Some poetry by Mary Rolls

I was reading about Westmorland, the historic county. I had never been quite sure where the borders lay. Essentially it's Kirby Stephen, Appleby, Kendal, Windermere, Ambleside, and Grasmere: it included some of the western Pennines, all of the Howgills, and the SE part of the Lakeland fells. Helvellyn marked the border with Cumberland. 

Westmorland was one of England's least populated counties, but I came across the name of a poet, Mary Rolls née Hillary (1775-1835), who was born in Westmorland to a Quaker family. In 1815 she married a curate and moved south, eventually to Aldwincle Rectory, Northants. She published as Mrs Henry Rolls. I can't see that any of her poems have been published online as text, so here's a sample of what I could find. 

ADDRESS TO LORD BYRON  (Published as a pamphlet in 1816)

Is this the boon of partial Heaven!

Is misery still to Genius given!

Does vengeance still prepare the blow!

Must poverty still lay it low!

Must scorn and grief its steps pursue,

And cold contempt her taunts renew!

Or, when slow sinking to the grave,

Is no kind arm outstretch'd to save!

When those who rise, by noble birth,

Above the wants of vulgar earth—

Receive within the cultur'd breast,

The Muses' sacred seal imprest,—

And pour from the enraptur'd lyre

The song of pure poetic fire;—

Must they too feel each varying pain,—

The maddening pulse— the fever'd brain,—

Each varying form of heart-felt woe,—

The lingering pang—the sudden throe—

And all the stings, that breast must prove,

That mourns the lot of blighted love;—

Till apathy each thought o'ercomes,

And every finer sense benumbs!

Or,—if the harp's deep notes still flow—

Speak but of scenes of guilt or woe—

Of victims none have power to save,

Or the dark slumbers of the grave!

BYRON ! is this thy genuine tale?

No!-- let thy friend remove the veil;—

Shew to thy heart its real state,—

And kindly warn thee ere too late;—

Rend the deep cloud that shrouds thy mind—

The richest—brightest—of its kind!

Why dost thou, the cold Sceptic's slave,

Renounce the Almighty's aid, who gave

That choicest gift—a soul refin'd—

Thy almost more than human mind?

To some, one feeble spark is sent;

To thee the Poet's sun is lent!

Others may catch a transient ray;

On thee, its beams unclouded play!

But, were those glories given to shine—

For thee alone, a wreath to twine?

To bid thee point a gloomy road,—

And steal the listener's heart from God?—

To prove us pilgrims of an hour—

Deny his everlasting power?—

And shew—'midst darkness, doubt, and gloom—

The lasting slumbers of the tomb?

To rend the bands of home-felt joy,

And life's sweet charities destroy?—

To raise the crowd's base censures wild,

And from the Sire divide the Child?

I am thy friend! ---none more admires

Thy genuine, true, poetic fires!

None hears, with purer joys, thy lays;

None, with more pleasure, speaks thy praise;

And none more truly can lament

Those rich, best gifts, so basely spent;—

And on thy tale of private woe,

None can a tenderer thought bestow!

Then be it mine the path to shew,

Where the rich fruits of grief may grow!

Bow thy proud heart beneath His rod,

And own the chastening hand of God!

Then happier, nobler, purer rise,

Fresh from thy grateful sacrifice!

Then fill thy lofty proper sphere,

And, whilst applauding senates hear,

Assert thy Country's sacred cause, 

Maintain her rights, protect her laws!

Stand the supporter of the Throne,

And make thy Sovereign's cause thy own!

Oh! let that choicest gift of heaven,—

To favor'd mortals only given—

Thy rich enchanting stream of song—

Be pour'd pure Virtue's course along!

Proclaim the triumphs of the brave,

Who fought their Country's rights to save;—

And their more mournful glories tell,

In Victory's field who nobly fell!

Or bid those beauteous scenes arise,

That ne'er must bless these wishful eyes!

Tell the proud tale of Greece once more;

Her long-lost lyre, to life restore!

And let thy purer notes proclaim

How sunk 'mid shades of Vice her name!

Ah! let the pure, the moral tale,

O'er every feeling heart prevail;

And, as the tears of Beauty flow,

Spread through her bosom Virtue's glow!

But there is still a higher theme,

Bright as the Poet's brightest dream!—

To sing the praise of Him, whose love

Descended from the realms above,—

From Sin's dark chains, the mind to save,---

And captive lead the vanquish'd grave!

Oh! worthy of thy lyre such strain! 

To sing Jehovah's endless reign;

To pint in raptured strains the road,

And lead the wandering heart to God!

Then shalt thou own a saving power,

Descending in this mournful hour;—

Then shall thy swelling sorrows cease;—

Thy life be joy—thy close be peace!

As sinks the slow declining sun,

When the long summer's day is done,

Yet leaves a track along the skies,

To shew he soon again shall rise;—

So calm may be thy setting day,

When life's last years are roll'd away!

Calm in the grave may'st thou repose

Till Heaven's eternal gates unclose!

Then may'st thou, with enraptur'd ears,

Drink the rich music of the spheres;

And join, with seraph hosts, the song,

Through endless ages pour'd along!

Then shalt thou own the Poet's prize—

The richest present of the skies—

In mercy to mankind was given,

To smooth the path from Earth to Heaven.

(Poem source.)

It's tempting to laugh, e.g. at the thought of Byron championing his Sovereign's cause. Still, I do like her forthrightness. The style of the poem is very much in Byron's own mode (e.g. the splendid punctuation and the speed) and Mary was evidently a genuine fan, though a deploring one, who fell for the first two Cantos of Childe Harold while plainly seeing their tendency. I suppose when she says she is Byron's friend she doesn't mean she was actually acquainted with him. Nevertheless she seems to know something about Byron's forthcoming lines on Waterloo (in Childe Harold III, published November 1816).

THE BUGLE-HORN

by Mrs Henry Rolls

The bugle-horn! How sweet the strain

   That floats along the moon-lit dale!

Oh ! It awakes a thrilling train

  Of thoughts long wrapp'd in time's dim veil:

The scenes, the hopes of  life's young morn,

When first I heard the bugle-horn!

Amidst my native mountains wild,

  When those clear notes responsive rung,

Oft have they roused the lonely child

  From dreams where fairy voices sung;

Starting, I deemed the bugle-horn

Was by some elfin huntsman borne!

Oh! then 'twas sweet at break of day

  To catch from echoing rock and scar,

Those notes which called the hunters gay

  To meet and join the sylvan war;

As those I loved at early morn

Assembled to the bugle-horn!

And it proclaimed the jocund feast,

  When seemed alive the mountain side,

As chief and peasant came; the guest

  To him, of all our race the pride,

With eye, bright as the star of morn,

And voice, clear as the bugle-horn!

But it has poured a solemn strain,

  Borne but by fancy to mine ear;

It floated o'er the sable train

  That wept around his early bier;

E'en now o'er ocean's wave seems borne

The echo of that bugle-horn!

(The Repository of Arts, Literature, Fashions, Manufactures, &c, 1 November 1828)

Departed greatness claims a sigh,--

We mourn when mighty heroes die,

And tears of anguish dim the eye,

  That sees its love to earth resigned!

But, how deplore the Prince of Song,

So raised above the tuneful throng, 

But who debased, so deep, so long,

  The matchless wonders of his mind!

If strains that angels weep to know,

Are poured upon a world below,

Can bid indignant virtue glow,

  BYRON! such guilty strains were thine:

Yet thine the song could fire impart

To Slavery's chilled and drooping heart,

And bid, fair Greece, thy Patriot start,

  By all the music of the Nine!

(from "A Monody on the Death of Lord Byron", found in Choice Selections and Original Effusions; Or Pen and Ink Well Employed (1828))

I was hoping to find her longer poems, but haven't succeeded; e.g her first book Sacred Sketches from Scripture History (1815), and Moscow, a Poem (1816).

MOSCOW, a Poem; by MRS HENRY ROLLS. London, Law and Whitaker, 1816. 

The author has founded her poem on one of the most dreadful events recorded, the destruction of Moscow, and drawn a moral inference that there is an ever-watching Providence, who may suffer tyranny and oppression to prevail for a time, but will, in an unexpected moment, turn the retributive scales of justice, and hurl the bolts of vengeance on the devoted heads of his guilty victims.

The facts are taken from Labaume; and their authenticity cannot be doubted. The versification is generally good, the descriptions are often lofty, and the interest is pleasingly excited throughout. This is not inferior to her former poem, Sketches from Sacred History, which met with so favourable a reception; and we have no doubt the subject of the poem, and the author's reputation, will induce our readers to become purchasers. 

(Notice in The Ladies' Monthly Museum).

From Legends of the North; or, The Feudal Christmas: a Poem (1825):

Veil'd in a cloud of sober gray,

Arose the year's last parting day;

And as at times a shower pass'd by,

Or swept the gale with plaintive sigh,

Seem'd as though nature join'd to mourn

The hours that never can return!

As though the morrow's rising sun

Had not another year begun,

And spread its ample page sublime

Beneath the rapid pen of Time;

Like Age, which marks its fading powers,

Weeps o'er its few short languid hours,

And, though all conscious of decay,

Would yet their final close delay, --

Unmindful that the reign of death

Ends with its last departing breath,

And that the last expiring sigh

Will waft to immortality.

(Quoted in a review in The Monthly Review, for September 1825.)

Transformations of Portrait in Smoke

"Not that I remember."

"Did she ever mention any place she'd like to live . . . or go for a vacation? Anything like that?"

Collins leaned back in his chair. He opened a box of cigarettes, selected one, and lit it with an expensive silver desk lighter.  "It's been so long since she left that it's hard to remember," he said exhaling a deep breath of smoke. 

"Did she write you after she left?"

"No," he said, "there was no reason she should."

"Did she say why she was leaving?"

His eyes burned at me hotly, but his face didn't change. The phone rang and he picked it up. He gave several short answers and hung up. He paused for a moment. "She said she was leaving town and that was all," he said finally. 

That stopped me. Was this the end of the line? I tried to keep my face and voice steady. "She didn't say why?"

"No." He stopped for a moment and seemed to be listening. "Come to think of it," he said slowly, "I have a feeling it might have been New York."

"Was she a good secretary?"

"Excellent."

"Didn't she ever use you for references?"

"Never."

I turned towards the door. "Thanks for your time, Mr Collins," I said. 

His voice didn't change; his face was expressionless. 

"I'm afraid I wasn't much help," he said indifferently. His voice hung in the air for a few seconds and he reached for his pen on the desk and started signing some letters. Deliberately he laid his pen to one side and turned back toward me. "You know, April," he said, "I've often wondered what happened to Miss Allison. I hope you find her. If you do, I'd like to know."

"You would?" I asked. 

"It isn't important," he shrugged, "but I'd be glad to make it worth your time . . . just for my own curiosity." 

(from Portrait in Smoke, Ch 4 Part 1). 

You can read it in English for free, on archive.org :

https://archive.org/details/portraitinsmoket00bill

*

It isn't very well known these days, and I'm speaking from considerable ignorance, but I'll stick my neck out and suggest that Bill S. Ballinger's Portrait in Smoke (1950) is absolutely one of the great noir novels, though it makes no attempt whatever at the torqued prose of e.g. In A Lonely Place.

And I'll also claim that Krassy Almauniski's ruthless journey from the Yards to Lake Shore Drive, painfully traced ten years later by the obsessed small-time collection agent Dan April, is one of the great novels of Chicago, though with no notion of being a game-changer like Native Son.

*

Miss Krassy Almauniski, 4120½ South Hempstead, today was announced the winner of the Stockyard Weekly News beauty contest.  ... 

So begins the faded newspaper clipping from ten years before. 

South Hempstead, along with that crazy high number, hints at South Halsted: i.e. part of Halsted Street, "the backbone of Chicago", which runs north-south behind all the famous skyline. It passes by the stockyards (the area called Back of the Yards), and that's where Krassy's story begins, c. 1940, in evil-smelling slums. 

[Halsted Street, for its great length and diversity, has acquired a fabled quality, maybe from Conrad Friberg's pioneering docufilm Halsted Street (1932), which in turn inspired David E. Simpson's Halsted Street USA (1995), which you can watch here: 

https://www.folkstreams.net/films/halsted-street-usa

I also found this long article by Stanley R. Osborn (from the mid 1950s?):

https://chicagology.com/chicagostreets/halstedstreet/ ]

*

It was a great era of transformations, the noir era, when novels and movies ran alongside. You could take something excellent, turn it completely inside out and end up with something completely differently excellent. It was an insight about social existence and social presentation, I sometimes feel.

Maybe all creative eras are full of transformation, but I'm especially reminded of the age of Shakespeare: the same commercial spirit, the furious activity of re-authoring and multi-authoring and revising and filleting and recycling other people's material into other forms.  

*

And while we're on the classics, one of the first things you'll hear about Portrait in Smoke is its notable use of two alternating narratives: Dan April in the first person, Krassy in the third person. The set-up itself is strangely exciting, in a way that goes beyond the things Krassy actually does or April's tenacious ferreting out of facts (and lamentable misinterpretations). 

The way Ballinger runs it I couldn't help wondering if it was reading Bleak House that showed him the potential. 

Don't imagine that this is like the familiar method of modern genre fiction about, say, WW2 or the 1960s, where someone in the present day finds an old diary in an attic.... That's more about speaking to the interests of the aging demographic who still read fiction. One of its reassurances is that life still has a present and a future but we're quite right to think that everything that really mattered happened back then.

In Portrait in Smoke the alternating narratives aren't really that far apart in time, though far enough to make Dan's stalking difficult. Here the message is of relentless change; ride the wave if you can, but you'll never completely understand it and if you're Dan April you'll always be small-time.

The passage I began with is a great example of the double narrative line at work. Mr Collins will never know what April's after, of course. But also, April will never know why Mr Collins agreed to see him, or what was really between Collins and Miss Allison and why Collins genuinely doesn't know what happened to her and why he wouldn't mind knowing. Only the reader, blessed with the other narrative line, will be able to put it all together: some of it, anyway. Ballinger, naturally, doesn't spell things out. 

*

Krassy, though....

*

"That's rugged," said Waterbury sympathetically. 

"Not too rugged," said Krassy bravely, "fortunately my parents left me enough money . . . that I don't have to worry. But it is lonesome . . . sometimes." She looked at her watch. "It's getting late," she added. "I should be leaving."

"I'll drive you home," Waterbury suggested. "We have a car at our disposal on the tour."

"I'd love it," said Krassy. 

Waterbury went up to Krassy's apartment with her. She mixed him a drink, and seated him in Collins' favorite easy chair. Then she scrambled eggs and made coffee. They ate it off the coffee table in the living room. Waterbury stretched out his long legs, lit a cigarette, and jammed his hands in his pockets. "I like it here," he announced.

"That's nice," said Krassy.

"I wish I didn't have to leave," he said. His face was expressionless and his eyes steadily watched the ceiling. 

"I wish you didn't, either," said Krassy. "But you must, you know."

"I may have so little time . . . that I'd like to spend it all with you," he said. 

Krassy shook her head. Waterbury arose from his chair and crossed over to the lounge; he seated himself beside her and put his arms around her. He kissed her, and Krassy returned his kiss with simulated passion. 

"Don't make me leave. Not tonight!" His voice was urgent. 

Krassy gently disengaged his arms. Taking his face between her two hands, she looked directly in his eyes. "You want to make love to me, is that it?"

"Yes," Waterbury replied levelly.

"No," said Krassy. She stood behind the couch and held her arms behind her back. "I want to wait until I'm sure," she told him softly. 

"I'm sure," he said. "Aren't you?"

"I don't know . . . not really. But I'm going to wait until I am sure." No persuasion from Waterbury could change her mind. He returned to the club that night. 

One week later, on December 24, Krassy married Dana Waterbury. 

(from Portrait in Smoke, Ch 5 Part 2)

--Lo siento --se compadeció Dana Waterbury.

--No lo sientas tanto --contestó vivamente Krassy --. Afortunadamente, mis padres me dejaron algún dinero... Es decir, no tengo preocupaciones monetarias... aunque resulte a veces algo triste vivir sola. Oh, se hace tarde --concluyó, después de consultar su relojito--; debo irme.

--Te acompañaré a casa --sugirió Dana--. Tenemos un coche a nuestra disposición.

--Te le agradezco de veras.

Dana subió al apartamento de ella. Krassy le sirvió un vaso y le invitó a sentarse en el sillón favorito de Collins. Luego, batió huevos y preparó café. Comieron en la mesita del saloncito. Dana estiró sus largas piernas, encendió un cigarillo y hundió las manos en los bolsillos.

--Estoy bien aquí --declaró.

--Lo cual me halaga --sonrió Krassy.

--No quisiera marcharme nunca.

Le dijo inexpresivamente, contemplando el techo.

--También a mí me gustaría. Pero tienes que irte, lo sabes de sobras.

--Dispongo de tan poco tiempo. . . que me gustaría pasarlo contigo. 

Krassy sacudió la cabeza. Dana se levantó del sillón y atravesó la salita yendo hacia el diván. Sentóse al lado de la joven y la rodeó con los brazos. Le besó y Krassy contestó a sus caricias con fingido apasionamiento.

--No me eches..., ¡al menos, esta noche! --murmuró él. 

Krassy se deshizo lentamente de su abrazo. Sosteniéndole el rostro con ambas manos, lo miró fijamente. 

--Deseas acostarte conmigo, ¿verdad?

--Sí --asintió Dana, con voz átona.

--No. Quiero esperar hasta estar completamente segura --denegó ella suavemente.

--Yo ya lo estoy..., ¿y tú?

--No lo sé. De veras; no lo sé. Y aguardaré hasta que esté segura.

Las frases persuasivas y melosas de Dana no la conmovieron. El joven regresó de mala gana al Club aquella noche. 

Una semana después, el 24 de diciembre, Krassy se casó con Dana Waterbury. 

(from Retrato de humo, 1971 translation by Mario Montalbán.)

It might be any heart-warming story of a wartime fighter ace and a whirlwind romance during his brief return from the front, if it weren't for that one word "simulated". But to us it means something completely different because it's Krassy's story we're following, and we know a lot about her though not everything. The symbolism, if that's what it is, of seating him in what used to be Collins' favorite chair (compare the symbolism of her dyeing her hair black, a few pages before). Her fraught, mostly repulsed, feelings about intimacy. Her desperate longing to be secure: the war hero Captain Waterbury represents old money and Philadelphia and ultimate respectability. Her underlying feeling, almost invisible but it's definitely there, that despite her impeccable choreography this fairy-tale is never going to be hers... she won't be able to hang on to it; it isn't even what she wants. 

*

I first read Portrait in Smoke in a Spanish translation (originally from 1971). I might as well introduce it by quoting what the back jacket of Retrato de humo says, as well as I can render it:

Dan April's story is an obsessive quest. April is trying to track down the girl that he fell for ten years ago. For him Krassy represents everything that's beautiful and sweet and worthy of love . . . Inevitably, the reality does not match the illusions of this unhinged passion. What gradually emerges is the true nature of Krassy, an adventuress who ends up in the comfortable lap of an aging millionaire . . . .

Two parallel narratives are juxtaposed in Ballinger's novel: the ideal, as magnified by the poor April, and another, more real, in which the woman he loves is calculating and cruel, has a weakness for betting on horses and lets nothing stand in her way . . . The astonishing thing is the union of both narratives, whose marvellous resolution, strictly in line with the story and the thematic construction, shows Ballinger to be one of the most modern and powerful of crime writers. 

Anyone who goes on to read Portrait in Smoke will find things to question about this, but I think it gets us to the right kind of place for asking those questions. 

*

The 1971 Spanish translation, by Mario Montalbán, is very confidently free (as you'll have seen) and mostly pretty plain, giving little hint of Dan April's slang. 

Sabía que, de llevarlo encima, apenas duraría algunas semanas.

I knew damned good and well I'd shoot all the dough if I kept it around where I could get my hands on it. 

Yet sometimes the Spanish text goes off-piste and adds ideas of its own, too. 

And besides, who'd believe me?

But the whole thing doesn't make sense. It doesn't make any sense at all. I been thinking about it and talking it over with myself. And then on top of that I get dreams. And it still doesn't add up. I can't understand why it happened. ...

Además..., ¿quién iba a creerme?

Nadie, puesto que el asunto, considerado en su conjunto, carece de sentido. No, no puede en absoluto comprenderse. Lo he examinado y estudiado desde todos los ángulos posibles, y continuamente le doy vueltas en mi cerebro. Y para que mi angustia sea aún mayor, sueño con ello. Pero todavía hay más. No entiendo cómo sucedió. ...

Or it just changes things. Fire-escapes are transformed into neon lights, thickly knotted ankles into exaggeratedly thin ankles....  the translator follows his own vision -- why not? -- and leverages ideas that were available in Spanish culture. For example, Mike Manola becomes "un valentón de taberna".

The Spanish translation is shyer of sexual content. After all Franco was still in power in 1971; maybe that had something to do with it, or maybe it was just about what the readership would tolerate. Anyway, it drops the rhythmic humping of Krassy's father and Maria, or Mike Manola's hand on Krassy's breast. Most importantly it drops Krassy's abortion; in the Spanish translation Krassy is only pretending when she informs Collins that she's pregnant. 

*

Portrait in Smoke  was the basis for the British movie Wicked As They Come (1956), starring Arlene Dahl. You can watch it on YouTube, and I think you should enjoy it without my spoilers, which will follow immediately.

The first thing you'll be struck by is the music: it's by the great Malcolm Arnold. The setting is initially New York, then London, finally Paris. The New York crowd scenes include black extras (I dare say that wasn't so unusual, but it surprised me.). Sid James, of all people, is Cathy's Noo Yawk step-father. 

You can tell that the screenwriters read Portrait in Smoke attentively. They made fearless transformations, but these transformations often highlight something that was latent in the novel. For instance the remodelled Larry Buckham, emotional and pathetic in the novel, is here prone to erupt in sudden violence. The remodelled Tim O'Bannion is developed into a powerful male lead, but along lines that the novel had already laid out before putting him aside.

(There's one unforgettable glimpse of the secretarial course and all the girls typing and swaying along to the music. A reminder that Portrait in Smoke is partly a novel about sheer hard slog. Both Krassy and her tracker are exceptionally diligent.)

The screenplay uses only parts of the book. Most drastically, there's no Dan April, and there's no Chicago. The denouement is quite different. Cathy (=Krassy) is on a ruthlessly gold-digging path, but as it turns out she kills her wealthy, elderly husband (Dowling, replacing Powers) by mistake. O'Bannion challenges Cathy to explain why she can't love anyone, and eventually discovers that in her teens Cathy had been attacked by four hoodlums (the unstated implication is that she was gang-raped). None of this was in the novel, and it turns complex hints (e.g. her spontaneous revulsion to Mike Manola's touch) into simplistic formulas, yet it feels in tune with how the novel brings us to see its heroine. The possibility of Cathy's redemption, i.e. finding true love with Tim, is cautiously hinted, but not seriously, because we're already heading for the exits. 

*

A nice little twenty-minute chat by James Ellroy's biographer Steven Powell about Portrait in Smoke, which is apparently one of James Ellroy's favourite novels:

https://venetianvase.co.uk/2024/02/18/ellroy-reads-portrait-in-smoke-by-bill-s-ballinger/

Colm Tóibín: Nora Webster (2014)

I'm not at all satisfied with the little I've been able to say of Nora Webster, a scant testament to how deeply I've taken up residence in it. 

So it's pleasing to supply a link to this piece by Gregory Day in the Sydney Review of Books, somewhat disputable, but which gets much closer to where I would have liked to go:

https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/reviews/the-submerged-moon-nora-webster-by-colm-toibin

And for its acuteness and accuracy I'd also recommend Kelly McMaster's review in the Columbia Magazine:

https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/book-review-nora-webster

*

Nora Webster, recently bereaved, is visiting her sister Catherine's house. 

They went to bed early. Nora was glad to be away from them and from the talk of auctions and big houses and new washing machines. It was clear to her that there was nothing she could have spoken to Catherine and Dilly about, nothing that would have interested her or them. When she asked herself what she was interested in, she had to conclude that she was interested in nothing at all. What mattered to her now could be shared with no one. Jim and Margaret had been with her when Maurice died, and that meant that all three of them could talk easily when Jim and Margaret came to the house because, while they did not refer to those days in the hospital, what they went through then underlay every word they said. It was there with them in the same way as the air was in the room, it was so present that no one ever commented on it. For them now conversation was a way of managing things. But for Catherine and Dilly and Mark conversation was normal. She wondered if she would ever again be able to have a normal conversation and what topics she might be able to discuss with ease and interest. 

At the moment the only topic she could discuss was herself. And everyone, she felt, had heard enough about her. They believed it was time that she stop brooding and think of other things. But there were no other things. There was only what had happened. It was as though she lived under water and had given up on the struggle to swim towards air. It would be too much. Being released into the world of others seemed impossible; it was something she did not even want. How could she explain this to anyone who sought to know how she was or asked if she was getting over what happened?

She woke early in the morning, dreading the day ahead. She wondered if the boys felt like this too. Did Fiona and Aine also dread the day ahead when they woke? Jim and Margaret? Perhaps, she thought, they had found other things to preoccupy them. She, too, could find other things to think about -- money, for example, or her children, or the job in Gibney's. Finding things to think about was not the problem for her; the problem for her was that she was on her own now and that she had no idea how to live. She would have to learn, but it was a mistake to try to do so in someone else's house. It was a mistake to lie here in a strange bed when her own bed at home was strange too. The strangeness of home, however, did not require a bright response from her. It would be a long time, she thought, before she would leave her own house for a night again. 

(Nora Webster, Ch 4)

Margaret, because she worked for the County Council, earned more money than Jim and had even fewer needs. Paying for Aine's school and giving pocket money to Fiona and the boys pleased her, gave her a stake in how they lived and what they planned to do in the future. It amused Nora, as they sat down to eat, to watch Fiona describing the cultural sights of London with her aunt and uncle rather than Saturday stalls and cheap clothes shops. Fiona had been to a Shakespeare play in which some of the actors had been in the audience and had jumped up at the most unexpected moments.

'How d-did you know they were actors?' Donal asked. 

'That's exactly what I was going to ask,' Margaret said. 

'They were in costume and they knew their lines,' Fiona said. 'But it was a big shock when they stood up.'

'Well, I hope that doesn't catch on,' Margaret said. 'Then you would never know where you were. The man beside you could be the Bull McCabe.'

(Nora Webster, Ch 6)

[Bull McCabe was the tough protagonist in John B Keane's The Field, a rural drama first performed in 1965.]

Nora Webster is so many things. It's a world we live within, once we learn to read its plainness of expression. It's one of the most complete modern novels I've read, but one that shines least in quotations. I shouldn't worry, it has found its way to plenty of readers, and I'm just happy that one of them is me. 

It uses chiaroscuro to striking effect. First impressions may be that the reader is assaulted with a multiplicity of names. And it's true; the novel draws near, quite deliberately, to the ordinary café talk that we sometimes overhear and find incomprehensible, and also to the genre of popular family sagas. 

"She knew the story of her life down to her maiden name", Nora reflects about May Lacey, a fellow townswoman who has never been to her house before (p. 3). But to give us a thrilling sense of sharing the immense network of knowledge in any ordinary existence, the author must not plod, but paradoxically must be highly selective: throw intense light here and here, leave the rest in suggestive shadow... The exercise of working out Nora's family tree (see below) shows that the novel is actually distinctly selective in the names it chucks at us. We never learn Nora's maiden name. We never learn the names of her mother or father. We never learn the names of her sister Catherine's children, or even how many there are. Nora hasn't much interest in these nephews and nieces, we infer; nor in her cousin John (whose wife is simply called "John's wife"). But as for her mother and father it's the opposite inference: they mean so much to her that her thoughts would never distance them by using a name. 

*

The novel is written strictly from Nora's point of view, which brings us to other chasms. She often becomes aware that her sons share some secret, or that her daughters have been saying something about her, but these mysteries are not to be solved, just briefly wondered about, like the way you wonder about the reason for something in nature, but know you'll never trouble to find out. 

The sea [at Curracloe] was rougher than she ever remembered it. She wondered if there was more shelter at Cush  and if the waves there broke more gently. Also, the strand there was shorter and there were stones at the edge of the shore. Here there were sand dunes and the long strand, no stones, no shelter, no cliffs made of marl ... (p. 179)

The wondering fades away with the events of the day. For instance when the boys are playing about on the lifts in Arnott's. They are away so long that she starts to worry.

When they found her, they pretended it was nothing, that the lift had merely stopped at every floor. When she told them that she had thought they were lost, they gave each other a look as though something had happened to them in the lift that they did not want her to know about. (p. 20)

The bereaved Nora remembers her time with Maurice as idyllic and no doubt this was basically true but not all there was to it. Perhaps being married to Nora wasn't always plain sailing. Perhaps Maurice who was so personable (her buffer against being exposed to society or needing to have her own opinions) was also often opinionated and ignorant (e.g. about musical life, p. 204). Maurice strongly disapproved of Nora's anonymous letters to Sister Agnes (p. 233). There must have been the usual marital arguments. 

Other people, including some of her own family, treat her with a certain caution: as if Nora was felt to be rather a difficult prickly person. She was a demon before she met Maurice, says Catherine (p. 301). Nora is notably sharp-witted and sharp-tongued, outwardly or internally: in particular about other women, including her own sisters and daughters. (You can see a certain family resemblance to her aunt Josie.)

There were also times her own family  repeatedly relished her discomfort (p. 205); perhaps they were not exactly angels even in the hallowed past. On the whole, we guess, they were a reasonably normal family.

*

Nora never got the chance of a university education. Her imagination and interests are local and very mainstream. She reads novels mainly to switch off, she watches the news on TV, she reads newspapers. 

(But readers who read in the same way as Nora have often been disappointed by Nora Webster, as its Amazon reviews voluminously testify.)

The novel delights in capturing the ordinariness of her thoughts. It makes us take these ordinary thoughts seriously. Her life, we see, is culturally rich though it isn't full of  the arts (high or low) or studious abstract thinking. A film (like Gaslight) or music (the Archduke trio) can suddenly produce a deep response in her, but she doesn't live for these moments.

You can hear Nora's voice in the above conversation about the actors: "the cultural sights of London" and "at the most unexpected moments".. Or

Nora could not think why Nancy was telling her all of this as though it were urgent and fascinating news. (p. 157)

When Aine's Leaving Cert results came, they could not have been better and this meant that Aine would be going to University College Dublin. (p. 188)

Those mundane expressions make us warm to her because we recognize them as ours. Nora's thoughts are audible in the prose, often signalled by their mundanity. Nora is a kind of narrator, as everyone else is, in her internal thoughts. She is driven to put a shape on her experience, and sometimes we can hear her preparing the expressions she would use to narrate it, should anyone ask. She is a pretty honest narrator to herself, not markedly self-deceiving, but she's still unreliable because there's so much about her own life and about Enniscorthy life that she will never know. 

*

Some things Nora doesn't know: 

What she seems like to other people (something she often speculates about). The intensity of her grief apparently blares out though her own thoughts are apt to understate it.

Why it was that she herself didn't contact her boys for such a long time when Maurice was dying. 

And what precipitated Donal's stammer.

And what he sees in photography.

And the photos he never shows her. (And she never asks to see?)

The other side of the bullying office manager Francie Kavanagh, attested to by Sister Thomas and the young bookkeeper. 

What happened when Laurie O'Keefe's picture changed (p. 204).

Is the appearance of Maurice her own imagination or something real?

Who is "the other one" mentioned by Maurice (p. 294). 

*

Dates. The action of Nora Webster occupies about five years, from October 1967 to Summer 1972. (No year dates are mentioned, but they can be worked out from public events.)

One of the incidental joys of the novel is its realization of provincial Ireland during this specific historical era. The first two years occupy about seven chapters each. The next three years occupy just four chapters. 

Ch 1  October 1967.

Ch 2 January 1968

Ch 3-5 Six months after Maurice's death. If he died in August 1967 that would make it February 1968. 

Ch 6 Working at Gibney's. Spring 1968

Ch 7 Summer 1968. Then, p. 113: The riot and baton charge in Derry. It is 5th October, 1968. 

Ch 8 October 1968

Ch 9 Late October 1968 to Christmas 1968 (p. 138-40).

Ch 10 March 1969 (p. 144). 

Ch 11 subsequent weeks...

Ch 12 The quiz night. May 1969?

Ch 13 Summer holiday: July 1969. (The landing on the moon took place late on Sunday July 20 GMT, the moonwalk in the early hours of Monday July 21st GMT). Later Aine and Donal follow the riots in Derry and Belfast (mid August 1969). Fiona visits London for a few days at the end of the summer.

Ch 14. Music lessons. From September 1969 and the next few months?

Ch 15. May 1970 (Haughey's arrest for gunrunning). The holiday in Sitges, in the first two weeks of September 1970, followed by Conor being put in the B class. Goes through to February 1971 (Aine on TV).

Ch 16. Goes through to early summer (1971), late July (p. 250), September (p. 252) when Donal starts at St Peter's. 

Ch 17. Christmas 1971. January 1972. Bloody Sunday (30th January 1972) (p. 263). British Embassy attacked 2 February 1972 (p. 265) -- the episode where Aine goes missing. Late February (p. 274): Nora gets interested in doing up the house. Painting the ceiling (April 1972?).

Ch 18. No dates are mentioned but it follows on. Summer 1972, basically. 

*

Nora's family:

Maurice, a teacher, has recently died. Aunt Josie looked after the boys while Nora nursed Maurice in his last months. Aine was at home with Una looking after her (and Fiona visiting them regularly). 

Josie was a teacher until she retired. 

Nora's father died when she was 14, Nora was alone with him. Nora was her father's favourite, Josie says (p.34).

Nora's mother had once been a servant girl at a farm (p. 62), later worked in Cullen's (p.63). She was a good singer.  She had a small shop (p. 50). Nora's mother died when Nora already had children; it was seven years before Maurice died (p. 196) i.e. about 1960. Nora didn't love her mother when she was alive, there was coldness between them (p. 196) and Josie thinks her mother didn't know what to do with her (p. 34). 

Both Nora's grandmothers died before she was born (p. 284)

Neither Jim nor Margaret have ever married, they live together in the old family home. Jim is 15 years older than Maurice. 

Maurice and Jim learnt Irish in the Kerry Gaeltacht forty years ago (p. 105).

Maurice had another "delicate" brother, who died (p. 167) of TB (p. 301). 

Maurice had a cousin called Aidan (p. 169)

Maurice's grandfather was evicted from his farm for political activity. Aine's politics came from her Webster side, according to Aunt Josie (p. 299). [NB  Aine is pronounced something like Ahn-yuh.]

Aunt Mary is mentioned on p. 284.

In the course of the novel, Una becomes engaged to Seamus.

*

Nora Webster runs parallel to major events in Colm Tóibín's youth. His own father Mícheál died in 1967 (like Maurice). The novel is in memory of his mother Bríd (d. 2000) and his younger brother Niall (who died in 2004, aged just 44); they are (and aren't) the characters Nora and Conor; Colm himself is (and isn't) Donal. 

About his mother, and much more: this great interview with Kathy Sheridan in the Irish Times:

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/colm-toibin-i-start-and-i-finish-1.1943080

*

Nora's car is an old Austin A40 at the start, but an old Morris Minor in the recent past. Perhaps an error? (The car on the jacket image is neither, as far as I can make out.)

*

"Too young to die, they say. Too young? No, rather he is blessed in being so young thus to be made swiftly an immortal. He has escaped the tremulous hands of age." (p. 47)

The quotation that Nora wants on the memorial card (given more fully on p. 51) is by the English Dominican Bede Jarrett (The House of Gold: Lenten Sermons (1931)).

Nora reads it again, and 

The words, she thought, seemed to be too certain. Wherever Maurice was at this moment, he would long for the comfort of this house and for her, as much as she longed for the past year of her life to be wiped away and for him to return to them. 

(p. 51)

It's possible to trace, or suppose we trace, Nora's feelings on this topic through the novel: from this early rawness through to "He has not been watching over me!" (p. 126) and eventually to her letting go of the past. 

*

On Colm Tóibín's The Master (2004):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2025/01/reading-around-colm-toibin-master-2004.html

On Colm Tóibín's The Heather Blazing (1992):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2017/06/colm-toibin-heather-blazing-1992.html

One more Prelude

michaelpeverett · Prelude No 18 In A Minor

Prelude No 18, in A minor. It was very difficult to avoid some of the familiar turns of this very familiar guitar key -- too difficult for me, anyway. I at least contrived to avoid the usual dominant of E7 (using Bb7 instead), and I enjoyed using the bottom E fifth in the melody line. I finished this one during a morning in the van in the Largo do Espírito Santo, Idanha-a-Velha.

All the Preludes so far: 

michaelpeverett · Preludes

Reading around Colm Tóibín: The Master (2004)

Terracotta bust of the twelve-year-old Count Alberto Bevilacqua by Hendrik Christian Andersen. Purchased by Henry James for Lamb House, Rye.

[Image source: https://jasoncochran.com/2014/04/29/henry-james-muses-the-bust-in-his-dining-room-and-a-sort-of-secret-dynasty/ .]

 

 ... For his friends, this night would be entered into the annals of the unmentionable, pages in which he had so studiously avoided having his name appear. As time passed, however, he realized that he could not betray the performers now. He could not give into his own horrible urge to be alone in the darkness, to escape into the night and walk as though he had written nothing and was nobody. He would have to go to them and thank them; he would have to insist that the repast planned after the triumph of his play should go ahead. In the half light he stood preparing himself, steeling himself, ready to suppress whatever his own urges and needs might be. He made his hands into fists as he set out to smile and bow and imagine that the evening in all its glory had been due entirely to the talents of the actors in the great tradition of the London stage. 

(From Colm Tóibín's The Master, end of Ch 1 (January 1895).)

*

That final sentence is a little miracle; Tóibín showing us Henry's distressed thoughts preparing for verbiage; the nonsense he must say at the after-show party, so begins to imagine. 

The Master is the wonderful portrait of an artistic freedom gone rogue. The more desperately Henry needs to preserve his freedom, the more he must confine his life and his thoughts. The more uncompromising he needs to be, the more he must compromise. It's a trade-off that's almost ruinous, to his life and to his art. Almost. 

Like many of his stories, Guy Domville was helplessly personal in its accent on renunciation. Guy's willingness to marry is as lightly thrown off as it's assumed; it's evident that he adores Mrs Peverel as a mother-figure.

*

GUY. What I must forget is that I've strayed! -- From the happiness that was near to the happiness that was far! 

MRS. PEVEREL. But the happiness that was "near" was a life you had put away.

GUY. The happiness that was near was a treasure not mine to touch! I believed that treasure then to be another's.

MRS. PEVEREL. You had too great things to think of -- and now I see how they've changed you. You hold yourself in another way. 

GUY. (Smiling.) I try to carry my "name"!

MRS. PEVEREL. (Triumphant, to prove how right she has been.) You carry it better than you did!

GUY. People have cried me up for it. But the better the name, the better the man should be.

MRS. PEVEREL. He can't be better than when his duty prevails. 

GUY. Sometimes that duty is darkened, and then it shines again! It lighted my way as I came, and it's bright in my eyes at this hour. But the brightness, in truth, is yours -- it grows and grows in your presence. Better than anything I sought or found is that purer passion -- this calm retreat! (Then on an ironic movement of MRS. PEVEREL'S.) Aye, calm, Madam (struck with the sight of LORD DEVENISH'S white gloves), save for these! I've seen them before -- I've touched them. (Thinking, recalling; then with light breaking.) At Richmond!

MRS. PEVEREL. (Deeply discomposed, at a loss.) My Lord Devenish left them.

GUY. (Astounded.) Was he here?

(From Guy Domville, Act III.)

Complete English text of Guy Domville, alongside a 2012 Portuguese translation by Mônica Zardo (PDF):

https://lume.ufrgs.br/bitstream/10183/66289/1/000870716.pdf

*

Guy Domville is set in 1780. The sets and costumes were designed accordingly (with mixed success), but Henry James took no great interest in the date he had specified. The characters speak modern Jamesian. Guy does indeed arrive in a "shay", that is, a chaise, a vehicle going out of use by the mid 19th century. But "shay" is American slang, perhaps recalled from "The Deacon's Masterpiece", a popular poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. 

*

Henry was so agitated on the opening night at St James's Theatre (5 January 1895) that he knew he must keep away. He walked up the street to the Haymarket to see Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband (which had opened two days before) returning to his own play only for its final lines and the catcalls. Seeing Wilde's play had made him feel worse; not only was it trash (Henry considered most plays to be trash), it had "smash hit" written all over it. 

LORD GORING. Come in there, father. Your sneezes are quite heartrending.

LORD CAVERSHAM. Well, sir, I suppose I have a right to sneeze when I choose?

LORD GORING. [Apologetically.] Quite so, father. I was merely expressing sympathy.

LORD CAVERSHAM. Oh, damn sympathy. There is a great deal too much of that sort of thing going on nowadays.

LORD GORING. I quite agree with you, father. If there was less sympathy in the world there would be less trouble in the world.

LORD CAVERSHAM. [Going towards the smoking-room.] That is a paradox, sir. I hate paradoxes.

LORD GORING. So do I, father. Everybody one meets is a paradox nowadays. It is a great bore. It makes society so obvious.

LORD CAVERSHAM. [Turning round, and looking at his son beneath his bushy eyebrows.] Do you always really understand what you say, sir?

LORD GORING. [After some hesitation.] Yes, father, if I listen attentively.

Complete text of An Ideal Husband:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/885/885-h/885-h.htm

*

Hendrik Christian Andersen and John Briggs Potter in Florence, 1894 painting by Andreas Martin Andersen.

[Image source: Wikimedia Commons .]

The painting has been given various interpretations: the homoeroticism seems blatant and yet is conceivably a figment. The same might be said of the scene in The Master from Henry's youth, when he spends a night in a single bed with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, both of them naked. [This was the Holmes who was later a US Supreme Court justice and proponent of eugenics.]

In the novel that formative scene, young Henry being cupped by Holmes' body, is quietly recalled much later in Andersen's sympathetic embrace of the older Henry in the Protestant cemetery in Rome (a scene, by the way, that also contains a cat who wants to be stroked). 

*

Henry in the Protestant cemetery is overcome before the recent tomb of his friend, the author Constance Fenimore Woolson, who committed suicide in Venice in 1894. (Was she another, the novel asks, who made the fatal mistake of pinning her hopes on Henry?)

Anyway, she had her own comment on art without compromise, when the obscure heroine of "Miss Grief" asks a successful author to read her play. 

I followed up my advantage, opened the little paper volume and began. I first took the drama line by line, and spoke of the faults of expression and structure; then I turned back and touched upon two or three glaring impossibilities in the plot. "Your absorbed interest in the motive of the whole no doubt made you forget these blemishes," I said apologetically.

But, to my surprise, I found that she did not see the blemishes—that she appreciated nothing I had said, comprehended nothing. Such unaccountable obtuseness puzzled me. I began again, going over the whole with even greater minuteness and care. I worked hard: the perspiration stood in beads upon my forehead as I struggled with her—what shall I call it—obstinacy? But it was not exactly obstinacy. She simply could not see the faults of her own work, any more than a blind man can see the smoke that dims a patch of blue sky. When I had finished my task the second time she still remained as gently impassive as before. I leaned back in my chair exhausted, and looked at her.

Even then she did not seem to comprehend (whether she agreed with it or not) what I must be thinking. "It is such a heaven to me that you like it!" she murmured dreamily, breaking the silence. Then, with more animation, "And now you will let me recite it?"

I was too weary to oppose her; she threw aside her shawl and bonnet, and, standing in the centre of the room, began.

And she carried me along with her: all the strong passages were doubly strong when spoken, and the faults, which seemed nothing to her, were made by her earnestness to seem nothing to me, at least for that moment. When it was ended she stood looking at me with a triumphant smile.

"Yes," I said, "I like it, and you see that I do. But I like it because my taste is peculiar. To me originality and force are everything—perhaps because I have them not to any marked degree myself—but the world at large will not overlook as I do your absolutely barbarous shortcomings on account of them. Will you trust me to go over the drama and correct it at my pleasure?" This was a vast deal for me to offer; I was surprised at myself.

"No," she answered softly, still smiling. "There shall not be so much as a comma altered." Then she sat down and fell into a reverie as though she were alone.

(From "Miss Grief".)

Woolson's writings are available on Project Gutenberg, so I've read a few of her stories. The most challenging was "King David", a brazenly racist assault on northern do-gooders (and their own inner racism), anticipating Stephen Crane. Her writing responded more warmly to the American South than anywhere else, I think. 

As soon as they could speak, "Where are the two out in the sail-boat?" asked the Sister.

"God knows!" answered Melvyna. "The last time I noticed their sail they were about a mile outside of the reef."

"I will go and see."

"Go and see! Are you crazy? You can never get through that water."

"The saints would help me, I think," said the little Sister.

She had risen, and now stood regarding the watery waste with the usual timid look in her gentle eyes. Then she stepped forward with her uncertain tread, and before the woman by her side comprehended her purpose she was gone, ankle-deep in the tide, knee-deep, and finally wading across the sand up to her waist in water toward the lighthouse. The great wave was no deeper, however, even there. She waded to the door of the tower, opened it with difficulty, climbed the stairway, and gained the light-room, where the glass of the windows was all shattered, and the little chamber half full of the dead bodies of birds, swept along by the whirlwind and dashed against the tower, none of them falling to the ground or losing an inch of their level in the air as they sped onward, until they struck against some high object, which broke their mad and awful journey. Holding on by the shattered casement, Sister St. Luke gazed out to sea. The wind was blowing fiercely, and the waves were lashed to fury. The sky was inky black. The reef was under water, save one high knob of its backbone, and to that two dark objects were clinging. Farther down she saw the wreck of the boat driving before the gale. Pedro was over in the village; the tide was coming in over the high sea, and night was approaching. She walked quickly down the rough stone stairs, stepped into the water again, and waded across where the paroquet boat had been driven against the wall of the house, bailed it out with one of Melvyna's pans, and then, climbing in from the window of the sitting-room, she hoisted the sail, and in a moment was out on the dark sea.

(From "Sister St Luke". Like "King David" this story appears in Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches.)

*

The ‘historical novel’ is, for me, condemned, even in cases of labour as delicate as yours, to a fatal cheapness, for the simple reason that the difficulty of the job is inordinate and that a mere escamotage, in the interest of ease, and of the abysmal public naivety, becomes inevitable. You may multiply the little facts that may be got from pictures and documents, relics and prints, as much as you like – the real thing is almost impossible to do, and in its essence the whole effect is as naught: I mean the invention, the representation of the old CONSCIOUSNESS, the soul, the sense, the horizon, the vision of individuals in whose mind half the things that make ours, that make the modern world, were non-existent. You have to think with your modern apparatus a man, a woman or rather fifty – whose own thinking was intensely otherwise conditioned, you have to simplify back by an amazing tour de force – and even then it’s all humbug.

That was Henry James writing to Sarah Orne Jewett (5 October 1901) about historical fiction. She had just published The Tory Lover (1901), set in 1777-78 during the American War of Independence  -- her first historical fiction, and her final book before the carriage accident (3 September 1902) ended her career as an author.  

It was frankly ungracious so far as timing went, but it was sincere. James had indeed a kind of extreme fastidiousness, amounting to a block, about admitting history into his novels. We know from his stage reviews that he loved Shakespeare's plays, responding deeply if not with notable originality. He lived in an era when most novelists loved to quote Shakespeare and other hallowed poets in their chapter epigraphs or their fictional conversations, to build a fictional world that confessed its rootedness in a tradition. In America there was a contemporary glut of historical romance (now largely forgotten), and James wasn't alone in deploring it. But he stood almost alone in the utter banishment from his work of old literature and indeed the words of other writers generally. The past is in fact irretrievable; it only enters his stories when filtered through modern sensibility; silly, touristic, fabricated and at best comic (moonlight on the Alhambra, for instance). His 1903 story "The Birthplace" won't even name the storied poet whose birthplace the Gedges curate, nor does it quote a single word or name from the poet's works. 

Mr Henry James and I are now writing letters to each other, and he always believes in an 'extinct soul' of the last century but I do not. (How could I, when one of my most intimate friends was a Harvard man of the class of '05, and I have seen fashions far back into the 1700's parading up the aisle of our old Berwick Church?)

(Sarah Orne Jewett to S. Weir Mitchell, 23 October 1901.)

But James' observation to Sarah Orne Jewett proves that all fiction, not just historical fiction, is "almost impossible". If a complete reconstruction of another's consciousness is truly necessary, then how can you put any other people into a novel than yourself? You'll immediately run up against the mystery of people who are a little older than yourself, and the still more intractable mystery of people who are a little younger. But everyone's a mystery... A different cultural background, different gender, different childhood, different social class, different health history, different passions... and all the rest... You can't fully know anyone. To people your pages, however, demands not universal knowledge but a sort of happy knack. Fiction is necessarily cheap. It must borrow, adapt, intrude, stage, creatively misremember and distort, reverse engineer, make adroit use of clichés, indulge in mystification, be flagrantly anachronistic, imagine such discourse as never existed, plunder from the intimacies of friends, cover its tracks, and exploit a hundred other tricks to spark the miracle of a story coming to life.

*

"My dear," he said, speaking eagerly, so that she must listen and would not draw away, "my dear, you ask an almost impossible thing; you should see that a suspected man were better left ashore, on such a voyage as this. Do you not discern that he may even turn my crew against me? He has been the young squire and benefactor of a good third of my men, and can you not see that I must always be on my guard?"

"But we must not distrust his word," begged Mary again, a little shaken.

"I have followed the sea, boy and man, since I was twelve years old. I have been a seafarer all my days," said Paul Jones. "I know all the sad experiences of human nature that a man may learn. I trust no man in war and danger and these days of self-advancement, so far that I am not always on the alert against treachery. Too many have failed me whom I counted my sure friends. I am going out now, only half trusted here at home, to the coasts where treason can hurt me most. I myself am still a suspected and envied man by those beneath me. I am given only this poor ship, after many generous promises. I fear a curse goes with it."

"You shall have our hopes and prayers," faltered Mary, with a quivering lip. The bitterness of his speech moved her deepest feelings; she was overstrung, and she was but a girl, and they stood in the moonlight together.

"Do not ask me again what I must only deny you, even in this happy moment of nearness," he said sadly, and watched her face fall and all the light go out of it. He knew all that she knew, and even more, of Wallingford's dangerous position, and pitied her for a single moment with all the pity that belonged to his heart. A lonely man, solitary in his very nature, and always foreboding with a kind of hopelessness the sorrows that must fall to him by reason of an unkindness that his nature stirred in the hearts of his fellows, his very soul had lain bare to her trusting look.

He stood there for one moment self-arraigned before Mary Hamilton, and knowing that what he lacked was love. He was the captain of the Ranger; it was true that Glory was his mistress. In that moment the heavens had opened, and his own hand had shut the gates.

The smile came back to Mary's face, so strange a flash of tenderness had brightened his own. When that unforgettable light went out, she did not know that all the jealousy of a lonely heart began to burn within him.

(from The Tory Lover, Ch 6)

*

Sarah Orne Jewett isn't in The Master -- more's the pity! -- but some of Henry's phrases are, for instance the "fatal cheapness" and the "humbug". In the novel he uses them while repelling his brother William, who thinks Henry should write a historical fiction about "the Puritan fathers". 

But The Master is emphatically a historical fiction, as John Updike pointed out in his review. All the same Tóibín, an intuitively un-Jamesian novelist in so many ways, is thinking about this matter of a vocation alongside his novelist-hero, thinking about its personal costs and what must be compromised and how what we repeatedly experience and what we're always having to deny and even what we dread are somehow what we have chosen, and how easy it is to fossilize into a horrible parody of what we hoped to be, and also how it's no good overthinking it, and that these questions aren't restricted to writing novels or any other vocation but sit unacknowledged at the centre of everyone's life.

In its totally different way The Master is just as personal a novel as Nora Webster. 

(It's a strange coincidence that one of the few unhistorical characters in The Master -- a young and arrogant English MP -- is surnamed Webster.)

*

On Colm Tóibín's Nora Webster:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2025/01/colm-toibin-nora-webster-2014.html

On Colm Tóibín's The Heather Blazing:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2017/06/colm-toibin-heather-blazing-1992.html