The Little Professor

Imposture

Benjamin Markovits is not the first to take on failed novelist, failed diarist, and failed physician John Polidori: Paul West had a go at him in the more extravagant Lord Byron's Doctor (1989).  Like West, Markovits is ultimately more concerned with Byron than with Polidori--in fact, he's purportedly writing two more novels on the subject.  While Imposture thus joins the already quite extensive list of novels about or featuring Byron*, its fascination with all kinds of fakery (fake identities, authorial fakery, etc.) also allies it with recent novels like Peter Carey's My Life as a Fake or John Banville's Shroud.

Appropriately enough, Imposture opens with a nod to early nineteenth-century novelistic conventions.  The novel we are about to read is supposedly transcribed from a manuscript, written by a now-dead English teacher who had concealed his real identity behind the name of Peter Pattieson--that is, one of Sir Walter Scott's narrators.  The transcriber in question signs the preface "Benjamin Markovits."  In other words, the "glamour of imposture" (xix) begins quite quickly: the "real" author impersonates the editor of a fictional author's novel, and the fictional author himself is impersonating the antiquarian who "collects" the stories that make up Tales of My Landlord.   Moreover, Imposture is itself an imposture, a pastiche written "in a style nearly two hundred years old" (xx).   Much as the preface reenacts Scott (driven to fiction after Byron usurped his status as the age's bestselling poet), the novel fictionalizes not just Scott's and Byron's historical moment, but also their writing--an imposture of total historical immersion, as it were. Or so the preface claims, in any event. (I'll return to this point at the end.)

Polidori's problem, at the beginning of the novel, is that publisher Henry Colburn has committed an act of commercial imposture: he has affixed Byron's name to The Vampyre (itself an imposture of sorts, given its autobiographical and Byronic overtones).  In trying to claim The Vampyre, the impecunious Polidori implicitly hopes to reclaim himself and explicitly hopes to gain some very necessary cash.  Instead, by telling the truth--"I wrote it" (3)--Polidori winds up impersonating Byron himself.  The young woman to whom he tells this truth, Eliza, herself impersonates a lady, and plots to "carry on an intrigue" (41) with the man she now believes is Byron.  Of course, she thinks, in order to romance her, "Byron" must pretend to be someone other than Byron, but her aristocratic employers would "see through any pretence of imposture he put on, and recognize him for what he was: the greatest, most beautiful, most scandalous poet of his age" (40).  It's as though Polidori has "glamour" in its older, magical sense; for Eliza, Polidori-pretending-to-be-Byron could not be anyone other than Byron, for his very public self shines through no matter what.  Except, of course, that "Byron"...isn't.  But even Byron, tellingly, adores imposture, "the false authentic" (72)--the "verisimilitude" (72) of history, much like the historical novel.

Eliza is a nod to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century nightmare of the bad female reader, who constructs  her life out of fragments appropriated uncritically from fiction and poetry.  When Polidori asks Eliza for her "history," she ignores the mundane, dreary realities of her life in favor of "the heroines of Byron's eastern tales," whose lives she desires to overwrite her own (89).  As Polidori thoughtfully observes later on, "[s]he was a girl who made things up, who lived, privately and powerfully, in the court of her own imagination" (111); in that way, she is his logical counterpart, the woman who matches "his own passion for dressing up" (111).  Both romance in general and Byronism in particular enable a temporary escape from drudgery and personal failure.  When Eliza finally realizes that she has lost her virtue to an imposter, she mentally turns herself into "the innocent abused, a creature with a pedigree almost as long and honourable as lovers'" (192)--a moment of sentimental narrative that only temporarily conceals the harsher realities of extramarital sexual encounters in the early nineteenth century.

When it comes to Polidori, though, his apparent ability to vanish into Byron--an early case of celebrity impersonation--is less an achievement than it is a sign of his own emptiness.  Polidori, who has an unfailing knack for killing his patients (as a doctor, he is, indeed, an imposter), spends the novel hovering on the brink of death himself, so "frail" that "his arm strained under his own half-weight" (80).  As he concludes after consummating his relationship with Eliza, "[h]e was the vampyre, he understood that for the first time; whatever he touched he corrupted.  He had no life of his own" (193). If we read Polidori's figurative vampirism as something more than self-pity, his "imposture" is less postmodern playfulness than it is something far more sinister--the "glamour of imposture" as something poisonous to both the performer and the performed.  A conclusion which, if taken to its logical extremes, might make us wonder about the historical novel as its own form of vampirism, infecting the past with the preoccupations with the present. 

Yet this novel is an imposter in an additional sense: it is not, in fact, a pastiche.  Here, for example, is the real Polidori:

Aubrey began to attach himself more and more to Ianthe; her innocence, so contrasted with all the affected virtues of the women among whom he had sought for his vision of romance, won his heart; and while he ridiculed the idea of a young man of English habits, marrying an uneducated Greek girl, still he found himself more and more attached to the almost fairy form before him. He would tear himself at times from her, and, forming a plan for some antiquarian research, he would depart, determined not to return until his object was attained; but he always found it impossible to fix his attention upon the ruins around him, whilst in his mind he retained an image that seemed alone the rightful possessor of his thoughts. Ianthe was unconscious of his love, and was ever the same frank infantile being he had [known]. She always seemed to part from him with reluctance; but it was because she had no longer any one with whom she could visit her favourite haunts, whilst her guardian was occupied in sketching or uncovering some fragment which had yet escaped the destructive hand of time. She had appealed to her parents on the subject of Vampyres, and they both, with several present, affirmed their existence, pale with horror at the very name. Soon after, Aubrey determined to proceed upon one of his excursions, which was to detain him for a few hours; when they heard the name of the place, they all at once begged of him not to return at night, as he must necessarily pass through a wood, where no Greek would ever remain, after the day had closed, upon any consideration. They described it as the resort of the vampyres in their nocturnal orgies, and denounced the most heavy evils as impending upon him who dared to cross their path. Aubrey made light of their representations, and tried to laugh them out of the idea; but when he saw them shudder at his daring thus to mock a superior, infernal power, the very name of which apparently made their blood freeze, he was silent.  (John Poldori, The Vampyre)

And here's a random paragraph from Markovits:

'You didn't dare,' Eliza reproached her, not without admiration.  She lay on her side, her chin propped up on her elbow.  The older woman stretched out on her back; her face, still flushed from dancing, just beneath her sister's.  The soft fine hairs of her skin shifted in Eliza's breath.  How young Beatrice looked, in spite of her twenty-two years, in spite of her recent motherhood.  She had the shape of someone still forming, the unripe figure that suggests the lines it will grow into.  Eliza, by contrast, looked as if she were already retracting, at sixteen.  Her figure was good, but spare rather than green.  The bone of her collar pronounced how little she could live on, how much she could do without.  Her smell was dry, too, like dead petals, while Beatrice filled her bed in the stewed richness of spent energies.  Eliza stroked her hair away from her forehead, then wiped the sweat of it against her own cheek; after all, his might have touched Bea's perspiringly. 'You didn't dare,' she repeated.  (21)

Markovits shows no sign of emulating Polidori's conventionally Romantic-era stylistic tics, such as hyperbaton, the rolling compound sentences, the lengthy parentheses, or the presence of both dramatic and grammatical punctuation.  He avoids archaic vocabulary.  The occasional paragraph-long excursion aside, his sentences are relatively short.  (And Markovits certainly doesn't share Polidori's own particular fondness for the coordinating conjunction.)  In other words, Markovits does not even attempt to create the illusion of early nineteenth-century prose style, which leaves the reader in an interesting position.  If, on the one hand, the novel was supposed to be a pastiche, then at that level it indubitably fails.  If, on the other, "Benjamin Markovits" (the fictionalized editor of the text "authored" by Pattieson/Sullivan) can't recognize a non-pastiche when he sees it, then he too is an imposter.  The second theory, obviously, is the more attractive. 

*--It's odd (or perhaps it isn't odd?) that Byron, whose critical reputation has probably fallen the most of any member of the Romantic Big Six, nevertheless still provides grist for the novelist's mill.  (There are far fewer people lining up to write novels about Wordsworth, although he has been known to put in the occasional appearance.)  Has Byron's life swamped his poetry?

Requirements

One of the greatest flaws of the ACTA report, as others have mentioned, is historical: it declares that Shakespeare requirements are "vanishing," but neglects to compare the number of required Shakespeare courses in 2007 to the number of required Shakespeare courses in, say, 1957.  There's simply no way of establishing the veracity of ACTA's claims either way without doing some very dull (and quite possibly expensive) archival work, but that the work might be dull hardly excuses ACTA's failure to do it.  ACTA can hardly advance the excuse made for Foucault--namely, that the philosophical framework is more important than the factual data.  After all, ACTA's point is nowhere without the statistical data in place, and ACTA has so far not provided the data.  (Yes, yes, I know: I'm being a boring conservative again, demanding empirical evidence and all.  So sue me.)

What's also missing from the report, of course, is any "philosophy of requirements" in the first place.  That is, ACTA does not ask itself why some courses are to be required, and others not; it simply assumes that Shakespeare, being Shakespeare, must be required.   Now,  I'm actually all for requiring Shakespeare, but having said that, I can think of many colleges which probably don't need to do so.  In fact, it's quite possible that most colleges don't need to do so.  Let me explain.   

To speak very broadly, the reasons for requiring courses can be divided into "high" and "low" categories.  Usually, a specific course must fall into both categories before it is "required."  (Distribution requirements are a slightly different kettle of fish--they aren't being addressed here.) 

• High: This subject is of such intellectual significance that no student's education can be complete without it.

• Low: If we don't require this damned but important course,the students will never take it.

Note, to begin with, that an author's aesthetic greatness is not  grounds for making him or her required.  Departments rarely require Milton, who is great (and, quite frankly, almost as important for literary-historical reasons as Shakespeare); nor do they require Chaucer.  Charles Dickens and George Eliot are great novelists, but I've yet to see a department require anybody to read them.  I would suggest that the Bible is more important than Shakespeare, but Bible as Literature courses usually aren't required (or, at least, not in secular programs). 

Similarly, literary-historical significance is also not grounds for requiring a given author or subject.  Sir Walter Scott is arguably the most influential novelist of the nineteenth century--not just in Britain, but also on the Continent and in the United States. There can be no history of the novel without Scott. And yet, we do not require our students to read him.  (It's worth remembering that many Victorians would have put Scott's name right next to Shakespeare's.) We do not require our students to read John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, even though the Pilgrim's Progress saturates later Anglo-American culture.  For that matter, we don't require our students to have even a passing acquaintance with Latin.

Now, to use an example from my undergraduate career, UC Irvine requires the infamous CR100A--an introduction to literary theory course.   It's a big, scary class that frequently reduces innocent English majors to hysterics.  The number of students who willingly expose themselves to its clutches is probably minimal.  Nevertheless, it's a very useful course--because, in fact, knowing something about the history of literary criticism is helpful when it comes to reflecting on one's own contemporary practice, in much the same way as knowing something about the history of hermeneutics helps seminarians deal with modern Biblical interpretation. CR100A is a fine example of a course that meets both the "high" and "low" requirements: students really need to know something about the subject in question, and they are  likely to run screaming from the room if you suggest that they should take the class voluntarily.  By contrast, the students were perfectly happy to enroll in Shakespeare all by themselves; in fact, the quarter I took the course, students were sitting on the floor because the course was packed to overflowing.*

And there's the rub: for ACTA, Shakespeare is "vanishing" because many schools don't require it, but they neglect to ask how many students actually take Shakespeare--or even how many sections of Shakespeare are offered in a given quarter or semester.  If students line up for Shakespeare of their own volition, then the department doesn't need to require it.   Requirements are not, in other words, just Arnoldian value judgments: they're partly responses to the needs and behaviors of the student body.   

*--When I was an undergrad at UCI, I wrote a letter to the editor in which (speaking of "the canon") I pointed out that it was possible to finish an English degree without studying Shakespeare.  But what I didn't mention, of course, is that to do so would require considerable planning on the student's part (not to mention an inexplicable antipathy to Shakespeare). 

This Week's Acquisitions

(I celebrated the semester's imminent demise by, um, exacerbating the current shelving problem.  Some of the books were free, though.)

• Florence Gregg, Bartholomew Legate: The Last Smithfield Martyr (Swan Sonnenschein, 1886).  Historical novel about a man burned at the stake in 1612 for heresy.  More background here. 
• Kathryn Davis, Hell: A Novel (Back Bay Books, 2003).  Dollhouses, 1950s houses...
• Graham Swift, Shuttlecock (Vintage, 1992).  Is the narrator insane, or is something inimical going on?
• ---, Out of this World (Vintage, 1993).  A photographer and his ravaged family.
• John Gardner, Jason and Medeia (Vintage, 1986).  The Greek myth with a twist.
• John Barth, Chimera (Mariner, 2001).  More Greek myths, served up with a side helping of Scheherezade.
• Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (Vintage, 1990).  World history, definitely askew.  (This was one of those "why don't I own this novel already, anyway?" purchases.)
• Virginia Woolf, Night and Day (Harvest, 1973).  Pre-WWI romance.
• Ian R. MacLeod, The Light Ages (Ace, 2004).  The Victorians, albeit with magic.
• ---, The House of Storms (Ace, 2005).  Sequel to the above.
• Benjamin Markovits, Imposture: A Novel (Norton, 2007).  Historical novel about John Polidori.
• Sir Walter Scott, Manners, Customs, and History of The Highlanders of Scotland (Barnes & Noble, 2004).  Originally published in 1816. 
• Donald K. McKim, ed., Historical Handbook of Major Biblical Interpreters (InterVarsity, 1998).   Encyclopedia of exegesis from the beginning to the present.

Where's Shakespeare?

A couple of nights ago, Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt noted, somewhat sardonically, that I appeared to be a rather conservative English professor.  Conservative, that is, in the sense that my courses emphasize close readings of mostly canonical texts (entirely canonical in the lower-divison surveys, less so in more specialized upper-division and graduate courses).  I'm a historicist in my scholarship, but a strictly literary historicist in the classroom.  Moreover, despite going to a theory-oriented school as an undergraduate, my interest in literary theory is entirely pragmatic: does it raise illuminating questions about a particular set of texts, or not? And if I had my druthers, quite frankly, we'd require Milton and Chaucer along with Shakespeare. 

Therefore, I ought to be the ideal audience for a report like Vanishing Shakespeare (PDF), which criticizes the disappearance of Shakespeare requirements.  Instead, this report reminded me why my academic "conservatism" has never progressed beyond occasional manifestations of crankiness.  I have always operated on the assumption that any critique of academic practice should be grounded in a) empirical evidence for current practices and b) historical awareness of past practices.  This report plays fast and loose with both a) and b).  Here, for example, is how the authors describe their undertaking:

To determine where Shakespeare stands in today's curriculum, ACTA surveyed English departments at the U.S. News & World Report's top 25 national universities and top 25 liberal arts colleges, as well as the Big Ten schools and select public universities in New York and California.  With the current festivities in our nation's capital in mind, we also looked at universities in or near the District of Columbia.  (9)

Now, as someone who does not teach in any sort of top 25 college or public research institution, I confess that this approach inspires me with a deep-seated urge to drop the Riverside Shakespeare on somebody's toes.  Repeat after me, children: this is not a representative sampling.  The curriculum at a Research I or an expensive liberal arts college has nothing to do with the curriculum at comprehensive institutions in rural areas serving first-generation college students.  Or even comprehensive institutions in urban areas serving first-generation college students.  Let's try an experiment, shall we?

I wandered over to the Index of American Universities and checked the Shakespeare requirements for colleges and universities with "State" in the name.  I did so on the (correct) assumption that such schools would be comprehensives, frequently located in rural or relatively low-population urban areas.   To be honest, I had never heard of most of them before undertaking this exercise.  And that was precisely the point: what happens when we move away from elite schools? The final count in my list, available beneath the fold, is 120 public schools (I did not try to exhaust all of the CSU and SUNY campuses).

Now, it's important to remember, as ACTA does not, that most English departments actually have several concentrations, tracks, or emphases.  (Tom Dillingham called the C 18-L list's attention to that salient detail.)  Shakespeare may be required in some tracks, but not in others.  Bearing that in mind, what are the statistics?

ACTA: 15 out of 70 schools, or approximately 21.5%, required Shakespeare (NB: Dillingham has shown that at least one of the schools they claim does not require Shakespeare actually does, but in the secondary ed track.)

LP:  All schools with requirements in at least one track:  68 out of 120, or approximately 57%. (That's not counting one school's "Age of Shakespeare" course.)

Schools that didn't require Shakespeare of their regular "literature" majors frequently required it of their secondary education majors--probably in response to certification standards. 

21.5% to 57% is a noticeable increase, which suggests that any serious quantitative discussion requires far better sampling techniques than ACTA uses (or that I used, for that matter).  I'm sure that I could have obtained a different result by manipulating my search criteria.   

This increase also  reminds us of something that every instructor at a comprehensive college or smaller university knows perfectly well, but outside commentators insist on forgetting: that the curricula are usually much more traditional in nature.  Many such schools have teacher-training mandates as well, which leads me to the question of "children's literature."  It's not quite clear why the ACTA writers think college-level children's lit courses are a new thing, or why (believing so) they have suddenly felt the urge to complain about them; my mother, after all, enrolled in one at CSULA over thirty-five years ago when she was pregnant with yours truly.  More to the point, the ACTA writers eem not to have noticed that programs have to offer children's and young adult literature courses in order to be accredited for teacher certification.  The report treats departments as though they're floating in space, instead of responding to national, state, or university mandates.  Along the same lines, one might point out the obvious: if a college has, say, a diversity GE requirement, departments will do their best to offer such courses so as to maximize their FTEs.  (Hence, for example, the "Women in the Novel" course I teach every couple of years or so--it fulfills an upper-division GE requirement.) Show me the money.

I have additional criticisms of this report's arguments and methodology--for starters, their inability to actually justify why we should require, and not just teach, Shakespeare--but those will wait for a later post.

Middlemarch and The Odd Women

At first glance, these novels have little in common, aside from their mutual preoccupations with women's potential and marital politics.  But the famous "Prelude" to Middlemarch also opens up a different avenue for comparison.  Noting the disappearance of latter-day St. Theresas, the narrator writes,

That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill- matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.

The tragedy of the "later-born Theresas," that is, is specifically historical: in the modern, post-Reformation world, the female subject who once might have aspired to "epic" finds herself awash in a fragmentary sea, her goals no longer quite intelligible either to herself or to others.   Nineteenth-century women have all been consigned to Thomas Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," unable--thanks to "circumstances"--to find narrative shape.  Without the "coherent social faith" that organizes all action toward a recognizable goal, such women merely flounder about, imagining possible futures without the language (or even the determinate ideals) to articulate them.   They neither write themselves into history nor can be written; by modern definition, any such goal simply becomes some sort of feminine excess ("extravagance") or feminine lack ("lapse"), and thus worthy of being forgotten instead of being remembered.*

Whatever Eliot may have thought of Spanish Catholicism in general, here she suggests that it offered a genuinely organic "context," one in which female "thought and deed" were not necessarily alienated from each other.  George Gissing's The Odd Women, by contrast, posits a world in which such faith neither offers nor can offer such an organic organizing principle.  It's not that religion is entirely absent from The Odd Women.  The Madden family is very loosely religious in a High Church way, although their religion clearly does nothing for them.  Moreover, religious language pops up now and again, but often wrested into an explicitly secular context: the very non-religious and eternally celibate Rhoda bears the appropriate last name of Nunn, while Mrs. Cosgrove calls for "martyrs" in the cause of drastic marriage reform (ch. 27).  And even when Monica Widdowson gives way to "the old faiths" and perceives herself as a "sinner" in need of "redemption," it proves transitory; her "confession" to Rhoda, which begins in religious impulses, ends in her relying on Rhoda's strength instead of God's (ch. 29).   The closest thing this novel has to a sacred text is John Ruskin's essay "Of Queen's Gardens" in Sesame and Lilies, which pops up now and again as the various characters' bugaboo.  Miss Barfoot  sees Ruskin's theory of gender complementarity as a coverup for thoughts "the reverse of charming" (ch. 13), and The Odd Women certainly offers a bleak commentary on this theory's workability. 

Instead, The Odd Women proposes a secular alternative to Eliot's "coherent social faith," one in the making instead of received: "A woman with brains and will may hope to distinguish herself in the greatest movement of our time--that of emancipating our sex" (ch. 8).  Rhoda's politics are entirely secularized; even sexual morality is strictly referred to social needs instead of divine law.  The paradox of this project, as Mrs. Cosgrove reminds Rhoda, is that it may result in temporary "anarchy" instead of coherence (ch. 27)--no construction without destruction.  With the possible exception of Miss Barfoot, however, the novel's main characters all hover anxiously before this threat of radical disruption, Rhoda included.  Monica's daughter, without a mother and abandoned by her father, offers no purely optimistic promise for the future; while "the world is moving," as Rhoda Nunn announces (ch. xxxi), where is it moving to?

 

*--That being said, one cannot help but notice that Lydgate, Bulstrode, Casaubon, and Ladislaw are equally consigned to the "life of mistakes" or the "tragic failure."  Even Mr. Farebrother (the clergyman who should have been a naturalist) or Fred Vincy (the college-educated "gentleman" who must work for his living) must compromise in order to survive.  It's only the men lacking entirely in real ambitions or real ideals who survive the novel without experiencing this self-consciousness of error--Mr. Vincy, Mr. Brooke, Sir James (who exchanges Dorothea for Celia with remarkable ease), and so forth. 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Emily Sarah Holt, Margery's  Son; or, "Until He Find It."  A Fifteenth-Century Tale of the Court of Scotland (John F. Shaw, [1878]).  Sequel to one of Holt's first novels, Mistress Margery. 
• J. M. Neale, The Farm of Aptonga: A Story of the Time of S. Cyprian (Pott & Amery, 1870).  US reprint of this Early Church novel, told from a High Church perspective. Biography of Neale and various e-texts at Project Canterbury. 
  
• Tom Franklin, Smonk: A Novel (Morrow, 2006).  Apocalypto-western.
• Jane Alison, Natives and Exotics (Harcourt, 2005).  Historical short fiction about an Australian family in transit.
• Jim Crace, The Devil's Larder (FSG, 2001).  Short fiction about food and the eating thereof.
• ---, Being Dead: A Novel (Picador, 2001).  Memories of a murdered couple.
• Emily Barton, Brookland: A Novel (Picador, 2007).  Historical novel set in eighteenth-century Brooklyn.
• "Benjamin Black" [John Banville], Christine Falls: A Novel (Holt, 2007).  Contemporary thriller involving love, murder, and upper-crust Catholics.
• D. B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee, eds., The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse (NYRB, 2003).  Reprint of this "classic" anthology, featuring disasters by poets like Wordsworth. 
• Lionello Puppi, Torment In Art (Rizzoli, 1991).  Representations of martyrdom, torture, and similarly upbeat things.
• Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy (Penguin, 2007).  Acclaimed new biography. 

Friday Cat Blogging

I don't know about your cats, but mine are always ready and able to help with the housework.  Making the bed, for example.

Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918

William St. Clair's The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, which clocks in at 765 pages, is a big book with a tightly-defined thesis about the effects of copyright law.  Philip Waller's Writers, Readers, & Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918, which clocks in at 1181 pages, is an ever bigger book with no thesis whatsoever.  Indeed, completely disregarding Aristotle on beginnings, middles, and ends, Prof. Waller has produced a book with no introduction or conclusion.  Luckily, thanks to a doughty assistant, "considerable areas have been truncated or excluded altogether" (vii); as it stands, Writers, Readers, & Reputations cannot be read without grave peril to life and limb [1]. 

Sore muscles aside, however, Writers, Readers, & Reputations is an enviably learned achievement that reveals an interior logic once you cease looking for the invisible thesis and start thinking about the book as the textual equivalent of a William Powell Frith painting.   While the book isn't structured as a linear narrative, it opens with a chapter on the collision between print and that new behemoth, the cinema, and closes with the late Victorian and Modernist rejection of traditional religions.  On the one hand, the rise of a new form of mass entertainment; on the other, the severing of a relationship between the still-religious mass public and "high" literary authors.   In both cases, the meaning of authorship itself comes under pressure: what rights (if any) does the author have to protect his text from cinematic adaptation? Does the author have social responsibilities? Is there a right relationship between the author and her audience? All of Waller's authors, whether high (Woolf, Henry James) or low (Marie Corelli, Florence Barclay) engage in constant struggles against explicitly public pressures--financial, political, or otherwise--to invent and maintain their public identities as authors, even if doing so means explicitly denying any claim to be artists. 

In its copiousness, Waller's book suggests the fantasy of a perfectly comprehensive study made real.  Authors as celebrities! As politicians! As reviewers! (Being reviewed!) As clubmen! As social climbers! As fashion plates! As moral authorities! The list could continue.  Waller is not especially interested in authors writing (although, of course, he discusses that too); he's interested in authors performing for the mass audience, in much the same way as the politicians of this era perform for an ever-widening electorate.  Even his most reclusive authors--Tennyson, George Meredith, James--find themselves meditating on and manipulating the market.  Indeed, if there's one thing that unites authors as apparently dissimilar as Thomas Hardy and Charles Garvice, it's their interest in making books sell.  There isn't a single author in this study, no matter how apparently rarefied their work, free from a preoccupation with sales figures, advertising (taken to hysterical lengths, in the case of Hall Caine), and reviews. 

By the time the reader has made it to the last page, it's clear that anyone nostalgic for an age before the "commercialization" of literature had best not look to the late Victorian period to find their Eden.    As Waller shows in his chapter on "Literary Advice and Advisers," even such apparently twentieth- or twenty-first century phenomena as the "Best Books" lists are not a symptom of recent malaise, but rather a response to the sheer quantity of books newly available to a wide (and sometimes autodidactic) readership.  Waller points out that there was a real audience for some exceptionally demanding literary self-help guides; thus, the magazine T. P.'s Weekly, aimed at all social classes, encouraged "serious self-improvement" (88) by recommending a wide range of literary productions, now-canonical and otherwise.  As Waller repeatedly points out, the audience for both high and mass literary texts crossed all class and educational boundaries.  The upper classes had no problem reading Marie Corelli, any more than it now has a problem reading, say, Stephen King.  Nor did a taste for the popular necessarily eliminate a taste for more refined work, although authors and critics despaired (as they continue to do) of the public's indiscriminate habits in this regard. 

Waller himself has clearly had no problem reading any of these authors; however, he pointedly refrains from citing much in the way of contemporary scholarship.  (The heart skips a beat when he mentions any scholar who has published after 1920.)  This approach leaves the book refreshingly free from score-settling, at least on the surface, but at times it feels a little random.  Surely somebody has written on women authors since Elaine Showalter? Rather a lot of somebodies? Still, that's a minor quibble, although those more theoretically-oriented than I might grumble.  In any event, besides being hugely informative, the book is also hugely amusing.  On F. J. Furnivall: "He made a religion of great writers.  Hence critics' clashes when Furnivall was involved were like crusaders colliding with infidels, producing plenty of gore.  Mercifully, he did not eat meat and consume alcohol or worse might have ensued" (224).  Or quoting J. M. Barrie on Marie Corelli's "vitality": "'Very much alive--yes...But you see that's just what we are complaining about'" (793).  There's plenty of writerly snark to enjoy.

On a more serious note, though, Waller ends on a point that could use more unpacking:

In The Voyage Out Virginia Woolf thus discarded Mrs Humphry Ward's matter as well as her method.  It marks the chasm between the pre-Great War best-seller and the modern (though Woolf would sell sluggishly before her work was deemed canonical by university literature departments): a shift involving not just new practices of composition but ushering in entirely different outlooks.  Authors who had no religion conspicuously failed to grasp a significant source of inspiration in others.  More than that, this carelessness cut them off from the past. 

That post-Modernist (by which I don't mean postmodern) high literary culture has been at least partly segregated according to "different outlooks" seems like a reasonable claim to me, Marilynn Robinson notwithstanding.  And yet the high Modernists were not bestsellers, any more than are most of their modern equivalents.  It's therefore odd to find Waller using Woolf to mark this particular historical rupture.  Moreover, to a literary historian, Waller's final claim is puzzling: despite the brief nod to Ward's "method," Waller here emphasizes content over form.  The twentieth-century novelist floats free in intellectual space, severed from religion's tether and thus from any deep connection to their inheritance.  But insofar as literary traditions are as much about form as content, if not more so, one might respond that Woolf's experimental narratives represent a very deep engagement with the literary past--even if it's not the past that Waller has in mind. 

[ 1] Or, as A. N. Wilson quips, "It is slightly too large to read in bed, otherwise I’d say it would be my bedside book for the next ten years."   

A somewhat frightening realization

As I've hinted, there are Evil Plans afoot regarding the current bookcase situation.  But I am just now coming to grips with the full horror of the process:

1) There are approximately 5200 or so books in the house.  (The other 1000 are on campus.)
2) I am planning to get rid of all but two of the bookcases currently occupied by said books.
3) In order to do that, I need to take almost all of the books out of the bookcases.
4) Worse still, I have to do so without using three of the downstairs rooms, as they will be out of commission thanks to paint, floor refinishing, and/or workman-related space issues.
5) I also can't use the basement, which is too damp.
6) I really don't have space for a POD, thanks to the prior occupant's habit of planting trees in bizarre locations (not to mention the inconvenience of lugging books outside, the unevenness of the ground, and my desire to keep what's left of my lawn alive...).
7) So the books will somehow have to fit in a) the living room, b) the dining room, and c) my bedroom upstairs.
8) No word on where I am going to fit.

Amusing, but probably How Not to Do It

I certainly got a chuckle out of Germaine Greer arguing that, yes sirree, Mary Shelley did indeed write Frankenstein.  Granted, I'm somewhat fonder of the novel than Greer is, but I incline towards the position that Frankenstein is a great idea, not a great work of fiction.  (Dracula is in the same boat.) Its primary recommendation for survey courses is that a) it addresses a number of topical issues in b) a relatively short space and c) in a form most students enjoy reading.  But you really can't argue authorship from quality--Homer nods, etcetera etcetera etcetera--and in that sense, Greer reverses her subject's strategy instead of refuting it.  With any luck, someone will drag out Charles Robinson or Donald Reiman to raise the pesky issue of *gasp* the manuscript evidence.  (Those of you with NASSR-L access can just check out the archives, where Robinson and Reiman do their best--and I fall prey to a fit of bad temper.) 

In any event, while I may have blinkers on, I confess that I just don't see Frankenstein's homoeroticism.  Perhaps I should have sent away for the appropriate decoder ring.   There's certainly some highly sentimental language flourishing around Frankenstein's relationship with his buddy Clerval, but nothing approaching the David-and-Jonathanisms--literally--of Jane Porter's The Scottish Chiefs (1810):

    Edwin, who stood near at this rite of generous enthusiasm, softly whispered to Wallace as he turned towards his troops; "But amongst all these brothers, cease not to remember that Edwin was your first.  Ah, my beloved general, what Jonathan was to David I would be to thee!"

   Wallace looked on him with penetrating tenderness, his heart was suddenly wrung by a recollection which the words of Edwin had recalled.  "But thy love, Edwin! passes not the love of woman!"--"But it equals it," replied he; "what has been done for thee, I would do; only love me as David did Jonathan, and I shall be the happiest of the happy."  "Be happy then, my dear boy," answered Wallace, "for all that ever beat in human heart for friend or brother, lives in my heart for thee."  (186)

And various other speeches in like vein, as well as sundry weepings, hugs, and so forth.  Between the lachrymosity and the sentimentality, I was expecting Edwin to be a woman in disguise.  (Since the novel has a woman wandering around in a suit of armor, in good romance fashion, my expectation was not as odd as it might seem at first glance.)

UPDATE: The author responds to Greer, but seems not to have noticed that far from being "continuously in print for nearly two centuries," Frankenstein's publication history in the 19th c. is in fact extremely spotty; for the numbers-crunching, see William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), esp. 364-67.