Cawdor - Robinson Jeffers

This is the third version of this story that I've read and without a doubt the most successful. Euripides' Hippolytus was more of a one dimensional fable discussing the cons of defying the gods, and I didn't think anything could come close to usurping Racine's Phaedra, but Cawdor is entirely in a league of its own.

In Euripides' Hippolytus, Hippolytus has sworn off love and instead has devoted himself to the goddess Artemis, his hunting companion, deeply offending Aphrodite; it is not a passive preference but rather a deliberate stiff-necked offence and he openly derails her as the "vilest of all the gods." This obviously annoys Aphrodite and she makes a plan for revenge; she will make his mother-in-law fall in love with him and it will destroy both of them leaving a trail of carnage and destruction in their wake.  

Aphrodite: " Look, here is the son of Theseus, Hippolytus! He has just left his hunting. I must go away. See the great crowd that throngs upon his heels and shouts praise of Artemis in hymns? He does not know that the doors of death are open for him, that he is looking at his last sun."

In Euripides' world there is a clear delineation of where mortals can and cannot tread. Theirs is a world with assigned rules and laws governing behavior of the classes. The play then represents one man's arrogance toward the gods and the just vindication they retaliate in turn. The fact that Phaedra is collateral damage is almost incidental.

In Racine's version things are a little different. While it is still true that Hippolytus is not really into love...he surprisingly finds himself infatuated with the daughter of his father's mortal enemy. When he has a premonition that his father has died, he returns home to either bury his father and discuss his inheritance or do his best to persuade Theseus that Aricia really isn't all that bad. He has been banished by his mother-in-law, Phaedra, they seem to bring out the worst in each other, but Hippolytus decides he must risk even this if it means being with Aricia.

Phaedra, while suffering from love sickness from the moment she saw Hippolytus, has refused to acknowledge it or even give voice to her malady. It is with great persuasion that her nursemaid, Oenone, finally draws out of her the reason for her abject misery. Oenone persuades Phaedra to reveal her curse to Hippolytus after they receive a message confirming the death of Theseus. Hippolytus is disgusted and in his hurry to get away leaves his cloak behind. About two minutes later in walks Theseus, not dead after all, and Hippolytus quickly tells him he loves Aricia, much to the chagrin of Phaedra. So he is capable of loving women, just not her. Oenone fabricates a lie on behalf of her mistress: Hippolytus has raped his mother-in-law while Theseus was away and, despite the murky veracity of this story, Theseus is enraged and calls down a curse from Neptune dooming Hippolytus to an imminent and painful death.

Pheadra, sick and disgusted by what she has become sees no other solution than to kill herself, and after ingesting poison makes her way to Theseus to exonerate Hippolytus of his crimes.  As the poison makes its way deeper into her veins, Theseus, disgusted leaves her to die alone and rushes off to embrace the now cherished remains of his son. 

Racine's version wrestles with the question of predestination and freewill. While the gods may set the course of our lives it is up to us to determine how we live. By taking responsibility for her guilt although doomed to suffer an endless temptation, she emerges virtuous and expresses her free will by engaging her temptation and battling with it to the death.

As Cawdor opens it is 1909 in the Big Sur region of California. A fire has swept through the hills destroying all but the most veteran farmers livestock.  As Cawdor watches the road among the animals fleeing in terror slowly comes an old horse carrying the charred semi-conscious remains of Martial and his bedraggled soot covered daughter Fera. Two years  ago the Martials decided to try their hand at farming and it was a catastrophic failure. Their cows ended up sick almost immediately and when one died in the creek, Martial, no longer having the strength to fight against nature, left her there to slowly poison the water supply, not out of malice but ignorance and dejection. Cawdor then had ridden over to remove the cow only to have the fetid carcass burst. Since that day Cawdor has despised Martial, but there's something about his daughter that quickens a place so long forgotten in his soul that he had thought it had died. Is it his heart? He allows them to stay for a short while so they can treat Martial's burns and get him healthy enough to travel.

As Martial is brought into the house he quietly whispers his anthem of failure: "Turn me that way before I go in, To the good light that gave me so many days. I have failed and failed and failed. Now I'll go in as men go into the grave, and not fail any more."

Cawdor at 50 would have sworn he was impervious to the potions of love, he is too old to woo and perhaps too pragmatic. He decides he will offer half courtship half blackmail and see what response he gets. He is too proud for rejection so he stacks the odds against her to ease the rebuttal, if one comes, as much as possible. He tells Fera it's time to go, if only she could stay....it's pitiful to see youth chained to helpless old age (when it is crispy and decayed of course) the unknown town might not be as kind as neighbors can be...he's never had time to play with colored ribbons -he's been a hard man that knew how to boss his men and turn a profit...

"and now I'm caught with wanting something and my life is changed....Oh, I'm still my own master and will not beg anything of you. Old blind man your girl's beautiful, I saw her come down the canyon like a fawn out of the fire. If she is willing: if you are willing, Fera, this place is yours..."

While the terms are still somewhat opaque, Fera bargains for marriage, only then will she have certain stability. Cawdor, embarrassed by his profession of love, ends the negotiations with the claim that he is certainly being made a fool, but in matters of the heart what can one do? And so in due course the marriage takes place and Fera pledges to be honest and love her husband well...which seems a foreboding promise to keep given her predecessors.

On the night of Cawdorr's marriage, his son Hood, away on a hunting expedition has a premonition that his father had died or was fast approaching death. In what is his slow and methodical way, he waits a few months to finish the hunting season and then begins the long trek homeward, on his way stopping to kill a mountain lion. Hood seems lacking in dimension, while his predecessors had taken a vow of chastity and instead worshipped at the feet of Artemis, Hood just likes to hunt. He's not in love with hunting, he's just a hunter, very measured and certain.

When he arrives home he finds that not only is his father still very much alive, but he has taken the neighbor's daughter as a wife. He recognizes the wind in her eyes although she has changed much from the sallow girl he had seen two years ago on the barren farm. He gives her the lion skin as a present and she, undisturbed by the fact that it has only recently been skinned and still very much a bloody carcass drapes it over her shoulders.

This Fera at first is pitiable. She is a girl of 19 entering into a marriage to save her father, who only manages to live a short time after. While she has promised love and honesty these things are far beyond her grasp. She has been complicit in her father's failure and along with the dripping lion carcass wears her own failure, deep and embedded in her soul, its talons gripping her heart. She must prove to Hood that she is worth looking at. And what begins as a pin prick of desire to be recognized and seen turns into an obsession to be loved and to conquer.

As Hood remains in his father's house Cawdor becomes suspicious of his obsessively chaste son. After her father dies, Fera now free of all obligations to the dying man, walks into Hood's room and propositions him, as she finishes making her plea to Hood's disgust and horror, in walks Cawdor:

"His confused violent eyes moved and shunned hers and walked the room, with the ancient look of men spying for their own dishonor as if it were a lost jewel..."

He knows something is awry, Hood is standing in his bed sheets half naked, but Fera plays the part of one deeply mourning and briefly lets them both off the hook. As Hood continues to reject her though, her pursuit becomes frenzied and while the men dig the grave for her father she asks Hood to cut some laurel branches for his casket. This is obviously a ruse, but one she creates with deft hands.

"Before you came I used to come here," she caught her quivering under lip with the teeth to keep it quiet, "for solitude. Here I was sure no one would come, not even the deer, not a bird; safer than a locked room. Those days I had no traitor in my own heart, and would gather my spirit here to endure old men."

She has been living in hell, has been taken captive by love and its talons are ripping her apart, either he submits to her desires or she will tell Cawdor he has raped her. For a moment his options seem limited and he drops to the bed of leaves to consummate her crazed desire. But...this is not who he is, Hood is a hunter, not easily stymied by a cunning fox and so he grabs his knife and plunges it into his thigh so that the pain will focus his attention and he will not respond to Fera's caresses.

This is the second time she has aggressively propositioned him and the second time she has been rejected.  She would kill herself, but is caught in an existential crisis of the hereafter. What if death does not offer a reprieve from these feelings? What if the mind is left forever chained to its wild and monstrous forever ruminations? Does she exchange one hell for another? If Hood will not make love to her than will he kill her? Will he, as a hunter, end her life with one quick stroke of his blade? There is no rest for either of them while she is alive. But as usual, Hood denies her request.

"You will be grateful tomorrow, for now we can live and not be ashamed. What sort of life would have been left us?"  "No life is left us," she said from a loose throat....

Fera decides to wear the lion skin and wait in the bushes...if he will not intentionally kill her she will make him kill her unintentionally, but at the last minute she convinces herself that Hood won't shoot but instead will track her up the mountain and maybe she can work in proposition number three. Hood shoots. In the dark he takes aim at the bushes and hits only her arm, crippling her, but not mortally wounding her. As Hood realizes what he has done a mix of indecipherable feelings rush through him and he quickly makes his way to deep into the woods to await the prognosis.

As Cawdor begins to piece Fera back together he discovers that her arm has been fractured and must be reset.  As he tries to put the bone back in place, Fera, thinking she is being tortured screams out the lie she has been quietly nursing: Hood has raped her, but she is innocent, why must he continue to torture her? Cawdor, suspicious from the start has all the proof he needs, when he has pieced her back together and she is quietly resting he tracks his son through the forest and kills him with little regard for his version of the story.

Fera decides she will try again to kill herself and this time hangs herself over the bedpost, but the maidservant hears her feet scuttling on the floor and rescues her. So then Fera, too weak to attempt suicide again, tells Cawdor it was all a lie. That she has been playing him for the fool he really is this whole time. That she always loved his son. She hopes she will arouse the rage she knows he is capable of and that he will strangle her, ending her misery once and for all, but instead she wakens only grief. She wants him to strangle her, but instead he walks away, disgusted and jaded.

Finally, her last card. She has tried to kill herself 3 times and has failed every time. She goads Cawdor into telling his other children and the farm hands that he has killed Hood, hoping that someone will maybe push them off a cliff...but instead, after his narrative, Cawdor gouges out his eyes and when Fera loses her nerve at the last moment and is unable to jump off the cliff herself, Cawdor is led back into his house, blind and aged to spend the rest of his waking moments buried in regret.

At the same time that Hood witnesses Fera's initial disgrace, two years ago as the Martial's primitive farm is filled with exploding cows, the hunter accidently maims an eagle. Despite his initial inclination to put this majestic bird out of its misery, his sister has nursed it back to health and it now remains crippled and encaged. Each day, Hood's sister brings it squirrels with just enough life in them to keep the bird of prey trapped in the farce that it is still a hunter.  As Hood sees the bird for the first time in almost two years he ponders the pitiable existence of this once formidable hunter:

"Hood remembered great sails, Coasting the hill and the redwoods. He'd shot for the breast, But the bird's fate having captivity in it took in the wing-bone, against the shoulder, the messenger of human love..."

Since that moment Fera has been cursed with a love sickness far deeper than that of her predecessors, in a world where fate is unalterable and agency is always outside of ones grasp. Fera has been consumed by Aphrodite's curse at a cellular level, every pore and gland oozes the curse and as she is consumed by her desire, Aphrodite finally has her revenge on the hunter. 

The Palm At The End Of The Rainbow - Wallace Stevens

I do not know how to read poetry. It is something I'm working on and have always felt somewhat sheepish about. Ever since I saw Anne of Green Gables as a 6 year old and witnessed a red-headed tomboy quote Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" while being unmoored in a canoe, I always thought reciting poetry would be incredibly romantic.  But alas, my friends and I always skipped the memorization portion and jumped right into the play acting, one girl being nominated to lay in the bottom a canoe while we delicately placed weeds around her tresses and pushed her out to sea/lake/pond.

A few years ago I picked up The Collected Poems by Langston Hughes (on the list - not by choice)  and came across this little gem.

Little Lyric (of Great Importance)

"I wish the rent was heaven sent."

While I appreciate it's brevity...I don't really get it. Why the word "wish"? I wish I could time-travel. I wish I had a million dollars...is that poetry too? Why not the word "pray"? At least there would be a barely perceptible tremor of passion, urgency, desire? Not that swapping out the word "wish" with "pray" makes it that more poetic...I feel like it's the kind of thing you scrawl on a napkin while a chatty Cathy is giving you a blow by blow account of her day. I can see the scallops making a protean border around the edge of the napkin. Cathy keeps talking. Langston's mind wanders...the rent...don't forget to get milk and eggs....

Thankfully the book took me about 90 minutes to read, and after a shrug I patted myself on the back for a job well done and crossed off another book on the checklist (which I used to carry around with me...back when I had no life or friends in the DC area and probably wandered around muttering conversations to my imaginary friend Harold Bloom, such as "HB...I do not know what you were thinking on this one...how did this make it in - but the Count of Monte Cristo didn't make the cut? Or anything by Dumas for that matter? It makes no sense. Oh and by the way "The Science Fiction Novels" of HG Wells....should totally be more than one cross off...)

Anyway, so when I warily picked up The Palm at the end of the Mind I was 70% more impressed than I thought I would be. There is the occasional feel of writers block, when apparently Stevens looked around his room and saw a banana and thought: "Bananas!" Yet, instead of something like "I wish the banana was heaven sent" he came up with:

"But bananas hacked and hunched...
The table was set by an ogre,
His eye on an outdoor gloom
And a stiff and noxious place.
Pile the bananas on planks.
The women will be all shanks
And bangles and slatted eyes."

-excerpt from "Floral Decoration for Bananas"

So again, while I have a hard time getting into this moment...there's a lot more there to keep me tethered. He does tend to talk a lot about birds, fruit and Key West, obviously all important...but as a whole, for a non-reader of poetry I occasionally found myself getting pulled into a moment, feeling a note of an emotion resonate in my soul. Here's an excerpt from "Farewell to Florida":

Part IV
My North is leafless and lies in a wintry slime
Both of men and clouds, a slime of men in crowds.
The men are moving as the water moves,
This darkened water cloven by sullen swells
Against your sides, then shoving and slithering,
The darkness shattered, turbulent with foam.
To be free again, to return to the violent mind
That is their mind, these men, and that will bind
Me round, carry me, misty deck, carry me
To the cold, go on, high ship, go on, plunge on.

I can feel this. There's a tangible desperation, maybe a fear of being lost? Maybe the fear of what you once were, despite your precarious instability, was a better, deeper, more profound place than where you are now. He's asking for freedom from this stability, in a land of manicured lawns and pink flamingos. To return to the deep waters where the life blood of the soul it held at bay by the impervious foam of regret? And there might be something about a girl?...I don't know. I'm probably completely misreading this. Maybe it's about a breakup with a girl from Florida and he's leaving to go back to his depressing slimy life...too bad for her, if only she knew what she was missing?

This is why I have a hard time with poetry. It's so incredibly personal and introspective. It almost feels like I'm reading a coded diary and half the time can't decipher the code. I guess, one of these days after reading tons and tons of poetry, maybe it will all click and I will bask in the glory of being able to decipher all at my leisure...one can only wish.

The Castle - Franz Kafka

I love to read Kafka when I'm depressed. It localizes my depression into one finite entity. As I finish the last page and close the book there is such a wave of relief to be finished that I find any lingering depression absolved.

We're moving to Germany in less than a month. I'm excited about this opportunity for adventure...but nervous about leaving my twin. We've never gone a day, that I can remember, without talking to each other for the last 10 years or so...in a way I think I'm defined by our relationship; when the murky chaos of life presents a grey impenetrable fog, and I am unable to see a reflection of myself...it is my twin that often brushes aside the clouds and allows a glimmer of sun to penetrate. Who will I be without her?

Who am I? Is a question I think our protagonist, K. can relate to. He has been called to a small village at the foot of the Castle to take over the position of Land Surveyor, but upon arrival is dismissed by the locals and finds his goal of actually making it to the Castle an improbability piled upon the impossible. As he seeks an anchor to tether himself in the quicksand of impervious truth, he stumbles upon Frieda, the barmaid of an upstanding inn. If he can not get to the Castle, perhaps he can get to Klamm, a high ranking Castle official and Freida's alleged lover.

At this point his goals are completely off track. He has begun his quest to simply be a Land Surveyor, but the fact that no one will acknowledge his presence or even the fact that he has actually been summoned, makes him obsessed with following the thread of misinformation that will hopefully lead him to his objective: a tête-à-tête with anyone of substance. Klamm seems to be the golden nugget at the end of a mythical rainbow that K. must blindly navigate towards. With each step of progress a new character is introduced to sit him down and have an inhumanely long conversation about how everything he has been led to believe thus far is all a lie. With each new telling, the narrative becomes more and more amorphous. Is Frieda K.'s comrade in arms? Or the sinister Siren leading him ever farther from his goal, and with each step closer to his destruction? 

More importantly is everyone incredibly simplistic and ignorant? Or is it just a ruse to keep feeding K. misinformation. Is there a singular plot against him? One day someone, somewhere decided it would be fun to singularly destroy the life of a Land Surveyor? Or is it simply a question of geography? Perhaps this one place, this on Castle, is so backward that once someone, for whatever reason, slips through the looking glass to this nether world all hope is lost and one is drowned in the bureaucratic tape that holds everything tirelessly in place. 

K. is an indefatigable protagonist. Nothing will keep him from scrutinizing every detail, of following every lead no matter how unpromising it may appear. However, unlike Sherlock Holmes, or any Willkie Collins protagonist...this is not a sensational mystery to be solved. And instead of clues leading him ever closer to resolution, he instead chases an infinite supply of red herring in an ocean that refuses to yield to lucidity. 

Unlike some of Kafka's other protagonists, K.'s task of truth finding is self imposed. There are so many opportunities for him to hang up his deerstalker and leave this miserable little town with Freida; they could begin a new life any where except here where his knotted fate, like a nervous tick, torments him unrelentingly. But K. is ultimately a seeker, on a quest for the meaning of things; his identity as a Land Surveyor comes with all the accouterments of the trade, ie. a need for measuring, mapping and identifying the physical world. Like August Esch, the accountant in The Anarchist, who can only make sense of a world schema of checks and balances, K. must identify the world he is a part of. But K.'s world refuses to be mapped and charted and is uncompromisingly hostile to those wishing to excavate beyond the surface. 

In a somewhat rambling narrative given by Olga, a compatriot in arms in the fight against the injustice of this place, we learn that Olga's family, once prosperous has been shunned for the last 3 years because her younger sister refused to sleep with a city official, or perhaps because she insulted the messenger. For whatever reason, and with barely any discussion, their friends and family slowly took leave of them, leaving them isolated, destitute and crippled as Olga's parents, steeped in regret, regress to an infantile state where their only objective is waiting to die. Throughout this narrative we learn that Barnabas, the messenger given exclusively to K., and Olga's younger brother, has his doubts about whether or not he is actually a messenger. He is certainly called and detained in an antechamber to some unidentified official, but is it real work that he is doing? Or is it all merely another way the City toys with those out of favor? Olga is bogged down in a quagmire of doubt, but she is resilient; there are other ways to become a Messenger, and she has not given up hope for her families survival.

After K. leaves his discussion with Olga, he learns that Freida was incapable of waiting for him for more than 10 minutes and has moved back to her old position as barmaid, has given up their engagement and want's nothing further to do with K.. From the beginning it has been unclear as to whether or not K. is simply using her for his purpose to access Klamm. His initial meeting with Frieda, definitely lacked the requisite wooing you would expect from someone "falling in love" and erred more on the "two warm bodies in the same proximity might as well make the best of it" genre. But for some reason K. believes losing Frieda means losing his one entry point to Klamm and so he must fight for their "relationship" in the most passive and  unconvincing way possible.

As K. confronts Freida, realizing his old assistant is at that moment in her room and perhaps even her bed, he seems more preoccupied with getting a bite to eat and finding a place to rest. He has been allowed into the bedroom hallway of the Inn to wait for a meeting he was supposed to have with a City official, and as he struggles to remember the right door to the correct official, he stumbles into the room occupied by Burgel, another peon in the inexhaustible hall of mirrors. Burgel, awakened from a sound sleep, begins prattling on endlessly, he invites K. to sit on the edge of his bed and while K. drifts in and out of consciousness, Burgel tells him the only way to beat the system, is to go on the offensive and attack when the bureaucracy least expects it, for example in the middle of the night. If one were to surprise a City official in the middle of the night, one could ask for what ever one wanted, to be officially reinstated as chief Land Surveyor, for example, really whatever one's heart desires for the element of surprise, coupled with the desire to go back to bed would force the official to grant any and all requests. K., unfortunately is asleep. The quiet soothing, monotonous droning of Burgel has lulled him to sleep and has denied him his glimpse of the unobscured. Burgel talks passionately on the pros and cons of night interrogations, while K. sleeps on, unaware of the opportunity that has passed him by.

When K. finally is dragged from sleep to yet another night meeting, it is as ineffectual as he expected. Exhausted, hungry in a stupor he slumps into a pile in the hall and watches the morning chaos of the messengers commence. It is not long before his presence is ousted though and he is forced to go down into the bar and begrudgingly allowed to sleep behind a barrel, only to be wakened by Peppi, the deposed barmaid, who feeling annoyed and disgruntled about her position must tell K. her version of history, and we, enduring our own form of torture are forced to listen once again to a monologue that calls black white, day night and reality once again is toppled head first into a cesspool of the obscure.

Finally the landlady, discovering K. attempts to give him a lecture, but is too preoccupied by a comment he made about her dress and instead of lecturing him decides to hire him on as a sort of dress maker/ assessor...that is if he decides not to become a chamber maid along with Peppi.

After reading Hermann Broch, Kafka's writing seems almost harsh and diluted. It is not beautiful writing. You do not get lost in the narrative. While both authors in a way tackle the disintegration of meaning/morals they do so from completely different sides of the elephant. Broch is an expansive, challenging writer; the world he creates is in a way more terrifying because it truly exists. The enemies are given names and they are formidable. Kafka's writing by comparison feels listless and monotonous. While in the Metamorphosis  Gregor Samsa in the end does become a terrifying insect of some sort...it's actually more terrifying that someone could commit cold blooded murder on a friend in a moment of war torn chaos and then transform from a monster into an accepted member of society.

The Castle lacks an element of the surreal and terrifying that one would expect from Kafka, and perhaps that would salvage the story and keep a modicum of interest alive for the reader, instead it is a monotonously opaque world where the narrative limps along on the endless retelling of a story no one was particularly interested to hear in the first place. In short, once finished, the perfect antidote to depression.

The Sleepwalkers, Part Three: The Realist - Hermann Broch

It is now 1918 and our protagonist, Willhelm Huguenau, in this final book of the Sleepwalker trilogy, is a thick-set Frenchman determined to make it through this mess of a war with his best interest his sole preoccupation. A smuggler, a deserter, a rat, a rapist, a murderer, a man of business, a salesman; in short, a man completely without honor or code.

When his shortsightedness is overlooked he dutifully follows the requisite call to arms and joins his compatriots in the dug-out where unparalleled filth reigned; streaks of urine covered the walls and it was impossible to ascertain if the effluvia was the derivation of feces or that of corpses.

A man without a code is unable to ever truly have a compatriot of any kind, he lives an almost solipsistic reality, and a fox hole only serves to expose his isolation rather than convince him of solidarity.

"...there was not one among them who did not know that he was posted there as a solitary creature to live alone and to die alone in an overwhelmingly senseless world, so senseless that he could not comprehend it or rise beyond describing it as "this bloody war.""

Eventually Huguenau has had enough. This war seems inconvenient to a man of enterprise, and he is unabashedly a coward, so he strolls away through the dense forest, littered with the bodies of those fighting for even an ambiguous sense of freedom; their bodies crucified on his behalf, in a world without order where morals are drowned in the maelstrom of bloody chaos, and there is only silence.

"...the world lay as if under a vacuum glass- Huguenau could not help thinking of a glass cover over cheese - grey, worm-eaten and completely dead in a silence that was inviolable."

Without running, with no sense of haste or urgency, but rather a somnambulistic sureness, he picks his way through the forest, leaving the dangerous zone behind him seeking out a greener pasture to make his fortune.

For the Romantic, Joachim von Pasenow, sleepwalking precipitated fate. Joachim was led upstairs to the brothel like a Sleepwalker, unable to resist or perhaps unwilling to acknowledge reality and instead purposely closing his eyes. For the Anarchist, August Esch, the past strangled him and he fought to nullify its demands, but like a sleepwalker he was unable to escape the past and instead followed its trajectory, unable to overthrow fate and destiny. But for Huguenau, he uses sleepwalking as a tool that frees him from the harsh reality of life, and in doing so he lives his life with the confidence of a dreamer.

It is not long before he finds himself in a small town with a newspaper run by none other than August Esch. Since we have last seen him, Esch has grown calmer.  No longer manically obsessed with balancing accounts, he has instead fixed his eyes on the coming Messiah who will bring forth the awaited panacea - Socialism. Huguenau thinks the newspaper business would be the perfect cover for a deserter and an easy way to squeeze a bit of income for himself so he visits Esch, beginning his vulture like circling to ascertain what sort of man he must deal with.

"He had something of the actor about him, something of the clergyman, and something of the horse."

Huguenau has decided to purchase the newspaper with a brilliant scheme that results in all the wealthy members of the town fronting the purchase price with the generous sponsorship from the acting Major, Joachim von Pasenow. Since this is a sleepy, trusting little town, his plan goes forward without a hitch and he has seamlessly ingratiated himself with the Major and become a spy on his behalf to seek out the evil and sinister nature he guarantees exists in the pacifist Herr Esch. But his plan is slow going and he has little to report to the Major and instead to his frustration and chagrin the Major takes a liking to Esch.  They have formed a spiritual bond of sorts over discussions of religion. Although the Major believes that religion is really more of a prescriptive right of landowners and at first to hear the words tumble off Esch's tongue make him uncomfortable, it is not long before he too is enraptured by the passion and zeal of an order and hope outside the bondage of the temporal.

The Major is alone; his brother has died; his confidant Bertrand has abandoned (and betrayed) him; he is separated from his family and his land and surrounded by an overture of distrust in a war he didn't ask to be a part of. If only there was a respite from his agonizing isolation, if only one could ford the gulf between the precipices of autonomy and for once have true communion with another.

"...and through the resonant laughter he saw the glimmer of a soul leaning out of a neighboring window with a smile, the soul of another brother, yet not an individual soul, nor yet in actual proximity, but a soul that was like an infinitely remote homeland.

 Their relationship provides the foil for Broch's endless dissertation on religion. The Major is a protestant and Esch a catholic, but I feel like it should be the other way around. According to Broch Protestantism is the incipient hole in the dike of moral values. Because the stringent, sacred, ordered and regimented faith of Catholicism has been exchanged for the abstract Protestantism, stripped of its ornamentation and instead distilled down to its most simplistic form, it has only increased man's isolation and made moral axioms relative and devoid of meaning.

"...it is as if the radicality of Protestant thought has inflamed to virulence all the dread ruthlessness of abstraction which for two thousand years has been sheltered by insignificance and reduced to its minimum, as if it had released that absolute power of indefinite extension which inheres potentially in the pure Abstract alone, released it explosively to shatter our age and transform the hitherto unregarded warden of abstract thought into the paradigmatic incarnation of our disintegrating epoch."

Protestantism represents a dumbing down in a sense of Catholicism. It has removed the necessity for priests, its acolytes instead having direct contact with the High Priest himself. It has removed all ornamentation and with it the beauty and mystique of something incomprehensible. By making faith accessible, Protestantism has tossed the first stone in what will become a crisis of faith and a disintegration of values.

But I think the Major then represents the better Catholic. He is at peace in the systemic order of a faith that can not be cast asunder. He sleepwalks because he acknowledges a God that is supreme and divine and ultimately the architect of his fate, unlike the endlessly angsty Esch who perseverates about redemption, salvation and sacrifice with the nervous twitch of the unredeemed. While they battle out the polemics of their faith, quietly there grows an even more subversive enemy than Protestantism: Humanism, where God has been denounced in place of man and the last bastion of concrete rationalism has been destroyed by the deity of Self; more specifically, Huguenau, the agent provocateur par excellence. When he ultimately realizes that it is hopeless to get the Major to think ill of Esch, Huguenau lazily makes it his personal vendetta to destroy him.

Huguenau has worked into his contract with Esch not only the controlling share in the newspaper company, but also his room and board; every evening while Frau Esch ladles them their soup and cuts them their bread, Huguenau goads Esch, but Esch is unseeing. Esch is fixated on salvation, on the necessity of this war to wipe the slate clean and make way for the Messiah, the Son that will conquer death and end the encroaching chaos.

Finally, the quite town can take no more, it is November 1918 and there are riots all over the country as men and soldiers tire of fighting for an elusive cause. Huguenau has night watch duty and while he daydreams about deserting yet again, another possibility presents itself: that of rioter. As the torch flames creep closer and men's shouts become audible, Huguenau joins with the rabble he is supposed to be defending against. When he is tired of watching the rioters antics, he wanders back to the Esch house to look for something to eat. The last few pages are more of a tour de force for the reader than for our protagonist as we are forced to sit back and watch Huguenau destroy everything that comes into his path, his methodical depravity heralding in an age of degeneracy - only to then escape with the Major, who now suffering from a concussion, clutches onto Huguenau's finger as if clutching the consecrated hand of a priest in this new vapid and amorphous religion of Self.

Of course I am leaving out about 80% of this 300+ page book. I am leaving out all the many character studies of existential loneliness like Godicke, the bricklayer/architect that has suffered severe brain trauma and must now wait "as his soul collects itself with agony around the core of his ego." Or Hanna, the wife that must wait for her husband's return from war, her world now a chrysalis of dread and anticipation, caught in the stasis of a moment preserved, tethered by a hope of what is to come and ultimately jaded by the disintegrating world around her.

This third book seems the most obvious counterpart to Goethe's Faust.  The narrative like Faust is interwoven with allegorical poetry and is concerned with the true essence of life and the limits of knowledge and power. But Huguenau is the anti-hero/anti-Faust; while Joachim Pasenow agonized about his true purpose and the essence of self and was tempted by Bertrand/ Mephistopheles he emerges victorious to his life of banal simplicity; while Esch is led through one lustful relationship after another until he finds his Gretchen in the form of the virginal widowed Frau Esch, rather than being destroyed by his lust or deceptions, he just slowly grows out of them and learns to love and respect his wife. But for Huguenau, there is no need for Mephistopheles, he is depraved and without moral values of any kind, he despises philosophy and the endless babble on the meaning of life.  There are no limits to his power and no justice for his actions. He is the fate the world must contend with if it chooses to turn its back on God.

As difficult as this book was to read, there were actually moments where I really enjoyed it. It is breathtakingly expansive and Broch has definitely earned his place next to Joyce, as an author one is forced to reluctantly admire despite their often inaccessibility. I think ultimately this is a hopeful book, Broch ends with the conclusion that the divine sparks in each one of our souls will forge a brotherhood of humble human creatures and that will be great enough to push us away from the precipice of moral decay.

The Sleepwalkers, Part Two: The Anarchist - Hermann Broch

"The 2nd of March 1903 was a bad day for August Esch, who was thirty years old and a clerk; he had had a row with his chief and found himself dismissed before he had time to think of giving notice. He was irritated, therefore, but less by the fact of his dismissal than by his own lack of resourcefulness."

15 years have passed since the narrative ended and we have entered an even more mercurial system of values as the prewar foundations of a society on the brink of moral decay shudder; a slight crumbling precipitates the coming collapse. How fitting then, that our protagonist is a book-keeper, obsessed with settling accounts, whether corporeal or imaginary; he is overly preoccupied with order and balance in a world that refuses to be ordered or to be held accountable.

Esch, unlike Joachim von Pasenow, is not without purpose, he is focused and diligent in his pursuit of redemption, but redemption from what? As he is walking away from his position as book-keeper, his friend, the crippled anarchist Martin, hobbles up on his crutches and informs him that he may know of a position available. It is a book-keeping position at the Central Rhine Shipping Company, chaired by none other than the shadowy, sinister Bertrand. With less effort than one would expect, Esch is given the new position:

"Nevertheless, Esch could not feel elated over his new post. It was as though he had purchased it at the cost of his soul's welfare, or at least of his decency."

His debt to Martin is filed, and it is not long before he has grown accustomed to his new duties and lifestyle, and yet are they new? Or is his life just a re-organization of matter? This thought too is filed for another day and he finds himself at the theater with his new friends Balthasar Korn and his sister Erna, whom Esch is encouraged to woo with little success. Esch's relationship with Korn is one of transactions, Korn pays for the drinks of his "Herr Brother In Law" while Esch struggles to remain free of obligations and morally solvent. But here, at the theater, the meaning and purpose of Esch's life is revealed. The theater becomes quite dark and silent. Then a pinpoint of light and a girl is revealed stretched against a black board, as if crucified, smiling and gracious, unaware of the peril that awaits her. The juggler has exchanged his balls for javelins and slowly he begins throwing his knives. His daggers whistling through the air, his murderous hand grabbing one knife after another, after another. And then finally, the girls face and body is completely framed, the throwing stops and this waif of a girl, Ilona, steps lightly and gracefully down from her cross.

Esch is so troubled by this vision, that he intends to free Ilona at all and any costs. He will redeem her. He will be her salvation. But when she lazily accepts the repulsive Korn as a suitor, his plans as her means of redemption become more complicated.

As he contemplates the incomprehensible he comes across a band of Salvation Army proselytizers, standing on a bench and pointing out the way of salvation. He watches them, drowning in isolation, weighed down by the responsibility of redemption and certain that he will die in utter and complete loneliness.

"A vague and yet unforeseen hope had risen in him that things would go better, far better, with him if he could but stand up there on the bench; and he saw Ilona, Ilona in the Salvation Army uniform, gazing up at him and waiting for his redeeming signal to strike the tambourine and cry "Hallelujah!"...yes, whether a girl like that beat a tambourine or threw plates, one only had to order her to do it, it was just the same, only the clothes were different."

His plan: The way he will redeem Ilona is to concoct an elaborate theatrical display of female wrestling, perhaps his success will free her from the knives. But not this alone, he must sacrifice himself in some grotesque and extreme way, he must suffer on her behalf and for this he decides to woo the unattractive and somewhat hostile widow, Frau Hentjen.

Frau Hentjen has spent her life as the proprietor of a small restaurant.  A passive feminist, she despises the men she must serve day after day, chained to them and their needs as they in turn satisfy their perfunctory cravings. She is fiercely independent and resents all attempts at even the remotest intimacy. Nevertheless, she has become the unlikely object of Esch's desire. He must conquer and possess her as a form of  kharmatic penance. And he begins his task with dutiful precision. Frau Hentjen rises to the challenge, with every token of intimacy she responds with increased independence and hostility, slowly winning, even for a brief moment, Esch's respect.

"It did him good to know that here was a human being whose character was decided and unequivocal, a human being who knew her right hand from left, who knew virtue from vice. For a moment he had the feeling that here was the longed-for rock, rising clear and steadfast out of the universal confusion, to which one might cling in security..."

Once again, Esch has confused his metaphors in a world where symbolism has lost its meaning and is laced with the unfamiliar. This one, lone woman is no more a rock than he, but there is something about her pride, her strength that he must break, that he must swallow and ingest. He must possess her if he is to save Ilona and so after bringing her on a long and arduous hike, he takes advantage of her low blood sugar and kisses her.

"He kissed her on the cheek as it slid past his mouth and finally he took her round, heavy head in his hands and drew it to him. She responded to his kiss with dry, thick lips, somewhat like an animal which presses its muzzle against a window-pane."

And as they walk down the hill and back to their still separate and insular lives Esch has the almost proud sensation of being Frau Hentjen's lover. A sensation destined to last merely a few paragraphs. Frau Hentjen is no match for Esch, he will overpower her, he will possess her. And as he does so, he is reassured by the thought that his sacrifice is the same as Ilona's, and not just that but his sacrifice is good and right and done for Ilona, for her and for redemption into righteousness. But despite being conquered, Frau Hentjen will not relinquish her soul, leaving Esch enraged because "she kept her soul tightly enclosed behind her teeth so that he should not possess it."

Frau Hentjen is no longer a woman, but a heritage to be wrested from the unknown, a birthright to be attained amidst the matrix of life, a means of deliverance and redemption. And the gift of herself, once consummated is despised. She is owned and once the delicate curtain of mystique has been rent there is no going back. Her passive acceptance of him enrages him, there is still a piece of her soul somewhere that he cannot see that he must possess, and when words fail him he beats her, her recalcitrance being simply a problem he must master and resolve.

What Esch cannot communicate to Frau Hentjen is his existential loneliness, a loneliness that is not alleviated by love or relationship because it is sewn into the fibers of his personhood; this personhood that was destined for greatness and instead is met with futility, destined to redeem and instead so overwhelmingly in need of redemption, willing to sacrifice everything only to realize that even his sacrifice is ineffectual.

"He felt strong, steadfast and well endowed, a man whom it would be worth while to kill. "Either him or me," he said, and felt that the world was at his feet."

"The only thing left to do, to sacrifice oneself for the future and atone for all that is past; a decent man must sacrifice himself or else there's no order in the world."

How Esch is able to come to the conclusion that he, a degenerate-wife-beating-drunken-womanizer is such a "decent" man is a sign of his exponential narcissism. And as Esch tries one sacrifice after another, one spiritual murder followed by a corporeal one, the creeping realization that all might be for naught begins to entwine its tendrils into his soul. It is not Ilona that was nailed to a cross, but another:

"Yes Esch, nailed to the cross. And in the hour of final loneliness pierced by the spear and anointed with vinegar. And only then can that darkness break in under the cover of which the world must fall into dissolution so that it may become again clear and innocent, that darkness in which no man's path can meet another's - and where, even if we walk side by side, we will not hear each other, but will forget each other. as you too, my last dear friend, will forget what I say to you now, forget it like a dream."

While this soliloquy is given by none other than Bertrand, now in the guise of reluctant sage, who has become a sounding board for Esch to philosophize with and ultimately another scapegoat to sacrifice, the philosophy debate seems to do the trick. Esch is exhausted by the constant quest to absolve himself and balance all debts. The past, which he has tirelessly tried to annul, still and forever exists - "there is no end to the human contrivances, and all of them engender barrenness."  Despite his attempt to free himself from the coil of the past, his attempts as usual, end in futility. The knives that have been thrown can never be recalled.

"For fulfillment always failed one in the actual world, but the way of longing and of freedom was endless and could never be fully trod, was narrow and remote like that of the sleepwalker, though it was also the way which led into the open arms and the living breast of home."

Esch hangs his angst on a peg and picks up the work-a-day coat of the banal. He has made it through the stations of the cross and emerged in awe of the divine while recognizing his agonies have given birth to humility. His quest for the immortal and transcendent has led to the buttressing conviction that here on earth we must all go our way on crutches.

The Sleepwalkers, Part One: The Romantic - Hermann Broch

"In the year 1888 Herr von Pasenow was seventy, and there were people who felt an extraordinary and inexplicable repulsion when they saw him coming towards them in the streets of Berlin,  indeed, who in their dislike of him actually maintained that he must be an evil old man."

Our protagonist, Joachim has had a tenuous relationship with his father since he was a child, culminating in the moment when Joachim while riding his pony cripples the animal and is immediately sent out of the house to begin life in the army. Being the youngest of the two Pasenow sons, a family that belonged to the landed gentry of Berlin in a time that still practiced primogeniture, Joachim was perhaps always destined to join the military, but his leaving the family estate should have been a moment of pride for the family, like his uncle he would be destined to make Major at an early age and bring to the family pride and glorious fame. Instead his father while barely looking at him, and in an icy tone says " It's high time that you were out of the house," and Joachim departs his family estate a failure, filled with insecurity and the dread of a precarious and unknown future, knowing now that his family has always despised and loathed him.

Despite his initial misgivings, Joachim is well suited for military life and finds the stringent regulations and dress code comforting. In a world on the brink of moral decline, where the buttresses of moral values, honor and duty have begun to crumble, the military is far more simplistic. Joachim finds in the dress code a second skin, one in which he feels more alive and confident than he's ever felt before. Here there is order amidst chaos.

His father visits Joachim in Berlin and as they walk through the crowded streets in the flaring glow of the gas-lamps, Herr Pasenow grumbles that the innovating policy of the founder of the Reich has certainly produced some curious fruits; the streets of Berlin are no worse than Paris; as he continues his monologue they find themselves at the front of a the Jager Casino and Herr Pasenow drags Joachim inside. While they sit in the dimly lit casino surrounded by prostitutes and degenerates, Herr Pasenow flirts lecherously with a Czech peasant woman, while Joachim persevorates about his friend Bertrand. Herr Pasenow, jokingly betroths his son to the woman, Ruzena, (or Rose in Czech) while pressing a fifty-mark note into her hand. As his jokes become more forward, Ruzena runs away, feigning insult and Joachim swallows his disgust and repugnance at his swine of a father.

Our protagonist is thus introduced. A man caught in the oscillations between insecurity and self-loathing. A man that feels naked without the order and regulation of his stiff military shirt, a shadow of a man sleepwalking between fate and destiny, between self actualization and the crippling expectation of a dying class system.

When we finally are introduced to the hitherto presumed apparition of Bertrand, despite his very obvious differences from Joachim, there is some sort of indescribable bond as if they occupied different sides of the same coin.

"So they smiled frankly at each other and their souls nodded to each other through the window of their eyes, just for an instant, like two neighbors who have never greeted each other and now happen to lean out of their windows at the same moment, pleased and embarrassed by this unforeseen and simultaneous greeting."

Bertrand is a complex Mephistophelean type; not interested in corrupting but rather serving the souls of those, like Faust, already in danger of being damned. For Joachim, his danger lies in his now romantic devotion to Ruzena and his inability to pursue his title and responsibility in the marriage to Elizabeth, the daughter of a neighboring Baron. While hesitant at first to pursue Ruzena, now he can not get her out of his mind. And as he stumbles though the banality of life, taking up his perfunctory caste-like seclusion, for one moment his persevorations turn from Bertrand to Ruzena. He must find her, and when he does it is as if she has been waiting for him. He tries to shroud himself from the reality that she is a prostitute and frames his desires in a somewhat more morally respectable light and invites her out for tea - but drinking tea is quickly exchanged for a kiss lasting "an hour and fourteen minutes" and before they know it the droshky is at her front door and their visit has come to an end. Ruzena, an expert accomplice to the desires of men, feigns modesty and hesitates to let Joachim up to her flat, but it is just a pretense, she's already been paid by his father and they "as if already dreaming ascend like sleepwalkers the dark stairs..."

"And with a jerk regaining his prescribed military bearing, he suddenly thought with relief that one could only love someone who belonged to an alien world. That was why he would never dare to love Elizabeth, and also why Ruzena had to be a Bohemian. Love meant to take refuge from one's own world in another's, and so in spite of his jealousy and shame he had left her in her world, so that her flight to him should be ever sweet and new."

His post-justification for keeping his mistress is evidence that he is steeped in insecurity, unable to rationalize a world where love triumphs over class he creates a neat and tidy box with clear definitions on what love is and isn't. When suddenly his brother dies leaving him heir to his family's estate he shoulders the burden of his imminent and respectable union with Elizabeth. But while Ruzena is the fulfillment of all his repressed desires, Elizabeth, whom he has known since she was only a few weeks old must in his view be protected from all the baseness and depravity of the world. He can only picture her surrounded by white, as if on a bier, with him forever taking on the role of protector, watching as she sleeps so that no unwholesome thought or desire would penetrate itself into her sacrosanct and forever chaste slumber.

"That was where Elizabeth hovered on a silver cloud, intangible her effluent, dissolving face, and he felt it as an agonizing impropriety that her father and mother had kissed her when the meal had ended."

Bertrand plays devils advocate for both Joachim and Elizabeth's internal turmoil; he becomes a foil for their secret desires while providing an audible voice for their inner demons. To Joachim he offers the liberal interpretation of things, preying on Joachim's aversion for the conventional:

"Bertrand went on: We take it quite as a matter of course that two men, both of them honorable - for your brother would not have fought with a man who was not honorable - should of a morning stand and shoot at each other. And the fact that we put up with such a thing, and that they do it, shows how completely imprisoned we all are in conventional feeling. But feelings are inert, and that's why they're so cruel. The world is ruled by the inertia of feeling.
The inertia of feeling! Joachim was struck by the phrase: was not he himself full of inertia, was it not a criminal inertia that had prevented him from summoning enough imagination to provide Ruzena with money in spite of her objection and to take her out of the casino?"

To Elizabeth Bertrand offers passion and romance, preying on her aversion to the obscenely practical and as every woman secretly desires, woos her. Joachim has known her for her entire life, their marriage is a practical conclusion to a passionless narrative. When Bertrand and Elizabeth are alone for a moment, Joachim taking care of another lame horse he has ridden poorly and ineffectually, Bertrand wastes no time in his quick and decisive offensive strike, immediately telling Elizabeth that she is renowned for her great beauty, a compliment that while perhaps distasteful coming from the wrong lover, is not unappreciated. Elizabeth has lived her entire life in the protected solitude of two devoting parents, she longs for adventure and the unknown, and Bertrand offers her a chance at actual unmitigated romance.

Bertrand plays to Elizabeth's intelligence as well as her beauty, something of course which would have escaped Joachim in his half-hearted courtship preferring to envision his intended as a virginal Madonna. But for once in her life Elizabeth can be a living, breathing passionate woman without reprimand. Bertrand tells her "To court a woman means to offer oneself to her as the living biped that one is, and that's indecent. And it's quite possible, indeed quite probable, that's why you hate any kind of courting."  Whether or not this is true, Elizabeth is flattered by Bertrand's attention.

Finally Joachim makes up his mind to ask for Elizabeth's hand in marriage. He must protect Elizabeth from Bertrand, and so he quickly puts his affairs in order and after asking her father for her hand takes his leave without bothering to bestow the same compliment on Elizabeth. Elizabeth of course immediately goes to Bertrand to see what she should do, and Bertrand as always offers only the most complicated and oblique advice:

"Love needs some degree of cleverness, not to say wisdom. You must allow me to be somewhat dubious of his love for you. I warned you once already..." But as he continues to play Devil's advocate to her wavering emotions, pausing only to work on the theatrical suit of his own he finally reveals his hand, of course his love for her is undeniable, but would she condescend to love him? A simple hard-working profiteering businessman from the wrong class? He, like Peter, offers himself up three times, asserting his unspeakable longing for her again and again, something they both know the practical marriage with Joachim will never amount to. The honesty, the humanity that they can share is less than a mirage if she chooses Joachim. But Bertrand won't take her as a wife, only a mistress and at last he plays his trick to far. Her propriety has been bred into her for generations, and while Joachim is allowed certain allowances, Elizabeth can not risk all that she has for a life of uncertainty. In a passage that would make Ayn Rand proud, she finally works up the gumption to take her leave of Bertrand:

"Goodbye, I'm going to get married...perhaps we are both committing the worst crime against ourselves...goodbye."

Both Elizabeth and Joachim have faced the devil's temptations and have emerged victorious to a life of awkward banal matrimony and conjugal misery.

The Warden - Anthony Trollope

A young, passionate, ex-physician, Mr. Bold, has given up medicine to take up apothecary of a more civic nature. He has made it his own personal crusade to right the wrongs of the down trodden and fight for the justice of the oppressed; living in Barchester, a small quiet suburb of London, finding the down trodden is a somewhat daunting task.

Mr. Bold is not to be dissuaded by a certain lack of victim-hood on the part of his neighbors and instead sets his sights on the Wardenship of Barchester. The Wardenship was created in 1434 by a Mr. John Hiram, a wool-stapler, who left his house and certain meadows etc. for the support of twelve superannuated wool-carders. 500 years later with the contemporary wool industry having little use for wool carders, the position of wool-carders was replaced by 12 homeless, needy and infirm old men. From the inception of the Wardensip, Hiram's estate has only prospered, and is now worth considerably more; each of the 12 men receive 1 shilling and fourpence a day, while the Warden receives as his income £800. The current Warden, being particularly generous, has increased the daily income of his bedesmen to 1 shilling sixpence, and the matter has been thought generally approved of.

Mr. Bold is not so certain. It seems to him there has been a misreading of Hiram's will and original intent. It is his contention that the Warden, Mr. Harding, is living off the estate unjustly, and that his nominal wealth of £800 should be split more reasonably with the 12 beggars. While Mr. Bold undauntingly pursues his cause, he simultaneously pursues the Warden's daughter, seeing nothing at all disingenuous about his actions.

The Warden, horrified that he could even theoretically be in the wrong and thought to have taken advantage of his position and his dependents, contemplates how best to extricate himself from the maelstrom of swirling slander. Should he give up the Wardenship in exchange for a life of poverty? It is less an issue of poverty that overwhelms him and more an issue of how best to undo the irrevocable damage to his good name and reputation. He has been slandered and his name carelessly has been splashed across every paper in London. Laymen have had their tea and brought forth verdicts of his morality in their leisure, while he has been unable to defend himself or his character.

Meanwhile, the Warden seems nonplussed at the concept of his nemesis becoming his future son in law. In fact, he goes so far as to give his daughter his blessing! From an objective standpoint, he does not hold it against Mr. Bold that his work demands such actions, even if Mr. Bold is headstrong and acting more on premonition than concrete evidence of injustice. The Warden's daughter, Eleanor, decides she must give up her suitor. How can she make love to the singular person responsible for her father's ruin?

After a couple articles are published further defaming the Warden, Eleanor takes it upon herself to set matters right. She goes to Mr. Bold to beg, plead, demand that he resign the suit against her father. As she passionately makes her plea, Mr. Bold is overwhelmed by her protestations and remarkable beauty and finally complies in exchange for courtship, which she reluctantly agrees to.

But alas, the suit has taken on a life of its own and has become an unstoppable behemoth. Mr. Bold attempts to withdraw his suit, but to no avail, his protestations are irrelevant as new articles are churned out at a steady pace.

The Warden decides the only option left for a man of honor is to give up his position and live on the infinitesimal sum of £75 a year. Despite the desperate attempts of his friends and family to persuade him to give up such a reckless decision, the Warden clings fast to his decision and the Wardenship is abandoned.

Eleanor moves into the little room they can afford to rent above a small mercantile shop, but within the year has married Mr. Bold and they all live happily ever after.

This book focuses on the damage unfounded accusations can have on all in its wake. What begins as a quest for truth and justice gets gobbled up by the political/media machine and becomes drivel to be chewed as cud, again and again, by a mindless populace.

Trollope has been said to span the Dickens/Thackeray divide. As Trollope's first book, it is entrenched in the Dickens camp, filled with caricatures void of dimension rather than the complexity of his later characters with the ability to change and develop personal growth. Trollope even goes so far as to have a character named Mr. Popular Sentiment...in case the reader needs a little encouragement to get the picture. Eleanor is the most reprehensible female character study I have witnessed in a while. A vapid, simpleton and Benedict Arnold, willing to overlook a familial catastrophe...for no apparent reason. She is not introduced as being madly in love with Bold, rather just easily persuaded.

In short, I hated this book. The only thing that forced me to finish, besides of course my obvious compulsive disorder and obsession with crossing things off lists, is every once in a while Trollope forgot that he was writing a treatise on slander and little gems like this could be found:

"Not, however, being aware of any connection between shellfish and iniquity, he entered, and modestly asked a slatternly woman, who was picking oysters out of a great watery reservoir, whether he could have a mutton chop and potato...The room smelt of fish, and sawdust, and stale tobacco smoke, with a slight taint of escaped gas. Everything was rough, and dirty, and disreputable. The cloth which they put before him was abominable. The knives and forks were bruised, and hacked, and filthy; and everything was impregnated with fish."