”

...  

“And you have seen nothing that satisfied you?”

“No,” said Newman, half reluctantly, “I am bound to say in honesty that I have seen nothing that really satisfied me.”

...

“She is perfect! I won’t say more than that. When you are praising a person to another who is to know her, it is bad policy to go into details. I won’t exaggerate. I simply recommend her. Among all women I have known she stands alone; she is of a different clay.”

“I should like to see her,” said Newman, simply.

...

(from The American, Chapter III)

The reader is evidently to understand in what ways Newman is not cold or calculating or driven by vanity. 

But at any rate he is quite explicit about marrying "with my eyes open". Not in the blindness of love that discovers new values. Here the substantive value comes first, and then "I shall love her enough".

I suppose the expression "trophy-wife" didn't exist in those days. But after all, the trophy idea is embedded deep in Newman's outlook. He applies it, for instance, to the business of choosing lodgings; or rather, of allowing someone else to choose his lodgings.

He had a relish for luxury and splendor, but it was satisfied by rather gross contrivances. He scarcely knew a hard chair from a soft one, and he possessed a talent for stretching his legs which quite dispensed with adventitious facilities. His idea of comfort was to inhabit very large rooms, have a great many of them, and be conscious of their possessing a number of patented mechanical devices—half of which he should never have occasion to use. The apartments should be light and brilliant and lofty; he had once said that he liked rooms in which you wanted to keep your hat on. For the rest, he was satisfied with the assurance of any respectable person that everything was “handsome.” Tristram accordingly secured for him an apartment to which this epithet might be lavishly applied. It was situated on the Boulevard Haussmann, on the first floor, and consisted of a series of rooms, gilded from floor to ceiling a foot thick, draped in various light shades of satin, and chiefly furnished with mirrors and clocks. Newman thought them magnificent, thanked Tristram heartily, immediately took possession, and had one of his trunks standing for three months in his drawing-room.

(from Chapter VI)

When it comes to a wife Newman is choosy: "I have seen nothing that really satisfied me". 

And in Chapter V, on his travels, he makes "a point of looking" at women as well as churches, and reports to Mrs Tristram: "I am more than ever in the state of mind I told you about that evening; I want a first-class wife. I have kept an eye on all the pretty girls I have come across this summer, but none of them came up to my notion, or anywhere near it."

And a little later, to Valentin:

" . . . If I get hold of a woman that comes up to my standard, I shall think nothing too good for her. I have been a long time looking, and I find such women are rare. To combine the qualities I require seems to be difficult, but when the difficulty is vanquished it deserves a reward. My wife shall have a good position, and I’m not afraid to say that I shall be a good husband.”

“And these qualities that you require—what are they?”

“Goodness, beauty, intelligence, a fine education, personal elegance—everything, in a word, that makes a splendid woman.”

“And noble birth, evidently,” said Bellegarde.

“Oh, throw that in, by all means, if it’s there. The more the better!”

(The American, Chapter VIII)

Well, why is Newman so choosy?  Given his own history and its inspiring evidence of the potential in ordinary human beings, why not find an ordinary woman, uneducated as he is perhaps, why is her potential not good enough? 

Unlike all those others that Newman rejects, there is value attached to Claire de Cintré, not in his own eyes but (more objectively, from his point of view) in the eyes of others. Mrs Tristram identifies her as "of a different clay". Newman trusts that endorsement more than he trusts his own heart. It's enough to start his imagination spinning romantic ideas around her. That Mme. de Cintré is also difficult to obtain adds another incentive. That she is also "of noble birth" is, we sense, much more than something merely "thrown in". Newman likes a challenge. His own sense of honour, that of an outstanding businessman who gets what he wants, is provoked into play. It's different from Valentin's idea of honour, but only extrinsically. 

The thought that Claire is a trophy is enhanced by the book's striking occlusion of this heroine and her relations with its hero, our lack of a sense of the couple getting to know each other, of whether Newman does in fact love her and of what there might be, in Claire's own personality, that he might love. Our increased acquaintance with her, anticipated since Chapter IV, is endlessly deferred. At first there are appreciable reasons, the barriers put up by her family and so on. But eventually those explanations are no longer adequate. There's a void here, most obtrusive (as James admits in his 1907 Preface) straight after the engagement when we meet the hero, not spending time with his intended, but attending the opera on his own. Reading the book without knowing the story in advance, I found the thought crossing my mind that he might back out; for what lay behind his stated commitment other than a demonstration of good business conduct? 

 James wrote:

I have been stupefied, in so thoroughly revising the book, to find, on turning a page, that the light in which he is presented immediately after Madame de Bellegarde has conspicuously introduced him to all her circle as her daughter's husband-to-be is that of an evening at the opera quite alone; as if he would n't surely spend his leisure, and especially those hours of it, with his intended. Instinctively, from that moment, one would have seen them intimately and, for one's interest, beautifully together; with some illustration of the beauty incumbent on the author. The truth was that at this point the author, all gracelessly, could but hold his breath and pass; lingering was too difficult—he had made for himself a crushing complication. Since Madame de Cintré was after all to "back out" every touch in the picture of her apparent loyalty would add to her eventual shame. She had acted in clear good faith, but how could I give the detail of an attitude, on her part, of which the foundation was yet so weak? I preferred, as the minor evil, to shirk the attempt—at the cost evidently of a signal loss of "charm"; and with this lady, altogether, I recognise, a light plank, too light a plank, is laid for the reader over a dark "psychological" abyss. 

(1907 Preface)

But isn't there a dark psychological abyss, too, in a man who so "knows his own mind"? Perhaps a more intimate portrait of their relationship would necessarily expose not just the lady but the gentleman too to the "shame" of, well, being rather less than impeccable?  But in The American James was, as he felt in retrospect, engaged in writing a kind of romance; a cutting of the balloon cable holding his vision to reality, more or less subtly managed. It was essential to his conception that Newman was understood to have been thoroughly wronged, but that judgement, on the part of the reader, might have been complicated by too much of the real. 

*

In Brussels (Chapter V)

He stood for half an hour in the crowded square before this edifice, in imminent danger from carriage-wheels, listening to a toothless old cicerone mumble in broken English the touching history of Counts Egmont and Horn; and he wrote the names of these gentlemen—for reasons best known to himself—on the back of an old letter.

We can make a guess at those reasons, though. The history does not redound to the credit of the Catholic church. It's also an important preliminary to the founding of the Dutch Republic, the world's first real democracy and as such an honoured forerunner of America. Two things we know about Newman, by the end, are that he is proud of being an American and that he doesn't like the Catholic church. Until the end, however, this latter view is well concealed, perhaps even from himself. 

For instance, during his first visit to Mme de Cintré:

“Your house is of a very curious style of architecture,” he said.

“Are you interested in architecture?” asked the young man at the chimney-piece.

“Well, I took the trouble, this summer,” said Newman, “to examine—as well as I can calculate—some four hundred and seventy churches. Do you call that interested?”

“Perhaps you are interested in theology,” said the young man.

“Not particularly. Are you a Roman Catholic, madam?” And he turned to Madame de Cintré.

“Yes, sir,” she answered, gravely.

Newman was struck with the gravity of her tone; he threw back his head and began to look round the room again. 

(from Chapter VI)

Newman begins the novel by trying to buy a copy of a Madonna. He doesn't seem to have felt that his church inspections entailed a question about the faith that built them. Babcock was troubled by his lack of seriousness on such matters. Nor, it seems, is Newman dismayed that the woman he wants to know is a Catholic. He finds it surprising that she should be grave about it. 

He had never let the fact of her Catholicism trouble him; Catholicism to him was nothing but a name, and to express a mistrust of the form in which her religious feelings had moulded themselves would have seemed to him on his own part a rather pretentious affectation of Protestant zeal. If such superb white flowers as that could bloom in Catholic soil, the soil was not insalubrious. But it was one thing to be a Catholic, and another to turn nun ....

(from Chapter XXI)

When Newman is baulked from his trophy, he sees that this cultural relativism has gone quite far enough.

*

In a strange way The American is an early prefiguration of one of James' obsessions: not marrying. ("The Lesson of the Master", The Ambassadors, "The Beast in the Jungle" . . .). It becomes a great and prescient theme: these non-marrying individuals and their inability to form the kind of open personality that can admit someone else on equal and permanent terms. 

In Newman's case the conscious will is there, the passion is there (he says so, anyway), but his conception of marriage is too like a business transaction, and his pursuit of the most unobtainable bride has something perverse about it. His egotism is not so far from John Marcher's, in the end; both men are over-committed to a story about themselves. 

*

In the 1907 Preface James reflects on this romance that, at the time, he did not even know he was writing. "I must decidedly have supposed, all the while, that I was acutely observing—and with a blest absence of wonder at its being so easy." 

As he points out, writing romantically or realistically is often not a conscious choice:

Of the men of largest responding imagination before the human scene, of Scott, of Balzac, even of the coarse, comprehensive, prodigious Zola, we feel, I think, that the deflexion toward either quarter has never taken place; that neither the nature of the man's faculty nor the nature of his experience has ever quite determined it. His current remains therefore extraordinarily rich and mixed, washing us successively with the warm wave of the near and familiar and the tonic shock, as may be, of the far and strange. 

As someone who is far more simply a fan of Scott and Balzac and Zola than I am of James, I must say I warmed to The American. I thoroughly enjoyed the very un-Jamesian experience of finding myself whisked off to Switzerland to attend the outcome of a fatal duel, or hearing dark secrets in a ruined chapel. 

But such-like things are only trappings of the romantic. Its essence, James thought,

is the fact of the kind of experience with which it deals—experience liberated, so to speak; experience disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered, exempt from the conditions that we usually know to attach to it and, if we wish so to put the matter, drag upon it, and operating in a medium which relieves it, in a particular interest, of the inconvenience of a related, a measurable state, a state subject to all our vulgar communities.

Newman, we remember, is abroad and has no family. His wealth is a more double-edged thing. After all, there are many romances in which the disengagement from community arises from being poor, or apparently so (e.g. "lost heir" plots). But there certainly is a strong economic element in all the authors that James refers to. The American feels particularly close to the Scott model, not only in its exposure of different cultures to each other but also in its central consciousness; I'm thinking especially of Frank Osbaldistone (in Rob Roy), another hero of the new ruling-class.

Diana Rigg as Madame de Bellegarde (Claire's implacable mother)

[Image source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUJdR48AFQE . From the TV Movie The American (1998), directed by Paul Unwin.]

The American, 1877 version:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/177/177-h/177-h.htm

The American: James' revised 1907 text and his interesting Preface. 

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_American_(New_York:_Charles_Scribner%27s_Sons,_1907)

Stanley Tick. "Henry James's The American: Voyons", Studies in the Novel Vol 2 No 3 (Fall 1970), pp. 276-291. https://www.jstor.org/stable/29531399

"The theme of the novel is pressed in epistemological rather than ethical forms." It concerns Newman's difficulty with seeing, that is, discerning. In a note, Tick points out that Newman's self-knowledge is less than perfect; for instance, he never admits his own sexual attraction to Noémie Nioche. 

"The American (1877): Life and Form", a chapter in Jeanne Delbaere-Garant, Henry James: The Vision of France, Presses universitaires de Liège, 1970. https://books.openedition.org/pulg/933?lang=en

A chapter from an excellent book about James' tussle with the problem of French culture through his career. The American represents one pole, The Ambassadors another.

Enrico Brotta. "The Wavering Ruins of The American", in Henry James's Europe: Heritage and Transfer, ed. Dennis Tredy, Annick Duperray and Adrian Harding (2011), pp. 113-120.  https://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0013.pdf .

"the idea of ruins -- which oscillates throughout the novel between the emblem of an artistic and cultural past to be achieved, and the tragic witness of the decline of Western civilisation --"