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."

The Way We Live Now - Anthony Trollope

At first blush, Anthony Trollope's expansive novel is about the speculation obsessed culture of Victorian England; here we are confronted with an entirely different sort of superfluous man. While Oblomov was too lazy to decide whether or not to get out of bed and allowed his friends to openly rob him, this generation of men take a more active role in their destruction, gambling away their inheritances whenever they are given the chance. For a moment Oblomov was roused enough from his stupor to momentarily fall in love, but here, in this world of apathy, love is an emotion too troublesome and vigorous for our young men. In an era of primogeniture it is the job of the eldest sons to marry an heiress and save the family estates from bankruptcy; these sons, as ineffectual and caddish as they are, have but one simple job, to make love to an heiress, and yet anything that takes them away from the whist table is seen as an awful and tedious bore.

Mr. Melmotte enters the scene as a brusque entrepreneur with an opaque past that is quickly forgiven by his vast and seemingly infinite fortune. Mr. Melmotte, with the help of Paul Montague and Mr. Fisker, becomes the director of a new and exciting railway scheme, a scheme that has no pretension of being a reality; this he hopes will be the biggest and most successful of a life of fraudulent enterprises.

"Mr. Melmotte may have been held to have clearly proved the genuineness of that English birth which he claimed by the awkwardness and incapacity which he showed on the occasion. He stood with his hands on the table and with his face turned to his plate blurted out his assurances that the floating of this railway company would be one of the greatest and most successful commercial operations ever conducted on either side of the Atlantic. It was a great thing, - a very great thing;- he had no hesitation in saying that it was one of the greatest things out. He didn't believe a greater thing had ever come out. He was happy to give his humble assistance to the furthermore of so great a thing,- and so on. (p. 81) 

His board is quickly assembled out of the most disreputable young men, all with titles and a certain amount of prestige despite their overwhelming incompetence. Most of these men don't even pretend to try and understand their position or alleged duties. 

"There was not one of them then present who had not after some fashion been given to understand that his fortune was to be made, not by the construction of the railway, but by the floating of the railway shares." (p.82)

Another quick and potentially even more successful way of making one's fortune would be to marry Melmotte's daughter Marie, the presumed heiress of an incomprehensible fortune. Melmotte has been "floating" his daughter about in a way not unlike his new railway company looking for the highest title he can buy. Two of the board members, Lord Nidderdale and Sir Felix are both eligible fortune hunters, both with acceptable titles and rank; while Nidderdale leaves the matchmaking to his father, Felix rouses a modicum of energy to woo Marie and thereby in a race of two despicable choices becomes the favorite. Melmotte, upon learning that Felix is not only destitute but a gambler and a drunk, the first of course being the biggest hurdle, pays Felix not to marry his daughter. Felix for a moment believes he has thrown in the towel, but when Marie persuades him to run away with her; she'll organize everything and provide a great deal of ready money...what does he have to lose? So he takes her money on the understanding that they will meet a couple days later on the boat to New York, only to immediately gamble it all away and end up a drunken mess in a gutter rather than a fiance on a ship to America. 

He is momentarily chastened by his acts of stupidity, but only momentarily. Felix has been taking advantage of the innocence and naivete of Ruby Ruggles who is currently acting as housemaid and nanny for her aunt. He persuades her to go out with him until all hours of the night, knowing that this will sully her reputation and potentially damn her. Ruby has previously been engaged to John Crumb, whom she considers to be drastically beneath her. She deserves a baron at least, and when Sir Felix visits his cousin's estate and happens to find a young maiden ready and waiting for him to sweep her off her feet, he finds there is actually very little sweeping involved. He gets used to having her around as a plaything, and she tells herself that he has only honorable intentions for her. When her aunt promises to lock her out of the house if she goes to another dance with Sir Felix unless he can put in writing his intentions to make her his wife, he refuses and she goes along anyway, his beautiful face being too genuine to hide any malfeasance. 

Felix's sister Hetta has found herself smitten by one of the original railway board members Paul Montague. Like all women in love she believes him to be true and genuine in his love for her and is shocked to learn that while making love to her, Paul has been unscrupulously making love to an American woman named Mrs. Hurtle. It is a trifecta of horror. Paul has been seeing another woman, that is married and an American! What could possibly be worse? In her agitation, Hetta is beside herself, and Felix takes it upon himself to defend his sisters honor, but unlike the days of Eugene Onegin, when such heated issues could be quickly if not irrevocably settled with a duel, the Victorians had outlawed dueling, making matters of honor a little more complicated.

"There is no duty more certain or fixed in the world than that which calls upon a brother to defend his sister from ill-usage; but at the same time, in the way we live now, no duty is more difficult, and may we say generally more indistinct. The ill-usage to which men's sisters are most generally exposed is one which hardly admits of either protection or vengeance,-although the duty of protecting and avenging is felt and acknowledged. We are not allowed to fight duels, and the banging about of another man with a stick is always disagreeable and seldom successful." (p.558)

Although Felix has every intention of showing Paul a lesson or two, he quickly decides maybe its more bother than its worth and decides instead to go find Ruby Ruggles. But while it is not appropriate for the gentry to go fist-to-cuffs over every question on honorable intent, the lower classes are not above a good beating or two, and when Ruby's betrothed finds that she is out with another man, late into the night he goes in search of them and gives Felix a pounding that leaves him mostly cowed and much less beautiful. 

Despite being jilted, despite the fact that Felix is now missing most of his teeth, again Marie Melmotte pledges herself and her vast fortune to him, or rather to his mother, since Felix can't be bothered with someone he assumes to be a destitute impostor or perhaps is too vain to show himself to even someone he despises, if he could truly work up gumption for such an emotion. 

When Melmotte dies, and Marie does become the heiress of a vast fortune, Nidderdale wants nothing to do with her because of the impropriety of her father's death. He is still uncertain of Marie's wealth and assumes its better to be safe then sorry, that is sorry that you actually don't inherit the fortune you were hunting even if it means you have found a soul mate. 

Nidderdale is back to the drawing board with his father:

'They tell me,' said the old man, 'that one of those Goldsheiner girls will have a lot of money.'
'A Jewess,' suggested Nidderdale.
'What difference does that make?'
'Oh no;-not in the least;-if the money's really there. Have you heard any sum named, sir?' The old man only grunted...
'They say the widow of that brewer who died the other day has about twenty thousand a year'
It's only for her life, sir.'
'She could insure her life. D*** me sir; we must do something. If you turn up your nose at one woman after another how do you mean to live?'
'I don't think that a woman of forty with only a life interest would be a good speculation. Of course I'll think of it if you press it.' The old man growled again. 'You see, sir, I've been so much in earnest about this girl that I haven't thought of inquiring about any one else. There always is some one up with a lot of money. It's a pity there shouldn't be a regular statement published with the amount of money, and what is expected in return. It'd save a deal of trouble.' (page 683)

While I loved this book and devoured all 830 pages without barely a breath, the endings felt a little too neat and tidy. Perhaps that's part of the zeitgeist of  Victorian literature though and not to be held against Trollope. While true love exists only rarely in the way we live now, and then only if it can be gently cared for and provided for by distant relatives, as is the case with Hetta and Paul - love often requiring a pension of some sort unless it is to be hastily outgrown - love can be learned as we see in the case of Ruby and John Crumb. Others have no capital to deal in romance and must take whatever options present themselves, weighing the pros and cons of a poor match and disinheritance- but a house in the city, with the bleak prospect of eternal spinsterhood. I say spinsterhood, because this book is more about the women than the men. The woman are the ones forced into creative forms of entrepreneurship, like Felix's mother who becomes a writer, producing one poorly accepted and low paying novel after another to keep her caddish, reprobate of a son solvent. They are the heroines, taking as much of an active role in their fates as contemporary culture would allow. It is ultimately Marie who is the true heroine of the book. She emerges triumphantly wealthy and alone with no one to control her destiny, until she realizes that that is actually a precarious position for any woman in the 1870's and decides with as much practicality as fortitude to marry Fisker and live happily ever after.

North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell

Margaret Hale, after spending nearly 10 years with her cousins in London returns home to the peaceful idyllic hamlet of Helstone. Her overly petted cousin Edith has been married to captain Lennox and the captain's younger brother is quick to make his feelings known to Margaret who is put off by his overt courtship. Perhaps Mr. Lennox is a little too confident in his good looks and charisma; he is only slightly abashed by her refusal and although Mr. Lennox departs from Helstone lacking the spoils he anticipated, we, the reader are certain we have not seen the last of him. Doesn't it always seem like the rejected lover always slowly woos the heroine or persistently earns her love? 

Margaret's father has been a pastor, but now, after wrestling with his faith, has turned his back on the church and has become a dissenter. He in good conscience can no longer live in the rectory and perform his duties, so he and Margaret, after much deliberation, decide to move the family north to a small mill town, Milton, recommended to them by Mr. Hale's good friend and Margaret's godfather Mr. Bell. 

After living a cosmopolitan life in London, the move back home to Helstone was a quiet reprieve from city life; Milton, on the other hand, is far from idyllic. It is a busy, bustling, dirty mill town. Margaret is shocked by the simple baseness of the place, and with a sickly mother to take care of slowly retreats into the solitude of their temporary housing. Mrs. Hale is the classic sickly mother, babied and petted by Margaret and her father...the type of character that is only good as a slow drawn out foil for the heroine to dutifully nurse. 

To earn a little extra income, Mr. Hale has become a tutor for the mercantile baron of Milton, Mr. John Thornton. Mr. Thornton is a self made man, a Silas Lapham type. When younger, his family was not of considerable wealth, but had the means to send John to school. His father, a gambler, lost the family savings and then in despair hung himself. John, a young boy, was forced to come home and support his mother and younger sister. Slowly by a life of frugality he and his mother were able to save their money and stone by stone, rebuild their family estate. Mr. Thornton is the new "american dream" type. Through hard work and perseverance he has crafted a life of success...but success in a class system is different than the idyllic success of the american dream, and while Silas Lapham was a simple minded hard working type, that knew that through enough conspicuous consumption could purchase his place in society, the idea of purchasing status would be anathema to Mr. Thornton, and instead he uses his great wealth to purchase knowledge, something that can never become valueless or be destroyed.

 The Hales, although poor, are of a good family line and in another place and different life would hardly associate with the working classes beneath them. Margaret and Mr. Thornton are at odds with each other from their first encounter. Their verbal sparring often leaves both of them frustrated and annoyed, but while Margaret's incredible beauty is enough to assuage any lasting feelings of annoyance, the same can not be said of Mr. Thornton. Margaret is not enchanted with Mr. Thornton, and her disenchantment at times borders on disgust / loathing. 

Slowly, as Margaret acclimates to their new way of life, she begins to appreciate the hard working people of Milton and becomes friends (in the most liberal sense of the word) with a working class consumptive girl named Bessy, who is constantly fainting and speaks of little besides her longing to die. Bessy's father is a worker in one of Mr. Thornton's mills and as rumors of the discontented workers begin surfacing, a strike begins to brew. Margaret takes it upon herself to become a sort of mediator and during their somewhat frequent discussions she tries to interpret the workers' desires in a more favorable way then they are apt to discuss. In a somewhat overly melodramatic scene, Margaret throws herself in front of Mr. Thornton as a mob of angry men begin to approach him threateningly and pick up stones to throw at him, shielding him with her body she begs the men to retreat and be sensible. But as she stands there, a small and delicate shield, a rock, meant for Mr. Thornton strikes her and she collapses into a dead faint. 

Quickly she is taken into Mr. Thornton's house and cared for by a less than enthusiastic mother and an almost useless sister of Mr. Thornton's. Between fits of unconsciousness, Margaret hears Mr. Thornton's sister saying that Margaret isn't good enough for her brother and that it's pretty brazen to throw yourself in front of your would-be-lover in front of angry mob of striking men just to get his attention. Margaret's pride is wounded perhaps more by a few words than any rock could have done and she musters all her strength to hobble home into the sanctity of her family's solitude. 

Mr. Thornton, who has a similar interpretation of Margaret's motives as his sister almost immediately rushes to Margaret to propose. Margaret, indignant, refuses. But Mr. Thornton being stubborn and headstrong decides that he will quietly love her from afar, but that his affections will never change. 

First Margaret's mother dies, then shortly thereafter her father dies of a sudden heart attack, leaving Margaret orphaned, isolated and without direction. She desultorily makes her way back to her cousins, having no where else to go and little purpose or desire to think for herself. Her cousins are narcissistic egoists and after about five minutes decide they have spent enough time in mourning and that they must give and attend the parties of the season leaving Margaret alone, a prisoner in another's house. She can not come and go as she pleases without their doting approval or passive aggressive denials. And then suddenly her godfather Mr. Bell dies as well leaving Margaret his vast fortune, and now as an heiress she sits and waits for the winds to carry forward some sense of purpose, which they do in an opportune visit from Mr. Thornton. 

Since we have seen him last, Mr. Thornton, again like Silas Lapham has lost everything. Because he could not be persuaded to participate in a money making scheme, he ends up losing his considerable fortune and once again picks himself up and starting from the bottom, slowly begins to work his way back to the top. Before the collapse of his fortune he has begun a somewhat socialist experiment with his men, by building them a dining hall, providing meals and occasionally sharing a meal with them he was able to discuss matters before they came to a head and resulted in a strike. He has visions of new experiments, but now sadly is unable to see them through to completion. Margaret, decides this is about exactly her cup of tea as she could find and suggests putting her fortune into his plans, restoring him to master of the mill and supporting his experiments. Mr. Thornton takes this as a proposal of affection, to which he accepts and they live happily ever after.

Gaskell brings into an otherwise predictable romance novel, the immediacy and tangibility of Victorian England. After the French Revolution, the English gentry was constantly on guard lest their lower classes revolt as well, and yet there were dramatic changes taking place that could not be ignored. Experimentation with different aspects of socialism were being discussed in salons while the working classes struggled to feed their starving children, the disconnect between theory and reality was tremendous as is often the case. What Gaskell suggests as a solution has become a sort of foundation of contemporary unions; a place to discuss problems in a sort of forum where the workers become valuable members of an organization rather than just mindless functioning automatons. Her heroine listens to the workers and values them as legitimate people and she ultimately marries someone from another world and class order from herself, a theme that became continually more popular in Victorian novels in a world where the abolition of class seemed like an attainable possibility. 

The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins is amazing. An expert craftsman, he weaves an  intriguing mystery story and it comes as no surprise that The Woman in White has not been out of print for the last 140 years, regarded as one of the first mystery novels and one of the finest of the "sensation" genre.

While the narrative is at times somber and melancholy, Collins weaves between the lines a sense of the humorous and improbable.  One of my favorite descriptions is of Laura's governess:

"Starting from this point of view, it will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all."

The narrative begins with Walter Hartright. Walter is hired by the Fairlie's to be the drawing master for the two Fairlie sisters. While Laura Fairlie is light haired, delicate and the description of beauty itself; her half sister, Marian, takes the counter-point, being dark and George-Eliot-like in appearances. While Laura is the heiress of a vast fortune, Marian is impoverished, but what she lacks in pecuniary standing she more than makes up for in her undaunting intellect.

Upon his arrival, Walter is immediately impressed with Marian's manner. At ease with herself, she puts everyone else at ease. But when Walter meets Laura he is unprepared for her beauty and gentle spirit. Slowly over the course of a few months, despite his best attempts to remain professional, and because Laura is of an entirely different social class, Walter attempts to check his emotions. But when his attempts prove to be in vain Marian intervenes. Laura has been engaged all this time to the dark sinister shadow of a man named Sir Percival Glyde, and while she has never been in love with him and he is twice her age, she has promised her father on his death bed that she would marry this man. So Walter hastily makes his departure, and the narrative baton is passed to Marian.

Marian, although somewhat suspicious of Percival, is not ready to throw practicality to the wind. If this is what Laura's father requested on his death bed there must be more to Sir Percival than meets the eye. But as we soon learn, Percival's charm has only been turned on for the purpose of efficient romancing, and his other more sinister nature reveals itself as he demands a marriage contract that hands over Laura's vast estate directly to him in the event of her death; a contract the solicitor very reluctantly draws up, knowing its ominous potential.

Slowly over the course of the story we learn that Sir Percival Glyde is not what he seems, and with the help of a suspect entourage made of an immensely rotund Count Fosco and his dutiful but vapid wife, the three villains begin to spin a web of deceit that is fated to trap both Marian and Laura irrevocably.

Collins' writing keeps you guessing until the end, with false deaths and insane ringers; everything a truly memorable suspense novel should have.